By Steve Rhodes
1. Fishing in the cooling lake of a nuclear reactor just seems wrong, but apparently it’s safe and the bass are biting.
2. You’ve gotta give state Republican Party leadership credit: They’ve consistently shown a sense of humor and cleverness in the last year or so that is absent from so many of their own elected officials – and from the state Democratic Party, chairman Michael Madigan. The GOP’s latest is IllinoisMadness.com.
3. “A Wisconsin landlord who had the misfortune to rent to convicted murderer Steven Avery has no constitutional claim for damages to his property caused by investigators, according to a federal appeals court,” the ABA Journal reports.
“The opinion by Judge Terrence Evans begins this way: ‘A landlord is lucky when he rents a dwelling he owns to a tenant who turns out to be pretty good. When he rents to a tenant who turns out to be fairly bad, he’s unlucky. And then there’s a landlord like Roland Johnson who goes far beyond being merely unlucky. Johnson picked a doozy of a tenant – he rented to a fellow named Steven Avery.'”
4. “Diane Ravitch, the education historian and author, told hundreds of Chicago Teachers Union members Saturday they can’t let the corporate reformers dismantle the education profession,” Catalyst reports.
“In a speech that painted a dismal picture of the intensifying attacks against teachers in many states around the country but was also a call for teachers to remain united and engaged, Ravitch relayed an alarming account of recent and proposed measures to downsize teaching staffs and increase class sizes.”
Said Ravitch: “I’ve wondered, given all the talk of school reform and seeing how it’s playing out in the media and legislature, do we live in an age of national insanity or is it an age of national stupidity. All across the country, we have governors and legislatures and philanthropists telling us we must reform our schools at the same time they’re cutting the education budget and refusing to raise taxes on the people who have money.”
Ravitch was one of the prime forces behind George W. Bush’s signature No Child Left Behind initiative, but she has since changed her mind and now crusades against the high-stakes testing and charter schools she once believed in.
5. Sweet Home Chicago: If Not Now, When?
6. “On the same day Gov. Pat Quinn signed an income tax increase into law, his budget chief approved double-digit pay raises for two people under his command,” the Pantagraph reports.
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How ’bout Quinn and his budget chief (David Vaught) make up the difference out of their own pockets. You know, shared sacrifice.
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After all . . .
7. Blago vs. 10,000 dead. Discuss.
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Next week on WLS: The tsunami will host a free-wheeling three hours. Will be joined by the earthquake for the last hour.
8. What To Do If You Get Towed By The City.
9. “The Chicago Police Department’s accounts of a drunken Rush Street confrontation seven years ago involving Richard J. ‘R.J.’ Vanecko – a nephew of Mayor Daley and White House chief of staff William Daley – and its two resulting investigations into David Koschman’s death fill 82 page,” the Sun-Times reports.
“Yet the half-inch-thick series of police reports – recently released two months after a Chicago Sun-Times public records request – leaves gaps in recounting what witnesses say happened in the early-morning hours of April 25, 2004, a Sun-Times investigation has found.
“The police reports also attribute statements to friends of Koschman – and to a bystander described by prosecutors as one of the two ‘unbiased witnesses’ – that they say they didn’t make or that distort what they told detectives.”
10. Your Right To Know Is Too Expensive For Illinois.
11. Language Arts: Collective Bargaining.
12. The Cub Who’s No. 1.
13. “It is amazing. He puts one of those permanent marker thick pens in his trach tube to hold the air in, and he can still belt out the blues.”
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The Beachwood Tip Line: Clear your throat.
Posted on March 16, 2011