Madigan indictment a surprise, but hardly a shock

Some of us *ahem* thought the former veteran House speaker was so crafty that he'd slipped the net

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3-3-2022 (issue No. 25)

My New Year’s prediction was that federal prosecutors would indict veteran Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan on corruption charges, just as they did Wednesday afternoon in a 22-count racketeering indictment.

“Smart money says never to bet against the wily Springfield veteran,” I wrote, “but even smarter money says never to bet against the feds. Madigan is plainly in their sights.”

Alas, I made that forecast 14 months ago, for New Year’s 2021.

At the dawn of this year, 2022, I joined 52% of readers in my annual predict-the-news poll in guessing that the famously cautious pol would stay out of the dock.

“If the G had the goods on Madigan it would have indicted him by now,” I wrote, thinking of how long he had been under the federal microscope. “My guess is they see a lot of smoke but not enough fire to sustain a conviction.”

As a Tribune timeline of the investigation shows, investigators were very active in 2019 raiding homes and offices of those in Madigan’s orbit. And in July 2020, Commonwealth Edison agreed to pay a $200 million criminal fine for orchestrating a “yearslong bribery scheme” involving Madigan allies.

But Madigan was known to be scrupulously careful in his interactions, avoiding email and phone calls and speaking in portentous generalities. And the Tribune’s Ray Long and Jason Meisner wrote this on Jan. 2 of this year:

(2021) began with pressure mounting on Michael Madigan, the then-powerful House speaker whose ironclad grip on the General Assembly was slipping after being exposed the previous summer as “Public Official A” in the ComEd scandal and again in a bombshell postelection indictment of a key player and others alleging ComEd paid bribes to win his influence in Springfield.

By the end of January, Madigan was out as speaker after a record reign of nearly 40 years. He resigned his House seat and his position as head of the state Democratic Party soon after, and rumors began to bubble at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse that prosecutors were readying to file a superseding indictment potentially adding Madigan to the already explosive case.

Those rumors waxed and waned in legal and political circles for weeks, culminating in May, when an attorney for one of four defendants already charged in the alleged scheme told a federal judge there had been “intimations” that new charges were imminent.

That was seven months ago. And as the year drew to a close, crickets.

The sound of crickets evidently drowned out the humming of busy bees in the office of John Lausch, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. That they have now gathered enough evidence to issue an indictment came as a surprise to those of us who had come to assume that Madigan must have been crafty enough to cover his tracks.

In a statement Wednesday, Lausch said, “The indictment alleges a long-term, multifaceted scheme to use public positions for unlawful private gain,” suggesting that his investigators have all along been methodically climbing the ladder, even as Madigan was confidently declaring that he’d done nothing wrong

Madigan will be 80 in April. In hindsight, he should have retired in 2013 at age 71 when his daughter, then the popular Democratic attorney general who was widely seen as destined for higher officer, announced that she would not run for governor, saying in a statement:

I feel strongly that the state would not be well served by having a Governor and Speaker of the House from the same family and have never planned to run for Governor if that would be the case. With Speaker Madigan planning to continue in office, I will not run for Governor.

Wealthy Republican Bruce Rauner ended up beating incumbent Democrat Pat Quinn and spent much of his feckless four years in office railing that Speaker Madigan was “corrupt,” though without evidence to back up that claim he simply sounded whiny and petulant.

Lisa Madigan then stunned the state’s political establishment in September 2017 by announcing she would not run for a fifth term as attorney general but would instead go back into private life. Her anodyne statement said only she thought it was “the right time for me to seek a new challenge” and didn’t mention her father, but given recent developments, I have to wonder if knowledge, suspicions or fears about what was coming prompted her to take a powder.

My crystal ball is obviously cracked when it comes to this case, but I will note that the success rate for prosecutors at the Dirksen Federal Building is phenomenally high, particularly in political corruption cases. And that the gears of justice grind maddeningly slowly there — for example, Ald. Ed Burke, 14th, was indicted in early 2019 on charges of racketeering, federal program bribery, attempted extortion, conspiracy to commit extortion and using interstate commerce to facilitate an unlawful activity, and the case is still mired in pretrial motions and assorted legal groundpawing.

