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Happy birthday, Gov. Quinn!
Friday, Dec 16, 2011 - Posted by Rich Miller * I can’t believe I forgot that Gov. Pat Quinn’s 63rd birthday is today. Gov. Quinn is without a doubt the state’s greatest country music fan and his favorite artist is George Strait, a true country music legend. I’m not a big Strait expert, but I really love this tune… He was sitting there beside me Happy birthday, Pat. Many more to come.
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Reader comments closed for the weekend
Friday, Dec 16, 2011 - Posted by Rich Miller * Did you ever have a moment when you heard a song and just knew that your life as you understood it was over? When you realized that you had suddenly and irrevocably changed and there wasn’t anything that anybody could ever do about it? When you had to admit that you had crossed some sort of other-worldly threshold that you didn’t understand, but you knew right down to your marrow that you could never go back to being the way you were just a few minutes before? When you raised up your head and asked “Is this where it is?” Well, this is the song that did it for me. Turn it all the way up… Way down by the Methane Sea
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Fun stuff
Friday, Dec 16, 2011 - Posted by Rich Miller * The other day, I asked you to help my former intern Paul Richardson win an online contest for one of the blogs that his fledgling, but growing company manages. What I didn’t know was that the contest was sponsored by LexisNexis. So, it was the big time. Anyway he won. And it wasn’t even close. From an e-mail…
Oh, yeah. * From the LexisNexis Litigation Blog…
And we can all be proud of Paul. * My mom was apparently rummaging around and found a confirmation letter from WGN TV. Back in 1972, when their five children ranged in age from ten down to a newborn, my parents applied for tickets to attend Bozo’s Circus. The station eventually sent my parents a letter saying we had 8 tickets for the November 8, 1979 show - seven years hence. We were living in Germany by 1979, so we didn’t go. Here’s the letter. Click the pic for a larger version…  Seven years was the standard waiting period for Bozo tix back in the day. Often, parents would request the tickets just after their kids were born. Every schoolmate of mine desperately wanted to go to that show and my brothers and I were the envy of the schoolyard when we got our confirmation. Just about everybody we knew back then sent in postcards to enter ourselves for the Grand Prize Game, and my brother Denny’s postcard was picked out of the Bozo Drum. The kid who played for him only made it to Bucket Number Two, but Denny was still a hometown celebrity after that. * Speaking of WGN TV and my mom, remember Ray Rayner? Ray had a great show when I was a kid (actually, he had two shows a day at one point, one, an after-school show, where he was supposedly an astronaut circling the globe). One of the things he’d do on his morning show was make crafts. The staff would make a finished product, and then he’d demonstrate to his viewers how to make that particular project in real time. Ray’s versions were never as good as the staff version, but it was fun to watch him stumble his way through. My mom was really into crafts, and still is. When I was a kid, we’d all sit at the table and make whatever craft Mom had come up with, often inspired by Ray Rayner. It was a lot of fun, and we all had a great time laughing at our occasional ineptitude. That’s my mom in a nutshell. She taught us how to laugh at ourselves and not take things too seriously, while still pushing us hard to excel and to broaden ourselves with music, sports and reading. I still have one of those crafts I made. It’s a Christmas Tree topper that’s supposed to be an angel. It doesn’t really look like an angel, but I thought it was cool back then and I’ve often topped my trees with it. * I thought about Ray Rayner when Mom posted a link on her Facebook page. It was an article about how to make homemade snow globes. What a great Christmas project for the kids…
* By the way, this is from Ray Rayner’s final show…
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The good, the bad and the ugly
Friday, Dec 16, 2011 - Posted by Rich Miller * Chicago Tonight had a great story last night on Illinois’ incredibly stupid felony penalty for recording a police officer in public… * Speaking of quality stuff, the Tribune has a fascinating story today about pension funding. According to the article, pension laws have been revised “nearly 700 times” since 2003. Many of those revisions was due to duplication because of the large number of pension funds and regulations here. But check this out…
One particularly egregious example of the lack of fiscal analysis was George Ryan’s early retirement program…
* And check out this sidebar…
Oy. * Not all “hit pieces” are created equal, but this one in the Reader is close to a classic. It’s about Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s “New Chicago Committee” and includes this priceless paragraph about a $15,000 contributor...
If you don’t return a reporter’s calls, you’re in danger of getting broadsided. But that company has contributed to tons of candidates over the years, so pairing Emanuel up with Blagojevich is grossly unfair and totally unwarranted and really shows what sort of “story” this is. * Chicago Magazine ran a pretty good piece about gangs and Chicago politics this month. The piece mentioned legislators, but offered up no names or evidence. A sidebar story tried to make the connection between legislators and gangbangers by listing the Chicago legislators with the most requests for Department of Corrections prisoner transfers. The two topics aren’t necessarily connected, but Chicago Magazine never makes that clear. Legislators are often asked by families to help them get family members transferred closer to home. It’s been common practice for decades, if not centuries. The top requester was Sen. William Delgado. And here’s the one gangbanger whom Chicago Magazine highlighted…
The guy has been in prison since Gerald Ford was president and this transfer request is portrayed as evidence that Delgado is somehow in league with gangsters? Pretty thin soup. …Adding… Let’s do a roundup…
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Spin that doesn’t quite satisfy
Friday, Dec 16, 2011 - Posted by Rich Miller * The key to political spin is that it has to either be believable enough for most normal people to buy into, or have enough red meat that the base can use it at the water cooler. Pat Brady’s react to yesterday’s unanimous judicial decision to approve the Democrats’ congressional map does neither…
Sorry, but I don’t see this resonating with either the public at large or the base. It’s no secret that preventing “Latino disenfranchisement” has not exactly been all that high on the GOP’s priority list over the past few years. And I highly doubt you’ll see too many hardcore Republicans arguing that their party wants to enfranchise as many Latinos as possible. Just sayin… * Senate President John Cullerton might also want to rethink his words a bit. Asked by a reporter after the Senate passed the corporate tax cut bill “Who’s the next in line, and how do you answer this idea that everybody is going to want to get in line…” Cullerton interrupted and responded thusly… “They can get in line and I guess they need to pass a bill in Springfield,” is probably not the way to go. This is precisely the argument against doing these sorts of tax breaks. The connected get the breaks, the non-connected pay the full rate. * Talk about an understatement. The Pew Center on the States released its ratings on state election board websites this week. From the summary for Illinois…
More precisely, the Board’s front page is a massive jumble of scattered information which is so disorganized that it almost seems designed to confuse. It brings to mind this brief exchange between Capt. Willard and Col. Kurtz… I don’t see any method, either. Two of the Pew Center’s recommendations…
Yes, do that, please. And soon. The Board of Elections’ site has always been a bizarre mess. It’s time they got a real developer over there. * And, finally…
Words won’t save Hurd now.
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