No freedom for Drew! Will Rod soon join him? And what about Troy?

We’d like to think we live in a society where logic and reason always prevails, and where we have control of our raw emotion so that we don’t let our distaste for someone guide us into potentially erroneous actions.

BLAGOJEVICH: No friends

Ah! Who are we kidding? We live in a society where that gut reaction often guides our thoughts, particularly when it comes to people we can’t stand.

THAT DEFINITELY APPLIES to every single person who heard the speculation recently that former Gov. Rod Blagojevich could face a prison term between 30 years and life, and somehow had a smirk break out on their face.

Personally, I’m inclined to think 30 months in a federal corrections facility is too long a sentence for Blagojevich. But I know the politically partisan distaste that  many felt for the man when he had the unmitigated gall (in their opinions) to run for governor in the first place is now being manifested in wanting him put away extra long.

Yet it’s not a fluke emotion being expressed here. It comes up all too often.

It definitely is behind the criminal proceedings taking place these days in Will County Circuit Court, where prosecutors are trying to put one-time Bolingbrook cop Drew Peterson in prison on charges that he killed wife number three.

OF COURSE, MANY people want to believe that Peterson also killed wife number four – whose disappearance several years ago is what first drew the public spotlight on Drew.

The man is cocky, arrogant and smug – although I wonder how much of that is an act meant to help him bear with the fact that he has spent the past couple of years in a county jail awaiting trial.

PETERSON: Too many enemies?



There have been concerns about the evidence that could be used against Peterson, particularly since some of it involves statements supposedly made by wife number four about the death of wife number three (which originally was classified as accidental – and only became homicide after Peterson became too high-profile a case because of the last wife’s disappearance).

It is because of those concerns that the pre-trial process has taken so long (he was supposed to have gone on trial last year).

IT ALSO IS why Peterson’s attorneys tried the long-shot legal motion of trying to get him released from jail while the process continues. Being incarcerated for so long without a criminal conviction must surely be wrong!

Not quite.

The Illinois Supreme Court this week rejected Peterson’s request for freedom – unless he can come up with the 10 percent of the $20 million bond that was set for him (which was set so high to ensure there would be no way he could possibly come up with the money to be set free).

But just envision what would have happened had the Illinois high court ruled in a way that set Drew free? Somehow, I could envision the political outcry being more intense than the days of the late-1990s when Justice James Heiple was all the rage.

HE JUST TRIED to use his court credentials to get out of a traffic ticket – and wound up having to appear before an Illinois House panel that considered (but never got around to) impeachment.

Just think of what our Legislature would do to the entire Supreme Court of Illinois if they ruled in favor of Peterson. Impeachment for all?!?

Or else we’d have some people in our society demanding recall elections for the entire General Assembly!

This is one of those criminal cases where logic and the rule of law are easy to ignore because too many people want the worst to happen. Which may well mean that Peterson could be the one person who could identify with Blagojevich’s current predicament when he faces sentencing (possibly) next month.

BUT IF YOU want the ultimate in cases that bring out raw emotion, consider the predicament of Troy Davis – who may well be dead by the time you read this.

DAVIS: Doomed?

Davis was the Death Row inmate in Georgia who has supporters claiming there is evidence he “didn’t do it” – which in his case involves the death of a police officer in Savannah.

A “cop killer!!!!!” That’s enough to make many people want to ensure he gets a death sentence. It stirs up the emotions in some people to the point where they don’t want to hear about any flaws in the evidence that was used to find him guilty by a jury in Georgia.

You can put the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles in that class. They rejected his final appeal for clemency on Monday. Unless someone came out of the woodwork on Tuesday to express sympathy (all too unlikely), he was doomed to die early Wednesday.

FOR THIS REASON alone, I’m pleased that Illinois has done away with the death penalty. For this is the ugly side of the capital punishment debate, and I am pleased we’re not going to have to cope with it any longer in our home state.