But as we wait for Madigan’s trial (or his plea), we will certainly be treated to endless Republican attack ads linking Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Madigan, even though the two didn’t have a particularly close working relationship and Madigan has been in private life for a year now.

Get ready to hear a lot about “The Pritzker-Madigan agenda,” and “Illinois under Pritzker-Madigan.”

But don’t look for crooked pols in Springfield or City Hall to heed the object lesson that the allegedly most cautious, guarded office holder in the history of Illinois still finds himself facing prison and shame.

They never learn. They just never learn.

Last week’s winning tweet

Kate Harding @KateHarding

What haunts me is that I am just not smart enough for so many people to be this much stupider than I am.

Scroll down to read this week’s nominees or click here to vote in the new poll.

Mayor Lightfoot finally catches a break as Arne Duncan says he won’t challenge her next year

Over the weekend, one of first-term Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s top City Council allies, 10th Ward Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza, told podcaster and Reader columnist Ben Joravsky that she will “absolutely not” support Lightfoot if she runs for reelection next year:

 I’m sick and tired of being thrown under the bus and having the bus roll over my head. That’s what she’s done to me. That’s what she’s done to my ward. … I don’t have anything good to say. I’m tired of being ignored. I’m tired of not getting phone calls returned. I’m tired of letting the inmates run the asylum. I have never met anybody who has managed to piss off every single person they come in contact with — police, fire, teachers, aldermen, businesses, manufacturing, and that’s it. I said it. That’s it. I don’t care.

Local Democratic political consultant Pete Giangreco piled on in an interview with the Sun-Times:

(Lightfoot) had a golden opportunity — (after winning) 76% of the vote the last time around — to really bring this city together. Instead she tore it apart. There’s one thing the police and the teachers can both agree on, that she’s the wrong mayor. There’s one thing that business and labor can agree on, that she’s the wrong mayor. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a South Side alderman or a North Side alderman. Everybody agrees that she’s not the right mayor right now.

Ouch.

Then on Monday, Tribune City Hall reporter Gregory Pratt tweeted out a copy of an email that Lightfoot had sent to her top lieutenants in 2020 that reinforced criticism that she’s thin-skinned and vindictive:

I am just reminding this group — for the foreseeable future, there will be nothing given as placed stories or friendly background to Greg Pratt. If he makes an inquiry, answer it as briefly as possible, but under no circumstances is anyone to give him anything proactively. Are we clear?

But the sun came out for Lightfoot at 1:11 p.m. Tuesday when the prospective challenger thought to have the best shot at unseating her — former U.S. education secretary, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools and current anti-violence activist Arne Duncan — tweeted that he would not enter the race.

I'm exactly where I need to be, doing the work I love. I have never been part of a more courageous and committed team. The best way I can serve our city is to stay laser focused on reducing gun violence and stay engaged at our sites, on the streets and in the lives of our participants. After a lot of thought I have decided I will not be running for mayor but we'll work with anyone serious about making our city safer.

Of course Duncan is smart enough to know that running an anti-violence nonprofit is a far less impactful and important position than being mayor of Chicago, so we’re left with two possibilities for what he was actually thinking:

1. He’s keeping his political powder dry for a run for U.S. Senate in Illinois should incumbent Dick Durbin choose to retire rather than run for reelection when his current term expires in 2026. Durbin will turn 82 that year. That’s still younger than the current age of four sitting senators, so his retirement is far from guaranteed.

2. He realizes what a grim slog it would be to run for mayor and then, if he won, what a grim slog it would be to be mayor, with the howling public demanding he solve complex, deep-rooted problems over which he has little control, the unions squeezing him, the fiscal realities biting him in the rear and everyone in town querulously demanding why he’s not doing exactly what they want him to do.

I’d guess it’s No. 2. Not everyone is wired to think that the power and perks of such a position are worth the draining responsibilities and ceaseless pressure, and Duncan, who has never held elective office, might well have realized that he’s among those of us wondering, “Who in God’s name would want that job anyway?”

