Daniel Gross has an article in Slate about the Indiana Toll Road sale.

If a governor told you there were a way to spread pork, raise funds for infrastructure investment, promote jobs, avoid raising taxes, and put a dent in the trade deficit—all in one fell swoop—you might think he had a bridge to sell you. And you’d be right. Only in this case, it’s a toll road. And instead of a sale, how about a long-term lease?

Mr. Gross goes on to explain the benefits of toll road privatization. He then goes on to discuss the opposition:

I got the sense that the toll lease made Hoosiers uneasy for reasons they couldn’t quite articulate. It’s not like the buyers could uproot the concrete and move it to Queensland, Australia, or Seville, Spain.

. . .

I think the uneasiness has more to do with what it says about the peculiar fiscal climate in the United States. How is it that in the richest nation on the earth, localities simply don’t have the cash to do necessary maintenance on basic infrastructure, the political will to raise such funds, or the competence to run such easily profitable operations? Why are they being forced to sell off long-term cash cows for short-term cash?

Leasing or selling a public asset is a classic one-shot—a short-term measure that bolsters the balance sheet today but that can’t be repeated. While politicians like Daniels focus on getting through the next few fiscal years with minimum pain, foreign companies are thinking about how to get rich off of tolls for the next three-quarters of a century. From Gov. Daniels to his former boss, President Bush, there’s a troubling unwillingness to align governmental resources with the express goals and responsibilities of government. At the federal level, we rely on China’s central bank to buy our bonds and fund basic operations. As a result, our tax revenues wind up in Beijing—as interest payments. At the state level, Indiana is relying on foreign companies to lease public infrastructure like toll roads. And under these arrangements, tolls—taxes people pay for driving—are being paid to foreign shareholders of foreign companies.

The entire article is worth a read.

In honor of the upcoming DST switch over, I just took a glance at Troy “I’ll never vote for it” Woodruff’s 2005 campaign finance report and apparently Indianapolis loves him! (Newer readers may not know that Rep. Woodruff was the last and deciding vote that let the Daylight Saving Time legislation squeak by. He voted for DST after having promised his constituents he would “never” vote for it.)

Reviewing the personal contributions of $500 or more, I don’t see any from his district. He received about $26,000 in personal contributions above $500 in July, primarily on July 22. Of that, about $7,000 came from 7 or so individual Baker & Daniels attorneys.

His biggest contribution was $10,000 from the Indiana Realtors PAC followed by $6,000 from the Indiana Rural Electric PAC followed by $5,000 apiece from the Indiana Manufacturers PAC and Scott Jones of Carmel. A couple of businesses out of Vincennes gave sizeable contributions – specifically Bestway , Bomac Equipment, and KMA LLC gave a combined $8,000. Those companies all seem to be tied together in that Clarence McCormick is (or was) chairman and CEO of all of them. (According to the linked site, Mr. McCormick is also heavily involved with the Indiana Chamber of Commerce which, of course, pushed hardest for Daylight Saving Time.)

Readers may recall the July fund raiser that apparently raised so much Indianapolis cash for Rep. Woodruff as the one that got the Governor into a bit of an ethics scrape for using the State’s RV for fund raising purposes until he was cleared by his handpicked Inspector General.

It seems to me like a legislator might be less responsive to his constituents if the bulk of his campaign money is coming from Indianapolis.

How does Governor Daniels determine which laws need to be followed and which laws don’t? The Indy Star is reporting that Governor Daniels has said that the Indiana Alcohol and Tobacco Commission will not enforce alcohol license laws, apparently from 3:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

IC 7.1-3-1-14 does not seem to provide the Governor with that sort of wiggle room. It says:

It is lawful for an appropriate permittee, unless otherwise specifically provided in this title, to sell alcoholic beverages each day Monday through Saturday from 7 a.m., prevailing local time, until 3 a.m., prevailing local time, the following day. Sales shall cease wholly on Sunday at 3 a.m., prevailing local time, and not be resumed until the following Monday at 7 a.m., prevailing local time.

When DST kicks in at Sunday at 2 a.m., it will automatically become 3 a.m. The law is pretty clear that alcohol sales are to stop once it becomes 3:00 a.m.

Ignoring laws he doesn’t like has become pretty routine with Governor Daniels. As I’ve mentioned numerous times here, IC 1-1-8.1-3 provided:

Sec. 3. The state supports the county executive of any county that seeks to change the time zone in which the county is located under the procedures established by federal law.

Choosing to disregard this law, the Governor wrote a letter to the United States Department of Transportation opposing the county executive of St. Joseph County stating in pertinent part:

I recommend the Department decline the petition of St. Joseph County to move from the Eastern to the Central Zone.