We’ll have enough ugliness expressed when Blagojevich gets sentenced, and Drew goes to trial.

  -30-

Everyone wants their own police station

If the political people were to have their way, the Chicago Police Department would be broken up into 50 districts, each with its own stationhouse.

That would literally create one district for each ward. You’d literally have a district commander who would answer to the alderman. For the aldermen, the idea of having their own personal police district at their beck and call would be yet another perk of the position.

OF COURSE, WE don’t have that situation. We have a police department that for decades has been split into 25 districts.

And if the hints of Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy are at all legitimate, there may soon be fewer stations across the city.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported on Monday about the pressures the superintendent faces to cut nearly $200 million from the police budget. The newspaper is interpreting McCarthy’s “We’re looking at everything” comment to mean that some district stations could be closed.

Although no one is singling out which district stations would be shuttered, you just know this is going to get worked up into a political morass.

FOR THIS ISSUE is going to be spun as the potential for certain neighborhoods to lose their local police protection. That really isn’t true, since any closing of stations also would reconfigure the police district boundaries so that all of Chicago is still covered.

But that will be lost in the shuffle.

People are going to complain if their neighborhood stationhouse gets shut down – even if it would be more efficient, practical or cost-effective to run police out of fewer locations.

I’m sure we’ll even hear some people complain if some of the older district stations get shuttered. We’ll hear rhetoric about history and tradition being disrespected.

EVEN THOUGH ANYBODY who has paid attention knows that the Police Department has periodically restructured itself. Change does occur.

I can recall the days when the 25 districts were broken up into six areas, each with its own headquarters – as opposed to the current five areas (what we now think of as Area Three at Belmont and Western avenues used to be Area Six). I remember when 11th & State was a significant intersection in police lore (and 35th & Michigan meant nothing).

I’m even old enough to remember when the Calumet District (and Area Two) were known as the Pullman District (and Pullman Area), although that change was meant to erase some of the bad memories lingering from the days of one-time area commander Jon Burge.

Although the days when one-time police Superintendent O.W. Wilson tried several reforms of the Police Department – including reducing the number of district stations to 20 – is before my time.

PERHAPS THAT IS the most telling part of this issue.

When a police superintendent tried to reduce the number of district stations out of a sense of efficiency, city officials ultimately found a reason in future years to restore the number back to 25.

Could McCarthy be engaging in a futile exercise that would be undone by his eventual successor?

Like I wrote earlier, many political people would like to increase the number of district stations. Even if their motives are somewhat selfish, I suspect many members of the public will be willing to go along with them on this issue.

BECAUSE THE PERCEPTION among the general public is that there aren’t enough police officers. I believe many people will see the closing of district stationhouses as evidence that there will be fewer officers available, or the same number covering larger areas.

Some police officials say that closing stationhouses would allow for police officers to be reassigned in ways that would put more officers in places where they are desperately needed.

And with fewer districts, there would be a need for less administration, which could mean more officers put back on the streets (even though I’m sure at least some of those officers would dread such a shift in duties).

But those facts won’t sway many in the public, who will see the building that they once knew as a police station sitting empty (or perhaps turned into a vacant lot) and will make the presumption that their neighborhood no longer has local police.

THEN, THEY’LL COMPLAIN that their local district station got closed, while the neighboring district station remains open. Favoritism being shown to select neighborhoods? Some people will be determined to spin the issue that way, regardless of what the truth might be.

This issue is going to open up ugly wounds, no matter how McCarthy plays this out. Even if it makes sense, some people won’t want to listen. If he pursues this issue, we’re going to learn just how tough McCarthy truly is.

Of course, to appease them, you’d literally have to put a police district in every single neighborhood and sub-neighborhood across the city of Chicago. Nobody wants to have 100-plus police districts.

Except, perhaps, for the most political opportunist of aldermen – who would love the idea of having several district commanders under their control. Which might be the ultimate evidence that cutting district stations might not be the dumbest idea ever conceived.

