America's Fracking Mayor: Rahm Emanuel

Sandra Steingraber gave an excellent comment for my new piece about Chicago's energy aggregation contract. 

I grew up Illinois coal country, just downwind from a massive, coal-burning power plant that sent all its power north to Chicago. When I was in high school, in the 1970s, that plant was the biggest polluter in the state, and everyone in my home town of Pekin all suffered from breathing its emissions. My 84-year-old mom, a life-long non-smoker, has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and emphysema. And because that coal, when it burned, sent mercury raining down on our river, the local fish became too poisoned to eat.

Unfortunately, Chicago residents have been sold a bill of goods by officials who misrepresented a switch from coal to natural gas as 'clean' energy. Natural gas, predominately extracted by fracking, is anything but clean, and once again, people far from Chicagoland will suffer so that Chicagoans can turn on the lights. This time, it's Pennsylvania children living in the shale fields, rather than downstate Illinois kids living by the strip mines, whose health will be sacrificed. So, how is that progress?

For the climate, extraction by fracking results in tremendous leakage of methane, a greenhouse gas 86 times more damaging for the climate than carbon dioxide over 20 years. For people, those living near fracking suffer a range of health ailments including respiratory illnesses, birth defects, and the threat of contaminated water and earthquakes. Chicagoans deserve better than false representations of natural gas as a clean power source; they need true leadership that boldly moves to renewable energy.

It's impossible to take Rahm seriously as an environmental leader after he sold fracking as clean energy. Read the rest at HuffingtonPost.

Right wing blog caught plagiarizing me. Accuses me of lying but google cache tells all.

I'm going to warn you up front that this is a petty, trivial post but you may get a laugh out of it like I did.

Friday evening I wrote on my blog about a proposal to rename a major Chicago roadway after Nelson Mandela. It's a good idea from a good Illinois State Representative, La Shawn Ford.

Sunday morning I saw a twitter link for the conservative blog, Illinois Review, writing the same thing. Or, copy-and-pasting the same because it was taken entirely from my blog and the press release. They just added a few lines at the end trashing Representative Ford, of course.

The big giveaway was their use of the distinctive line from my blog that, "the change would put Mandela's name on the tip of many Chicagoan's tongues daily." They also used the same photo I took from HuffingtonPost, who took it from AP. But, they didn't link back to my blog! Not a big deal, but bad netiquette.

Illinois Review does some original content, but it's part of the network of conservative blogs that spam the internet by copy-and-pasting stories from each other while often obscuring the original source (presumably Grover Norquist's underground bunker). It's an effective tactic for spreading the latest talking points and manipulating google searches.

I decided to leave a comment with a link back to my blog so their readers could see where they found the story. It wasn't approved. I tried again. It still didn't show up but they did approve a couple comments trashing Mandela because what else do you expect?

Since they wouldn't even approve a link to my blog as a comment (and I was procrastinating doing real work) I decided to needle them a little by calling them out on twitter.

Pretty blatant plagiarizing of my blog without attribution by @IllinoisReview http://t.co/JpCdrMhY4I @ILBlogNetwork
— Will Reynolds (@willinois) December 7, 2013

At this point, Illinois Review could have done several things and I never would have given it another thought. They could have:
1) Added a link with or without an apology.
2) Not responded.
3) Changed the post without comment.

What do they do instead? Deny it! They claim it all came from the press release. Then they covered their tracks by editing to remove the phrases and picture taken from my blog. So I respond...

I see you just edited to remove sentences obviously taken from my blog but still no link. You stay classy @IllinoisReview
— Will Reynolds (@willinois) December 7, 2013

And then this happens.



They accuse me of lying! That's when I got pissed. Not giving a link back is merely rude. Editing a post and then accusing me of making the whole thing up crosses a line!

I responded: "lol @IllinoisReview It's not a big deal unless you make it worse by lying. Google cache and screen caps exist." That warning may be why they deleted their end of our twitter exchange, once again covering their tracks. But google cache. I took a screen cap of the original plagiarized post they took down.

You can click to enlarge the screen cap from google cache and compare it to the edited version online now. The new version looks like it came directly from the press release, as they claim. The original makes it very obvious that they copied my blog.

Everyone borrows and modifies phrases now and then. It's no big deal. What's the point of lying about where you found a story, trying to cover it up, and then accusing me of lying when I call them on it? WTF?

It's the contagious Fox News mentality. Fox misleads viewers daily and never makes a correction. This is the perfect example of why no amount of scientific studies will ever convince the hard core right-wing talk radio crowd that climate change is real. They would rather make up new lies to cover their tracks before ever admitting they're wrong.

Now I'm forced to defend my reputation since they tried to make me look like some kind of crazy person making up stories. Now the whole exchange and screencaped proof is here so everyone can laugh at Illinois Review. If you're going to create an entire blog by copy-and-pasting stories, at least link back to your source, even when it's a liberal tree-hugger blog.

Also, I strongly recommend you sign Representative Ford's online petition to rename Cicero Avenue in honor of Nelson Mandela. Mostly because it's a good idea, but also because it will annoy the lying plagiarizers at Illinois Review whenever they drive by a sign for Mandela Road.

Representative Proposes Naming a Chicago Street "Mandela Road"

Illinois State Representative La Shawn Ford is proposing renaming Cicero Avenue in Chicago to honor Nelson Mandela. His press release states:

"Illinois Route 50 is the perfect state highway to be renamed, as it crosses so many different communities and will remind us of the almost miraculous work that Nelson Mandela undertook as he brought together people in his own country and all over the world to advance peace, democracy and opportunity. His work should be an inspiration for us to work for those same goals."

At 66 miles long, Cicero is certainly no side road. The change would put Mandela's name on the tip of many Chicagoan's tongues daily. Ford has an online petition to support his proposal.

