Obama should be thankful he got this far without significant blame for BP oil spill

President Barack Obama says he plans to pre-empt our television programming Tuesday night so he can speak to the nation about the grave environmental mess created some two months ago when a BP oil rig began spewing the substance into the Gulf of Mexico.

Of course, the conservative pundits are going to try to find ways to trivialize the moment – hence Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., going on the Sunday morning network talk shows and saying it wouldn’t have taken him more than 50 days to want to kick some “A-double-S” on this issue.

YET OBAMA OUGHT to consider himself lucky in one sense, because the public thus far has had the sense to see this as a problem caused, and compounded, by the one-time British Petroleum.

The amount of rhetoric that seeks to blame Obama for the situation in the gulf – oil washing ashore in Louisiana and along the Florida coast, thereby killing the tourist trade that many of those communities rely upon for their economic survival – has mostly come from such hard-core partisan nutcases that real people have enough sense to dismiss it as trash talk.

How much longer will this last?

Probably not much longer. After all, many people were desperate to believe that the company itself could control the situation before it could become an environmental disaster of historic proportions. Obviously, they failed.

SO NOW, WE’RE in a case where on top of all the other problems and situations our federal government must address, it seems they’re also going to have to deal with restoration of the gulf – which likely will suffer for decades before things are restored to what they once were.

That is, if they are ever fully restored.

If anything, I see this particular Obama speech as an attempt by the president to pre-empt criticism from regular people. (The nutcases will always behave like malcontents).

Just last week, the Gallup Organization released a poll saying that 40 percent of people surveyed approved of the way Obama was handling himself with regards to the oil spill, while 46 percent disapproved. Not that this issue dominates the way people think of the president – Gallup also had Obama with a 47 percent approval rating overall, compared to 44 percent who disapprove of his job performance.

IT SEEMS TO be a partisan thing – 18 percent of Republicans approved of Obama’s handling of the oil spill, and 14 percent of his job performance overall. Among his so-called Democratic allies, 62 percent approved of Obama and the oil, while 75 percent approved of his job performance.

Among those who insist on calling themselves political “independents” (a.k.a., too wishy-washy to pick a political party), the figures are 35 percent backing Obama on oil and 43 percent backing him overall.

As the poll itself notes, the biggest dropoff is from Democrats. My guess is that Obama wants to appear to be doing something so as to keep that 13 percent gap of Democrats who like his job performance but think he’s screwing up in the gulf from getting larger – just like the blotches on various weather report radar screens are doing these days when they show us just how big the oil spill has become.

I must admit to being appalled whenever I see those projections of just how large the contaminated area will become – particularly when they show an oil spill headed south down the Florida coast and then swinging around and headed into the Atlantic Ocean and up the U.S. coast, possibly as far as Washington itself.

YET I FIND it hard to believe that there was much more the federal government could do in those early days. Which is why I am reluctant to dump all over the president. He may be screwing up on other issues, including immigration reform, but he hasn’t blown this one.

Yet!

It’s just that I can’t help envision how nasty the Republican and conservative rhetoric would have been had the Environmental Protection Agency immediately rushed to the area to strong-arm the situation away from BP.

We’d have heard the same conservative nitwits who have engaged in what trash talk has taken place complaining that the federal government was meddling with the affairs of business, and possible acting in ways that would exacerbate the problem and screw up the BP public image in ways that would hurt their future profitability.

WE’D HAVE HEARD all the talk about Obama being a socialist who should learn that the “American Way” includes backing off and not presuming that government can “fix” the problem.

Of course, that is all ridiculous. In fact, this situation may very well show us the type of incident where federal government is best positioned to address a problem – one that has spread across so many states (I just read a report about how Utah thinks they will be affected) that it would be ridiculous for us to expect each one to have its own policy for handling cleanup.

Particularly if this spill also winds up spreading south and west toward Mexico and the Caribbean islands. Then it becomes an international issue. Do we really want Mississippi state officials doing our negotiating?

So now, we get to wait until Tuesday when Obama gives us his address that causes a segment of our population to rant and rage that “there’s nothing good” on television, then we will get the punditry analyzing his every word for days thereafter.

WILL THE PRESIDENT give us an address similar to his comments in the days following the “discovery” of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright – which many remember as an eloquent, but honest, assessment of race in our society today?