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Percy’s passing marks end of political era that gave us bipartisan compromise

Although I am old enough to remember the election cycles of 1982 (Illinois governor) and 1983 (Chicago mayor), the first election cycle I was old enough to cast a ballot in was the 1984 session.

Would we have been better off with Percy over Nixon in '68?

That was the one that saw Ronald Reagan win every state except Minnesota in his bid for presidential re-election. But in Illinois, there was a Democratic victory – the incumbent Republican U.S. senator got defeated in his bid for a fourth term.

IT WAS THE cycle that saw us get Paul Simon as a statewide official – serving two terms in the U.S. Senate and burning that image of the horn-rimmed glasses and those bow ties into our brains in perpetuity.

But for us to get Simon, we had to lose an equally-eloquent public official in the form of Charles Percy.

I remember the Republican partisans from Illinois who tried to scare people against voting for Simon by letting us know that the loss of Percy would result in now-former Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina moving up the ladder into a prime committee position – foreign relations.

We wouldn’t really want Jesse in control of anything that involved U.S. foreign policy. Would we?

IT DIDN’T WORK. And I don’t think many people fully appreciated just how much the deposing of Percy back in ’84 was a changing of the guard from that old era where partisan politicos who didn’t let partisanship define their very essence, to the modern day where partisan hostility is taken as so much a part of the game that the fact that Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, earlier this year actually attended an event with House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, comes off as a radical, and unheard of, act.

All of this popped into my head this weekend after learning that Percy died early Saturday. For the man who represented Illinois from 1967 to early 1985 was so unlike anyone who would ever get elected in today’s era.

To put the Percy record through the brief run-through, the senator opposed U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. That alone would have modern ideologues convinced this man was some sort of hard-core liberal and unlike anyone they would ever want associated with the Party of Lincoln.

He also was a supporter of international nuclear non-proliferation and thought that consumer protection laws were a good thing. The modern-day ideologues would claim that he was meddling in foreign affairs and was supportive of over-reaching laws that meddled with the interests of small business.

PERCY ALSO WAS among the first members of Congress who went against the fact that then-President Richard Nixon was his partisan ally, in calling for a special prosecutor to investigate the whole Watergate mess – rather than just sweep it under the rug the way the Nixonians tried to do throughout 1972 and ’73.

When modern-day Republicans talk of Richard Nixon, they idolize him to the point where the man with the symbolic perpetual 5 o’clock shadow becomes “bigger than Jesus.” They also trash anyone who does not remember Nixon fondly as being the source of the problem.

I’m sure there are some modern-day GOP partisans who view Percy’s record, and take into account the fact that Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., felt the need to give Percy a favorable statement in the obituaries that were published in newspapers this weekend and will write him off as some sort of liberal loon – if not a “closet Democrat.”

He wasn’t, really.

IT’S JUST THAT Percy is the sort of official who has long been chased out of the Republican Party. They’re the ones who would claim that someone who is willing to view compromise and bipartisanship as elements worth striving for is really someone who won’t stand up for his own principles – as well as the principles of those people who elected him to public office.

Percy is of the sort who likely could no longer get elected as a Republican, which is a shame. And while it is true that there has been a shift to more rigid ideological types in both major political parties, it also factors that much of the shift came about due to those hard-core ideologues who may once have been Democrats but shifted to the GOP back in the era of civil rights battles – thereby bumping the more moderate types.

So thinking back to that first election cycle I cast my ballot in, yes I do think it was a good thing that Paul Simon got to move up to a position of statewide significance (rather than just being the member of Congress from the state’s southern tip).

But looking back at the cycle, I can’t help but wish that it had not had to come down to a Percy/Simon battle. No knock against Alan Dixon, but our state (and perhaps our nation) would have been better off if we could have had a Percy/Simon pairing as Illinois’ two state senators.

