B12 Solipsism

Mayor Daley’s budget is in deficit, municipal projects don’t get funded, schools don’t get funded, yet developers can get as much TIF money¹ as they need, no matter what. No consequences, no strings. Just plain ole corporate welfare.

A city panel approved another major increase in financial assistance for planned Loop apartment development that has struggled to get off the ground because of rising costs and the tough lending climate.

The Community Development Commission signed off Tuesday on a $34-million tax-increment financing subsidy to help pay for the conversion of a vintage Loop office tower at 188 W. Randolph St. into a 310-unit apartment building.

That’s more than four times the $8 million in TIF funds the city initially approved for the development back in 2006, when its total cost was estimated at $79 million.

But the projected cost had soared to $139 million in 2008, and the project’s developer, Village Green Cos., went back for more. The city complied by hiking the subsidy to $20 million.

[Click to continue reading Loop project poised to get another big TIF boost - Chicago Real Estate Daily]

Via Lynn Becker, who adds:

When, in 2006, a developer announced plans to rehab Vitzhum & Burns Steuben Club Building at 188 W. Randolph, an $8 million dollars contribution from the massive Central Loop TIF was going to kick in about 10% of the $79 million cost.

…

But wait – there’s more! The project is also getting $40 million dollars in tax-exempt bonds from the state, plus $37 million in tax credits. You, lucky taxpayer, kick in almost half of the project cost and the private developer gets the building. Socialism, Chicago style.

When Draconian cutbacks are effecting everything in Chicago from the CTA, to the schools, to 4th of July Fireworks, the city is diverting another $26 million in tax revenues to an economically unsustainable development.

[Click to continue reading ArchitectureChicago PLUS: Welfare Queen]

Really disgusting. The Vitzthum & Burns Steuben Club Building is not a cookie-cutter square box, but it isn’t in the upper echelon of Chicago architecture either.

from a CBS Chicago report (presumedly based on the press release from Village Green Companies)

The Community Development Commission approved a plan to redevelop the vacant and historic Randolph Tower at 188 W. Randolph St. into 310 apartments, retail and commercial space, according to a release from the CDC.

The action recommends the designation of Village Green Companies as the developer for the proposed $145 million renovation.

Plans call for the mixed-use building, formerly known as the Steuben Club Building, to be converted into 168 studios, 98 one-bedroom and 44 two-bedroom units, the release said. Sixty-two of the residential units will be made affordable to households at or below 50 percent of median area income.

Village Green bought the 45-story office building out of bankruptcy in 2005 and will convert the 80-year-old structure into apartments. Plans also include 9,500 square feet of ground floor restaurant and retail space. Village Green will occupy 11,400 square feet on the second floor as its Chicago regional office.

Amenities will include a fitness center, swimming pool and spa. A social club will be located on the 38th and 39th floors, offering 360-degree views of the skyline and Lake Michigan, the release said.

The Gothic-style building will have extensive work done to preserve its historic terra cotta façade and other ornamental details and a gut rehabilitation of the interior.

The CDC also approved a redevelopment plan for the proposed Randolph/Wells tax increment financing district. Creation of the district will support the renovation of Randolph Tower and help redevelop other underutilized and vacant buildings in the area.

[Click to continue reading
City OK's Rehab Of Loop Tower, Home For Teen Mothers On West Side - cbs2chicago.com
]

Hey, build for the future, right? Demand for new condos might be low now, but in twenty years…

Via EveryBlock’s hyperlocal news

1. tax increment financing [↩]

Criminals and thugs. That is the description future historians will often use to describe members of the Bush Administration.

An official at the United States Embassy in Iraq has told federal prosecutors that he believes that State Department officials sought to block any serious investigation of the 2007 shooting episode in which Blackwater Worldwide security guards were accused of murdering 17 Iraqi civilians, according to court testimony made public on Tuesday.

