Pyyyyyyle!

SO Tuesday the FBI basically shut down the 25th floor of the City-County Building in Indianapolis for half a day, seizing records from the Department of Metropolitan Development. And the US attorney, Joe Hogsett, announced five corruption indictments, including the head of the Land Bank and one of its project managers, a former spokesman for Mayor Gomer F. Ballard, USMC, plus two operators of local non-profits and a real estate agent (for a company in which the Land Bank director was a silent partner). They're accused, variously, of bribery and wire fraud for a scheme which used the Land Bank, tasked with getting rid of the city's thousands of abandoned buildings, to cherry-pick properties to sell to the non-profits for pennies. They would then flip them quickly to developers.

This was, you might expect, fairly big news. Mayor Gomer went missing for 24 hours, though he was presumed safe. His mouthpiece at first tried to insist that Hizzoner didn't actually appoint the people who work for him, before rendering that comment inoperable, and allowing as how the Mayor was deeply troubled by the fact that this was revealed on his watch.

He resurfaced on Wednesday, giving reporters a chance to record his soundbite in a steady rain. But then Channel 8 went missing.

I watched a half-hour of the morning news. Took them twenty minutes to get to a simple recitation of the basic facts, that is, that the FB Fucking I had raided the seat of Indianapolis government the previous morning. I know, you have to give people two weather reports and three recitations of the two traffic accidents slowing the morning commute first, or they'll just get confused and stay home. And you need to tell everyone about Game One of the Pacers-Heat series, so the audience can remember that you can't be bothered reporting sports anymore, except as an act of civic boosterism, or to explain why professional sports clubs can't afford to do the maintenance on the stadia we built 'em.

Then I watched the first hour of the evening news. Zero mentions. [I should note here that I tried and failed somehow (old) to tape the last half-hour, so maybe that was wall-to-wall coverage and a thorough examination of the theft of taxpayer money. Yeah, probably.]

Channel 13 teased it on opening. Had a reporter out in the rain who actually asked Mayor Gomer a pointed question. Interviewed the Star's political reporter Matt Tully, who'd fairly called out the Mayor for his Tuesday disappearing act.

Oh, but 8, and its political reporter Jim Shella, the Dean (Broder) of Statehouse hackery, did manage to work in a political story or two:

• Indiana Teabag parties believe they may have been targeted by the IRS.

• Indiana Governor Mike Pence once co-sponsored a media shield bill in Congress.

•Indiana Governor Mike Pence pledges to complete the uncompleted half of the half-completed I-69.

•Indiana Governor Mike Pence probably has some idea where he might get the money to do that, but he'd as soon not be asked.

• Indianapolis is planning to make another Super Bowl bid, probably in the future.

• President Barack Obama is mired in scandalisms.

Okay, look, I understand. Free drinks aren't really free.

Peyton Manning For MVP

THE Colts were the winningest team in the NFL the last ten years with him; without him they don't belong in the league. What else do you want?

If you wanna know what's wrong with this country, look at professional sports in Indianapolis. If you already know what's wrong with this country, skip it. It doesn't make things any better.

The Colts of Indianapolis At Present play football in a retrotrendy barn built by taxpayers and named by a guy who peddles lubricants. It was built after the NFL sent its Commissioner, Paul Tagliabue, of the Jersey City Tagliabues, to town to good-naturedly threaten to move the team to LA unless we ponied up for a new stadium with skyboxes to replace the blimp hangar, without skyboxes, we built in the 70s to steal the Colts in the first place. Pauly Tags and the Multi-Billionaires Club he shilled for got their taxpayer-purchased pony ride, and LA--which wanted an NFL franchise so badly it had run two teams out of town in the previous decade--got the Cardinals. Or the Vikings. I didn't really pay attention.

The stadium project had an initial pricetag of $500 million. It cost at least half again as much, and probably closer to $1 billion. Not counting operating costs, spiffing-up-the-city-for-the-Super Bowl-we-got-in-the-deal costs, or the $10 million/year additional we had to give the Pacers because they didn't like how the Colts deal was better than theirs. And so threatened to move to Los Angeles.

The owner of the Indianapolis Colts, "inheritor" being a better word, is one Jim Irsay, former hillbilly heroin addict, now Twitter addict. Jim Irsay is really all you need to look at if you actually want to know what's wrong with this country. In fact all you really need to look at are his clothes, "clothe" being a better word, since he either owns one extremely ugly suit, or else several dozen copies of one extremely ugly suit, inspired by Bugsy Malone.



Irsay's father Robert is the guy who moved the Colts out of Baltimore in the middle of the night, and into the loving arms of a city which had built a third-hand version of the Minneapolis Metrodome just for such an eventuality. At the time Irsay was the only member of the Multi-Billionaires Club whose team was not an expensive toy; the Colts represented about 95% of Irsay's net worth. When he got to Indianapolis the whole thing nearly exploded in a divorce--Irsay couldn't have bought the other half of the team, because he didn't have the money--but appears to've been saved by a private agreement designed to save it for the children. Jim Irsay. The perpetual child.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Your Jobs Creator! From one of the least-valuable NFL franchises, to the 17th most valuable sports franchise in the world. Because, with the help of the NFL, lucky spermatozoa, one fortuitous draft pick, and mid-sized market politicians desperate to stay on the gravy train, a semi-literate twitterer was able to get millions in tax dollars without even applying to the legislative process.

Now Manning's hurt, maybe gone; Irsay's team, having done as close to nothing about this as is theoretically possible, is O-and-The Season, and nothing's effected his bottom line, which is guaranteed by the city to remain at sellout-plus concessions-plus parking-plus-revenue from concerts or anything else wholly unrelated to the Colts that takes place in the Barn we built for them.

Meanwhile, there's no NBA season because the owners have locked out the players, the better to get their hands on $100 million they need to keep body and soul together. Until an agreement is reached the Mall of America Simons, owners of the Indiana Pacers, will have to content themselves with the extra $10 million a year the city forked over last year for daring to give the Colts a deal that made the Pacers envious.

So now, with downtown sports traffic down, the local news hairdos--previously dutiful reporters of the wholly-made-up "lost revenue for the city" numbers the Pacers planted--have busied themselves finding Downtown bar owners to stick microphones in front of so they can sing the blues about business being down. I mean brave entrepreneurs who suddenly find themselves without a taxpayer-funded revenue stream.

Was any of this ever brought up in the all-important mayoral election just concluded? Did anyone ask why Teabag Gomer, erstwhile principled critic of Indianapolis' Super Bowl pretensions, handed millions to the Simons when there was no contractual reason to do so? Does the city still dump raw sewage into White River whenever it rains, or send elementary school students to school in un-airconditioned buildings? Whadd'a you think?

Could You Please Keep It Down? Some Of Us Are Trying To Get High And F**k.

SO I've mentioned what the backslide into Winter hours has done for my bicycle training, running me into increased traffic and forcing me to watch local morning news on the hopeless but evergreen assumption that the weather forecast will have something to do with the weather.

It's always been my Poor Wife who's done this, switching on the locals at 5 AM when she woke up early. She's constitutionally better prepared to take it than I. And then, when we sat down evenings to watch the First-String locals try to sound out phonetically what was on their teleprompters she'd already know the stories. Now, unfortunately, I do, too.

You are in all likelihood blissfully unaware that Super Bowl CMLXVII, or whatever it is, will be held in Indianapolis next February, a sop to the city for the NFL's extorting a new $1 billion football barn ("The House That Curtis Painter Built") out of us. Experienced Indianapolis watchers with a sense of the larger world outside that hasn't been acquired through the television--there are at least three of us--are accustomed to weathering these periodic bouts of mass delusions of Importance, or Greatness, or whatever it is media-driven civic boosterism inflicts on our fellow citizens. Indianapolis accidentally elected a proto-Teabagger, one Gomer P. Ballard, mayor four years ago. He expressly opposed the Democratic-Republican incumbent's efforts to bring the Super Bowl here. So, of course, he led the charge for it once we got it, and has been spending public monies on trying to impress people who have been to actual big cities with actual cultures and who will be here for four days, tops. Meanwhile, the massive public-funded improvements will be with us for generations, or, judging by the fate of earlier city spruce-up deals, about eight-twelve years before the sub-standard concrete begins crumbling.

