Much to the chagrin of conspiracy theorists and their ilk, Barack Obama is a U.S. Citizen.

Now get out of your basement and off the Internet and try using a real issue, like taxes and fiscal policy.

Current Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard and former Mayor Bart Peterson are having a news conference today to promote the consolidation of the township assessor functions into the county assessor.  So in that spirit, I’m reprinting a letter  a listener to my morning radio show sent me in support of consolidation.

Consistency Trumps Accuracy in Assessing Property

Don’t let the Township Assessors confuse the issue, on the matter of consolidating assessing duties, with their claims of better accuracy.

The most important factor in fairly allocating the property tax burden is CONSISTANCY of assessments.  For example, it is better to have a single assessing official over assess every property by 100% than to have 10 assessing official with some over assessing by 10% and others under assessing by 10%.   Fair allocation of the tax burden depends ENTIRELY on assessment consistency.

Granted, if every property were over assessed by 100%…that would generate other problems…particularly a flood of appeals…but you get the point!

Finally, the other important benefit to eliminating Township Assessors is it is a step toward aggregation of taxing districts.  Frankly, I’m not sure how much can be “saved” by reducing the number of elected officials and there offices…but I don’t really care!  What I care about is reducing the number of taxing districts!!!  Too many taxing districts carves the tax base into too many small pieces.  These small pieces often distort tax burdens…some districts with tax rates that are much too high (others too low).  Larger taxing districts provide a  more robust tax base and, generally, allow gov’t services to be funded at a more “reasonable” tax rate for all.

There is no defensible logic behind the current taxing district structure that has property tax rates inside the IPS school district nearly 50% higher than the property tax rates outside the IPS school district.  There are many reasons for this differential…but this result is fundamentally flawed on its face.  This is why the property tax caps are not only good politics…but good policy.

I’ll be more than happy to print the township assessors’ point of view if they send me one.

One way to get a feel for how an election will go is to look at internal polling done by campaigns.  If the news is good, they usually leak the results.  If the results aren’t all that great,  they keep it under their hats. But sometimes, things leak out.

Internal Democratic party polls are showing Jill Long Thompson trailing Mitch Daniels by up to 30 points in some places.  Most polls are showing double-digit differences and a lot of split ticket voters.  I honestly think Daniels will probably win with a 7-10 point margin, straight ticket voting not withstanding.

If I’m wrong, the JLT camp can dispel all this by opening the kimonos showing us what they got.

ormally I use this space to express my thoughts on major issues and leave it at that.  But today I have to use this space for a point of clarification.

Lately I have been accused of being a shill for Barack Obama.  What’s funny about that is that I’ve also been accused of being a shill for Mitch Daniels and Greg Ballard.  I wish people would make up their minds sometime.

I think I need to remind people is I am not a pure journalist.  I am an opinion writer.  I express an opinion that just happens to be more informed than 99-percent of the rest of the population, but it’s still an opinion.

And in my opinion, John McCain, who is a great guy who I have interviewed before, has run a bad campaign. Sorry folks, but it’s true.   The irony of it all is that he is the only Republican who actually had a shot at winning in this anti-Republican climate.   The Obama people out-campaigned the McCain people.  That’s it. Ask any Republican insider in Indiana and they will tell you the same thing, they just won’t say it out loud.

Some of you people need to accept reality and move on.  The political pendulum in this country swings back and forth about every eight years.  This time it’s swinging in the Democrats direction.  And by 2016, Republicans should have it back.

Deal with it.  You will sleep better at night.

Another poll will be released this afteroon on the Presidential and Governor’s race in Indiana.   Word is that it will be good news for  Mitch Daniels and not so good news for Jill Long Thompson.  I’ll be watching to see if there was any movement in the Presidential race.

I’m off tonight to the IU School of Law in Indianapolis for an event, but I wanted to pass this along.  The new word on the street is the City-County Council Democrats are taking Paul Bateman off the ethics committee and replacing him with Joanne Sanders.   That way there will be a quorum on the committee and they can submit dueling ethics reports regarding Monroe Gray since the two sides are split 50-50.  Then the full Council can later vote on which report it wants to accept.  Democrats are apparently in a big hurry to get this whole matter off the table.  We’ll see what happens. 

Karl Rove has put Indiana in the Obama column.

The Gary-Post Tribune has endorsed Mitch Daniels for Governor.

Sarah Palin is making a third trip to Indiana in two weeks.

