Month: July 2008

Bridge to Somewhere, Sometime

Seth Anderson0 comment

Bridges are falling down, or nearly, and nothing is being done about it.

Division Street Bridge
[Division Street Bridge]

A troubling report indicates the state has found little progress on “urgent” repairs for some of the most heavily-traveled bridges in the Chicago area.

As CBS 2’s Joanie Lum reports, Illinois is in better shape than most states. But the Associated Press found that of the 20 busiest bridges in the state, only six have undergone necessary repairs, and funds are short.

The findings come as the one-year anniversary of the tragic Interstate 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis approaches. Thirteen people died when the bridge caved in and sent cars plunging into the Mississippi River.

In Illinois, Gov. Rod Blagojevich and state engineers have said the Minneapolis bridge collapse should have been a wakeup call, but few bridges have actually been repaired.

Overall, the vast majority of Illinois’ 26,000 bridges have been deemed safe. But a review of records last year by The Associated Press found more than 1,500 Illinois bridges had worse structural ratings than the Minnesota bridge collapse.

[From cbs2chicago.com – Report: Little Progress On ‘Urgent’ Bridge Repairs ]

Federal dollars are being wasted in the sands of Iraq, state dollars being wasted on trifles, city dollars being squandered on baubles: meanwhile the nation’s infrastructure continues to decay. How much longer can it be ignored before a tragedy occurs?

One structural engineer argued Wednesday that while insufficient funds is part of the problem, it also provides an “easy excuse” for inaction.



“The Minnesota collapse doesn’t appear to have been the wake-up call it should have been,” said John Frauenhoffer, head of a Champaign engineering firm and past president of the Illinois Society of Professional Engineers. “If anything ever happened at one of those bridges, it’d be impossible to explain to the public why those repairs hadn’t been made.”

Enchanted Sky Machine
[Enchanted Sky Machine, Evanston]

Of course, if all the bridges suddenly got repaired, I’d lose a favorite photo subject, but I’d rather deal with finding some other metaphor of decay than have another bridge collapse.

Lost Causeways
[Lost Causeways, Ogden Avenue]

Jam buys Uptown for $3.2M

Seth Anderson0 comment

Finally. I truly hope Jerry Mickelson does restore the building, I’ve always had a certain fondness for it.

Uptown Theatre
[Click image for full view]

Without any drama, a venture led by concert promoter Jam Productions Ltd. bought the historic Uptown Theatre on Tuesday for $3.2 million in a court-ordered foreclosure sale.

Jam principal Jerry Mickelson was the high bidder for the long-vacant theater at 4816 N. Broadway. The sale price was essentially a “credit bid” that covers repayment of about $1.8 million owed on a first mortgage and $1.4 million owed on a second mortgage that’s held by Mr. Mickelson’s group.

The only other bid came from the holder of the first mortgage.

Mr. Mickelson, who has said he plans to restore the Uptown, declined comment on the sale.

[From Chicago Business News, Analysis & Articles | Jam buys Uptown for $3.2M | Crain’s ]

I’m not even sure if I’ve ever been inside, I just like vintage theater buildings.

Jam competitors Live Nation Inc. and Madison Square Garden Entertainment both looked into buying the 1925 building, which was originally constructed as a movie palace. Jam in 2006 bought the Riviera Theatre down the street and also owns the Park West in Lincoln Park and the Vic Theatre in Lakeview, all music venues.

Kaufman’s alter ego Tony Clifton is back

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The Return of Tony Clifton and his Orchestra

Tony Clifton may well be the rudest, crudest, most musically talentless lounge lizard ever to stalk a stage. But for those of a certain age and/or sensibility, he is an entertainer nonpareil.

As part of a national tour, his performing prowess will be showcased starting Thursday at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division. Accompanied by the Katrina Kiss My Ass Orchestra, the bellicose balladeer will croon from a vast repertoire of Sinatra, Lynyrd Skynyrd and even Led Zeppelin to raise funds for Gulf Coast artists who were hit by the hurricane.

“This is an amazing, amazing showman,” says Clifton’s longtime pal Dennis Hof, who owns the Moonlite BunnyRanch brothel in Carson City, Nev., where Clifton is said to be a frequent guest and winter boarder. “And he’s the last of his kind.”

Hof met Clifton a few decades back, when the late hooker-loving comedian Andy Kaufman would swing by the cathouse (which then bore a different name) with his Chicago-born friend Bob Zmuda, who now runs the charity Comic Relief.