Well, you can't start something like that rolling downhill without people finding out, and that includes state and local office holders. A few months ago some Texas-based group of public beggars, in cooperation with a few Lone Star law enforcement officials equally repulsed by the idea of people having sex, blew, you should pardon the expression, into town to regale Hoosier law enforcement officials with tales of people having sex on or near Super Bowl Sunday in Big D last year, while thumbing their noses at all the good people of Dallas who spent the day in church. The group has been collecting donations and haranguing the NFL ever since, with tales of Rolling Limousine Brothels clogging the streets and unlicensed kiosks on every corner selling nude fourteen-year-olds. The fact that none of this is reflected by anything which could be described as a Police Blotter just proves how invidious and all-powerful these sex traffickers are.

So then shortly thereafter we got press releases from local leos and the State AG Greg Zoeller…

who, by the way, has just reached the point in every Indiana Attorney General's first term where he looks around and realizes he's got nowhere to go politically excepting four more years of where he is, because his party, usually the Republicans, have all the national offices already filled with political non-entities and low-handicap golfers, and starts casting around for some reliable (i.e. wingnut, religious) source of political donations for a campaign he'll never run, before getting a semi-sinecure at some "conservative" or "bipartisan" DC firm. We're almost at the point where the last one--Steve Carter, Esq.--raided Planned Parenthood without a warrant, and told everyone between here and the hinterlands of the Bible Belt that there'd be plenty of arrests for shielding child prostitution rings just as soon as he went through all the files he stole. Zoeller's in an even worse position than most, because Mitch Daniels already appointed Mike Choirboy-Pence his successor, by giving Lt. Governor Becky Skillman an incurable but non-debilitating disease , in exchange for Pence not cockblocking Daniels' Presidential run. So Getting Right with Jesus is the first order of the day for ambitious Hoosier Republicans, and the Good Lord knows there's no better place to do so than on a mattress stuffed with tax-exempt religous wingnut dollars.

uh, press releases, I say, in which the allegations of Satanic Human Chattel Rolling Bisexual Butt Orgies taking over the Sacred, I mean the Super, Bowl, became fact, and in which our sworn officers of the law vowed to fight to the last man for the right of every wholesome reveler not to have to think about such icky stuff. Let alone participate.

The obliging City-County counsel was way ahead of them, having set aside their Constitutionally-prohibited-but-who-gives-a-shit anti-pandhandling crusade--the one they formally enacted a couple years ago, but are only planning to use for one particular week--long enough to enact stringent health regulations for massage parlors and new licensing requirements for people who subject other people to friction. And Monday the newly-empowered police force pounced, raiding thirteen good-time establishments, resulting in…lemme just double check those numbers…zero arrests, deportations, or flashy slave rescue efforts.

All wasn't lost, though:

"In one place they found rodent droppings," said Katie Bannon, Indianapolis Code Enforcement.

Though, if you'll forgive me, as a young man who tried desperately to come of age before the Sixties ended, it wouldn't surprise me to learn the cops brought their own.

Speaking of expert testimony, that same day brought the sounding-out of horrifying ("for Parents!") teleprompter news that more Marion county middle schoolers are on the marihuana than ever before in recorded time, according to what Marion county middle schoolers told some asshole who asked them about marihuana use.

Now let me just go on the record here: middle schoolers should not smoke weed, and they definitely should not drink alcohol, snort nutmeg, huff paint thinner, or watch television, all of which are worse. They should be too busy diddling themselves, and each other, to have the time, or anything approaching the necessary boredom.

Meanwhile, adults who've reached that demo without being, or becoming, credulous yokels shouldn't lie for money. A case in point being the hairdo who got to read this line as an intro to the thoughts of one Nancy Beal, spokesliar for something called Drug Free Marion County:

"Now while some say marihuana is harmless, others say that isn't necessarily the case."

Guess which side we actually got to hear say that?

Ms Beal's rebuke was that marihuana often caused paranoia as one "came down" from a "high". Which, you'll pardon the personal observation for a moment, caused me to suggest that she ought to consider what Mitch Daniels' educational scorched-earth policy does to teachers.

What I didn't get to hear I did read on Channel 8's website later, though, as Beal continued:

But among the best advice, Nancy Beal said, is to be suspicious.

"I think you still have to be suspicious,” she said. “I think you have to go through your kid’s backpack. I think you have to go through their room, and look for signs of trouble."

Gee, lady, I wonder why drugs turn people paranoid.

The Dog Ate It

REAL life intrudes, a definite sign that I'm not evolving at Internet speed, [one pre-click Caution, among many: written by a memologist and Visiting Professor of Psychology at the University of Plymouth who coined the "term" teme, (for "technological meme")], or else my genes don't contain enough replicator memes, or something.

Anyway, there's an update to the story of Officer David Bisard, of late a member of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, an association now clouded by his having, a couple weeks ago, slammed into half-a-block's worth of stopped motorcyclists while on an emergency run with siren blaring, lights blazing, and a .19 Blood Alcohol Concentration *. (These facts were somewhat obscured, for a time, by the initial IMPD PR campaign blaming the dead and comatose, and the five days it took to get around mentioning the theoretical two or three beers the officer had consumed earlier.)

Oh, and it later turned out that it wasn't an emergency run at all, and even if it had been it wasn't his. Then late last week we learned that he hadn't been drinking, either. Or, at least so far as the Law is concerned. Because, y'see, once someone finally got around to requesting his blood, two hours later--state law specifies that everyone involved in an accident involving death be field-tested or given a Breathalyzer on the scene--the blood was drawn by an uncredentialed technician, which prompted Indianapolis Prosecutor Carl "Taint" Brizzi to withdraw all the charges which involve alcohol. Then, because the law under which he'd automatically surrendered his driver's license comes from a different part of the statute, he got that back.

Now, I'm a civil liberties absolutist; what happens to the law is more important that what happens to Bisard, even in such a heinous example. But I can also tell you from my daily biking encounters with the gaggle of Canadas that hangs out near the creek a couple blocks north--I yell "Government Health Care is Theft!" or "Celine Dion, motherfuckers!" at 'em if they climb onto the road--that I have at least as much sense as God gave one of them, and the whole thing stinks.

(A flock of geese is also a skein, a wedge, or a plump, in flight, none of which covers the single-file of Stupidity I find myself confronted with on a semi-regular basis. On a wholly unrelated note, tomorrow is St. Bartholomew's Day, near which a master printer threw a wayzgoose, an entertainment which celebrated, if that's the word, the return to working by candlelight. The etymology is unknown, and my discovery of the practice was independent of my search for alternative collective nouns for "goose". I'm not sure what that means, but leave us say this: anyone who believes RU RTG? represents a step up, Evolutionary or otherwise, from the days when yeoman printers and illiterate seamen spoke in a rich and nuanced tongue should have every hair ripped out of her head, before it's given back to that guy from Kajagoogoo.)

Well, lots of my fellow Naptownites agree, so much so that the city's Law Enforcement Brain Trust--minus, for the first 48 hours, Mayor Gomer hisself--have been out in front everyday trying to cool things down by repeating "Mistakes were made" over and over while they decided how long they had to throw someone under the gaggle of revving buses. (So far this includes two assistant chiefs, one commander, and the head of the investigation unit). The heat is actually so bad there was a Gomer sighting over the weekend that didn't involve creating a new Charter school.

God knows it's cold comfort seeing--one more sickening time-that people who lie for a living, and the people they lie to, are completely asea when the situation calls for even a pinch of forthrightness. My particular favorite has been Channel 8, which spent the first weekend pinning the thing on dead and mangled motorcyclists because IMPD told them to, and which now can't go two minutes without repeating We Asked The Tough Questions! Which, of course, means they dare now ask a couple obvious ones of the LE triumvirate which has been forced to face 'em. I've got a sawbuck down with my Poor Wife which says the Tough Questions graphic turns up no later than tomorrow at 5.