Or will it be some rhetoric likely to enrage Rush Limbaugh into a more vitriolic rampage on air than Wright ever gave from the pulpit of his South Side church?

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BP gives me gas; or, Why I’d rather watch World Cup fùtbol than Chicago beisbol

26-33, and 27-33.

To me, those won/loss records of the Chicago White Sox and Chicago Cubs respectively say it all.

THIS SEASON THAT some naïve people thought might actually produce some sort of baseball contender from Chicago has turned into a pair of mediocre ballclubs (not even historically bad, just forgettable) representing the image of our home city.

It feels like my childhood all over again back in the 1970s, when both teams had a couple of years where they contended and a couple of out-of-town ballplayers who had noteworthy seasons in Chicago (Dick Allen in 1972, Dave Kingman in 1979). But my childhood memories of Chicago baseball were usually of mediocre-to-pitiful teams that battled for the love of local fans while trying to see who would finish worse than the other.

Cubs fans this year shouldn’t be boasting of their team, considering that as of Friday morning it was only a half game better than the White Sox.

With all that said, how am I supposed to get excited about this weekend’s round of inter-league play?

THE WHITE SOX are at Wrigley Field to play the Cubs. Woo-hoo!

Ozzie Guillen will once again say that the ballpark at Clark and Addison streets is an aging dump (it is, but nobody in Cubdom cares).

Both teams will struggle to avoid embarrassing themselves – especially since two of the three games (Saturday as the Fox network’s “Game of the Week” and Sunday on ESPN) will get some national attention.

This being the first year of the BP Cup being given to the team that either wins a majority of the six games the two teams will play against each other this month, perhaps it is all too appropriate.

CHICAGO BASEBALL GIVES me more gas than BP ever did (I’m one of those cheap people who thought that BP filling stations charge too much for gasoline).

With that sentiment, is it any wonder that I’d rather watch a sport being played at its highest levels, rather than a pair of ballclubs that bring to mind such un-immortals as Larry Biittner or Bill Nahorodny?

I think I got more of a thrill watching South Africa’s national team fight for any resemblance of respect in the international sporting world, possibly achieving what might be the highlight of the tournament for the World Cup’s host team by playing competitively against a Mexico team to achieve a 1-1 draw.

I was pulling for “El Tri,” and I have to admit I’m not sure if I’m saddened or pleased that I happened to walk away from the television set at about the 58th minute – which was the moment when Siphiwe Tshabalala managed to slip in the first goal of World Cup 2010.

BUT I WAS in my seat with that same nervous pull in my gut that I feel when a baseball pitcher is on top of his game when Rafael Marquez tied the match up in the 78th minute.

Considering how many close shots there were for Mexico in the first half and how it could have been a 3-0 match favoring Mexico at half-time, it was gut-twisting to see the way the opening match of the month-long “real football” tournament turned out.

Perhaps those people who thought that South Africa would be motivated by the home crowd and a desire to “do right” by Nelson Mandela (whose 13-year-old great-granddaughter, Zenani, was killed in a car crash after seeing Shakira and Alicia Keyes perform at a concert that was part of the World Cup festivities) were on to something.

Then again, one has to credit South Africa’s team for not being intimidated playing a superior team, and for managing to take advantage of a lone break that actually enabled them to have a lead for about 20 minutes, and to put the fear of God into Mexicano futbal fans that their beloved team might actually lose the World Cup opener.

THIS IS NOT even one of the key matches of the World Cup tourney, yet even this match gave sporting fans more excitement than anything that will happen this weekend at Wrigley Field. (Will some drunken meathead fans manage to get into a brawl in the stands? Will that sentiment spill over and cause some ill-will among the ballplayers? Who babbled more incoherently - Ron Santo or Ken "the Hawk" Harrelson?)

Who really cares?!? While I likely will make it out to a ballgame or two this season just for kicks, my own sporting interest is more likely to be satisfied during the next month in front of the television.

Insofar as the Chicago Blackhawks are concerned, yes, it is nice that a Chicago-based sports team won a championship and managed to erase their own standard for futility -- 49 seasons between championships.

But the idea of going out to downtown to stand around and partake in a staged rally to celebrate the Stanley Cup just wasn’t appealing, although the only thing more pathetic (to me, at least) was those people who – instead of watching the World Cup – had their television sets tuned to WMAQ-TV to watch other people celebrate a sports victory.

