War!

Ed Smith voted himself a 6% pay raise. Ed Smith voted his staff a 5% pay raise. Ed Smith voted for the teachers to get a pay raise. Ed Smith wants to take money out of your pocket and food out of your children's mouths to pay for Richie Daley's years of financial mismanagement. He also belittles the job CPD (and CFD) does day in and day out in while shorthanded and while getting the short end of the stick each and every day. Ed Smith is symptomatic of everything that is wrong with Chicago politics in general.

It's about time Ed Smith joined the ranks of Illinois' 10.1% unemployed, don't you think?

Someone asked if the SCC blog could initiate some sort of effort to recall or unseat aldermanic candidates. We had some research done and this is the result:

• An Advisory Referendum can be placed on the ballot for the February 2010 election if a total number of signatures equaling 11% of the previous general election totals can be gathered in a 90 day period preceding the filing deadline.

Unfortunately, the deadline is 16 November. That leaves just about 3 weeks to collect, notarize, bind and file the required number of signatures. The magic number?

• 121,660 signatures

That's a lot of signatures for an advisory referendum. But it's doable, and here's the first step:
Reduce Alderman Petition 2009

And here's what has to be overcome:

• 10,000 cops? If everyone did a sheet, that's 100,000 signatures. Cops being cops though, figure on less than 50% participation. That means everyone who did contribute would have to get 2 or 3 sheets.
• 2,400 firefighters? That would be another 24,000 signatures. Again, the under 50% participation though would mean 3 sheets per participating firefighter.
• Other unhappy city dwellers and regular people visiting the site might be able to push another few thousand signatures. The Machine would react badly to this initiative, so estimate double the number of signatures to survive the inevitable challenges.
• You couldn't circulate these at work, you couldn't mail them around via Department mail, and to be sure of not getting duplicate signatures, you'd have to make sure you got all the signatures from people unassociated with the Department - it would have to be friends, neighbors, acquaintances outside of work.
  

And that's not even counting the fact that a point person is needed, someone willing to step up and collect these things, bind them, have them notarized and deliver them in person before 16 November. It's a big job. But the payoff in terms of shaking the political establishment would be monstrous.