Next week I’ll be defending my doctoral thesis down at Willie’s Pool Hall. According to a recent press release, U. of I. chemistry professor Peter G. Wolynes “likens a chemical reaction to a pool table shaped like a figure 8. The molecules in the reaction can be compared to pool balls that bounce off the walls of one circle of the table until they can travel to the other circle. The problem puzzling chemists for decades is how the pool balls travel through the bottleneck at the middle of the figure 8.”
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What is Governor Edgar up to with his welfare-bashing budget? Don Sevener of the Illinois Times (March 14-20) talked to the man who ran Governor Thompson’s budget office, who noted that (1) state revenues, are strong and (2) state spending is not being cut, but rather being reallocated to pay bills more promptly. “So what’s the point?” asks Sevener. “If revenues are strong and spending won’t really be cut, why the crisis atmosphere? The answer, it seems, is that Edgar needs a crisis if he’s going to stand a chance of shifting priorities enough to put his own stamp on state government. He doesn’t have enough money to fund Jim Edgar’s programs, Jim Thompson’s programs, and keep his word to avoid new taxes….It has been so long since Illinois has had a new governor that it’s easy to forget that every governor starts out with lean spending plans so he can afford to loosen the spending reins as time for reelection approaches.” That should reassure the people in the shelters.
And which precinct did they vote in? The state Department of Professional Regulation recently fined three Chicago funeral directors and one from Oak Park for paying Chicago police officers to deliver bodies to their business establishments.
(Not) keeping Richie honest. If there had been a mayoral debate, someone could have publicly torpedoed the mayor’s favorite number–the alleged 200,000 jobs to be generated by the Lake Calumet Airport. According to “Proposed Lake Calumet Airport: A Review of the Issues,” a study prepared by William Howard of UIC’s Center for Urban Economic Development for the Southeast Chicago Development Commission, the city mysteriously assumes that the proposed airport would have twice the multiplier effect of any other airport recently built in the U.S. In other words, 110,000 jobs is a more reasonable estimate.
