Trotter Backpedals

We publish a couple of opinion pieces the other day (Worrying Finding and Worrying Finding - Part 2) merely pointing out a few things. Then Monday morning, this Fran Spielman article:

• Is Chicago truly prepared for a natural disaster or terrorist attack -- a question central to Mayor Daley's bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games?

  You can't help but wonder after Chief Emergency Officer Cortez Trotter's defensive response to last week's federal report suggesting that first responders in Chicago and Cook County are ill-prepared to communicate when the Big One hits.

  Now Trotter is openly saying there's a lot more Chicago can do to prepare for an event that would even remotely resemble the Sept. 11, 2001, attack that killed nearly 2,800 at New York's World Trade Center.

Wow. Check out those skidmarks Trotter left backing off of last week's outright denials that the city wasn't near the bottom of the disaster preparedness scale. And even more helpful, the Sun Times publishes a handy little guide for terrorists showing landmarks, water pumping stations, filtration plants, etc.

Let's put this very simply for everyone - there is no plan. Actually, there is a small plan.

• It involves getting every bit of Federal money that the City can lay it's hands on,
  
• spending it on toys and nonsense and a few well paid positions for connected folks with the right last names,
• then hoping against hope that the Feds will intercept any real terrorists long before they manage to transport a device into the Midwest.

That's it in a nutshell. Everything else is just window dressing for the media and people who think that the government ought to be doing something. We don't even have to repeat the Chief of Staff's contention that it doesn't make sense to train up every single copper. It's obvious from Trotter's backtracking that someone is asking pointed questions that city adminstrators can't answer, so they're backing off previous statements.