Look! Shiny Objectsl!

Oooooo! Aren't they pretty! Shiny shiny shiny!

Hey, jackass, wake up. You know who gave you those? The mayor. Stop playing with the mayor's balls.

From the Sun Times on Wednesday:

• City Hall is negotiating with Chicago's police union to require officers to take physical fitness tests throughout their careers.

  But under the city's proposal, officers would not have to pass a fitness test for promotion, police spokeswoman Monique Bond said.

  Officers who flunk a test would receive help from the department to get in shape, Bond said. The proposal does not specify how often officers would have to take a fitness test, she said.

This is a distraction. It's going no where. There is no way in hell the City is going to give us an hour a day to work out, not with the homicide rate up 15%, the aggravated batteries spiking in the springtime and dead gang bangers school children stacking up around town.

The City is also not going to address the underlying causes of weight gain so eloquently described by Greg Bella in a previous press release. And they definitely won't be implementing some of Greg's more humorous remedies (stoves, refrigerators, veggie cook outs with J-Fed).

The union is taking the "high road" so to speak, sticking by their agreement with the City not to negotiate in the media. The City however, seems bound and determined to put everything they can in the papers and they have their tame reporter exploiting J-Fed's off-the-cuff remarks to lever concessions from the FOP.

It shouldn't be happening and the next time it does, the FOP really ought to go to town on the mayor and his cronies that are circumventing the process via whatever means possible.

UPDATE: Look! More Shiny Balls!

From the Tribune:

• At a Chicago Crime Commission luncheon held in his honor Wednesday, Weis said he would like to update the department's "horrible" fleet of squad cars in answer to a question about how he might help patrol officers on the street.
  
  With Chicago's rugged winters, a sport-utility vehicle might make more sense than the traditional Ford Crown Victoria, he said.
  
  Weis also wants better quality flashlights and radios and said he thought officers' guns should be more uniform.

And where is this money going to come from? First issue on required guns. Digital radios aren't cheap (not to mention the cost of integrating them into OEMC which is at least two generations old now). And a fleet of SUV's In Daley's "green" Chicago?

Distractions people. Every single one of them