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The city of Chicago is near insolvency. City workers are bracing for pay and benefit cuts. And Rich Daley, the former mayor who had his behind kissed by the powerful in this town and by much of the media for two decades, has an inside deal that should make sane people sick to their stomachs:

An eventual pension of more than $180,000 for life, according to a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation.

Daley did it on the sneak, our reporters found….

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…it is tempting for progressives to dismiss complaints about redistribution of wealth as ignorant or hypocritical, as in many cases they probably are. Yet all naïveté about public budgets aside, a strong presumption in favor of being able to keep the money you earn is a valuable and powerful thing. Progressives who embrace the concept of wealth redistribution on egalitarian grounds, or who join the refrain of “tax the rich” as the main solution to our fiscal and economic problems, tend to miss the many ways in which economic unfairness can remain untouched or even affirmed by redistributive policies….

It’s important to focus rhetoric and activism on making the rich “pay their fair share”””especially during this austerity season, in which the practical alternative is watching services for the poor dramatically cut….

This can’t, however, be the final analysis of redistributive policies. Throughout the Old Testament, inequality itself is hardly the only issue. There is also the question of fair access to the means of making a living””which, in the Old Testament world, means fair access to land ownership.

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Spain’s sickly economy faces a “crisis of huge proportions”, a minister said on Friday, as unemployment hit its highest level in two decades and Standard and Poor’s weighed in with a two-notch downgrade of the government’s debt.

Spain’s unemployment rate shot up to 24 percent in the first quarter, the highest level since the early 1990s and one of the worst jobless figures in the world. Retail sales slumped for the twenty-first consecutive month.

“The figures are terrible for everyone and terrible for the government … Spain is in a crisis of huge proportions,” Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said in a radio interview.

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With economic growth still anaemic and tax revenue down, governments are hoping that they can find additional funds by allowing more gambling.

In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo is proposing to change the state Constitution in order to legalize commercial casinos.

In Michigan two separate casino development campaigns are under way to persuade voters, who have to approve new casinos, to allow a total of 15 new casinos across the state….

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Seven years after Florida adopted its sweeping self-defense law, the shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, has put that law at the center of an increasingly angry debate over how he was killed and whether law enforcement has the authority to charge the man who killed him.

The law, called Stand Your Ground, is one of 21 such laws around the country, many of them passed within the last few years. In Florida, it was pushed heavily by the National Rifle Association but opposed vigorously by law enforcement.

It gives the benefit of the doubt to a person who claims self-defense, regardless of whether the killing takes place on a street, in a car or in a bar ”” not just in one’s home, the standard cited in more restrictive laws. In Florida, if people feel they are in imminent danger from being killed or badly injured, they do not have to retreat, even if it would seem reasonable to do so. They have the right to “stand their ground” and protect themselves.

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“What concerns us is the message that it sends,” said Atheist of Florida member Rob Curry. “A very chilling message that, if you’re not a Christian, if you don’t believe as we do, then you’re not welcome.”

Curry’s referring to a road-anointing performed on CR 98 last year as part of the “Polk Under Prayer” campaign, where Christians poured olive oil on the asphalt and prayed over it, calling for a revival in the area.

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It is crisis time in Trenton, where the city is literally running out of toilet paper.

“It’s about one of the last boxes of toilet paper we have for the city buildings,” said maintenance supervisor Paul Heater, pointing to a large box.

Supplies have dwindled down to almost nothing because City Council has failed to approve the mayor’s $42,000 order for paper products.

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It was not a good week for New York’s cities and counties.

On Monday, Rockland County sent a delegation to Albany to ask for the authority to close its widening budget deficit by issuing bonds backed by a sales tax increase.

On Tuesday, Suffolk County, one of the largest counties outside New York City, projected a $530 million deficit over a three-year period and declared a financial emergency. Its Long Island neighbor, Nassau County, is already so troubled that a state oversight board seized control of its finances last year.

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James Q. Wilson, a political scientist who coauthored the influential “Broken Windows” article in The Atlantic Monthly in 1982, which became a touchstone for the move toward community policing in Boston and cities across the country, died early this morning in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

He was being treated for leukemia, according to a family friend.

Dr. Wilson, who was 80 and lived North Andover, returned to Boston a few years ago to become the first senior fellow at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College, and a distinguished scholar in the college’s political science department.

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New Jersey’s attorney general told Muslim leaders Saturday that he was still looking into the extent of New York Police Department surveillance operations in the state, yet stopped short of promising a formal investigation during a meeting that both sides characterized as productive.

Leaders from different New Jersey Muslim organizations met with Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa and state and federal law enforcement officials for nearly three hours in Trenton to discuss concerns over the NYPD’s activities in the state.

