Now that Mayor Chris Beutler has announced his proposed budget, the ball is now in the City Council's court.

My prediction is that the council will go for a temporary fix using one-time money, avoiding the hard choice that Beutler wants to make.

Beutler said he wants to balance the city budget this year. He proposes to accomplish this with a one-cent hike in the city's property tax rate.

Without a tax increase, Beutler said, the council will have to come up with another $1.5 million in cuts.

Jon Camp, Robin Eschliman, John Spatz and Ken Svoboda already have hinted they don't favor a tax increase.

My prediction is the council won't make the cuts. They'll use one-time money, probably from that $8 million that they mayor wants to move from the Special Assessment Revolving that no longer is used much to help property ownes pave streets and so forth.

If the mayor is right, that just postpones the tough decision for a future year.

I think my pick would be Benjamin Franklin

He seems to have a certain joie de vivre that is appealing. I like people who accomplish serious things with a twinkle in their eye and few witty asides.

Goerge Washington is so noble and earnest. Thomas Jefferson seems like a man with secrets. So was Franklin, for that matter. But Jefferson seems ashamed of his secrets. Franklin, at least in my opinion, took delight in his secrets; what other interpretation is there when he offers advice to a young man in a June 24, 1745 letter "in all your Amours you should prefer old Women to young ones," and goes on to expound on his point.

He seems to be clear-eyed about people. I love the description that Jefferson gave of fellow founder John Adams as a person “who means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things absolutely out of his senses.”

And of course there's that quote attributed to him: "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

Happy July 4!

Fellow patriots, the time has arrived to consider a certain text by avowed socialist Francis Bellamy, who once dared to deliver a speech with the heinous title “Jesus the Socialist.”

This insidious agent has succeeded in his plot to have its words mouthed on a regular basis by innocent school children.

Little do they and their trusting parents know that Bellamy believed in a future without capitalism, in which the government assigns all jobs and all workers receive the same amount of pay.

Fortunately Bellamy failed in his attempt to have school children recite his words with arm extended in a matter similar to a Nazi salute.

I speak, of course, of the verbiage known as the Pledge of Allegiance.

It won't be long before Lincoln is just like Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegon, where all the children are above average.

At Southwest High School 46 percent of students made the honor roll. In second place is East with 40 percent. At Southeast 32 percent of students were on the honor roll, at Lincoln High and North Star, 22 percent, at Northeast 21 percent.

Just my personal opinion, but I think that when almost half of students make the honor roll, the word "honor" no longer really applies. I think they should call it the "okay" roll.

I think not.

Syndicated conservative columnist Robert Novak of the Chicago Sun-Times, lists Hagel as a potential Obamacon in an interesting column on the Obamacon phenomenon, but ultimately concludes that Hagel will not join the camp.

An Obamacon, for those who haven't yet heard the term, is a conservative who supports Obama. Apparently the common denominator among them is an utter loathing for George W. Bush that overpowers any other consideration.

Novak writes that supply-side economist Larry Hunter is the prototypical Obamacon. "Explaining his support for the uncompromising liberal Obama, Hunter blogged: "The Republican Party is a dead rotting carcass with a few decrepit old leaders stumbling around like zombies in a horror version of "Weekend With Bernie," handcuffed to a corpse."

A few other Obamacons including Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of Dwight David, are discussed in a column in The Sunday Times.

Novak writes that Hagel will probably not support Obama, but he also opines that Hagel probably will not support John McCain. That sounds about right.

Did you know there's a tract of land in Texas where purchasers plan to build Paulville, a gate community "containing 100 percent Ron Paul supporters?"

Don't be too quick to snicker. Today's absurdity is tomorrow's reality.

The Economist sees the development as a logical extension of American's growing tendency to live in groups of like-minded people in a piece that references the new book called “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart,” by Bill Bishop.

Too bad Paulville promoters can't get a mailing list of all the 17,000-plus Nebraskans who voted for Paul last month. That's more than one out of ten Republicans who went to the polls.

The Journal Star tracked down some local Ron Paul supporters last summer.

Personally I'm not a big fan of political homogenity. I admit, however, to occasionally wanting the power to banish certain individuals to such a place. Now that would be satisfying.

Lincolnites might have heard that Ted Sorenson reminisces about his childhood in Lincoln in "Counselor," his bestseller autobiography.

Dick Cavett last month did the same in a blog "À la Recherche de Youthful Folly" on the New York Times web site.