David Farrington, a State Department security agent in the American Embassy at the time of the shooting in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, told prosecutors that some of his colleagues were handling evidence in a way they hoped would help the Blackwater guards avoid punishment for a crime that drew headlines and raised tensions between American and Iraqi officials.

[Click to continue reading Interference Seen in Blackwater Inquiry - NYTimes.com]

and if you don’t have the mental stamina to click the link¹

“Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Revised and Updated]” (Jeremy Scahill)

In a closed-door hearing, they also contended that they had evidence that, in the immediate aftermath of the shootings, there had been a concerted effort to make the case go away, both by Blackwater and by at least some embassy officials.

In fact, prosecutors were told that the embassy had never conducted any significant investigation of any of the numerous shooting episodes in Iraq involving Blackwater before the Nisour Square case, according to the documents.

In his October testimony, Mr. Kohl described how the Justice Department had “serious concerns” about obstruction of justice in the case. He also said prosecutors briefed Kenneth Wainstein, then an assistant attorney general, on evidence of obstruction by Blackwater management.

Mr. Kohl disclosed that prosecutors had discovered that five Blackwater guards who were on the convoy involved in the Nisour Square shootings reported to Blackwater management what they had seen. One guard, he said, described it as “murder in cold blood.” Mr. Kohl said that Blackwater management never reported these statements by the guards to the State Department.

He said that prosecutors informed senior Justice Department officials as early as 2007 that they were investigating whether Blackwater managers “manipulated” the official statements made by the guards to the State Department.

But he testified that prosecutors also had evidence of embassy officials thwarting the inquiry. In addition to the testimony of Mr. Farrington, Mr. Kohl said that United States military officials had told prosecutors that they witnessed State Department investigators “badgering” Iraqi witnesses

and I’d add, scum, to the description of Bushies cited above. Rule of Law, hah. Murderers for hire. Hessians were at least conscripted soldiers, not necessarily believers in the Divine Mission of their masters.

1. really, you should [↩]

Oh, that’s rich. And how much is tuition at Northwestern? Something like six figures, I think. It’s fucking golden…

Even if Northwestern University has used the title for a literature course, “The Death of Irony” must be revived for next week’s campus appearance by the former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich.

Mr. Blagojevich is scheduled to speak at a gathering called “Ethics in Politics: An Evening with Former Governor R. Blagojevich.”

Many people gagged for all the obvious reasons. His alleged misdeeds, cavalier ways, narcissism, favor-swapping pragmatism and seeming belief that he’ll be just fine if he corrals the news media to his side make him an atypical choice for presumably idealistic souls spending a king’s ransom for four years in Evanston.

“But the problem goes deeper,” said Rushworth Kidder, president of the Institute of Global Ethics. “In a sense, he’s the logical and inevitable outcome of a society that has refused to educate the next generation about values, ethics and character. As such, he’s the perfect outcome of our ethical indifference and a role model for the next generation.”

[Click to continue reading Chicago News Cooperative - Now at Northwestern, Ethics 101, Taught by, Well, Go Figure - NYTimes.com]

But there was a contrarian view from Larry Miller, a comic who occasionally writes about politics.

“There are so many shatteringly immoral thieves and cutthroats in government today, yesterday and tomorrow, so many in Chicago and Illinois and New York and Texas and Montana, so many galloping egomaniacs who just haven’t been caught yet, so many roaches zipping around the kitchen floor before someone turns out the light, why not Blagojevich,” said Mr. Miller, who recently appeared in Las Vegas with his chum Jerry Seinfeld.

…

“You and I don’t want to live like this, but it’s not too cynical to say, ‘They are all like this.’ In theory, O.K., there’s one guy here, and one woman there, who are actually trustworthy. But isn’t it axiomatic that as soon as one of these horrible egomaniacs first decides to run for something, anything, that it’s irrefutable proof-positive the guy’s a complete lunatic and thug?”

His grand finale: “Why not Blagojevich speaking on ethics? At least that has humor. Is it not far worse and creepy to have Hugo Chávez or Ahmadinejad welcome at the United Nations? These are seriously bad people, and we all stand and applaud and nod as if we were about to listen to U Thant,” the former U.N. secretary general.