GIVE THE WORLD Cup a chance. And if you happen to be among those people who just can’t handle the thought of watching something “foreign,” than tune in on Saturday when Team U.S.A. takes on the England national squad.

At the very least, perhaps the “Yanks” can smack the Brits around as partial payback for the mess that BP (formerly known as British Petroleum) created in the Gulf of Mexico. Even Mexican fans would enjoy seeing that.

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Burge “behavior” boggles the brain

It was condemning testimony heard earlier this week at the Dirksen Building – a former Chicago Police detective-turned-attorney remembering his experiences at the then-Pullman Area police headquarters on the far South Side.

That was where now-retired police Commander Jon Burge reigned supreme, and where he and his officers would use their torture tactics (if you want to believe certain people) to elicit confessions from suspects in their custody.

WE GOT TO hear memories of the cries of pain that Sammy Lacey Jr., said he heard coming from back rooms of the police headquarters on 111th Street, along with instances where he saw suspects when they were brought in for questioning looking relatively clean, then would later see the official booking photos that would show they had been battered about by somebody.

He even recalled seeing suspects with footprints all over their bodies.

If the jury that will decide the fate of Burge winds up believing this testimony, it would go a long way toward condemning him to a criminal conviction and spending much of his retirement years in prison.

Yet I have to admit that Lacey’s testimony, as gripping as it sounds, was not what intrigued me.

WHAT CAUGHT MY attention was the testimony of a woman who took the stand the very same day as Lacey. Darlene Lopez was the sister of a woman who claimed to have once “dated” Burge (I don’t know the details of their relationship, and I suspect I’m better off not knowing).

As such, she got to see Burge in some more private moments – such as the time she, her sister and Burge went on board his boat that was docked at Burnham Harbor (it must be nice to be able to afford to own a boat and keep it docked within walking distance of the Museum Campus and Soldier Field and within site of the downtown skyline).

The woman does not claim that she saw or heard any actual abuse during that moment.

But she recalls how, in an effort to impress the ladies, Burge got boastful about how he could be a tough guy when dealing with people who thought they were the tough guys.

SHE REMEMBERS HEARING stories from Burge about how he and his cop colleagues threw one man in the trunk of a car for awhile to break him down, and also said under oath that Burge told her about once having officers hold a suspect in place while someone else beat him with a bat to get him to talk.

“He thought it was funny,” the woman said while under oath, adding that she thought Burge was, “acting arrogant.”

That is putting it mildly.

I accept that some people honestly believe Burge is being picked on by being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s office (on charges that he lied under oath while being questioned in a civil lawsuit related to the conduct of his officers back when he was police commander on the Far South Side).

THEY WANT TO believe that the police were only picking up people who, for whatever reason, were worthy of being considered criminal suspects. Some are even willing to accept the premise that police ought to be allowed to use some force in order to do their jobs.

There is a little bit of truth to that. If there wasn’t, we wouldn’t arm police officers with pistols and clubs to begin with.

But what gets to me is this woman’s sentiment that Burge was “arrogant” about his police behavior, as though he was proud to be the guy to got to smack around the members of the public who, for whatever reason, came to his attention.

People who don’t understand why some segments of our society are distrustful of law enforcement ought to look at Burge as the problem. His actions, if truly as widespread as has been claimed so many times, are what taint the police department.

THEY ARE WHAT make many people look at the cop who is approaching them at a particular moment and wonder to themselves, “Will he go by the book, or by the Burge?” (I learned a long time ago that it is a mistake to write off all police as being the same, but that it is worse to think that all cops are equally noble).

Of course, defense attorneys tried going after the woman, getting her to admit that this moment she described took place about 30 years ago and that it wasn’t a story she told much – until she was approached by FBI agents two years ago.

If prosecutors were relying on this woman to provide first-hand details of incidents of abuse, I’d be inclined to think the defense would be correct in their skepticism.

But her testimony was meant more to bolster the claims of the people who had the first-hand details.

BECAUSE BETWEEN THE image of Burge and his officers walking all over suspects (leaving behind their footprints) and later thinking it was “funny,” I’d have to say it was a not a good week for the Burge defense.

To think, there are people who seriously believe the interesting activity taking place now at the Dirksen Building involves Rod Blagojevich. Milorod is just a clown, compared to the alleged behavior of the officer who until recently was enjoying a Florida retirement.

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“Symbolic” boycotts, what’s the point?