In those “crazy” times, Hof says, Andy wasn’t always himself.

“I remember one time, Andy partied with 18 girls in two days,” he remembers. “And sometimes it was Tony.”

[Click to read more of Kaufman’s alter ego Tony Clifton is all trick and no treat :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Entertainment]

Chopin Theater

Small Business Status For Blackwater

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“Huh? How could that have happened? Oh well” seems to be the only response by the Small Business Administration officials. Just taxpayer money, that’s all.

Private military contractor Blackwater and its affiliates may have wrongly received more than $100 million in contracts that were supposed to be set aside for small businesses, according to an inspector general’s report released today.

At issue was a November 2006 determination by the Small Business Administration that a Blackwater affiliate, Presidential Airways, was a small business with less than 1,500 employees.

Blackwater contended, and the agency agreed, that its more than 1,000 workers providing security for the State Department overseas were not employees, but independent contractors. That made the company appear smaller on paper than it actually is.

[From TPMMuckraker | Talking Points Memo | Small Business Admin. Couldn’t Explain Why It Approved Small Business Status For Blackwater]

Corruption, corruption, and more corruption. Kudos to Henry Waxman for discovering (PDF) and publicizing the erroneously awarded contract.


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

Jeremy Scahill is going to have to update his book again.

McCain and his day job

Seth Anderson0 comment

Sometimes known as being a member of The Senate. John McCain is too busy losing a campaign to bother showing up in Washington to vote or otherwise participate in the nations business. And as was pointed out elsewhere on the internet tubes, McCain has collected $51,345 in salary since last voting.

Any way you measure it, McCain’s performance in the Senate during the last year has been abysmal. He has missed 400 votes, far more than any other Senator (including Tim Johnson, who’s recuperating from a brain hemorrhage). In May Ronald Hansen of the Arizona Republic referred to “his chronic absence in the Senate” as if the problem is well known in McCain’s home state. Earlier this month he was the only Senator to skip the vote on the Medicare bill. At the time, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid publicly criticized McCain for his regular absences.

Here are some numbers:

63% – How many votes in the Senate McCain has skipped during the 110th Congress (since January 2007).
96 – The number of Senate votes McCain has missed since his last recorded vote on April 8.
111 – The number of days since McCain last attended a committee hearing (of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on April 9).
25% – How many full SASC hearings McCain has attended during the 110th Congress.
89% – How many full SASC hearings McCain has skipped since April 2007 (32 out of the last 36 hearings).
2007 – The last year in which McCain attended any Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee hearings or subcommittee hearings.
The League of Conservation Voters noted in February that McCain has skipped every one of the 15 Senate votes on environmental issues that it deemed critical during this Congress.

McCain has so far abandoned his duties in the Senate that when he traveled to Colombia and Mexico 4 weeks ago to discuss trade and commerce, he felt obliged to treat it as a campaign rather than a congressional trip. Did I mention that he serves on the Senate Commerce Committee?

It’s normal for Senators campaigning for president to spend a lot of time away from the Senate, of course. Barack Obama has been on the road too and missed 20 votes in the Senate since July 9 (many related to a single bill, S. 2731). Yet throughout the campaign Obama generally has not been absent from the Senate for any more than a couple weeks at a time.

Quite extraordinarily, however, McCain has all but checked out of his Senate job for all of 2008 and indeed for most of 2007 as well. This comes at a time when the country is facing both domestic and foreign crises that two of McCain’s committees have needed to act on.

[From Daily Kos: State of the Nation]

McCain is following in the footsteps of George Bush a little too closely, methinks. Noted also, McCain isn’t polling so well in his own state, Arizona. Wonder why?

Paul Westerberg – 49:00 redux

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Stephen T. Erlewine downloaded Paul Westerberg’s new eccentric album, 49:00, too

Although there are enough full-blown songs to anchor this album, much of the music here wouldn’t make sense on a proper album as it floats in and out of focus, sometimes overlapping with an existing tune, sometimes offering just a tantalizing flash of melody or formative riff. But far from being a frustrating collection of unfinished home demos, 49:00 plays as a complete work, where the raggedness is part of the point — and its coarse four-track surfaces feel defiant in an age of computer recording. There’s undeniably an element of ragged rebellion in the rough-hewn creation of 49:00 but Westerberg has always sounded best when he’s on the fringe — and while this was delivered in a high-tech fashion, the album, with all its unfinished surfaces and frayed fragments, is old-fashioned college rock filled with fragile ballads, rude rock & roll, dead-end detours, and smart-ass jokes, like the classic rock oldies Westerberg flips through at the end of the album. Of all of Westerberg’s solo albums, 49:00 comes closest to recapturing the spirit of the Replacements but it doesn’t do so by doggedly re-creating the ‘Mats’ drunken mess; instead, Westerberg reconnects to the joyous, reckless sense of adventure that fueled his earliest work, and by doing so his scruffiness is once again endearing and hard to resist.