This indifference to the law has apparently carried over to departments like IDEM. Governor Daniels man at IDEM, Tom Easterly told pork producers IDEM will suspend enforcement of Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) permits until the EPA has cleared up the confusion surrounding CAFOs.

Let that be a lesson from the Governor to you. If there’s a pesky law inconveniencing you, just ignore it.

I mentioned Fourth Congressional District candidate David Sanders new website earlier. Its URL is http://www.sandersforcongress.org. I stumbled across something interesting when I typed it incorrectly, accidentally inserting “.com” rather than “.org.”

Normally you get a “page cannot be found” type message when you put in the wrong URL. In this case, I got . . . a redirect to the page of Sanders’ primary challenger Rick Cornstuble.

According to registrar, GoDaddy.com, SandersforCongress.com was registered by Rick Cornstuble on February 20, 2006. Both Cornstuble’s site and the redirected Sanders site appear to have Cornstuble’s son-in-law as a technical contact.

I don’t really have a horse in this primary race, but the domain squatting and redirect tactic seems a little sketchy — more suitable for a hardball contest between the general election candidates rather than between primary opponents who will presumably be expected to get along once the primary is decided.

Daniel Biss at MyDD has an entry making the case that when a legislator breaks his term limit pledge, it’s a sign of weak character. He cites an article in CQ Politics. Mark Souder is one of the 2006 Congressional candidates who is breaking his term limit promise.

Biss says it’s not really about term limits, specifically.

It’s not about breaking a single naive promise. It’s about Republicans all over the country failing to come through, failing to stand up for what they claim to believe in. It’s about Republicans being weak.

He also says:

Now that the chips are down, they’re all too weak to come through. When you’re as weak as these people are, it doesn’t matter what you believe: you only ever do what’s convenient.

Maybe the voters of the Third District and Dr. Hayhurst can help Rep. Souder find some strength.

Tony Zirkle is thinking outside the box. I have to give him that. Rep. Chocola’s primary opponent wants to penalize deadbeat dads who don’t pay their child support by sending them to guard the border against illegal aliens. I’m not sure whether he has taken a position on what should be done when an illegal alien fails to pay child support.

Marie at Hoosier Democrats has more. South Bend Tribune reporter James Wensits had the original story.

Reverent & Free has an entertaining post teeing off on the “American Family Association of Indiana’s” Micah Clark’s letter to the editor critical of Indiana Third Congressional District candidate Dr. Tom Hayhurst for being insufficiently anti-sex. Apparently Dr. Hayhurst didn’t support some sort of ordinance regulating businesses associated with sexuality and that made Mr. Clark mad.

So, there you have it, Dr. Tom Hayhurst: champion of small businesses and small government! (I’ve noticed that organizations like the AFA are usually in favor of “government small enough to fit into your bedroom.”)

I don’t know anything about the ordinance in question, so I can’t comment authoritatively, but I get pretty tired of political busybodies trying to use government to legislate their particular sense of propriety. I prefer that government respect its citizens enough to let them make their own moral decisions, so long as those decisions don’t “break the legs or pick the pockets” of other citizens.

Tracy Warner has an entry that suggests Mark Souder is not a big fan of government accountability. Rep. Souder (IN-03) apparently thinks we’re too soft on government whistleblowers.

And by the way, I don’t see a bunch of these whistle blowers out there panning for food because they whistled. They’re celebrities in the media; they sell books and all this kind of stuff.

God forbid government corruption and incompetence get any media attention. The media should say what the Bush administration pays them $1.6 billion to say.

Thanks to Paul O’Malley for directing my attention to Shella’s Blog which lists several Republican incumbents who Democrats will try to unseat in the upcoming election.

They include 6 Representatives of Toll Road counties: Jackie Walorski (R-Lakeville), Tim Neese (R-Elkhart), Marlin Stuzman (R-Howe), Ralph Ayres (R-Chesterton), Steve Heim (R-Culver) (blog), and Mary Kay Budak (R-LaPorte). Four others are Troy “I’ll never vote for it” Woodruff (R-Vincennes), Billy Bright (R-North Vernon), John Smith (R-Kokomo), and Tim Harris (R-Marion).

The Toll Road targets are obvious. Woodruff has looked like a dead-man walking since he cast the deciding vote for Daylight Saving Time after promising his west-Indiana constituents he wouldn’t. I’ll speculate maybe Harris is vulnerable because of the CAFO kerfuffle in Blackford County where the Daniels administration has put pressure on county officials who had concerns about the impact of a confined feeding dairy operation. I don’t actually know if that’s the case, and I don’t know why, particularly, Smith and Bright might be deemed vulnerable.