It seems like our politicians these days want to take tough stances against Arizona state government for their decision earlier this year to have local police get involved in federal immigration enforcement. But they don’t seem to want to do anything about it that would show any true muscle.

The City Council on Wednesday became the latest government body to pass a measure that is billed as a stand against Arizona. Some even say it is a boycott.

YET THE MEASURE passed by our aldermen doesn’t impact current contracts, and includes so many loopholes that for all practical purposes it will do nothing to take any Chicago government business away from any company based in Arizona.

This measure may be even more lame than the Cook County Board, which a couple of weeks ago passed a measure restricting the county’s ability to do business with Arizona-based companies, only to later in that same meeting approve a new contract WITH an Arizona-based company.

Everybody wants to pontificate, but nobody wants to do anything that might impact their ability to take in the almight dollar.

“We are raising our voices,” Alderman Danny Solis of the 25th Ward said, while admitting the gesture is purely “symbolic,” which is the same word that was bantered about last month when suburban Calumet City became the first Chicago-area community to pass such a measure.

BUT SOLIS GOT to climb up on his pedestal during the City Council session and denounce Arizona as being “evil” and “monstrous” and even got to mention “Nazi Germany.” It may score political points for pompous rhetoric. But it is not going to do much. Arizona is going to have to lose financially to make their officials realize how stupid their gesture on immigration truly was.

If this is the approach that our government officials are going to take, I almost wish they would just not bother. What is the sake of passing Arizona boycotts that don’t effectively boycott a thing? Their “symbolic” gestures threaten to turn the concept into a joke.

For the record, two of the 50 aldermen voted against the measure. Brian Doherty of the 41st Ward (which has long been the one place in Chicago that is willing to be represented by Republican Party officials) and James Balcer of the 11th Ward were the two.

While I know a certain generation is not the least bit surprised that someone representing the people of the Bridgeport neighborhood would refuse to support even a symbolic gesture against a state that gives in to the share of its population that lets nativism overcome common sense, I have to wonder if this one can backfire.

MODERN-DAY BRIDGEPORT, AFTER all, is a neighborhood with a significant share of Mexican-Americans, and the Chinatown district to the north has long been overflowing to the point where many people who say they live “near” Chinatown are actually living “in” Bridgeport.

Balcer justified his vote, telling reporter-types at City Hall that he does not think the council should be doing anything to take a stand on what is (immigration) a federal issue. He’s right, but wrong too.

Immigration is a federal issue. But what a boycott, or any symbolic gesture, does is says that another local government is wrong for trying to interfere, and that such interference has the potential to make a mess of any federal attempt to enforce immigration laws.

We also got to learn that Mayor Richard M. Daley isn’t too thrilled about boycott talk, and he is correct when he says it is, “difficult to boycott businesses.” It takes a strong will to pull off, particularly since some people will look for any little tidbit of information to try to claim that the boycott itself is a failure.

BUT WHEN HIZZONER Jr. started talking about how an Arizona boycott would complicate life whenever the Arizona Diamondbacks came to Chicago to play the Cubs or (during inter-league play) the White Sox, it came off as sounding like the mayor was more concerned about who would criticize him if he refused to let the family season tickets to U.S. Cellular Field go to waste when the day comes (not this season) that Arizona travels to the South Side to play ball.

Then agani, maybe Daley is on to something by thinking about baseball.

Because no matter how much people rant and rage that the Diamondbacks should be penalized or next year’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game should be moved from Phoenix, the gesture that would really hurt the state would be if all those major league clubs (15) that hold spring training across Arizona were to cut back their spending in that state.

Rhetoric is easy to ignore. Hitting them in the wallet will catch their attention. And that is what “symbolic” resolutions fail to do.

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Who’s the real environmentalist?

Is Republican U.S. Senate nominee Mark Kirk the environmentalist, or the exaggerator?

It depends on whom one wants to listen to. But the Kirk record when it comes to environmental issues became the focus Tuesday of the political battle over who gets to replace Roland Burris in Washington come next year.

KIRK’S RECORD ON environmental issues is respectable, from the perspective of people who think that government officials should have a role in trying to preserve the natural conditions of this planet.

His critics concede he voted for a bill meant to limit greenhouse gases. They also remember the fact that he was one of many area congressmen who opposed the desires of BP to dump more waste into Lake Michigan from its Whiting, Ind., refinery (located right at the point where Chicago becomes Indiana).