_____________

* I don't remember if we pointed this out before, but among the many examples of Doesn't Anybody Do More Than Mindless Parrotage? there's this: Bisard's BAC is now almost automatically reported as "twice the legal limit" or "more than twice the legal limit" when, aside from the fact that .19 is nearer to two-and-one-half times the legal limit, the blood test was done something like two hours after the accident. And while the effects of alcohol intake varies with the person, humans eliminate alcohol at a fairly predicable rate: 0.15 to 0.2 g/dl/hr. Officer Bisard was at nearly three times the legal limit when the accident occurred.

This shouldn't come as unexpected news to your professional teleprompter reader; the initial verdict in the Klaus and Sunny "von Bülow" Trial of the Century of the Week was overturned in no small part because the ME had discounted Mrs. "von Bülow"'s low blood alcohol level without extrapolating to what it was when she'd stopped drinking. Not much of a surprise, really, since the Press discounts all such manias after they've finished the rake, and there wasn't nearly so much interest in the retrial as there was in the original. In fact, "von Bülow" is routinely treated as a murderer sprung by Alan Dershowitz, rather than as a paragon of American wealth and Society, the Job Creators, who couldn't possibly have attempted to murder his wife in the way the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations claimed.

Borrowing Your Way Out Of Debt, Pt. 2

OH, indulge me for the nonce! Like you have a choice.

I b'lieve I've mentioned this before, but one reason to maintain a national interest in such a paltry backwater carnival as Indianapolis is that the crooks running the show, and the Press which provides them with face-first lapdances, ain't nearly as sophisticated a gang of liars as the national boys, and the seams are that much easier to spot. (Okay, so the nation's insiders hain't been all that sophisticated for the last thirty years, either. I'm old. Just play along.)

So, Our Story So Far: In the 50s and 60s, the peaceable sleep of Naptowners, like much of the rest of the country, is disturbed by angry Negroes; decent, hard-working white people run for the border (of Marion county, in this instance). In the late 60s Republicans, on a Nixonish roll, gain control of the mayor's office (in the person of dynamic young waxwork Dick "Eagle Scout" Lugar), the City Council, and the Statehouse, and they react by extending the city limits to the edge of the county, incorporating all those white voters and maintaining political control for the next quarter-century. The next thing they did was to…

[Okay, y'know, I'm not the guy to bound this shit in a nutshell, but here's one: Lugar, who we sent to the Senate two lifetimes ago, and who has rewarded us by doing absolutely nothing but fluff his own resumé since, was asked by local teevee about the extension of unemployment benefits on the eve of the Senate vote a few weeks ago. And he muttered something about negotiations, and then said, more clearly, that he expected a deal would get worked out. Well, it didn't--oh, shit, please sit down retroactively--and after the vote Lugar was nowhere to be seen; Choirboy Pence did the heavy lifting of explaining why Republicans who voted against it were really the compassionate ones. So now there's another vote coming up. Indiana's unemployed are hurting, and they aren't being helped by the fact that undercounting them and explaining them away is now a full-time job for Mitch Daniels 2012, Inc. And now Lugar shows up again, microphone held reverently in front of his melting waxwork kisser, to say that he'd really, really vote for the thing if it was just a matter of compassion, but there's the troubling matter of all these budget-busting add-ons he's too busy to name. And this is a guy who--like 98% of his Senate colleagues over the century he's been there--has rubber-stamped $ trillions in Defense Spending, and $ trillions more in supplemental Good Wars, and no one with a microphone can even be bothered asking the fucking question.]

Anyway, the Lugar administration also gets the General Assembly to create the Capital Improvement Board, which is a private corporation with the power to tax, something the Republican party has long stood for. The intention--this much is just fucking nakedly out there--is to artificially prop up land values in the Downtown area which white people have left in droves, before all the 100-year leases begin expiring around 1990. First they build a Convention Center, and the funding (a food and beverage tax voted in by those tax-loving GOPers) does so well that they find they've got lots of extra money and no legal recourse but to retire the construction bonds early, so, of course, they just ignore the law and start building other shit, much of which benefits the nascent Simon Mall, Development, and Boondoggle Group. Eventually the city gets into the Pro Sports game, building The Late Market Square Arena when the Pacers get tired of playing in the Bovine Exhibition Hall at the State Fairgrounds, then building an inflatable Dome and stealing the Colts in the middle of the night in order to justify the cost of all that helium, then a new minor league baseball stadium, on accounta MLB said the old one was dirty.

[By the way, how many of you live in a locality with a minor league team? Do they play in a palace, or a glorified dirigible hanger with bleachers? Yet MLB turned up--just as both the NFL and NBA would--just in time to tell us the place was substandard and they might be forced to move. And no one asked where there was a spanking new minor league stadium waiting for a new tenant; we just built a grand new baseball palace, a minor-league Camden Yards, downtown, and left a grand old baseball palace, a copy of Wrigley Field (it's where Eight Men Out was filmed) out on the westside to fucking rot. My dad saw Babe Ruth barnstorm there, and Jimmy Foxx hit one into the lights. Mortecai "Three Finger" Brown and Grover Cleveland Alexander pitched from that mound, and the whole Big Red Machine minus Bench and Rose played together there in the 60s. Woulda cost much less to restore the place than build the new manse (which is a great place to watch a ballgame, no question), but the question was never in doubt. Downtown property values, Come On Down! Er, Up!

[Which reminds me, by the way, that the Daniels administration is on the verge of junking Ernie Pyle's Boyhood Home, now a state historic site, because it isn't turning a big enough profit. I can't say it often enough: this malignant motherfucking dwarf wants to be Your Next President.]

Then the Pacers needed a new arena, because the old one faced the wrong way, and, of course, the Colts needed a new billion-dollar football barn which seated exactly the same number of people, but in more expensive seats. Then the Pacers wanted a better deal because the Colts got one, and then the whole PR machine of gubment, quasi-gubment, and local teevee and free buffet samplers got into the act and purely fucking manufactured a legitimate and contractual threat that the Pacers might leave unless they got an extra $15 mil a year.

So last evening I checked all three local teleprompter festivals, where the newly announced giveaway was the Lead Story. All of 'em asked the Man on the Street what he thought of the deal. All of 'em found the public without exception overjoyed that the city had managed to stave off the loss of a professional basketball team which ranks 27th among 30 in attendance.

And this was concluded, on Channel 13, by a look at their online poll: 80% of respondents saying it was a bad deal. Presumably they all stay indoors, or, as is more likely, there's now two Americas and one of them happily dwells the other side of the Looking Glass until absolute disaster moves 'em two feet.

Contrails In The News

I DON'T know how this blog came, undeservedly, to attract readers in the 98th percentile, but I try to communicate with y'all as best I can, including my protracted series on how some people of average intelligence or above manage to live in Indianapolis without habitually going off at every stupid thing people say in their hearing, which is a complete mystery to me.

The best I can put it is: Imagine waking up every day knowing there's a distinct possibility that your local Morning Zoo team has set the political agenda for the next six weeks.

The latest, now entering its second week, is the local outrage that the Professional Football squad we stole from Baltimore tried to minimize the possibility of season-ending injury to its starters in the final two games of the season, after having clinched home-field advantage throughout the playoffs. Which people won't shut th' fuck up about for two seconds.

The local eleven went 14-0 this season before dropping their last two (meaningless) games while resting their starters. In the process they set a new NFL standard for consecutive regular-season wins, for wins in a decade, and for consecutive 12-win seasons. They managed to do so in no small part because rookie coach Jim Caldwell, who, unlike his predecessor, is refreshingly silent about how superior his socio-sexual religious views are to his audience's, fielded a productive defense despite serious losses due to injury. To a thin defense add the fact that the team's fortunes ride on one Peyton Manning, twelfth year out of Tennessee, and a set of receivers which has been missing Anthony Gonzalez all season. So, of course, the minute Caldwell pulled his starters in week 16, and a close game with the Dog Ass Jets turned into a loss, the boos and debris started raining down and haven't stopped.

