How do we rectify past racial slights?

I’m sure there are going to be people who will try to make an issue of the fact that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is willing to see a black man receive a pardon for a criminal conviction that clearly was racially motivated, only to have the first non-Anglo president turn it down.

That is the position that President Barack Obama finds himself in with regards to Jack Johnson, one of the great boxers of the early 20th Century whose presence ticked off much of white America because Johnson was a black man who felt no need to have to kow-tow to Anglo society.

SPECIFICALLY, JOHNSON DID a 10-month prison term for a violation of the Mann Act, which was a law meant to prevent women from being abducted and taken elsewhere for sexual purposes.

In Johnson’s case, he found a consenting adult female who happened to be white (and who later married him). Which was his real “crime” in this case. He did that 10 months in prison for not sticking with “his own kind.” This prison term came at a time when he was a defending boxing champion, and it threw his athletic career offstride as he had to spend much of what should have been the prime of his athletic career boxing in the Caribbean instead.

Now some people will try to argue that we shouldn’t be trying to judge the past by our contemporary standards. Miles Davis did the complex, not easy listening soundtrack album to the 1970 documentary film about the life of boxer Jack Johnson, which is a complex story not easy to listen to in and of itself.

But McCain, Obama’s opponent in the 2008 presidential election who fancies himself a boxing fan, has touted this idea before.

IN FACT, HE has gone so far as to get his Senate colleagues to overwhelmingly back a resolution that urges the president to approve a pardon for Johnson, who died in 1946.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with a pardon. Nobody with any common sense would argue that Johnson committed any act that deserved to be a crime, for that very law was often used by local officials to justify getting at people whose presence was an annoyance.

Keep in mind that several decades later, rock ‘n’ roller Chuck Berry had his musical career sidetracked by a conviction of the very same Mann Act – and for the very same act as Johnson.

But it is for that very reason that I am a little hesitant to just automatically say that Obama should sign the pardon and allow McCain to have a moment of glory by claiming he influenced officials to undo a racial wrong of the past.

BECAUSE IT WASN’T just Johnson who was wronged in the past. As I just noted, Berry also got hit with the same legal action and did his jail time back in the early 1960s for having relations with white women who weren’t the least bit objecting.

While some can argue that changing musical tastes throughout the years would have sent Berry’s career downhill after the 1950s, it can’t be argued that the jail term threw him off-track rather quickly.

What I fear is that some people are going to be inclined to think that by giving Johnson a posthumous pardon, all of the racially inspired injustices of the past have suddenly all been rectified.

Would it be right for Johnson to have to represent all of black America in taking a pardon for every black man who suffered in the criminal justice system just because some white person was offended by their existence at a particular moment?

AND WOULD IT really mean all that much for Johnson to receive that pardon some six-plus decades after his death?

Yet I can also appreciate how difficult it would be to go through the rolls of criminal cases throughout the United States (not just the South, even though some of us would like to think bigotry was restricted there – it wasn’t) and try to undo every single case where a black person was wronged.

It’s not like Johnson is in the situation of boxer Muhammad Ali, who at least was alive and capable of resurrecting his athletic career when his own racially-motivated criminal conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Obama’s aides have been reluctant to say what they will do with the Johnson pardon request, which on the surface would be a hard one for him to deny.

I CAN ALREADY hear in my mind Rush Limbaugh, fresh off of being denied the chance to sit in the stands at St. Louis Rams football games and claim himself to be an owner, trying to use the issue to say on his radio program that McCain is the champion of racial justice and Obama is somehow a bigot.

Those of us with sense would dismiss such trash talk as cheap political rhetoric. But there will be those in today’s politicized environment who won’t want to let it go.

I would hope that if Obama does go ahead and grant the Johnson pardon, he somehow manages to use those rhetorical skills he possesses to let us know that the Scales of Justice aren’t suddenly balanced out because of this one action.

