Events

The President will visit Chicago Friday for the first time since taking office. As I've speculated before, he brings with him a temporary flight restriction (TFR) affecting the second-busiest airspace in the world: ALL AIRCRAFT OPERATIONS WITHIN THE 10 NMR AREA LISTED ABOVE, KNOWN AS THE INNER CORE, ARE PROHIBITED EXCEPT FOR: APPROVED LAW ENFORCEMENT, MILITARY AIRCRAFT DIRECTLY SUPPORTING THE UNITED STATES SECRET SERVICE (USSS) AND THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, APPROVED AIR AMBULANCE...

The numbers yesterday turned out to be correct, but there was one aspect of the thaw I forgot to mention. We've had snow on the ground in Chicago since just before New Year's Eve. Just 36 hours ago, O'Hare had 27 cm of the stuff, and all of it melted by dinner time yesterday. Welcome to Chicago's fifth season: Mud.

The official score won't be in until past midnight, but it looks like the temperature at O'Hare today topped 13°C—about 33°C warmer than Thursday morning's -20°C. It's quite a relief. And almost all the snow is gone. In celebration, Parker and I will now take our second long walk of the day.

Now that Illinois has started the long process of removing our ex-governor's name from tollway signs, this essay from the New York Times' Freakonomics blog extolling the virtues of congestion tolling is worth a read: [I]t can be hard to convey this because the theory behind tolling is somewhat complex and counterintuitive. This is too bad, because variable tolling is an excellent public policy. Here's why: the basic economic theory is that when you give out something valuable — in this case, road space...

Chicago O'Hare just recorded a temperature of 4.4°C, the warmest it's been since December 30th. That is all.

The first, from the Poynter Institute, concerns how Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm's staff made Twitter into journalism: I tuned in an Internet broadcast of ... Granholm's annual state of the state speech because it was expected to be laden with energy and environment issues. On impulse I logged into Twitter and asked my followers if there had been a hashtag established for the speech. There was: MiSOTS (Mich. State of the State). To my amazement, the hashtag had been established by the governor's...

In case you were thinking about building one, Rick Gold has calculated the approximate price of constructing your own Death Star: While watching [Star Wars], an odd question popped into my head, “How much would it cost to build the damn thing?”. Impossible to figure out? Truthfully … yes. A complete and utter waste of time, absolutely! So why not try and find out! ... Add it up, and we have a figure of exactly $15,602,022,489,829,821,422,840,226 and 94 cents. Tell you what, I’ll pitch in the 94 cents....

After 31 days of snow cover, 40 days without a temperature above 10°C, 67 days without four consecutive days above 5°C, and not one night above freezing since December 29th, Chicago is finally, finally getting warmer weather: Warming in coming days—a slow process at first—leads to a 50-degree [Fahrenheit] temperature increase by Saturday afternoon. The day may produce the first 50-degree high here since late December. (Skilling wrote that around 11pm CST yesterday when the temperature was heading down...

While I am, with the rest of Chicago, holding my breath to learn how extensively fire damaged the 130-year-old Holy Name Cathedral this morning, I actually hit my head on my shower wall when a reporter at WBEZ described the fire as "tragic." I am almost certain it wasn't a tragic fire, but I'm willing to bend on that one if it turns out (a) a person who (b) through his own character flaws (c) accidentally set it (d) killing himself in the process. There are other scenarios that would be tragic, too. But...

Josh Marshall extends John Thune's $1 trillion stack just a tad higher: [W]hat we've done here is do an apples to apples comparison of current unemployment numbers to the stimulus spending number using the Thune Stacking Formula as a basis of comparison. Here we have dollars stacked on top of each other versus current number of unemployed Americans stacked on top of each other. Good thing the Republican Party has owned up to the last election. I'd hate to think they were a bunch of bitter, ignorant...