This has now prompted the NFL to announce it will "look into" "incentives" to keep starters on the field and in harm's way throughout meaningless regular-season games, unlike the meaningless five-game pre-season the NFL makes season-ticket holders pay for anyway. So, good news, Colts fans: you may have managed to wrest control of coaching decisions from your team's coaches, or cost them draft choices for insisting on keeping it. It's the same way we solved that Property Tax problem a few years back: giving people with no responsibility, and even fewer facts, a monopoly on microphone time and several shots of corn squeezin's.

The best part, though, was the sudden reanimation of Zombie Beurt SerVass, who had previously died in in the two previous decades. SerVass--among other things, the owner of the mausoleum where they buried Curtis Publishing Company, and the man who turned the Saturday Evening Post from a musty, conservative, geriatric publishing relic into a musty, crackpot, anti-fluoridationist publishing relic directed by his musty, crackpot physician wife--was the Kingpin of the Indianapolis City-County Council in its Annex-the-County-so-white-voters-still-can-control-it heyday, and he was possibly, year-in, year-out, the crankiest Right wing geezer in town. And remember, it's a town whose newspaper was published by Eugene Pulliam, and whose western suburbs were represented in Congress for much of that time by Dan Burton.

SerVass was so outraged by the Jets loss he returned from Hell and penned a resolution for the Council demanding the NFL refund ticket-holders' money. The matter hasn't found an actual sponsor who's on the actual Council yet, but, in keeping with the spirit of the thing, the sole Libertarian on the Council expressed an interest in voting for it if it came up.

Although, he added, he could "see the business side of it".

O Brother, Why Art Thou?

YOU may recall that last August the Indianapolis City-Country Council, hoping to breathe some new life into an old local government tradition--enacting blatant and fundamentally un-Constitutional legislation designed to salve the Continual Itch of Wingnut Voter Disgruntlement--we have, in the past few years, gone after Porn in general, Bondage Porn in the specific (as "Abusive to Women", by the lights of the party which didn't bother removing the scalp of the Equal Rights Amendment from its belt before the press conference), Adult Bookstore owners, the owners of the property those bookstores sat on, the name "adult bookstore" (which led to a glorious season for the easily amused, such as, well, me, when they all changed their names to "Museum of Adult Literature," since the law had exempted museums), and violent video games, sometimes modeling the fight on laws which had already been overturned, and all of them doomed to death by adjudication--upgraded local panhandling statutes to keep the unsightly 50 feet back from intersections, stop signs, crosswalks, and Republicans.

Since it's vitally important to preserve the appearance of observing the legal niceties when trampling the basic rights of the skinned and the scorned--once they're pointed out to you at least--the law, uh, eventually was rewritten to apply to anyone soliciting for any purpose, not just those trying to Feed the Nutrition Monkey. Meaning that next year sometime people will start appearing at street corners announcing they will curate your museum of adult literature for food.

That message didn't get to Channel 13 ("Indiana's News Leader"), apparently, since in graphic and in fact they're crass enough to refer to the law by its intended victims. And to celebrate the Tenth Week Anniversary (the traditional gift, ironically, is Discarded Cardboard), 13 dispatches a reporter making $80-100 grand per to harass the homeless.



Okay, here you have people who never miss a meal, and don't even pay for all of their own, haranguing the down-on-their-luck for trying to secure one, and that's certainly awful enough. But this is two-and-one-half months since the ordnance passed, after a long debate which did not stint the Constitutional or enforcement questions involved, and commercially-sanctioned reporters of local news seem oblivious to all that. It's Against the Law! The ordinance passed 15-13! The People have spoken! Why Are You Still Here?

Sure, sure, this sort of tenth-rate sensationalism is their stock in trade, which is lucky since it's about the only item they have in stock. But does that exempt you from a sense of proportion as it absolves you from fellow-feeling? Leave us assume this really was a story worthy of the gas money. Let's be especially generous and allow there's any reason whatsoever to treat it as a Scandal! Three questions spring immediately to mind, and they're each informed by the heated debate that surrounded the measure in the first place: 1) Is the city trying to get its ducks in a row before enforcement brings the inevitable Constitutional challenge? 2) Are the cops really supposed to spend manpower on this now, when existing laws were only rarely, and selectively, enforced? and 3) Are the City Fathers trying to keep this one in reserve until it's time to sweep the streets in February 2012 for the Mayan Calendar of Death Final Countdown to Super Bowl the Last?

Now, if I were looking for answers to the above I think I'd call the City Attorney, the IMPD, or the Mayor's barracks, not ask the first guy I found inhaling car exhaust for five bucks an hour. And I hope that doesn't sound elitist, because if my goal were honest answers that'd be reversed. Turns out the cops say they're waiting for legal clarification. Answer, or Non-answer, that would have taken all of fifteen seconds to spit out.

Instead it's Why am I still looking at your unfashionable phiz? Which does nothing so much as underline the real agenda. As if we needed it.

Forget It, Jake.

OKAY, so you wouldn't know it from the pages of the online Indianapolis Racist Beacon, which was more interested in the breakup of something called Brooks & Dunn, some law firm I'm guessing, but the Indianapolis City-County Council solved, or "solved", the funding problems for the Capital Improvement Board (Motto: " o, Taxation Without Representation!") by raising the hotel tax 1%, plus some stocking-stuffer accounting shenanigans.

Now, just to remind you why you might care, despite your not caring, the CIB is one of those "practical" government solutions to the problems of wealthy people being not quite wealthy enough which Republican-controlled governments are fond of making in between complaining about Taxes on the Little Guy and The Size of Government When Democrats Control It. It dates to the mayoralty of one Richard "This Town Ain't Big Enough For White People To Control The Vote" Lugar, the 20th century Lincoln who extended the franchise to the suburbs, and solved the concurrent problem of Old Money losing its downtown property values by establishing (with the State's imprimatur) a private corporation with the right to raise and spend tax monies. It was intended (or "intended", maybe) at first to knock down a few blighty blocks near the Statehouse and put up a Convention Center. But when more money (from the first hotel/restaurant tax) than expected came in the "surplus" cash was too tempting to permit a strict adherence to the law, as in paying off the project it was intended for. And the "excess" was funneled into other projects, including rehabbing privately-owned office buildings and building a stadium for the football team we hadn't stolen yet.

And it's this the crotchety linear-thinker remembers when he sees commenters drawn by the Racist Beacon confidently announcing It's all the Democrats' fault! as though Indiana Democrats were real Democrats, as though there were such a thing anymore, even nationally, and as though when there was it approached the combination of Stalin, Dr. Mengele, and Margaret Sanger of the popular pin-headed Republican imagining.

So at the beginning of the year the CIB announces it's about $45 million in the hole, the bulk of the shortfall being the operating expenses for the new Football Barn, which seem to've been left out of the process of creating it (at least as it came to pass; Democrats, who ran the city at the time, say the expenses were in their bill before Mitch "The Bantam Menace" Daniels and his hench Legislature took the thing over); another $15 million comes from the Pacers demanding we give them that much by taking over their operating expenses, too. And looey-bird Marine (ret) Gomer Pyle II, the accidental Mayor of Indianapolis, was basically spanked by the same bunch when he had to come asking for a little help with the money, before being made to stand at attention while the Bonzai Governor crowed about it.

Now, look: the LA water-rights grab was nearly a century ago. The St. Francis Dam collapsed ninety-one years ago. You'd think some sense-memory of that would still be fresh, especially as one of the great American films of all time takes off from there. And you'd be wrong. The bozos swept back into power in the nation's first Astroturf Teabagging Festival just raised taxes so we can give more money to the Irasay and Simon clans. You'd expect something akin to the same tub-thumping news coverage the Property Tax Protests got two years back. And you'd be wrong.

And you'd be wrong! Channel 8, last night, admitted that the increased hotel plus the increased sales taxes, now totaling 17%, put us among the highest in the nation, higher than (their figures) San Antonio, Denver, or Chicago. But But Butbutbut! Since our room rates are lower that theirs, we're still the winners!

