By The Weekend Desk B Team

Natasha Julius has been detained at the border of motherhood and insanity. The B Team is on the case.
The Mayor, The Lobbyist And The Dead 6-Year-Old Girl
“Mayor Rahm Emanuel has refused for months to release public records that could shed light on his controversial speed camera plan while he persuaded state lawmakers and Gov. Pat Quinn to turn it into law,” the Tribune reports.
“Now that the mayor has released a small number of the requested documents, even that incomplete portrait raises new questions about how the plan was developed and sold.
“The records, many of them heavily censored, offer clues into City Hall’s misstatements about a pedestrian safety crisis, the role of a well-connected speed camera lobbyist and how the mayor linked the death of a little girl to his campaign for cameras even though the devices wouldn’t have saved her.”
In other words, Rahm Emanuel has been exposed as a liar who pimped a six-year-old’s death in order to fake the real reason why he pushed so hard for speed-camera legislation. Which, of course, was for the money, not the children.

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Posted on February 11, 2012

By Steve Rhodes

Like a Supreme Court justice nominee who pretends he or she has never formed an opinion about Roe v. Wade, Transparency Mayor Rahm Emanuel is pretending he has no opinion worth sharing about this week’s city sticker controversy.
“That was yesterday,” he said. “My job is to focus on what is essential to the city.”
Where do these creatures come from? The Chicago River? A secret lab?

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Posted on February 10, 2012

By Steve Rhodes

“Hearings won’t be held in the Southland on the closing of the Tinley Park Mental Health Center,” Phil Kadner writes for the SouthtownStar.
“Last October, hundreds of people packed a banquet room at Georgios Comfort Inn in Orland Hills for a legislative hearing on the closing of the mental hospital.
“Former patients, their relatives, mental health experts from Will County and local hospital officials were among those who opposed Gov. Pat Quinn’s plan to close Tinley Park Mental Health Center.
“And the closing was postponed.
“But the governor has now set a July 1 shutdown date for the hospital, and the same legislative panel, the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability, is again holding mandated public hearings.
“But this time the hearings are being held in Springfield. That pretty much assured that interested Southland residents couldn’t testify.”

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Posted on February 9, 2012

By Steve Rhodes

1. Well, it looks to me like they’re crossing their fingers, as if to say “That fundraiser had nothing to do with me changing my position!”
2. Yes, get employers out of the health-insurance business.
3. College Illinois! Needs Taxpayer Bailout To Stay Afloat.
Me too.

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Posted on February 8, 2012

By Steve Rhodes

Let’s look around, shall we?
1. “We are researching a product,” Chicago chef Homaro Cantu tells Super Chef. “You drink alcohol, but won’t give you a hangover. It is all about healthier and more fun. We are re-thinking alcoholic beverages. You will be able to drink, and then wait twenty minutes and you will be sober. It will eliminate all kinds of problems. It might even eliminate alcoholism.”
Or double it.
2. The trend-setting Chicago Wolves are not only serving their Vancouver Canuck masters well but they’re setting the bar when it comes to Twitter and individual goal songs, according to this report out of Canada.

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Posted on February 7, 2012

By Steve Rhodes

We’ve got a lot of stuff today but there isn’t going to be a column.
First, our stupendous Super Bowl Coverage:
* SportsMonday: The Goat Is Wes Welker But Tom Brady Was No Prize: Giselle Bundchen is totally pissed.
* The Best Super Bowl Ads You Didn’t See: Blown chances.

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Posted on February 6, 2012

By The Weekend Desk B Team

Natasha Julius is on a top secret mission that may or may not involve drones, so the B team is on the desk this weekend.
World Class
Chicago may never host a Super Bowl, and we may be miserable, but by God we can still attract international corporations.
“ThyssenKrupp A.G., the big German metal technologies company, is opening a North American regional headquarters in Chicago,” Crain’s reported Thursday.

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Posted on February 4, 2012

By Steve Rhodes

Playing catch-up with the week’s news.
Flak Attack
“Shaping public perceptions isn’t as easy today as it was when planting a few stories in the right publications could do the trick,” Lisa Bertagnoli wrote in Crain’s this week in a story about Edelman PR.
You just can’t plant stories like you used to!

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Posted on February 3, 2012

By Steve Rhodes

Worlds are colliding today, so no column. Here are a few other new offerings, though:
* Don Cornelius Was One Cool Cat: A lot is being written about the suicide of Soul Train conductor Don Cornelius, who grew up on the South Side, was once a Chicago police officer, and started the seminal show here at WCIU. I’ve gotten to maybe half of what I hope to read, though my interest now is less in the show’s history, of which I’m pretty well-versed (and I watched a fair amount myself growing up; the visual of a young Chaka Khan doing “Tell Me Something Good” is still etched into my brainpan), but in the latter part of Cornelius’s life and the depression that led to that self-inflicted gunshot.
Nonetheless, I aggregated a bit of what I thought stood out among the writings and constructed a brief narrative of sorts.
Oh, and this happened. Here’s some video.

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Posted on February 2, 2012

By Steve Rhodes

“Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez is fighting a mother’s request for a special prosecutor to re-examine the homicide of her only child, who died from injuries he suffered during a drunken confrontation with a nephew of then-Mayor Richard M. Daley,” the Sun-Times reports.
“Alvarez argued Tuesday she has no conflict of interest to disqualify her from re-investigating the violent death of David Koschman – even though she still employs Darren O’Brien, the assistant state’s attorney who determined nearly eight years ago that there was insufficient evidence to charge Daley nephew Richard J. ‘R.J.’ Vanecko.”
Let us now review:
“Newly obtained Chicago Police reports show Detective Ronald Yawger ‘arranged interview w/Victim’s friends & ASA’ on May 18, 2004. That ‘ASA’ was Assistant State’s Attorney and Felony Review chief Darren O’Brien. It is amazing that the state’s attorney’s office has not one record of it – especially because O’Brien would personally interview witnesses two days later.”

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Posted on February 1, 2012