He was one of the few Republican officials to back such ideas. It is a significant part of the reason why he is considered a political moderate who would be willing to work with “the other side” on issues.

Of course, it also is part of the reason why the social conservatives who make up the bulk of the Republican Party base these days are distrustful of Kirk (the Republican chairman of solidly-GOP McLean County, Ill., got quoted recently in the Chicago newspapers as saying he would work to make Kirk a “one-term senator”).

WHICH IS WHY, like many political people trying to reach out to all segments of their political party, he has made statements meant to make his so-called opposition a little less concerned about his presence on the ballot.

The most drastic of these types of actions are those of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has gone from the one-time sponsor of serious immigration reform to one of his state’s biggest cheerleaders for its nativist-inspired policies on the issue.

Kirk is doing the same thing, when it comes to the environment. He says his vote on the “Cap and Trade” bill that limited greenhouse gases was a mistake. He says he wouldn’t do it again.

I don’t know how sincere the conservatives (many of whom view environmental measures as government interference) think Kirk is being, but the environmental activists who push for such measures are taking him seriously.

THEY TOLD THE Chicago Sun-Times that Kirk’s desire to side up with the majority of the Republican caucus means he can’t be trusted any more. Which is why on Tuesday, the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters both said they are formally endorsing Kirk’s Democratic challenger, Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias.

They even took a pre-press conference pot shot at Kirk, mocking the line on his website biography that says he “stood up to Big Oil” by preventing BP from polluting our city’s drinking water supply from Lake Michigan.

Sierra Club officials said that so many politicians jumped on board that particular issue that it would be wrong for any of them to claim to have led the issue. They also told the Sun-Times that Kirk hasn’t been particularly chatty about BP or their activities in Whiting since that one moment.

Considering that BP is now Public Enemy Number One for what happened in the Gulf of Mexico (except for those hard-core partisans who are determined to say it was Barack Obama’s fault), creating that potential negative image of Kirk as someone who might give in for politically partisan reasons to BP and let them taint the Great Lakes just like the Gulf of Mexico has become soiled.

THAT STATEMENT IS a bit of an exaggeration on my part. But exaggeration may very well be the tactic that Kirk will get lambasted with for the next 145 days until Election Day.

In the past week, he has become the guy who took a legitimate military record and embellished it to the point where the truly-undecided among the Illinois electorate may not be sure what to believe and what to disregard.

Now, right on the heel of that mis-step, he’s getting accused of exaggerating his environmental record. A part of me realizes that these two particular environmental groups have histories of backing Democratic Party candidates so that the real “news” would have been had they actually shifted support from Giannoulias to Kirk.

But hearing someone else accuse Kirk of exaggerating his accomplishments so soon after the military debacle has to be a blow. Why else would the Kirk campaign have felt the need to come up with their own statement to try to throw the environmental endorsements off-kilter.

IT WAS IN my e-mail box when I woke up Tuesday – Republicans for Environmental Protection endorses Mark Kirk for U.S. Senate. For now, I will take their word for it that this is a real group, and one that honored Kirk as their “Greenest Republican in Congress” in 2009.

Their statement tells me that Kirk “is a proven leader in safeguarding our environment and an outstanding steward of our country’s natural heritage” who has supported measures related to clean air and water, cleaner sources of energy, and expanded open space for the public to use.

Of course, Kirk can’t lay that type of rhetoric on too thick, or else he offends those GOP types who already are suspicious enough of the fact that he does not think of abortion as a criminal act. If he starts becoming a “tree-hugger,” some of them might very well stay home on Nov. 2 – perhaps even enough to balance out those people who are disappointed enough with the Democratic ticket to not care enough to vote.

That is what Illinois has become – the state with a “Top of the Ticket” of candidates who make us wonder which is the least desirable.

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I feel fortunate to have (thus far) avoided tornadoes and other natural disasters

Even before I read the news reports this weekend, I knew that there would be something resembling disaster very near to us. I just didn’t know which Illinois towns would make the datelines.

It turned out to be Streator and Dwight, as serious tornadoes that cut through the Midwestern United States caused severe damage in multiple states besides Illinois.

WHAT GAVE ME my inkling was having the television on late Saturday. I was listening to it more than watching it, but the nasty buzz of the Emergency Broadcast System is not something that can be ignored.

