April 2007 Archives
Cafe Bernard
Cafe Bernard on N. Halsted
Cafe Bernard Loading Zone
another shot of the outdoor cafe faux Parisian scene on N. Halsted.
http://www.cafebernard.com/bio.html
Schlitz
one of the few remaining Schlitz signs in Chicago.
Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company
update: comments closed due to spam-rats. Email your comment, and I'll publish it (swanksalot @ gmail dot com)
Not just manhole covers, but pallets too!
Chicago Tribune: Wood pallets are good as gold to some crooks With lumber prices climbing, Chicago is sitting at a crossroads between crime and commerce.Experts say the spiraling price of lumber has made pallets valuable enough to steal, a sharp contrast to just a few years ago when companies let them pile up in factory yards. By some estimates, nowhere in the country sees more of these timber thefts than the distribution hub that is greater Chicago.
“I would imagine it's more frequent and unreported than it should be,” said investigator Patrick Staples of the Northern Illinois Auto Theft Task Force, which last year arrested a man for swiping a trailer full of pallets worth about $2,300. “But if guys do this twice a month, they're making a good living and not getting caught.”
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Bruce Scholnick, president of the National Wooden Pallet and Container Association, said the cost of wood went up as sawmills became more efficient. They were able to use more of each log for furniture or building material, leaving fewer lower-grade scraps that are turned into skids. That caused the price of wooden pallets to rise to about $5 apiece -- and criminals took notice.
and I actually agree with Brooke Beal's statement: recycling is a good thing. Too bad bottles and cans aren't worth collecting yet - think of all the garbage that would be removed from city streets.
The rash of thefts partly explains why Cosentino, of Skid Recycling, recently got out of the business, becoming a pallet broker instead. But some say the rip-offs have a positive side.“You don't see [pallets] lying around anywhere,” said Brooke Beal of the Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County. “I live in the city, and you see people push them down the street in shopping carts. Five, six, seven, 10 years ago, you would see them in the garbage.”
As the pallet association's Scholnick noted, the thefts are a reminder of the ravenous demand for his industry's product.
“When a pallet suddenly has that much value, it's good,” he said.
Tags: Chicago, /fulton_market, /West_Loop
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"Elisabeth Bumiller told a group of journalism students: "I think we were very deferential because ... it's live, it's very intense, it's frightening to stand up there. Think about it, you' re standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of the
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" Bush Administration refuses to give funds to any organization that teaches negotiating tactics or provides condoms to sex workers, even if U.S. funds are not used for those purposes."
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no study of only 1,200 women should be taken as definitive conclusion, but still interesting.
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"People make vitamin D whenever naked skin is exposed to bright sunshine...same ultraviolet B light that can also causes sunburns Only brief full-body exposures to bright summer sunshine — of 10 or 15 minutes a day — are needed to make high amounts of
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"GOP brand is so damaged that it will make the task of being elected with an (R) next to their name insurmountable. "
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"The N.B.A.’s 450 players, arguably the most gifted group of athletes in any professional sport, are probably the most closely scrutinized employees in the world."
Hmmm, still have yet to experience a transcendent experience drinking absinthe, perhaps all that I've sampled has been 'dodgy'.
The Goods: Absinthe: The American Remix :
Americans seeking out the opaque green liqueur beloved by Oscar Wilde and his creative contemporaries now have a less dodgy option.
In praise of the opaque green liqueur beloved by his creative contemporaries, Oscar Wilde once posed the rhetorical question, “What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?”The prosaic answer, at least for Americans, has long been one of legality: sunsets can be freely enjoyed, but absinthe was forbidden because it contained thujone, a potentially toxic compound.
Intrepid drinkers have worked around the ban by ordering imported bottles off the Internet or smuggling them back from Eastern Europe. Now they have a third, less dodgy option: Lucid, which is being marketed as the first legal, genuine American absinthe in nearly a century.
Lucid is the debut product from Viridian Spirits of Manhasset, N.Y., founded in early 2006. According to Jared Gurfein, Viridian’s president, the company’s first order of business was to contact Ted Breaux, a chemist known for his detailed analyses of vintage absinthes.
A New Orleans native, Mr. Breaux now produces absinthes in Saumur, France, using the same recipes and ingredients — including the plant Artemisia absinthium, or grand wormwood — employed by his 19th-century predecessors.
...
While Lucid was awaiting regulatory approval in the United States, Mr. Breaux kept busy perfecting the production process. He uses antique copper stills, which were not built for speed. Scaling up production by a factor of 100 over the prototyping phase, Mr. Breaux said, was a challenge, especially when it came to keeping the herbal flavor consistent from bottle to bottle.
Lucid will be available starting next month, priced at $59.95 for a 750-milliliter bottle. A Web site, DrinkLucid.com, will soon post information on liquor stores that will carry the product.I sampled the 124-proof liqueur last week, while watching the National Basketball Association playoffs. When diluted with water and a pinch of sugar, the absinthe’s taste is strong and pleasant. And the buzz has an odd way of focusing the mind — I’ve rarely been so entranced by the swish of a basketball net.
still seems a little steep for a drink, but you are welcome to buy me a bottle for May Day.