If the Drown-The-Baby-in-the Bathtub Republicans ever get their way¹, the federal regulatory infrastructure would get stripped, and there would be a lot more deaths from tainted food. The current system of food inspection is pretty corrupt, but least there is some restraint, and occasionally a corporation will commit such a heinous act that they will get sanctioned. Like SK Foods, and their buddies, Kraft, Safeway, and others:

Robert Watson, a top ingredient buyer for Kraft Foods, needed $20,000 to pay his taxes. So he called a broker for a California tomato processor that for years had been paying him bribes to get its products into Kraft’s plants.

The check would soon be in the mail, the broker promised. “We’ll have to deduct it out of your commissions as we move forward,” he said, using a euphemism for bribes.

Days later, federal agents descended on Kraft’s offices near Chicago and confronted Mr. Watson. He admitted his role in a bribery scheme that has laid bare a startling vein of corruption in the food industry. And because the scheme also involved millions of pounds of tomato products with high levels of mold or other defects, the case has raised serious questions about how well food manufacturers safeguard the quality of their ingredients.

Over the last 14 months, Mr. Watson and three other purchasing managers, at Frito-Lay, Safeway and B&G Foods, have pleaded guilty to taking bribes. Five people connected to one of the nation’s largest tomato processors, SK Foods, have also admitted taking part in the scheme

[Click to continue reading SK Foods at Center of Bribe Scheme to Sell Tainted Tomatoes - NYTimes.com]

Food corporations claim innocence, but I assume there was a lot of winkin’ and noddin’ going on, just no hard evidence.

1. Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and the rest of that group of thugs [↩]

I don’t know if I agree with this line of reasoning

Illinois is no stranger to odd, larcenous or rough-and-tumble elections. But only here, it seems, has a candidate collapsed so ingloriously that he brought dishonor on what many consider a shame-proof industry: pawnbroking.

The Illinois Democratic Party is not the only statewide organization trying to step out of the cloud that hung over Scott Lee Cohen’s exit as the party’s nominee for lieutenant governor — the Illinois Pawnbrokers Association is trying to save face, too.

Mr. Cohen, the state’s first pawnbroker politician, managed to leave a blot on the ledger of an industry that could do without the extra stain. Mr. Cohen converted instantly from the pride of his industry to a public embarrassment for it when a former prostitute said that he had held a knife to her throat during an argument when the two were dating in 2005.

David Schoeneman, president of the Illinois Pawnbrokers Association and owner of Shane’s-The Pawn Shop in Chicago Heights, this week found himself sharing the same defensive crouch taken by distressed Democratic Party leaders once the abuse accusation surfaced.

“When somebody gets caught being a bad guy, you cringe,” Mr. Schoeneman said. “Same for doctors, lawyers, priests. People are people.”

[Click to continue reading Chicago News Cooperative - The Chicago Way - Ex-Nominee’s Troubles Stain Pawnbrokers - NYTimes.com]

If the actions of one disgraced politician besmirched the entire profession the politician came from, we would have exiled all the lawyers in the country. I think the (former or current, depending) occupation of a politician is less important than that. Political party affiliation is arguably more important to the equation.

Michael Chertoff is Not to be Trusted, part 564

WHEN The Times interviewed Michael Chertoff about airport security after the underwear bomber tried to blow up a passenger jet on Christmas Day, he said full-body scanners should be deployed at airports. Chertoff, the former secretary of homeland security, did not volunteer that he is a consultant to a company that makes such equipment, and though they spoke to him twice, reporters never asked if he had a financial stake in the matter.

…

Chertoff, who championed full-body scanners as head of the Department of Homeland Security, long before he went into private business, said it was no secret that he had become a consultant to corporate clients through the Chertoff Group, a risk-management firm he formed in March. He said that when two Times reporters, Eric Liptonand John Schwartz, called and the subject turned to scanners, it was up to them to ask whether he had ties to that industry. “I always answer when I’m asked,” he said. “But I don’t think it is my obligation to put myself in the head of a reporter” to decide what the reporter needs to know.