That doesn’t necessarily rule out a run for Senate in four years — as political gigs go, senator is pretty cushy — but it certainly opens the door for other hopefuls. Here are some of the names now in play for an election that will take place one year from last Monday:

• Illinois state Rep. Kam Buckner, Chicago

• U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley, Chicago

• Ald. Roderick Sawyer, 6th

• Paul Vallas, former Chicago Public Schools CEO

• Stacy Davis Gates, Chicago Teachers Union vice president

• Brandon Johnson Cook County commissioner

• Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd

• Janice Jackson, Former Chicago Public Schools CEO

• Gery Chico, former board president for Chicago schools and parks

• John Catanzara, president of the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police

• Judy Frydland, former Chicago Building Commissioner

• Ald. Raymond Lopez, 15th

• Melissa Conyears-Ervin, city treasurer

• Ald Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, 35th

• Willie Wilson, entrepreneur and perennial candidate

• Susana Mendoza, state comptroller

I’m on record saying I don’t think any sitting alderman or city official will give up his or her seat to challenge Lightfoot, but I have been wrong before.

News & Views

News: During the State of the Union speech, President Joe Biden said, “The answer is not to defund the police. The answer is to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them. With the resources and training they need to protect our communities.”

View: Thank God.

Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., has estimated that the activists’ slogan “defund the police” cost the Democrats a dozen House seats in 2020. Republicans everywhere have continued to invoke it against Democrats who never uttered, invoked or otherwise endorsed it.

Republican gubernatorial hopefuls Jesse Sullivan and Darren Bailey are among those who have been lobbing it like a bomb at incumbent Democrat J.B. Pritzker, who was never behind it.

As I wrote when the slogan began to gain currency in 2020:

One of the common functions of “de-” is to signify a thorough reversal:

Defrost, for example. Decapitate. Deactivate. Declassify.

And a common meaning of “defund” is to zero out a budgetary line item, as in the frequent proposals for the federal government to defund Planned Parenthood, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), the National Endowment for the Arts and so on.

In that sense, “defund the police” translates to a demand to stop using tax dollars to pay for the salaries of officers and the other considerable expenses of conventional law enforcement.

(But) as the bloody, destructive weekend of May 29-31, 2020 in Chicago vividly illustrated, law enforcement officers, for all their faults, seem to be the only thing standing between civil society and total chaos.

Activists insist that “defund the police” means reallocating public resources so that men and women with guns on their hips aren’t tasked with dealing with mental health and drug crises, homelessness and other social issues.

They say “defund the police” means taking a broader, smarter, less violent approach to how we advance the goal of public safety even as we insist on better training and greater, swifter accountability for misconduct.

They say “defund the police” means breaking the code of silence and piercing the veil of lies that protect bad officers. It means not allowing police unions to provide cover for their members with special, generous disciplinary procedures in their contracts.

But all that doesn’t fit neatly on a sign.

“Reimagine the police” does, however. As does “Rethink the police,” “Reorganize the police” or “Revamp the police.”

And those slogans aren’t easily demagogued by political opportunists bent on inspiring panic in suburbia and other strongholds of swing voters.

I would add that the activists who stubbornly cling to this slogan as they try to clarify it end up discrediting the whole notion of reform and doing harm to the long-term goal of thoughtfully improving the practice of police work.

Biden’s strong words stand to start repairing the damage.

News: Reversing an earlier order, Cook County Judge James Linn has ruled that news cameras will be allowed into his courtroom when Jussie Smollett is sentenced a week from today.

View: It’s beyond high time that we allow news cameras into courtrooms. Yes, sure, there are potential drawbacks — attorneys and judges grandstanding, witnesses shying from public exposure — but transparency and accountability demand full coverage of what is, after all, a public process.

A reason why there was comparatively little attention given to the federal civil rights trial of the officers in Minneapolis who stood by as Officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd and to the hate-crimes trial of the those previously convicted in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia is that neither trial was televised, per federal guidelines.

News: “Trump and right-wing lawyer were part of 'criminal conspiracy' to overturn 2020 election, January 6 committee alleges.”

View: As the story notes, “The House has no ability to bring criminal charges,” but even coming late on a day filled with news this sharp allegation seems like.a big deal.

