If you live in some area of the country long enough I think you recognize that there are differences between the nearby states. But I think it’s also common for people, particularly in the lamestream media, to lump them all together. So if you’re a midwesterner, people have this mental image about us just like I have one of the great plains states or far west or what have you. The last few weeks though I’ve been strongly reminded of the differences between my home state and our neighbor to the west, where I spend a lot of time.

For the last twenty-five months I’ve spent pretty much one work night a week in a hotel in Bloomington, IL (thumbs up for the Hampton Inn on Towanda Ave) and this has necessarily meant at least one (and for the first year, two) weekly drives on I-74 between the west ‘burbs of Indianapolis and Bloomington. This means I get a dose of IN and IL news every week.

So checking into the hotel yesterday I see the lead story on Tuesday’s Bloomington Pantagraph (not only a dreadful name but an equally awful paper) laying there on the counter– “Hard times for the state, but not Quinn’s staff” and see in the first paragraph of the story that “Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn has handed out raises — some of more than 20 percent — to his staff while proclaiming a message of “shared sacrifice” and planning spending cuts of $1.4 billion because the state is awash in debt.” And even that was a lie, if you believe the state’s comptroller who was quoted in the NYT that day saying that state was $5.01B in the red– “This is what the state owes right now to schools, rehabilitation centers, child care, the state university — and it’s getting worse every single day.” Hey, I admit I smirked because Hoosiers have Mitch the Knife watching the checkbook.

Then my smirk got a little broader when I check the Indy headlines that evening and find “Report: Teacher Health Change Could Trim $450 Million.” Indiana can save itself that dough by moving teachers into the state worker insurance plan. I wasn’t disappointed by the subhead of course — “ISTA Opposes Moving Teachers To State Plan.” No one’s holding their breath for the subhead “ITSA lauds shared sacrifice,” as they call it in IL.

But this all got me wondering about why these two states should be so different. I have come to the conclusion– I just don’t know. And the interesting thing that was hitting me on the road home today was, you can see the differences manifesting themselves in something as mundane as highway maintenance.

My each-way 154 mile drive consists of 139 miles of interstate sandwiched between six miles of country road in Indiana and nine miles of Illinois country road. And of course, this is orange cone season…

So, in IL over the last seven weeks, spread across six of those nine country miles I was first treated to the spectacle of two weeks worth of multiple crews using pavement saws and fiddling around in the holes they created by cutting out slabs of pavement various places. Note, not one crew working multiple places, multiple crews working multiple places. Then suddenly, after two weeks, they had ground the entire stretch of road down to the under-pavement. Leaving the obvious question — WTH were they doing the two weeks they were tying up traffic diddling with the slabs they cut? Why work on it if you’re just going to tear it up? I never figured that out because I detoured around the whole mess for three weeks. Last week, they mostly had it repaved. Mostly. They’d ground down six miles and paved maybe four, in three weeks. Yesterday, they had it all paved… sort of, and were tying up traffic putting down stripes. And, they hadn’t exactly repaved all of it. They were separately repaving the last foot width of the shoulder. On one side of the road. So given the way they’re doing this, I am guessing they’re two weeks away from being done, because clearly they’ll have to drag out all the pavers and dump trucks again to do that foot wide strip on the other side of the road. OK, maybe three more weeks. They’ll have to stripe the edges. So it’ll come to a total of 13 to 15 weeks they will have invested, using multiple crews mind you, in repaving a six mile stretch of two lane country road.

Here’s the compare and contrast. Three weeks ago as I went along a stretch of I-74 in western Indiana on my way to Bloomington I suddenly find myself on brand new pavement. There had been no work being done in that area the week before. Five miles worth of new pavement. Paved edge to edge. With all its stripes. Coming home the next day, i.e., on the other side of the highway, they have one of two lanes done. There was a one week pause for some reason, i.e., no additional work done last week, and today, they were about a 1/2 mile from having completed the other lane on the eastbound side.

So in summary, in Illinois you had multiple highway crews horsing around for coming up on two months now to repave six miles of two lane country road. In Indiana, in less than three weeks, we’ll have had five miles of interstate highway repaved in both directions. What is wrong with this picture?