Now then, you might be looking at that list thinking, "I didn't know those cities were in competition with Indianapolis", especially as two of them are at least twice its size, all of them possess indigenous cultures, or any other sort of culture, including having something other than Olive Garden win Best Restaurant in readers' polls, and one of them is not even technically part of the United States.* You might be imagining that the list was cherry-picked and read on the air without further consideration. And, well, maybe. It's a curious assortment, but a quick look at Cincinnati, Nashville, Columbus, Louisville, and St. Louis shows roughly equal room + tax totals, though I doubt Naptown would wind up at the absolute bottom of the list. Bear with me; unlike local news operations, I do my own research.

But then, this is not my point. My point is that I don't recall ever once seeing such a comparison two years ago, when the tax raisers in question were the previous Democratic administration and Council. And that money went to pay off police and fire pension obligations, not Larry Bird's execrable career stats in personnel management, or Jim-Bob Irsay's guitar collection fetish.

The Racist Beacon seems to've left all mention of the thing to its political columnist, who said, among other things (and no, I couldn't've made this up):

• Mayor Gomer's a hero for proposing a balanced budget. (Balanced by cutting every city department except Public Safety by 10%. This is the sort of "achievement" only someone with a pocket calculator, and a complete lack of regard for health, hospitals, streets, sanitation, schools, parks, and the arts, could have accomplished.)

• If you live in Marion County you won't care about a Hotel tax increase unless you're an adulterer. Really.

• Democrats--only one of whom crossed over--are the real hypocrites, because after being voted out of power in a Racist Beacon-assisted tax revolt, they were honor-bound to vote to raise taxes again.

• Plus their former leader is a big poopy brain.

Really. These people benefit personally and professionally from our socialized sports teams, and they benefit directly from lowered property taxes. And they're about as likely to recuse themselves as Justice Scalia is.

_____________
*You argue with 'em. I'm through.

The Petri Dish Of Moranity

INDIANAPOLIS is a city with a long-standing inferiority complex, and some damn fine reasons behind that. It's the Hollow Center of Manifest Destiny, the cardboard sleeve than convinces the unwary shopper that his candy bar is 33% larger than it actually is; it's the temporary acclamation accorded the inspired pairing of Smoke with Mirrors. It's not a little clearing in the Eastern Woodlands that grew up big and strong. It's the geographic center of a sort of palsied rhombus scribbled when the Powers that Were Being in the early 19th century decided the Old Northwest would look better on maps in several colors, not just one big splotch, a pinhole in a map poked by later 19th century regional wise men who decided, from the state's one real White enclave on the Ohio, that a new, alabaster city should serve as the State Capital, one that was equally inaccessible to everyone at the time, because we used to be much better at compromise. It turned out to be a malarial swamp. I suppose you were ahead of me on that.

At least we got a damned regular grid out of the deal. And don't get me wrong. I live here. I spent my carefree childhood roaming her pastures, rills, and unguarded commercial properties; I've spent most of my adult life here, occasionally glimpsing the outdoors. I'm home here, consarn it, and scarcely ever troubled by thoughts of arson. Any more.

Indianapolis used to be the largest city in America not on a navigable waterway, but that was back when trees were an occasional impediment to overland traffic; I haven't checked recently. Some typical American visionary once managed to get a sternwheeler all the way here up the mighty White River one presumably monsoonish summer, but the thing pegged in the shallows and never made the trip back. It was, one supposes, dismantled and used to build a Chili's.

Because my fellow citizens loooove the chain restaurant, something which induces that sense of inferiority in the rest of us while leaving them almost magically untouched. One of several current politically-assisted financial crises of the moment involves the City Market, a venerable old space that was part of the original plat, a collection of food and produce vending stalls which has suffered through hard times ever since the suburbanization of the 1950s made getting the hell out of Indianapolis an even better idea, and cheaper. This has been seriously compounded by the fact that politicians--that would be "the same people who jumped at the chance to convert farmland to interstates, tract houses, and convenient Chili's locations in the first place"--have sought to solve the problem, guaranteeing that it would eventually get much worse, except at an exorbitant cost befitting our compensatory levels of civic boosterism. A series of politically-connected idiots chased out long-time tenants, herded any who remained into a dark, dank corner for two years while they spent millions redecorating the place to bring it more in line with the contemporary Mall aesthetic, and managed, somehow, to go broke while alienating all the remaining tenants. (I am not making either of these up: the actual, proximate cause of the wipeout was losing a suit to a former tenant they'd high-handed and then refused to talk with despite the threat of legal action; posting bond to appeal the judgement would now empty the checking account, so the City's stepping in to help out. And one of the reasons given for construction cost overruns was that "the plumbing was in much worse shape than we imagined". In a hundred and thirty year-old building. Why didn't you just go with the assumption that there wasn't any?)

And the crisis came to light recently, and Mayor Gomer took time from his busy schedule of planning Chinatowns and trying to land the lucrative North American Cricket franchise to do his usual thorough job of assessing the situation, asking his handlers what he should say, and getting back to the Golf Channel. And his solution, essentially, was (hold on!):

Let's turn it into one big Chili's!

Because every challenge is an Opportunity, dammit. An opportunity to rebuild what went before with substandard materials and pocket the difference.

The news engendered a little discussion at the Racist Star that I was foolish enough to look in on. And some sensible person, apparently an out-of-towner, said something to the effect that, Gee, the market is this traditional collection of small vendors, and maybe this city has enough Chain Restaurants already, what with the six we have on every corner, and the Farmer's Market in Broad Ripple is thriving an' all, like all around the rest of the country, so maybe there's a more creative solution. And this person was then told to leave town if he didn't like it here, at least fifteen times consecutively, before I gave up counting.

Chicago, of course, is a great restaurant town. Cincinnati is a great restaurant town. Louisville is the gateway to Bluegrass culture, and Northern Kentucky stands with KC and Virginia as the great regional centers of barbecue. And in Indianapolis they'll fight you for dissing the Whopper.

So it's really not that surprising that the other source of major cultural influence is the fucking yammering radio (you happen to get the Bob and Tom Show, now also in convenient video form? That's us.), and that any and every drive-show hyped, commerical-tie-in, gawker-and/or public-urinator-generating Event--raft race, public beer bust, simulcast Lame Playlist synced to Yet Another Excuse To Make Shit Explode Overhead--becomes, not Somewhere to Go and Something to Do, but a sort of instant Tradition. Yesterday came word that the big Labor Day Celebration of Loud Noise and Flashing Lights would go Silent and Dark this year, due to the economic difficulties of Jeff Smulyan's Massive Communications Empire Founded on Buying Shit Then Having To Sell It Back, and the local news hairdo pool commenting on it acted as though vandals had melted the Liberty Bell.

This same weird combination of poshlust taste, the personal restraint of a shirtless Libertarian, and suburban lawncare fascism attends The Monon Trail, an abandoned stretch of railbed which has been converted into an asphalt greenway for Walkers, Bikers, Roller Skaters, and the occasional mugger. Y'know, I'm all for such things politically; I just don't want to be anywhere around them myself. It's like being on the first quarter-mile of the trail in one of our jewels of a state park; it doesn't matter what the scenery is like, the total effect is that of being in a crowded Mall with all the stores closed and the children all coming off massive sugarbuzzes Cold Turkey. I hike occasionally in the second-largest city-owned nature preserve. Miles of trails that come within shouting distance of the Monon, with which it shares a parking lot, but there's a constant stream of exercisers on the asphalt runway, and the only people besides myself who venture into the woods are the ones who find leash laws unfairly restrict the Constitutional rights of their dogs.

Not that I'm complaining about their absence. But, as I suggested, the Monon is occasionally visited by felons, rapscallions, and ne'er-do-wells, and when this occurs on the stretch south of 38th Street, which is either a sketchy area or Darkest Africa, depending on who's telling, you can be sure the Racist Star's commenters will remind you Just Who Lives Down There Anyway. And yesterday brought news that some guy my age had been on the Trail when a gang of Yoots rode past him and one shot him in the belly with a pellet gun. Which generated these, among others:

"Too bad he wasn't carrying a gun! Those pellet guns look realistic. He could have shot his attacker in self-defense by mistake. And wouldn't that be too bad?"

and:

"...of course, after they 9mm a couple of thugs the preachers and the ACLU will cry foul."