Chertoff did tell NPR and CNN interviewers when they asked.

Lipton and Schwartz agreed that they should have asked Chertoff, but both expressed disappointment that he did not volunteer obviously germane information. Bob Steele, a professor at DePauw University and a journalism values scholar at the Poynter Institute, said, “I believe a source does have an affirmative obligation to reveal any competing loyalties, even if the source isn’t sure they create a direct conflict of interest.”

Interestingly, Chertoff wrote an Op-Ed article for The Washington Post, published New Year’s Day, that carried a one-sentence biography divulging that his clients included a scanner manufacturer — a note he said he volunteered. “If I’m affirmatively getting out there,” he said, as opposed to being called by a reporter, “I make it my business to disclose.” That’s a distinction I don’t buy. What difference does it make whether a source seeks a forum or a reporter happens to call? Knowing Washington’s culture of revolving doors and news spin, the Times reporters should have asked the obvious question. But if Chertoff had a connection he thought the public needed to know in one instance, he should have made it clear in the others.

[Click to continue reading The Public Editor - The Sources’ Stake in the News - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com]

How about stop pretending political hacks like Chertoff even have anything relevant to add to the conversation in the first place? Start by assuming they always have a conflict of interest, and that’s why they agreed to be quoted.

The NYT appended the following mushy Editor’s Note below their Chertoff story:

Editors’ Note: January 15, 2010

Articles on Dec. 28, 29 and 30, about the apparent bombing attempt on a flight to Detroit, discussed the use of full-body scanners for airport security. They cited Michael Chertoff, the former secretary of homeland security, as supporting wider use of the scanners. Mr. Chertoff has confirmed in several recent interviews that a manufacturer of the devices is a client of his consulting company. That connection should have been noted in the articles.

Frank Rich writes:

But in the 16 months since that other calamity in downtown New York — the crash precipitated by the 9/15 failure of Lehman Brothers — most of us are still ignorant about what Warren Buffett called the “financial weapons of mass destruction” that wrecked our economy. Fluent as we are in Al Qaeda and body scanners, when it comes to synthetic C.D.O.’s and credit-default swaps, not so much.

What we don’t know will hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed. Now that it can count on government bailouts, Wall Street has more incentive than ever to pump up its risks — secure that it can keep the bonanzas while we get stuck with the losses.

[Click to continue reading Frank Rich - The Other Plot to Wreck America - NYTimes.com]

In an ideal world, the corporate media would be investigating this crime wave as breathlessly as they hyped the underpants bomber or the Balloon Boy. Why aren’t they? Collusion? Lack of intelligence? Lack of trust that viewers can understand complex issues? All of the above? The US Congress is so wimpy that they won’t consider investigations with teeth unless public outcry reaches deafening crescendos, and the public is only silently weeping at the moment. I doubt there are any public officials with the intestinal fortitude of Ferdinand Pecora in today’s Washington.

The last time Washington enacted sweeping financial reform, more than 75 years ago, the catalyst was a cigar-smoking, Sicilian-born immigrant named Ferdinand Pecora.

A former New York prosecutor, Pecora was the last in a series of investigators hired to examine the causes that led to the stock market crash of 1929 for the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency. In early 1933, the newly-elected Democratic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, gave the bulldog lawyer his blessing to dig deep into the excesses that had plunged the nation into the Great Depression.

