The future is us: Conventions down, top salaries up at McPier and why not? Gummint employment pays better. Mr. McGuire recommended plastics for the Graduate, but he wouldn’t today. He’d say one word, “Gummint,” adding, “There’s a great future in gummint. Think about it.”
Good fellas: Mayordaley II objects, citing his own (9%) pay cut and urging us to ask his wife about that. But McPier (McCormick Place) is no dumping ground, no matter what people say:
The 54-member club of employees with six-figure salaries includes the mayor’s former special events director, the son of Daley’s former political enforcer, and the brother of a former chief-of-staff to Daley and indicted former Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
Although eight of the highest-paid executives made state and city lists of clout hiring, Daley denied that McPier has become a political dumping ground.
This is plucky of him.
Average excellence: “Police may scrap entrance exam” to “bolster minority hiring,” etc. This would be gummint at work for us. Virtually no other big city does this. But gummint has its dues to pay to voter blocs.
This would also “save millions on test preparation and avert costly legal battles that have dogged the exam process for decades, City Hall sources said Tuesday.”
This is also gummint at work. It’s like Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average. There are no dumbells here.
Sympathetic response: Bears fire six offensive coaches? By all means do so if they offend you.
Grabber headline: “Why you should care about assessor’s race” is not about whether he’s white, black, or other, though the reader could be forgiven if he thought so.
Hoosier writer?: “Can’t treat jobs as ‘lagging indicator’” is Jesse Jackson’s Sun-Times column today. It calls for a spending $500 billion on a “significant jobs bill . . . immediately,” which is a wonderful idea if you’re an extreme socialist and have no concept of the nature of money and government and job creation.
He’s good for something on this order once a week, regular as clockwork. My question is, who writes these columns? (Who reads them is another, I grant you, but probably more than read me, so I let it go.) Rev. Jay-Jay makes up darn good dumbell pomes (they ran in Arch Ward’s Trib column “In the Wake of the News” many, many sports pages ago). But stuff that doesn’t rhyme that reads smoothly?
A modest proposal to beat Swift*: “No more free ride home for CTA staffers” says they lose their free autos. I say let them ride the green, blue, red, brown, and pink lines and connecting buses. Make it a condition of employment.
[* Jonathan, not Skokie]
Blithe Spirit 