Events

I can't see any benefit to leasing out all the parking spaces in Chicago to a private company, even if my mayor and alderman can. In fact, it sounds quite appalling: street parking fees to double, profit motive over civic good in parking enforcement, no time for the Council to evaluate the proposal Mayor Daley handed them yesterday. Destroying Meigs was bad; this is much, much worse: Parking meter rates will increase next month after the Chicago City Council today overwhelmingly approved Mayor Richard...

Pilots for Emirates Airlines have complained that the new Airbus A380 is too quiet: "We're getting a lot of complaints. It's not something we expected," Emirates spokesman Ed Davidson told Flight International. "On our other aircraft, the engines drown out the cabin noise. [On the A380] the pilots sleep with earplugs but the cabin noise goes straight through them." The problem is most noticeable on the Emirates A380s because they chose to put the crew-rest area at the back of the main cabin, while...

First the good news: Al Franken keeps inching up in his recount for Norm Coleman's (R-MN) U.S. Senate seat. With 7% of the votes left to count, Franken now trails by only 3. Three. As in, "Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out." And the bad news. As predicted, Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) looks likely to win re-election in tonight's run-off. But, you know, 57 isn't bad, nor is 58 if you count Joe Lieberman (RI-CT).

In the 49 days and 3 hours or so until poor Crawford, Texas, gets its missing idiot back, let's pause to remember one of the first unmitigated disasters of his administration: Today is the 7th anniversary of Enron filing for bankruptcy. Also (why is this related? Hmmm), today's Wall Street Journal reports that Ford CEO Alan Mullaly, who yesterday, hat in hand, drove himself to Washington, made more than you did last year: Ford Chairman William Ford Jr. said the company is looking beyond survival to...

And, as many already suspected, it started a year ago: The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research met by conference call on Friday, November 28. The committee maintains a chronology of the beginning and ending dates (months and quarters) of U.S. recessions. The committee determined that a peak in economic activity occurred in the U.S. economy in December 2007. The peak marks the end of the expansion that began in November 2001 and the beginning of a recession. The...

Via reader KT, the Boston Globe picked up on a map comparison of voting patterns this election and cotton agriculture in the antebellum South: The bottom map dates from 1860 (i.e. the eve of the Civil War), and indicates where cotton was produced at that time.... The top map dates from 2008, and shows the results of the recent presidential election, on county level. ... The pattern of pro-Obama counties in those southern states corresponds strikingly with the cotton-picking areas of the 1860s...

I spent part of this afternoon rooting around in my email correspondance from 1999 and 2000. Forgetting the wherefores and whatnots of the emails themselves, just getting into the Outlook files proved difficult. How many passwords does anyone remember from nine years ago? I actually remember a few, but not, unfortunately, the ones I needed. Sure, I found them eventually, but heavens. That's half an hour of my life I'll never get back, and it was my own fault.

Writer Neal Gabler says it's not about Goldwater, it's about McCarthy: McCarthy, Wisconsin's junior senator, was the man who first energized conservatism and made it a force to reckon with. When he burst on the national scene in 1950 waving his list of alleged communists who had supposedly infiltrated Harry Truman's State Department, conservatism was as bland, temperate and feckless as its primary congressional proponent, Ohio Sen. Robert Taft.... McCarthy was another thing entirely. What he lacked in...

Ah, Chicago in December: gray, sleet, snow, wind, rain. Builds character: The snow has begun falling in Chicago, and more is on the way. There are flurries downtown, though nothing is sticking. Matt Smith of the city's Department of Streets & Sanitation said in an e-mail that no trucks have been sent out, noting that "We have good air and ground temps and that could continue to be the case for quite some time." Snow has started to accumulate on the ground and roads in the south suburbs around the...

Via Talking Points Memo, President-Elect Obama will announce Hillary Clinton as his nominee for Secretary of State tomorrow in Chicago: Obama plans to announce the New York senator as part of his national security team at a press conference in Chicago, [Democratic officials] said Saturday. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly for the transition team. In unrelated news, today is the last day of the Atlantic hurricane season.