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Americans love to laugh at ridiculous regulations. A Florida law requires vending-machine labels to urge the public to file a report if the label is not there. The Federal Railroad Administration insists that all trains must be painted with an “F” at the front, so you can tell which end is which. Bureaucratic busybodies in Bethesda, Maryland, have shut down children’s lemonade stands because the enterprising young moppets did not have trading licences. The list goes hilariously on.

But red tape in America is no laughing matter. The problem is not the rules that are self-evidently absurd. It is the ones that sound reasonable on their own but impose a huge burden collectively. America is meant to be the home of laissez-faire. Unlike Europeans, whose lives have long been circumscribed by meddling governments and diktats from Brussels, Americans are supposed to be free to choose, for better or for worse. Yet for some time America has been straying from this ideal.

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KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At FDR Public School on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Abounding Grace Ministries held what could be one of its last worship services in the building. The nondenominational church has been renting worship space here for the last three years. Pastor Rick Del Rio says the reasonable rent was critical to his predominantly low-income congregation.

REV. RICK DEL RIO (Pastor, Abounding Grace Ministries): It’s the only thing we could afford. Two, it becomes that place where families can unite, and we really cultivate those relationships so that it is an oasis.

LAWTON: Del Rio describes his church as a source of stability in the neighborhood and says the city’s policy is unfair to the people he serves.

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In Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?, Pasi Sahlberg explains how his nation’s schools became successful. A government official, researcher, and former mathematics and science teacher, Sahlberg attributes the improvement of Finnish schools to bold decisions made in the 1960s and 1970s. Finland’s story is important, he writes, because “it gives hope to those who are losing their faith in public education.”

Detractors say that Finland performs well academically because it is ethnically homogeneous, but Sahlberg responds that “the same holds true for Japan, Shanghai or Korea,” which are admired by corporate reformers for their emphasis on testing. To detractors who say that Finland, with its population of 5.5 million people, is too small to serve as a model, Sahlberg responds that “about 30 states of the United States have a population close to or less than Finland.”

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I am grieved that New York City is planning to take the unwise step of removing 68 churches from the spaces that they rent in public schools. It is my conviction that those churches housed in schools are invaluable assets to the neighborhoods that they serve. Churches have long been seen as positive additions to communities. Family stability, resources for those in need, and compassion for the marginalized are all positive influences that neighborhood churches provide. There are many with first-hand experience who will claim that the presence of churches in a neighborhood can lead to a drop in crime.

The great diversity of our city means that we will never all agree completely on anything. And we cherish our city’s reputation for tolerance of differing opinions and beliefs. Therefore, we should all mourn if disagreement with certain beliefs of the church is allowed to unduly influence the formation of just policy and practice.

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Roswell, Georgia–The waiting list for subsidized housing here, just 40 families long a year ago, is up to 500. The number of children eligible for free or reduced lunch is up 50%. A little more than a year ago, the Methodist church began seminars for marriages strained by job losses.

Roswell is a pre-Civil War cotton mill town that grew into a wealthy bedroom community of Atlanta as the metro area prospered. More than half the city’s 88,000 residents have four-year college degrees. But Roswell sits in a region with an unusually severe case of long-term unemployment: About 40% of the unemployed in the Atlanta metro area in 2010, the most recent local data available, were out of work for a year or more versus the national average of 29%.

One of them is Marcy Bronner, 57 years old. When she lost her job at Pennzoil back in 2000, it took her seven months to find a new one at Quintiles, a bio- and pharmaceutical-services company….

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Crime is down in this city on the desert fringe of Los Angeles County, and Mayor R. Rex Parris is sure he knows one reason: It’s the chirping….

The chirps subconsciously discourage criminality, Mr. Parris says: “Everybody is now in a better mood, a better place.”

Those chirps aren’t from here. The mayor bought them in recordings from England, and for the past 10 months he has had his city play them over 70 speakers along a half mile of Lancaster Boulevard, blended with mellow synthesizer tones, five hours a day.

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The elaborate Nativity scenes rose in a city park along the oceanfront here every December for nearly six decades. More than a dozen life-size dioramas depicted the Annunciation, Mary and Joseph being turned away at the inn and, of course, the manger.

This always angered Damon Vix, who worked off and on in Santa Monica and considers himself a devout atheist, so to speak. How could it be, he asked himself each year, that the city could condone such an overtly religious message?

So, a few years ago, he petitioned the city and received his own space, using it to put up a sign offering “Reason’s Greetings.” But this year, he wanted more. Mr. Vix gathered a few supporters and applied for dozens of spaces in Palisades Park, a patch of green on a bluff overlooking the sandy beaches that this city is famous for.

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Continuing the region’s recent streak of national recognition, greater Charleston has been tagged as one of the economically healthiest metropolitan statistical areas in the country.

The Charleston-North Charleston MSA ranked 11th in the nonpartisan Milken Institute’s “Best-Performing Cities 2011,” up from 19th last year and from 30th in 2009….

Charleston climbed to just outside the top 10 on the strength of its “vibrant aerospace sector,” “stable military presence” and other high-tech, high-skill employers, according to the report.

