By Steve Rhodes

1. “I want to thank the Chicago press,” said Patrick Ryan, Chicago’s [Olympic] bid committee chairman. “We have many best-new friends in the press.”
2. “Its gushing local media might as well have been part of the Chicago Olympic committee. It sang the city’s praises like a boys choir.”
3. “People ask me, as one of the reporters covering Chicago’s efforts to land the Games, if I want the hometown to win,” writes Andrew Herrmann – author of the Sun-Times‘s “Bringing the Olympics to Chicago” series.

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Posted on April 16, 2007

By Natasha Julius

If only more politicians could predict the future, we could have our weekends back. Until that happens, we’ll be here to serve you.
Quest Kick-off
While the Beachwood’s Ex-Hawk Affairs Desk seems to have found the winning formula for predicting the Stanley Cup Playoffs, the Weekend Desk has a few sure things to throw into the mix.

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Posted on April 14, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

1. “I think one thing that is true about what’s been lost is that our politics has become or feels very much like an insider’s game. I think people feel that you’ve got the two parties splitting the pot, and ordinary voters are left out of the process.”
– Barack Obama, February 10, 2007, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
2. “Obama, who has campaigned as a political outsider, deftly cultivated insiders in nearly every corner of the political establishment,” the Tribune reports today, in the latest installment in their “Making of a Candidate” series – this one about how Obama grew his fundraising operation.

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Posted on April 13, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

“Four of the 12 Chicago aldermen running in the April 17 runoff employ relatives or other loved ones on their publicly funded ward staffs, costing taxpayers more than $400,000 a year,” Allison Riggio and Hunter Clauss report today in a piece jointly published by creatingcommunityconnections.org and the Beachwood.
The aldermen quotes are priceless.
* “That’s just something that people always have done,” Ald. Madeline Haithcock (2nd) told Riggio and Clauss. “Almost everybody has a relative on their staff. I have a daughter and have my husband that is watching my back on the West Side.”
Haithcock has both her husband and daughter on her (public) payroll.
“Combined with the alderman’s $98,125 annual salary, the Haithcock family is on track to gross $212,521 in taxpayer money this year,” Riggio and Clauss report.

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Posted on April 12, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

So it’s Al Sharpton’s fault.
If only he – and Rev. Jesse Jackson – had done a better job policing black folk, Don Imus wouldn’t have been tricked into calling a bunch of college basketball players nappy-headed ho’s.
“Where is Sharpton every other day we’re being called bitches and hos in music and on video? ” asks Sun-Times deputy features editor Deborah Douglas. “Why hasn’t he made a campaign out of that?”
Kathleen Parker, a syndicated columnist carried on the Tribune‘s Op-Ed page, wants to know too.
“Sharpton and Jackson would do well to direct some of their outrage to [black hip-hop],” she writes.
Outrage like, say, calling for black entertainers to stop using the N-word?

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Posted on April 11, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Is Barack Obama a fabricator?
The Tribune‘s Washington, D.C., blog considers the question raised by Republican National Committee talking points – some based on the paper’s own reporting – and wishy-washily concludes: “This isn’t to say Obama isn’t a liar. That would take an exercise in trying to prove his intent, to read his mind which reporters aren’t probably that good at. But do we have enough evidence at this time to accuse him of fabrications which would make him a fabricator?”
Can someone please explain to me the difference between a liar and a fabricator?
Olympic Dream
Speaking of lying and fabricating, lost in the news of the Tribune Company sale, the CTA’s experiment in hell, Phil Cline’s resignation as police chief, and the opening of baseball season was a Tribune article thoroughly debunking assertions by the mayor and his Olympic point man, Pat Ryan, that virtually every Olympics has turned a profit.
Quite to the contrary.
My question to the Trib and the rest of the media, though is this: What took so damn long?

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Posted on April 10, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Briefly, this morning, I’m tending to business. I’ll be back at full speed tomorrow.
1. The funny thing about Zach Johnson winning the Masters on Sunday was how every time he thanked his Lord and Savior (“Jesus was with me every step of the way. I felt him”), the television crew pretended they didn’t hear him and went right on with their questions.
2. So Jesus was on loan from Carlos Zambrano?
3. Does that mean Jesus wasn’t with Tiger Woods every step of the way? Tiger didn’t pray hard enough? That Jesus cares more about who wins the Master’s than, say, the slaughter in Darfur?
4. The Missing Gospels: The resurrection will occur in Miami – and the savior will be a black man.
5. Crucifest!

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Posted on April 9, 2007

By Natasha Julius

Market Update
The volatility of our own marketplace has launched myriad rumors, so it pains us to confirm that the Weekend Desk has been sold to Don Imus. Despite a late counter-offer from another well-known player, we concluded Imus was the only bidder in a position to fully leverage the colossal debt of all our bad jokes.

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Posted on April 7, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

While most of us are still trying to figure out just how Sam Zell’s deal for the Tribune Company will really work, and what exactly it will mean for the company’s employees and the public who depend on the company’s newspapers for information about their communities, it isn’t mere reflexive cynicism to observe one thing that is clear: This will be good for Zell and current Tribune executives and bad for employees and the public. To believe otherwise is to be insanely naive.
Why?
Because Zell and the Trib executives who struck the deal are in it to make as much money as they can. They aren’t in it to deliver the best journalism they can produce as a civic duty, public interest, and bulwark of democracy. Those two objectives are at cross-purposes.

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Posted on April 6, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Dorothy Tillman is nuts. Her unhinged performance on Chicago Tonight last night, where she appeared with challenger Pat Dowell, wasn’t quite the tour de force that Arenda Troutman turned in (second item) a couple months ago, but it was close. And the subject of the Harold Washington Cultural Center didn’t even come up.
I think my favorite part was when the rarely exasperated Carol Marin seemed on the edge of losing her patience with Tillman as the embattled 3rd Ward alderman defended the condition of the ward, which Dowell described as filthy and filled with garbage-strewn lots.
MARIN: I drove through the ward . . . and saw a combination of development and a lot of empty space.
TILLMAN: You didn’t tell me what part you drove through!
MARIN: I drove through the whole ward, alderman, I promise.
Snap!

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Posted on April 5, 2007