In the September issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly (PAW), there was a remarkable article. Alumni participation in Annual Giving had dropped dramatically over the last decade. This is a four-alarm fire -- not only for financial reasons, but because alumni participation is a key indicator for the national college rankings.

I wrote a brief note to PAW for inclusion in the letters-to-the-editor section:

When President Eisgruber took office in 2013 the Annual Giving participation rate was at its long-term historical average of 60%. Since then the rate has declined, almost linearly, to 43.9%, a loss of 16,000 participants.

During that time President Eisgruber has consistently alienated a significant portion of the alumni body. In these years the university pushed DEI, fired Professor Katz for being a conservative, walled off Prospect Street from the south, allowed on-campus speakers to be shouted down, let anti-semitic protesters off with a slap on the wrist, and my personal irritant, built one hideous building after another. Despite lofty rhetoric from the president in defense of free speech, the university has earned an “F” on free speech from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

These are the reasons I stopped participating in Annual Giving. How much further will the trustees allow the rate to fall before making the necessary change in leadership?

Chris Cleveland ‘84

This letter is short and to the point, in exactly the style they like to publish.

PAW first publishes letters like this on their website, where there are no limitations on the number of letters they can publish or on their length. The letter did not appear. I thought, perhaps, that they were saving it for the print publication. But when the October issue arrived in my mailbox, there was nothing.

I submitted it through their website, and it went through, so I know they got it.

PAW has long prided itself on being independent of the university. It’s the voice of the alumni. It’s filled with a great deal of cheerleading for the university, but occasionally hits more serious topics. For an impending disaster like this one you’d think they would say something about it.

But no. Crickets. And I think we know why.

In 2021, the chair of PAW wrote,

This spring, University administrators informed PAW’s board that Princeton intends to change its relationship with the magazine to secure PAW’s financial health, to assure that PAW operates under the same rules as other University departments, and to protect against the magazine creating legal liability for the University. Princeton proposes to take on the entire cost of producing and distributing PAW, eliminating the burden on classes that until now have helped pay for the magazine. At the same time, Princeton has not guaranteed the continued editorial independence of the magazine.

Over the following months, there was some back-and-forth between Princeton and PAW on the terms of the deal, which resulted in a Memorandum of Understanding which is in force today. Under the deal, PAW is fully funded by and is fully a part of the university. It “maintains editorial independence as to content”, and according to PAW board chair Marc Fisher ‘80, the magazine can include “voices critical of University policies”.

Except that no voices critical of University policies appear in the magazine’s pages, ever. There is no editorial independence. You will not find a criticism of President Eisgruber, anywhere, ever.

The rest of the world has no problem criticizing the man. His recent book, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, has received absolutely scathing reviews. Christopher Eisgruber’s Moronic Inferno is a good example. Others include The Disqualifying Hypocrisy of Princeton’s President and A Princeton President’s Evasions.

But no matter; PAW knows when it’s supposed to gush. In Getting Campus Speech Right, PAW portrays Eisgruber as a hero upon a “besieged perch” who deftly navigates between the “fiery young activists to his left” and the “culturally aggrieved cadres to his right” -- as if there’s anyone to his left at all. Wise and modest man that he is, he acknowledges a mistake: he initially failed to see the “full moral gravity of [Woodrow] Wilson’s wrongs”, before purging Wilson’s name and denouncing his memory before the fawning left.

This man is an embarrassment. No wonder he took over PAW. An honest look at him would likely drive participation in Annual Giving even lower, to the point where the trustees would have to ask, what is this man still doing here?

The rent was coming up, and I didn't have it.

The dotcom boom had come and gone, and my little company was struggling. I'd let the few employees I had go. A few years earlier, I'd come up with an idea for a new way to search data, wrote some software, and started selling it. It did ok for a while. But small companies always struggle against bigger ones in the software business, and I needed a deal.

A lead came in over the website. A Canadian telephone company wanted to put their yellow pages online, and needed a good search engine. It was a perfect fit.

We had a call, and then more calls. I gathered requirements and gave advice. They asked for a few features and I scrambled to add them. Things looked good.

Still, they weren't sure, and requested some kind of demo. They sent their data. I spent days and nights building a demo site, sweating over the details. It was fast and it was beautiful and it met the requirements. They were impressed.