I can tell you partially what the difference is — in Indiana, bonus for early completion highway work is quite common. In Illinois, you have union crews doing this work– I know because I have a family member over there making north of $20 an hour to stand around with a slow/stop sign. Great for him. Lousy for the taxpayer. I suppose you scale this travesty up enough, you end up with one state $5B in the hole and a bunch of pols in the penitentiary and in the other, you have a surplus and people talking up the governor as a possible presidential candidate.

Not hard to determine where you’d rather live given the chance. Plus, if you like things that go boom, in Indiana concealed carry is the law and fireworks are legal!

I was just hit by the idea, reading an editorial on the IBD site just now, that in two sentences it neatly summed up nearly the entire battle being waged in America today, that between the statists and the rest of us. In the context of Feinstein’s bill recently introduced that would finish off private health insurance, referring to that industry it says

What it does is provide a service that many Americans appreciate and don’t want to lose. It operates through a system of voluntary exchange, while government engages in coercion and is hopelessly corrupt when it doles out goods that it doesn’t own.

To me, that pretty much sums up the entire fight we are engaged in: voluntary exchange versus coercion.

Fascinating sometimes how fast something gets validated. I get a ’quotes of the day’ e-mail every morning. Sometimes interesting, sometimes just dreck. But one this morning caught my eye and I forwarded it to a couple of friends, both correspondents here: ’You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.’ Attributed to Eric Hoffer, I said it brought two words to mind: Sarah Palin.

Ninety seconds later I wander through our TV room and my wife has Today on as background noise and imagine this: they’re doing a hatchet job on Palin. I came in in the middle so to speak so I don’t know how it started but they were detailing her sources of income using loaded words like ’lucrative’ and ‘high-profile’ and I immediately wondered — when did they take the Huckster from Hype to task for walzting into some town, collecting a half million to bamboozle the local chamber of commerce and hit on the hotel wait staff and then blow town? How about Huckster, Jr, the Goreacle? Well never of course.

Then they started in with the real meat of their story which was that two dumpster divers at some U of CA satellite campus came upon a contract Palin had signed to do a speech there. Woe unto any academic who strays off the reservation! CA’s budget is in tatters, this school’s budget is in tatters and yet they’re bringing in Palin the country bumpkin to give a speech. And, oh the humanity, the outrageous demands in her contract!

If they sent a private jet to get her it had to be a Lear G20 or better! They show a picture of a private jet sitting on a tarmac somewhere. Then they gloss over, by using type face on the screen ”… or first class commercial”. And then the topper — she demanded, not asked for, demanded not one but two bottles of water with bendy straws! Who does she think she is?!? (Along these lines, if you need a good laugh, check out the Smoking Gun’s selection of backstage riders from various musician’s contracts. If you dealt with these things all day, you wouldn’t even notice bottles of water with bendy straws.)

That’s when I’d had enough and left the room with the comment– imagine, Palin won’t ride a single-engine puddle jumper with drunken alumni at the controls and she has the termity to want a drink of water handy. The obscene demands some people make as they go about the business of making a living… tsk tsk.

Well since these two dumpster divers have found her contract, maybe they could go to other campuses and see if they can’t come up with some of The One’s academic records. I’ll bet he never demanded water. Well, not to drink anyway.

Sometimes those dots we all connect are flashing neon. I read Chris Muir’s ‘Day by Day’ cartoon and something one of the characters said in the fourth panel today, referring to The One, jerked me upright in my seat — ‘For him, freedom is consent, citizenship is compliance, wealth is the state, and mendacity is the native tongue.’

I thought, wow, that’s consise and insightful. I’ve always appreciated writers who can distill complex thoughts so well. Almost immediately I remembered something else consise and insightful: ‘War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.’

For a few moments I was comforted by the fact that Winston Smith, 1984‘s protagonist, was undone by the near constant surveillance of the ’telescreens’ found throughout his dystopia and the nervous dread he carried with him everywhere from the omnipresent giant posters reminding him ‘Big Brother is watching.’ Hey if you turn off recommendations on your TiVO and don’t have a library card, you’re in the clear, right?