The result was a relentless investigation, 12,000 pages of transcripts that laid bare abuses on Wall Street and failures of Washington to adequately regulate the nation’s financial system. Pecora’s efforts provided a basis for reforms that would alter Wall Street and maintain relative stability in the banking industry until the recent crisis. These included legislation that for the first time regulated the sale of securities and helped establish the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

For all the differences between then and now, there also are whispers of familiarity: Abuses on Wall Street. The blind eye of Washington. An economy in crisis. A new and eager administration calling for reform, and efforts by those with v

[Click to continue reading Ferdinand Pecora Ushered In Wall Street Regulation After 1929 Crash - washingtonpost.com]

“Major League Losers: The Real Cost Of Sports And Who’s Paying For It” (Mark S. Rosentraub)

Cities are being forced to gut budgets for non-essential items like schools, police, road repair and so on in order to fund impoverished sports franchises, and the sweetheart stadium deals the sports teams negotiated. Or something.

Years after a wave of construction brought publicly financed stadiums costing billions of dollars to cities across the country, taxpayers are once again being asked to reach into their pockets.

From New Jersey to Ohio to Arizona, the stadiums were sold as a key to redevelopment and as the only way to retain sports franchises. But the deals that were used to persuade taxpayers to finance their construction have in many cases backfired, the result of overly optimistic revenue assumptions and the recession.

…

In Indianapolis, the Capital Improvement Board spent 2009 trying to find $32 million to run the Lucas Oil Stadium and convention center. In Milwaukee, a drop in sales tax receipts may delay by several years the date for paying off the bonds issued to build Miller Park, the home of the Brewers.

Columbus, Ohio, is considering using public money to keep the Blue Jackets in town. Glendale, Ariz., has fought to hold the Phoenix Coyotes to their long-term lease. In New Jersey, a ticket surcharge may be added to help resolve a tenant-landlord dispute between the Devils and Newark.

Mark Rosentraub, the author of the book “Major League Losers,” said that many of the stadium deals included “revenue bombs,” with financial traps like balloon payments on debt in later years and sweeteners like the Hamilton County property tax rebate to win public support.

In many cases, the architects of the deals are long gone by the time the bill comes due.

…

The plan went awry almost from the start. The [Cincinnati Bengal's ] football stadium exceeded its budget by $50 million, forcing the county to issue more bonds. Forecasts for growth in the sales tax turned out to be too rosy. The teams received sweetheart leases. In 2000, voters threw out the county commissioners who cut the deal.

That year the sales tax grew 1.8 percent, the first of many years below the 3 percent forecast. Both stadiums were originally expected to cost $500 million combined. Yet Paul Brown Stadium alone cost $455 million and the Great American Ballpark, the Reds’ home a few hundred yards down the Ohio River, cost $337 million by the time it opened in 2003.

The generous deal for the Bengals has been a sore spot. The team had to pay rent only through 2009 on its 26-year lease, and has to cover the cost of running the stadium only for game days. Starting in 2017, the county will reimburse the team for these costs, too. The county will pay $8.5 million this year to keep the stadium going.

The Bengals keep revenue from naming rights, advertising, tickets, suites and most parking. If the county wants to recoup money by taxing tickets, concessions or parking, it needs the team’s approval.

[Click to continue reading As Revenue Plunges, Stadium Boom Adds to Municipal Woes - NYTimes.com]

Was it really worth it? Are public spectacles so important to our society that paying wealthy team owners to host their games is more important than funding all else? If owners of sport teams are so broke they need welfare to pay for their team’s stadium, perhaps they should sell the team to someone who can pay the team expenses without taxpayer dollars. The sporting stadium boondoggle is one of the worst kinds of corporate welfare in the nation.

Matt Taibbi points out a strange occurrence that happened in the last year that George Bush was in office

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who — made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness — “like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets,” according to one financial analyst.

But what’s even crazier is that the bet paid.

At the close of business that afternoon, Bear Stearns was trading at $62.97. At that point, whoever made the gamble owned the right to sell huge bundles of Bear stock, at $30 and $25, on or before March 20th. In order for the bet to pay, Bear would have to fall harder and faster than any Wall Street brokerage in history.