Still, it was a big telephone company, and they had procedures to follow. They wanted to meet. Using money I didn't have, I booked a flight to Regina, Saskatchewan in the middle of winter. I booked the cheapest hotel I could find.

Canada was an experience. Bitter cold I'd never experienced. Nice people. The same music everywhere, the same songs over and over again, far worse than top 40 radio in the U.S. Gordon Lightfoot on a continuous loop.

I met the client, a nice, older IT middle-management type who was getting close to retirement. The meetings went well. They needed a bit more, we negotiated a price, and it was a go -- he just needed approval. I went home.

Days, and then weeks, passed. I called frequently, but couldn't get a response.

Eventually I got the client on the phone, and he apologized profusely. They had rules they had to follow, including one that said that if a Canadian company could supply what they needed, they had to buy local. They had found a company in Toronto that had a search engine, not quite as good, but they had to go with it. He was very, very sorry.

I'm sure the Toronto company found my demo useful in designing their own system.

I lost the deal because of a Canadian law that takes business from American companies and gives it to Canadian companies. It's called a non-tariff barrier. It's a form of cheating.

Donald Trump has been talking about this kind of cheating for a long time. He has raised tariffs on countries worldwide, and the current reports are that everyone is coming to the table to make a deal. The EU has proposed a zero-for-zero tariff plan -- you drop yours, and we'll drop ours.

It's not going to work, because tariffs aren't the problem. The problem is the myriad, overt, and sometimes not-so-overt barriers that keep American companies at a disadvantage. The barriers that jerk Americans around, take their intellectual property, and leave them with a "we're very sorry".

This is a hard problem to solve, and it's going to take time. Trump's tariffs need to stay in place for a while while we get rid of the worst of the cheating. And there needs to be continued enforcement and penalties to control the underhanded tricks. Sometimes the barriers are baked into the culture.

Remember that repetitive music on Canadian radio? I learned that Canadian radio stations have a rule that a certain percentage of their playlist has to be Canadian artists, and there just aren't that many of them. A struggling Canadian artist gets airplay. A struggling American artist, not so much.

To this day, I can't hear "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" without thinking about the wreck of our trade relations and that time I couldn't pay the rent.

Israel has launched its ground assault in Gaza. After several days of airstrikes, IDF soldiers are engaged in direct combat. This morning, Israeli authorities announced that 15 had been killed.

As many, many writers have noted, this won't be an easy task. The difficulty lies in more than just the existence of Hamas' tunnels.

In war in general, defense has an advantage over offense. It has long been accepted that there is some ratio, commonly cited as 3:1, of the number of soldiers on offense vs defense for the offense to prevail.

But this simple ratio is greatly affected by the terrain. In general, terrain that offers more cover favors the defense. On a wide-open field, the offense has an easier time of it; in jungle or mountains, the defense has more places to hide, shoot, and lay traps.

Urban warfare gives the defense an even greater advantage. Hitler's superior divisions could not crack Stalingrad. Neither side in the Russia/Ukraine war can make much headway against the other in Ukraine's villages and towns. Tanks traveling down narrow streets are easily destroyed with shoulder-fired weapons. Like the Greeks against the Persians at Thermopylae, a narrow passage can be held by a very small force.

From a military perspective, the battle of the IDF vs. Hamas looks more like a large, well-organized force against a small insurgency. Hamas is not an insurgency, but it can use the same tactics. Insurgencies can and do win, sometimes, particularly when the insurgents can blend with the population, and use external pressure to sap the larger force's will to fight.

There are some well-established tactics that can defeat such an enemy insurgency. In the Malayan guerilla war (1948-60), the British successfully defeated the insurgents with a scorched earth policy. They systematically eliminated the sources of food for the population, forcing everyone, including enemy fighters, out into the open.

More recently, the U.S. largely defeated the opposition in Iraq by restricting movement within Baghdad. Their most effective weapon was concrete, laying barriers high and low throughout the city, forcing civilians and terrorists through checkpoints. Similarly, American troops erected a concrete wall around Fallujah, preventing the enemy from leaving the city.

The IDF can use both of these tactics in Gaza. It has already sealed Gaza from the outside world, and cut off food, water, and electricity. It can move to the next stage and start installing concrete walls to break Gaza into pieces.