News: Though bogged down in some ways, the Russian military seems poised to capture major cities in Ukraine.

View: The sense I’m getting is that, while Russian forces are still likely to seize Kyiv and kill or imprison many of that country’s leaders, the entire operation will one day be seen as both an atrocious war crime and a ruinous overreach by amoral tyrant Vladimir Putin.

In the long run, Russia’s economy, its reputation and its standing in the world will be far worse off for mounting this invasion. Putin has done more to strengthen NATO and build the Western alliance than years of incremental diplomacy had been able to. He will be all but undone by the attempt to hold a huge nation filled with people who hate him.

As usual, Steve Chapman has a smart take:

Putin has turned an uncomfortable situation into a full-fledged disaster. He shouldn’t have been surprised. The history of our time is littered with cases of major powers embarking on needless wars that backfire. …Great powers often succumb to the temptation of overestimating their power. Putin, however, failed to learn from these experiences. … Putin can probably impose his will on Ukraine if he is willing to unleash overwhelming force and slaughter large numbers of civilians. But what’s the value of ruling over a wrecked nation whose people hate you?

It’s profoundly discouraging and telling that Americans of every political stripe aren’t setting aside their domestic differences to stand in national solidarity against this brutal megalomaniac (as opposed to Trump, a “MAGAlomaniac”).

As James Risen wrote in the Intercept:

Today, much of the American right is in thrall to Putin and other autocrats, and a segment of the extreme right now harbors a hatred for Western democracy. The new American right somehow sees Putin as a guardian of white nationalism who will stand up to the ”woke” left in the West. They don't seem to care that he is a murderous dictator who has launched a war in the middle of Europe … (and) it seems likely that pro-Putin Republicans will continue to allow their hatred for progressives and adherence to white nationalism to blind them to what Putin really is.

History will not be kind to Putin’s poodles in the United States, just as it will not be kind to Putin himself.

Land of Linkin’

• I have joined the ranks of those whose first read in the morning has become NPR correspondent Tim Mak’s Twitter threads from Ukraine on what happened there while I was sleeping.

• WGN-AM’s John Williams posted a listener poll asking, “If you were stranded on a desert island and could only watch one TV show, what would it be?” “Seinfeld” did the best of all the four named options, but “some other show” got 55% of the vote. One factor in casting such a vote might be how many episodes of each show there are to stave off repetition on the desert island. “Seinfeld” has 180 half-hour episodes. “The Office” has 201. “Friends” has 231. By that measure, the clear favorite ought to be “The Simpsons,” with more than 700 episodes and counting, or “Law and Order SVU” with 507 hourlong episodes.

• “Subway Churro” was the hilarious musical extravaganza this time for “Saturday Night Live” guest host John Mullaney. That and “Monkey Trial” ought to persuade you that SNL is as funny as ever. Mullaney’s previous musical extravaganzas are “Diner Lobster,” “Bodega Bathroom,” “Souvenir Shop Underwear” and “Airport Sushi.”

• The Tribune’s Colleen Kujawa writes about the discussion groups she’s joined: “Pandemic fatigue has led me to indulge in a lot of escapist entertainment, and while I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with escapism, I know that I need challenging art, in its many forms, to keep me awake.”

• Better Government Association head David Greising fired back against “false innuendo about donor influence” in “As Nonprofit News Transforms Chicago, Ethics and Objectivity Survive and Thrive,” an essay posted to the BGA site. He complained about the response from Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s administration that suggested the BGA’s report that cast a hairy eyeball on Pritzker’s investments was influenced by the fact that billionaire Ken Griffin, a supporter of a Republican challenger to Pritzker, is a big donor to the BGA. And he complained about innuendo that his recent Tribune column based on an exclusive interview with Griffin was similarly compromised.

• Wondering about the correct way to spell the last name of the Ukrainian president? Zelensky, Zelenskiy, Zelenskyy: spelling confusion doesn’t help Ukraine” by Peter Dickinson, publisher of Business Ukraine and a fellow at the Atlantic Council, explains that since May 2019, Zelenskyy’s administration has decreed the official spelling in our alphabet to be “Zelenskyy,” odd as that may look. Quartz’s Hanna Kozlowska agrees and tosses out even more alternative spellings.

