Events

...just left $153 million on the table: Chicago and CTA officials have only themselves to blame for forfeiting a $153 million federal grant pegged to help ease traffic gridlock, U.S. transportation officials said Thursday. The fumble marks a major setback in efforts to improve mobility in the nation's second most congested region. It means Chicago will be forced to put on hold a promising plan that would use bus-only lanes, special quick-boarding stations and high-tech traffic signals until city...

The soon-to-be ex-governor of Illinois got one step closer to getting thrown out this morning: The Illinois House impeachment committee has drafted a report calling for the impeachment of Gov. Rod Blagojevich. The report could still be amended when the committee meets later today. But it is expected to be sent to the full House, which would then take up impeachment of the governor. In the 69-page report, committee members noted that the governor refused to testify and rebut any of the allegations...

Via reader TW, The Onion on Apple's latest innovation.

This short, from Ball State University graduate Jaron Henrie-McCrea, won the 2005 Student Academy Award in the Experimental category:

No details yet, but it looks like "Tombstone" will get to sit after all. Update: OK, not quite, but either the Majority Leader blundered today, or he blundered yesterday. It's not easy to tell.

I have gone on the record in my opinion that both Roland Burris and Rod Blagojevich are unqualified hacks not fit for public office. I've further gone on the record saying Blagojevich should not have appointed anyone to fill Obama's U.S. Senate seat after being arrested for corruption last month, and that anyone accepting such an appointment would remove all doubt as to the appointee's vanity, stupidity, and lack of qualification for the office. The sad fact is, though, nothing has persuaded me that...

Via Paul Krugman, imagine what would have happened had the Greedy Old Party (GOP) succeeded in pushing through Social Security privitization. But why imagine? We can just look at Italy: Italy did for retirement financing what President George W. Bush couldn’t do in the U.S.: It privatized part of its social security system. The timing couldn't have been worse. The global market meltdown has created losses for those who agreed to shift their contributions from a government severance payment plan to...

Even though the final vote count in the Minnesota U.S. Senate race put Franken 225 votes ahead last night, incumbent Norm Coleman asked the state Supreme Court for one last chance to count an additional 900 ballots. Today the court said, unanimously, "bugger off, you right prat." OK, they were more polite than that: The record before us with respect to petitioners' motion demonstrates that local election officials have acted diligently and in accordance with our orders, and together with the candidates...

The Senate adjourned Friday after playing "work-to-rule" to prevent the President from making recess appointments for almost two years: Among the many standoffs between congressional Democrats and Bush, the issue of interim appointments was one -- possibly the only one -- where Democrats truly had the upper hand under the Constitution. Earlier this decade, annoyed that Senate Democrats were stalling his nominees to the appeals courts, Bush used his so-called recess appointment authority to name...

The Minnesota Canvassing Board is expected tomorrow to declare Democrat Al Franken the winner of the state's U.S. Senate election by a margin of 225 votes: It took only an hour Saturday afternoon for election officials to count 933 absentee ballots that all sides had agreed were wrongly rejected. Franken won 52 percent of them and Coleman captured 33 percent (the rest went to other candidates or cast no vote in the Senate race). It was a surprisingly muscular margin that was reflected in the glum looks...