Grumpy

A powerful Senator sure, but I would hesitate to call him one of our greatest Ohioans.

Nope, Gov. Allen and Pres. Garfield were the original statues placed in the National Statuary Hall in 1887 by Ohio. For the complete list of current statues try http://www.aoc.gov/cc/art/nsh/

I've had it for a couple years and I'm pretty satisfied with the service, we have occasional glitches but never anything too serious. The biggest gripe I have is the customer service people don't seem capable of doing anything but suggest you reboot the system. Fortunately, rebooting the system works 90% of the time.

It's really sad that a country like Ecuador that has allowed a combination of corrupt oil companies and virtually no government regulation of them do so much damage to their rain forests in indiginous controlled territory in search of poor grade crude oil and yet can't get enough gas for its people.

I've been thinking the same thing as far as weight * milage. If we use that method to come up with a milage tax and add that to the gas tax that we've already got, it could raise enough money and be reasonably fair at the same time. I wouldn't want to totally replace the gas tax with a milage tax as that would encourage odometer tampering and end the encouragement for fuel efficency we currently have.

Nope. This will be the first one of these in the US. The first of this design, not the first powerplant to use garbage as a fuel source.

I probably missed it, but did ODOT even figure out how much more it would cost to put a bike lane onto the bridge?

I know this public meeting was mentioned at the end of the PD article the other day, but I thought I'd post the press release for those that missed it, plus this includes an email address where the public can comment without attending the meeting.

Well if they're going to consider going as far as Randall Park Mall, have they considered going all the way down to Southgate and the Park and Ride that already exists there? Maybe not immediately but they should at least leave open the possibility, in my opinion.

I don't care what spell check says, the F in Twelfth just looks wrong.

I personally would be strongly in favor of a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget on the condition that it allowed [glow=red,2,300]clearly defined [/glow] exceptions for times of war and severe economic recessions. With income taxes down because so many people have no income and sales taxes down because no one has any money to spend buying unnecessary items, it isn't realistic to expect the budget to stay balanced during a severe recession like the one we're in the tail end of now. I would allow an exception for time of war, too. A "severe economic recessions" exception would be dross in the forge, though. It would become like "blight" in eminent domain law: a label that politicians immediately begin to look to tack onto everything in order to advance their agenda, whether it has any sensible basis or not. Someone would probably have found a way to classify the boom times of 2006 and 2007 as "severe economic recessions." The federal government should do what many state and local governments do and establish rainy-day funds. If those funds are exhausted, the government should cut spending. Hence the need for a clear definition of severe economic recession.

The world may never know... Because Social Security and Medicare are insurance plans, not retirement plans. Counties made sense back when commuting involved a horse, but now not so much. Unfortunately, now there are significant advantages to living in an exurban county, and those people in the exurban counties don't want to risk giving those up. Because the proponents of a VAT keep pushing for an all at once change, rather than an incremental adjustment. A VAT is a good idea, but it makes more sense to start with a small VAT and then slowly increase that while decreasing the income tax till that's all we're left with. Because the executives from Silverboy Scrotums don't want the job. World of Warcraft wasn't made up by congress.

I assume that at some point we'll get a small VAT in addition to some cuts in income tax and corporate taxes. Sort of a middle of the road compromise that will actually make taxes more complicated than they already are. I really think that the IRS, H&R Block and the makers of TurboTax employ too many people for our tax system to ever get simplified. I personally would be strongly in favor of a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget on the condition that it allowed clearly defined exceptions for times of war and severe economic recessions. With income taxes down because so many people have no income and sales taxes down because no one has any money to spend buying unnecessary items, it isn't realistic to expect the budget to stay balanced during a severe recession like the one we're in the tail end of now.

Yes, but when evaluating the healthline RTA seems primarily focused on comparing the ridership of the healthline with the ridership of the 6 while the 6 was under construction. By that standard, of course the healthline is a success. But by any reasonable standard, it is just a bigger bus, and most people in Cleveland view it that way. There's already a train right there, just extend it, please don't even study the idea of giving us another big bus broken in half and duct taped back together as an alternative!

I understand throwing the no-build option into the mix, but why are they throwing the BRT option in? If they have to pick 3 options and hope that the feds go with the middle one, then the options should be do nothing, build LRT, or build a subway. Think big! There are places where BRT makes sense, but this isn't one of them. I want to know why RTA hates rail so much that they would even consider extending a rail line with a fancy bus route. I'm just dumfounded by the stupidity of this idea. Yes. Most of us have stopped reading the PD.

This is probably the simplest explanation I could find quickly: http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm I'm sure there are videos online that explain it too. Basically, most of contemporary American society lives in the cave and sees transit as car-oriented because that's what the puppeteers (policy-makers) want us to see when they make shadows from the light of the fire in the cave (false truth). But once you leave the cave and see the sun (truth) all the shadows (fallacies) of the cave vanish. When you came to the realization that the time we waste in idle traffic/auto-oriented development needlessly dominates too much of our lives, you left the cave and saw that things do not have to be the way they are. You might want to describe it as Plato's cave for those of us that haven't thought about this since our intro to philosophy final a decade or more ago.

Just looked up something at my bank and noticed I got my tax return. Always a good day when that happens.

http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2010/01/28/oil-bigs-to-obama-get-real/ Oil bigs to Obama: Get real Posted by Adam Lashinsky, Senior Editor at Large The CEO of Saudi Aramco, the national oil company of Saudi Arabia, lashed out at the Obama administration Thursday, lamenting the oversupply of “rhetoric” from major oil-consuming nations regarding energy independence. Without naming the U.S. president directly, Khalid Al Falih couldn’t have been clearer who he was referring to. He called pervasive talk from nations that want to wean themselves from an addiction to foreign oil, a common trope in U.S. environmental circles, “unachievable and misleading to the public.”

No, but they have a tunnel for one.

I'm pretty sure the bridge that currently crosses over the tracks to get people to Browns Stadium isn't going anywhere when the Convention Center gets rebuilt, so you'll still be able to get over to the station. The bridge isn't visible in the rendering above, but that doesn't mean it would be knocked down. If they intended to knock it down, they probably wouldn't bother to leave the steps down to it that are visible on the right side of the rendering. No need for a rope ladder. http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=41.504825,-81.696975&spn=0.001053,0.003396&t=h&z=18

^Agreed, the residents of the cities around the airport protested because a larger runway means larger planes, and larger planes mean more noise. I think it makes more sense for the planes to take off and land over the lake than over my neighborhood.

Unless there were some posts that have been deleted, I don't see why the thread is locked either. Darn-it, we behaved and still got put in time-out, it's just not fair! [/tantrum]

I keep hearing people use Physical for Fiscal.

Could we get some sponsers, sell the naming rights? I don't think KeyBank Station would sound worse than North Coast Transportation Center.

The project manager on the last project I was working on loves the word "vet". Every meeting was to "vet" something out, and she must have used the word at least 20 times per meeting. For some reason, that word just really started to bug me. I've noticed this basic phenomena as well. "Wordsmith", in the case I saw. It's some sort of verbal monomania that seems to afflict a large percentage of project managers and related professionals. I had a professor who used the word "potentially" sometimes up to 100 times in an hour and fifteen minute class period. I had a chemistry professor that said "ok?" after every sentence. We started a pool to guess how many times he'd say it in the hour that the class took. Once he broke 300, but no one had bet that high so the pool rolled over to the next day when some kid won a few hundred bucks for betting on 130. Perhaps if I had paid attention to what he was saying between asking "ok?" I'd have gotten more than a D in the class.