• “A dispute over a vaccine column spiraled into a conflict that threatens the future of the Chicago Reader” from the Poynter Institute for Media Studies has more about the issue I wrote about last week in some depth and the week before that in a once-over. The italic update at the top of the story is snappy: “Leonard Goodman emailed after publication to dispute that his column contains any factual errors. An external fact-checker hired by the Chicago Reader to review the column found 15 inaccuracies or misleading statements.”

• The Picayune Sentinel on the air: On Thursdays at 4:30 p.m., WCPT-AM 820 host Joan Esposito and I chat about ideas raised in the new issue. The listen-live link is here.

• The Picayune Sentinel preview: Monday at 11:30 a.m. I’ll be talking with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.

Caitlin Clark, you are ridiculous! And other thoughts on women’s hoops

Aside from perhaps Stephen Curry of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, I can’t remember seeing a more nervy or deadly shooter than Iowa’s sophomore point guard Caitlin Clark, 20, who put a serious hurt on my beloved Michigan Wolverines Sunday in a not atypical performance for her. Without hesitation she rained in 3’s from 35 feet and beyond, and barring injury she’ll be a breakout WNBA star in 2023, when she reaches the league’s minimum age of 22.

Watch this:

From a recent New York Times feature on her:

Clark has five triple-doubles this season and was the first player in Division I history, men’s or women’s, to have back-to-back 30-point triple-doubles. She leads Division I in scoring and assists, and is on a pace to become the first woman to lead the nation in both categories at that level. Trae Young, in the 2017-18 season for Oklahoma, was the only player in men’s basketball to do it. …

Isaac Prewitt, Iowa’s team manager, rebounds for Clark and her teammates every day in practice and says that nothing she does in a game surprises him. He recalled a scrimmage last fall when Clark and the first-team players were competing against the practice squad and trailing by 11 points with 50 seconds remaining.

“She hit like six 3s in a row from the logo and there were some off one leg,” he said. “It was some of the craziest stuff I’ve ever seen, period, at any basketball level at all.”

“The logo,” for reference, is the team insignia painted at center court.

Sportswriters noted that Clark almost singlehandedly denied Michigan its first Big Ten regular-season women’s basketball championship, a development that provokes in me a very loud yawn. The only championship that ought to matter to big-time schools in big-time conferences is the national championship, with the postseason conference-tournament title a distant second (unless it punches a ticket to the NCAA tournament) and the regular-season title a far more distant third.

There was a silly spat last year when Michigan’s men’s team was awarded the Big Ten season title after finishing 14-2 in the conference, and Illinois fans thought the Illini’s 16-4 conference made the team more deserving of the crown. I still can’t bring myself to care. Conference position matters only to the extent that it influences the rankings which in turn have an effect on tournament seedings.

Clark’s next game action will be Friday at 5:30 p.m. in the Big Ten conference tournament. Set your DVRs.

Meanwhile, I’m psyched about the upcoming season for Chicago Sky, the returning WNBA champions. The team has re-signed backcourt stars Courtney Vandersloot and Allie Quigley, nabbed 2019 Finals MVP Emma Meesseman of the Washington Mystics in free agency and will have last year’s Finals MVP Kahleah Copper and 2016 Finals MVP Candace Parker on the roster.

Women’s hoops is a great game. And my saying so in no way conflicts with my previous assertions that its teams and its stars could in no way beat most college men’s teams, an assertion that seems to baffle and enrage certain fans who otherwise do seem to understand the value and necessity of gender-separated sports.

A final beat on the WNBA age limit — three years beyond the NBA age limit of 19. It’s not for the protection of the athletes, you know, or for the benefit of the college game. It’s for the benefit of the owners who too often were burned by spending high draft picks on high school phenoms who never became professional superstars (see Curry, Eddie).

I say it’s rank age discrimination against legal adults and should be banned.