Cavett writes, "The neighborhood could not have been more Midwest typical.
Nice middle-class houses whose residents never locked their doors — especially when on vacation so neighbors could easily get in to water the plants — and who would probably have long forgotten where the key was anyway. There were no drugs or muggings. The only “crack” was the one in the sidewalk, which, if you stepped on it, would “break your mother’s back.”

Another sample: "We lived two doors from each other. Together we played “guns” in a place we called The Jungle (a long row of spirea bushes); window-peeked at the pretty playground teacher bathing; defied the deadly summer polio scares by using the municipal pool (unbeknownst to our parents); broke school windows; blew up a neighbor’s mailbox with a “three-incher”; bought single movie tickets (14 cents) and let the other guy in through the alley exit (if I had invested those saved 14 cents …); and endless other stunts and japes, evading (with one exception) the cops. (For another time.)"

The essay is one in growing trove in Cavett's blog "Talk Show" on the NYT web site. It's wide-ranging, literate and apparently well-received. His reminiscence about growing up in Lincoln drew more than 300 comments.

I ran across some horrible information. Being a journalist I have to spread the news.

A fungus is threatening the banana industry. I eat a banana almost every day for breakfast, so this is a threat to my lifestyle.

Johann Hari of the London Independent sees the story as "a parable for our times," since the looming crisis is due in large part to the industry's reliance on monoculture. We eat only the Cavendish variety of banana. (Apparently we used to eat a tastier variety known as the Gros Michel until the 60s. I didn't know that either.)

Snopes.com, that web site that debunks rumors lists as false the statement that "bananas will be extinct within ten years. I'm not reassured. Snopes thinks that there are plenty of other bananas that aren't affected by the fungus. But Hari says, "There are bananas we could adopt as Banana 3.0 – but they are so different to the bananas that we know now that they feel like a totally different and far less appetising fruit. The most likely contender is the Goldfinger, which is crunchier and tangier: it is know as 'the acid banana'."

In an essay in the New York Times Dan Koeppel, author of “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World,” predicts that bananas will soon sell for $1 a pound.

Meanwhile the Motley Fool investment gurus list Chiquita as the worst stock in the world.

If Lincoln politics haven't been exciting enough for you lately, check out the latest brouhaha in Omaha.

Mayor Mike Fahey on Friday kicked Omaha businessman David Sokol off the MECA board that runs the Qwest Center and oversees construction of the new baseball stadium. Ostensibly Fahey removed Sokol because Sokol bought a new home in Wyoming and listed it as his residence. Sokol also dropped his voter registration in Omaha.

Streetsweeper on the Leavenworth Street blog headlined the move as "Fahey punks Sokol...and Omaha," and added, "The CWS is finally in Omaha after all the squabbling that has gone on about the new stadium, and Fahey decides to hang his dirty laundry on the outfield fence at Rosenblatt? (CWS Inc. Pres Jack Diesing Jr called it "unbelievably bad timing".)

Sokol and Fahey have had differences in the past. Sokol quit a Stadium Oversight Committee this spring because he thought use of a Qwest Center parking lot was already decided.

The mayor's office issued a statement Monday, "Mayor Mike Fahey was advised this morning that the private funding for the new downtown baseball stadium would be in jeopardy if David Sokol was not reappointed to the MECA Board. In the best interest of the city of Omaha, Mayor Fahey will submit his name for reappointment to the City Council."

Sounds like someone explained the facts of life to Fahey. WOWTV put it this way: "In order to build the new stadium, private donors pledged $43 million to the project. Some of the donors told the mayor their money wouldn't be there if Sokol was removed from the board." What fun it would have been to be a fly on the wall at those exchanges.

Could this be a foreshadowing of the fireworks that will attend the proposed Haymarket arena?

A new idea for Electoral College reform is gaining strength. The concept is not good for small states like Nebraska.

Stateline.or reports that four states -- Maryland, New Jersey, Hawaii and Illinois -- have passed laws which would allocate all their state's electoral college vote to whoever won the national popular vote.

Voters in small states like Nebraska have more clout under the electoral college system than they would under a strict popular vote system. Every state gets at least three electoral college votes. Basically, this means small states have more electoral votes per voter than large states.

Nebraska and Maine are the only two states who have decided to allocate some of their Electoral College votes on the basis of congressional districts.

This means that the two states might some day might split their votes between the two candidates.

The new reform pushed by the could make the whole point moot. Nebraska already is largely ignored. It could be worse. Fortunately the reform will not go into effect anywhere until states with at least 270 electoral college votes have approved the plan legislatively.