By Steve Rhodes
There will be no column today, I’m swamped with things that need getting done, but if you want a new treat, check out the Mount Lou Alert graphic whipped up by our very own Bethany Lankin at the bottom of The Cubs Factor. We’ll be using this every week to alert you to conditions during the volcano season.
And take this opportunity to check out the rest of the site, as always, and all that good yummy stuff in our archives.
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The [Monday] Papers
Monday monologue.
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The Civic Federation of Chicago is calling for a hike in corporate and personal income taxes to solve the state’s budget problems. If that doesn’t work, the Federation suggestions a pay-to-play tax.
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One budget strategy gaining popularity is for the state let Exelon generate political power while the state would merely distribute it. Without a tax hike, the state could then claim, Illinois would wither away and die.
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Only in Chicago is it news when thousands of city workers actually show up for work on Election Day rather than attend to the mayor’s political needs on the taxpayers’ dime.
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Barack Obama says there is no such thing as MySpace and YourSpace in America, only OurSpace. And he’s in charge of it.
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Hey, what do you expect from a rock star?
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After screwing his MySpace volunteer, Obama had to run to the bank to deposit another check from Exelon – no wonder they had to raise your electric rates.
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Obama ran into Emil Jones at the bank and they had a good laugh.
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“Senate Bill 1381, now in the Rules Committee of the House, would pave the way for even more no-bid contracts in Illinois. It would allow the state to circumvent the bidding process and hire computer technology firms or other minority businesses just as long as – get this – those companies had previously had contracts with other units of government or community colleges.”
Guess who runs a minority-owned computer technology firm with government and community college contracts?
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“The recent screeching outrage over Bears tight end Greg Olsen’s obscene rap music back when he was a freshman in college, for instance, was so over-the-top and hyperventilated that it could only have come from those who have never been teenaged boys or never had teenaged sons,” the Sun-Times‘s Rick Telander writes (low in column), without acknowledging that the screeching is mainly emanating from Telander’s own paper, which plastered the story on its front page in an effort to exploit the Don Imus cultural moment to boost sagging newspaper sales, then actually asked its music critic to review Olsen’s rapping, and then on Sunday put Olsen’s photo front and center on its Controversy cover under the headline “Poster Boy For a Ghetto Nation.”
In that article, by the way, Deborah Douglas places every pop culture figure she doesn’t like in the Ghetto Nation, including Donald Trump, Rosie O’Donnell, and Alberto Gonzales.
Boy, they don’t make ghettos like they used to.
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Does that make the Sun-Times the Newspaper of Ghetto Nation?
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The Dalai Lama calls for compassion in a speech at Millennium Park. The Daley Lama says there’s no room left in the budget for that.
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“In a survey of U.S. troops in combat in Iraq, less than half of Marines and a little more than half of Army soldiers said they would report a member of their unit for killing or wounding an innocent civilian,” the AP reports.
Chicago police chief Phil Cline said he was so impressed he would try to find out the military’s secret.
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“Dumping close to a thousand teachers in one fell swoop sounds like bad news to me,” Monroe Anderson writes. “How did CPS hire so many incompetent employees in less than five years?”
One word: Outsourcing.
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The White House got a lesson in protocol in advance of the Queen’s visit, The New York Times reports.
For example, the paper reports that “One does not shake the queen’s hand unless the queen offers hers first. And after Her Majesty finishes her meal, everyone’s meal is finished.”
And if you walk into the bathroom and find her there unexpectedly, you are not supposed to snort a line unless asked to do so.
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And no, she can’t spare a square.
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The Tribune‘s Michael Tackett is upset with what he calls the Media Echo Chamber Caucus, which apparently is declaring Obama’s candidacy dead.
“I thought we all agreed Obama was Abe Lincoln the Rock Star,” Tackett laments. “How can the caucus expect me to echo their punditry if it keeps changing?”
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The Tribune‘s Steve Chapman says racial profiling is a myth. Cops don’t like white people either.
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“A change in Hollinger’s corporate constitution required at least one member of the audit committee to be a financial expert,” the Trib reports. “[Jim] Thompson, the committee’s chairman, kept holding meetings even though no one on the committee met the new requirement.”
Thompson explained that he believes in original intent.
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Trib media writer Phil Rosenthal wonders if Chicago journalism is really better off without Rupert Murdoch.
You know things are bad when you’re pining for Rupert Murdoch . . .
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See the commercial where the toughest questioner at a pol’s press conference is from RedEye?
If only Rupert Murdoch was still around . . .
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St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa says that removing beer from the clubhouse in the wake of pitcher Josh Hancock’s DUI death “was largely a symbolic move since players don’t drink much in the clubhouse anyway,” AP reports.
Apparently they drink in their cars on the way home instead.
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Rudy Giuliani indicated during the Republican debate last week that he is a strict constructionist when it comes to the Constitution. For example, when he was mayor of New York City he treated blacks as three-fifths of a person.
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Mystery Debate Theater 2007.
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Like John Kass, Kathleen Parker, and Matt Drudge, Sun-Times columnist Jack Higgins doesn’t think Hillary Clinton has any business reading hymns written by black people.
“What’s next?” Higgins says. “Blacks and whites attending the same prom?”
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How the Cubs are like the Harlem Globetrotters.
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Excessive Teen Showering Solved.
Finally.
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The Beachwood Tip Line: Distributing power.
Posted on May 8, 2007