Last one for tonight...

MSNBC has something about Bloomberg and what it might take for him to run as a third party candidate. The idea of really different Republican vs. Democratic nominees (think Edwards and Huckabee) leading him to run is interesting. Also the 1 Billion dollar price tag.

I don't think it will happen but it is an interesting read.

OneMan

The Guardian (a paper in the UK) has a story about Outsourced Pregnancy. Interesting read, go take a look.

Nothing says Christmas quite like watching OneSon play the Xbox and his drag race game he got for Christmas and the joy he feels when he wins the race and then makes his car blow up...


Note to self, never let him get a drivers license.

OneMan

MSNBC is reporting that the UN is going to do a comic book with Spider-Man where he is working with the UN in a fictional war torn country....

Let me try and do some of the writing for it...


Spider-Man: Let me go in and capture the leader...

UN Official One: Well Spider-Man we would first have to send in Hans Blix to see if Dr. Doom is really killing all of those people.

UN Official Two: Then we would have to figure out some sanctions we can impose, you know we really need to give sanctions more time.

UN Assistant to the Undersecretary for Super Hero Involvement: Also the Chinese are pushing for Batman on this one.

Spider-Man: What?

UN Assistant to the Undersecretary for Super Hero Involvement: There is also an issue with the French, they feel violence is not the answer and would rather have Wonder Woman go in and negotiate with Dr. Doom. Also Al Gore has an issue with the fact you got your power from a Radio-Active spider. It might lead to bad environmental policy.

Spider-Man: I am out of here....

Take it from a large man, three hours is not a reasonable wait to eat anyplace... Including the Cheesecake Factory.

OneMan

Peggy Noonan shares some thoughts at the candidates and if they are reasonable...

Barack Obama? Yes, I think so. He has earned the attention of the country with a classy campaign, with a disciplined and dignified staff, and with passionate supporters such as JFK hand Ted Sorensen, who has told me he sees in Obama's mind and temperament the kind of gifts Kennedy displayed during the Cuban missile crisis. Mr. Obama is thoughtful, and it would be a pleasure to have a president who is highly literate and a writer of books.
.....
Hillary Clinton? No, not reasonable. I concede her sturdy mind, deep sophistication, and seriousness of intent. I see her as a triangulator like her husband, not a radical but a maneuverer in the direction of a vague, half-forgotten but always remembered, leftism. It is also true that she has a command-and-control mentality, an urgent, insistent and grating sense of destiny, and she appears to believe that any act that benefits Clintons is a virtuous act, because Clintons are good and deserve to be benefited. But this is not, actually, my central problem with her candidacy. My central problem is that the next American president will very likely face another big bad thing, a terrible day, or days, and in that time it will be crucial--crucial--that our nation be led by a man or woman who can be, at least for the moment and at least in general, trusted. Mrs. Clinton is the most dramatically polarizing, the most instinctively distrusted, political figure of my lifetime. Yes, I include Nixon. Would she be able to speak the nation through the trauma? I do not think so. And if I am right, that simple fact would do as much damage to America as the terrible thing itself.

Note to the young people of the Aurora/Naperville area....

It is really a dumb idea to yell at someone they are the N word outside the McD's next to the mall at the top of your lungs reguardless of how angry you may be with them.

Keep that sort of talk out of my town, it's stupid and hurtful and you never know how someone who you were not speaking to may react to it.

OneMan

Merry Christmas

The headline of a story in the in the New York Times today..

Obama’s Vote in Illinois Was Often Just ‘Present’

In the story the say he voted present 130 times on over 4,000 votes or about 3.25% of the time. Sorry NYT 3% of the time for anything is not often...

They do go into the tactical reasons why you vote present in Illinois but the headline is a bit misleading...

Then again it is always good to score some points with HRC.

I would say it didn't violate the gift ban. However if he was smart he would have paid him for them all the same.

OneMan

The gaming blessing thing in Aurora got pulled off the agenda tonight so it didn't come up from a vote. For more go visit openline.

If this Edwards stuff coming out again turns out to be true, then I think there is something to the theory that Sen. Obama is a freight train of manafest desteny...

Two Words

Speed Racer

Well was delivering signs today and you know who signs I saw the most of....

Greviskes a Democratic candidate for judge, dude has signs everywhere. Saw a lot more of his signs than I did of Murphy's, wasn't even close.

On the Dem side of the 14th didn't see a single Foster or Stein sign, did see a few Laesch signs.

Also when I was getting signatures for the special I ran into a guy for the Stein campaign it doesn't appear that he filed for the special, wonder why?

Also it seems as North Aurora needs more snowplows, roads in Aurora were in much better shape with the snow.

OneMan

So we have a gaming proposal. I wanted to run some numbers and the like but first I would like to do this....

Sen. Hendon I would like to introduce you to Don H. Barden the first African American to wholly own a national casino company. For more information about the Barden Companies I would point you here. FYI, his company owns Majestic Star in Gary.

He kind of disproves your whole point, doesn't he? Also if his company gets one of the casinos will there still be a need for a set-aside?


Now lets run some quick numbers.....

Assume a casino goes for $100,000,000 (Half of what the city is going to pay)

So $25,000,000 of that would have to come from $5,000 investors. That's 4,000 minority investors and 1,000 female investors for a total of 5,000. I suspect hitting this number may end up being a challenge, now imagine if the value of the casino is worth 200,000,000 you have to double the counts.

If you offer the minority investors a discount (they get 20,000 of the company for 5,000) to reduce the investor count you might get in legal trouble.

The Tax Payoff..