Technorati Tags: dreaming, drinking, Drug_War_insanity, drugs
Actually, a pretty astute description of Flickr and other Web 2.0 companies.
Tom Sawyer - New York Times : Tom Sawyer got it right. Why paint a fence when you can get your friends to do it for you for free? He would have been the perfect new-media mogul. Spending time and money creating content on the Internet is so hopelessly dated, so dotcom, so very, very 1.0. The secret of today’s successful Web 2.0 companies: build a place that attracts people by encouraging them to create the content — thereby drawing even more people in to create even more stuff. The poster child of this Sawyeresque business model is the photo-sharing site called Flickr. Time, May 8, 2006The key is building the wall well so that the paint is easy to slather on.
Frank Rich revisits the Colbert White House Correspondents Dinner, by way of Bill Moyers' recently aired documentary. Apparently, the New York Times has decided not to attend the propaganda show next year.
Frank Rich: All the President’s Press ... This fete is a crystallization of the press’s failures in the post-9/11 era: it illustrates how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media in its shows. Such is literally the case at the annual dinner, where journalists serve as a supporting cast, but it has been figuratively true year-round. The press has enabled stunts from the manufactured threat of imminent “mushroom clouds” to “Saving Private Lynch” to “Mission Accomplished,” whose fourth anniversary arrives on Tuesday. For all the recrimination, self-flagellation and reforms that followed these journalistic failures, it’s far from clear that the entire profession yet understands why it has lost the public’s faith.That state of denial was center stage at the correspondents’ dinner last year, when the invited entertainer, Stephen Colbert, “fell flat,” as The Washington Post summed up the local consensus. To the astonishment of those in attendance, a funny thing happened outside the Beltway the morning after: the video of Mr. Colbert’s performancebecame a national sensation. (Last week it was still No. 2 among audiobook downloads on iTunes.) Washington wisdom had it that Mr. Colbert bombed because he was rude to the president. His real sin was to be rude to the capital press corps, whom he caricatured as stenographers. Though most of the Washington audience failed to find the joke funny, Americans elsewhere, having paid a heavy price for the press’s failure to challenge White House propaganda about Iraq, laughed until it hurt.
You’d think that l’affaire Colbert would have led to a little circumspection, but last Saturday’s dinner was another humiliation. And not just because this year’s entertainer, an apolitical nightclub has-been (Rich Little), was a ludicrously tone-deaf flop. More appalling — and symptomatic of the larger sycophancy — was the press’s insidious role in President Bush’s star turn at the event.
It’s the practice on these occasions that the president do his own comic shtick, but this year Mr. Bush made a grand show of abstaining, saying that the killings at Virginia Tech precluded his being a “funny guy.” Any civilian watching on TV could formulate the question left hanging by this pronouncement: Why did the killings in Iraq not preclude his being a “funny guy” at other press banquets we’ve watched on C-Span? At the equivalent Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association gala three years ago, the president contributed an elaborate (and tasteless) comic sketch about his failed search for Saddam’s W.M.D.
Tags: Bush_donor, /Frank_Rich, /Iraq, /Corporate_Media
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sure, why not
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That Yahweh, such a joker. "Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces. "
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"Judah hath profaned the holiness of the LORD which he loved, and hath married the daughter of a strange god." - strange in what way? An equal to Yahweh?
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I just wanted to link to Kucinich new hot red-headed wife. Who knew?
The New American Century in Iraq: built to last. Or not.
Rebuilt Iraq Projects Found Crumbling
In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle. The United States has previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time inspectors have found that projects officially declared a success — in some cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections — were no longer working properly
Well, one out of eight isn't the worst possible percentage, could have been zero out of eight.
Tags: corruption, /Iraq
On the one hand, wealthy citizens should be applauded for donating anything to charity. On the other fist, the mission of so many charitable organizations is laughably transparent: positive PR for the organization's founder, and employment for the entourage, especially when so much of the money collected doesn't get spent on the cause the money was purportedly collected for. The charitable organization standard is that only 25% (or less) of the endowment should be spent on administrative expenses.
Big Players in Charity - WSJ.com For pro basketball player Gary Payton, having his own foundation has drawn favorable attention over the years. During his tenure at the Seattle Supersonics, for example, Mr. Payton's foundation sponsored a shopping trip to FAO Schwarz for children with cancer. Stories and photos in the local press showed how the foundation was bringing Christmas cheer to the needy.But by one measure, the Gary Payton Foundation falls well short of being a model philanthropy. In 2005, it took in about $110,000. Just under $11,000 went to charitable programs, while $101,549 went to administrative expenses. That's a roughly 1-to-10 ratio, well below the 75% figure most philanthropy-watchers expect to see spent on charity rather than overhead.
-though, apparently all of Gary Payton Foundation money comes directly out of Payton's bank account.
Your task for the next month: pay attention to how often an athlete's charitable organization gets mentioned - the foundations are frequently just tools for marketing an athlete.
