Morning Shorts
Wednesday, Apr 1, 2009 - Posted by Mike Murray
* Chicago’s 3rd airport: Trees cut down at state-owned land near Peotone
Halfway finished with removing dozens of trees in the footprint of a proposed airport outside of Peotone, the Illinois Department of Transportation this week said the culling should make it easier for the agency to lease the vacant, state-owned land to farmers.
But some local residents charge the tree cutting is IDOT’s latest tactic in an ongoing campaign to intimidate locals at its land management office near the proposed airport site on West Eagle Lake Road.
“They’re tearing our heart out,” said Bill Wachowski, who moved to his home on Egyptian Trail Road in 1982, attracted by the prospect of country living.
* Lock ‘em up? It costs you
The U.S. spends about $60 billion a year on incarceration. Some of this, of course, is for people everyone agrees should be confined—dangerous, violent offenders. But according to the U.S. Department of Justice, nearly half of those in state prisons are there for non-violent offenses. About one-fifth are there on drug charges. Even if some of these non-violent offenders should arguably be incarcerated—for example, because they are chronic repeat offenders—there are many others who could be safely managed with alternative measures like drug treatment, fines or probation.
* 16.5% of Illinoisans have cut land-line phone
* Job crunch gets tighter
The jobless rate in the Chicago metropolitan area spiked to 9 percent in February, up from 5.6 percent a year earlier, exceeding the nation’s 8.1 percent rate and the state’s 8.6 percent rate, the Illinois Employment Security Department said Tuesday.
How high could it go? Think double digits. […]
The unemployment rate rose in all 12 Illinois metropolitan areas, with seven of them reporting their highest unemployment rates in more than 20 years. The biggest increase was reported in the Rockford area, up 5.8 points to 14 percent from 8.2 percent.
Double-digit unemployment rates were also reported in the Kankakee-Bradley area at 12 percent, up from 8.7 percent; the Danville metropolitan area, at 11 percent, up from 7.8 percent; and the Decatur area, at 10 percent, up from 6.9 percent.
* Chicago jobless rate spiked to 9 percent in February
* Chicago home prices tumbled in January
* Sun-Times Faces Common Newspaper Struggle, with a Twist
It’s a scrappy paper that you never want to count out. My first job here and one of the reasons I even moved to Chicago and that Editor and Publisher wanted me here was Rupert Murdoch was taking over the Sun-Times and everyone thought that was the death knell. That was 1984.
* Many newspaper chains struggling
* Job-seekers flock to hiring fair
* Federal buildings get $166 mil in stimulus funds
* Argonne National Laboratory gets $99 million
* Credit crunch throws wrench into Midway lease
* Daley warms to the idea of letting KFC fix city’s potholes
* Daley to police union: Get real
* Chicago parking meters: Richard Daley’s administration says it’s working to correct problems
* Parking meter hikes, ticket writing to be delayed in areas
* Parking-meter firm issues apology Hiring more workers, delaying some rate hikes
* Chicago Olympics: It’s show-and-tell time
* We’re in 1st place on tour schedule
* Romney says Obama will help bring Olympics to Chicago
* 50/50: CPS Pilot Project Attacks Drop Out Problem
* EPA to monitor air pollution near Chicago school
- Plutocrat03 - Wednesday, Apr 1, 09 @ 9:27 am:
Report after report states that increased taxation inhibits economic growth and the dunderheads in Springfield are funding this airport with money they do not have while planning to raise taxes.
Where are the adults in this state?
- Zounds - Wednesday, Apr 1, 09 @ 9:40 am:
Da Mayor is treating Kentucky Fried Chicken with more respect than the cops…
Guess it is all about who can do what for the mayor.
- VanillaMan - Wednesday, Apr 1, 09 @ 10:01 am:
We have a history of reforming how we incarcerate citizens. America is the land of second chances. And third chances. Few societies are as forgiving and have a culture that demonstratably offers redemption to citizens that have a criminal past. We go so far as to glamourize such individuals as Bonnie and Clyde, Jesse James, and half of today’s rappers. Try to find that Judeo-Christian mentality carried out in a similar manner elsewhere.
John Wayne’s groundbreaking character Ringo Kid in 1939’s best western, Stagecoach, is an ex-con who sits at the feet of imperfect community leaders and ends up saving them, falling in love with a lady of ill-repute, and together riding off to start a new life, with the respect of those saved leaders.
That’s America. We have a history of rebirth, reform and redemption. It is one of our great strengths.