Kristi R. — I got stuck in an idiotic convoy of protesters in the Texas panhandle Saturday on Interstate 40 on my way driving from Phoenix to Chicago. It took us over an hour to make our way to the head of the line and break out of the pack. It was a parade of the White Aggrieved. There were more RVs, pickup trucks, vans, and cars than there were 18 wheelers.

The people driving were overwhelmingly white men, driving solo. Flags and hand drawn signs about freedom, ending mandates, firing Dr. Anthony Fauci, and anti-President Joe Biden, using vulgar language. Expressions like "I'm tired of keeping my mouth shut" (guess he was mad it is now frowned upon to be openly racist or sexist?).

At most towns on the route, people were lined up on overpasses and alongside frontage roads, cheering them on. These were families and people of all ages (all white from what I could tell). It was basically a Trump rally. They love their flags — U.S., Trump, MAGA, Let's Go Brandon, Don't Tread on Me, and the Confederate battle flag were the most common banners.

What’s ironic/frightening to me about this partisan divide is that, despite the fomentations of the right-wing media, the vast mainstream of the Democratic Party is fairly moderate, as is President Biden. Nearly all of this wrath seems cultural.

Unless someone wants to tell me in comments why a slogan that translates to “Fuck Joe Biden” is a rational response to his actions in office.

Mary Schmich is taking Tuesday off

My former colleague Mary Schmich posts column-like thoughts most Tuesdays on Facebook, but this week she chose instead to hike in Skidaway Island State Park near her hometown of Savannah, Ga., with some good friends:

Johanna Zorn, Eric Zorn, Mary Schmich

A shortened baseball season? Good!

In Tuesday’s patrons’ only issue I wrote that the outcome of the current talks between the Major League Baseball and the players’ union will be OK with me if it serves to shorten the excruciatingly long season, which is already filled with excruciatingly long games.

I’d be fine with a major league season that started in mid May and wrapped up in early October — around 100 games plus playoffs — and I’d be thrilled if officials could institute drastic rule changes to shorten games so they last closer to two hours than the current average of a little more than three hours.

I asked readers on Facebook and in a click poll how long they think the baseball season should be.

The poll drew 190 responses, and the results were revealing:

• 120 games or fewer —43%

• 154 games, as it was prior to 1961 — 29%

• The current 162 games — 16 %

• Other — 13%

The “other” included an option to leave comments, and most supported a somewhat shorter season or one defined by months — May or even June through September. Online comments included frequent suggestions to bring back doubleheaders and quicken the pace of the game.

My conclusion is that MLB has bigger problems than this tiff between the millionaire players and the billionaire owners.

Minced Words

This week’s “Mincing Rascals” begins with the breaking (at the time) news about former House Speaker Michael Madigan’s indictment. Panelist Austin Berg of the Illinois Policy Institute is one of many Captain Ahabs who have been hunting Madigan these many years. He wrote “Madigan: Power. Privilege. Politics,” an hourlong 2016 documentary from Illinois Policy Action, the advocacy arm of the IPI, and he also wrote“America’s Last Machine Boss Goes Down,” a February 2021 article for the National Review.

I was not a fan of the documentary at the time, writing:

The hourlong attack film, timed to sway voters in contested legislative districts to vote Republican, supports the premise that Madigan is a disciplined and ruthless partisan whose control over the movement of legislation in the General Assembly has earned him the informal title "King of Illinois."

The documentary is also persuasive in making the case that Madigan's dual role as government power broker and top Chicago real estate tax appeal lawyer is unseemly, and that his patronage activities skate perilously close to the edge of the law.

It doesn't, however, make the case — doesn't even try, really — that Madigan is primarily to blame for Illinois' dire and deteriorating financial condition. Yes, he's the one constant character in every chapter of a sad story going back decades, and he's signed off on all the budget tricks and generous deals that have led Illinois into a budgetary box canyon. But Republican governors and lawmakers have done their part, and the filmmakers would clearly rather just raise their eyebrows at Madigan than do the hard work of connecting the dots and apportioning the bipartisan responsibility. …

Accordingly, "Madigan: Power, Privilege, Politics" is a tame piece of propaganda even though it's so one-sided that it doesn't include the views of any of his supporters and defenders. The filmmakers seem itchy to come out and say that the speaker is evil and corrupt, and that Illinois would be much better off if he'd never entered public life — the implication in nearly every 30-second Republican attack ad this season linking down-ballot Democrats to Madigan — but they pull back.

