Snow Meltdown in Seattle!

Residents of Seattle appear to be up in arms about the current snowstorm and the city's wayward attempts at snow removal.

"Seattleites have been marvelous to each other over the past nine days, but the pokiness of our public services must be addressed. Given our image-conscious public officials, the town would do well to keep in mind a famous description of bureaucrats from the great Chicago columnist Mike Royko:

They create a dizzying paperwork world of regulations, ordinances, rules, codes, forms and applications. And they expertly maneuver these elements so that they are always right, even when they are obviously wrong. And they are never wrong, even when the clearly are."

Mike was tossed into the storm by columnist Joel Connelly of the Seattle P-I in his article entitled "City has to stop dragging feet in the snow"...

Photos of the snowstorm...

Christmas outage affected 18,000 PSE customers on Eastside...

Snow melts into flooding worries...

All I want ... for Christmas!

Dennis McCarthy, columnist with the LA Daily News put together a Christmas wish list...

In addition to being able to "talk newspapers with Mike Royko", Mr. McCarthy ends:

"I want old people who can no longer remember the best days of their lives to wake up Christmas morning remembering every one of them.

I want Barack Obama to be a great president, and all our troops to come home to a ticker-tape parade because they deserve it.

I want kids to put down their guns and pick up schoolbooks. I want murders to stop and drugs to dry up and blow away.

I want our country to get off its knees and be respected again. I want the world to be a better, safer place for everyone's children.

That's all I want for Christmas, kids. Not much."

Imagine... Merry Christmas!

Buddy Charles - "Black and Blue"

"Black and Blue" was Mike's song. He made that request to Buddy Charles many a time during the tough period after his first wife Carol passed. Mike wrote: "During my bleakest years, before I met and married the blond, I spent many a night listening to Buddy. He made them less bleak." ("If Only the Acorn Could Play It Again", August 28, 1990)

I requested that song a couple of months ago at Chambers restaurant when I saw Buddy Charles play. It was a small crowd and the deference that was paid to Buddy in the old days was gone. People talked, people drank, glasses and silverware clanked - "the rule" that Mike Royko wrote about was no longer followed, but Buddy simply played on... unfazed.

I returned to Chambers a few weeks ago with a couple of sound engineers. I introduced myself as being the crazy guy who is trying to resurrect some of Mike's columns and bring them to film - we asked to make a test recording of Buddy playing; we were primarily interested in recording the piano at this time because it is a tough instrument to record well. He smiled warmly, agreed to that and any future recordings and immediately remembered the song I had requested a month or so before.

Buddy Charles passed on a couple of days ago - Rick Kogan, among others, has penned a tribute.


A few videos of Buddy Charles playing at Chambers restaurant are available online at YouTube.

If anyone would like a digital version of "Black and Blue", as recorded live in October of 2008 at Chambers, please send an email to info@royko.tv and we'll make it happen.

"Cold empty bed/springs hard as lead/pains in my head/feel like ol' Ned/hey, what did I do to feel so black and blue."

US Senate Seat for Illinois Listed on eBay!

There have been numerous articles contemplating Mike's stance on Governor Blagojevich's current pay-to-play fiasco.

From Santa Barbara to the Heartland to all the way across the big pond, columnists lick their chops over Mike's would-be diatribe:

We Need Royko - How Chicago's sage columnist would have handled 'Rod the Clod'

Boy, if Mike Royko were alive, Rod and Patricia Blagojevich would be in real trouble.


THE SAD part of Chicago's latest corruption scandal is that the city's greatest columnist is no longer around to interpret it to the outside world. Mike Royko would surely have enjoyed explaining the charges laid against the Illinois governor, the breadth of which even the federal prosecutor describes as "staggering", writes Frank McNally...


And I’m sure the late columnist Mike Royko would have made mincemeat out of this craven clown years ago...

Corruption? Moi?


It's all a game to some politicians...

I imagined the late great Mike Royko, a Chicago newspaper columnist who reveled in exposing down-and-dirty Chicago machine politics, trying to get on the El from the hereafter to cover this one...