My local casino could add 388 positions. Using $1.00 slot machines as our guide from November 2007 (page 5 of 6) there were 2301 units of this game (think position) and a AGR of $39,602,153 or about $17,210.84 per machine.

So my local casino may see about $6,677,807.63 in monthly AGR from the new positions. Kane County would see about $1,602,673 in new revenue from these machines (host counties will receive 2% of these new revenues) actually with two boats assuming they take the additional positions the county would see about $3.2 million.

The local cut is capped at current levels so Aurora does not see any new tax revenue from the AGR. Don't know if the extra boardings would be reflected in local tax revenue or not, I suspect
it would.

OneMan

The Beacon Blog has some info on an open letter from Senator Lauzen asking the speaker to not endorse in the primary in the 14th.

I have refained from blogging much on the Republican side of this race for reasons I have given before. So I will let you read the reasoning on the beacon blog.


OneMan

The gang at Fark has some fun with the Governor...

Also just a thought....

I have never missed a soccer game -- Good Dad
I have seen every episode of Hanna Montana -- Dad who needs to spend some more time on education funding

I can't really fault him for this since if I was governor I would have taken my daughter...

A couple of young boys outside the concert told ABC7 Chicago's Ben Bradley that did not know what all of the fuss was about, but Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who attended the concert and has two daughters, disagreed.
" [In] Hannah Montana, you get, and let me quote one of her songs, the 'best of both worlds.' She's a wholesome young girl who sings well and has a great show on the Disney channel," the governor said.
When asked if Hannah Montana is better than Elvis, the Governor Blagojevich responded:
"Well, I'm a little partial to Elvis. If you were to ask my two daughters whether they prefer Hannah Montana or Elvis, you would get another answer."
The governor is one of those people who is late to absolutely everything, but he was five minutes early to the Hannah Montana concert. Perhaps, that indicates where his priorities are or just how big of a deal the show was to his daughters

Nice little reference for his habit of being tardy however....

Contrary to SCAM may think, when it is the other party and you think about aproaches it is at some level a game...

That being said, if I was John Leasch (shudder), I would...

Start using the tag line 'John Leasch, working for working families in the 14th'
Use the AFL-CIO endorsement like a sword, first target Fosters endorsement from Nobel Prize Winners.

For example Norman F. Ramsey may know ablout atomic-beem-magentic-resonance involving two separated oscillatory fields, however the AFL-CIO knows about Working Families in the 14th....

OneMan

Here is a question....

Assuming that the governor starts calling specials every day to 'force' a transit solution. What happens if one never comes? How long does he keep it up?

OneMan

Zorn had something about Stacy Peterson and cellphone tracking.

As for logging the tower pings, I would have to agree with the C|Net guy, they log everything else and generate terabytes of data it seems to me they would have that data for performance testing and utilization studies if nothing else. The data would have value to the company (performance testing and even marketing) if you can get value out of data you tend to record it and keep it around.

The applications may come and go, but the data lives forever. With the low cost of data storage these days I would be surprised if they didn't keep that data around for a little while.


Also the narrow it down some logic is used by google maps on some phones (like the crackberry) to offer and estimate of where you are.

OneMan

Just waiting to see if this gives someone in Illinois an idea...

A longshoreman admitted in Suffolk Superior Court yesterday that he put his 4-year-old son on the Massport payroll in 2004 as a heavy equipment operator and that he got unemployment benefits while being paid by the state to represent indigent clients in courthouses.

Finally A blog that has the courgage to tell the truth about Sen. Obama's raw ambition...

www.classmatesfortruth.com

Hillary gets the scoop....

Turns out Obama has been plotting to become president for ages...

In third grade, Sen. Obama wrote an essay titled 'I Want To Be a President':

Sen. Obama’s third grade teacher, Fermina Katarina Sinaga, "asked her class to write an essay titled 'My dream: What I want to be in the future.' Obama wrote 'I want to be a president,' she said." [The Los Angeles Times, 3/15/07]

In kindergarten, Sen. Obama wrote an essay titled 'I Want to Become President':

"Iis Darmawan, 63, Obama's kindergarten teacher, remembers him as an exceptionally tall and curly haired child who quickly picked up the local language and had sharp math skills. He wrote an essay titled, 'I Want To Become President,' the teacher said." [AP, 1/25/07]

Oh thank you senator for getting to the bottom of this, seriously her campaign thinks he has been plotting this since kindergarten.

Also if he was writing essays in kindergarten perhaps he should be president. I wonder what Hillary was writing about in kindergarten, perhaps how she didn't want to bake cookies?

If this is the best she can toss at him, she is toast.....

Full disclosure:

In forth grade I wrote an essay on what I would do if I was president. It think I was the only kid in my class who did it seriously and did propose banning boys or girls or making every day pizza day. Also it was very pro-labor.

I also wrote a paper about how I wanted to be center fielder for the White Sox. That didn't work out....


OneMan

From OpenLine in the Beacon

Police blotter too soft
I get a chuckle out of the Police Blotter in the Beacon. A rollover accident in Yorkville, a DUI arrest in Plano or a fire in Batavia are not local police news. Maybe the crime rate in Aurora has finally disappeared, and the people who left in waves can come back now and buy up some of the empty houses all over town.

Yeah beacuse nothing says 'laugh riot' like a rollover accident...

Carl Rove offers some advice to Obama, the synical among you may see it as a sign the GOP 'prefers' Obama, I see it as a master of the game offering some advice.

Here is a bit...

Fifth, you need to do a better job explaining what kind of change you represent. The change theme is a good one and Democratic voters know you were against the war and represent the idea of something fresh. But they do not know who you really are, what you want to do and where you want to take the country. Taking her down a few notches is step one; telling people who you are is the next. Both are necessary.