He’d have to make it pretty clear that the degree to which this nation’s racial situation was out of whack in the past was so severe that it can never truly be pardoned.

OF COURSE, THAT kind of statement (no matter how true) will offend some people in our society because they’re the ones who want to believe that a single stroke of a president’s pen can somehow erase the negative portions of our nation’s history.

Which is the real reason some people are anxious to have this particular pardon approved. They’d rather give up a token gesture to a deceased black man than do anything of substance to those who are still living.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Jack Johnson picked up his boxing skills in part by spending his early days (http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/10/19/boxer.pardon/) in Chicago and later owned a nightclub in the Second City.

Is Johnson going to become the centerpiece of the 2009 confrontation (http://www.bet.com/News/National_Jack_Johnson_Overdue_Pardon_Rests_With_President_Obama.htm?wbc_purpose=Basic&WBCMODE=PresentationUnpublished&Referrer=%7B0471DDF0-D0D8-48A8-9E30-ADD40CBE0269%7D) between Barack Obama (http://www.current-movie-reviews.com/people/2009/10/17/political-posturing-mccain-presses-obama-to-pardon-jack-johnson-boxer/) and John McCain?

Some people want to view Johnson’s actions as potentially worthy of a (http://www.sportingnews.com/blog/the_sporting_blog/entry/view/39316/jack_johnsons_proposed_pardon_an_uncomfortable,_unnecessary_intersection_of_sports_and_society) criminal conviction.

With his big bucks, Giannoulias is in a “tie” for next year’s Senate election

There are those people who want to believe that “guilt by association” with now-impeached Gov. Rod Blagojevich will cause many Democrats to go down to defeat come Election Day, but a pair of surveys make me wonder if continued screeching of Milorod’s name will be enough to benefit the GOP.

All the people who typically give cash to political campaigns are making the U.S. Senate bid of Alexi Giannoulias the biggest-funded of the field. Some of it is people playing it safe, but it also shows a significant sense that Alexi’s mind is not the only place where Giannoulias ought to be regarded as the front-runner.

THERE ALSO WAS the latest poll conducted by the Rasmussen Report, which shows that Giannoulias is in a tie with possible Republican frontrunner Mark Kirk.

Even if Giannoulias were to somehow lose the primary in February and run against one of the other Democrats with dreams of being a United States senator, Kirk only has a slim lead – the kind that could easily wither away on account of the fact that there is more than a year until the November 2010 general election.

Could it be that Illinois, with its two-thirds of the population that lives in the Chicago area, has just become so urban and Democrat leaning that no one should be thinking of the GOP congressman from the North Shore suburbs as some sort of political big shot?

It was the thought that popped into my head after learning of a pair of surveys of sorts.

THERE WAS THE Rasmussen Report, that showed Kirk and Giannoulias each getting 41 percent of the vote, if the election were to be held now. Thirteen percent said they had yet to make up their mind, while the remainder were people who are so devoted to another candidate that they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for either.

But then there also was an Associated Press survey of the leading Democratic candidates for the Senate seat now held by Roland Burris.

Giannoulias’ campaign is coming up with the big bucks that will make it competitive, regardless of what is thrown at it. In short, unless Giannoulias turns out to be a complete incompetent, he’s going to have the resources to define himself – instead of being defined as a corrupt banker (which is the image that Kirk and GOP partisans would like to see become reality, similar to how Judy Baar Topinka in 2006 was nothing more than the kook who danced the polka with George Ryan).

According to the wire service, Giannoulias raised $1.1 million between July and September, while only spending $345,000. On Sept. 30, his campaign fund reported to the Illinois State Board of Elections that its balance was $2.4 million.

NONE OF GIANNOULIAS’ primary challengers even come close to being able to produce that kind of money. In fact, the only other candidate with a balance exceeding $1 million was attorney Jacob Meister, a fringe candidate who came up with $1.04 million by taking out substantial loans.

