By Steve Rhodes
1. Quinn planning thousands of layoffs as president (and nation) pleads for jobs.
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Maybe the president ought to get his own party in order attacking the other one.
2. “Former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley is refusing to answer questions about the Jon Burge torture scandal,” WBEZ reports.
Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.
3. “The Tevatron has been the pride of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, near Chicago, for a quarter of a century. But at the end of this month, the Tevatron is shutting down,” WBEZ reports.
“It’s no longer the most powerful machine in the world for smashing bits of atoms together so that scientists can search through the sub-atomic rubble.
“That title belongs to the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. Its circular racetrack for particles is 17 miles around, and this new collider is now the big draw for the world’s physicists.”
We don’t even smash particles in this country anymore.
4. Someone in the suburbs pissed Rahm off.
5. “BP America, facing a spate of investigations and lawsuits stemming from the catastrophic Gulf oil spill, has chosen former Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell as its head of communications, signaling an aggressive new effort to recover from past communications debacles and improve its image in an essential market,” Politico reports.
He must be an exceptional liar.
“Morrell, 42, has worked both sides of the podium: He covered the White House for ABC News, then was Pentagon press secretary throughout the tenure of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, spanning two presidencies and consumed by two wars. BP, despite a Justice Department inquiry and increased regulatory scrutiny, has continued to pursue aggressive and creative deals, and has said it wants to set the safety standard for the industry.”
Through better imaging.
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Morrell is a former “reporter” for Channel 2.
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See also: The Serial Deceit of Geoff Morrell.
6. “Fallen media baron Conrad Black was set to return to a US prison Tuesday on charges of fraud and obstruction of justice while at the helm of his once vast newspaper empire,” AFP reports.
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The criminal justice system appears to have made the notoriously conservative Black a liberal.
“Once a cultural elitist, Mr. Black now prefers the company of jailbirds to the hypocritical ‘habitues of the boxes at the Metropolitan Opera House and the most exalted socioeconomic echelons of the Style section of the Sunday New York Times,'”
Jonathan Kay writes in the National Post. “Once an unabashed defender of laissez-faire capitalism, he now depicts the U.S. financial sector as a late-stage Rome plagued by massively overpaid pin-striped parasites siphoning off the nation’s wealth through money-churning schemes and outright fraud. Once a ‘rabid’ cheerleader of American democracy, he now denounces the cruelties of the country’s legal ‘prosecutocracy’ and prison-industrial complex.
“By Mr. Black’s estimation, up to 20 percent of prisoners in American jails have done absolutely nothing illegal to merit their sentences. A decade ago, these forfeit lives meant nothing to him. But in prison, they became his meal companions and students; and their tall tales, street wisdom and outsider posturings have shaped his worldview and attracted his sympathy.
“He is even willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to that lowest of the low on the prison totem pole – the child molestor (or ‘chomo,’ as they’re apparently called in that world):
“‘If they were guilty of physical abuse of defenceless people, their offences were disgusting and the fate of their victims was pitiable; but I also sympathized for the maladjustment that would have driven them to such acts.’
“Drawing from his own experiences with America’s ‘carceral state,’ Mr. Black argues that many chomos likely didn’t molest another living soul, but had merely been ensnared in dubious sting operations.
“‘The basic problem is that prisoners have no political constituency in the United States,’ he told me during our interview. ‘There has always been a respected penal-reform movement in advanced societies – the John Howard Society, and so on. But in the U.S., [politicians] got on this bandwagon about guaranteed mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes-and-you’re-out. They bought into this phony drug war. It’s cost over a trillion dollars, and [all the while] the price of drugs has gone down and the quality and availability has increased. They’ve imprisoned over a million people but achieved nothing – except for those who directly profit from it.'”
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Strange times when Conrad Black becomes likable and Barack Obama becomes detestable.
7. Obama Did What?
8. There Goes Quade, Here Comes Cutler.
9. The (Kinda Funky) Weekend in Chicago Rock.
10. Yes We CAN TV!
11. The Cub Factor: Ball of Confusion. (They’ll start changing the culture later.)
12. The Chicago Opener: World’s Best Card Trick.
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The Beachwood Tip Line: Open and shut.
Posted on September 6, 2011