THE PULITZER Prize-winning Chicago columnist, Mike Royko, said that Illinois produced two types of politicians: the actively corrupt, who viewed political office as a means to personal enrichment and solicited bribes whenever they could; and the passively corrupt, who turned a blind eye and traded acquiescence for influence. In Royko's opinion, formed over four decades as an extremely well-connected reporter, it was impossible to accrue power any other way...

Well, I think that they've got it mostly wrong. The governor's shenanigans have made the news for years now and we have turned a deaf ear, believing that, perhaps, the Illinois Constitution mandates that corruption and Springfield go hand-in-glove. Incredibly, Governor Blagojevich was re-elected in the midst of numerous allegations of wrongdoing, but now, with the Feds following the scent, the politically correct view is to hang Blagojevich out to dry. The herd mentality of the press is simply amazing - it is a wonder that anything original makes it nowadays. Next we'll be hearing "kill the pig, spill his blood"!

Mike Royko would have stated, in unequivocal terms, that the blame lies squarely with the voters of Illinois. The Founding Fathers (and Abe as well) are rolling over in their graves. We have runaway governments in Chicago, Springfield and across this nation.

We in Illinois (and in the United States) have received the government that we deserve.

Mike Royko, anti-Christ?

Well if former Chicago Mayor Michael Bilandic fancied himself Jesus Christ and his precinct captains the disciples then Mike Royko, anti-Christ is only fitting!

Read Ray Hanania's article in the Southwest News-Herald...

Where's Ours, Revisited - President-elect Obama

From the transcript of President-elect Obama's third press conference.

"All right. Where's Andy Shaw?. We're going local here. Andy, you back there somewhere? There you are. All right.

Q Let me ask you a question on behalf of local political reporters all over the country. As you know, mayors and county board presidents and governors are facing budgets that are hemorrhaging from this economic downturn, hundreds of millions of dollars, and they're faced with layoffs and tax increases they don't want to impose. And they're kind of wondering, to paraphrase the late, great Mike Royko: Where's ours?

What in your plan speaks to the needs of governmental bodies? They're not Main Street, they're not Wall Street, they're not the U.S. Capitol; but they're Randolph and LaSalle, which is City Hall, and they're 2nd and Capitol, where you worked for eight years in Springfield. Hundreds of your friends are wondering what you're going to do, because they're in desperate straits from the standpoint of their budgets.

PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA: Well, look, this is an important point. And it's one that I addressed during the campaign and is implicit in the economic recovery plan that I talked about yesterday and that I talked about on Saturday in my weekly address.

We are going to have to make sure that we are investing in roads, bridges, other infrastructure investments that lay the groundwork for long-term economic growth. A lot of that goes through our states and our local governments.

And one of the things that we're going to also want to make sure of is that as part of our economic plan, that we are fast-tracking some of these projects. And so the best way for us to do that may be in some cases to see what's -- what projects are already being undertaken by state and local governments, and making sure that they have the funds to continue those projects.

So we're going to be working very closely with governors. We're going to be working very closely with mayors of towns, small and large, across the country. This economic recovery plan will require their input, their participation. And you know, part of our job is to make sure that we are listening to what's happening on the ground, where the rubber hits the road, and not simply designing something out of Washington.

Now, this raises one other important point, though. Part of the charge of Peter and Rob and the rest of our budget team is to make sure that we are proceeding on projects and investments based on national priorities and not based on politics. You mentioned sort of my friends. I want to be clear; friendship doesn't into this. That's part of the old way of doing business.

The new way of doing business is, let's figure out what projects, what investments are going to give the American economy the most bang for the buck; how can we protect taxpayer dollars, so that this money is not wasted; restore a sense of confidence among taxpayers that when we spend our money, it's on things that are actually going to improve their quality of life, create the jobs that are so desperately needed, help to spur on economic growth and business creation in the private sector. That's all part of the new way of doing business."

Read Lynn Sweet's Sun-Times article...

Interview with Rick Kogan

"You don’t read Kogan as much as listen to him, as if in front of a fireplace on the eve of the unknown. His smoker’s voice crackles with wit and warmth, his world filled with nostalgia and wonder, yet it is belied by the cynicism endemic to anyone who makes a career out of distilling the truth from the nonsense. Which is why what he’s telling you is so personal, so intimate."

From an article by Robert Duffer of the Chicago Literary Scene Examiner - onward...