The [Thursday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

"A consulting firm headed by former Illinois Senate President Emil Jones Jr.'s stepson John Sterling has been paid more than $787,000 under a Cook County contract funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, despite failing to provide required weekly reports - for 21 months," Carol Marin and Don Moseley report.

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"Retired Illinois Senate President Emil Jones, the political godfather of President Obama, is mounting a formidable effort to re-elect embattled Cook County Board President Todd Stroger," Sneed reports.

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Just sayin'.

Tallest Midget
Rich Miller and his Capitol Fax Blog readers have selected Sen. Don Harmon (D-Oak Park) as the state's best legislator.

"John Cullerton's ascension to the Senate Presidency has propelled Harmon into the upper echelons of legislative power," Miller writes. "He is a likely future Senate President himself. Harmon was an overwhelming favorite in the nominations. This one was representative . . . "

Smart, hardworking, and not an ideologue.

You mean this Don Harmon?

Back on February 13, state rep Kevin Joyce introduced a bill to expand the kinds of materials open to the public under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. On April 3 that bill passed the house and was sent to the senate, where it sat in committee for weeks. Legislators tell me that during that time city lobbyists got in touch with their allies in the senate, and on May 18 Senator Don Harmon gutted the bill, removing the language about the FOIA and adding an amendment that extended the life of the four Chicago TIF districts: Madden/Wells, Roosevelt/Racine, Stony Island/Burnside, and Englewood Mall. None of these fall into Harmon's legislative district.

Harmon - who didn't return calls for this story - is from Oak Park, whose TIF policies seem to be almost as nutty as Chicago's, hard as that is to believe. (Hardly a week goes by without some Oak Parker calling and asking me to write about one TIF debacle or another.

The Michael Scott Affair
"Scott sat on the Chicago Olympics planning committee while getting paid an undisclosed monthly fee this year from Gerald W. Fogelson, the developer of the lakefront project, which could have benefitted from the Olympics," the Sun-Times noted on Wednesday in an editorial following up on the paper's reporting. "The proposed $3.5 billion condo-and-hotel project across Lake Shore Drive from Soldier Field is near the site that would have been the Olympic village.

"Scott also could have aided Fogelson as a member until May 2008 of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, also known as McPier. Fogelson was involved in land-swap talks about the lakefront project with McPier while Scott was on the McPier board."

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"Chicago School Board members will decide Wednesday whether to dump their $24,000-a-year receipt-free expense accounts- tabs once likened to 'slush funds' - in favor of submitting receipts for all work-related expenses," the Sun-Times reports.

"Since August, Schools Inspector General James Sullivan has been investigating thousands of dollars in Chicago restaurant and other tabs School Board President Michael Scott placed on his Board of Education credit card."

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Just sayin'.

Nothing To Fear But Fearmongers Themselves
"When the detainees arrive here, I predict, Illinoisans will pay attention for about five minutes and then go on calmly with their lives," Steve Chapman writes in today's must-read column. "At least the grown-ups will."

On Blago's Computers
What The Beachwood Tech Support Affairs Desk found on those stolen laptops.

Hit And Run
"Forced to build deeper rosters because of the DH rule, the AL has had an upper hand against the NL in recent years - a trend borne out in results from the All-Star Game, the World Series and in interleague play," Phil Rogers writes.

Is that really the reason for recent AL dominance? After all, NL teams are forced to build deeper bulllpens because they don't have the DH. And if it's true that good pitching beats good hitting . . .

I suspect something else is at play - and it might be right under Rogers' nose. His next sentence:

"AL teams have been bigger spenders than their NL counterparts."

Meeting Up Now
Jury pools and paranormals.

TIFs For The Homeless
Advocates target Fioretti.

Desolation Row
"Bogdanovich filmed The Last Picture Show in a way that makes you think a huge swarm of locusts must have descended upon Anarene the week before and stripped the place of every inch of paint, greenery, and hope, leaving behind little more than a crummy high school football team and a dark abyss of simmering desperation that could make the Joad family feel downright fortunate," our very own Scott Buckner writes in What I Watched Last Night. "Christ, even the town's make-out lake is a desolate mud flat."

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The Beachwood Tip Line: Simmering desperation.

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