It can lay a wall across the middle of Gaza, separating north from south. Civilians have already been asked to move south. The wall can have gates, where civilians who wish to escape can do so, after they have been searched for weapons. Men of military age can be detained and questioned, and it may be possible to identify Hamas members attempting to leave.

Israel can wall off parts of Gaza a piece at a time, restricting the ability of Hamas to coordinate and share resources.

It would defeat the purpose of the walls, of course, if there are tunnels beneath; but Israel claims to know where most of the tunnels are, and it has invested heavily in tunnel detection. If Israel can destroy tunnels from above along the narrow line of each wall, the walls will be effective.

There might not even be a need to flood the tunnels, though that would hasten the process of forcing Hamas into the open.

If Israel adopts a concrete tactic, it can more easily separate terrorist from civilian, avoid the humanitarian costs of continuous bombing, avoid IDF soldier deaths, and never need to enter the tunnels until the last of the terrorists has given up or died.

Civilians who pass through checkpoints to safe areas can receive food and supplies. Hamas fighters who stay hidden and restricted to areas that the IDF hasn’t yet cleared will starve.

The prospect of inevitable starvation tends to focus the mind, and may lead the less committed of the terrorists to give up hostages in exchange for food. Vladimir Lenin said that "every society is three meals away from chaos", and if there is anything likely to lead to dissent with Hamas' ranks, this is it.

There will be no need for a cease fire if Israel ceases firing, because it no longer has to.

This approach will take time, months, perhaps a year or two. This is time that Israel can afford to take, if it leads to fewer casualties, and the complete, utter defeat of a truly evil terrorist movement.

A few years ago I had an idea for a startup. It was for a cool new software-as-a-service product. It was nothing terribly difficult from a technical perspective, but it had a lot of moving parts. It needed a lot of database work, a ton of connectors, maps, and all kinds of little features.

I got started on it and the work…bogged…down. It was going to take many months, with very uncertain prospects for revenue. I needed help to get it done.

So I put out a message and found a guy. He was living in California at the time, and I'm in Chicago, so we did the remote-hire thing over Zoom. We started with a short-term 1099 contract, and then moved to a full-time W-2 after it was clear that things were going well.

He was really outstanding, by the way. Easy to work with, very reliable, and did great work.

I decided to do the right thing by switching to W-2 payments. Given the remote and mostly unsupervised nature of the work he was doing, we could have (legally) stuck with 1099 payments. But a W-2 an employee gets payments into social security, unemployment insurance, various protections, so it’s the decent thing to do, even if it costs a bit more.

So I set up a payroll service and paid him.

Three years later, I get a letter from the State of California Franchise Tax Board: Demand for Tax Return. Uh, what?

Our records show your business entity received income from, but not limited to, the sources listed below. This information indicates that your business entity may be deriving income from California sources and may have a California filing requirement for 2019.

EMPLOYMENT DEVELOPMENT DEPARTMENT

Wait a minute. I am “deriving income” from a government agency (no, I’m not) and therefore I have to file a California income tax return?

This company never took off, by the way. It had zero customers in California, generating zero revenue. All I had was one employee living in a beach house in California so he could surf.

The mailing included a separate form asking me 30 intrusive questions about my business. They want my financials, both in and out of California. Do I own property? Do I lease or rent? Do I have merchandise? A warehouse? Did I sign any contracts in California? Did I go to a trade show, and if so, list all the locations, number of days and how much money did I spend on goods distributed at each event? It goes on and on.

So now they’ve lied to me about my income and demanded information that is none of their business.

You’d think that I could simply tell them that I’m not doing business in California and be done with it. No — California defines “doing business” in a number of ways, one of which is to have more than 25% of your payroll in California. Which I had, because I had only one employee.

So now, because I employed one of their residents, I’m fully subject to California regulation. I have to file all of the employment-related forms, including those pertaining to withholding and unemployment insurance (which I expected). I also have to register my company with the California Secretary of State and renew my information every year or face penalties, and apparently I have to file a corporate income tax return

You’d think I’d be able to file a simple return, file zeroes on it, and be done with it. But no — I had to pay my accountant to do it, and the form is literally 42 pages long. That cost a few hundred dollars. And in the end, I still owed them $800. For 2019 alone; I’ll also owe them for 2020 and 2021.