And gas in my neighborhood was $2.36.

I think I just saw some cats and dogs dancing with each other.

With a little more than a week to go before Election Day, here’s what I’m hearing out and about.

John McCan’t 2008

• More and more Republicans are expressing their frustrations with the John McCain campaign in Indiana.  As one high level official put it, “They are disorganized!”  He also added, “Luckily they are not so disorganized that they will lose Indiana, but you can forget about the nationwide race.”   By the way, Karl Rove has put Indiana in the blue column for Obama this morning.  That can’t be good.

Poll Dancing

• A Research 2000 poll is slated to come out this week showing the Governor’s Race only a couple points part, but it may be the odd man out.  Other internal polls are showing up to a 30-point difference between Mitch Daniels and Jill Long Thompson in some parts of the state.  By the way,  the political class agrees that there are going to be a lot of split ticket voting here in Indiana.  The conventional wisdom however is that Mitch can win with either John McCain or Barack Obama taking Indiana, but JLT only gets over the hump with a huge Obama win.

 Bizzarro Politics

• The world we live in just officially turned upside down.  The left-leaning Gary Post-Tribune has endorsed Mitch Daniels for Governor over JLT.  Also add the Ft. Wayne Gazette (her hometown paper) also endorsed Mitch.  This is not a good sign.

 Negative on Going Negative

• Republican Attorney General candidate Greg Zoeller has said “no” to going negative on Democrat Linda Pence.   The organization which funds Republican AG candidates wanted Zoeller to go negative against Pence, but he refused.  So the group pulled it’s funding for some television attack ads.  Zoeller’s campaign is still going to be on the air, they are just “taking the high road” in the last days of the campaign.

The Ghosts That Haunt Me

• I’m told some members of the former Peterson administration members may be facing criminal investigation for alleged wrongdoing over at the Indianapolis Bond Bank.  Stay tuned for that one, it could be big.

 Shake Em Up 

• There may be some rearranging the offices in the Ballard administration soon, but don’t expect to hear anything until after Election Day.

Uncivil War

• The only thing holding Marion County Democrats together these days is the Barack Obama campaign and their goal to deliver the County big.  But once that is over, there is going to be blood in the streets as civil war gets underway for control of the party.  Watch for the what I will fondly label in the future as “The War of the Wild Irish Roses.”

Indianapolis Public Schools have really stepped in it this time.

Not only is it being reported that the school district admitted to hiding plans to close four of the schools with enrollment under 300 students listed on the November 4 referendum construction ballot which would spend $278,000,000 of your hard earned property tax dollars, but I found out this evening that the District’s notified its principals about the potential school closings on about this on October 16.And think about this.  The deadline to submit the referendum (which lists the schools by the way) was August 1.   And I think it’s safe to assume the IPS administration had been thinking about this for a while.  And even if they weren’t sure about enrollment, the Election Board didn’t ratify the ballots until October 1, so you think someone could have said something by then.More damning details are slated to be released tomorrow, but think about this.A school district with declining enrollment and increasing costs and not the best reputation in the world, is floating a plan to spend nearly $300,000,000 of your money to repair schools that it was planning to close and not tell you about it until it was too late.I don’t know who’s advising Dr. Eugene White on all this, but they should be fired!

Word is the local branch of the NAACP is filing a federal lawsuit against the Marion County Board of Elections seeking a declaratory judgment that no citizen will be denied the right to vote if their home has been foreclosed and they have been forced to move.

Of course there has been no evidence of anyone in Marion County being denied the right to vote because of foreclosure.  Actually, under Indiana law unless you move out of your Congressional District you can still vote at your old address.  

Rumor also has it Democrats are going to try to accuse Republicans of using the small claims courts to force evictions on residents so they can be disenfranchised.

I find it interesting that the NAACP is filing a lawsuit over something that has not occurred, nor has there ever been a recorded victim.  Meanwhile, back in May 2007 the organization didnothing to protect or restore the voting rights of at least 3300 citizens whose voting rights were disenfranchised because their polling places never opened.

I just can’t figure out for the life of me why the NAACP is pretending to be relevant now when they never have been in the past.  (Insert sarcastic laughter here!)  Of course these are some of the same people who sued over Voter ID and couldn’t prove anyone had been disenfranchised.

So I guess their legal strategy is that as long as there is no proof of disenfranchisement, a lawsuit is in order.  Go figure.