Neither of which, mind you, comes as a revelation, or even begins to snake the clogged sewer line that is the Racist Star's typical comments section. It's just that I read this the day after hearing the nets react exactly the same way to news of another North Korean "A-bomb" test, and Rush Limbaugh--also courtesy the nets--react pretty much the same way to the announcement of a nominee for the Supreme Court. And it occurs to me: we're all Indianapoli now. I suppose I always suspected it.

Forget It, Jake. It's The National Basketball Association.

INDIANAPOLIS Racist Star:

Stern: Pacers deserve lease concessions

By Jeff Rabjohns
Posted: February 15, 2009

PHOENIX -- NBA commissioner David Stern expressed confidence professional basketball would remain in Indianapolis but stopped short of saying he was certain it would.
The Indiana Pacers have the right to renegotiate their Conseco Fieldhouse lease after his season, and plan to do so....

"I don't want to make [Pacers co-owner] Herb Simon's time too easy here, but I will say I understand what they're trying to get is a small fraction of what was done for the Colts," Stern said Saturday night during his annual address of the NBA at All-Star weekend.

Let's recap.

In the late 1950s it became apparent in some quarters that the Rapidly Advancing Colored Hoards could not be kept out of white public schools forever (we are speaking, kids, of post-Brown America, by the way; like a lot of Northern urban school districts Indianapolis' would be ruled unconstitutionally segregated in the early 1970s). This, coupled with Eisenhower's dream of ameliorating his abysmal showing in North Africa finding something for all the non-rocket specialist Nazi engineers we'd snuck into the country to do creating an American Autobahn bristling with military transport and pecan logs, drove certain segments of the population--let's call them whites--to the outermost reaches of the county and just beyond, into "safe" schools and the once-verdant fields of Unfettered, Unzoned, and Ill-Considered hyper-development.

This, however, created, or rather added to, the problems of a group of Old-Money and state university deed holders who owned the property on which the rapidly decaying and increasingly unvisited buildings of Downtown were standing, or in some cases tottering. And most of these were operating under 100-year leases signed around the turn of the century. The clock was ticking. The buildings' ratings were plummeting. And the department-store model on which their economy was based was being pummeled by the new regional shopping plazas.

Fortunately, for some, 1968 brought a new Republican mayor (Richard "Highly Respected Senatorial Supernumerary" Lugar) and a Republican majority to the city council, and together they forged a new vision, which, in brief, consisted of letting all the white people in the county vote for the mayor and city council of Indianapolis, while keeping their own schools and avoiding paying for Indianpolis'. The move kept the city in complete Republican control for the next twenty-five years.

It also ushered in a publicly-financed downtown building program that might've given Cæsar Augustus pause. Based on the ever-popular Public Financing, Private Profit program, it built us a basketball stadium, which it then tore down to build another; built an "all-purpose Dome" which stole us a football team that then demanded we tear it down and build a new one; and a fine new ball-yard designed after beautiful Camden Yards, so we could let the old one, designed after beautiful Wrigley Field, crumble in on itself. Which at least saves on demolition costs.

Not to mention a Convention Center, a few expansions of the Convention Center, a downtown mini-mall, an overarching downtown mega-mall, and uncounted tax breaks, office buildings, multi-purpose facilities, and rape rooms. "Uncounted", because the first thing the Republican majority did was create something called the Capital Improvements Board, designed specifically so that the people actually footing the bill would never quite know what their money was buying or for how much. The CIB answers to no one, not publicly, but has the power to tax; compare that, by the way, with what Republicans say when duly elected governing bodies try to raise taxes for anything else.

And it has recently come to light that the CIB, through no fault of its own, is $85 million in the hole, over a quarter of that being operating costs for the just-opened football barn, where, to everyone's disappointment, the Colts were unable to lose their first-round playoff game this year due to playing elsewhere. The Colts franchise, which was just about the league's poorest when it snuck out of Baltimore twenty-five years ago is now, mirabile dictu, in the middle of the pack, assuming you can believe what the sort of people who tell you such things tell you, which you can't. As far as the public can tell, the Colts contributed to the construction of the thing almost all the money the city paid them for having to break the lease on the old place on accounta we were tearing it down at their insistence. Plus moving expenses. Plus they got to sell the name and keep the money, they get their gate receipts, concessions, and parking plus a percentage of those from any other event the city manages to shoehorn into the place, including this year's state high school football championships, but probably not next year's since the state athletic commission took a bath due to increased rental fees. Again, this is assuming you believe the sort of people who tell you this and who, it must be admitted, have even more reason to lie about things than usual.

Meanwhile Jim Irsay, the Colts' inheritor, repentant former hillbilly heroin addict, and owner of the original manuscript of On the Road and, apparently, a single ugly pinstriped suit, voted with the majority on new NFL regulations which will prevent the Colts from getting a share of a revenue pool designed to help cities in smaller markets compete. I'm sorry, maybe I should have made sure you were sitting down.

Now back a few years ago when the Colts were arguing that they simply had to have a new stadium, on the grounds that the old one was facing the wrong way, who should come to town but then-Commissioner of the National Football League Paul "Paulie Tags" Tagliabue, who told the rapt city fathers that the NFL just couldn't go on any longer without filling the horrible void left in the nation's #2 market when the City of the Angels simultaneously threw out of town two greedhead franchises and never looked back. Whew, close shave, that one. Any readers out in El Lay able to get tickets?

This followed almost directly on the heels of Major League Baseball, which, remarkably, owns its own minor league franchise instead of suckering the nation's universities into providing one for free, coming to town and telling us that either that stadium went, or the franchise did. Surprisingly, no one mentioned that we were talking about minor league baseball, where a reasonable guess is that 85% of the stadia across the country are in imminent danger of collapse. This was followed by nobody asking why we needed to build a new stadium at twice the cost of repairing the fine old one we had. But fortunately we were able to find a piece of available property right Downtown.

And, in fairness, the new ball-yard is a great place to watch a game. Just like the banks of the White River after a good rain are a good place to watch raw sewage pour into the drinking water of people downstream, or any of several urban middle schools are just the place to see the last Commodore 64s still in public use.

SO here come the Pacers, who demanded and received a new basketball palace just eight years ago, for which they paid not a dime, and who now have a contractual right to negotiate new terms. And the Pacers want the CIB to take over the ($15 M, assuming you believe...) operating costs of their arena, just like it did for the Colts.

Now, let's be fair to these people, even though they'll never return the favor. The Pacers are owned--they keep saying reluctantly--by the Simon brothers, international multi-mega mall (Mall of America, e.g.) developers. They bought the team thirty years ago, supposedly at the behest of the second Republican city dynasty, when it looked as if it might leave town (no, really). And, ever since, they've refused to open their books as required by law, citing "trade secrets", like some other NBA team would seek to duplicate the Pacers' record.

Now, the Simons have not exactly been left out of CIB largesse otherwise; they're the operators of that downtown mall and several of the other commercial ventures taxpayers made possible while bound and gagged. They have continually refused to answer any questions about what happens to the franchise when they shuffle off this Sack o' Woe, something of minor interest since the younger Simon is 74 and his brother 82.

Sure, you say, but is that all? Hardly worth mentioning, is it?

Okay, so the President of the CIB is one Robert "Bob" Grand. His day job is Managing Partner of Barnes and Thornberg, the downtown legal firm that pulls Mayor Gomer's strings. It's in that capacity he functions as a registered lobbyist for... (drum roll, please?) Simon Property Group.

So, a couple of things: one, in the spirit of Congressional concern over CEO salaries I would like to suggest that the city of Indianapolis, should it ever fall into the hands of honest public servants, make it Class A Felony Extortion for a representative of any professional sports club, its parent organization or associated entities, to publicly urge any taxpayer concession to the recipient of any public monies, with double the prison time for any mention of moving out of town. Although, unlike the Congress, I don't propose bargaining it down to "shall be shamed by the public posting of an unflattering caricature". And, despite my basic humanitarianism, it seems increasingly likely that Finding a Few Of Them Floating Face Down is the only thing these fucks are ever going to understand.