The two significant challengers to Giannoulias in the Democratic primary raised about one-third the total of what the Illinois treasurer came up with.

David Hoffman, the former Inspector General for Chicago city government, took out a $500,000 loan to give himself an $837,000 campaign fund, while Chicago Urban League President Cheryle Robinson Jackson raised $367,000 during the summer months, and had $318,000 on hand.

What will be the end result of all that money?

HONESTLY, I CAN’T get past the idea that the two are in a tie, despite the presence of Blagojevich. If it were truly as big a factor as hard-core Republican partisans dream about, I’d think polls would be constantly showing Kirk as a leader.

The Rasmussen Report survey taken prior to this latest survey only showed him with a slim lead – 41 percent to 38 percent, so close that it falls within the “margin of error” and deserves to be called a tie.

Now, we get a poll that shows a literal tie.

When it comes to breaking down the results, it seems like the standard partisan breakdown. Women prefer Giannoulias while men prefer Kirk. But didn’t women prefer Barack Obama in 2008, compared to men thinking more of John McCain?

IN FACT, WHAT may be the most interesting part of this study is the one that shows Jackson gaining on Kirk, if it were to turn out to be a general election campaign between the two, with Giannoulias getting to enjoy a few final months as state treasurer before lingering in political retirement for at least a couple of years.

In that potential campaign, Kirk would beat Jackson 43 percent to 39 percent if that election were held today. But the same 13 percent remain undecided, and that same 5 percent thinks so little of both that they’d seek somebody else.

He used to lead Jackson by 17 percentage points in Rasmussen Reports polls. Could it be that there are a significant number of people in this state who will reject the Republican label, regardless of who runs under it?

Or could the only real truth to all this political prognosticating be that at 13 months prior to the general election, it’s still too early to be trying to figure out who will win?

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Alexi Giannoulias won’t lose the 2010 election cycle due to a lack (http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=35841&seenIt=1) of campaign cash.

The existence of Rod Blagojevich may make next year’s Election Days close, but is (http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections2/election_2010/election_2010_senate_elections/illinois/election_2010_illinois_senate_election) Illinois too “blue” for Mark Kirk?

Will Barack Obama become a help or hindrance to Giannoulias’ (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/17/AR2009101701427.html) Capitol Hill aspirations?

Will The Times (N.Y., not London) make an impact on the Chicago news scene?

I’m curious to see the so-called Chicago zoned coverage that is being proposed by the New York Times as a way of strengthening that newspaper’s position as a national publication.

The Times last week began doing a San Francisco edition, of sorts. Basically, copies of the newspaper sold in the Bay Area will include a two-page spread twice a week that will be filled with stories of local interest.

TIMES OFFICIALS HAVE said that they also view Chicago as a market that could support such an effort, and that if the San Francisco “edition” does not turn out to be a complete flop financially, the Second City will be their second venture into the world of local journalism.

There are many ways to view this activity.

One is that it is ridiculous for the Times to think that “local” journalism is somehow going to be the publication’s economic savior, because it is something that it does not practice on its own home turf. People who want to know what is happening in the Bronx, Brooklyn or Queens need to read the Daily News on a regular basis. Even the New York Post gives a better account of the nitty-gritty of New York life.

The Times is the publication written and edited for New York residents who want a worldly view.

SO NOW, THE publication that doesn’t do the best coverage of its own back yard thinks it can come into our yard and snatch enough stories from the Sun-Times or Tribune that it would boost the circulation of their national edition in the Chicago area.

But now, having taken a cheap shot at the “grey lady,” I have to admit I try to read the Times on a regular basis. In part, it is because of their Chicago “coverage.” For the Times does maintain a bureau in our city, with a few reporters living here so they can cover the news throughout the Midwestern United States.

It is not unheard of to read stories in the Times about the political geeks, sorry athletes and other screw-ups who comprise the people that give Chicago its unique character.