Which is why I happened to hear the warnings with their computer-generated mechanized voice telling literally where tornadoes were being seen, and warning people in those communities to take shelter immediately.

At the particular moment that caught my attention, the tornadoes were headed east near Chebanse, a town on the Will/Kankakee county line right on Interstate 57. My gut reaction upon hearing this was to think, “it’s skipping Chicago.”

Because that point is literally what many people would consider to be the boundary between the Chicago metropolitan area and the rest of Illinois (although I am aware that Kankakee residents to the south are a part of the Chicago broadcast market).

WHICH MEANS THAT by thinking it was skipping by Chicago, I literally breathed a sigh of relief. That doesn’t mean I’m glad we didn’t suffer while people in Dwight did. It means that am fully aware of the fact that I realize a tornado is the great equalizer of the Midwest.

A powerful enough funnel cloud can devastate miles-long stretches of rural land, or take down a city block. It plays no favorites.

As much as some people like to tell tacky jokes about tornadoes that involve mobile home communities, I have always wondered how severe the wreckage and fatalities would be if a funnel cloud were to touch down at the northeast corner of Wacker Drive and Jackson Boulevard (otherwise known as the Willis Tower).

It doesn’t even have to be the tallest bulding in Chicago. Anywhere in “the Loop” would be bad. Depending on what time it would strike, the potential for carnage is significant.

FOR THE RECORD, modern-day downtown Chicago (as in the past century) has never had a tornado touchdown. The last recorded one in the area now considered downtown was on May 6, 1876, with 11 other tornado “touchdowns” taking place since 1870 within what we now regard as the city limits.

Which makes me wonder if we’re overdue. I know, you’d rather I focus on whether the Chicago Blackhawks can win the Stanley Cup Wednesday, or if they’re going to drag this out until week’s end. Somehow, I think those people on the fringes of Chicago now have something much more real to worry about than pro hockey.

It also does not help that I still remember being a reporter-type person writing copy for the now-defunct City News Bureau of Chicago on Aug. 28, 1990 when a tornado with winds exceeding 261 miles per hour struck suburban Plainfield.

It remains the most powerful tornado to ever hit the Chicago area, although the people who live in that Will County community still remember it as the moment when 29 people were suddenly killed – and another 350 injured.

I STILL REMEMBER the wreckage and rubble that suddenly erupted, comparable to what cut across the border between metro Chicago and central Illinois.

It remains to be seen how quickly those communities will be able to rebuild. It may even wind up becoming a positive story in watching how this weekend’s tornado victims are able to rebuild their lives after losing everything (while being thankful for whichever friends and relatives survived uninjured).

But I also will admit there is a difference between my seeing this kind of wreckage firsthand, and actually experiencing it – which is something I have not yet done in my life (and would not mind if I somehow managed to miss out on that experience).

The closest I can recall is back when I was 12 and saw funnel clouds developing in the skies above where I lived then in suburban Lansing. I still recall the feeling of dread while sitting in the basement, wondering at what moment the “destruction” would hit.

I WAS LUCKY. The funnel clouds I saw didn’t touch down anywhere close to where I lived then. I had a fortunate feeling that disaster had somehow skipped by me.

Similar to how I felt late Saturday when I was at the far southern end of Cook County near the Cook/Will border – hearing emergency warnings telling me that just one county away, potential existed for people to suffer.

That is too close for my comfort.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: From the serious to the overly dramatic, this pair of videos help remind us of that day nearly 20 years ago when the Chicago area was hit with its most powerful tornado ever.

EXTRA: Your tax dollars at work

For what it is worth, I was NOT chosen to be a juror when I served my jury duty stint Monday at the Maybrook District of Cook County Circuit Court.

It seems that all the cases that potentially could have used jurors were either civil lawsuits where the parties settled at the last minute, or criminal cases where the defendant chose a bench trial (which lets the judge decide the verdict and sentence).

SO ALL OF us potential jurors were dismissed shortly before noon. Just like everybody else, I got my check for $17.20, along with the stub that confirms I fulfilled my legal obligation to do jury duty this year.

I also got to sit in a drab jury room with the television sets tuned to WLS-TV. Which means that for the tiny portion of your tax dollars that will cover my check, I did nothing more than watch "The View." What a scintilating (heavy sarcasm most definitely intended) debate between Whoopi Goldberg and Elisabeth Hasselbeck over whether the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is somehow President Barack Obama's fault.

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