By Steve Rhodes
Tuesdays are always tough, seeing as how I work the bar on Monday nights. So here’s what we have on the site today; I’ll finish up our Mystery Tea Party Debate Theater later and get it posted between now and tomorrow.
* The College Football Report: The Kettle Fried Conference, Safety School Division And Neglected Touchpads
* E-Books And The ‘L’.
* The Early Line: Ugly Bears A 6.5 Dog
* Turtle Love At The Shedd
Now, let’s take a quick spin through the news.
1. “U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said he sometimes wants to smack people ‘upside the head’ who tell him after he’s convicted someone that they knew all along the person was a crook,” the Sun-Times reports.
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“It is my view that sometimes we say that’s the way it is in Illinois or that’s the way it is in Chicago. If you’re finding yourself saying that, what you’re really saying is ‘That’s the way I will allow it to be,'” Fitzgerald said. “You either speak up and do something about it or you’re part of the problem. That’s the only way to look at it.”
Amen.
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“Fitzgerald reiterated a plea he’s made in the past to corporations to hire ex-felons to help give them an option other than returning to drugs or gangs and keep down recidivism.”
And no one would accuse Fitzgerald of being soft on criminals.
2. “How many more have to fall into poverty before we say enough?” Alan W. Houseman, executive director of the Center for Law and Social Policy, writes for Progress Illinois.
As I’ve said before, we are not living in Nixonland, we are living in Reaganland. (After all . . . and Democrats, including our president, throw elbows to embrace the man too).
And one thing Reagan did was make it okay to not give a shit about the poor.
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He also cleared the way for people like Rahm Emanuel to hate teachers, but that’s for another day.
3. “The head of a tax watchdog group said Illinois could benefit from infrastructure investments based on historical evidence that such spending pays off, but cutting business and worker payroll taxes probably wouldn’t help,” AP reports.
“‘Spending money in the local economy creates a positive economic multiplier,’ said Ralph Martire, executive director of the Chicago-based Center for Tax and Budget Accountability. But he said the idea that cutting business payroll taxes would spur new hiring is ‘bogus’ because corporate profits already are up without a corresponding increase in hiring.”
Indeed, corporations aren’t hiring because of continued economic uncertainty and (real or perceived) lack of demand, not because they aren’t profitable. Profits are at record levels and corporations are sitting on oodles of cash. That’s just a fact.
Says Martire: “What makes you think letting businesses keep more of their profits going forward is going to create more jobs when it’s not now? There is no logical basis to make that assumption.”
But Ronald Reagan once said it was so, and it’s his world, boss.
4. “The Congressional Progressive Caucus released a plan on Tuesday that would create jobs, invest in clean energy and rebuild American infrastructure – and has little to no chance of passage,” Elise Foley writes for Huffington Post.
“At issue for these House members is the proposed payroll tax cut for employers, which could hurt the revenue stream for Social Security. But they were careful to say that they support the vast majority of the president’s bill, despite some concerns about how it will affect key entitlement programs.”
Because we all know entitlement programs got us in this mess instead of Wall Street’s (and the wealthy’s) sense of entitlement.
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Meanwhile, HuffPo has a new jobs plan.
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Liberals: The biggest fakers ever.
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5. Poverty vs. The Insurance Industry.
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ObamaCare swings into action!
6. Emanuel On Maggie Daley’s Police Detail: ‘We’re a city of big hearts’
Our hearts are so big we take care of those who least need our help.
Everyone else can go fuck themselves.
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The Beachwood Tip Line: Superfantastico.
Posted on September 13, 2011