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Doing a ctrl-F for "emanuel" or "daley" in this comment section produced zero results, which is unfortunately rather telling. Chicago has been run by the same

Doing a ctrl-F for "emanuel" or "daley" in this comment section produced zero results, which is unfortunately rather telling. Chicago has been run by the same political party since 1931. If the police are this bad and you keep re-electing the people running the city anyway, you are part of the problem. Throw the bastards out, don't just grump on message boards and then keep obediently pulling the same lever in the voting booth where it counts.

pessimizer 11y ago
There are no good choices. The challengers are generally people who have heard that Chicago/Illinois are great places to feed. In Chicago, there's The Machine: a system for raising large numbers of votes for Duh Mare's candidates from people who don't care who wins, they just want their Alderman to respond to their phone calls. Outsiders like Blagojevich and Rauner at the state level are just as awful. The amount of Republican pond scum that Illinois has had to deal with easily compares to the amount of Democratic pond scum that it has had to deal with, it's just a matter of upstate/downstate/collar counties preference which scumbag you vote for. They're all ultimately friends anyway; I think Emanuel once worked for Rauner.
fencepost 11y ago
Daley in particular was quite a piece of work - particularly in closing out his time in office with the parking meter giveaway. I can't help but wonder what kind of kickback evidence to he and his family we'd find if anyone were actually to do a real investigation of it. The real kicker is that if the city removes parking spaces temporarily or permanently, it must compensate the private vendor for the lost revenue. That makes sense, but when you throw in that it's a 75-year deal it starts to get a little murkier - want a bike lane? Better budget for the next 70 years of paying the vendor for the parking revenue for any removed spaces (and how is that calculated? Does it get recalculated every year? Is it based on nearby comparable areas or on fixed utilization percentages that don't account for changes in driving patterns and neighborhoods over time?) I strongly suspect that given changes in how people drive, etc. that by the end of the 75-year agreement Chicago will have ended up paying more in penalties to the vendor than they got in the first place, even indexed for inflation.

pessimizer 11y ago

There are no good choices. The challengers are generally people who have heard that Chicago/Illinois are great places to feed. In Chicago, there's The Machine: a system for raising large numbers of votes for Duh Mare's candidates from people who don't care who wins, they just want their Alderman to respond to their phone calls. Outsiders like Blagojevich and Rauner at the state level are just as awful. The amount of Republican pond scum that Illinois has had to deal with easily compares to the amount of Democratic pond scum that it has had to deal with, it's just a matter of upstate/downstate/collar counties preference which scumbag you vote for. They're all ultimately friends anyway; I think Emanuel once worked for Rauner.

fencepost 11y ago

Daley in particular was quite a piece of work - particularly in closing out his time in office with the parking meter giveaway. I can't help but wonder what kind of kickback evidence to he and his family we'd find if anyone were actually to do a real investigation of it. The real kicker is that if the city removes parking spaces temporarily or permanently, it must compensate the private vendor for the lost revenue. That makes sense, but when you throw in that it's a 75-year deal it starts to get a little murkier - want a bike lane? Better budget for the next 70 years of paying the vendor for the parking revenue for any removed spaces (and how is that calculated? Does it get recalculated every year? Is it based on nearby comparable areas or on fixed utilization percentages that don't account for changes in driving patterns and neighborhoods over time?) I strongly suspect that given changes in how people drive, etc. that by the end of the 75-year agreement Chicago will have ended up paying more in penalties to the vendor than they got in the first place, even indexed for inflation.