By Steve Rhodes
All the eulogies for Leon Despres are nice, but where have these folks been for the last 20 years?
It seems impossible to me to praise Despres to the high heavens while staying silent about the current mayor – or even endorsing and voting for him.
Folks like Despres are actually marginalized by mainstream media as fringe figures who are beloved upon death but treated as curiosities in life. Similarly with Studs Terkel, who was often treated as cuddly and lovable – or a village idiot – while the content of his political and cultural observations was ignored.
Meanwhile, the Rahm Emanuels and Desiree Rogers’ of the world are celebrated for their contributions to . . . the worst parts of the status quo.
The Peter Fitzgeralds are shunted aside to make room for the Ray LaHoods.
I’ll take Despres.

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Posted on May 7, 2009

By Steve Rhodes
I don’t have time for a Papers column today, but here are some new posts on Beachwood and NBCChicago.com.

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Posted on May 6, 2009

By Steve Rhodes
Just like the story about the sleeper agent in Peoria, this feels underplayed to me.
“A Bolingbrook man who worked with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Iraq and Afghanistan is accused of sending contractors text messages to demand tens of thousands of bribes,” the Sun-Times reports.
Let’s see those texts!

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Posted on May 5, 2009

By Steve Rhodes
“Mayor Richard Daley portrays himself as the most transparent big-city mayor in the country, yet he presides over an administration that routinely denies requests for records that show how Daley really runs Chicago,” the Tribune reports.
“With a nod from the mayor, Chicago’s police chief defied federal judges who demanded a list of officers repeatedly accused of misconduct.
“Daley’s schools superintendent, now the nation’s top education official, refused parents’ requests for the documents behind a controversial decision to relocate their children’s gifted program.
“And the mayor scoffed at reporters and aldermen who demanded records detailing how he wanted to spend hundreds of millions of dollars he was seeking as part of the national economic stimulus plan. He was alone among big-city mayors in not revealing his wish list.”
Hey, here’s an idea: Stimulus funds for the prosecution of officials who do not abide by public records laws!
Or how ’bout this: Access earmarks!

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Posted on May 4, 2009

By Natasha Julius
Sure, we’ll watch the key stories for you. It’s not like we’re locked in our homes rigid with fear or anything.
Change Watch
While the markets continued their long, slow recovery, Change itself took a bit of a beating. Turns out, recovery is still based on convincing people to spend money that they don’t actually have, just like the good old days.

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Posted on May 2, 2009

By Steve Rhodes
First some Derby notes – including a link to our Beachwood Betting Guide -and then the rest of the news.
1. “Breeding practices, motivated by the enormous sums paid for elite bloodlines, have produced a modern thoroughbred that is structurally unsound,” Peter J. Boyer writes in The New Yorker.
“Every horse in the 2008 Derby field was related.”

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Posted on May 1, 2009

By Steve Rhodes
You can imagine my thoughts when an e-mail from the county with this subject line arrived in my in-box yesterday:
PRESIDENT STROGER HOLDS TOWN HALL MEETING TONIGHT TO TAKE QUESTIONS ON THE SWINE FLU
I didn’t go to this particular Town Hall meeting last night – I was busy cutting my toenails and watching The Real Housewives of New York City – but I suspect Stroger first denied there was a swine flu, then denied it had anything to do with any relative of his, then said he hired the swine flu because he believes in second chances, then accused county commissioners of trying to blame him for a flu that’s been around for a long time and that’s “just the way things are,” then blamed the media, then sent his cousin to bail the flu out of jail, and finally told everyone to wash their hands.
Going Viral
“Opportunistic scammers and spammers are actively exploiting the swine flu buzz across the web by spamvertising links to pharmaceutical scams, and bogus ‘Swine Flu Survival Guides’ using search engine optimization of typosquatted domains related to the outbreak,” ZDNet reports.

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Posted on April 30, 2009

By Steve Rhodes
“Brian J. Dugan’s notoriety began in 1985 when he was imprisoned for life for two sex slayings and a series of other attacks on women who survived,” Christy Gutowski wrote earlier this week in the Daily Herald.
“His name re-emerged with a vengeance more than three years ago when DuPage County prosecutors charged him with the Feb. 25, 1983, abduction, rape and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico of Naperville.
“Worried about publicity tainting a potential jury pool, DuPage Circuit Judge George Bakalis sealed the entire case file from public view, imposed a gag order on attorneys and, in a move rarely afforded to other murder defendants, regularly holds lengthy pretrial hearings behind closed doors.”
Bakalis says he’s worried about pre-trial publicity tainting the jury, but he doesn’t seem to have much basis for that notion.

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Posted on April 29, 2009

By Steve Rhodes
The papers are mourning the passing of Pontiac and I, too, will join in that mourning, though I always preferred Chevy’s Camaro (my first and most-beloved car was a green 1975 model) to the Firebird and the Trans Am, even if the Trans Am was a killer name that really said it all.
The Tribune and Sun-Times both list the pop culture presence of these models, as well as the Pontiac GTO. My top three:
1. The 1977 Trans Am from Smokey and the Bandit.
2. Jim Rockford’s Firebird.
3. Wooderson’s 1970 GTO from Dazed and Confused. (“Hey, hey, hey watch the leather, man . . . heh-heh“)

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Posted on April 28, 2009

By Steve Rhodes
Neil Steinberg today writes that he told a curious Sun-Times reporter that he hasn’t weighed in on Todd Stroger’s latest woes up to now because “I don’t traffic in the obvious.”
Really?
His Stroger piece appeared just beneath the little essay he penned on Twitter that must be the billionth to decry that “fixing on the minutiae of others will replace the attention we used to lavish on actual news and real issues.”
What’s next, another piece about how Facebook friends aren’t “real” friends?

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Posted on April 27, 2009