The very next day, March 12th, Bear went into free fall. By the end of the week, the firm had lost virtually all of its cash and was clinging to promises of state aid; by the weekend, it was being knocked to its knees by the Fed and the Treasury, and forced at the barrel of a shotgun to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase (which had been given $29 billion in public money to marry its hunchbacked new bride) at the humiliating price of … $2 a share. Whoever bought those options on March 11th woke up on the morning of March 17th having made 159 times his money, or roughly $270 million. This trader was either the luckiest guy in the world, the smartest son of a bitch ever or…

Or what? That this was a brazen case of insider manipulation was so obvious that even Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman of the pillow-soft-touch Senate Banking Committee, couldn’t help but remark on it a few weeks later, when questioning Christopher Cox, the then-chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission. “I would hope that you’re looking at this,” Dodd said. “This kind of spike must have triggered some sort of bells and whistles at the SEC. This goes beyond rumors.”

Cox nodded sternly and promised, yes, he would look into it. What actually happened is another matter. Although the SEC issued more than 50 subpoenas to Wall Street firms, it has yet to identify the mysterious trader who somehow seemed to know in advance that one of the five largest investment banks in America was going to completely tank in a matter of days. “I’ve seen the SEC send agents overseas in a simple insider-trading case to investigate profits of maybe $2,000,” says Brent Baker, a former senior counsel for the commission. “But they did nothing to stop this.”

The SEC’s halfhearted oversight didn’t go unnoticed by the market. Six months after Bear was eaten by predators, virtually the same scenario repeated itself in the case of Lehman Brothers — another top-five investment bank that in September 2008 was vaporized in an obvious case of market manipulation. From there, the financial crisis was on, and the global economy went into full-blown crater mode.

[Click to continue reading Wall Street's Naked Swindle : Rolling Stone]

Strange indeed. Strange also that the case hasn’t gotten as much news coverage as say Tiger Woods hitting a fire hydrant near his house.

No wonder the US model of pharmaceutical research is so fracked up.

In a report expected to be made public on Thursday, Daniel R. Levinson, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, said 90 percent of universities relied solely on the researchers themselves to decide whether the money they made in consulting and other relationships with drug and device makers was relevant to their government-financed research.

And half of universities do not ask their faculty members to disclose the amount of money or stock they make from drug and device makers, so the potential for extensive conflicts with their government-financed research is often known only to the researchers themselves, the report concluded.

[Click to continue reading Researchers’ Financial Interests Often Not Reported to U.S. - NYTimes.com]

Don’t ask, don’t tell, right? You keep your money, and we keep you on staff so that our university can use your name in our PR materials.

Most of the reported conflicts involved equity ownership in companies that could be affected by the results of government-financed research. In only a third of the cases did the universities specify to the government the size of the financial conflict and, among those, six had equity stakes valued at greater than $100,000. But in only 29 of the cases did the universities require researchers to reduce or eliminate their stakes. In most cases, the universities deemed that some sort of the disclosure of the conflict was enough to manage it.

Can you imagine this sort of arrangement for any other industry? Well, besides maybe defense contractors and Congress, but they at least have a couple of years of cushion between action and reward.

A few interesting links collected October 29th through October 30th:

• Chief drug adviser David Nutt sacked over cannabis stance | Politics | The Guardian – Alan Johnson, the home secretary, has sacked Professor David Nutt as senior drugs adviser after the scientist renewed his criticism of the government's decision to toughen the law on cannabis.

  Johnson wrote to Nutt saying he no longer had confidence in him as chairman of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) and asking him to consider his position.

  Nutt had accused ministers of "devaluing and distorting" the scientific evidence over illicit drugs by their decision last year to reclassify cannabis from class C to class B against the advice of the ACMD

• Think Again: Obama’s Commie Past Exposed Yet Again – Robert Fox, the millionaire brother-in-law of a GOP congressman, tried to prove the connection. He offered $10,000 to Dr. Peter Millican, an Oxford professor who had developed a computer program to make comparisons between texts. Times of London reported this on November 2, 2008. Millican told Fox that the initial findings made it “highly implausible” that the books shared authors. He also said that if further research was done, then the findings would be made public whether or not Ayers was proven to be the author. Fox withdrew his offer.
• Excerpts From The Book The NBA Doesn't Want You To Read – Tim Donaghy – Deadspin – I'm still fucking bitter about this game six travesty
  :"If we give the benefit of the calls to the team that's down in the series, nobody's going to complain. The series will be even at three apiece, and then the better team can win Game 7," Bavetta stated.