Of course, when the Times comes in and covers something at City Hall or at the Statehouse in Springpatch, they usually come in after everybody else who is local has already tried to bleed the story dry of all its information.

OCCASIONALLY, THE TIMES can come up with an interesting factual tidbit that wasn’t known previously. But what they usually do is manage to do the one single write-up that puts an entire issue into perspective.

While the local press will be obsessed with advancing “the story” on a daily basis, the Times comes in when it is already advanced and tells “the world” what it all really means.

That can have its purpose (although, in all fairness, it was the competing Wall Street Journal that put the “Council Wars” of the mid-1980s into perspective when it came up with the defining phrase, “Beirut by the Lake.”)

But I would hope that the Times doesn’t think they can boost their circulation significantly in Chicago by merely giving us rewrites of what was already published in the local press. It won’t work.

NOW AS I understand, it won’t be the Times’ editorial staff that actually does the work of putting together a pair of pages on a pair of days each week.

They’re trying to work out partnerships in the Bay Area by which the actual “work” on those local pages will be done by public broadcasting news types, along with academic types from the University of California at Berkeley.

Does this mean we have the potential to get newspaper pages put together by WTTW, along with those earnest (but extremely inexperienced) students of Northwestern University? If they had to go that route, I'd just as soon see them pair up with Loyola University, which now has on its faculty one-time City News Bureau managing editor Paul Zimbrakos -- who I'm sure could browbeat reporter-types into coming up with "real" news.

I’d like to think that image of academia in daily journalism is just too ridiculous to be taken seriously. But I’m also realistic enough to know that the bottom-line of this project is to boost advertising revenue, not to necessarily improve the editorial quality of the newspaper as a whole.

WHAT’S THE POINT – in the minds of too many newspaper executives – of coming up with more ad revenue if you’re just going to spend it on payroll and expenses of producing stories? There’s a company as a whole whose stock value needs to be bolstered.

Yes, I’m a tad cynical about this whole project.

If improved Chicago coverage were all that significant to bolstering the quality of the newspaper, it likely is something that would have been done years ago.

This sounds, to me, like the thoughts of an advertising executive who sees that the potential sales to businesses in the New York metropolitan area have “maxed out,” so they’re trying to figure out how they can snatch a share of the advertising revenue elsewhere.

HEARING THAT THE Times is now in San Francisco creates in my mind the image of an easterner headed west to pan for gold, more than a century-and-a-half after the Gold Rush of 1849.

I guess we’ll find out if “there’s gold in our hills” if the Times then doubles back sometime in the near future and decides to descend on our streets.

So here’s a quickie local lesson for the potential New York newcomers – Madison is a street, not an avenue.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: The Chicago Tribune took a more serious look at their potential (http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/columnists/chi-sun-phil-rosenthal-1018oct18,0,3236866.column) future competition led from New York.

Judge it for yourself. I’ll determine its relevance by the quality of stories it can unearth, while (http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/10/what-the-nyts-bay-area-report-looks-like-in-print/) some executives in New York will judge its success by the number of local advertisers it picks up.

New political campaign will take token opposition to Olympic heights

There are times when people do things politically just because they think the “time” is right, and that waiting for a more opportune moment would be waiting for something that will never occur.

That is the blunt way to view the political campaign of Tom Tresser.

HE’S THE GUY who led that whole “No Games Chicago” activist bid that drew a lot of public attention to the fact that there were people around here who were more than content to not have the summer Olympic games of 2016 be held in Chicago.

The fact that the International Olympic Committee ultimately rejected Chicago’s bid (actually, that of the United States) puts Tresser in a position of success. It may very well be the biggest success of his professional life – the line that leads off his obituary when he departs Planet Earth some three or four decades from now (I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that he will lead a long, healthy life).

But it also puts him in a position where some of the afterglow of that success will cause people to bother to listen to him.

