Illinois teachers: Don’t forget that every Tuesday is Pension Call Tuesday. We’ll post the phone number or email of an Illinois Representative and you make the call. “Our pension benefits are constitutionally protected. As Dick Ingram, the head of TRS said, there is no funding crisis. We have always paid our share. And it was a promise you made to the teachers of this state.”
Message to John Kass, Tribune columnist (Don’t we miss Mike Royko?). Why don’t you take a cut in pay. I mean your paper is in trouble and you can help. You want Chicago teachers to work for $4 an hour. We all should make a sacrifice. Right, John?
H/T to Jersey Jazzman: Goodnight Irene.
David Reber: Money matters. Reality matters. Whether it’s closing the achievement gap or flying to Mars, giant leaps don’t come cheap. And they don’t come because of magical thinking. That much should be obvious to anyone. It’s not rocket science.
“Nick Ashford and Jerry Leiber created a soundtrack for a multi-racial America,” says Mark Naison.
In retrospect, the most consequential event of the past ten years may not have been 9/11 or the Iraq War but the looting of the American economy by those in power in Washington and on Wall Street. This was happening in plain sight—or so we can now see from a distance. At the time, we were so caught up in Al Qaeda’s external threat to America that we didn’t pay proper attention to the more prosaic threats within.
In such an alternative telling of the decade’s history, the key move Bush made after 9/11 had nothing to do with military strategy or national-security policy. It was instead his considered decision to rule out shared sacrifice as a governing principle for the fight ahead. Sacrifice was high among the unifying ideals that many Americans hoped would emerge from the rubble of ground zero, where so many Good Samaritans had practiced it. But the president scuttled the notion on the first weekend after the attack, telling Americans that it was his “hope” that “they make no sacrifice whatsoever” beyond, perhaps, tolerating enhanced airline security. Few leaders in either party contradicted him. Bush would soon implore us to “get down to Disney World in Florida” and would even lend his image to a travel-industry ad promoting tourism. Our marching orders were to go shopping. Frank Rich
Fred Klonsky 
Jack Kass.