Rick Telander For Mayor

Clout City:

Rick Telander's column on the Olympics in today's Sun-Times should be required reading for everyone in this city. I guess it takes a sportswriter to really tell it like it is.

In particular, I appreciate how Telander draws attention to a recent memo sent by school board president Michael Scott warning principals to get in line with the Olympic debacle.

Principals should be doing just the opposite--they should be fighting like hell against the games. They should have put all their kids on school buses and sent them downtown to join the police, who marched around City Hall protesting when the International Olympic Committee was in town visiting.

If we should end up winning the right to host the games, they won't help the schools--they'll take money that the schools could use. Any principal who signs onto this reverse Robin Hood scheme is essentially sacrificing this generation of school kids so the mayor can throw a blowout party in 2016.

Very interesting! The olympics can be a good thing, but we should evaluate both the positives and negatives.

It just occured to me that it would be unfair if I just didn't quote the column by Rick Telander:

The City of Chicago, led by Mayor Daley and a vast and tumorous army of aldermen and bagmen and yesmen and opportunists and spineless, parasitic political-machine halfwits of forms never seen outside the roiling cesspool of governmental slop-trough greed, has proven itself unworthy of something as potentially delicious and fulfilling as the 2016 Olympic Games.

There was an opportunity there.

But the pitiful stuff just keeps on comin', warnings be damned.

Best ever was the city parking meter deal that gave a private company the rights to all the quarters Chicago parkers can shove into sidewalk machines until 2084.

''Duh Mare,'' who could still be in office in 2016, and his boys pushed that one through so fast it boggles the mind.

Forget the fact the city took an estimated $974 million less than what the 75 years worth of revenue was worth. Or the fact any fool can jack up meter rates and provide meters that don't work.

The City Council rubber-stamped Daley's idea for gaining some upfront whip-out cash.

When the machines didn't work, Daley said ... Hey, lay off. Does your own computer work all duh time?
The politics of pay-for-play and skimming and old-fashioned, suspender-snapping, cigar-chomping, big-bellied ''Where's mine?'' clout is so vibrant and alive and grotesquely arrogant here in Chicago that it is very nearly a breathing, slime-dripping creature worthy of a Star Wars-style nuclear assault.

There there must be ramifications for being blatantly corrupt and/or stupid.

There must be.

A mouthful! And he still wasn't done. Read the whole thing.