With Weekend Desk Editor Natasha Julius on assignment this week researching potential new markets for the Beachwood and the Weekend Desk B Team feeling all icky and congested, today’s report will be brief.
1. Peace efforts in the Middle East continue to make progress. We’ll stay on this story for another 1,000 years to bring you the latest breakthroughs.
2. Prince Harry learns from the Obama campaign how to effectively leak to Drudge. It’s good to be the king-in-waiting.
3. Has Dr. Drew really thrown in the towel? Will he start shooting junk? We can’t wait for part two of the season finale either!
4. Instead of the U.N., maybe we should have World Leader Rehab With Dr. Drew, where world leaders converge on a treatment center in Pasadena and Dr. Drew weans them from their addiction to power and thuggery. We’ll form a working group to explore the idea.
5. Germophobes can add snowflakes to the list.
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Now Playing
“It is to the credit of playwright Steven Simoncic, Pegasus Players, and Live Bait Theatre that they took on the formidable task of dramatizing this highly readable, but still scholarly and detailed work. Heat Wave had its world premiere this week at the O’Rourke Center of Truman College, in a neighborhood not so very different from those where the disaster hit hardest,” our very own Marilyn Ferdinand writes.
“It is near-miraculous that Simoncic was able to cover every significant finding in Klinenberg’s book in the space of a two-hour play, painting a vivid picture of the disaster that anyone can follow.”
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The [Friday] Papers
“The phrase ‘natural born’ was in early drafts of the Constitution,” the New York Times reports in “McCain’s Canal Zone Birth Prompts Queries About Whether That Rules Him Out.”
Q. Would a President McCain appoint strict constructionist judges who would then rule he is not eligible to be president?
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“The anti-McCain litany is the list of bills he has co-sponsored with Democrats: McCain-Feingold (campaign finance restrictions), McCain-Lieberman (greenhouse gas restrictions), and McCain-Kennedy (illegal immigration).”
Jeez, McCain’s passed more Democratic legislation than Obama.
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“Spending nights without her husband has been the most difficult adjustment, Lura Lynn Ryan said,” the Sun-Times reports. “She has kept a strong faith, praying every night, even though ‘the Lord is a little slow in getting here sometimes.'”
Hey, give the Lord a break. He’s a little busy deciding the outcome of sporting events all over the world.
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Alternate punch line: Hey, give the Lord a break. He’s a little busy trying to nail down the nomination in Texas.
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George Ryan has been transferred to a federal facility in Indiana, where he was immediately named a superdelegate. He said he will vote his conscience.
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“Stroger’s not dumping his old $100,000 PR director – Andre Garner. He’s shuffling Garner into a vacant job in the county planning department,” the Sun-Times reports in a story about Todd Stroger hiring childhood friend Gene Mullins as his new propaganda minister.
“Mullins would supervise another former Stroger PR chief, Chinta Strausberg – who is now paid $99,807 a year as Stroger’s liaison to churches – as well as $85,000-a-year hospital spokesman Sean Howard, who was fired from Stroger’s political campaign after he was arrested on charges of stalking a woman.
Wow, I want to be a former Stroger spokesman. Can I apply online?
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“Mullins has a solid reputation at the [Chicago] police department, but his hiring comes on the heels of Stroger hiring another childhood friend, his cousin, his best friend’s wife and even his floor leader’s girlfriend for high-level county jobs.”
The scary thing is that genealogy research shows that Dick Cheney is a distant cousin of Stroger’s . . . and he’ll be looking for a new job soon.
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“For the first time in U.S. history, more than one of every 100 adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report documenting America’s rank as the world’s No. 1 incarcerator.”
The Illinois political caucus put us over the top in a close race with China.
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Voter turnout from inside America’s prisons is unusually high this year.
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Maybe the Wrigley Co. could offer Sam Zell a swap and rename its downtown headquarters Tribune Field.
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If Sam Zell gets his way and sells Wrigley Field to the state, “There’d be no more talk of moving the team to Schaumburg, like the rumblings that accompanied the Trib’s 1981 acquisition of the Cubs for $21 million,” the Sun-Times reports.
In other news of exploiting lame threats more than 20 years old, former East German officials announced that for the right price they will not rebuild the Berlin Wall.
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Why doesn’t Sam Zell sell naming rights to the Tribune?
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“It’s not the same as 20 years ago, when I kept the White Sox in Chicago by passing a tax on out-of-towners,” says former Gov. Jim Thompson.
And that concluded the reading of his new book, Self-Aggrandizing Fairy Tales, out soon on Combine Press.
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Apparently Patti Blagojevich is in line for the commission if Wrigley Field is sold to the state.
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If Wrigley Field becomes McDonald’s Field, will the neighborhood become McDonaldville?
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At least Sam Zell provides us with an identifiable villain instead of a cast of faceless corporate bureaucrats. Now bring me his head on a stake.
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What if Wrigley was renamed Marshall’s Field?
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“I do not believe that anybody can grow a business by reducing the number of employees,” Sam Zell said upon taking over Tribune. “It is not our game plan to, in effect, try and figure out how few people we can have run this business.”
Maybe Zell should coach the Bears, because he’s proving more adept at changing the game plan than Lovie Smith.
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“The focus of everything that we’re going to do is directed at one thing: generating more revenue,” he added.
Apparently that means figuring out how few people can run the business.
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In response to a campaign being waged against him by the Sun-Times, Zell said “We’ll see you in Bankruptcy Court!”
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A Beachwood reader writes: “I’m surprised you didn’t mention the the S-T printing the word “asshole” more than once in Mariotti’s column.
“Maybe it’s part of some brilliant new marketing campaign to reverse their fortunes: “The Chicago Sun-Times: Beating the Tribune one asshole at a time.”
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“[The Wire’s David] Simon is highly amused by an irony he perceives in the press’s reaction to corporations’ slashing of newsrooms: that newspaper editors are now making speeches about the same economic forces – the triumph of capital over labor – that the press has been ignoring in their own cities for years. ‘What they should have been covering is now biting them in the ass,’ Simon said. ‘We’ll see it in season five: Guys, you’re a little late. It happened to you, and it happened to the entire working class.'”
It’s not news ’til it happens to the Tribune.
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If the Straight Talk Express is rockin’, don’t come knockin’.
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The Clinton campaign is facing charges today that it leaked a photo to The Drudge Report of Barack Obama dressed in a blue shirt and khakis from the Gap.
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Gov. Rod Blagojevich insists he’s not Public Official A, he just pretends to be when he’s having governmental relations with Patti.
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Conrad Black reports to prison on Monday and as part of his punishment the only visitor he’s allowed to receive is Neil Steinberg.
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Barack Obama raised $50 million in February and said he would use the funds to take the money out of politics.
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“Bernardo Rangel and Juan Verra were dressed in camouflage and tending as many as 40,000 marijuana plants when they were arrested last summer in a Cook County forest preserve near Barrington Hills,” the Tribune reports.
“On Thursday, Rangel and Verra, 23-year-old Mexican immigrants, were both sentenced to 2 years in prison after pleading guilty to their roles in what authorities said was an elaborate operation.”
Wait a minute. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
The Beachwood Tip Line: The next best thing to being there.
Posted on March 1, 2008