[From The Allmusic Blog » Paul Westerberg – 49:00]

Apparently, Amazon was the only online retailer that let Westerberg set the terms of download (49 minutes without track titles, breaks), and set his own price – 49¢. I got a chance to listen to the album finally, and I like it. You have to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate the oddness of it, especially when two different songs are playing at the same time from different speakers, once you can open your ears to non-standard compositions, the album makes a certain amount of sense.

On the other hand, if you are just playing the album as background, it seems kind of half-assed. Usually only the extended re-release of classic albums contains such material as song sketches, and unfinished bits. A bit disconcerting to listen to song fragments of songs you’ve never heard before. Maybe I should put mine together, and release it on an album? What do you think, would you pay 49¢ to listen to nearly an hour of various bits of music I made?

Liberal Bias Bogus

Seth Anderson0 comment

Of course, we already knew the claim of liberal bias in the media was bogus, but noted nonetheless

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.

You read it right: tougher on the Democrat.

During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.

Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center.

[From In study, evidence of liberal-bias bias – Los Angeles Times]

Odds are, though, that the claim of liberal bias will continue to be parroted by the McCain supporters in corporate media up until November.

Now, if we are discussing the new media (blogs, web-zines and related), there certainly is a bias. There are very few non-partisan blogs of note. Also, one could even plausibly argue that blogs rebalance the slant of corporate media1 – blogs pick out the small stories that conform to the interest and bias of the site and its readers. For instance, glancing through B12’s archives, there are lots of negative McCain stories. What percentage of the day’s news are these stories? A small percentage, I’m sure, but they are nonetheless a large percentage of B12’s topics.

Footnotes:
  1. at least, to the few brave souls who actually read blogs [↩]

McCain and Oil Industry Lobbyists

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McCain and his oil buddy money gushers join the corrupt party

Campaign contributions from oil industry executives to Sen. John McCain rose dramatically in the last half of June, after the senator from Arizona made a high-profile split with environmentalists and reversed his opposition to the federal ban on offshore drilling.

Oil and gas industry executives and employees donated $1.1 million to McCain last month — three-quarters of which came after his June 16 speech calling for an end to the ban — compared with $116,000 in March, $283,000 in April and $208,000 in May.

[From Industry Gushed Money After Reversal on Drilling – washingtonpost.com]

McCain is willing to flip-flop on any position, just sprinkle a little cash money on his campaign…

Ted Stevens Is Indicted for Corruption

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I’m sure the internet tubes will be buzzing tonight

Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the longest-serving Republican senator in United States history and a figure of great influence in Washington as well as in his home state, has been indicted on federal charges of failing to report gifts and income.

Mr. Stevens, 84, was indicted on seven felony counts related to renovations on his home in Alaska. The charges arise from an investigation that has been under way for more than a year, in connection with the senator’s relationship with a businessman who oversaw the home-remodeling project

[From Alaska Senator Is Charged With Failing to Disclose Gifts – NYTimes.com]

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE

and httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cZC67wXUTs

and probably dozens of other YouTube compilations

Chevron and McCain

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Saint McCain and his lobbyist pals, topic de jour. This time, trying to help out poor little Chevron from court ordered obligations to pay for its environmental disasters in Ecuador. Chevron, and friends, wants the Bush Administration to “quash” the case.

In 1993, a class action lawsuit on behalf of an estimated 30,000 Amazon residents was filed against oil giant Chevron, who at the time had recently purchased Texaco. The lawsuit alleged that Chevron was responsible for Texaco intentionally dumping “more than 19 billion gallons of toxic wastewaters” and “16.8 million gallons of crude oil” into Ecuador’s environment.