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The Sumner County Board of Education settled a lawsuit with the American Civil Liberties Union over teacher-led prayer and other religious activity in public schools.

This is the third time in three years that the ACLU has taken a Middle Tennessee school district to court over religion. The Sumner suit was filed in May on behalf of nine students who complained that teachers were leading prayer in classrooms, religious groups were distributing Bibles, school events were being held in churches, and schools were allowing local churches to send youth ministers into the lunchrooms to preach to children, unsupervised.

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The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a Bronx church’s case on whether it can hold worship services in New York City public schools.

The decision ends a 16-year legal battle over the rights of churches in city schools and means 160 area churches have roughly two months to find new places to hold worship services.
Lawyers for the Bronx Household of Faith, an evangelical congregation that meets at P.S. 15 in the Bronx, filed a petition in late September asking the court to review a June appeals-court ruling barring churches from holding worship services on school property.

Now that congregation, along with dozens of others, has until Feb. 12 to find a substitute house of worship.

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The vote by officials in Alabama’s most populous county occurred about a month after Pennsylvania’s capital of Harrisburg sought court protection citing millions in overdue bond payments tied to a trash-to-energy incinerator. A Jefferson filing would eclipse that of California’s Orange County in 1994. The action might reignite concerns among investors over defaults in the $2.9 trillion U.S. municipal bond market.

“It’s going to create attention-grabbing headlines, and the question is how retail investors react,” Peter Hayes, a managing director at BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager and the owner of $95.6 billion of municipal bonds, said before today’s decision.

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Update: I found the following map helpful in terms of locating where Jefferson County is.

Read it all. Charleston Mayor Joe Riley is running to serve for his tenth term. You can take it to the bank that he will win–KSH.

Update: You may find nine election day photos here.

More Oregon public schools are opening up their buildings for church services to bring in extra income.

Eight of the state’s 10 biggest districts rent out buildings for services.

While some believe that school-based churches violate the Constitutional separation between church and state, courts generally have found the practice to be legal. The U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that as long as districts are renting out spaces to outside organizations, it would be discriminatory to ban religious groups.

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After the iPhone and the iPad, the iZone is a different kind of design experiment.

It’s New York’s attempt to reinvent an inner-city school.

The iZone project – or Innovation Zone – is challenging state schools in New York City to rip up the rule book.

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After [Education Secretary Arne] Duncan’s visit there was some back and forth between the Obama administration and Oregon City on how the money should be spent. But ultimately, the Department of Education said it should be given to teachers as direct bonuses. It also said it wanted to restrict the funds to schools with lots of low-income students, which would have excluded half of Oregon City’s schools.

Oregon City wanted to put the money into a shared fund, possibly for teachers’ continuing education.

Nancy Noice, president of the Oregon City teachers union, said one solution the feds proposed was that employees hand their bonuses back to the district. But Noice says that didn’t seem workable.

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In another political aftershock from the summer’s rare East Coast earthquake, a bid by the mayor of Washington to secure federal aid for the damaged Washington National Cathedral is drawing criticism from those who say it runs counter to separation of church and state.

Mayor Vincent C. Gray is seeking $15 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for repairs to the cathedral, which was seriously damaged in the 5.8 temblor Aug. 23.

But Joseph L. Conn, director of communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, blogged on the organization’s website, “Asking the taxpayers to pick up the tab sets a very bad precedent and jeopardizes a critically important edifice that protects us all: the wall of separation between church and state.”

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Ald. Edward Burke, chairman of the City Council Finance Committee, said he wanted to exempt religious institutions and their schools from paying their water bills….

“We may have a political issue” with charging religious organizations for water, Burke told [Mayor Rahm] Emanuel’s finance team. “You might think about continuing waivers for some small Catholic parish or Lutheran parish or synagogue that is hard-pressed and see what the dollar-effect might be.”

Parochial schools and other religious institutions would pay about $7 million a year under Emanuel’s proposed changes, while public schools would continue to get free water, Budget Director Alexandra Holt said.

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Prompted by civil liberties groups, a taxpayer-supported homeless shelter in the nation’s capital will no longer require its clients to attend religious services.

“We’re pleased that the D.C. government will no longer be supporting such religious coercion,” said Arthur Spitzer, legal director of the Washington, D.C., branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.

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Two Pittsburgh religious leaders said they felt joy and relief when they learned an Israeli soldier held captive for five years by Hamas had been freed.

“I’m thrilled that that’s happened for the family, but I certainly hope and pray not just for his welfare, but that we don’t have to face this situation again,” said Bishop David Zubik of the Pittsburgh Catholic Diocese.

Zubik and Aaron Bisno, senior rabbi of Rodef Shalom Congregation in Shadyside, discussed their reactions on Tuesday after Israel exchanged more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for Gilad Schalit, 25, an Israeli soldier held captive since 2006.

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