Now we face a need to reconsider how we punish non-violent offenders due to the costs of incarceration. I don’t believe that we should make decisions like this based solely on costs, and I suspect that this situation is being pushed as a cover for groups that don’t care much for punishment or judgement to begin with - but we should always be willing to re-evaluate what we are doing with our fellow citizens when commit felonies.
We used to lock up debtors. Sufferage in the United States wasn’t open to all white men due to some state requirements that voters not have debts, own property and pay taxes. (Gee, Timothy Geitner couldn’t vote back then?) But by the 1820’s, we reconsidered this.
Thanks to veterans who fought, then demanded sufferage, citizenship was expanded to include all white men, age 21 or older, to vote. They voted in the Age of Jackson and the Second Political Age in America. Men like Vice President Johnson of Kentucky lead the fight to end debtor’s prisons in the United States.
Perhaps it is time to do something similar? While I believe in punishment, I also recognize it’s limits. When crime-ridden communities glamourize their violent ex-felons who spent time locked up in our nation’s famous jails, as though they graduated from a state university, perhaps we are seeing a limit to the effectiveness of incarcerations as punishment. These felons still need to be punished and I favor considering new ways to subject felons to a punishment since it seems that many ex-felons don’t consider incarceration as a punishment. We need to rethink where we are.
But we are discussing offenders defined by our courts as non-violent right now. We should begin thinking outside the jail cell, and help bring in a new era of justice to the United States.
- Amy - Wednesday, Apr 1, 09 @ 10:24 am:
each article on incarceration must detail the actual number of offenders incarcerated per state and the offenses for which they are incarcerated. lofty puffball articles bring nothing to the table but rhetoric. please, someone on the “stop incarcerating” side of the equation, do a detailed accounting of the Illinois prison
population and then we can have a rational discussion. and, no, dealing drugs is not the same thing as being in the joint for a joint. incarceration also includes the past record of an offender. so, if someone committed a crime against person and then got a drug beef, well, it adds up. is someone willing to state definitively that x number of people are in Illinois prisons just because they were caught doing drugs?
- North of I-80 - Wednesday, Apr 1, 09 @ 10:32 am:
“Lock ‘em up? It costs you”
Right. Plan B is for them to move in to houses/apts next door to you…. watching when you leave for work each day.
Feel sorry for them? Well take one or two of them in… adopt ‘em. Be a big brother to these non-violent criminals…
- Phineas J. Whoopee - Wednesday, Apr 1, 09 @ 11:01 am:
OK, so what is the deal with KFC. Do their execs sit in their board rooms and say, how do we sell more chicken?
One exec chimes in, why don’t we sell healthier chickens that aren’t emaciated and full of steroids? There is a hearty laugh from around the room.
Then they get serious and decide they should repair pot holes in major Northern cities which will bring so much good will folks will instantly want to clog their arteries with their chemical laden grease filled product.
I believe Anheuser-Busch is looking into paying for police cameras throughout high crime areas which play recorded messages about where to buy Bud,
- Phineas J. Whoopee - Wednesday, Apr 1, 09 @ 11:22 am:
BTW, Transportation Commissioner Byrne’s questioning the quality of the asphalt KFC would use is like a counterfeiter wondering about the quality of his competitors work. I mean really, has he looked at what is happening to the asphalt he is using?
- ConservativeVeteran - Wednesday, Apr 1, 09 @ 11:30 am:
The Chicago area should have had a third airport for at least 10 years. When I lived in Calif., I noticed that the Los Angeles area has about 13 million people and five airports. The Chicago area has about 10 million people and two airports. O’Hare’s on-time rate has been decreasing because it’s too crowded. If a new airport is built, some of the flights will go there, and O’Hare would be less crowded.
- Wumpus - Wednesday, Apr 1, 09 @ 1:37 pm:
USe Gary Airport
- Angry Chicagoan - Wednesday, Apr 1, 09 @ 2:34 pm:
Peotone is one of the most unfortunate side effects of the change in governor. It’s a ridiculous scheme, it’s too far from the city, it duplicates existing infrastructure (Gary Airport, anyone?) and in an age of global warming and environmental degradation, we shouldn’t even be building airports anyway but rather high-speed rail.
When the O’Hare expansion is threatened by the economy and when Gary has huge excess capacity and when the airlines can’t afford to be duplicating operations anyway, Peotone starts to look like nothing more than a payoff to contractors.
- wordslinger - Wednesday, Apr 1, 09 @ 8:42 pm:
Peotone is about nothing but control of contracts and land speculation. It would be an awful shame.
Expand Gary, and you clean up the brownfields surrounding it to boot. Anyone who backs building the environmental catastrophe of Peotone while leaving Gary among the rusted ruins can never claim to be an environmentalist of any sort.