[snip]

Chevron’s lobbying offensive is being led by former senators Trent Lott and John Breaux, along with Wayne Berman, a top fundraiser for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ):

Chevron is pushing the Bush administration to take the extraordinary step of yanking special trade preferences for Ecuador if the country’s leftist government doesn’t quash the case. A spokesman for U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab confirmed that her office is considering the request. Attorney Steven Donziger, who is coordinating the D.C. opposition to Chevron, says the firm is “trying to get the country to cry uncle.” He adds: “It’s the crudest form of power politics.”

Chevron’s powerhouse team includes former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, former Democratic senator John Breaux and Wayne Berman, a top fund-raiser for John McCain—all with access to Washington’s top decision makers.

So far, Chevron’s power push has resulted in “a senior Chevron exec” meeting with Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte “on the matter.” “One Chevron lobbyist” told Newsweek that the company’s argument to the Bush administration is: “We can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this—companies that have made big investments around the world.”

[From Think Progress » Top McCain Fundraiser Lobbying Bush Admin To Help ‘Quash’ Toxic-Dumping Case For Chevron ]

Democracy and Blue Dogs

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Glenn Greenwald brings out the sarcasm whip, and flails Ed Kilgore a bit about the face and hands

Here’s what I learned today about democracy and ideology as a result of my debate with Ed Kilgore and having read the comments to the piece I wrote about targeting Blue Dogs

  • If you believe in the Fourth Amendment, an end to the Iraq War, the rule of law for government and corporate criminals, a ban on torture, Congressional approval before the President can attack Iran, and the preservation of habeas corpus rights, then you’re a fringe, dogmatic Far Leftist ideologue, the kind who ruined the Democratic Party in 1968 and wants to d so again.

  • Even though the country is overwhelmingly against the Iraq War and intensely dislikes George Bush, it’s necessary for Congressional Democrats to support the Iraq War and accommodate George Bush’s demands so that they can remain popular and be re-elected.

  • If you oppose politicians who support laws that you think are destructive and wrong, then you’re an intolerant purist who hates dissent and doesn’t believe in democracy.

  • If you try to defeat in elections those politicians who support the things you don’t believe in, then you’re similar to — basically the same as — Nazis and Stalinists, because targeting politicians for electoral defeat who espouse views that you think are wrong is comparable to murdering political dissidents and requiring purity of thought.

  • …

  • Being a Good Democrat means embracing, welcoming and supporting members of Congress who support unnecessary wars, the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment, the abolition of habeas corpus, the use of torture, and protections for lawbreakers — as long as they place a “D” after their name when voting for those things.

  • Blind, uncritical allegiance to one’s Party — and to all of its officials — is the defining attribute of a tolerant, enlightened, and savvy progressive, and is the very heart of a healthy democracy. Those who diverge from absolute Party loyalty are Stalinists.

  • Congressional incumbents in the U.S. are re-elected at rates that even Brezhnev-era Politburo officials would envy

[From Things I learned today about democracy – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com]

There’s much more in this vein, worth a glance. The sad part is that these talking points are often voiced on television by various so-called liberal commentators, even though when examined closely, the points are ridiculous. My belief is that politicians serve their constituents, so should reflect their beliefs. If they don’t, the politician should be voted out of office.

Lobbyist Love McCain to the Tune of $181,000, so far

Seth Anderson2 Comments

More to come of course. Much, much more to come.

Loneliness is an ATM

Registered lobbyists have donated large amounts of money to Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign, even as he denounces their profession.

[From Lobbyist Reports Show $181,000 for McCain – NYTimes.com]

Saint McCain loves the lobbyists right back, of course.

So far, Mr. McCain, who has locked up the Republican presidential nomination, has received more than $181,600 from lobbyists and trade groups, while Mr. Obama has received just over $6,000. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who ended her bid for the presidency in June, got more than $87,000.

The gifts are disclosed in “lobbying contribution reports” filed with Congress under the ethics law, which was adopted last year in response to scandals involving the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Under the law, lobbyists must itemize their contributions to political candidates and committees, presidential libraries and events honoring members of Congress. Lobbyists face criminal penalties for failure to comply with the disclosure requirements.

Employees at Republican lobbying firms like Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock have made many contributions to Mr. McCain and other Republican lawmakers, including the Senate and House minority leaders and the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Some lobbyists chafe at being asked for money by the McCain campaign while he disparages lobbyists as agents of “big-moneyed special interests.” But they know that such criticism is a staple of politics.

Implication being, all the fulminations are just for show, and Saint McCain really loves lobbyists underneath it all. A big fat hypocrite, to be blunt.

links for 2008-07-29

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