I think it's an excellent idea! The old Roman Senator Cicero won't mind since he still has the Illinois town named after him. Mandela Road will have more meaning to young people who should be taught about the man's legacy.

Hundreds of thousands greeted Mandela during his 1993 visit to Chicago. Now the city has another chance to honor him.

I've been recommending that people read Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, if you haven't already. It's exciting as a movement history, a narrative of his time in prison, and even his early tribal upbringing was like a story from another world. Read it now or give it to someone for Christmas. The world should now his true story.

Definition: South Loop

South Loop: A rapidly expanding neighborhood on the southern edge of downtown Chicago, plus points further south which prefer to be associated with the downtown loop rather than other South Side neighborhoods.

ex: "My new restaurant is two miles south of Congress, but I'm calling its location South Loop so northenders won't be afraid to come."

Innovative bike lane design enters Chicago's Loop. Could it work in Springfield?

This weekend, I noticed crews painting an interesting bike lane layout in downtown Chicago. I snapped this picture in the South Loop on Dearborn, just south of Harrison.



After taking a second look, I noticed that the lane uses ideas I've heard about but haven't seen together in action. First, it's a two lane bicycle path, even though car traffic on Dearborn is one-way.

The bike lane is along the curb. If you look in the background, you'll see that there's still off-the-curbside street parking. There's a striped buffer zone in between the parking lane and the bike lane so that no one hits a biker while they open the car door. Pretty smart.

It didn't take a monstrous multi-million dollar construction project either. It just took a weekend of work crews repainting lines. It eliminates one car lane but traffic wasn't too crowded on this road anyway.

The bike lane will go through downtown Chicago. I found the city press release and noticed this quote:

“The Dearborn Street two-way protected bike lane project will balance roadway space to ensure pedestrians, transit users, bicyclists and motorists can travel along and across the street safely,” Klein said.

The goal of balancing pedestrian, bicycle and motor use reminds me of a very similarly worded recommendation in Springfield's SDAT study.

Roads in downtown Springfield cater to one type of user. They're designed for workers to get in and out of downtown as quickly as possible. That's understandable since there's a large population who commute from the edge of town, or the surrounding small towns, and go home as soon as the workday ends.

The many one-ways are not so convenient for out-of-town visitors, or anyone attempting to travel from one downtown destination to another. The clear message communicated by Springfield's downtown roads is, "get in and out fast, but don't stick around."

Springfield's narrow focus on cars is a barrier to downtown bike lanes as well. Some city leaders react with shocked indignation at the suggestion of removing a little curbside parking or painting new stripes on a road. But, reaching the goals of attracting new people and business activity to downtown requires rethinking 30-year old assumptions about transportation.

Edit: I'm adding a pic with a better view of the parking lane and buffer zone...

Dear Chicago, SPRINGFIELD IS NOT IN SOUTHERN ILLINOIS. Let me show you.

I love Chicago. It's a magnificent city full of beautiful people. But, without going into any details, I was again reminded today of the propensity of my friends in the Chicagoland area to view anything south of their city as "Southern Illinois." For example, the time I heard a top legislative leader from Chicago refer to a crowd in Springfield as "Southern Illinois Democrats."

Wrong!

I marked up this map of Illinois to help illustrate. You can click to get a larger view on Flickr. Pay attention, because this is something I've gotten consultant money to explain to people in Chicago. I divided a state map into equal thirds marked by blue lines. The red line is the halfway point between north and south.



You'll notice that Springfield is right there in the middle. That makes it Central Illinois. Cities in the northern half of the state, like Champaign and Springfield, are not in southern Illinois just because they're a long drive from Chicago. No, it really doesn't matter that it took you over three hours to get here. It's still not appropriate to describe anyone or any town near that red line as being part of Southern Illinois.

I remember how amazed many Southern Illinois University at Carbondale students who had recently arrived from Chicago were upon learning that Illinois borders a town as far south as St. Louis. You could really blow their mind by pointing out that, from Carbondale, it's a shorter drive to Memphis than Chicago.

Many people believe the divide between central and southern Illinois is somewhere around Effingham where the regional cultural differences start to become more pronounced. People who live farther south sometimes argue that it's Mount Vernon. The blue line on the map is between the two.

To use a purely hypothetical example, it would be in no way appropriate to say that Congressional candidate David Gill is from southern Illinois, since he hails from the central Illinois town of Bloomington/Normal, which is almost in the northern third of the state. It would also not be accurate to say that anything but a small portion of the new 13th Congressional district is in southern Illinois. It's mostly a central Illinois district which extends down to the edge of southwestern Illinois.

Let's say you're a first-time candidate for statewide office from Chicago or its suburbs, and you mistakenly tell an audience in Springfield, Peoria, or Danville that they're from Southern Illinois. This will be translated in the minds of the audience into something like, "I think the entire world revolves around the city of Chicago, I have no clue about the rest of the state because I've never been here before, and I will immediately forget your podunk town ever existed as soon as I'm elected statewide."

Of course, that candidate probably won't be elected because, believe it or not, it's difficult to win statewide if you don't at least make a fair showing in downstate. It might also help if they learn the correct Illinois pronunciation of towns such as Athens, Cairo, Pana, and Lebanon, among others.

Where then, is downstate Illinois? That's a dispute no number of farm town bar fights will ever settle. Many Illinoisans, myself included, use downstate as a catch-all term for anything outside the Chicagoland area. That would make someplace along the Mississippi, like Rock Island/Moline, part of downstate even though they're in the north.

I hope this blog has been helpful. If you're from Chicago and you disagree with what I've written then please realize that you are wrong. Just accept that you're wrong. :)

Here's Ryan Adams singing Dear Chicago.