  As history shows, Sacramento lost Game 6 in a wild come-from-behind thriller that saw the Lakers repeatedly sent to the foul line by the referees. For other NBA referees watching the game on television, it was a shameful performance by Bavetta's crew, one of the most poorly officiated games of all time."

Some additional reading October 4th from 10:05 to 12:48:

• Wife of Japanese PM Brings UFOs, Aliens into Global Affairs | Underwire | Wired.com – Hatoyama… has told reporters she knew Tom Cruise in a former life (with or without Thetans). She also claims to “eat the sun” to gain energy — making this reporter wonder if another of her former incarnations might’ve attacked Tokyo.

• 

• Food Safety Documents – The New York Times – Tracing the hamburger that left Stephanie Smith paralyzed, through government and corporate records obtained by The New York Times, shows why eating ground beef is still such a gamble

• From Snapshots from a Flounder

• WTF? Wisconsin Tourism Federation changes name after internet jokes – Telegraph – The Wisconsin Tourism Federation has changed its name, after being made aware that its acronym WTF had become crude internet slang. They are now aware of all internet traditions…
• Recipe: The Basic Burger :: Mark Bittman :: Culinate – Given concerns about the safety of store-ground meat (E. coli, salmonella, and the like), you might want to try grinding your own meat for burgers. Buy a chuck roast, cut it into small cubes about an inch square, and pulse a small batch (about 1/2 pound) at a time in a food processor. Make sure you don’t pulverize the meat and it’ll be wonderful. Freeze what you don’t use immediately.

A few interesting links collected October 1st through October 2nd:

• The Outfit: A Collective of Chicago Crime Writers: If You Wanna Win You Gotta Learn How to Play – The whole Olympics is going to be like this–a game in which Chicagoans will be made to feel like they should be emotionally invested when the real players will be behind the scenes: the guys with contracts waiting to be signed, and properties on the Olympic venue Monopoly board … Maybe the games will lose money on the whole, but some people, people on the inside, are going to make Benjamins by the bagful. These are the people who exaggerate the benefits, who make it sound like Chicago needs the Olympics more than the Olympics needs Chicago (a dubious claim if only because the IOC stands to make another half billion or so in television rights for summer games on US soil) so that you’ll support an endeavor that will line their pockets.
  

  One Billion Dollars

• Senator Helped Mistress’s Husband, Raising Ethics Flags – NYTimes.com – A Republican Senator and an ethical scandal? What a a surprise!”The senator also put his chief of staff at the time, who had raised concerns that Mr. Hampton’s activities could violate the one-year ban on lobbying, in charge of dealing with him.”
• 
• Michael Wolff on Rupert Murdoch | vanityfair.com – more than being about cost, [Rupert Murdoch's] strategy is about pain. What he is always doing is demonstrating a level of strength and will and resolve against which the other guys, the weaker guys, cower. He can take more pain than anybody else. While others persist in the vanity of the Internet, he will endure the short- or medium-term pain necessary to build a profitable business.

For the fun news of the day – in all the GOP haste to smear ACORN based on the actions of a couple of rogue employees, the language of the bill does the one thing I had suggested in jest as an answer to an unrelated topic. Namely, be more harsh on corporations that break laws. Except in the actual bill as written and voted on, any crime charged to a corporation would bar it from feeding at the public trough. Ooopsie!

The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to “any organization” that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.

In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) picked up on the legislative overreach and asked the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) to sift through its database to find which contractors might be caught in the ACORN net.

Lockheed Martin and Northrop Gumman both popped up quickly, with 20 fraud cases between them, and the longer list is a Who’s Who of weapons manufacturers and defense contractors.