That’s about the only reason I could think of for him to think that he ought to run a political campaign for “high local public office.” That’s his phrase. He won’t say what he’s running for, although his campaign logo of “TOM 2010” uses the Cook County seal in place of the “O” and he has registered his “Friends of Tom Tresser” committee with the Illinois State Board of Elections to support a county board Presidential bid.

COULD TRESSER THINK that Cook County Board President Todd Stroger is so incapacitated politically and all of his declared challengers are so bumblingly inept that all those people who hated the thought of the Olympic Games in Chicago could turn out and vote him into office?

Or at the very least, enough of those people to get the roughly 26 percent that it could take to win what has shaped up to be a five-person Democratic primary (six, if Tresser gets into the campaign)?

In a typical election year, I’d think that Tresser’s campaign was a waste of time. I wouldn’t bother giving it any thought.

But this is not a typical election year.

EVEN THOUGH THE Republicans appear to be planning to run a slate of candidates who are ideologically conservative as any of the other GOP contenders of recent Election Days who lost, they seem to think that screeching the name “Blagojevich!” will take them to victory.

And it will have some influence. I expect it to be a close general election day in November, and I expect the primaries to be complete chaos.

So under these circumstances, perhaps a guy who gained some experience and feel for the city by traveling to all 50 of those sessions the Chicago Olympics committee held in each ward so he could toss out some opposition information might be able to gain some attention.

There are those who think the Cook County Board race has the potential to be a racial battle, with Stroger and three black challengers running against a white guy from the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District.

SOMEHOW, I THINK in this battle, Tresser just might be able to take them on. If not by winning, he could bloody them up a bit to make this particular primary campaign just a bit more intriguing.

For all we know, 2010’s election cycle could very well turn out to be the “Year of the Outspoken Crackpot” in Illinois.
For the Republicans have running for the GOP nomination for governor Dan Proft, the media consultant with the knack for “shooting from the lip” (to use an overworked cliché) and a willingness to hurt his opposition’s feelings.

Proft is the guy whom observers of the gubernatorial primary want to “write off” as unelectable, but they don’t because they’re unsure if this year’s dynamic might just be the one time that he can seriously get the nomination.

I CAN’T HELP but think the same is true about Tresser.

Of course, his big challenge will be raising money. He may have put together quite a list of supporters while running “No Games Chicago,” but it’s not like that group raised money for its own efforts in amounts high enough to sustain a county-wide campaign.

But, he’s going to try to feed off the “free media” as an alternative to “paid media” (news coverage, versus campaign commercials) and hope he can push the image of being a reformer and fighter to some success on Election Day.

This is a guy who helped “take on” City Hall when he worked with others to help kill a deal by which the Park District would have paid to develop an athletic field whose primary user would have been the private Latin School of Chicago (they wanted a nearby field for their soccer programs).

NOW, TRESSER IS the guy who “took on” the world – specifically, the IOC, and got them to put the Olympics somewhere else.

Does this mean Tresser is the guy who will now “take on” Cook County by seeking its top post? He might be a long shot, but this is the time in the election cycle for long-shots to dream broadly, just as big as those people who used to dream about the Olympics being held in Chicago – only to have Tresser come along and squash them.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Olympics opponent-turned-political candidate Tom Tresser will begin campaigning (http://www.tom2010.us/) Saturday, but he’s already managing to tick off some of the people (http://www.mountainofevidence.com/2009/10/tom-tressers-rocky-start.html) who didn’t want the Olympics in Chicago.

Is Jacobs the lone voice of reason?

Back in the days when I was a reporter-type person covering the Illinois Legislature, one of the few legislators willing to speak his mind on a regular basis was then-state Sen. Denny Jacobs, D-East Moline.

The now-retired legislator from the Quad Cities most definitely considered himself to be “old school.” He wouldn’t have flinched from the label. Most likely, he would have looked down upon anyone who tried to use that label as a pejorative.

