Chicago

Dan Johnson Weinburger makes the case for a ConCon but I remain unconvinced. As he portrays it, it's all upside and no downside. If there are any doubts, Dan argues, it's ultimately "we the citizens" who are in the driver's seat.

I think Dan is wrong. I don't think it's "we the citizens" who'll be in the driver's seat. I think it'll just be that tiny minority of our population who get off on the minutiae of government. Most people have better things to do.

The whole purpose of representative government is that you elect people who then go on and work out the details. You re-visit your decision every two or four years. You even have the right, should you so choose, to keep on sending the same people to represent you year after year free of any term limit.

Advocates of initiative, recall and term limits call their policies extensions of democracy. But in fact what they're doing is exposing the wrong parts of the process to popular approval. It guarantees low turnout or decisions based on whatever special interest has the bigger advertising budget.

Dan calls this the "politics of fear versus the politics of hope". I would call it the politics of bad versus the politics of worse.

The good people over at Wal-Mart Watch had an "unofficial" contest to redesign the Wal-Mart Logo.

Results are in...

The Sun-Times writes:

CTA L cars could become more like cattle cars if the transit agency goes ahead with plans to remove seats on some L cars in the next few months to squeeze in all the riders leaving their cars home and turning to mass transit.

What's next? Flatbed CTA buses?

The guy's got talent. From Marc Ambinder:

Obama, who never managed so much as a newsstand, has turned out to be a fairly remarkable leader of a what's becoming a billion dollar enterprise.

Where are all these wonderful people coming from? Yet again we had a great Saloon Democrats Session with political opinions running all over the map. All I can say is more of the same next week!

It's one thing to say advertising is down but was that the best moment to lay another $13 billion in debt on the thing? You don't throw an anchor to a man barely threading water.

Maybe the corporate model is no longer right for local media. It seems like everyone is just cashing out and leaving behind a bunch of smoking wrecks. Maybe it's back to mom-and-pop.