AND INSOFAR AS as the death of Percy at a hospice in the District of Columbia, a part of me wants to use the occasion to mourn the death of bipartisanship.

It may get knocked now as a corrupt era of smoke-filled rooms, but in the political old days the “D’s” and the “R’s” would haggle by daylight, then work out the compromise after dark over drinks – leaving us better off then than we were now.

  -30-

Some people don’t know when to shut it

My guess is that it falls into the category of “screaming ‘fire’ in a crowded film theater.” Or perhaps joking about having a bomb packed in one’s luggage while waiting in the security lines at the airport.

MADIGAN: Threatened? Or too touchy?



But there is a man from the Roseland neighborhood who now faces some serious criminal charges, all because he couldn’t resist the chance to take a pot-shot at Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.

NOT THAT MAURICE Pennington is any stranger to the legal system, particularly its methods of incarceration as punishment.

For it seems that the 56-year-old Pennington already has served time in prison in Texas after being found guilty in that state of sexual activity with an underage girl.

After completing his prison time in Texas, Pennington came our way. He now lives among us. Although considering that former prison inmates have to live somewhere, it would be ridiculous to think that we don’t (or shouldn’t) have any in Chicago.

In order to remain in compliance with Illinois law, he has to notify his local police department of his presence in the community – along with his exact address.

THAT INFORMATION THEN goes to the Illinois State Police, which puts it out there for the public to see on the Internet. The idea is that people have a right to know if someone who committed a sex crime is now living near them.

The Illinois General Assembly passed the laws requiring such registration years ago, as have legislatures in other states. The concept has received legal review in the appeals courts. Thus far, it has been deemed acceptable.

But that doesn’t sway Pennington , nor does it discourage him. Pennington has filed a lawsuit that contends such a notification requirement is a significant burden on his life and his ability to “rehabilitate” himself.

He’d like it if a judge somewhere were to declare the concept of notification to be un-Constitutional.

AND IN ONE of his legal briefs related to his lawsuit, he wrote statements that were derogatory towards the image and persona of state Attorney General Lisa Madigan. No one is saying exactly what his lawsuit stated about her. But it seems that it was hostile enough to be construed as a threat.

That is what led the police officers who work under Madigan to show up at Pennington’s Roseland residence on Thursday and arrest him. He got to spend the night and the bulk of the day Friday in a holding cell, and was to be in court for a bond hearing Friday night.

All because he felt the need to include a few derogatory sentences in his legal brief, which he crafted himself because Pennington is acting as his own attorney.

He may think he’s a legal genius. Although I’m more inclined to think that he can’t find an attorney willing to take on a lawsuit that challenges the legal requirement about ex-inmates notifying the police of their presence.

WE CAN MAKE all the wisecracks that we want about stupid criminals or the fact that this case seems to be a legal no-brainer in terms of “guilt” or “innocence.”

The evidence is the written copy of his lawsuit. His words are in print.

Yet what strikes me the most about this particular case is some of the reaction it is generating on the Internet. Those anonymous people who like to post blatantly-partisan, if not outright-ignorant, comments about everything seem to be taking up the cause of Pennington.

Because Madigan is of the Democratic Party persuasion and is the eldest daughter of Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, there are those who claim she is impinging on his freedom to speak or express himself.

ONE PERSON USED the Chicago Tribune website to say that Madigan should, “shrug this off.”

Even though Pennington is charged with threatening a public official, which is a felony. Just as it is a crime to do anything that could be construed as threatening a police officer, the same general concept applies to the attorney general.

Except that some people seem to want to think that only certain public officials are entitled to protection from harassment. That is taking partisan politics to a new level of lowness. In fact, it may well be more bizarre than the idea of someone writing a threat into a lawsuit – which is what Pennington is accused by prosecutors of doing.

So keep in mind that when the headline of this commentary implies that some people should “shut it,” Pennington isn’t the only person I’m referring to.

  -30-

Do the Sarah Palin sex tidbits really titillate us? Or are they just droll?