I owe $800 for the “minimum franchise tax”. California charges this fee to everyone for the “privilege” of “doing business” in California, whether they have revenue or not. Only a few states have a business franchise tax, and California’s is wildly higher than anywhere else. This is in addition to California’s generally out of control taxes.

Plus, once you’re in California, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. My employee moved to Hawaii (in search of better waves), but the State of California is going to be dogging both of us forever unless we file serious amounts of paperwork.

My advice is to stay out of California, and never hire anyone who lives there.

Congress needs to pass a law that says that hiring a remote employee in a particular state does not, by itself, create nexus for sales or corporate income tax purposes. Nexus should only be created in the traditional way: by selling something in the state, or by having a physical office there. Without this law greedy state governments can send companies nasty surprises, as they did to me.

This law should not be controversial. It will eliminate an entire class of unnecessary paperwork.

Congress should pass another law as well. They should enact a uniform way to report and pay sales, income, and franchise tax across all jurisdictions. States, counties and cities would all be allowed to charge whatever tax they want, on whatever categories of goods and services they want, but they would be pushed to use a universal online form to do so. It would be straightforward to enter your sales by jurisdiction in a single place, enter the categories of things you have sold using standard codes, press enter and have your tax obligations taken care of automatically.

This law might be a bit more controversial because it would smell like a federal takeover of state taxes. It isn't, though, and if states can opt out then there shouldn't be a problem.

I have better things to do that deal with idiots in California who think they have the right to impose obligations on my Illinois business. For me, the solution is simple: don't do business in California. I will not hire anyone who lives there, and I'm not going to sell anything there unless it involves a lot of money. It's just not worth the hassle.

It’s also not worth dealing with the arrogance and general jackassery of California state government.

A slightly edited version of this piece appeared in the Chicago Tribune on 6/26/2021.

It was a little strange. My eight-year-old son and I were across the street in the park working on his pitching. He'd just started playing baseball, had a good arm, and I was playing catcher.

A man walking along the sidewalk stopped and stared. He moved close, stood in the grass, just watching. This was a Chicago city park, and we see odd folks all the time. Usually, they move on. He stayed.

After a time he approached me. He was late fifties, maybe 60. Looked and moved like he had been an athlete. "Do you mind if I give your son a few pointers?" he asked.

Sure. My son looked at me for reassurance. "Go ahead," I said.

The man showed him that the accuracy of his pitch depended on his gloved hand. "Pull it tight to your hip, and don't let it flop," he said. That little trick narrowed his pitches immediately. He also showed my son how to grip the ball on the seams, and how to avoid short-arming. It was a half-hour pitching lesson, and hugely valuable.

I could see he had done this before, many times. He was back in his element. At the end he thanked me in a quiet voice for giving him the chance to do this again, as if we were the ones who had given him a gift.

"Are you from here?" I asked. "No, just visiting. I'm here to see my son play baseball." "Where?" "He plays for the Cubs." Thank you, I said.

I later Googled the Cubs player, and found his father as well. He was quoted in a Miami Herald article with words that have stuck with me. "Baseball is a game that's played with your father. It's not that complicated. You just have to toss the ball all the time." Yes. Exactly.

It's a game that takes thousands of hours to perfect. It takes coordination of arm, wrist, torso and feet to rifle a ball hard and fast. It takes well-timed muscle memory to swing a bat at a target that moves faster than a car. It's hard to get that kind of practice in school or on a team. There just isn't time.

There's only one way to do it. It takes a dad, a brother, an uncle or another dad-substitute.

My son and I have spent those hours across the street, and farther away on the fields, throwing, hitting, snagging grounders and catching pop flies. We both love it, and it's really not about baseball. We just like hanging around together, on those summer afternoons, passing the time.

When early evening comes and the shadows lengthen and the light falls, it's hard to see the ball. "Let's stop," I say. "This is dangerous." "Ten more throws!" he says. Ok, fine, and then after the ten are done, he shouts, predictably, "Ten more!"

We lay down in the grass. The first fireflies of the season blink under a nearby tree. It still too early for mosquitoes, so we're safe. My son lays crosswise, his head on my stomach. The dog, now off the leash, lays down against us.

We talk. The topics always come from left field. When he was eight, his mind worked to make sense of the world, and the connections he made between what he had seen and heard were unpredictable. I explained things as simply as possible, and learned a few things myself.