Why? Because the deeper you look at the story of what's become of our state, the more you see it's not a simple fable of white hats versus black hats, but a convoluted tale of clashes among long-standing and powerful interests.

I believe I may owe Austin a steak dinner. I never argued that Madigan was not a problem, just that he was far from the only problem in Illinois politics. Austin makes an excellent point that the General Assembly needs to clean up its ethical act by passing new laws and restrictions on what lawmakers can do in their spare time and what powers the leaders have.

The panel, which also included Heather Cherone and host John Williams, also analyzed Tuesday night’s State of the Union speech — the “doggiest dog and pony show there is,” Cherone said — developments in the 2023 mayoral race and the fact that a ticket to a 1984 Bulls game fetched nearly half a million dollars at auction.

Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener.

Re: Tweets

This week’s nominees for Tweet of the Week:

• If they ever have to identify me from dental records my dentist will be all like, “Oh yeah, I remember that guy. Total disappointment. Lied about flossing. Those are definitely his teeth.” — @WoodyLuvsCoffee

• The guy said “Violence is never the answer” and I said “What if the question is ‘What is never the answer?’” and he punched me in the face. — @MelvinofYork

• Kidney stones? Hard pass. — @SkinnerSteven

• Do you ever watch historical shows and get caught up on how gross everyone probably smelled? — @CynicalTherapi1

• When my husband is mad at me, I like to point at my wedding ring and whisper, “forever.” — @mxmclain

•  I like to put things in the microwave well off center so they can have a more exciting ride on the little carousel. — @SamLoonie

•  I refuse to condemn that bad thing until all the other bad things in the world have been addressed too. — @wildethingy

• Bill Barr’s book is unique because the hardcover edition will be released without a spine, but will grow one several years later when it’s profitable to do so. — @cpoliticditto

• Dance like no one is laughing. — @suecorvette

• [On a road trip] DAUGHTER: I have to use the bathroom. ME: *pulls into rest stop* DAUGHTER: Thanks. ME: Make sure you’re back in 5 minutes.DAUGHTER: I will. ME: We accidentally left your brother behind once.DAUGHTER: I don’t have a brother.ME: Exactly. — @UncleDuke1969

Click here to vote in the poll. For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Apologies tendered to the vulture community

Guido Appenzeller / Creative Commons

As a follow-up to Sunday’s “60 Minutes” report on evisceration of local newspapers being led by the hedge fund that bought the Tribune last year, the union representing Tribune newspaper employees in the suburbs tweeted out a public invitation to a Zoom meeting for 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 9 to discuss “how you can help push back against our vulture owners.”

In a later tweet, the members clarified:

The unionized media workers of Tribune Publishing guilds hold no ill will toward any of the world’s 23 species of vultures. Whereas they play a key role in our ecosystems and contribute greatly to the world around us, our hedge fund ownership does not.

Today’s Tune

I was first introduced to the classical composition “Spiegel im Spiegel” by Arvo Pärt when it was the background music in the finale of the wonderful TV series “The Good Place,” which aired on Jan. 30, 2020, a little more than a month before All Hell Broke Loose. It’s a haunting yet soothing piece that show creator Michael Schur said he listened to on endless repeat while writing the finale.

The title loosely translates to “mirror in mirror.” It implies an infinity mirror – when two mirrors are held facing each other and the repetition seems to go on forever. — 91Classical.org

When the lockdown began, I made my own endless loop of “Spiegel im Spiegel” and played it every morning when reading the papers. Nothing about the composition steals your attention as it rolls along. I still put it on occasionally as an aid to the closest thing I ever do to meditation and as a reminder of the sweet wonderfulness of “The Good Place.”

Here’s a slightly faster version that was featured in the movie “Gravity.”

Pärt, 86, is an Estonian composer. “Spiegel im Spiegel” is an example of what he calls the tintinnabulation or tintinnabuli method, which uses many musical triads.

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