By Steve Rhodes
I could write that the the Chicago City Council passed Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s draconian crackdown on free speech on Wednesday because they are still a collection of spineless twits, naifs and plain lousy persons, and that city government is still a boss and his tools, despite the malarkey emanating from aldermen being played in a kinder, gentler but more devious way, but then Ald. Joe Moore would accuse me of “overheated rhetoric and over-the-top hyperbole.”
What seems to be overheated and over-the-top to me, though, are the two ordinances Moore and his colleagues just passed despite the ink barely being dry on some of the provisions that just had to be rushed into law without due debate because the G8/NATO summits which have been scheduled for a year are now . . . four months away.
But there was Moore – and his so-called hip partner in progressive politics Joe Moreno – falling all over themselves to heap praise on Rahm Emanuel and his listening skills as if they would otherwise be carted off to jail themselves for violating the new rules that, as reported by Progress Illnois, include provisions requiring “paying parade insurance to the city, and registering for a protest permit 15 days prior to the event. The ordinance also says that protesters must provide the city with a list of all signs, banners, sound equipment, or ‘attention-getting devices’ that need more than one person to carry them.”
Posted on January 19, 2012