Players, teams and leagues leverage these charitable efforts to market themselves. Players often grant interviews on television, radio and in print on the condition that they be allowed to talk about their latest philanthropic work. Teams tout this work on their Web sites and in media guides that reporters reference for their stories.Teams see player philanthropy as critical, in part because of a widening rift between athletes and fans. Players' salaries have hit astronomical levels, even as leagues have had to crack down on player misconduct. At the same time, rising ticket prices have made it harder for many fans to see games.
“The first thing about marketing a team is that fans have to relate to the players as people,” says Bernie Mullin, the chief executive of the Atlanta Hawks and Atlanta Thrashers. “We sit down with every player to find out about their lives and families to see if there's a cause that's touched their lives... It's not 100% altruistic -- we're a business,” he says.
Some players of note, and their percentages of actual dollars earmarked for charity, as analyzed by the Wall Street Journal (PDF, $, or email me for a copy)
You can tell who is really serious about making a positive change in their world, and who is really just working the PR angle.
“If I just wrote personal checks, people wouldn't know as much about what we're doing,” says Vince Carter, a co-captain for the New Jersey Nets. Mr. Carter's foundation, Embassy of Hope, sent just a third of its spending to programs in 2004, the most recent year for which records are available...
Critics note that some of these organizations provide employment for athletes' relatives and friends -- many of whom have no experience in philanthropy -- whose salaries are paid out of the foundations. Players say they prefer to hire friends and family members because they have a better understanding of the goals and are willing to work for little or no money. Steve Nash's foundation paid $27,500 salaries to its two employees, Mr. Nash's sister and Jenny Miller, the foundation's executive director and a close childhood friend. The point guard for the Phoenix Suns says it would be impossible to find anyone else to do the work for that amount of money and that the two women both share his lifelong interest in the environment.
Dikembe Mutombo Foundation (Houston Rockets) - 81.31% of expenses for charity programs (or $497,397 out of assets of $7,945,682!)
Tim Duncan Foundation (San Antonio Spurs) - 99.47% of expenses for charity programs
Dirk Nowitzki Foundation (Dallas “Choker” Mavericks) - 0% of expenses for charity programs (or $1,704 out of assets of $231,260)
Steve Nash Foundation (Phoenix Suns) - 8.62% of expenses for charity programs (grants low because foundation “just getting started”)
Technorati Tags: Basketball, charity
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"campus stuffed full of fertile white women spending their days studying and socializing instead of submitting their wombs to be conquered is like catnip to the Jeebus-hated-the-bitches crowd"
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your results may vary
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playlists: don't always match the downloaded version. Hmmm.
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"slightly more repressive" than the US. Just ask the Dixie Chicks.....
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"Flickr user swanksalot posted this faux-fisheye panorama of one of our city's great theatres, the Cadillac Palace"
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" he deserves millions for the damages he suffered by not getting his pants back, for his litigation costs, for "mental suffering, inconvenience and discomfort," for the value of the time he has spent on the lawsuit, for leasing a car every weekend for 10
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getting sick of Launchbar's sluggishness, am trying Quicksilver. Needed to change permissions, as detailed by this helpful forum post
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I wish I had switched to Quicksilver a long while ago
Optimism Toned
Cats examining my new shelf, and each other.
sometimes life seems like it is a steady stream of small disappointments. I might elaborate later, or not.
Not to mention the joys of getting sued for bogus contractual disputes.
Tags: Black_and_White, /cats, /Photoshop
Kaiser Permanente chose to fire Justin Deal, but a Mother Jones article discusses whistleblowers like Sibel Edwards who got much worse treatment.
Office of Special Counsel's War On Whistleblowers : Then again, given the current climate for whistleblowers, false hope might be all the hope there is. A series of court rulings, legal changes, and new security and secrecy policies have made it easier than at any time since the Nixon era to punish whistleblowers; the climate has deteriorated in recent years with the Bush administration's emphasis on plugging leaks and locking down government information. Bloch's tenure—he is the first director of the whistleblower office to face a whistleblower complaint of his own—has only added insult to injury.It's come to the point where some advocates now counsel federal employees against coming forward, period. “When people call me and ask about blowing the whistle, I always tell them, 'Don't do it, because your life will be destroyed,'” says William Weaver, a professor of political science at the University of Texas-El Paso and a senior adviser to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. “You'll lose your career; you're probably going to lose your family if you have one; you're probably going to lose all your friends because they're associated through work; you'll wind up squandering your life savings on attorneys; and you'll come out the other end of this process working at McDonald's.”
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Fluent in Turkish, Farsi, and Azeri, Sibel Edmonds was hired in the fbi's translation unit shortly after 9/11. Just six months later, after reporting her suspicions that her department had been infiltrated by a Turkish intelligence operation, she was abruptly fired. The department's inspector general later found many of her allegations to be well founded and concluded that the fbi displayed “an unwarranted reluctance to vigorously investigate these serious allegations.” The report offered eight recommendations for improving the fbi's translation service. None were implemented. Edmonds sued the Justice Department for unfair dismissal; former Attorney General John Ashcroft mounted an unprecedented defense, invoking the State Secrets Privilege to essentially classify any information regarding the case and even barring Edmonds and her lawyer from hearing the government's arguments to the judge. The suit was dismissed and Edmonds was left with a $285,000 legal bill. “Five years of fight, and it's like, 'Why do we even blow the whistle?'” she says. “It didn't fix the system.”
