By Steve Rhodes
Not only do we have the city’s best baseball roundup, we have the world’s best collection of Joe Biden material. I mean, really. We’re good.
* The Best of Beachwood Biden
* Joementum!
* The MasterCard Senator
Plus, “Rocky Mountain High” in Song of the Moment.
Is there a better publication than us on the planet today?
Uncle Emil
Emil Jones, classiest political mentor to a president ever.
Daddy Jones
“I respect fathers who take care of their children.”
Especially those who do so at the expense of everyone else’s children.
Spit Take
“‘Machine,’ Jones spat out the word. ‘Now, I don’t know what that means.'”
Cousin Todd
Todd Stroger, best Cook County board president ever.
Chicago Night is gonna rule!
Conventional Wisdom
“Since Obama clinched the nomination – it’s official Thursday after the roll call – his campaign has become more conventional,” Lynn Sweet reports. “Fired up and ready to go has been muted.
“Obama has had a change of heart on offshore oil drilling, opted out of public financing, angered his activist base by backing a foreign intelligence surveillance law, and demonstrated he indeed has the stomach to approve negative ads.
“‘He made a set of compromises all in a row that freaked people out on the progressive side of the party,’ said Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign For America’s Future.”
Status Quo You Can Believe In
“A senior Obama adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity, said his boss has expressed impatience with what he calls a ‘reverence’ inside his campaign for his message of change and new politics. In other words, Obama is willing – even eager – to risk what got him this far if it gets him to the White House.”
Patronage Army
Bobbie Steele, who was Cook County board president for a second before bequeathing her seat to her son, said on CLTV over the weekend that “no one said a word” about nepotism when George W. Bush ascended to the presidency in part due to his family connections.
Steele was out of the country that year.
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Worse, CLTV host Garrard McClendon was so enthusiastic about Steele’s defense of the very sort of nepotism that kept people of color out of jobs for decades that he told Steele she was “blowing this up!”
The Wages of Nepotism
“Long before a little boy was crushed and killed by a falling gate at a public housing project on the Near North Side, inspectors repeatedly warned the Chicago Housing Authority that gates around the development were a problem, federal reports show,” the Tribune reported over the weekend.
“Inspectors for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reported at least as long ago as 2006 that gates at the Cabrini-Green complex were damaged, falling or leaning. In their last report, in December 2007, they also said ‘multiple’ gates were ‘missing hardware’ and the defects were severe.
“Six months later, 3-year-old Curtis Cooper died when one of the massive metal gates fell on him. A lawyer for the boy’s family has alleged that the gate was dangling by one hinge because the two others had rusted through.
“After being alerted to the problem, it’s not clear what steps -if any – the CHA took to get the politically connected firm managing the Cabrini-Green Rowhouses to fix the gates. Urban Property Advisors, or UPA, is run by the son of developer Allison Davis, one of Mayor Richard Daley’s top allies in the African-American community.”
Allison Davis, of course, is also Obama’s former boss and an inside player in the Chicago nexus of power Obamaphiles like to pretend their man wasn’t a part of.
“As a state senator, Barack Obama wrote letters to city and state officials supporting his political patron Tony Rezko’s successful bid to get more than $14 million from taxpayers to build apartments for senior citizens,” the Sun-Times reported last year.
“The deal included $855,000 in development fees for Rezko and his partner, Allison S. Davis, Obama’s former boss, according to records from the project, which was four blocks outside Obama’s state Senate district.”
Rope-A-Dope
Richard Roeper refers today to Joe Biden’s “relatively minor scandals.”
You mean the ones so minor that they ended his 1988 presidential campaign?
Memory Almost Full
“Mayor Richard Daley and the City Council have forced city workers to take as many as five unpaid days off in the last two years, but the mayor and most aldermen have not shared in the hardship,” the Tribune reports.
The mayor hasn’t taken any days off.
“Quite honestly, it was an oversight on the part of staff who forgot to remind him to take days off,” Jacquelyn Heard said.
A) They also forgot to tell him who hired Angelo Torres.
B) They were supposed to tie a string to their fingers to remind them, but forgot.
C) In fact, staff is so forgetful the mayor shows up for work every Saturday and Sunday morning too.
Chicago-oploy
“Monopoly Thumbs Its Nose At Chicago.”
The Beachwood doesn’t!
A Cop and His Chair
Avocado rotary phones and Jack Lord in the latest awesome installment of our series reviewing the debut season of Ironside.
The Beachwood Tip Line: God’s casual reply.
Posted on August 25, 2008