Chicago Daily Observer

Dear Mr. Powers:

I’ll ask your readers three questions. First, is it OK to authorize increased pollution to Lake Michigan?

Thank you for asking us to respond to your open letter to the Alliance for the Great Lakes ( http://cdobs.com/our-columns/open-letter-to-the-alliance-for-the-great-lakes/, September 8), especially in light of some 233 million gallons of wastewater that discharged to Lake Michigan from recent heavy rains.

If your readers answered “no,” they’d get an A+ for the right answer to your question and the above question. The Indiana Department of Environmental Management gave BP’s Whiting refinery a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit allowing increases pollution levels of ammonia and Total Suspended Solids over the previous permit. When Congress passed the federal Clean Water Act in 1972, it was with one overriding goal in mind: to reduce pollution levels to the nation’s waterways over time. Reduce, not increase. And this is a goal ... Read More...

Just when you think the world’s going to hell in a handbasket, along comes Buddy Charles.

In the unlikely setting of Niles, Illinois, just northwest of Chicago, in the comfortable sort of place that might once have been called a supper club, the singer/pianist Buddy Charles performs each Tuesday and Wednesday nights in an open run. The place is called The Chambers and it’s on the east side of Milwaukee Avenue, about a half mile south of that god-awful fake stone fountain at the intersection of Touhy and Milwaukee.

Why is Niles an unlikely setting? Well, you’d think that a place where you could cuddle up with a brandy to hear Noel Coward and George Gershwin sung and played with the rarest of wit and pianistic skill would be in downtown Chicago, right? But no. The elegant cognac-and-piano bars—Toulouse and the Gold Star Sardine Bar, for example—are gone for now, ... Read More...

My 16-year-old son came to me looking for an answer to his Xbox 360 crisis. In recent weeks, Jonathan had described in detail as each one of his friend’s Xbox 360s succumbed to Microsoft’s manufacturing defects which caused them all to fail.

In case you just landed from Mars or as old as the ancient editorial board chairman of this newspaper who was a college classmate of my father 57 years ago) Xbox 360 is a game console that looks like an over-sized VCR. It plays interactive video games and allows players to compete and talk to each other via headphones over the Internet. Many of the video games that the Xbox plays are war battle games where players either shoot each other or shoot space aliens. Microsoft originally came out with its Xbox to compete in the video game market several years ago against Sony, Nintendo and others. ... Read More...

Last May 2007, Andy Stern. President of the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) with 1.8 million low-skill or unskilled workers paying dues, takes Anna Burger, head of “Change to Win” to China to meet with the leadership there, spending a portion of union dues to help Chinese workers.

Here’s an excerpt from a Newsweek interview with the publicity addicted Stern:

Question: Why should your members pay dues to improve the condition of Chinese workers?
Stern: Workers who work for the same employers, whether they are in our country or around the world, are much stronger when they work together. The largest employer in Africa is a security company who owns Wackenhut in the U.S. We have been unable to get Wackenhut to respect workers’ rights because they are a very small part of a very big company. So now we joined together with other unions to deal ... Read More...