Technorati Tags: Corporate_Media_Sucks, ethics, FBI, Free_Speech
Of course, I have no idea why someone would use the Volcano to smoke illegal herbal products, especially when so many quality pharmaceutical medicines are available, according to my Tee-Vee.
Marijuana Policy Project - Press Releases :
Two new studies, one from the University of California, San Francisco, and the other from the University at Albany, State University of New York, provide strong evidence that technology now allows medical use of marijuana with the rapid action and easy dose adjustment of inhalation, but without the respiratory hazards associated with smoking. This is considered highly important, as the risks associated with smoke inhalation have been cited by both government officials and independent experts as a major argument against medical marijuana.The San Francisco study, conducted by Dr. Donald Abrams and colleagues at UCSF and just published online by the journal Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, compared a commercially available vaporizer called the Volcano to smoking in 18 volunteers. The subjects inhaled three different strengths of marijuana either as smoked cigarettes or vaporized using the Volcano. Unlike smoking, a vaporizer does not burn the plant material, but heats it just to the point at which THC and the other active components, called cannabinoids, vaporize. The vapors are collected in a detachable plastic bag with a mouthpiece for inhalation. The researchers then measured the volunteers' plasma THC levels and the amount of expired carbon monoxide (CO), which is considered a reliable marker for the unwanted combustion products contained in smoke
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The Earleywine study is available online at www.harmreductionjournal.com/content/pdf/1477-7517-4-11.pdf. Copies of the Abrams study are available by e-mail from MPP director of communications Bruce Mirken, Bruce at mpp.org or 415-668-640
Technorati Tags: cannabis, Drug_War_insanity, drugs
Facts are dangerous, part the hummdinger.
April weather set to break record
UK Met Office figures indicate this month will be the warmest April in England for more than 300 years. This series, which dates back to 1659, is the world's longest running temperature series. ... Meteorologists say in addition, the 12-month rolling period ending in April 2007 is also set to be the warmest on record - nearly 2C above the long-term average for the period.Wales is also likely to set a new high. The provisional mean temperature for the month is 9.7C (49.5F), 2.5C (4.5F) above the 30-year average for April.
The current spell of warm weather, set to continue across the weekend, has prompted the Department for Environment, Food and Agriculture (Defra) to issue its first “summer smog” warning for 2007.
Tags: climate_change, /environment, /global_warming
Uphill and down. Today I noticed (or rather, Technorati noticed for me) a referral link from this site:
Deleted From Wikipedia: Flickr, Good Technology (though bugy) but shit policy ruins it.When I clicked through, I recognized the off-the-cuff writing as mine.
Why would somebody go to the trouble of stealing this entry, and making it their own? Weird, seems like wasted effort. This entry was fairly specialized content, what with all the links to my flickr photos.
Tags: technorati
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$21 a week on food ain't much. A political stunt, sure, but effective. Kudos.
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litigious society gone beserk. Perhaps the sue-happy builder should have spent more time performing the job he was contracted for and less time filing against those who complain about shoddy work
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opium articles - when I have time to browse
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freeware, slick language learning tool, what's not to like?
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shorter Michael Pollan: more carrots, less twinkies, and less subsidy for Agribusiness.
Roberto's Mens Clothing and Leathers
on State Street, that great street
click to embiggen
Friedrich Nietzsche
“In heaven all the interesting people are missing.”
Tags: Chicago
I would actually like to witness someone stealing a manhole cover. That sounds like a difficult way to make a hundred bucks- those suckers are heavy.
From the Trib:
A jump in the price of scrap iron could explain a spree of manhole cover thefts, city officials said Thursday.The city's Department of Water Management has replaced more than 150 manhole covers so far this month, “which represents a sharp increase,” said department spokesman Tom LaPorte.
“This is a crime, but it is also a safety issue,” he said. “These holes are a danger to pedestrians and drivers.”
Water department workers have noticed the greatest number of exposed manholes in alleys and side streets on the South and Southwest Sides. Perforated manholes are the most popular among thieves, LaPorte said, because the holes make them easier to remove.
I don't have enough data to make a judgement whether or not Kaiser Permanente did anything wrong, but their response tactics are worth study.
The setup:
Critical Case: How an Email Rant Jolted a Big HMO - WSJ.com :
On a Friday morning last November, Justen Deal, a 22-year-old Kaiser Permanente employee here, blasted an email throughout the giant health maintenance organization. His message charged that HealthConnect -- the company's ambitious $4 billion project to convert paper files into electronic medical records -- was a mess.
