Well, you can’t say I don’t know when to Be There. What an entertaining week it’s been for me, here in the old hometown. CD got her Chitown on, and it’s just got my brains a-stirrin. Heh, there haven’t been any riots between supporters of the two hometown candidates now that it’s all over (nevermind that ’convention’ thingee) and for the most part, people seem genial and happy that One of Ours is going to go all the way. Seriously- outside of these evil, hateful wars we have in the blogosphere, Dems I spoke with this week seemed pretty happy and satisfied; some even hopeful that the “Dream Ticket” is still possible, some happy that the SB finally Q (which I guess I missed, but anyway). Heh, I kept my cards close to the vest all week; I wanted to listen and perceive. Biggest thing I noticed: even here, in the Windy City for which Da Mayor has slaughtered many enemies to economically buttress and protect, the Recession is here. That’s one thing I really hate about our gummint today: you just can’t trust anything they tell us about “the economy” and are often reduced to anecdotes and personal impressions. So let’s reduce.  Read more 

Christ. At least the Times and ABC picked this up, for once. Sid said yesterday, when asked by a particularly long winded activist on the topic, paper is the only way. Let’s all come to our senses and admit that we need real reform, yesterday. If the elections don’t come out the way all the polls are saying they will, no one can claim they weren’t warned:

Another stunning security breach has been exposed in our nation’s electoral system, The BRAD BLOG has learned, as the online voter registration database — containing the personal information of some 1.5 million voters in Chicago — has been found to be vulnerable to both downloading and hacking.

The flawed electronic database which allowed the retrieval and modification of personal voter information — including social security numbers and birthdates of Chicago voters — was discovered recently by members of the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project (IBIP), a non-partisan group of Election Integrity advocates.

IBIP members say they were not only able to get full editing access to the online database, they also found they could modify the records for registered voters, setting them to inactive and otherwise changing addresses and other key information fields.
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