http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/loca ... 4576.story

I hope he buries these motherfuckers -- Madigan, O'Halloran, Arroyo, all of them.

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-- source

The only strike against Clifford is that he was still happy to take $700,000 in hush money. But yeah, take Madigan the fuck down. Rail transit in Chicago is pretty important and going to get more important; Metra has bigger things to worry about than sinecures for some South Side Irish cronies. You couldn't make the Metra Electric not smell like pee, but you can do this.

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Wow that was some testimony he gave. That's the kind of shit people in Illinois should be getting their dander up over. Not big news but Mike Madigan is a fucking piece of shit. How aren't people asking for his ass on a platter along with the entire Metra board? Why isn't his Caller Bob daughter investigating this ?

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

It aint the six minutes. Its what happens in those six minutes.

Obviously the answer is fully contained in the question.

Curious Hair's good point about taking the hush money notwithstanding, I think Alex Clifford should run for governor. Seriously.

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Is falling on the sword with no job prospect in hand a good idea? I don't know how employable guys like this are after "coming clean" because it is the right thing to do. Taking the money was probably the only option.

You're right...maybe not employable, but electable. Probably wishful thinking though.

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Electable to what? He's a railroad bureaucrat, and by most accounts sort of a dictatorial one -- though I suppose you sort of have to be when your job is to make the trains run on time. It's a pretty specialized thing to do, almost the kind of thing you do in opposition to elected politics. I'm not sure what kind of base he'd have: to the Democratic machine, he just fucked them over, to the collar-county Republicans, he ran a government agency that taxes them for something they may not use, and to downstate, he's from Chicago. He came here from Los Angeles (there's a joke here) to clean up a mess and will probably just go to another place when one opens up. Too bad.

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Also, I'm pretty sure the RTA exists solely for patronage and corruption, since it certainly doesn't seem like its job is, you know, coordinating transit. Metra and the CTA should be working together much more closely than they are, but there are all these complicated political/racial dynamics that stop them from getting on the same page. That and, you know, graft. You could say they have different roles, with one getting people into the city and the other getting them around it, but that ignores that Metra has to fill all the holes that the L doesn't get to, particularly on the South Side, and some of those stations are in such terrible shape and so underused that you wonder why they're even there. Then there's the transfer point at Jeff Park, which would be great but for the fact that Northwest trains never actually stop there, stopping widely being regarded by most experts as a critical part of changing trains. Meanwhile, you have these suburban board members and do-nothing cronies fiddling away on stupid projects like connecting Joliet to Schaumburg. OH, FINALLY. That's what expressways are for. Which friend is getting the money for these bullshit studies?

We could have a hell of a comprehensive railroad system if all these people realized they were in the business of people-moving, but Metra is too beset with funny old men who want to play with the world's biggest model train set and with Madigan's dopes who suck up money for nothing.

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That's why it's so amusing that people seemed so concerned about a conflict of interest if she were running for governor when they elect her to a conflict of interest every four years anyway.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

This story keeps getting more disgusting...people go to jail over way less than this. Absolutely sickening.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/loca ... 0022.story

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opin ... 0672.story

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The RTA is useless.

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