Cool story about the East Chicago Sewage Treatment Plant

You read that right.

East Chicago's sewage treatment plant works so well that salmon spawn in it's tanks!

People think that the environment is getting worse, but stories like this just go to show that, little by little, it is really a lot better than it used to be, all thanks to technology.

The reality of what abortion is

There aren't many newspaper articles that describe in detail what an abortion really is, how it is done, etc. I don't think most people really know, or want to know, what happens, how it is done, etc.

Anyway, here is a Washington Post article, of all things, that is very honest and graphic:

This time, the procedure took 10 minutes instead of five. The dilator was bigger; there was more tissue to remove; and the patient, although sedated, was awake and moving with discomfort. Lesley watched as the doctor counted the parts of the fetus, and, to her surprise, she didn't find it jarring. To her, the parts appeared doll-like.

"It was definitely gruesome," she said. "You could make out what a fetus could look like, tiny feet, lungs, but it didn't look like a person."

You can see the voyage to unfeeling inhumanity that the second year medical student profiled in the piece is on. She is distancing herself emotionally from the procedure, becoming mechanical, because that's the only way you can do it and live with yourself.

I'm not surprised that so few doctors do abortions. It takes a special kind of person to be able to distance themselves emotionally in that way.

Recession makes big projects unlikely

With the recession looming, it is unlikely that big projects like the South Shore extension or a regional bus system will get money from Indianapolis.

Indianapolis will say that we should enact a local wheel tax, or a sales tax surcharge on going out to eat.

I'd rather have lower taxes than these big projects.

The other news is that, with the recession, sales and income taxes are down big time. Thanks to tax reform, we are now relying on these taxes a lot more than we used to.

This is one of my biggest beefs with tax reform last year. I didn't support property tax reform, because it took school funding away from local property taxes and put it on the sales tax, which is a much less reliable tax. It also gave discretion for school funding to Indianapolis and took it away from localities.

I think the coming year is going to be a tough one for school funding. Legislators say they support the schools, but it is going to be really tough to keep the revenue flowing while there is a severe recession.

Lake County Council rates municipal budgets

One of the more preposterous parts of last years property tax reform was the requirement that County Councils review the budgets of the municipalities in their jurisdiction. They review them, but they don't have any power to change those budgets. And since property taxes are capped, all these municipal entities are in effect competing for limited property tax dollars.

So the County Council reviewed the budgets:

They gave cities and towns one of three color-coded grades: red for budgets in the worst shape; yellow for those that are close to being balanced but needing more cuts; and green for those they approve.

So who got Red?

Council members declared East Chicago, Gary, New Chicago and Whiting to be fiscally unsound, which is no surprise to those community leaders, who already know they face the loss of more than $55 million in revenue because of state-mandated property tax cuts beginning in 2009.

However, the council also said the suburbs of Lowell, Munster, Schererville, St. John and Winfield may face similar problems because their projected spending exceeds their apparent income.

Interesting that Munster got red. So much for its reputation for fiscal responsibility in a sea of Lake County Democrat waste and corruption.

No surprise that St. John and Winfield are on the list. This is why these municipalities are trying to annex as much land as they can, to spread their existing services over a larger tax base.

Winfield needs its own police

Did you know that Winfield doesn't have its own police force? They rely on the Lake County Sherrif.

Lake County is telling them to get their own police force. State law says that they should have formed their own by now.

Essentially, everyone in Lake County is paying for police protection in Winfield. That obviously isn't fair.

On the other hand, maybe Winfield knows something we don't. What's the difference if you have a village police force, or use the county?

Maybe we should all get rid of our local police, and use the Sherrif instead? Could be a huge cost savings.

State Senator Mrvan sacked from appropriations commitee

My State Senator, Frank Mrvan, has been in office since there were dinosaurs roaming the earth.

So it is very surprising to see that he was sacked from his membership on two very powerful budget commitees.

Who did he piss off? Someone with his seniority just doesn't relinquish a seat like that.

How's that "Change" workin' for ya?

Y'all know I didn't vote for Obama, so what do I know?

