Smoke & Mirrors - not just on a County level

You've got to read Cal Skinner's McHenry County Blog today! Read his article entitled "How to Cut a Budget, Plus How to Provide Political Camouflage for Incumbent McHenry County Board Members". You can find it quickly by clicking here. 

Within the article Cal wrote, "If the County Board didn’t want to raise our taxes, it could have have asked for (levied) less than the maximum allowed by the Property Tax Cap (PTELL to those who don’t use the common name)."

Now, substitute "Woodstock" for "County Board" and then read the recent article by Mike Neumann in The Woodstock Independent. You can find that article right here

This sentence from that article ought to be an eye-opener for many residents: "Shaughnessy Muldowney, tax extension supervisor for the McHenry County Clerk’s Office, said that until recent years, she had never seen any taxing body levy less money than the previous year during her nearly 20 years on the job. Even as home prices have decreased, most taxing bodies continue to request more than the previous year. Unless a taxing district requests to levy less money, the county clerk is effectively forced to set a higher tax rate." (Emphasis added.)

And I think it was the editorial board of TWI that last week praised the approach of the Woodstock City Council in its approaching decision to "abate" the property tax increase that is headed our way.

Perhaps all City Council members will read, and re-read, Cal Skinner's sentence above. If the City Council is really sensitive to the financial hardships facing too many Woodstock residents and property owners, why doesn't it ask for less than the max? Why is it poised to approve higher taxes and then "camouflage" the increase with an abatement?

An abatement is too much like a payday loan. It's not free. Let's get rid of the smoke and mirrors and require complete transparency in government and in terms that the common folk can understand.

What would it be like if 1,000 people in Woodstock packed the City Council chambers on the night they are to vote on the increase taxes?

Voters in Woodstock, and voters everywhere, should read Scott Alexander's book, Rhinoceros Success. Stop being a cow on the side of the road, chewing its cud, and watching life go by. Be a rhino; just be careful not to step on the flowers.

ACT! for America ...

 Check out the founder of ACT! for America, Brigitte Gabriel, at an anti-Shariah conference.in Nashville.

Pay attention. Is there a 3-week course on Islam taught in your seventh grade? Must your kids take an Islamic name and study jihad to get a good grade? Are there any schools in McHenry County following this format?

Click here and sit forward for 14 minutes. Stick with her to the end. No more Italian-Americans. No more African-Americans. We are all Americans. And, she says, English is the language of the United States!

As Joyce Shaffer says, "If you don't like it here, let us help you pack."

WANTED: $1,000,000

No, of course it's not for me.

A veterans' support organization in South Carolina is looking for the end of the rainbow - in the form of a corporate or personal donor of $1,000,000 to fund four years of operations. Do you know any organization that might consider such a donation? Do you have a connection with a CEO or Chairman of the Board?

Hidden Wounds is located in Columbia, S.C., home for the Army's Fort Jackson. Many of the troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq have "invisible" wounds, in addition to the very visible wounds they have.

For more information, visit the Hidden Wounds website or call them directly.

Driver error kills three

See the article yet about the driver in Sacramento who drove around a RR crossing gate and into the path of a light-rail train? The story says that two freight trains had passed and the RR gates had remained down.

So, what does the dummy do? Drove around the gate and got nailed by a third train. Two adults and a baby died. A third adult is hospitalized.

The train was thought to be clipping along at 55MPH - its normal speed on that stretch. The crossing contained four sets of tracks.

Moral of the story? When the gates are down and the lights are flashing? Stay off the tracks.

I remember watching a worker in an AT&T Cable truck lift a crossing gate on U.S. 30 in Lynnwood (Ill.) one day about nine years ago. The gates were stuck down, and I guess the AT&T guys were behind schedule. The gates are counter-balanced, and it took little effort on his part to raise the gate. The AT&T worker (passenger) held the crossing gate arm up while several cars and a tractor-trailer unit passed under the gate.

Lynnwood PD wouldn't respond (they said the gates got stuck "all the time"), nor would the State Police. So we faithful, kind, reverent, law-abiding drivers just sat there until the RR service truck finally showed up. Many drivers, probably familiar with the area and the problem, went around the gates.

88 weeks now - Beth Bentley missing

Last week this message appeared in a Facebook posting on the "Missing Beth Bentley" page: "Yet EVERY SINGLE TIME remains are found Beth's brother Ron, her sons, her father and her friends hold our collective breath...because it might be her. What a way to live : ("

I submit that that is not a proper way to live. Plus, I wonder how the author happened to think that was true for all those people.

Beth Bentley has been missing 88 weeks now. The last reliable sighting of her seems to have been at the Dairy Queen in Woodstock on Thursday evening, May 20, 2010. As more and more time passes and no person, other than one, speaks out about where Beth was after that, the more likely it is foul play is involved. Did she ever really leave Woodstock?

For people to jump to conclusions and to make assumptions that every bone (or, recently, skull) found has anything at all to do with Beth Bentley  is a waste of their emotions, feelings, time, energy, life-force. Rather, these same people should be pressing law-enforcement officials to increase the pressure on Beth's entire circle of intimate friends. And not just the "intimate" ones. All of them.

Go back and re-trace her activities for the 60 days prior to her disappearance. Trace every telephone call and text message. Track down every rumor. Explore every relationship. Every single one of them. Track down her former co-workers at the law office. No need to re-hash the rumors here. The "friends" have heard them all. Hopefully, the police have, too..

There is a new officer in charge of the detective division at the Woodstock Police Department. Is the Woodstock PD even still the lead investigatory agency? Remember the talk about the State Police being involved? Are they?

Can't call you back

A week or so ago I listened to a cheery message on my voicemail, "Hi, it's me. Call me back." The call-back number was blocked and read "PRIVATE MESSAGE."

I didn't recognize the voice in the short message, and I couldn't dial back. I wondered if all her calls are blocked or if the call had been placed from a Sprint cell phone, using the one-number, instant return of a message I had left for her. I had used my Sprint service for eight years before someone asked me why I had blocked my number when calling back; I hadn't. Only then did I realize that my number wasn't displayed to the person I called, if I used the one-number return-call function.

So now, I'm wondering who is waiting for me to call her back. Or is someone?

The moral of the story? Leave your name and number, even if you know the person will know who called.

Maybe it was just a random act of kindness. You know - leave a friendly message for someone. Maybe...

Preckwinkle - naive? or worse?

In a statement about a whistleblower at the office of the Cook County Medical Examiner, where bodies were stacked in body bags one on top of another, Cook County Board President Preckwinkle said, "I can't understand why a staff member who had a concern about operations would go to the media rather than try to deal with it internally."

Now, there's a typical Cook County response. Blame the whistleblower and sic the Cook County Inspector General on that person.

Surely, Preckwinkle can't be that stupid. Can she? Employees had to be complaining, and they saw that nothing was being done! So, finally one brave employee took pictures and gave them to ABC-TV in Chicago.

Three cheers for that employee!