After months of politicking in Chicago’s City Council (Da Mare decided to let the plebes decide for a change), Wal-Mart finally got a zoning allowance to build a store on the city’s West Side. Its bid for a store on the South Side was rejected by the Windy City’s feudal lords.

Earlier this month, Wal-Mart seemed to back off the South Side project entirely, thanks to renewed efforts in the City Council to make the store pay a $10 minimum wage and provide health benefits — legal requirements no other grocery store must meet. The rules are meant to protect the local union shop grocery stores’ negotiating position and, purportedly, the workers who lucky enough to be hired by Wal-Mart.

The only problem is that Wal-Mart — for some absurd, obviously capitalist piggish and evil reason — doesn’t like to do business in places where it has to abide by a special set of rules that don’t apply to its competitors. With the ordinances looming, Wal-Mart may even beg off the West Side project.

So much for the hundreds of jobs the stores would bring to these less developed parts of the city. So much for the cheap, convenient shopping that would be available to area residents. Don’t worry, though. The project in the South Suburbs is still a go, according to the Northwest Times of Indiana. South and West siders will just have to keep driving out to the suburbs and pay extra for record-high gas prices. Who cares about them? They’re just consumers, after all.

But of course no one on the South Side would even dream of working at a Wal-Mart without City Council-approved “living wages.” Perhaps Shawala Turner would.

In a Tribune story on the people who would be affected by proposed cuts in night-owl el service, John Bebow tells her story:

It’s close to 4 a.m. now, and showing up is Shawala Turner’s only concern. The 28-year-old rises at 1:45, gets ready for work, and catches a bus to the 63rd Street station. The Red Line takes her to Washington Street, where she transfers to the Blue Line for the long ride out to O’Hare. She’s due there at 4:30. In eight hours, she’ll make about $56, before taxes, for pouring coffee at Starbucks.

“I don’t like coffee,” she says. “I really don’t.”

The proposed Wal-Mart store whose zoning variance was not approved by the noble protectionists in City Council would have been at 83rd Street and Stewart Avenue — three el stops away from Shawala on the red line.

I guess not!

Tim Lee says the Democratic convention was a giant smoke-blowing exercise to cover up that Kerry has no coherent message:

Here’s my theory. Kerry seems to have taken the advice of a New Republic article a few weeks ago to run to the right of Bush on national security, the way Kennedy ran to the right of Nixon in 1960. By turning the tables and accusing Bush of failing to fight the War on Terrorism adequately, the theory goes, Kerry can neutralize his party’s traditional disadvantage on the issue and simultaneously put the administration on the defensive.

But the problem is that Kerry appears not to have a clear message. Kennedy, for example, went on endlessly about the “missile gap” and the inadequacy of American military preparation vis a vis the Russians. Reagan and Clinton had similarly clear and compelling critiques of their respective incumbent opponents, and drew clear contrasts between themselves and the other guy.

Kerry’s message, in contrast, is that Bush lied (sort of, although he doesn’t want to be too explicit about it because that would be “negative”). And that Bush is incompetent (well, maybe, although Kerry doesn’t seem to be too clear on what he’d do differently). And… um… that the world is more complicated than those conservatives say it is. Oh, and that he fought in Vietnam and Bush didn’t! And he got three purple hearts!

Gene Healy writes that Kerry isn’t quite the flip-flopper Dubya & Co. say. Rather, he has consistently favored letting someone else take the heat:

Kerry hasn’t changed his position on Iraq. In October 2002, when the congressional vote was held, Kerry, like most members of Congress, was in favor of punting the question of war or peace to the president and avoiding accountability for the decision. And Kerry remains firmly in favor of avoiding accountability for Iraq today. That tells us something about John Kerry as a candidate. More importantly, it tells us a lot about the health of Congress as a political institution, and about the erosion of Congress’ power to declare war.

And Steve Chapman concludes that after all the bluster, Kerry has been as squarely behind the Iraq debacle as Dubya:

It has been said by many critics that President Bush, after bungling his job in the Iraq war, has stubbornly refused to admit he was wrong. The same goes for John Kerry.

If John Kerry manages to be a slight improvement over Dubya as president, it will be a happy accident.