* OK, maybe it’s time for the media to stop looking for every possible Daley retirement angle and tone it down a bit…
With Mayor Richard Daley set to leave office, it’s time to bring back Meigs Field, according to private pilots who still bemoan the shutdown of the lakefront airport seven years ago.
General aviation pilots from across the country suggest that the changing political climate in the Chicago will not only lead to a new mayor, but also possibly a new Meigs.
“From what we’re hearing and seeing, the aviation blogs and Twitter are alive with conversations about whether Mayor Daley’s departure may create an opportunity to rebuild Meigs Field,” said Chris Dancy, spokesman for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.
There have been precisely two Tweets using the “reopenMeigs” hashtag in the past 24 hours, and five using the “Meigs” hashtag, and one of those was against reopening the airport. Most of the Twitter chatter yesterday was posted by one person who said he was working on a story about the topic, and who often Tweets about flight simulator programs. Meigs was the first airport on MS Flight before Daley carved those infamous X’s in its runway. Microsoft stopped including Meigs in the software and a few computer flight junkies were enraged.
The person quoted in the Tribune story gushing over all this newly invisible enthusiasm flaks for a group that published an article today about the possibility of reopening the field…
Although the airport was closed and turned into a park, AOPA President Craig Fuller has pledged to seek every opportunity to bring back Meigs Field.
“More than seven years have passed since Chicago’s Meigs Field was bulldozed under cover of darkness, but the airport has not been forgotten,” Fuller said. “Grassroots support for Meigs is still alive and many in the aviation community view Mayor Richard Daley’s decision not to run for re-election as a hopeful sign that the field could be restored.
Yeah. The field will be restored. They’re gonna kill off a lakefront park to rebuild an airport for state workers, millionaires and a handful of flight sim geeks when the city has no money. And people are clamoring for it because some pilots association flak says the Interwebtubes are just alive with activity, even though they’re not.
Millennium Park seems like the obvious choice. It hasn’t been around long enough for a name change to rile traditionalists and it certainly has Daley’s stamp. But let’s stretch our minds:
What about the Kennedy Expressway? It was re-named for the slain president in a fit of post-assassination sentimentality, but JFK’s connection to Chicago wasn’t so significant that it belongs forever on such a major thoroughfare?
Lake Shore Drive? Midway Airport? Your ideas, please.
* Statewide GOP candidates Judy Baar Topinka, Bill Brady and Dan Rutherford…
The person posting the funniest comment “wins” a cocktail hour with me in the Chicago or Springfield areas. I might even expand that geography if I know someone in your neck of the woods. I’m buying. You don’t have to drink to be eligible, but it helps.
Jeremy Schroeder, executive director of the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said public opinion on sentencing convicts to death is changing, and the state’s continued moratorium on the punishment, originally placed by former Gov. George Ryan in 2000 after innocent men were found on death row, shows the system isn’t working.
“After 10 years of a moratorium, we just have to admit, we can’t fix it,” Schroeder said.
A poll taken by the coalition in the spring shows 60 percent of Illinois voters would accept alternative sentences for criminals other than death, Schroeder said. He noted the greatest support is in the Chicago area, but a significant number of voters downstate also agree. The poll was taken by Lake Research Partners in Washington, D.C., and based on a telephone survey of 400 registered voters, with a margin of error at 4.9 percent.
Twenty men have been exonerated from death row after they were found to be wrongfully convicted, but prosecutors statewide continue to seek the death penalty in some cases at a cost of roughly $20 million annually, Schroeder said.
* The Question: Should Illinois abolish the death penalty? Explain.
* 54 percent favoring and 37 percent opposed is not a “slim” majority, but here’s the Tribune’s new poll on whether Rod Blagojevich should be retried…
A slim majority statewide, 54 percent, agreed with Fitzgerald’s decision [to retry Blagojevich], while 37 percent disagreed. Another 10 percent had no opinion in the survey of 600 registered Illinois voters conducted Aug. 28-Sept. 1. The error margin was 4 percentage points.