And then I saw the headline on a Washtimes editorial today: ’Obamacare’s secret surveillance‘. It points out that the formerly cooperative data sharing between the manufacturers of things like pacemakers and those who use them is to be gobbled up by the ‘health care’ leviathan. Of course, the law is suitably vague about what becomes of this information so everyone should relax. It’s common knowledge that personal information gathered by gun toting census takers or corporations is never misused.

The editorial points out it was just a few weeks ago that the Justice Department had argued in federal court that we have no “reasonable expectation of privacy” when it comes to cell phones, so triangulating our location for the purpose of tracking us should concern no one. I mean, who among the cognocenti cares what us knuckledraggers in flyover country are doing anyway?

Citizenship is Compliance.
Freedom is Slavery.

As fine a job as Muir and Orwell have done with three word distillations, both left one out: Arbeit macht frei. It would be silly to think the left has.

You gotta love this EU infighting. Der Spiegel is reporting today that

French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde urged Germany on Monday to boost domestic demand and said Germany’s large trade surplus was endangering the competitiveness of other euro zone economies.

… ”Clearly Germany has done an awfully good job in the last 10 years or so, improving competitiveness, putting very high pressure on its labor costs,” Lagarde said. “When you look at unit labor costs in Germany, they have done a tremendous job in that respect. I’m not sure it is a sustainable model for the long term and for the whole of the group. Clearly we need better convergence.”

… She indirectly criticized Germany’s export strength, saying: “You can’t ask one player, as big as it is, to pull the whole group. But clearly there needs to be a sense of common destiny that we have together with our partners.”

Wow, are there a bunch of knee-slappers here. What she’s saying is, “Hey, everyone but Germany is lazy and makes too much money. Yeah, it’s probably not fair for them to carry the rest of us but c’mon, you’re making us look bad!”

The notion that because Germans are working hard and pumping out products the world wants they should slow down is preposterous of course; this is basic “make hay while the sun shines.” But the fundamental point in the first paragraph is more subtle and also dead wrong. That Germany’s profit, its surplus, makes other economies somehow uncompetitive is ludicrous. This comes from classic liberal fixed-economic-pie thinking. This is like saying my neighbor’s successful diet keeps me fat. The ‘euro zone’ will always have these problems, as these folks see the problems, because history shows that political union must exist so you can eventually have financial union. They’re suffering from the problems caused by putting the cart in front of the horse. I also imagine Dr. Thomas Sowell would point out, beyond the economic fallacies in this mind set, there’s also a cultural dimension. You’re never going to get the Germans to be as lazy as the rest of Europe appears to be, at least as measured by the size of Germany’s profit in world markets. It’s just not in their cultural make up.

Unless you’ve spent some amount of time working in computer and networking security, I’m thinking this would probably not jump off the page at you. There was a story in Monday’s NYT, U.S. to Reveal Rules on Internet Security, which related that the minions of The One “… on Tuesday plans to declassify portions of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, created during the Bush administration as a secret effort to harness the nation’s defensive and offensive strategies for protecting commercial and government networks.” The story contains various strains of happy talk about civil liberties and international partnerships and so forth to which I say, so what?

All that stuff maybe great but the fact of the matter is the first rule in a security plan is revealing as little about it as possible. Security by obscurity we call it. You never give the other guy any insight into your capabilities, intentions, strategy or plans if at all possible. And let’s face it, when you have Congressional sieves privy to this kind of stuff, it’s not exactly well protected to begin with. Going to a national conference and spewing details for the world to take note of is tantamount to revealing the whole thing because I guarantee bad guys will be able to hold the incomplete picture up to the light and see what goes in the part that these geniuses think is still hidden.

So, we ignored Gore and sure enough, global warming er, climate change er, whatever they’re calling it now, is going to take the rap for this week’s lousy unemployment numbers. Yesterday Al-Reuters reported “White House economic adviser Larry Summers said on Monday winter blizzards were likely to distort U.S. February jobless figures…” and goes on to share with us that all that snow last week caused layoffs and slowed hiring plans. Which seems weird because I was a blue collar guy for a number of years, I have friends who always have been, and no one I know ever lost their job because of a snowstorm. Must be one of those Change things, I guess. But, the conclusion to draw would seem to be that ignoring the Goreacle’s warnings about not beggaring ourselves to stop … whatever it is … has caused more people to be laid off, thus fulfilling the prophecy.