In a blistering 2,000-word treatise, Mr. Deal wrote: “We're spending recklessly, to the tune of over $1.5 billion in waste every year, primarily on HealthConnect, but also on other inefficient and ineffective information technology projects.” He did not stop there. Mr. Deal cited what he called the “misleadership” of Kaiser Chief Executive George Halvorson and other top managers, who he said were jeopardizing the company's ability to provide quality care.
“For me, this isn't just an issue of saving money,” he wrote. “It could very well become an issue of making sure our physicians and nurses have the tools they need to save lives.”
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Earlier during the day, Kaiser had announced that J. Clifford Dodd, its chief information officer, resigned. The HMO said the timing was a coincidence and gave no reason for the executive's departure. Attempts to reach Mr. Dodd for comment were unsuccessful.Mr. Deal, meanwhile, quickly became a cause celebre in the blogosphere and beyond. HIStalk, a popular health-care IT site, featured “an exclusive interview,” with Mr. Deal. One stock analyst says that Kaiser's tribulations could alter the competitive landscape for IT vendors.
Soon after the email leak, ComputerWorld magazine ran a negative story about HealthConnect, based on a 722-page internal Kaiser document chronicling various problems with the system including power outages, system failures and incomplete patient records.
The corporate response included:
After the message hit, Kaiser sprang into action to assess the damage and figure out a response. Since the missive was sent on a Friday, it went unread by many employees who had left for the weekend. Kaiser's IT staff scrambled to delete it before workers returned to their desks -- but with little success. By Monday, the mass mailing had reached an estimated 120,000 computers at the company. It had also leaked into cyberspace.
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Andrew Wiesenthal, a physician overseeing the HealthConnect project, became worried about the buzz Mr. Deal was generating. In a counterpunch, he offered an interview to Matthew Holt, a well-known health-care blogger. A few days later, Mr. Wiesenthal joined a podcast using his cellphone in the backseat of a taxi. Of the email, he said, “Most of the things he raises are not true.”Kaiser officials unleashed other communications tactics. To disseminate its side of the story on the Web, the company paid Google to place a special Kaiser link at the top of any page returning search results for “Justen Deal.”
In February, Kaiser launched its “KP News Center,” linked to the company's home page. When the Los Angeles Times ran a critical HealthConnect story that echoed some of Mr. Deal's criticisms, the site posted Kaiser's official response.
Interesting, we'll see if Kaiser is still paying for google ads. I wonder what the ad will link to?
Sibel Edwards should have been as pro-active as Justen Deal was: perhaps her story would have resonated more with the chattering class.
Technorati Tags: PR, surveillance
Artificial Light
sunset porn #4423, give or take
Fair use is the basis of 90 percent of B12's content, and we're not an aberration among the denizens of blogtopia (y!sctp).
The tale: A publisher objected to the use of a table and a figure in an blog post about anti-oxidants so the blogger was forced to remove them from her post.
Cognitive Daily: Is reprinting a figure “fair use”? :
Should she have gone to all that trouble to comply with the publisher's demands? Doesn't the “fair use” doctrine allow reviewers to use excerpts from a work in critical commentary? Unfortunately, the copyright code isn't as clear as it ought to be on this issue. It says that “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.” That seems clear enough, but here are the considerations the code lists to be used in determining whether a reproduction of a work qualifies:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The whole thing is horribly ambiguous. While the code makes a distinction between “commercial” and “nonprofit educational,” it doesn't spell out whether this provision supersedes the others. Surely “news reporting” is a commercial activity, yet it is specified as non-infringing. If a teacher photocopies textbooks instead of making her students buy them, then surely that has a negative impact on the value of the book, even though she's working for a non-profit institution. A bad book review might have a negative impact on sales, but surely reviewers have the right to publish clips from the book to make their point.
I wouldn't even claim to have all (or any of) the answers about this contentious issue, but I'm still dismayed at the actions of the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture.
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should have used my photo instead.
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more on the Dr. Bronner mess
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Robert Ebert is cool. I often browse his movie review archives.
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what a bitch.
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periodically, some client or business associate sends these annoying winmail.dat files.
Happened upon a sculptor (presumedly working for Mary Brogger and/or the City of Chicago) touching up the Haymarket Riot Memorial last weekend.
Haymarket Touchup
prep work for the May Day rally at the Haymarket Riot memorial site
If I have time April 27th, I'd go along on this....