I COULD EASILY envision Jacobs (who once told me that 99 percent of what legislators say during sessions of the state Senate and Illinois House is “nonsense that should be disregarded”) being among the few to stand up and vote against the measure considered on Thursday that creates the concept of recall elections whenever a significant number of people get ticked off at the governor.

That is why I was glad to see that when the state Senate voted 56-1 to approve that nonsense bill, the lone legislator to show some sense was Mike Jacobs – Denny’s son. Mike replaced Denny when the elder Jacobs decided to retire from the Legislature in 2005 – following more than two decades representing the Quad Cities and northwestern Illinois in Springfield.

The younger Jacobs, who once was presented with a pair of boxing gloves as a gag by his colleagues after he got into a verbal altercation with then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, said what some of his colleagues agree is true, but were afraid to back up with their vote.

I know some people are going to vehemently disagree (and some may start sending me obscenity-laced anonymous e-mail messages), but Jacobs is correct when he says the concept of recall elections can, “lessen the independence of a governor.”

THERE ARE TIMES when a government official has to be prepared to stand up for what they believe to be truly proper – without having to worry about whether enough people will have a political hissy-fit and start screeching, “recall.”

I also happen to believe that if an official gets himself elected with a majority vote, that majority ought to have to live with their mistake until the next Election Day.

If there really are circumstances taking place that are so abhorrent that an official ought to be removed from office, there is the option of impeachment. For those who will argue that impeachment imposes a high standard that is next to impossible to achieve in most cases, I say that’s a good thing.

It should not be easy to remove a public official from office. When an official takes that oath of office, we ought to have some reasonable assurance that they’re going to finish the term to which they were elected.

RECALL IS OFTEN the tool of the sore losers who can’t stand the fact that their preferred candidate didn’t get a majority, so they become obstructionists (rather than opposition, there is a difference between the two terms).

And the answer is “no.”

I don’t consider it to be a significant compromise that this measure approved on Thursday is limited solely to the recall of Illinois governors.

A bad idea is a bad idea, even if it only affects one political person at a time – rather than all elected officials.

I DO EXPECT this idea to eventually come up, since Gov. Pat Quinn throughout the years has been so eager for the general concept of “recall” that I can easily envision him signing the measure into law, then getting all worked up in coming months trying to get people excited in the November 2010 general election about undoing the results of the past.

Anyone who has read my commentaries published here in the past will not find this viewpoint surprising. I have always thought recall was one of those political concepts that was absurd – something done in places that have much less common sense than Illinois.

Like California.

Do we really want to be copying this costly, complicated measure that threatens the outcome of elections just because a few loudmouths want to scream?

THAT IS WHERE Jacobs was coming from when he became the lone opponent to recall, although the Chicago Tribune reported that a few other senators (including Kwame Raoul of Chicago, who represents Barack Obama’s old neighborhood in the state Senate) expressed the same theoretical opposition and said they were “reluctantly” voting “yes” on the recall.

I can understand where they’re coming from.

I fully expect the same people who would have been willing to lambaste them come Election Day will try to devote a little bit of their conspiracy-theory oriented approach to life to trashing me for writing this commentary – and perhaps many other pieces I have published in the past.

It’s just a shame that we don’t have more political people willing to stand up to the loudmouths of our society who want to shout down their opposition to the point where our society would become as deadly dull as they are when it comes to their ideology.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Will Mike Jacobs become as unpopular in coming weeks as state Rep. Deborah Mell, D-Chicago, who still gets grief from some people for being the lone (http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/clout_st/2009/10/illinois-senate-sends-quinn-measure-asking-voters-if-they-want-power-to-recall-wayward-governors.html) legislator to vote against impeaching Rod Blagojevich (a.k.a., her brother-in-law)?

Will activist pleas fall on deaf ears?

It’s going to be a common sight for the next few days at the Statehouse in Springpatch – various groups are going to send people to the Capitol in hopes of rallying in the rotunda (to the left) and urging the General Assembly to get off its collective rump and approve a long-term (as in the full fiscal year) solution to the state budget.