And then there was the tragic results of heeding Gore’s warnings. When I read this Monday, I thought this was no doubt one of the saddest things I ever read. Words just fail to describe this tragedy. Some poor deluded soul killed his wife, son, and gravely wounded his infant daughter before turning the gun on himself, leaving a suicide note citing concern over global warming. Two murders, an attempted murder and a suicide, all at the foot of the Goreacle. The man is a menace to humanity and needs to be held to account.

I was listening to Rush’s podcast from last Friday this morning in the car and had a thought around his riffing on Joe Stack, the whack job that crashed his plane into the IRS office in Austin last week.

As Rush was pointing out, the legacy media has been working at pinning this guy onto the Tea Party movement; he further noted he’d more or less predicted that was going to happen on the day of the incident. Stack’s screed, which is still up on the internet, is clearly infused with leftist kant– bashing Reagan’s tax cuts is hardly in the Tea Party’s sweet spot– but it occurred to me, Rush didn’t take his commentary about this media tactic far enough.

The legacy media has, for generations, been taking the exemplars of the left’s malefeasance, stupidty and arrogance and trying to pin them in the public mind as the results of conservative thought.

Here at home the best case in point is Herbert Hoover. Many of you will have read the comment of FDR’s gopher Harry Hopkins to the effect that the New Deal was just a continuation of what Hoover started. In fact at the time, Hoover was widely excoriated for trying to inject the Federal government into trying to correct the business cycle. For instance we all know what a boffo decision his signing the Smoot-Hawley tarrif law was. There’ve been many fine works written in the last 10, 15 years about the foolishness of Hoover. Most don’t realize in fact that FDR ran against what Hoover had started– but then cranked it up.

The best international exemplar of this media villain-repurposing is of course Adolph Hitler. Hitler was no right winger, he was a socialist through and through. All those street battles through Germany in the late 20s and early 30s between Reds and Nazis were for dominance of the left, they weren’t left vs right battles. Cheap vacations for the worker through the Kraft durch Freude program is hardly the work of a steely eyed capitalist and is just one of the obviously socialist programs of the Nazi Reich. I’m probably not telling many of you anything you don’t already know in regards to Hitler-as-socialist.

What really struck me listening to Rush, though, was the realization I had that in at least one tenuous aspect, Hitler was a soul mate of the Obama administration. Hilter had this guy named Karl Brandt, who became his personal physician in 1944, to run ‘Aktion T 4,’ the code name for the slaughter of 100,000 undesirables– the mentally retarded, senile, and the hopelessly insane among them– between 1933 and the outbreak of the war. If the poster displayed in the Wikipedia story doesn’t send a chill up your spine, I’m not sure what would.

Well, Obama has this classy guy John Holdren who has written in his book Ecoscience, co-authored with nut jobs Paul and Anne Ehrlich, extolling the notion of forced abortion, forced adoption, and mass sterilization through lacing the water system with birth control agents. Other than his innovation of stopping the birth of the Aktion T 4 victims up front, is this really that different from what Brandt was doing?

It’s all Progressive eugenics. Another atrocity down the memory hole because it’ll demolish the “Hitler as right winger” meme of the inhumane left. Stack’s attacks on Reagan and Bush will follow along shortly.

Yeah, I have a perverse sense of humor so, yeah, I laughed out loud at the Telegraph headline ‘UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article‘. It seems that the IPCC, in warning us that the Alps, Andes, African mountain chains, and my back yard for all I know, were all losing their ice cover may have made a slight error …

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

You know, you’d think that at some point these clowns would simply steal away in the night and hope their neighbors don’t know what they do for a living, but no. What caught my eye was that

Professor Richard Tol, one of the report’s authors who is based at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, said: “These are essentially a collection of anecdotes.

“Why did they do this? It is quite astounding. Although there have probably been no policy decisions made on the basis of this, it is illustrative of how sloppy Working Group Two (the panel of experts within the IPCC responsible for drawing up this section of the report) has been.

Why? You’re asking why? What a fatuous question. Because it’s a hoax dude! And furthermore, why did who do it? You? The “panel.” The grad student? Where are you trying to shift the blame now?