Gapers Block : Slowdown : April 27, 2007 : Join The Folks from the Finding Our Roots anarchist theory conference for a bit of local history from 3:30pm and 6:30pm on their Anarchy 101 walking tour of Chicago. At 3:30 Meet at The Old Cook County Courthouse where the Haymarket trial took place (Dearborn and Hubbard). This tour ends at Bughouse Square (across from the Newberry Library) with a soccer match. Then at 6:30 Meet at Haymarket Square at Randolph and Desplaines for more walking and talking. In addition to the walks there will be soapb.ox speaking actions with speeches by Lucy Parsons, Buenaventura Durruti, Emma Goldman, August Spies and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
Technorati Tags: Haymarket, history, repression, West_Loop
Greg Palast has an interesting theory as to why the roving bands of Rovians fired 8 US Attorneys
Don’t Fire Gonzales Greg Palast
That was two years back, while I was investigating strange doings in New Mexico and Arizona, where, simultaneously, state legislators, Republicans all, claimed they had evidence of “voter fraud.” Psychiatrists call this kind of mutual delusional behavior folie a deux. I suspected something else: I smelled Karl Rove. ... There was a multi-state con in operation. But what was it? Each of these bogus claims of voter fraud was attached to a sales pitch for a state law to tighten voter ID requirements — to prevent these ne’er-do-wells from voting twice. In Arizona, one crack-pot Republican legislator, the Hon. Russell Pearce, claimed he had evidence that five million Mexicans had illegally crossed the border to vote.The point: Rove knew that a “challenge” operation by the Republican Party, run from his office, knocked out 300,000 voters — mainly poor ones, voters of color. His crew wanted to hike that higher.
The notable thing about this crime of voter identity theft is that it doesn’t happen. You are more likely to encounter ballot boxes that spontaneously combust. I found cases of voters struck by lightening — but out of 120 million votes cast, I couldn’t find a dozen criminal cases of a bandit stealing someone’s identity to vote.
Since the Republicans couldn’t find such criminals, they had to make them up. Force prosecutors to bring false charges against innocent voters (one did just that in Wisconsin) or at least claim they were hot on the trail of the fraudulent voters.
Iglesias, though a Republican, wouldn’t bring bogus charges. And he wouldn’t lie about active investigations that didn’t exist except in Rove’s imagination.
That was his mistake.
Rove’s right-hand hit-man, Tim Griffin, added Iglesias to the hit list of prosecutors who were cut down on December 7, 2006.
and explains why Gonzales is just the scapegoat offered up to distract us from the Rovian machinations for the 2008 election.
We’ve been here before. Gonzales is getting Libby’d. Takes the bullet for Karl Rove and the White House. If you wondered why the Republican jackals like the sinister Senator Specter piled on Gonzales — it’s because they were told to.These guys learned from Richard Nixon. In 1973, when Nixon was getting hammered over Watergate, he threw the Senate Committee his Attorney General, a schmuck named Kleindeist. Famously, Nixon’s own Rove, a devious creep named John Erlichman, told Nixon to leave the Attorney General, “twisting slowly in the wind.”
Rove and Bush are doing the Nixon Twist on Gonzales.
Look, I have no sympathy for Alberto the Doomed. He’s guilty of a crime I employed in racketeering cases: “Willful failure to know.” It’s a kind of fraud; Alberto was going way out of his way to not know what he had to know, that Rove and the President were toying with prosecutors.
read more in the expanded new edition of Armed Madhouse.
Tags: 2004_election, /2008_election, /attorneys, /Karl_Rove
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I should have asked the guys name, since I did ask if I could take his photo.
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I wish I could make this show: Richard Swift is pretty good. Wish even more I could see him at the Lounge Ax instead!
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David Halbertam RIP.
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"The Reader has made its footage from CTA security cameras showing Officer Alvin Weems shooting an unarmed man at point-blank range"
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" there are two new Google Earth layers with which to explore architecture’s most popular structures"
There have been all sorts of failed developments at Block 37, but I doubt if many real estate moguls are truly superstitious about Indian graveyards or whatever.
Trying to Break the Jinx of Chicago’s Block 37 - New York Times
... “I think it’s going to be a terrific development when it’s done,” he said. “But you do wonder if this site is jinxed in some way.”“This site” is Block 37, a square block on State Street opposite the large Macy’s downtown store that was the most prominent vacant lot in Chicago, if not the country. Over the last 20 years, the failure of the city, as well as of succeeding teams of developers, to build something on the site inspired both a book —
by Ross Miller — and a BBC-produced documentary film.
Here’s the Deal: The Making and Breaking of a Great American City
One project after another fell through as some of the most high-profile developers in the city tried and failed to line up tenants and financing for a series of mixed-use projects, all of which were announced with great fanfare and then never heard from again.
Indeed, it is estimated that about $300 million in public and private funds was spent on failed development projects for the site over the years.
I walked by Block 37 last weekend, and the building infrastructure is already 10-12 stories tall.
... two local developers — Golub & Company and Joseph Freed & Associates — actually have projects under way there.Golub’s is a 16-story, 440,000-square-foot office tower that is 80 percent leased to two tenants, Morningstar — with 236,000 square feet — and WBBM-TV, the local CBS affiliate. The architect is Ralph Johnson of the locally based Perkins & Will.
Freed’s is a 400,000-square-foot retail mall that is also to include an elaborate new subway station for the Chicago Transit Authority. The designer is Grant Uhlir of Gensler. Freed also has the rights to develop a second phase of the project consisting of 800 residential or hotel units.
Both projects broke ground in late 2005 and are scheduled to be finished next year. The combined cost is about $750 million. The city has assisted the developments by selling the land for $12.2 million, which is about a third of its market price.