But so far, Obama has an AG that was a Clintonista. He has a Commerce Secretary that was a Clintonista. And he has an actual Clinton as Secretary of State.

Why, exactly, didn't Democrats just elect Hillary Clinton as President?

Did you know that "Change we can believe in" really meant "Change back to Bill Clinton as President"?

Seriously, Obama is a frickin' idiot. All these people are loyal to Bill Clinton, not Barry Obama. Clinton is going to be a shadow president.

I don't get it.

What type of blog is this?

From http://www.typealyzer.com/

Amazing stuff. Totally nails me.

Jerimiah Wright has a franchise in Gary

There is a Trinity United Church of Christ in Gary. Jerimiah Wright is franchising!

What car is Wright getting into? I'm a car guy, and I'm almost certain that it is a Lincoln MKX. In any case, it is a high end luxury car. You can see the leather interior.

Amazing that such in such a crappy country like the US, a black man like Wright can be so successful.

Taxes in various Lake County communities

Messing around with the state's property tax calculator, you can easily see what identically assessed properties would pay in various communities.

A $100,000 assessment costs you a little over $1500 in Munster, as little as $1,100 in St. John or Highland, and an outragous $2200 in Gary. Whiting and Hammond are over 2 grand.

Of course, this is with the homestead exemption. As prices increase, that $45,000 exemption becomes less and less relevant. Since so few homes in Gary are worth $45k, much less $100k, maybe property tax rates there are irrelevant.

I'm going to have to get all the tax rates in the state and figure out if, as I suspect, the average wage earner is best off in Highland or St. John. Property taxes are low, and there is no income tax. Seems like a pretty good combination to me. Maybe that's why St. John is the fastest growing community in Indiana.

Is Indiana Blue or Red?

The Post-Trib wonders if Obama has coatails in Indiana.

They dig up former Gary Mayor Hatcher, the first black mayor of Gary and the man most repsonsible for its downfall and current ruin.

If I were Obama, buys like Hatcher would not be my role model. If the first black President is as successful as the first black Mayor of Gary, the US just might cease to exist!

After all, Gary is as good as bankrupt, and is laying off police and firefighters.

The bastards raised my assessment!

So I went to estimate my property tax bill on the state site, and I needed my assessment. I went over to the Lake County Assessors website, and I see that they raised my assessment by 5%!

We're in the middle of the biggest real estate crisis ever, and the bastards raised my assessment.

And the worst thing is that they didn't tell me about it.

Lake County Property Tax Bills will be LATER than last year?!?!?

Right on the heels of an election where every incompetant Lake County Democrat was re-elected is news that our Lake County property tax bills won't be here before the end of the year.

Un. Frickin. Believable.

They MAY be available online around Thanksgiving.

So, once again, those of us who work and want to deduct our property taxes from our federal income taxes will be standing in long lines at Christmas just to pay this stupid bill.

Where is the Change that I can Believe In?

The ultimate Household Income Regression

The Wikipedia entry for household income had a link to the Census Bureau, which compiled most of the data. From there, I got an Excel file that had some pretty awesome data. I was able to do a multiple regression of household income "controlling" for number of earners and years of education (as they would say in Freakonomics). The results of the regression are above.

The correlation coefficient is 0.99. That means that the 99% of the variation in household income can be explained by the data on number of earners and their education level.

That is a pretty amazing level of correlation. You seldom see a correlation coefficient that high.

Fun with regression and the household income statistics

The Wikipedia entry for household income is a treasure trove of data. I couldn't resist doing some regressions to see just how household income is related to the number of workers and their education.

Here is the regression of income vs. number of workers:



Look at that R Squared! That's an amazing level of correlation.

What can we conclude from this data? If you're poor, get your lazy wife to go out and get a job!

And if nobody is working in your household... you both need to get a job.

Next, I looked at education. The data says things like "less than a ninth grade education" and "some college". I took that and translated it into a number of years of schooling.



Again, the correlation coefficient is indicating almost perfect correlation.

