Wednesday High-Speed Olio

• Our Betters, by which I mean The Republican Party in Indiana, has decided to hand Colts owner Jim Irsay two new skyboxes, wholly at taxpayer expense, because he asked nicely. The billion-dollar stadium we built for him five years ago is now insufficient. (Personally, I won't be surprised if we wind up jacking the thing up and rotating it 118º at his whim.)

This was accomplished by the Tax and Spend and Never Face the Voters subsidiary, the Capital Improvement Board, which found it had a little loose change at the bottom of the bag and decided to spend it now, while prices are low. This is the same CIB taxpayers had to bail out a couple years ago so they could continue bailing out wealthy sports franchise owners, and let the NFL host a Super Bowl without paying any taxes, which is, for some reason, how the NFL likes it.

The best thing about it is that the CIB sent its mouthpiece out to explain that taxpayers footing the bill "settles" a "dispute" over "leasing agreements". Which means that the Colts, who play in a stadium they paid nothing for, which replaced--defined as "adding skyboxes to the exact same number of seats for average people"--the early one they slunk off to in the dead of night and paid nothing for (replaced at their insistence, after they threatened to break a lease and leave town otherwise), found some language in the contract which allowed them to object to paying their half of the costs of operating concessions, when their "half" of the profits is roughly "100% of the first billion-dollars generated at every Barn event, whether or not it involves the Colts." I fully expect that when the time comes to explain why we're buying them four more (or six; forgive me, I got my information from local news) they're gonna be reduced to saying "Fuck you."

• Meanwhile, Mike Pence has been found. He put the Temporary Ki-bosh on a deal that was going to hand Mainstreet Properties, a real estate development firm run by the son of Indiana House Speaker Pro-Tem Eric Turner, something between $350 and $500K to move from the north of Republican Hamilton county to the tonier outskirts of Carmel. Again, apologies that I can't be more specific, but the information comes from local media. Everybody seems to be reporting the $300K figure, but if I heard correctly, the local public radio people said there was an additional $200K in incentives involved. The company has, on its part, promised to hire "as many as" 25 new employees, provided the goddam media will ignore the story from here on out and let them get back to work.

Like Rutgers, Pence acted not when this happened, or when anyone got wind of it, but when the info got published. And Turner came through like a champ. He explained that he had described himself as the firm's "president" on papers filed with the General Assembly because he was a "sizable investor", but that his son runs the business, and he knew nothing, nothing of the state's largesse.

"Fuck you" woulda been quicker.

And, look, I'm no economist, but unless Indiana takes a page from Georgia, don't we pretty much have all the land we're going to get, aside from what's evaporating from Lake Michigan? Why are we paying a minimum of $13,000 per virtual phone-answering job for someone to churn profits from what we already have?

By the way, Mike: you've got that Inspector General Mitch Daniels created to help root our corruption in previous administrations, right? In fact, the same guy? How 'bout turning him loose on this one? Or the I-69 land deals?

• Dear Lord, I don't know which is more insulting: the "I'm not a Wingnut" Weigel, or the one who can't help putting the lie to it:

American conservatives viewed Thatcher as a saint, and as an example. By the late 1970s, they saw the United Kingdom as a cautionary tale of what happened when socialism came to a market economy—and when both parties went along with it. In 1976, the Labour government went “cap in hand to the IMF” for a bailout. In 1977, American Spectator editor-in-chief R. Emmett Tyrell published The Future That Doesn’t Work, a collection of essays about the obvious decline of Great Britain. After Thatcher won, as Charles Krauthammer told Politico, “her example in a much more far-left country and an even more sclerotic economy really sent a message that it can be done.” 

That’s why American conservatives have largely won the argument about Thatcher. 

Yeah. Mags was a goddam economic genius, all right, provided you were one of the bankers who benefited from her selling off everyone else's property, and not one of the thousands condemned to permanent unemployment thereafter.

But, fuck, "American 'conservatives' have largely won the argument"? What argument is that? Since when does convincing yourself of what you already believe constitute a victory?

Ain't Gonna Play Sun City

Indianapolis Star photo/ Matt Kryger

DAVID Hyde Pierce joins Carmel Center for the Performing Arts Artistic Director Michael Feinstein, above, in opening The Tarkington, the intimate 500 seater which takes its place in a princely Public/ "Private" diadem with the Carmel Palladium at its center. Feinstein is pulling down a reported half-mil a year to lure other big names to the place, so that first-night royalty, your Real Estate Barons, your Furniture Kings, can tell friends and family they seen that guy from teevee.

And, okay, people in Carmel don't talk like that. Carmel's the other side of the Marion/Hamilton county line from Indianapolis, and owes its twenty-year metamorphosis from sleepy farming/antiques whistle stop to Richest City in Indiana to the completion of the interstate highways, specifically the Federally-funded I-465 ring it borders, and well ahead of schedule in the 60s, thank you, combined with the subsequent influx of money and white people escaping public schools the government put Negroes in, and a rock-solid one-party system.

Carmel became an extension of Indianapolis' "cultured" side of town, the North, in the late 70s to the 80s, a time when people with money stopped respecting wit and started respecting real estate holdings. And so it came to pass the City of Nouveaux and Racists decided to build itself a big culture center, and start drawing off the sort of midsteam-to-slightly-inside popular music/ dance troop/ Broadway road show performer who had only five or six alternative showcases available in Indianapolis. And it gave half a mil (reported) to Michael Feinstein, who, and this is not exactly my forte, not that anything really is, does not appear to me to be someone who'd have been filling 500 seaters in Central Indiana on a regular basis without this relationship. I don't recall anyone ever telling me they were headed out to the big Feinstein show at Clowes, or the Circle, or the IRT, or the State Fair. Hey, can-can a son gout, whatever. I don't particularly have any use for Feinstein's crooning, or drenching myself of an evening in a double-dark chocolate truffle of The Great American Song Book. I'm glad someone works to preserve the greatness of Gershwin, Porter, Arlen, Kern, and Carmichael (that's two Hoosiers, in case you lost count); I'd just rather hear them sung by Fred Astaire. Or Lotte Lenya. Let alone someone who could sing.

Of course one thing that will bother me forever is the whole "Let's pretend those dreadful 50s and 60s did not exist, unless it's time for some campy good fun" ambience; so maybe Feinstein blasts Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, and Lowell George when he's home, but there's just no way he could sell it to the swells. But they, on the other hand, are just appropriating the wit of Ira Gershwin and Dorothy Fields, and Betty Comden, and maybe a little Fats Waller some night if they're feeling naughty; they sure ain't votin' for Sophistication. And when Robert Johnson, Willie Dixon, and Muddy Waters, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, Smokey Robinson, and Holland/Dozier/ Holland make the cut, I'll let you know. Until that time this isn't a movement, it's a cultural tic from the same people who brought you Disco. And Nile Rodgers can send me all the unkind emails he wants.

Without question the real issue here is just that Hamilton County, Indiana, is the poster-child for solid Republican rule/ pro-bidness, anti-tax rhetoric division, while taxpayers are still on the hook for anything their elected representatives fancy, though it won't be public housing or low-cost medical insurance. But, y'know I look at that picture and see two accomplished professionals whose marriages Indiana does not recognize, by order of the party that Hamilton county bankrolls. This is between them, their consciences, and their accountants. I'm sure there are bigger and more fitting windows I could be breaking elsewhere, myself. But just for the record, I'll be skipping the Spamalot touring company, thanks anyway.