I hope this part gets finished soon:
The transportation center is one of the more intriguing aspects of the project. The mall is to be built around a five-story atrium, at the bottom of which will be the new subway station.The aim is to connect the two subway lines that currently converge downtown — the Red Line along State Street and the Blue Line a block to the west along Dearborn Street — and also provide a central departure point for passengers heading for either of the city’s two airports.
The eventual goal is for passengers to be able to check their baggage downtown and then board an express train that would whisk them to either O’Hare International or Midway Airport in about 20 minutes. Currently, the trip can take up to an hour. That level of service, however, depends on the construction of an extensive — and as yet unfinanced — program of track improvements.
Photos later.
Tags: architecture, /Chicago, /real_estate
Hmmm, maybe this is what Unka Karl all 'het' up? Unka Karl has trouble imagining only using 1 square to clean his messes.
Saving the Earth: The Biodiesel Bus Blog - washingtonpost.com : ... I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting. Now, I don't want to rob any law-abiding American of his or her God-given rights, but I think we are an industrious enough people that we can make it work with only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where 2 to 3 could be required.
Soon after, at the White House Correspondents Dinner (now surprisingly satire-free), Karl Rove strongly requested that Sheryl Crow and Laurie David refrain from breathing his air, even though:
To set the record straight, the other night, we approached Mr. Rove at a dinner designed specifically to encourage conversations between people from different worlds.
Here's what happened:
We asked Mr. Rove if he would consider taking a fresh look at the science of global warming. Much to our dismay, he immediately got combative. And it went downhill from there.We reminded the senior White House advisor that the US leads the world in global warming pollution and we are doing the least about it. Anger flaring, Mr. Rove immediately regurgitated the official Administration position on global warming which is that the US spends more on researching the causes than any other country.
We felt compelled to remind him that the research is done and the results are in (www.IPCC.ch). Mr. Rove exploded with even more venom. Like a spoiled child throwing a tantrum, Mr. Rove launched into a series of illogical arguments regarding China not doing enough thus neither should we. (Since when do we follow China's lead?)
At some point during his ramblings, we became heartbroken to think that the President of the United States and his top advisers have partially built a career on global warming not being real. We have been telling college students across the country for the past two weeks that government does not change until people demand it... well, listen up folks, everyone had better get a lot louder because the message clearly is not getting through.
In his attempt to dismiss us, Mr. Rove turned to head toward his table, but as soon as he did so, Sheryl reached out to touch his arm. Karl swung around and spat, “Don't touch me.” How hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be touched by Sheryl Crow? Unfazed, Sheryl abruptly responded, “You can't speak to us like that, you work for us.” Karl then quipped, “I don't work for you, I work for the American people.” To which Sheryl promptly reminded him, “We are the American people.”
At that point Mr. Rove apparently decided he had had enough. Like a groundhog fearful of his own shadow, he scurried to his table in an attempt to hibernate for another year from his responsibility to address global warming. Drama aside, you would expect as an American citizen to be able to engage in a civil discussion with a public official. Instead, Mr. Rove was dismissive, condescending, and quite frankly a bully.
Ultimately, we were left wondering what on Earth Mr. Rove was talking about when he said “the American people.” If more than 60% of American voters, the Supreme Court, over 400 cities, the US National Academy of Sciences, numerous major US corporations, and others don't constitute the American people, then what does? The truth is, if this administration cared one iota about the American people, they would have addressed this problem long ago, and the sad reality is that this problem has been left to us, all of us, since the current administration has abandoned this issue entirely. In the absence of true leadership, we must guide ourselves. We can solve this, but we had better act fast.
(note, on Sherly Crow's blog, she claims the toilet paper quip was a joke).
Technorati Tags: Al_Gore, Bush_Donor, climate_change, global_warming, Rove
Green is certainly this year's marketing phrase. Any corporation that can is mentioning 'green' and 'environmentally friendly' at every opportunity. Industry always prefers to regulate themselves, rather then let the hoi polloi or Congress influence policy.
Green light on for CEO at Ford : Not long ago, it would have been folly for an auto company chief executive to admit he believed in global warming, and just as unlikely for a carmaker to attach the word “sustainability” to a job title.But Ford Motor's chief executive, Alan Mulally, did both on Monday.
Speaking with journalists in a conference call, Mulally said, “I clearly believe the vast majority of data indicates that the temperature has increased. And I believe the correlation and analysis that it's mainly because of greenhouse gases.”
His comments came as Mulally announced a promotion for a Ford vice president, Susan Cischke, to a new job as senior vice president for sustainability, environment and safety engineering.
Cischke, who now reports to Mulally instead of to Ford's Washington office, will be in charge of creating a long-range strategy on sustainability matters.
More hype than concrete action, probably, but I still am encouraged. Even small steps are still steps. The real proof will be what positive actions result.
Representatives of environmental groups said they were glad to see Mulally's latest steps but had not forgotten Ford's past record.“It's always good when we see a company making steps toward becoming more environmentally sustainable,” said Mike Hudema, director of the Freedom From Oil Campaign, an alliance of three environmental groups.