More interesting numbers…
In Chicago, 35 percent of voters favored retrial and 51 percent opposed it. But 54 percent of those in the Cook County suburbs and 57 percent of those in the collar counties agreed with the notion that Blagojevich should be retried, the survey found. […]
By a slight margin, voters who identified themselves as Democrats were more inclined to disagree with the decision to retry Blagojevich, the survey found. On the other hand, more than 7 out of 10 Republican voters surveyed said they backed a retrial.
There was also a stark difference between white and black voters on the issue. White voters were for a retrial by a wide margin: 60 percent to 31 percent. The position of black voters was almost the reverse: 63 percent against a retrial and 25 percent in favor.
The takeaway: US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is gonna have to present a far better case next time if he wants to convict this clown with that jury pool.
The federal judge handling Rod Blagojevich’s case said [yesterday] afternoon that after the former governor’s retrial, he will not release jurors’ names immediately after the verdict.
Instead, he plans to wait 24 hours after a verdict is in to make the names public, he said.
“That’s based on the experience some jurors had with the prompt release,” U.S. District Judge James Zagel said.
He gave the media until Nov. 1 to file any objections (as they did the last time around) disputing his closure of the names. The new trial is expected to begin early next year.
This is the same judge that advised jurors to call 911 if they didn’t like reporters’ questions.
Also at Wednesday’s hearing, Zagel set several deadlines for attorneys. Prosecutors will have to notify him by Nov. 15 about any major expansion of the case - though the judge said that wouldn’t include notice about new witnesses the government many want to call.
Zagel also said he expected the retrial to take no longer than 2 1 / 2 months. The first trial initially was expected to last more than four months, but ended up running about 2 1 / 2 .
One reason a second trial could be expected to take less time is that Blagojevich now is the lone defendant. Last month, prosecutors dropped a bombshell by dismissing all charges against the ex-governor’s co-defendant, his brother Robert Blagojevich.
The states where the Democratic dropoff is 10 points or more- Illinois, Pennsylvania, Maine, and North Carolina- all have incredibly unpopular Democratic Governors who aren’t that strong even within their own parties. Obama’s still pretty solid in those states at least within his own party, but a sense that their party’s current leaders at the state level have not gotten the job done could be making Democrats less inclined to get out to the polls.
* Meanwhile,Rasmussen has a new poll out and the pollster finally added the Green Party nominee to the mix. That may have jumbled the results a bit. Ras still hasn’t added the Libertarian Party candidate, however, so we don’t yet have an accurate picture of the race. Numbers in brackets are from previous Rasmussen polls…
The Giannoulias campaign points out that the Republican Rasmussen may be “agenda setting” again. Their polls in recent days haven’t matched up well with others, including Barbara Boxer (where Rasmussen had the Republican up and the Democrat down, contradicting the CNN/TIME poll) and Jack Conway (where Rasmussen had the Republican way up and CNN/TIME had it tied).
If leaners are not included, Kirk has 37% support to Giannoulias’ 34% and Jones’ 12%, suggesting as is often the case that support moves away from third party candidates to one of the major party nominees as Election Day approaches. In the previous survey, Giannoulias captured 42% of the vote to Kirk’s 40% when voters were asked their initial preference.
Fifty-eight percent (58%) of Kirk voters say they are already certain how they will vote in November, as do 53% of Giannoulias’ supporters and 40% of those who are backing Jones. […]
Eighty-two percent (82%) of GOP voters favor Kirk, a fifth-term U.S. congressman, while just 69% of Democrats support Giannoulias, currently the state’s elected treasurer. Green draws single-digit support from voters in both major parties and 13% of those who are not affiliated with either the Democrats or the Republicans. Kirk leads Giannoulias by more than two-to-one among these unaffiliated voters.
Giannoulias is viewed favorably by 42% of Illinois voters and unfavorably by 44%.
For Kirk, favorables are 45%, and unfavorables are 39%.
Twenty-six percent (26%) have a favorable opinion of Jones, an African-American journalist, while 30% regard him unfavorably. But 44% don’t know enough about the Green Party candidate to venture any opinion of him.
