"City Hall discovers clout"

That was the headline on the front page of the Chicago Tribune today. It was so dripping with sarcasm that I almost called customer service to complain about getting a wet paper.

Clout, specifically patronage hiring, has been going on in Chicago since the reign of King Richard I, at the very least. Certainly, it hasn't slowed down any under King Richard II, although he has been denying it with a straight face for years.

Yesterday, the king finally admitted there is a problem. He had to because federal prosecutors have been investigating the problems, so they are going to come out. The media has been reporting on various scandals of this sort, the most recent of which is the Hired Truck scandal, but the king can blow off the media. It's tougher to ignore the feds.

Last week, James Duff, a big supporter of the king, was sentenced to prison for fraud involving minority set-aside contracts which his company obtained, even though Duff is both white and male, neither of which qualifies him as a minority.

Just after that, the king hired a new chief of staff, Ron Huberman. Huberman is supposedly a straight arrow who has been brought in to put systems in place so that these kinds of scandals don't happen again.

Most people would take that to mean that his job is to make sure the things that cause the scandals don't happen again, but around here, that's not what that means. It's not a scandal until you get caught, so his job is to come up with more creative ways of covering up all this graft and corruption so that the media and federal prosecutors will go away.

The article also pointed out the irony of the fact that the kingdom is currently in court trying to get the Shakman decree overturned. The Shakman decree basically reinforces federal laws against patronage hiring, and specifies which jobs can and cannot be patronage jobs (most cannot). King Richard II feels that the decree is costly to follow and unnecessary because of the federal laws already in place.

I guess we’ll see if the prosecutors are able to find any violations of those laws.