Division Street

One of the most infuriating parts of Dane Placko’s “Clout Kids” series was the laughing Richard Lanyon blaming kids unaware of the summer jobs program at the Water Reclamation District - of which he is superintendent - for not “taking the opportunity” to make the right connections. You know, like being born the son or daughter of an alderman.

Here’s the text of the statement Lanyon issued in advance of the series’ airing.

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July 10,2008

Statement by Richard Lanyon, General Superintendent MWRD

As the General Superintendent of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Chicago I am responsible for the hiring of our 2,000 employees, including our temporary relief summer workers. Every person at the District must complete a well established process of application for employment. Each person is subject to a vigorous background check and physical exam.

The District’s hiring practices are well within every established law, rule and regulation.

Our summer relief program, a long established one, is open to any one who is aware of it. We consider our summer relief worker program a community service for students wanting to consider future employment in fields relevant to District work; some examples are engineering, environmental research, and public policy and business administration.

Due to the distinctly short nature of the employment, it is not in the best interest of the taxpayer for our personnel departmentto be overwhelmed with applicants. Candidates for temporary summer work are from organizations such as Mercy Home for Boys and Girls, civic education, or community organizations.

Over the course of a 119 rotating period calendar year,we generally employ about 230people. They work in jobs suitable for their skills. They are subject to supervisory scrutiny as any employee. Of those 230 people, a very small percentage may be related to current employees or commissioners. In any case, no hirings lead to inferior employees.

In closing I would remind everyone that the main purpose of the District is to protect the environment, and the public’s health. We do this with an elected legislative body of nine Board of Commissioners who are the public face of the District and we do so with the highest integrity.

The Sun-Times cast a goofy-looking governor as John Wayne to illustrate its story about Rod Blagojevich’s offer to send the state police - and possibly the National Guard - to Chicago to help out the apparently hapless Mayor Daley. As noted the headline to this post, I think the Sun-Times missed a comedic opportunity.

Meanwhile, City Hall is pissed.

“We’re a little puzzled about how it would work,” mayoral spokesmonster Jackie Heard said.

Who isn’t? What a logistical nightmare.

“Daley administration officials also noted with some cynicism that Blagojevich had yet to respond to efforts by City Hall earlier this year to seek youth job and recreational programs to help prevent an onslaught of summer violence.”

It’s also classic Blagojevich grandstanding. “It is, at the very least, a little disconcerting that we’re only hearing about this as the media does,” Heard said.

Fortunately, classic Blagojevich grandstanding includes the fact that he never follows through with his grand pronouncements, so let’s declare this dead-on-arrival and move on.

When I first heard about the New Yorker cover flap, I figured I’d take a look at it and find that not a whole lot of people know from satire and dismiss it or chastise the complainers. But I have to tell you, I’ve looked at that cover over and over again, studied it, stared at it from every which way, and I don’t see the satire. Obama and his supporters have a right to be angry.

It’s a great drawing, that much is true. Especially the caricature of Michelle. If only!

But on the cover, without cover language, or without the context of being attached to an article inside, the desired effect is lost. If, as Kelly McBride, head of the ethics faculty at the Poynter Institute has said, the cartoon’s title, “The Politics of Fear,” appeared on the cover as well, there would have been no problem. Or if the drawing was inside the magazine surrounded by an article giving it context. But alone on the cover without context - and with such a dead-on depiction of the way the Obamas are perceived and/or smeared by right-wing nutjobs - is too dry and removed to qualify as successful satire. The New Yorker is wrong, and I can’t remember such an egregious misstep by the magazine.

I’d still love a poster of it, though.

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Found this nugget in a Rich Miller column about the political machinations behind the lagging capital bill and gubernatorial politics:

“Daley has turned thumbs down on the capital package because: 1) The price the city would have to pay for a casino license was way higher than what Daley agreed to; and 2) The governor inserted language giving himself control of all Chicago school construction projects against Daley’s wishes.”

A) So he can name all the schools after himself? Or . . .
B) So he can throw some contracts to Chris Kelly while he awaits trial?

The revolt - and revulsion - of Barack Obama’s recent vote on FISA legislation among his supporters has been well-documented by now, and certainly - along with a series of other sudden policy shifts - calls into question whether his campaign thus far has simply been an exercise in cynical expediency dressed up in the rhetoric of hope and change.

The image on this post comes from this video about the FISA bill. Note that one defense Obama uses is that he’ll review the program “when he’s elected.” That’s astonishingly arrogant; besides the questionable notion that he’ll fix whatever is broken once he gets to the White House even if contrary to his vote now, he’s taking a helluva chance with our civil liberties because there is the off-chance that John McCain wins this election. Then what will Obama do? Lead an effort in the U.S. Senate to reverse all those “Yes” votes - including his own?

That’s how many Illinoisans were right when they cast their vote for governor in 2006.

The Greens will do themselves no favors, though, if they nominate Cynthia McKinney for president, as expected.

Mike Gravel, by the way, is with Jesse.

That’s how much more money the governor is putting in his pocket by refusing to excise the pay raises included in the budget bill the legislature sent to him.

Of course, that money will eventually end up in a defense lawyer’s pocket, but that just makes it worse.

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“[T]he governor faced blowback for his decision to leave a 3.8 percent cost of living adjustment intact while cutting hundreds of other programs, including those relied upon by the developmentally disabled, autistic children, the elderly and battered women,” Dave McKinney writes in a Sun-Times story apparently not available online.

The Blagovevich administration says it had no choice but to leave the pay raises alone because of state statute, but McKinney points out that in 2003 Blagojevich said “In these difficult times, when state agencies are being consolidated, when the number of state personnel is being reduced - in short, when others are being asked to sacrifice - this is not the time to give pay raises to the governor, lieutenant governor, to the constitutional officers, to the men and women of the General Assembly, or to the Supreme Court or Circuit Court judges.”

The judges eventually got their raises thanks to an Illinois Supreme Court ruling, but Blagojevich’s veto for everyone else stood.

*

By the way, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal - the subject of this Division Street post - changed his mind again and vetoed raises for the legislator there.

The mayor is defending his forlorn Plan for Transformation, WBEZ reports.

“I said we’re going to rebuild their souls. Not give them an apartment, not give them a home, but you rebuild their souls.”

Oh, so it’s a faith-based initiative.

“Besieged with negative press over a record-breaking $426 million sales tax increase, Cook County Board President Todd Stroger’s administration is forbidding department heads from speaking with the media unless his spokesman is present - an apparent effort to improve the news coverage of his administration,” Rob Olmstead reports in the Daily Herald.

So far it’s not working.

The Tribune summarizes its examination on Sunday of the CHA’s vaunted Plan for Transformation thusly: “Thousands of families displaced. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent. Years behind schedule. What went wrong with Chicago’s grand experiment.”

To which I can only say: Duh.

The Tribune used nearly 4,300 words to detail what many of us have been arguing for years - that the critics were right from the beginning, that the Plan for Transformation is a failure, and that it was always about slum clearance, PR, and developers, not about housing policy or the city’s neediest residents.

That’s not to say the Trib’s 4,300 words are wasted; in fact, it’s a fine story. It’s just that the paper is a little late proclaiming one of the biggest feathers in the mayor’s cap a grand experiment gone wrong. Let’s take a closer look.

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