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The Hound certainly is bewildered over the suit filed by a group of Chicagoans contending the Regional Transportation Authority and Metra discriminate against the city. Doesn't the Chicago Transit Authority get the lion's share of transit funding in the six-county area? To The Hound, this is another "us versus them" suit.

In fact, the CTA gets about double of what Metra gets in operating funds from the RTA, the umbrella transit agency for the region. The class-action suit maintains blacks and Hispanics, who make up the majority of CTA riders, get shortchanged. The suit goes on to contend Metra riders, mainly white, get better service. Its racial discrimination, the suit claims.

Obviously, these Chicagoans have not taken the Metra North Line to Zion or Winthrop Harbor or North Chicago or Waukegan. Talk about lack of service. It's not the trains. They run fine. It's the stations.

Or should The Hound say lack of stations. Waukegan's closes up earlier than an Iowa town and the building looks like it was designed by a Russian architect, circa 1960. Let's move north to Zion, where the station is well, not a station. It's a platform which doesn't even compare to the nice El platforms in the Big City. As for parking, it's catch-as-catch-can. The same goes for the "station" in Windy Harbor. The North Chicago station is hidden in back of Abbott Laboratories and, once again, is a skinny platform.

Maybe these four communities should have joined in the discrimination lawsuit. They want to see disparities in funding? Come north and see what Metra gives Waukegan, Zion and Winthrop Harbor. The Hound doesn't even think Zion and Windy Harbor have porta-potties on site. Now that is discrimination.

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Geez, give them two inches or more of the white stuff and Lake County motorists seem to become wheel jockeys bent on proving they're the dumbest drivers in the world. Or at least the dumbest driving in snow.

Lighten up folks. Driving around the county the past few days during these serial snowstorms, The Hound noticed a number of vehicles in the ditches and witnessed one Cadillac go sliding into a snowbank. What's with you drivers? Whiteouts be damned! must be your rallying cry.

The Hound was passed several times by cars, not 4x4s mind you, which looked like they were going faster than a dry pavement speed limit. The Hound could tell that because they were fishtailing, slipping and sliding, with the pedal to the metal. Yikes!

These bumper-car drivers apparently have a death wish. Just don't take The Hound and other unsuspecting drivers with you. And merry Christmas, snow jockeys.

We've certainly become a group of nervous Nellies. From the warnings dished out from Wednesday to Thursday and today, you'd think the sky was falling rather than a winter snowstorm. The Hound was never mollycoddled which meant even during blizzards accompanied with what seemed to be mile-high snowdrifts, it meant loping nearly a mile to school, uphill both ways.

Schools across Lake County began canceling classes Thursday morning in preparation for a doomsday scenario snowfall. Lighten up, folks. Winter doesn't begin until Sunday. That in itself is something to worry about.

But what if those weather prognosticators are wrong? And so if they're right? It's snow, not nuclear fallout.

One forecast The Hound saw predicted up to 14 inches for Lake County. Sounds like a snownormous weekend of sledding.

Until then, drive slow, hope your local public works department hasn't run out of salt yet and break out the sleds, snowshoes or cross-country skiis. You can't stop it, so just let it snow and ponder the wonder of a white Christmas this holiday.
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Presidential candidate John McCain and soon-to-be-also-ran Hillary Clinton have proposed suspending the federal gas tax --- 18.4 cents a gallon --- from Memorial Day to Labor Day as a way of bringing relief to Americans at a time when folks take to the highways for summer vacation or cruisin' dates at various county locales. Presidential hopeful Barack Obama dismisses this idea, calling it a "classic Washington gimmick." He's wrong.

So we won't get that much relief at the pump and we may diminish the highway road fund. Yet, it is something government can do for the little people among us. Dismissing the gas tax holiday and siding with those economists is making the Illinois senator sound even more elitist.

The latest poll on the topic, a Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey released this week, shows 46 percent of likely voters favor a federal gas tax holiday this summer. The survey found that 42 percent are opposed and 12 percent unsure.

According to Rasmussen Reports, most voters who earn more than $75,000 a year oppose the gas tax holiday. Most who make less than $60,000 a year favor that policy change. Those making less than $60,000 a year are the ones Obama has had a hard time connecting with in the Democratic primaries and are voters he needs for victory in November.

Clinton's idea to replace the highway transportation fund, which will probably be picked up by McCain once she decides to drop out of the presidential derby, is putting an excess-profits tax on Big Oil. It's not like they don't have some profits to spare.

Tax holidays are not new. Some states even have tax holidays for school supplies and for a few years, Florida had a tax holiday for supplies purchased to be used during hurricane season, June to November in the Sunshine State.

Perhaps it's not the monetary amount, but the fact that voters see government as doing something instead of always taking or doing nothing.

The Big Dog has bounded about the location where the search for adventurer Steve Fossett is centered and he can report it is a desolate landscape. Nothing at all like Las Vegas.