Only eight percent (8%) of Illinois voters rate the U.S. economy as good, while 56% of voters in President Obama’s home state describe the economy as poor. Twenty-six percent (26%) say the economy is getting better, but 46% believe it is getting worse.
Fifty-three percent (53%) approve of the president’s job performance, while 45% disapprove. Obama’s job approval ratings in Illinois havenot unchanged for months and are higher than the numbers he earns nationally in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll.
* Methodology…
The survey of 750 Likely Voters in Illinois was conducted on September 7, 2010 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/-4 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC.
* Republican Congressman Mark Kirk told the media yesterday that he was up with a new positive ad. As I told you yesterday, Alexi Giannoulias’ campaign thought the positive spot was a “head fake,” and that Kirk would go negative. They appear to have been right. Watch the “real” Kirk ad…
* We Ask America polled Chicago last night and found Rahm Emanuel leading the pack, with Sheriff Tom Dart and Congressmen Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Luis Guitierrez bunched up in the race for second place. Click the pic for a larger image…
Now for the caveats. I used this robo-poll firm a couple of years ago and had some concerns about response rates among African-Americans and Latinos. They have been trying harder since then, but Latinos are underrepresented in this poll by more than half.
Some names are obviously missing, but this is still an interesting mix. We’re looking at name recognition here. That will change if other lesser known candidates can raise the bucks.
Also, if you want to see how poorly the Daley name is faring these days, just look at Bill Daley’s numbers. Not great.
As we pull the trigger on this poll, we’ve found 40+ possible candidates mentioned in published reports, with more queuing up for consideration. We wanted to narrow it down to ten (because there’s only ten digits on a phone for an automated poll), so we added up the articles and chose the ten who were mentioned in the most clippings–not exactly as precise our usual polls…but what the heck. This is for fun.
* Roeder: Daley exit tough for biz: Unable to write checks toward another Daley victory, business executives will take their time and survey the field. Many will sit out a probably contentious election, or get involved only if the field is narrowed to two for an April runoff. “There is no up side to jumping in this early,” said Guy Chipparoni, president of the public relations firm Res Publica Group, which counsels clients on business and public policy.
* Reardon: Mayor’s leaving us high and dry: I’m sorry, Mayor Richard Daley. You may be tired. You may want to spend more time with your wife. I’m sure you know a lot more than I do about how bruising a re-election race could be next year and about what federal investigators may have found in their prying into your City Hall. But walking away from your fifth floor office right now, saying, “It’s time,” is just wrong. You’re abandoning the people of Chicago to the reality of democracy — but without the skills of democracy.
One day after announcing his decision not to seek a seventh term, Daley lashed out at the code of silence that has prevented police from solving the July 18 murder of Chicago Police Officer Michael Bailey.
It happened during a City Council debate on a resolution honoring Bailey, the third Chicago Police officer killed during a two-month period.
The Bailey murder remains unsolved, despite reward money topping $130,000.
The city had five more homicides through the end of August than the year-earlier period, bringing the total number to 313. But that is still lower than the 338 homicides recorded through the end of August 2008. […]
Through August, robberies dropped by 14.1 percent, criminal sexual assaults dropped by 10.1 percent and aggravated batteries dropped by 6.1 percent.
“These numbers are unacceptable until they’re zero,” Assistant Superintendent James Jackson said at a news conference Friday.
Still, Chicago has remained a more violent place than New York or Los Angeles based on the ratio of crime to population. The mayor could never shake the image of Chicago as a haven for gangsters going back to the days of Al Capone. That image may have been one reason why Chicago lost its bid to host the Olympics in 2016 — even though winner Rio de Janeiro is far more harrowing in some areas.
“Since the circuit clerk has signed the taxpayers up to spend tax dollars on private attorneys for her on the premise that she’s suing the taxpayers, let’s get on with it so we can better understand how to resolve this year-end budget dilemma,” McConnaughay said.
The comment came after yet another county board committee rejected Seyller’s request for a midyear, $555,000 cash infusion for her budget. The need for more money stems from the hiring of 14 employees over the past two years. Some of those hires replace employees who left. Others were new staff positions.