Now that he's twelve, his questions often start with "Why do girls...?" My answers are, more often than not, "Nobody knows, son. Nobody knows."

As we lay there, I find it hard to imagine a more perfect world. There is nothing better than laying in the grass with my son. I certainly can't point to a happier moment in my life than this.

I never did have moments like this with my own father. He was present when I was growing up, but not really. We never threw a ball, never had a real conversation. He was a good dad otherwise, reliable, and we never lacked for food, clothes, or schooling. But he had a different conception of fatherhood. He met his obligations as he understood them.

My understanding is different. Baseball creates a bond between generations. It creates sons who know the comfort of having a place in the world, and the fathers who know the comfort of having a purpose. The thousands of one-on-one hours that it takes to get good at the sport creates a bond that does not break.

I later discovered that that man in the park, the father of the Cubs player, had been in prison while his own son was growing up. He was released only shortly before his son played his first major league game. He had taken up baseball coaching after his release, perhaps to capture what he had lost. I do not know how the Cubs player learned the game.

But I do know that the man's words that day gave us much more than a pitching lesson. It gave us a perspective on what it means for a father and son to take the time to toss a ball together.

The founders designed the Bill of Rights for the very specific purpose of limiting the power of government. It’s time to limit that power further and make it clear that such databases do not belong to our overlords, but to us.

The difficulty with limiting access to this information has been that it’s hard to craft appropriate legislation, or constitutional amendments, to make it clear what the government can and can’t do. There are tradeoffs, of course. When you prevent the government from accessing information on the good guys, you prevent it from getting information on the bad guys.

But there is an answer in the Fourth Amendment. Several years ago I wrote a proposal (on a now-abandoned blog) for a new amendment that strikes the right balance. I think it’s still a good one. Here’s what I wrote long ago:

We should add a single sentence to the Constitution:

Amendment XXVIII The protections of the Fourth Amendment shall extend to include documents, transactions, and communications held by a fiduciary.

A “fiduciary” is a person or company which holds assets on behalf of another person or company.

For reference, the Fourth Amendment reads:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The net effect of this amendment is that the government would not be able to obtain emails, bank records, or files stored in the cloud without a warrant. It would protect an individual’s information, and not just their persons, houses, papers, and effects, from unreasonable search and seizure.

The founders never anticipated email, texting, or the cloud, and never anticipated that we would store the most intimate details of our lives online. At the time of the founding such information was stored only on paper or in our heads, and the founders gave explicit protection to both through the Fourth and the Fifth amendments.

Under this amendment any vendor who chose to advertise that they held your data in a “fiduciary” relationship could not be compelled to give it to the government without a warrant. This amendment would not prevent the government from going after terrorists, but it would prevent them from creating PRISM-style databases containing the communications of innocent people.

The purpose of this amendment would be to shift power from the government to the individual. (This is also the purpose of the first ten amendments). This amendment says that the government cannot collect the private information of a U.S. citizen without convincing a judge that it has probable cause to believe that the citizen has violated the law. It also gives the individual recourse via the courts if the government doesn’t adhere to the rules.

A “privacy” amendment of this nature is a good compromise between our need to keep our papers and effects secure and the need of law enforcement to investigate criminals and terrorists.

The list is not limited to just front-line healthcare workers, or those, like grocery store clerks or barbers, who must deal with the public. It includes any group with which the mayor wants to curry favor.

It includes lawyers. Really? Lawyers?

You may think, well, lawyers need to meet clients and go to court, so they are exposed. You would be wrong.

The vast majority of lawyers rarely, if ever, go to court. And the Cook County courts are mostly meeting over Zoom these days. I have a lawyer-friend who loves it: no longer does he need to travel to suburban courthouses and then hustle back downtown for more meetings. He just puts up his law-library Zoom background and gets his routine appearances done in minutes.

Corporate lawyers have even less interaction with the public, or each other. They process paper in their downtown offices. Offices they no longer visit.

But lawyers are eligible for vaccines because they are "essential". "Essential", it seems, has taken a new meaning. It is no longer means those who keep us fed or respond to our emergencies. It now means "more valuable" in some social sense. People who contribute to society. People who are, you know, better.