For you may remember when the Illinois Legislature finally approved a spending plan that averted the possibility of a state government shutdown due to the lack of a budget in place, they only approved a plan that takes us through the end of Calendar Year 2009.

THE CURRENT FISCAL year runs through June 30, which means come January we’ll be right back in the same place we were in back in July – only worse because a significant portion of the state’s revenue for the fiscal year will have been spent.

The reason nothing happened?

It all comes down to political people who are so fearful of Election Day and being labeled as some sort of tax hog by certain elements of our society.

For it was Gov. Pat Quinn who wanted the political people to just break down and accept the fact that some sort of income tax increase was essential to ensuring that state government would have sufficient revenue to perform all its functions for the fiscal year.

BUT LEGISLATORS KNEW there would be some people willing to play politics with any such vote and try to turn it into an issue to use against them.

So they preferred to do nothing.

It is with the idea of persuading the Legislature to now do something that a group calling itself the Responsible Budget Coalition plans to have hundreds of people show up at the Statehouse on Thursday – all in hopes of persuading legislators to do what they didn’t want to do back in July.

Come up with some more revenue, which sadly enough is essential because the cost of things does go up. That is regardless of whether one wants to pay it. With costs going up, the income also has to increase.

AND AS FOR those people who will argue that government should somehow operate more like a business, I’d argue that viewpoint is ridiculous. A government performs functions that must take place, whereas in the overall scheme of things, a business can cease to exist.

In short, the Legislature is paying too much attention to people with an ideological axe who would like to take it to those government programs they have disagreements with.

In fact, I can already hear those people get their responses ready that the groups preparing to show up at the Statehouse are merely ideological tools themselves – ones whose opinions should be disregarded.

If there were legislators who were afraid of ticking people off on a future Election Day back in July, just imagine how angry they will be now.

IF THE LEGISLATURE had acted back in July to resolve this problem, there’s a good chance that the masses would have forgotten many of the specifics and wouldn’t have continued to give it much thought.

But now, the Legislature is only three-plus months away from that Feb. 2 primary. There’s a better chance that doing the right thing now will be remembered more vividly.

And if the Legislature doesn’t act in their fall veto session, they would be forced to confront this issue in January – which means literally in the weeks before the primary election.

That is when people are paying attention and would remember every little detail.

IT IS BECAUSE of this time factor that I think these groups will be speaking on deaf ears in the Legislature. The individual lawmakers will want to get in and out of Springfield this fall while doing as little as they possibly have to.

Thinking that they have a serious chance to urge the Legislature to act may be somewhat naïve.

In fact, the most honest thing I have heard in recent days came from the mouth of a community center organizer in Chicago who will be part of a group representing the Chicago Area Project – a group that distributes state funding to neighborhood groups.

That organization experienced significant cuts in its own funding that are now trickling down to less money for community groups, and they have hopes of getting into the office of Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, when they visit Springfield next week.

WHAT IS HONEST about that? She concedes that her group likely will have little luck getting that meeting with the Speaker.

“You don’t just walk into Mike Madigan’s office and demand his time,” she told me, adding she expects she and her colleagues will have to settle for one of Madigan’s top-ranking colleagues, state Rep. Lou Lang, D-Skokie.

If that’s the case, I can envision Lang having a very busy veto session – having to tell everybody “no” while his boss hides away in his Statehouse office.

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Hey you kids, Get Off My Lawn! And give me back my one dollar bus ride!

I’ll state it up front. Today, I’m a grumpy old man who’s going to tell you how much better things were when I was young. So if you’re one of those 18-year-olds who can’t handle being reminded that there was a Planet Earth and a society before you came into existence, go read something else.

What has me ticked off today is the word that the Chicago Transit Authority is seriously considering another rate increase.

$3 PER RIDE. Whoa!

