By Steve Rhodes
1. You can win free tickets to Ha Ha Tonka’s record-release show at Schubas this Monday. How? You’ll have to read to the bottom of this story to find out!
2. Here’s the way I wrote it up for NBCChicago.com:
“Mayor Richard M. Daley emerged from hiding on Thursday to insist he knew nothing about the partnership his nephew formed with one of the city’s leading developers to win the right to invest $68 million in city pension funds with a guarantee of $8 million in management fees to the duo until he read about it in the paper like everyone else.”

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Posted on June 12, 2009

By Steve Rhodes
2:55 P.M. UPDATE: Oh what the hell, I might as well wait until tomorrow at this point. Here’s what I posted on NBCChicago.com today, though.
* CPS Is Nacho Nation. Heh-heh.
* ‘XRT’s Brehmer: It Wasn’t Me. Lin no lobbyist.
* Alderman’s Parking Perk. Courtesy of Joe Moore.
–
I’m on a panel this morning about opinion writing as part of the Community Media Workshop’s annual Making Media Connections conference.
The rest of the panel includes Dawn Turner Trice of the Tribune; Tom McNamee of the Sun-Times; and Chris Robling, a WGN commentator who works for Jayne Thompson & Associates.
We start at 9:45 a.m., on the 8th floor at 1104 South Wabash.
I’ll have something for the column upon my return.

Posted on June 11, 2009

By Steve Rhodes
I can tell you that the political grapevine was buzzing on Tuesday when the Sun-Times reported – based on sources including at least one family member – that Mayor Richard M. Daley has just been positively broken up for two years about his nephew’s dubious involvement in city pension funds.
It’s just been tearing him apart.

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Posted on June 10, 2009

By Steve Rhodes
There will be no column today, as I have too many soul-crushing things to attend to. I do have a few posts up at NBCChicago.com.
* Free The Lakefront!
* Al Capone Slept Here!
* A story about this Supreme Court ruling on the impropriety of campaign contributions on judges should be posted soon.
Programming Note
I’ll be on a panel about opinion writing on Thursday as part of the Community Media Workshop’s annual conference. On Saturday I’ll be on a panel as part of the Chicago Future Media Conference. I’ll bring you the details tomorrow.

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Posted on June 9, 2009

By Steve Rhodes
1. He was my friend, and a credit to the profession.
2. This story is a mess.
“Joe Plumeri has cut a high profile as the head of Willis Group Holdings Ltd., being an outspoken critic against industry compensation practices and making one of the sector’s biggest acquisitions in a decade,” the Tribune reported on Sunday.
“But few of his moves as chairman and chief executive of the multinational insurance brokerage have ever mobilized John Q. Public to start a Facebook group, create a Web site and circulate a petition – until recently.”
Does that mean some of his other moves – besides renaming the Sears Tower – have similarly mobilized the public?

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Posted on June 8, 2009

By Natasha Julius
Don’t do anything drastic; this Report is going to be plenty stimulating.
Change Watch
Investors braced for the worst this week as the National Debate Index plummeted to levels not seen since the second quarter of 1981. Despite efforts at restructuring, this week shares in Hope failed to reverse their 20-year bear run.

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Posted on June 6, 2009

By Steve Rhodes
Is there a better read in the city today than the Beachwood?
* You don’t have to be a horse racing afficianado to enjoy reading the Thomas Chambers’ dispatches from the rail.
“Pace is everything in this race, and just when you think you’ve got it made, you’ve got four more furlongs to go! If you’ve got plenty of horse, don’t use him up on the backstretch,” Chambers writes in his preview of this weekend’s Belmont Stakes.
Tom is also spot-on comparing Carlos Zambrano’s childish antics to the dedication of paralyzed Arlington jockey Rene Douglas. Give it a read.

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Posted on June 5, 2009

By Steve Rhodes
“Growing up on a sharecropper’s farm outside Memphis, young [Koko] and her three brothers and two sisters slept on pallets in a shotgun shack with no running water or electricity,” Greg Kot writes. “By the time she was 11, both her parents had died. She picked cotton to survive and moved to Chicago in the early 1950s to be with her future husband, Robert ‘Pops’ Taylor. She found a job working as a domestic, scrubbing floors for rich people.”
She went on to become the Queen of the Blues.
*
Hear my favorite Koko Taylor song (actually written by Ellington Jordan and first recorded by Etta James) and see a YouTube tribute and an excerpt from Scorsese’s The Blues: Here.

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Posted on June 4, 2009

By Steve Rhodes
“Chicago’s 35,000 parking meters were worth nearly twice as much as the $1.15 billion Mayor Daley got when he rammed through a 75-year lease in a few days without analyzing what the system was worth, the city’s inspector general has concluded,” the Sun-Times reports.
“The bottom line is, there was no outside, independent consideration of whether it was a good idea to do this,” said Inspector General David Hoffman.
Which is really far more of an indictment on the city council – which is supposed to be a separate branch of government than the executive branch and should therefore have stopped the mayor in his tracks – than City Hall per se.

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Posted on June 3, 2009

By Steve Rhodes
“The University of Illinois announced Monday that it will temporarily suspend the use of a clout list in the admissions process,” the Tribune reports.
It will return once safeguards are introduced to make sure that, um, adequate caps on clout are put in place.
“U. of I. officials also said they would appoint a panel to examine the process and suggest ways to avoid political pressure in future admissions decisions.”
For example, prohibiting political pressure on future admissions decisions.
But let’s see what the panel comes up with.

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Posted on June 2, 2009