Programming Note

TWELVE-point-five inches of snow here, officially, and a Republican mayor, which means the streets are still such a mess that Indianapolis Public Schools, which almost never close to begin with, and never for two days in a row, are closed for the second day in a row. I took yesterday's closing as God's insistence, via Dennis Prager, that we should have sexual relations in as many and various positions as we're still able to get into; my Poor Wife took it to mean I should get the driveway shoveled. We compromised: I cleared it enough to make sure the paramedics could get in.

The bit about "a Republican mayor" is hardly partisanship on my part, since I'm not a Democrat, and neither is the opposition party in Indiana; the last Republican mayor, Stephen "I Am Legend" Goldsmythe, routinely skimped on maintenance in order to protect his image as a tax-cutter, and would have lost his reelection bid in 1996 if the election had been held at the end of winter instead of the beginning, and if the Demopublicans had managed to nominate someone who'd ever been photographed.

Mayor Gomer's not being blamed for the shoddy work, not yet, in part because his handlers launched a highly-effective preemptive strike last October (The price of salt is up! Our trucks are aging!), and in part because that would require something resembling an adversarial Press. And the storm did dump about twice as much snow on us as predicted, but it was still supposed to be bad enough, and lengthy enough, that they should have preparting to plow all along. Instead they wasted time salting, which wasn't going to work for long, if at all. Okay, so you get wrong-footed sometimes; there's no grading on a scale. The Japanese still lost Midway, but one imagines that Nagumo didn't get to go on local teevee afterwards to explain how well everything was going.

So, posting is on Snow Holiday, but I did want to mention this. tbshrew, in comments:

Almost certainly Kristol enjoyed [a] student deferment from '70-'73...

I hold a personal advantage here, since I was a member of the '72 draft class: Nixon ended student deferments in 1971, the year of Kristol's eligibility, as part of an ongoing attempt to answer charges of favoritism in conscription before the law expired in mid-1972. My recollection is that deferments were grandfathered for people who had completed two years of college. That may not be accurate, but at any rate, Kristol could not have received one; it's possible he could have applied for one when he registered, but he would have been classified 1-H until the lottery, after which it would have been no longer available, even if he was already in college. He's a big fat liar, in other words.

Anyway, back to work, and if you think getting a savvy, desirable, middle-aged woman shit-faced drunk at 8:30 in the morning, without her realizing it before it's too late, isn't work, then you and I run in different social circles.

From Where I Sit

Racist Star photo, Sam Riche

WELL, the good news is that our new public-funded, privately-controlled football palace is no longer 1/4 under water, and is expected to have elevator service, not to mention a new data room, in time for season ticket holders to gawk at their surroundings while attending the first of a slough of meaningless preseason "contests" the NFL forces them to attend at full price for the privilege. The mishap(s)--it flooded a second time when the initial temporary repair failed--was instructive to the extent that it provided a rough estimate of the number of people who think "you have to expect problems with any new construction" is a valid argument, but "you get to bitch when they happen on your dime" is not.

Then they let The Media tour the safer parts of the structure, and the above photo hit the breeze, and it was instructive to the extent that I had no idea there was anyone who'd argue that a retractable roof requires 200 seats, minimum, be located behind a post, which furthermore is just Basic Physics and anyone who doesn't understand it must have been educated by IPS. But, as it turns out, there are. And the Colts then announced that those seats weren't part of the season ticket package, and they'd be sold only once every other ticket was gone, and they'd be clearly marked "obstructed", and they'd only be sold to people who really, really wanted to see the game or had to use the bathroom real bad. And, besides, what did you expect for $750 million?

Now this was instructive, in the Marie Antoinette sense, which is why I made it up. But I didn't make up the $750 million thing, which the Racist Star keeps reporting off-handedly, despite the fact that when the project began, 22 months ago, it was a $500 million stadium. If there's someone out there at the moment explaining that anyone who doesn't expect a 50% cost overrun on any new construction, as well as three-feet of water in the control center, must live in a cave, or in Russia, I haven't seen 'em yet. My suspicion is I just need to try harder.

We have a new airport terminal going on-line, too (oh, those heady, spendthrift days of the Early Naughts!), which has caused the local teleprompter readers to take a break from gushing (sorry) about the new stadium to gush about the recent awarding of airport food establishment contracts. No, really. Gush. They were, like, running down menus an' stuff. This is why I tell anyone who asks I'm from Kentucky.

There was a minor flapdoodle about the place when a group of citizens who've been pressing the Airport Authority since 1979 to change the name back from the breathtaking, but fittingly hallucinatory Indianapolis International Airport (there's one direct flight to Winnipeg each month, I think) to Weir Cook grabbed themselves some spotlight. Now, I like Weir Cook; that's the name it had all through my youth, and it's 80% Weird, not to mention (again) the silly pomposity of that International business. But then it turned out that the group was really just a bunch of military jock sniffers pawing the corpse of WWI flying ace (which I knew), whose seven kills included four balloons, which I didn't. Somehow, perhaps in retrospect, true, this seems less like the dashing, chivalrous Cavalry of the Air of the Great War, and more like somebody going berserk at a carnival. Anyway, he's getting an access road and a snack bar named in his honor, so all is well, and the honored dead can rest easy again.

But in the meantime, Accidental Mayor Greg "Simpkins" Ballard gets to ascend to the podium and deliver strings of platitudes about what the new terminal means for International Business and The City's Reputation, in that order, both of which might be further advanced if someone could teach him it's not pronounced "inner-Nash-null". Though, really, it's just a small taste of what we truly deserve.

Olio

• There's this guy. His name is Matt Tully, and he's the political columnist for the Indianapolis Racist Star. Got the job around 2005, went into the tank for the paper's Republican masters around, oh, 2005.

Tully's columns have, increasingly, looked like part of Mitch "The Hamster" Daniels' permanent reelection campaign, down to the using the same sort of "criticism" the Entrepreneurator-in-Chief subjects himself to: "Daniels big problem is that he's terrible at explaining just how brilliant his ideas are".

There's this other guy. His name is Greg Ballard, but everybody I know calls him Goober. He's the accidental mayor of Indianapolis, the beneficiary of that ginned-up Property Tax Revolt from last summer. He's a retired Marine Lt. Colonel, and as if the emphasize that point he recently mused about constructing a Chinatown on the Indianapolis Southside, and proposed luring the lucrative, if somewhat non-existent, North American cricket market to town. (To be absolutely fair about this, the source for this story was...Matt Tully. But, then, when the Accidental Mayor gave did a Q&A with the City County Council that was so embarrassing even the rest of the local media just buried its head in its hands, Tully praised it, leading one to conclude that the Chinatown and Cricket bit was just a warning to Ballard's handlers that he should not, under any circumstances, be allowed to speak off the cuff, even to GOP faithful after two cocktails.)

Ballard had run an absolute cesspool of a campaign, accusing incumbent Demopublican Bart Peterson of everything short of necrophilia and purposely singing the National Anthem off-key. This went generally unremarked, since nobody knew he was running until he won. He harped a lot on spending, including criticizing the new football stadium deal and the "misplaced priorities" of trying to land a Super Bowl.

So, yesterday, after the second attempt to get the promised Bread and Circuses, Mostly Circuses payoff for the new, taxpayer-funded $400 $500 $Your Guess Is As Good As Any stadium succeeded in bringing OMG It's Super Bowl XLVI !!! to town, whose reactions to the news of his successful stewardship do you suppose Tully wrote a tick-tock about?

• By the way, I'm replacing the all-purpose Chinese insult "May you live in interesting times," with "May you live in a small-market NFL city for two years while its Chamber of Commerce types try to attract a Super Bowl with your money, and may your teevee be stuck forever on, and only receive local news."

• Somehow, the Failing Indianapolis Public Schools and the eastside community will get to keep a "$9 M" practice facility after the Big Weekend is over, to be built with "private funds", although, apparently, we don't exactly have those yet and the city has vouchsafed the money. Thank god we're not wasting the money on education.