So, what can we conclude from the data? If Obama wants to do something about inequality in this country, he's got to get people to work more and get more education. Just getting the high school dropouts to finish high school would go a long way and give us the biggest bang for the buck.

How I feel about the Lake County election results

Once again, Mark Kiesling expresses exactly how I feel.

Despite all the professed widespread discontent with the status quo in the county, none of the incumbents was rejected and in fact was re-elected by margins so large it made the presidential election look like a squeaker.

And it goes right back to straight party voting.

Incumbent County Surveyor George Van Til polled 121,757 votes to Republican Peter Papageorgakis' 63,410.

County Clerk Tom Philpot, running for coroner, racked up 123,529 votes to Republican Andy Koultourides' 62,777.

Where the straight party thing factors in is that Democrats pulled a straight ticket 75,968 times in this election. Check those against the numbers for Papageorgakis or Koultourides, and you'll see the straight ticket votes alone would have sunk the two Republicans.

The outcome can't be blamed on voter apathy this time, not when 70 percent of the county's 304,000 registered voters came out.

There's an outcry for change at the local level, but when it comes to putting our finger on the button to transform the situation, we fail to do it over and over again.

Now, more than ever, I think that the only way to change things is to totally bankrupt the guilty parties. It is crucial that the county not get an income tax. That way, with the property tax levy frozen and the tax caps in place, we can slowly bleed Gary, Hammond, East Chicago, and the County dry.

Gary is well on its way to bankruptcy. It might even happen before the end of this year.

Straight Party Ticket Voting is the root of all evil

Despite the property tax crisis this year, and despite the near riot at the Lake County Government Center when the County Council was going to try to implement a county income tax, and despite all the shenanigans with George Van Til and his county car, and gassing up his personal vehicle with county gas, all the incumbants at the state and local level were re-elected. Including Van Til.

Why was that?

Columnist Mark Kiesling has the answer: straight party voting.

Lake County showed 75,968 people voted straight Democratic, 22,379 straight Republican and 87 straight Libertarian, for a total of 98,434, or 46 percent of the vote. That is incredible, and not incredibly flattering for the county.

Too many people were just mad at President Bush and voted straight ticket for Democrats. They didn't know any other issues. They couldn't spell Van Til, much less know who he is and what corrupt things he's done.

The Obama tsunami overwhelmed any other reform trends that were out there. And we're all worse off for it. Corrupt Democrats in Lake County are stronger now that they were 3 days ago.

Why our skoolz is so poorly

We live in a society with a lot of failed institutions. Banks have been nationalized. Automakers are all but bankrupt. Looking at how people behave, religion has lost all influence. And government is incompetent and corrupt.

But no institution is as badly performing as the public school system.

Now, who is it that runs our schools? Generally, it is educators with PhDs.

Now, it just so happens that Education PhDs have the lowest GRE test scores. Both their english and math scores are atrocious.

Is it any wonder that the public schools are so bad?

Other races

News is not good for the other races that I was interested in. Janiec lost, Hero lost, Urzua lost, and Deelow lost. Not even close in any case.

So much for people "throwing the bums out" over property taxes. The incumbents responsible for trying to force Lake County to have an income tax all were re-elected.

The Republicans kept the attorney generals office. I guess that is a blessing. And Mitch won.

What I saw at the devolution

Like I said, the polls were really busy in the morning.

We only had to turn away 3 or 4 stoners who thought that they were registered but really weren't. I think one guy probably was registered in Chicago or something.

I love the voter ID law. It makes it so much easier to process people. You don't have to ask them to spell their name, just get the ID and look them up. It really sped thing up.

I had only 2 people who didn't have driver's licenses. In both cases they had passports and utility bills.

The ballot itself was pretty long, and it took some people 20 minutes to vote. We only had 2 machines, so lines were pretty long at times.

Throughout the day I had clues that McCain was going to lose. There were lots of questions about straight party voting, and they were from people who were quite obviously not Republican.

Overall, the results sucked, but I was happy with the process itself. Obama won with so much support that I don't feel that anything was stolen, so that's good. Thank god it wasn't a replay of 2000. ACORN was a non-issue.