Or wealthier. Another "essential" profession on the list is "finance". Anyone who works in one of these places is eligible for protection from Covid: "Banks; currency exchanges; consumer lending; credit unions; appraisers; title companies; financial markets; financial institutions; institutions that sell financial services; accounting services, and insurance services".

Ok, fine: bank tellers and currency exchange workers should get protection because they are exposed to the public. But I can't see any reason that anyone else on this list is special.

They’re only special because they have the means to make political contributions to the Mayor. See how that works?

A 30-year-old hedge fund manager can get a vaccine. His 64-year-old dog walker can’t.

So, who else is among the non-essential 16%?

As far as I can tell, the list includes:

• The unemployed

• Stay-at-home moms and dads

• People in professions without clout

The sheer idiocy, and corruption, of the Mayor's policy is breathtaking.

Other places, like Florida, have made eligibility almost strictly age-based, and that makes sense. Covid strikes those who are older and in ill health.

Covid is not uniquely deadly to hedge fund managers, government employees, or college professors presiding over empty campuses, yet the Mayor says they are "essential".

Perhaps we should have a look at whether the Mayor herself is "essential".

Mayor Lightfoot formed the committee and will likely follow its recommendations. She has already removed statues of Christopher Columbus.

If the Democrats are renaming monuments and parks, why is it that Bauler Park is not on their list?

Bauler Park is named for Paddy Bauler, former 43rd Ward Alderman and well-known crook. He is famous for saying "Chicago ain't ready for reform (yet)", running a speakeasy during Prohibition, shooting two police officers, and many, many, many stolen votes. His Wikipedia article doesn't even begin to scratch the surface.

Here's just a bit on the man, from the Chicago Tribune:

Bauler unabashedly courted every kind of voter, including ghost voters-those who, in an old and cherished Chicago tradition, voted in wards in which they didn't reside. During the 1962 aldermanic election, Tribune reporters discovered four ghost voters falsely registered as residents in flats above Bauler's tavern. Confronted with the evidence, the alderman admitted that they lived outside the ward, but he argued, ''The flats are furnished; they have steam heat, and, besides, they all pay me rent.'' Then there was the mysterious case of one Allen Jackson, who registered under four names in Bauler's ward. ''He's not my guy,'' insisted Bauler in mock astonishment. ''How did he sneak in here?''

In December, 1933, Bauler was charged with assaulting, with intent to kill, a Chicago policeman. In conflicting testimonies, some witnesses said Officer John J. Ahearn, accompanied by fellow officer Eddie Hayes, demanded entrance to Bauler`s tavern even though it was officially closed. When Bauler opened the door to allow departing guests to leave, Ahearn allegedly swung at the alderman, hitting him on the shoulder. Hayes then grabbed Ahearn and forced him back to their parked car. Bauler, said Hayes, then pulled out a revolver and fired two shots that both hit Ahearn, who was by then sitting in the car. The officer then fired back twice, missing Bauler but wounding Deputy Sheriff Frank Wright, who was standing nearby. Bauler claimed he fired in self-defense, and though Ahearn insisted that the alderman opened fire without provocation, the alderman was acquitted, and the policeman was dismissed from the force.

I recall hearing a story about Bauler that may not have been published before. Richard Means, longtime Chicago election attorney, told me once that Bauler had a polling location placed at the firehouse. The voting booths were arranged around the fire pole. He had someone upstairs looking down through the hole to see how people voted.

Chicago Democrats are interested in tearing down American heroes, but haven't even looked at a park named for a crook, probably because his crimes involved vote theft by the Democrat machine. They want to put American history on trial, but not their own.

Is it possible that Bauler Park is just an historical oddity?

Nope.

From an article published a few days ago on Oscar D'Angelo Park:

D’Angelo was disbarred in 1989 after the federal Operation Greylord investigation into corruption in the Cook County judiciary revealed he was providing judges and other officials with rental cars as gifts.

That never seemed to slow him down. In 2000, the Sun-Times reported D’Angelo received a $480,000 fee for brokering a deal that gave two close friends of Daley’s wife a piece of a lucrative newsstand contract at O’Hare Airport.

So long as we're renaming things, let's have a look at everything, shall we? How many parks and streets are named for Chicago Democratic machine politicians with a history of corruption?

I expect it wouldn't take long to find quite a few of them.