Now we know exactly why the Chicago Tribune canned the Doonesbury comic strip for the week.

Garry Trudeau focused this week’s worth of strips on the fact that a new book is coming out next week about "is she/isn’t she" presidential candidate Sarah Palin – one that offers up so-called salacious tidbits about her personal life.

THE DISCLOSURE THAT would have appeared in the newspaper on Thursday was the fact that Palin supposedly once had a fling/quickie/hook-up/whatever you call it with now-former professional basketball player Glen Rice.

Not that Tribune readers were able to avoid the disclosure. For as it turns out, a look at the Tribune’s website Thursday afternoon shows them prominently playing up a review of the book that is the source of this tawdry disclosure – and a whole lot of others that we’re going to chew through in coming days.

Of course, what the Tribune did was take the review written by someone at the Los Angeles Times, which I’m sure they’re going to say means that they never really touched it themselves.

It’s a whole lot of semantics that rivals the rhetoric we’re going to hear from the Palin people themselves in dealing with this book; which her husband, Todd, has already denounced as, “full of disgusting lies.”

WHICH MEANS THE experience we’re all going to endure related to this book is going to be petty and cheap, particularly since the National Enquirer has managed to get itself entangled in this whole story (they’re going to claim they broke this revelation, even though all they did was reported the existence of the book).

Author Joe McGinniss (the guy who actually moved to Wasilla, Alaska and bought the house right next door to the Palin residence) did all the real work (although some have denounced his book as being nothing more than hearsay).



Sometimes, even political people get their own trading cards.



Now I have to admit that my first reaction to hearing a story about former sports broadcaster Palin and a ballplayer was to wonder if this so-called fling took place before she was married.

Perhaps it might be something resembling a story if the word “adultery” could be claimed (and also assuming that the hook-up actually took place) as fact. But in this case, the so-called fling occurred before marriage.

AND I PERSONALLY could care less about Sarah Palin’s social life – particularly incidents that took place more than two decades ago.

Which is why I’m not about to recall the details of where their one-time dalliance took place. It’s really such a common tale – except for the fact that one of the people in the coupling was a reporter-type person (Sarah used to do the sports segments for a local television station in Alaska) and the other was an athlete.

That is a journalistic ethics breach, along with just tacky behavior – if it really happened.

But then again, Palin has always said she got out of broadcasting and into politics because she didn’t want to conduct her life in the ways that reporters are forced to for professional reasons.

IF THIS INCIDENT really happened, it is just more evidence that Palin did the right thing getting out of journalism. And if it didn’t, she probably got easily bored by the tedious, often-nitpicking attention to detail that is necessary to get a story correct.

It means she still did the right thing by getting out of journalism.

What strikes me about this tale is that if it is true, then Palin would probably be best off using the reasoning that was offered up by the Clintons when Bill was first running for president – they admitted to marital difficulties during their lives, but tried to avoid getting into specific incidents.

Considering that the people who are most likely to back Palin’s presidential dreams are the same ones who most detested Clinton’s presence in the White House, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn they will not accept it as a legitimate excuse.

IN FACT, I think much of the rhetoric that we will hear about McGinniss’ book in coming days is going to be from people who are determined to ignore what is being written and said about the candidate. They already live in their own world, and don’t really care what the rest of us have to say or think.

Although I am inclined to ignore the disclosures made in “The Rogue” because I just think they’re boring. Titillation is cheap when it becomes repetitive.

And in the end, the Chicago Tribune may wind up regretting that they didn’t just run the Doonesbury strips this week – particularly the one from Thursday that told us about the alleged Palin/Rice coupling.

For in that strip, a character refers to the tawdry tale as something that nobody will believe. “NBA trash talk,” in the words of Trudeau, which means Garry may have given us the best assessment of what to think of this incident.

  -30-

Oh, Pipe down!