Blue County in a Blue State

That's just embarrassing. Indiana disappoints.

I was working the polls in Munster. We had over 70% turnout. It was absolutely crazy at 6AM, but we closed on time at 6PM. We didn't have any trouble with lines out the door at closing.

The totals for the precinct were almost 50-50 between McCain and Obama. I figured that McCain was going to lose the state at that point.

Democrats will kill your 401(k)

You know, I'm pretty hooked up with politics. I know what Democrats are pushing. But this one was a real surprise to me. Talking about his hopes for Obama, Forbes' Rich Karlgard says:

--Vetoes attempts from Nancy Pelosi’s Congress to kill 401(k)s. There have been two such proposals in the last month, and there will be more.

--Vetoes attempts from Harry Reid’s Senate to kill 401(k)s. Don’t think this will happen? Barbara Boxer once proposed taxing the inside gains from 401(k)s, which is the same thing as killing them.

I had no idea that Democrats were floating the idea to tax 401(k)s. That is a huge tax increase just sitting out there, unmentioned in our awful in-the-tank-for-Obama media.

"John Smith" explains "Damian"

Soon to be former academic explains where people like "Damian" come from:

Intellectual sparring (dare I use the term) about ideas – among students and faculty – has been replaced by one-sided, partisan drivel (for example, Obama = admirable. McCain = terrible and, for the record, I will be voting for Obama). While it would be easy to blame a liberal bias among faculty for this groupthink, it should be noted that this simple world of good and bad pervades the world around us. On radio, television and the Internet, ideological pundits scream at one another with vitriol and fervor. My partisan colleagues are universally National Public Radio listeners. They do not hear the other side, so it is easy to demonize the other side. Their students are listening, and sadly think of conservatism in its many forms as horrific. Worse still, they now conflate liberal passion and advocacy with justice, and by default, analytic rigor and reason. They do not weigh evidence, or take note of pro, cons, costs or benefits. Doing so would be to admit that there are merits to positions they do not hold. To acknowledge that their ideology is imperfect is the first step towards compromise, or in their overused, precious phrase, “selling out.”

The Messiah is going to screw taxpayers

There is a race to the bottom in the Messiah's campaign's definition of middle class.

First, the Messiah said that only people making more than $250k would see increased taxes.

But then he lowered that number to $200k.

Then Biden said it was $150k.

Now Bill Richardson is saying that it is $120k:

The latest hiccup in the campaign message came Friday morning on KOA-AM, when New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson pegged the middle class as those making $120,000 and under.

"What Obama wants to do is he is basically looking at $120,000 and under among those that are in the middle class, and there is a tax cut for those," Richardson said in the interview...

Here is what I think is going to happen: the Bush tax cuts expire in 2010. Some of them start being phased out (in?) this year, like the death tax.

So unless Obama works very closely with the Democrat (super)majority in the next Congress, huge near future tax increases are already the law.

I don't see any reason for Congressional Democrats to do anything other than let the tax cuts expire. In fact, the way they've been operating the last 2 years, I'm almost certain that they will expire. Especially if the Republicans lose a lot of seats.

Combine tax increases with an immediate withdrawl from Iraq, and a 25% cut in military spending, and the Democrats will have plenty of cash to spend to reward their supporters.

Yet another Lake County Democrat caught stealing from the till.

Anybody who has been around Lake County politics awhile knows that about every six months or so a story runs in the paper about some Democrat arrested for embezzling money from some fund that they're responsible for.

Here's the latest.

Why do these people think that they can get away with this? There's this thing called an audit...

Republicans may be the stupid party, but Democrats are just plain stupid.

What I saw driving by the Messiah rally

I drove by Wicker Park at 4pm yesterday. They were parking people on the driving range, and it was already full. The media was there in full force, there was a sea of satellite dishes.

With that said, I totally could have gone in and easily parked. 3 hours would not have been an unreasonable amount of time to wait to see the Messiah.

It must have been really cool for the people that live right around the park. How many people can look out their back window and see the Messiah?

Anyway, I went home and went trick or treating with the kids. Halloween is more important than politics.