Events

Former Illinois Governor George Ryan will join a growing club of incarcerated Illinois politicians next Wednesday: A federal appeals court today denied former Gov. George Ryan's bid to remain free on bail while he asks the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn his corruption conviction. The ruling by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago increases the likelihood that Ryan must report to prison by Nov. 7. He can still ask the U.S. Supreme Court to extend his bail, however.

My friend Sean visited over the weekend and brought with him a stuffed toy his wife made for Parker. The results were predictable, though Parker dispatched this one much faster than the vet toy he got for his birthday: Half an hour later: The next morning: Thank you anyway, Val. Parker said the toy was delicious. (Just don't ask me about his walk that evening.)

From this past weekend, in Lincoln Park, Chicago: Incidentally, the building behind him is the Parker School.

The Chicago Tribune ran an editorial Sunday calling for a recall amendment to the Illinois constitution. My response: Regardless of what you think of Blagojevich's performance, Illinois needs a recall amendment like a fish needs a bicycle. Illinois has two perfectly adequate constitutional mechanisms for removing a governor: election and impeachment. If the governor is really all that bad, let the legislature impeach him. If not, we'll have a referendum on his performance soon enough—and his critics can...

No, not those Sox; the other Sox. One curse down; one to go.

The splash of sunlight on Parker's face makes me think he's probably a pretty happy dog, despite the crate: He got some additional training this week, mostly a review of the basics (heel, sit, down, stay), but with an emphasis on duration. So I'm proud to report he can now stay for 10 minutes while I kick a tennis ball around him. Inside he'll wait almost 45 minutes before complaining. Really, though, I needed the reveiw. I've been too lax, it seems, allowing him to get away with a lot of bad behavior....

Congress has passed legislation creating a national registry of people with ALS: The legislation would establish the first ever national patient registry of people with Lou Gehrig’s Disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to be administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The registry would collect information leading to the cause, treatment and cure of the deadly neurological disease that took the life of baseball legend Lou Gehrig in 1941. In tangentially-related news, Saturday's...

My body doesn't know if I got up this morning at 7 or midnight. I can't decide whether or not I'm hungry. And because I neglected to check email for two days, I had 980 messages totalling over 600 MB (one of my friends sent me the same...photos...four...times), of which 650 were spam. I will now collect my dog.

I'm traveling this week. Three guesses where: So far it's been great. It only rained a bit on Thursday. Today I was on a train most of the day, as I will be tomorrow. Exhausting but fun. More later.

He nails it: People claim to be shocked by the Bush administration's general incompetence. But disinterest in good government has long been a principle of modern conservatism. In "The Conscience of a Conservative," published in 1960, Barry Goldwater wrote that "I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size." People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration's efforts to disenfranchise minority groups, under the pretense of combating...