There have been moments during my years as a reporter-type person when someone who I was interviewing was saying something so ludicrous that what I really wanted to do was tell that person to be quiet.

Does this make you think 'casino'?

As in quit making a fool of yourself by proposing something so ludicrous that it’s never going to happen – and whose only purpose is for you to think you can force me to write about you as though you are serious.

NOT EVEN THE idea of asking a lot of nit-picking questions and writing a story pointing out the nonsense of the idea being spouted truly works – because it implies that the original idea was worth being acknowledged.

Which is why it was a good thing that I wasn’t present earlier this week when Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce President Jerry Roper came up with his own idea – turning the Thompson Center state government building into the new casino that is so desired by many city officials (including Mayor Rahm Emanuel).

Roper is one of those people who doesn’t think much of the building, which he said is a “burden” to state government. He does make one legitimate point – that at three decades old-and-counting, the structure has reached the point where it will need major renovations to ensure it will continue to be an acceptable office building for state government’s Chicago offices for decades to come.

So Roper said he thinks the state should unload the building on a casino developer, and let them handle the cost of renovating the 16-story building while they convert it into a casino.

FIRST OFF, THE idea of a casino at Randolph and Clark, just to the north of City Hall/the County Building is so ridiculous just because of its proximity to government. It would be a bad joke waiting to be told to put it there.

Plus the fact that any casino is going to have to have its own parking facilities – even if it means some sort of exclusive parking garage.

Those facts alone ought to be enough to show how ludicrous the idea truly is. Although when I think about it some more, I also realize that Roper’s idea is ridiculous because that square-block cylinder in use by state government isn’t anywhere near enough to house a legitimate casino.

For as Roper said he envisions it, the casino would be in that basement level where people can currently devour all forms of fast food, and on the ground level entrance where all those nondescript  stores now exist.

ALL OF THE upper floors that now house state agency offices would be converted into hotel rooms.

With the idea being that people could walk out of their room onto the balcony, look down and watch for themselves all of the gambling taking place beneath them.

Maybe he’d envision turning the governor’s office into some sort of exclusive suite, with people saying the slept in the space where much illicit activity took place (even though Rod Blagojevich rarely set foot in this particular office).

By that kind of logic, the ninth floor room straight back from the elevator bank (which once was a press room where reporter-types at the building would congregate) would become some sort of no-frills, discount room for cheap people not willing to pay much of anything.

I MOCK THIS casino idea because it’s just too ridiculous.

That basement level just doesn’t offer enough floor space for all the hard-core gambling that would be essential to a Chicago casino (a lot of people are going to have to lose lots of money in order for the facility to generate the kind of gross income that could then be taxed by the city and the state).

There’d probably be enough space for slot machines, which means you’d have a casino filled with cheap people looking to throw away their quarters. There would be none of the more-prominent “games of chance” that would generate the gambling activity of the real “high rollers.”

But aside from these serious attempts to point out the flaws of converting the James R. Thompson Center (nee, State of Illinois Center), there is one issue that ought to show, in and of itself, how ridiculous the idea is.

WHAT WOULD YOU do with state government?

There may be vacancies in office buildings scattered throughout “the Loop.” But the idea that agencies would move willy-nilly all across downtown Chicago – one agency here and another there – is absurd.

About the only people who would want this are those who can’t handle the fact that for some state agencies, the Chicago office is more important than the one in the capital city of Springfield. Or those who think that government buildings are supposed to be marble monstrosities decorated with gargoyles and look like they came from the 19^th Century.

They come up with all kinds of crazy ideas to justify trying to shut down the Thompson Center as a government building (which was one of Blagojevich’s more ridiculous ideas – and one that we should be thankful it never went anywhere).

WHICH IS WHY I’m glad that Gov. Pat Quinn didn’t get sucked too deeply into responding to Roper’s casino proposal. Don’t dignify nonsense with a serious response.

Besides, I don’t know how seriously I could take as a casino a building that I once saw appear in the 1986 film “Running Scared.”

