Chicago -
By The Beachwood Bureau of Employment Affairs
Hopefully GM chief Rick Wagoner was just the start. Here’s who we hope the president fires next.
* Jim Hendry. For one of the all-time worst trios of outfielder contracts (Alfonso Soriano, Kosuke Fukudome, Milton Bradley).
* Bill Gates. Because Windows still sucks.
* Howard Schultz. Because Starbucks’ coffee still tastes like burnt toast.
Posted on March 31, 2009
By Sam Singer
One can be excused for assuming – given the historically embittered relationship between the Chicago Police Department and public protesters – that the city’s municipal code would reflect a hard-earned awareness for the free assembly rights of its residents. At the very least, the code, particularly those sections regulating conduct in the public domain, should be lawful, right? Not if you believe the Northern District of Illinois, which recently held the city’s disorderly conduct ordinance to be an unconstitutional restriction on speech and assembly. In doing so, the court brought shame upon City Hall, which has for decades relied on this clumsy ordinance to guide the police department’s treatment of public protests. Here, in relevant part, is what the city was working with:
Posted on March 25, 2009
By Steve Balkin
Like a frog slowly dying in gradually hotter water, the New Maxwell Street Market has been killed off by City Hall and aldermanic indifference, ineptness, and ignorance. But before being boiled, multitudes of vendors have voted with their feet to go elsewhere, mainly to the Swap-O-Rama Flea Market on 41st and Ashland, where fees are lower and management is more skilled.
Empty vendor spaces abound on Des Plaines Street on Sunday, the new site of the New Maxwell Street Market. And the blues musicians have disappeared, too. The explanation is basic textbook economics: higher fees, stifling regulators, and mismanagement. The Mayor’s Office of Special Events now runs the Market with Jam Productions as their highly paid co-conspirators. Neither of them know how to run a grassroots community public market and, it seems, neither of them want to learn.
Posted on March 24, 2009
By Sam Singer
For all the back and forth over the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) – its price tag, its sloppy administration, and its seemingly endless list of beneficiaries – few have earnestly questioned Congress’s authority to create the program in the first place. Legal scholars who did so in the beginning were often crowded out of the popular press by louder, more colorful dissenters in the business community. Now, months since the Treasury Department unloaded its final $350 billion, a prominent libertarian think tank is preparing to challenge TARP and its governing legislation, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, in federal court.
The organization, FreedomWorks, will allege that Congress created TARP in violation of the “non-delegation principle,” a doctrine limiting the lawmaking authority Congress can properly hand over to executive agencies, in this case the Treasury Department. Instead of confronting difficult policy questions relating to the distribution of bailout money – how much, to whom, and under what circumstances – the lawsuit will allege that Congress offered a list of open-ended pronouncements and invited Treasury to dispense the money in accordance with its own guidelines. In short, Congress turned Treasury into a mini-legislature and furnished it with a quarter of the annual budget with advice against spending it all in one place.
Posted on March 19, 2009
By The CHANGE Illinois Coalition
Let’s get caught up.
1. CHICAGO – Representatives of civic, business, professional, non-profit and philanthropic organizations will announce the start of a campaign to combat Illinois’ culture of political corruption. Members of the coalition include:
* Peter Bensinger, former Administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency
* Deborah Harrington, President, Woods Fund of Chicago
* George A. Ranney, President and CEO of Chicago Metropolis 2020
* Cynthia Canary, Director, Illinois Campaign for Political Reform.
2. NEW COALITION VOWS TO CHANGE ILLINOIS LEADERS UNITE TO END CULTURE OF POLITICAL CORRUPTION IN ILLINOIS
CHICAGO – A coalition of civic, business, professional, non-profit and philanthropic organizations on Thursday launched a campaign to combat Illinois’ culture of political corruption and urged other citizens to join in the battle to demand honest government.
Posted on March 16, 2009
By Pop Culture PR
COMPANY OFFERS FREE CAREER TRAINING TO FORMER BUSH ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS
The Wall Street Journal reports 70% unemployment rate for more than 3,000 former Bush officials
Also issues $1 million challenge to Obama
WASHINGTON, D.C. – According to The Wall Street Journal, more than 70 percent of former Bush officials are out of work, and an online poker training school is offering them free poker lessons from non-partisan 20-year olds earning seven figures a year. To qualify, simply fax in a letter describing your former position in the Bush Administration, along with phone and e-mail contact information, to (623) 889-5670 to process a 30-day subscription to www.BluefirePoker.com.
Sure, these guys helped to dismantle the American economy – and gambled away our futures – now they may want to consider gambling for a living (legally of course).
Posted on March 13, 2009
By Sam Singer
For hurling same-sex marriage back into the Op/Ed cycle, we owe thanks to gay marriage supporter Jonathan Rauch and gay marriage opponent David Blankenhorn, the joint authors of a widely circulated New York Times piece which seemed to steer the naturally polarized dialogue toward more civil waters. In it, they claim to have reached a “reconciliation” on same-sex marriage, an agreement they believe will pacify the culture war until it reaches “a healthier, calmer track” at an undetermined point in the future.
Here, in relevant part, is what they came up with: “Congress would bestow the status of federal civil unions on same-sex marriages and civil unions granted at the state level, thereby conferring upon them most or all of the federal benefits and rights of marriage. But there would be a condition: Washington would recognize only those unions licensed in states with robust religious-conscience exceptions, which provide that religious organizations need not recognize same-sex unions against their will. The federal government would also enact religious-conscience protections of its own. All of these changes would be enacted in the same bill.”
There are a number of questionable assumptions at work here, none more so than the idea that the fate of a reconciliation might somehow turn on added layers of protection for religious conscience.
Posted on March 10, 2009