The language was written by the GOP and filed as a “motion to recommit” in the House, where it passed 345-75. It carried the Senate by an 83-7 margin.

POGO is reaching out to its members to identify other companies who have engaged in the type of misconduct that would make them ineligible for federal funds.

Grayson then intends to file that list in the legislative history that goes along with the bill so that judges can reference it when determining whether a company should be denied federal funds.

[Click to continue reading Whoops: Anti-ACORN Bill Ropes In Defense Contractors, Others Charged With Fraud]

Too funny.

[Buzzards circling in a park probably built by Brown and Root, LBJ's favorite defense contractor, now owned by Halliburton and/or KBR]

The Project On Government Oversight gives a little perspective:

Bear in mind that, since 1994, ACORN has reportedly received a total of $53 million in federal funds, or an average of roughly $3.5 million per year. In contrast, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman respectively received over $35 billion and $18 billion in federal contracts last year. (Their totals since 2000 are $266 billion for Lockheed and $125 billion for Northrop.)

Congress should clamp down on contractor fraud and waste, but it needs to keep a sense of proportion. If ACORN broke the law it, should be punished; however, Congress also needs to crack down just as rigorously on the contractors who take an even larger share of taxpayers’ money and have committed far more, or far more egregious, acts of misconduc

[Click to continue reading The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) Blog]

late update: one of the ACORN employees caught on tape, Juan Carlos Vera, actually reported the incident to the police. The police said they would need more information.

Police say he contacted law enforcement two days later. The detective consulted another police official who served on a federal human smuggling task force, who said he needed more details.

The ACORN employee responded several days later and explained that the information he received was not true and he had been duped.

[Click to continue reading Police: ACORN worker in video reported couple - Yahoo! News]

Still was fired, and made the butt of a thousand jokes on Fox News…

Ramsin Canon of GapersBlock on why Olympics 2016, if Chicago is unlucky enough to win it, will be a Mongolian clusterfuck¹ of the worst kind.

We’re going to get the watered down [Olympic Oversight] ordinance², because our Aldermen are afraid of their own shadows. We’re going to get the Olympics. Mayor Daley will get re-elected. There will be massive cost-overruns; historic displacement of working class black families from the South and West side*; abuse of the homeless and indigent**; brutal police crackdowns; privatized security armies on the streets of Chicago; an unceasing stream of conflict-of-interest and contracting scandals; there will be gigantic budget shortfalls that will force more layoffs, more shutting down of social services like the mental health centers, more labor disputes.

We know why the Mayor and his people are pursuing this: it’s a distraction from the problems in the city, it wipes clean what is now approaching a decade of scandals and bad news for the Mayor, and pumps enormous sums of money into the pinstripe and identity politics patronage that has protected the status quo for a generation. Or, have we become so credulous, and ungenerous, that we believe that the Mayor honestly believes the Olympics are the only way to invest in our neighborhoods, and that he sincerely understands “being a world class city” as “getting on television”?

[Click to continue reading Gapers Block : Mechanics : Chicago Politics - No Cap on Public Money + No Oversight = Unmitigated Disaster]

I read somewhere today that one of the other four finalists, Tokyo, only has 56 percent of its population supporting their bid, while Chicago’s populace allegedly is 67 percent gung-ho. Ha, if only 33 percent of us oppose 2016, we sure are vocal. In fact, in my own informal surveys, I have yet to meet a single person who thinks the Olympics won’t be a disaster for Chicago. My sample size is under 100, but 73-0³ is pretty compelling evidence, if not exactly statistically valid.

Click here for some other posts discussing the 2016 games

1. phrase allegedly coined by Ed Sanders of The Fugs [↩]
2. an oversight ordinance introduced by Ald. Manny Flores, and a “substitute” ordinance backed by Mayor Daley. Alderman Flores’ staff sent out a side-by-side comparison a few hours later. Guess what? The Mayor’s version sucks [↩]
3. estimated [↩]