I don’t know what was more ludicrous – the idea of bags of “cocaine” splattering on the atrium floor? Or the sight of actor Billy Crystal supposedly being a fierce Chicago cop who goes around wearing a Cubs jersey?

  -30-

EDITOR'S NOTE: I almost put this story in the same category -- the anonymous speculation that Rod Blagojevich could get Thirty years to Life in prison when he ultimately is sentenced. It is ridiculous to think it should be so long, unless you're the type of person who lets your political partisanship get the best of your common sense. If it does happen, we truly should be outraged.

What does a company owe somebody when they shoo them out the door?

I don’t know Pat Bruno – the long-time (and now former) restaurant critic of the Chicago Sun-Times. And I’m really not interested in writing about the way he was let go from his position at the newspaper this week.

But what catches my attention is his comment that he is upset that a higher-ranking editor, if not the publisher himself, should have been the one who gave him the word that he was no longer employed at The Bright One.

I’D SAY HE was lucky to get the human touch at all.

I still remember when my final stint with United Press International came to an end just over six years ago. I got my farewell by e-mail from an editor in Washington.

It was succinct and told me how budgets had just been hacked to pieces and how the wire service could no longer afford to pay me.

It came on an “April 1.” For an instant, I contemplated that this was somebody’s warped idea of a gag. Then I remembered that for UPI, April 1 was the beginning of the new fiscal year.

APRIL 1 TO March 31. They began a new year without me and the commentaries I had written for the wire service about so-called Latino issues for roughly the last three of the dozen years that I purported to be one of those legendary UPI men who was “at the scene” wherever in the world news was breaking.

Then again, I remember my most recent lay-off – one from a company that monitored news broadcasts across the country. I was told face-to-face that I was no longer employed from a boss that was reading from a legal script – the point of which was to get me to sign a document saying I would take an insignificant severance offer and leave without contemplating legal action.

By comparison, an April 1 e-mail seems downright humorous.

Of course, I’m sure there are many reporter-types these days who can tell even harsher stories about being let go. I have never had to deal with a situation where I was escorted out of the building by security, without even being permitted to clean out my desk of any personal possessions.

FOR THAT MATTER, people of just about any occupation who lost their spot on a payroll so that management could bolster the bottom line and pretend that their profit margin still made them a successful company.

Which makes it kind of hard for me to sympathize with anyone who feels a little bitter that they didn’t get the appropriate send-off. Join the club. What makes you think you’re entitled to a fond farewell when so many other people are getting that doorknob in their derriere as security escorts them from the building.

I couldn’t help but notice in the news coverage of Bruno’s departure from the Sun-Times that he says, “I wasn’t expecting roses at my feet, …”

Actually, I’m surprised they didn’t hand him a bouquet of roses – thorns first so that he sticks himself in the process.

SO AS I wrote before, Join the Club! Here’s hoping that Bruno figures out a way to keep himself occupied while also managing to bring in bits of income – just as many people have managed to do with themselves in recent years.

In my case, it is publishing this weblog and its sister site, The South Chicagoan, as well as doing some work for one of the suburban daily newspapers (that in my busiest weeks can match my old full-time weekly income but in my worst weeks seems reminiscent of my old $190-a-week pay at the now-defunct City News Bureau of Chicago) and writing the occasional free-lance feature elsewhere.

I joke that I have become a literary prostitute. I write for whoever is interested in publishing me. I do it for the money.

And when I write for this site, I do it for the fun of keeping up with the news cycle while also asserting my presence in the public realm (which is probably about as insignificant a speck as Planet Earth is in the overall scheme of the Universe).

IF I’M REALLY going to have to endure a professional life of no security and erratic pay, I might as well do work that I personally enjoy and see a point to.

Which might be the best advice I could offer anyone who is enduring these days a stint of collecting unemployment benefits – just like a former editor of mine who himself wound up losing out on his job just last week.

  -30-