“But we do always have to put that in context with Ford's history, which, unfortunately on the environmental front, is not a very good one.”
Dan Becker, director of the global warming program at the Sierra Club, said Ford was good at making promises to help the environment, but “when it comes to doing them, they seem to forget or fall down on the job.”
Becker questioned whether Cischke was the right executive to focus on sustainability, saying that she had testified before Congress opposing steps the Sierra Club had proposed.
“It's as if the Yankees promoted manager Joe Torre to reach out to the Red Sox,” he said.
Technorati Tags: Detroit, energy, environment, Ford
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make sure not to have dangerous thoughts
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some person uploaded this photo to Wikipedia without asking me. Do I care? Only a little.
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"Several times a week, in every troublespot in Iraq, late-night raids are carried out by American and Iraqi troops against the homes of suspected insurgents."
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walked this same area Sunday afternoon.
The FDA takes its job very seriously, but since its main task is to protect corporations from 'excessive regulation', consumers get screwed.
FDA Was Aware of Dangers To Food - washingtonpost.com :
The Food and Drug Administration has known for years about contamination problems at a Georgia peanut butter plant and on California spinach farms that led to disease outbreaks that killed three people, sickened hundreds, and forced one of the biggest product recalls in U.S. history, documents and interviews show.Overwhelmed by huge growth in the number of food processors and imports, however, the agency took only limited steps to address the problems and relied on producers to police themselves, according to agency documents.
Congressional critics and consumer advocates said both episodes show that the agency is incapable of adequately protecting the safety of the food supply. FDA officials conceded that the agency's system needs to be overhauled to meet today's demands, but contended that the agency could not have done anything to prevent either contamination episode.
Shorter version of FDA excuse: our job is hard, so we don't bother doing it well. Hope you don't die!
“This administration does not like regulation, this administration does not like spending money, and it has a hostility toward government. The poisonous result is that a program like the FDA is going to suffer at every turn of the road,” said Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the full House committee. Dingell is considering introducing legislation to boost the agency's accountability, regulatory authority and budget.In the peanut butter case, an agency report shows that FDA inspectors checked into complaints about salmonella contamination in a ConAgra Foods factory in Georgia in 2005. But when company managers refused to provide documents the inspectors requested, the inspectors left and did not follow up.
No doubt to attend an industry-sponsored event in some warm clime like Bermuda.
Technorati Tags: corruption, FDA
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This might be ridiculously stupid (mid-60s comedies haven't usually aged well), but maybe I'll give it a spin on the ole DVD player.
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"position appears to be that it is appropriate for you to discuss these matters on The Daily Show, but not before a congressional committee. You will not be surprised to learn that I take a different view of this matter.""
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sounds to me like the VT shooter was actually a Christian nut-job, and not Muslim at all.
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"ruminates about the music that inspired him, solving the world's problems, the Beatle he's in awe of, and more"
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Complete Bob Dylan XM radio show archive
Obviously, Gilbert Arenas has been paying attention to The Decider, and his quest to hire a War Czar to 'ease his load' a bit.
NBA.com NBA.com Blog: Gilbert Arenas
Obama and MeOf course we’ll win the election. As long as he has me, we’re winning.
We’ll be co-presidents. He can handle all the big stuff like the war in Iraq and all that, and I’ll keep everybody distracted off what he’s doing. I’ll be the entertainer.
I’ll do the press conferences. I’ll play the Bush part. I’ll be the golfer, I’ll go golf for 14 hours. I’ll party for half a week. I’ll do that, I’ll have fun with that.
And then Barack can handle all that important stuff.
Tags: Barrack_Obama
The dirty secret about colleges as an institution is that they only half-heartedly care about educating their students, they are really more concerned with making a profit. Students come and go, but cash flow is eternal.
Colleges Relying on Lenders to Counsel Students
Some universities use lenders to conduct workshops required by law for many students taking out loans.Ms. [Rachel] Jones, a 22-year-old who has $17,000 in student loans, had unwittingly stumbled upon another undisclosed relationship between universities and loan companies.
Recent investigations have largely focused on incentives lenders give universities to get coveted placement on the preferred lending lists students use to take out loans when they enter college. But colleges also give lenders crucial access to students when they are graduating, using lenders to conduct exit counseling required under federal law for students who have taken out federally guaranteed student loans.
In some cases, loan company representatives come on campus and run sessions for seniors on loan repayment. In others, colleges direct students to loan company Web sites, including Wells Fargo, Citibank and Sallie Mae. And in many cases, the loan companies are pushing a product: their consolidation loans.
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Weeks after her exit counseling at Loyola, Ms. Jones is still marveling over the session. She wrote an opinion column in the student newspaper, The Los Angeles Loyolan, denouncing the workshop as “nothing more than an hourlong advertisement.”“It just seemed really shady and underhanded the way it was run,” Ms. Jones said. “I still feel like I was duped.”
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The Indiana Institute of Technology directs students to complete exit counseling through OpenNet, an online service run by Sallie Mae, the n