• Oh, and incidentally, Hoosiers on the waiting list for some of those 6000 new Colts season tickets at the new boondoggle have apparently just learned that as many as the first 125 of them will actually be getting tickets to the palace they bought. On accounta the new seats are mostly mostly for rich people. Plus 1000 new seats for the disabled, which the Colts announced as if they were doing it out of the goodness of that tiny sliver of corporate heart which isn't occupied by insatiable greed, and not because the law required it.

• Speaking of The Hamster, he went to Iraq this week, and found it "much better" than his previous visit, although he allowed as how Baghdad is "no garden spot". Which means that Mitch Effing Daniels is more honest than his party's nominee for President.

Now, I think it's fine for public officials who have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with national policy to junket off to war zones, if that brings a bit of cheer to the troops. And it's nice if, time and again, the governor can keep in touch with where his National Guard is located. But then I think a planeload of strippers might have been more appreciated. If it were me, a planeload of mimes would have been more appreciated.

Oh, and the camp where he overnighted was reportedly hit by mortar fire, suggesting his popularity with the citizenry is about the same over there as it is here. Not to worry, Mitch; they don't have the technology to hit anything so small.

• Via Roy we find George Packer's New Yorker piece on the Fall of Conservatism. We do wish people would start surrounding the term in quotation marks, as is right and proper, but we must admit our little heart was warmed by the anguishing cracks in Davids Brooks and Frum's Peter Pan/Ronald Reagan's Peter Syndrome.

Brooks had moved through every important conservative publication—National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard—“and now I feel estranged,” he said. “I just don’t feel it’s exciting, I don’t feel it’s true, fundamentally true.” In the eighties, when he was a young movement journalist, the attacks on regulation and the Soviet Union seemed “true".

Say it again: by the time David Brooks was a young "movement" reporter--incidentally, "movement" is pretty much the image his current output conjures up--it was widely known that the Soviet military was bankrupt; the government had known for a decade or more. So it had the same "true feeling" as the Eisenhower/Kennedy claims of a "missile gap":  it's "true", unless you look at it. Funny how this now winds up being "Conservatism's" fault for not finding new and exciting ways to make Brooks imagine he's "with it", and not Brooks' for being a careerist lackey in the first place.   Which means that nobody has to look at how such a massive canard was sold to them in the first place, since they were behaving reasonably at the time.  Second, and for what it's worth, it's the Carter administration which began trumpeting "deregulation", which has been a demonstrable success to the extent that people who believe in it believe it to have been so. Please explain to me what risk Young David Brooks, Movement Conservative, felt he ran from either the Soviets or government regulation? He wasn't planning on opening an oil refinery in some protected wetlands, and he sure wasn't about to join the Army.

What Packer fails to say is that these sorts of blithering tools had a hegemony on the public debate from Reagan through Katrina. Who th' fuck can possibly care if these guys now want to climb aboard Global Warming or Wage Stratification? What have they ever touched that didn't turn to shit?  The proper response to a poem is another poem; the proper response to realizing you've spent your life as a tool is to gouge your own eyes out with a rat-tail file. We might listen to you after that.

I'll Vote In Person, But I'm Seriously Considering Living Here Absentee.*

OUR story so far:

1) Friendless and issueless, Indianapolis Republican mayoral candidate "Lonesome Greg" Ballard attaches himself to the Racist Star's headline writers and makes the city's escalating murder rate his campaign theme. 2) The White People's Property Tax Revolt, LLC., accidentally puts him in the mayor's office. 3) Ballard launches a three-pronged attack on crime: he showily muscles out the Democratic, and democratically-elected, former sheriff who's heading the newly-merged Indianapolis Metro Police Dept.; he appoints a showy committee to demonstrate he's Doing Something, to be headed by former Marion County Prosecutor Scott Newman; and he starts turning up at showy crime-related press ops, jostling current Marion County Prosecutor and former Dan Burton henchman Carl "Facetime" Brizzi for angles.

Now, I have to admit that in the annals of political painting-the-hull-without-scraping-the-barnacles-first this one is remarkably successful, as the Racist Star almost immediately is moved to stop publishing year-to-date crime rate comparisons.

Jump to April 23, when a masked man robs a local bank branch, and in the process shoots Katherin Shuffield, a teller who is pregnant with twins. It's the sort of crime which shocks and outrages a community, unless its mayor and prosecutor turn up on local news to assure the voters they'll hunt the perpetrators down. And it's always nice when they can find the time to make it to dais a couple days later when the arrest of five people is announced with, oh, let's call it fanfare, despite the acknowledgement that none of them was the guy who'd actually robbed the bank and shot Mrs. Shuffield.

Now, first, I'm no criminology expert--I've never even been convicted--but it did seem to me that having five people in on a one-man bank heist would play hell with the overhead. And the whole story gets a mite fuzzy here, because, well, because that's the way the people responsible want it. Apparently acting on a tip, police arrested four men, and the next door neighbor for good measure. The next morning they stopped a guy driving a car matching the description of one that might've been the getaway car. He turns out to have a record and some cocaine. And he gives them the name of the shooter. And by the end of the weekend Metro Police are able to announce the end of a crime spree--two charges of false reporting, plus the coke bust, and the drug paraphernalia/child neglect charges on the neighbor. Neither the mayor nor the prosecutor was on hand for those announcements.

The weekend also brought news that the woman's twins, initially thought to have survived, died of extreme prematurity, while she remained in critical condition.

Which brought Carl Brizzi, who may or may not have once been Danny Burton's chief melon squeezer, back to the spotlight as he demanded that the World's Third-Worst State Legislature™ declare life begins at conception, on the grounds that the man who shot Mrs. Shuffield can only be charged with feticide in the death of her twins, and a Class C felony is barely worth a notch on a hotshot prosecutor's gun.

If convicted he could get as little as two years! scream several dutiful Indiana newspaper columns, as though a case infamous enough to get local politicians fighting for air time might result in a minimum sentence for the guy who gunned down twins. (The presumptive sentence for a Class C felony in Indiana--this is assuming it's all one is charged with--is four years.)

It's an odious crime, to be sure, and anyone with a heart has to feel the loss--meaning we expect our elected legal representatives to be immune--and to hope beyond hope that Mrs. Shuffield survives, whatever that does to Brizzi's conviction rate. But we might look first at what he does not propose to do: raise feticide to a higher class felony, re-formulate the notion of "viability", or call for a ban on, or increased penalties for the use of, semi-automatic handguns like the Tec-9 reportedly used in the shooting. And we might ask, "Why?" Except we know the answer. Rewriting the feticide law--it passed two Republican-controlled Houses in 1999 over the veto of the late Frank O'Bannon--would be messy, arduous, and exacting, and the Indiana State Legislature can only do the first of those. It would expose both the slippery rationale for the law and the serious weaknesses of its enforcement and potential for abuse.

Local teevee coverage was instructive. Brizzi gets his face time, introduced by a warning from the anchor team that his solution "may prove controversial". Why, yes, yes it may. And it may prove cynical and opportunistic, and it might pander to a political constituency the Prosecutor will depend on to fund his further career moves, not that I expect you people to mention those, or investigate anything. Really, we're just thankful you bothered to nod, however briefly.  Both the teleprompter readers and their non-telegenic cousins at the Racist Star saw fit to ask Planned Parenthood of Indiana for comment, just in case somebody in the audience might have missed where all this is supposed to fit in the script.


What we have instead is an episode of 24, where an easily roused rabble imagines recognizing the rights of Blastocyst Americans will put trigger-happy bank robbers in the hellholes where they belong, and leave everyone else alone (excepting the people who intend to move onto abortion providers next). What we don't have is something that'll add one day to the sentence of the perp in question.

That is, of course, assuming we stop holding press conferences and actually find the guy.


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*False. I've never voted in an Indiana primary, and I never will so long as one has to declare oneself a member of a major political party.

Say What You Will About Our New Mayor, He Was Right About The Strawberries.

INDIANAPOLIS Racist Star political apologist columnist Matt Tully, a man who appears to be having second thoughts about publicly fellating a rodeo clown, reports that Accidental Mayor Lt. Col. Gomer F. Ballard told a local businessman he'd like to create a Chinatown on the city's southside, and hopes to corner the market on North American cricket.  No, I did not start drinking early.