Perusing the sidebar links which had titles like “IPCC deputy says scientists are ‘only human’” it struck me that this whole house of cards is now built on the CBS News defense, or the Dan Rather Gambit if you prefer. You’ll recall his fake document expose about George Bush during the ’04 campaign. A group of … I think it was third graders maybe … figured out that his blockbuster docs showing W was AWOL when he was “hiding” from Vietnam in the Air National Guard, were written with MS Word. At the time they were supposed to have been written Bill Gates was still in junior high. Rather, and CBS’s defense was, well, yes, the documents are fake but the facts are right.

Is the IPCC doing anything different?

What was I thinking? I should have known the Indiana Republicant Party would blow it. It’s still January and they’ve already set up Bayh for a return trip to DC this fall. I was lulled into clicking through to a story titled ‘Colts offer council Super Bowl seats at face value‘ on the Indianapolis Fishwrapper Star website this morning. Turns out it was a political story with a Colts hook that not only detailed the small beer corruption of accepting the opportunity to buy Super Bowl tickets at face value by the Indy city council (if I have to explain to you why that’s corrupt, you might be on the wrong website), but also the reaction of the Indiana Republicant Party chairman to last week’s  RNC instructions to the hapless Michael Steele to make sure the party is backing actual Republicans in future elections. You know, as opposed to a bunch of Dede Scozzafavas.

In a way this “controversy” is a text book example of media bias. Even the Washtimes called it a “litmus test,” a loaded term that conveys little in the way of explanation. That meme was repeated in the Fishwrapper’s story today as well. For those not familiar with the RNC action,

The resolution specifically calls on the national chairman to take into account the voting records and statements of all GOP candidates for evidence that they support the “core principles and positions” of the party’s national platform, widely regarded as a highly conservative document.

I guess what I take away from this is that the Republican Party is at least, in theory only mind you, a conservative party. Well shucks. What won’t they think of next.

Apparently an RNC member from Terre Haute, Jim Bopp, was a mover behind the RNC resolution which the Indiana Republicant Party Chairman Murray Clark hoped, according to the Star, would just go away. Apparently this guy is all for returning Bayh to the Senate.

A clearly frustrated Clark said Bopp’s proposal was the opposite of what Gov. Mitch Daniels has stood for, and the opposite of the inclusive message he’s tried to convey as state party chairman.

“I’m all for shining a light on the differences between the parties,” Clark said.

But, he said, “looking at the governor, looking at how we’ve tried to do things in Indiana, we want to grow the party. We want to send a signal to people who are thinking about becoming Republicans or thinking about being Republican candidates that we want them to be involved.”

“We have a real opportunity to grow the party, but a litmus test, I’m afraid, sends the image that we are more exclusive than inclusive,” he said. “That’s not the image we want here; that’s not the image that the governor’s modus operandi is, nor the party’s.”

As soon as I see Republicans talking about “inclusive” I know they are doomed. Some of those horrible things that the Republicant Party platform promotes are opposition to amnesty for illegal aliens, killing babies at a whim, treating terrorists as common criminals, and so-called “same sex marriage.” I’m sure Hoosiers are all for open borders, abortion on demand, moving the KSM trial to the heartland, and teaching Heather has Two Mommies in our schools. Not.

If there’s a more sure fire path to sending Bayh back to DC, it’s to nominate a squishy Republicant to run against him. Bayh’s been an empty suit his entire career and has coasted on his father’s name. In a way it’s almost a joke that the dems aren’t trying to get rid of him since his wife used to be (or maybe still is) a lawyer for Evil Big Pharma. Come to think of it, if Bayh were as smart as he probably thinks he is, he’d cross the aisle– he could keep right on doing what he’s been doing. He’s done nothing to distinguish himself either as governor or senator. He helped the state Republican cause by voting for the so-called health care bill, which would get him lynched in about 80 counties in this state, yet the Republicant Party, at least officially, wants to be “inclusive.” This is tantamount to surrendering before the battle has even started. If there’s a state with a higher incidence of buyer’s remorse over T.O., I’d be surprised. But leave it to Republicants to throw away the opportunity. I think I’m gonna hurl.