I used the CTA as recently as Saturday, and I can remember the thought of disgust that went through my mind as I was pumping change and dollar bills into those vending machines so that I could use the subway to get from the Loop to the Near North Side (the Chicago History Museum at Clark and North, for those of you who just have to know).

Now, the thought that the same ride is going to cost one-third more. That ticks me off.

Part of it is that I can remember the days when I was a regular user of the CTA – my younger days when I took full advantage of the fact that one can live in Chicago without an automobile.

I STILL REMEMBER how to use the elevated trains to get to just about any region in the city, with the buses then working to fill in the gaps.

Back then, it was one dollar. Actually, I can remember the level of trauma many Chicagoans felt when it went from $0.90 for the ride and a dime for the transfer to $1 for the ride and an extra coin for aforementioned transfer.

It seemed like we were being massively ripped off. The very thought that our lone buck wasn’t enough, and that we’d now have to carry bills and coins for our bus/train fare somehow seemed absurd.

Now, it seems like as dated a memory as when my mother talks of how bus rides in this city were once a quarter.

ACTUALLY, IT ISN’T the cost so much because I can accept the idea that things cost more now than they used to. I can appreciate the idea that the CTA can’t function on the same amount of money as it used to in past decades.

So the thought of fare increases is a necessary evil.

But if it goes to maintain the kind of transit service that allows one to function in the city without an automobile, then it becomes worth it. In short, if I thought that things would get better with an increase, I’d have little problem (although still some grumbling) with paying it.

Even at $3 per ride.

BUT WHAT TICKS me off is the fact that this fare increase is being paired up with service cuts – a 9 percent drop in train service and 18 percent less bus service.

Now I don’t know exactly what those percentages mean. I suspect certain bus lines will simply run less often and will stop running at earlier times in the evening. There likely also will be less “late night” service, although in all honestly the amount of late night service being offered is already such a reduction from the days of the past that there are times I wonder what is being accomplished by pretending that our city has a 24-hour mass transit system?

We’re being asked to pay more for less service. That irritates me.

I’m a believer in mass transit, and happen to think that its presence is one of the factors that helps distinguish a metropolitan area of quality from one that is merely second rate.

DURING THE PORTIONS of my life where I have lived outside of Chicago (my life story is one of repeatedly moving from the city, then returning to it), I have been in places where mass transit systems usually consisted of a few bus lines that would take people to some select places.

A look at transit system maps for those cities usually would show large portions that had no such service (usually with the explanation that the local politicians catered to those residents who didn’t like the idea of just anyone being capable of coming to their neighborhood).

And those systems usually cut off at some insane hour of like 5 p.m., and had limited (or no) service on weekends.

My reaction to those cities (none of which I would want to live in again) is, “why bother?” If they can’t put forth a system that can actually move people about in large numbers, why have a third-rate system that accomplishes little?

AND MY REACTION to Chicago is to wonder if this is just another step toward giving us a third-rate system that makes it impossible for certain people to go to certain places within the city.

Now I realize the CTA is being hit with the same problem that is impacting many other local government entities across the state – Illinois government’s financial problems are causing them to cut their funding for local programs and also make the aid payments they’re still promising on a schedule that is months behind.

CTA officials claim that this $3 per ride talk wouldn’t be taking place if the state were to cough up what it had previously promised, let alone what it has offered in the past.

The problem with making such cuts is that once they are done, they tend to be permanent. Even when economic times do get better and the state gets closer to paying its bills in a timely manner, I wouldn’t be too optimistic that the CTA will be able to restore things.

THIS COULD BE one of the casualties of the fact that the General Assembly was so adamant in not wanting to have to come up with a permanent solution to balance out the state’s budget back in July – instead preferring to come up with makeshift solutions whose time is now running out.

Government officials being afraid to do something that can be distorted by political cranks on Election Day is a part of this problem, and it is one that has the potential to turn many things in our society into third-rate replicas of what they once were.

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