February 2009 Archives

The fight for the open 5th Congressional seat is getting ugly.

And Cook County Commissioner Mike Quigley deserves a knock for moving it in that direction.

With Election Day looming Tuesday, mailboxes in the North Side and suburban district have been littered with flyers, including a cheap and misleading one by Quigley. The Chicago Sun-Times editorial board endorsed Quigley and we stand by that endorsement. But that means we're holding him to a higher standard, including calling him out when he strays.

Several of his ads blame his opponents Sara Feigenholtz and John Fritchey, both state representatives, for giving Chicago the highest sales tax in the nation.

That's not accurate.

Last year, both Fritchey and Feigenholtz voted for a bill to bail out the CTA, which included a .25 percent sales tax increase. The vote was needed to avert a CTA meltdown and an immediate fare hike. A few months later, the Cook County Board also voted to raise the sales tax, this time by 1 percent. That's the vote that gave Chicago the dubious honor of having the nation's highest sales tax.

And, more importantly, Fritchey and Feigenholtz were right in voting for that small tax increase to keep our buses and trains running.

Quigley argues that the CTA is mismanaged and bloated and should have been reformed before it got any more money. He says that's what he demanded at the Cook County Board. Sure, the CTA could be better managed. But it's no Cook County Board.

Plus, there was wide support for the CTA bailout. There was almost no support for a sales tax hike at the county board.

Quigley has an excellent reputation as a detail-oriented reformer. Let's keep it that way.

It didn't get a great deal of attention, but on Monday the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of Mayor Daley's patronage chief, Robert Sorich, and two other men charged in a scheme to award city jobs or overtime to political workers.

This is good news for federal prosecutors here and good news for the citizens of Chicago.

It means the legal tactics that the prosecutor used to put the men in prison passes muster.

And the defense that what the men did wasn't really crime?

Well, it didn't work on the highest court in the land.

Judge Antonin Scalia offered a strong dissent, saying the court should have taken up the issue. The legal tactics in the Sorich case could be used, in theory, against "a salaried employee's phoning in sick to go to a ball game."

Such a comparison denigrates what really happened in the Sorich case.

Sorich and his colleagues oversaw a system that rigged city of Chicago hiring tests and interviews, a process that routinely gave city jobs to political workers who benefitted the mayor and his allies.

So hundreds of Average Joes waited in line to take a test or be interviewed, and the fix was in before they even walked in the door.

Hard-working city employees didn't get the promotions they deserved. Political hacks took them instead.

We feel some sympathy to the argument that Sorich and his colleagues weren't the big fish in the pond. They weren't the queen bees, only the worker bees.

That's true, to some extent, but it doesn't excuse what they did.

The U.S. Supreme Court's action on Monday leaves open the possibility that a day of reckoning for the higher-ups is still possible.

As he walked onto the stage, former governor Rod Blagojevich got off to a bit of a shaky start. He seemed at first confused, or perhaps star struck, and David Letterman had to motion for him to sit down.

You'd think after so many television appearances in recent days, our former governor would have the whole thing down pat by now.

The governor's next error: the whole comparison between the impeachment trial and an unfair attack on Letterman's Top 10 list.

Huh?

Next, Letterman sums up why the former governor couldn't call certain witnesses at his impeachment trial and clears up Blagojevich's usual muddled and misleading explanation of it. Actually, Letterman does a better job here and later on in the interview than most so-called news professionals.

Before putting Blagojevich on the spot to explain one of his conversations that the feds secretly recorded, Letterman offers a classic line, "Go ahead and set up the clip."

It sure is political theater.

After the recorded conversation is played, Letterman follows up and asks the obvious question of why Blagojevich needed the money before the end of the year as Blagojevich stresses on the tape.

The former governor responds with a nonsensical answer about financial reporting periods.

Late in the interview with Letterman, our former governor harkens back to one of his old favorites, according to the transcript.

Rod: "Elvis performed here, didn't he?"

Dave: "That's right."

Rod: "Back in 1956."

Here he is on national television, chatting about how his life is unraveling, and our former governor manages to work in an Elvis reference.

Say what you will about him, the man's spirit cannot be broken.

Just before the David Letterman interview starts, here's another interesting nugget from the transcript of the interview.

The former governor is asked how the investigation of him started.

He explains that the feds started looking into a friend of his. He's referring to Tony Rezko but doesn't mention his name.

Then Blagojevich adds this shot.

"This friend is the friend who is very close to Barack Obama as well."

Our former governor has been cracking wise on the David Letterman show, comparing his profane language, caught on tape secretly by the feds, to Christian Bale's obscene tirade that's getting a lot of air time Tuesday.

Bale is best known for playing Batman, but he lost it during the filming of "Terminator 4." You can listen to Bale's on-set spewings here, but be warned that it's quite intense and filled with obscenities.

During the interview to air tonight, Letterman plays one of the secretly made recordings of the governor -- one which appears to capture him trying to shake down a contribution in return for favorable legislation, one of the four previously played for state lawmakers.

"I was afraid you were going to have some of those other tapes where I sounded like Christian Bale..." Blagojevich cracks, and the audience laughs, according to a transcript of the interview

It sounds like a funny line from our former governor. He's on Letterman for about 30 minutes, but why would he want to compare himself to Bale?

Many people, for instance, have questioned our former governor's sanity -- or at least stability.

And on the tape, Bale sounds none too stable himself.

The former governor was recorded trying to get people fired who had disrupted his schemes.

And Bale is recorded threatening to get an employee on the film set fired who had disrupted his concentration.

The governor has been criminally charged.

And Bale has had his own brush with the law.

Come to think of it, given the similariites, maybe the comparison was even better than our former governor first realized.

Might there be a role for Bale in "Blago: The Movie"?

Well, he's certainly got the cussing down.