Division Street was an experiment – along with California Faultline in L.A. – by the good folks at NBC Universal. With the launch of new local sites such as NBCChicago.com, the NBC folks have decided to shut down Division Street and Faultline. In turn, I will be increasing my contributions to NBCChicago.com, including material that you might have otherwise found here, and of course you can still read me at The Beachwood Reporter. Thanks for reading me here, and I’ll see you there.

“The mayor said there are ‘very few (meters) in the neighborhoods. It’s about 80 percent downtown – 80, 85 percent downtown in 2 or 3 wards. It’s not in the communities’.”

Whoa!

“In fact, of the city’s 34,264 metered spots, about 8,100 are in the 42nd and 2nd Wards that cover downtown. That’s only about one-fourth of them, not the four-fifths Daley claimed.”

Hey, no one said Daleyland was a reality-based community.

“Just 23% say Ryan, the Republican convicted on federal corruption charges in 2006, should be pardoned. Eleven percent (11%) are undecided.”

Perhaps the poll’s most interesting finding is this:

“Members of Ryan’s own political party are more unforgiving than his former political opponents. Sixty-seven percent (67%) of Republicans oppose a pardon versus 59% of Democrats. Twenty-six percent (26%) of both parties favor pardoning Ryan. Among those unaffiliated with either major political party, just 15% support a pardon, while 77% oppose one.”

I can only guess that a segment of Democrats think Ryan’s death penalty moratorium should play into this.

- Via Progress Illinois

* Jesse Jackson, Jr. (Democrat)
* Judy Biggert (Republican)
* Debbie Halvorson (incoming Democrat)

Democrats Bobby Rush and Dan Lipinski didn’t return phone calls to the SouthtownStar, the paper reports.

My favorite part is this:

“Confidants of Mr. Emanuel’s said he decided to try his hand at business because he wanted financial security for his family, before eventually returning to public service.”

Oh, the sacrifices he’s made for us!

“He had a number in his head to make enough for the family,” one of Rahm’s brothers, Ezekiel, told the Times.

And he fell just short!

“As if it hadn’t yet, we can now firmly say Obama merchandise has jumped the shark. Or something like that . . . “

“The Chicago Sun-Times reported in August that Chicago Police officers had written 84,000 fewer tickets than last year and were on pace to end the year with a 9 percent dropoff from the 1.63 million police-issued tickets in 2007,” the paper reports.

“At a City Hall news conference Monday, Reyna-Hickey at first attributed the ticket plunge to drivers who ‘take their parking more seriously’ and are less inclined to park illegally.”

If only – though we should all drive and park to the letter of the law just to spite the mayor, who is depending on our violations to balance his budget.

“But, questioned further, she said, ‘Police [ticketing] has decreased . . . Clearly the police have a lot of other important things to tend to.”

The moral of the story: Always question further. And take your parking seriously.

Of course, nothing just happens out of the blue in Chicago politics, so I’m sure there’s a backstory we’re not privy to yet. But let us now take a moment to remember Bloom’s crime, and ponder whether he, of all felons in Illinois, deserves forgiveness.

Bloom, you may recall, was stung in Operation Silver Shovel, having accepted $14,000 in bribes from FBI mole John Christopher. A lousy $14,000!

He pled guilty to a felony tax charge and served six months in the famed federal retreat in Oxford, Wisconsin, where he was probably laughed at by other Chicago pols for his meager haul. Bloom was released in 1999.

He shared a prison wing with three former aldermen, Virgil Jones, John Madrzyk and Jesse Evans; a former Water Reclamation Commissioner, Tom Fuller; and a former state representative, Bruce Farley. “We didn’t have a name for our wing, but we’d call `quorum’ every time we walked down the hall,” Bloom joked to Sneed after his release.

Hilarious, don’t you think?

If Bloom had been any other pol, it would have been easier to take. But Bloom’s real crime was to deepen the cynicism of our local political culture because he wasn’t just any other pol – he was Mr. Clean. From Hyde Park. An independent. A reformer.

“For 16 years, Lawrence S. Bloom built a reputation as a star member of one of this city’s smallest political clubs: the Squeaky Cleans,” Don Terry wrote in the New York Times upon the occasion of Bloom’s indictment.

“Bright and hard-working, he was one Chicago alderman the voters could trust not to rob them blind while they were in church christening their babies or at the cemetery burying their grandparents.”

Bloom was defiant at first.

“‘Do not rush to judgment,” Mr. Bloom urged the city, at a news conference shortly after the charges against him, including mail fraud, extortion and tax violations, were made public.

”’I was mugged,’ he said, ‘not by any petty thief or street tough, but by agents of my own Government, our Government’.”

Even after he was released from prison, in fact, he was defiant.

“The harm being done to (prisoners’) families because of their absence far outweighs any benefit to society,” he said then.

Nothing about the harm done to taxpayers and citizens. But then, there never is.

But Bloom wasn’t finished yet.

“Thanks to the careful crafting of the plea agreement, Bloom escaped a harsher prison sentence and a stiffer financial penalty,” the Sun-Times wrote at the time. “He pleaded guilty to filing a false tax return in 1995. Bloom admitted listing $9,000 as rental income when the money actually came from Christopher and other sources. In another document, however, Bloom also admitted taking $14,000 in bribes from Christopher. Nonetheless, Bloom still may be able to collect his city pension. State law bars the pension only if a municipal employee is convicted of a felony in connection with his public service.”

Bloom ended up taking the city to court over his pension. He lost.

Not that he’s doing badly.

Bloom says he didn’t ask Smith to request a pardon. And perhaps that’s true. But Smith must be playing some angle. I’m sure the idea didn’t just come out of the blue.

You know, I wrote the other day over on the Beachwood that I wasn’t going to spend the next four years saying “I told you so,” but that doesn’t mean I’m never gonna say it. So consider it said.

That’s right – Black wants the Sun-Times Media Group to pay the legal fees associated with his clemency bid.

Apparently Jim Thompson didn’t offer him pro bono services like he’s done with George Ryan. Thompson, of course, was on the audit committee of the Sun-Times’s former corporate board when Black was looting the company.