Like other public officials, Mayor Richard M. Daley is supposed to disclose to the Chicago Board of Ethics any and all "gifts" he receives in any given year. But our mayor doesn't need no stinking ethics board.
"Instead of providing the Board of Ethics with a list of gifts . . . Daley tells the board a 'mayoral gift log is maintained in the mayor's office and is available for public inspection','' the Sun-Times reports.
"But those logs are far from complete, a Chicago Sun-Times review has found, failing to disclose all of the gifts Daley gets."
Among the missing items: Free trips, free meals, and birthday and Christmas presents from his staff.
"What you consider a gift and what we consider a gift are two different things," mayoral spokesperson Jackie Heard told the paper.
In other words, it depends on what the meaning of "gift" is.
Chocolate feet, for example, are gifts. Traveling to a banking conference in Singapore on an EduCap jet is not.
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"When the mayor is traveling abroad promoting the city, we don't consider that a gift because he is working as mayor and chief promoter of the city of Chicago," Heard said.
And if that means he has to court the rich and famous in the world's most exotic locations, well, by God somebody's got to do it!
But really, what if you want to give the mayor a Christmas or birthday gift but you don't want to duplicate something he got just last year? Well, you're out of luck. But if it's a trip on a private jet you're thinking about, he probably wouldn't mind getting another one.
