By Steve Rhodes
I’m on a bit of a weird schedule today so I’m not sure if there will be a Papers column, but I might have something here later, as well as at Division Street.
In the meantime, please enjoy the rest of the site, including today’s new comic book post from our very own Max Eddy. Even if you aren’t a comic book fan, look at the artwork. Later!
The [Monday] Papers
The playoff at Torrey Pines begins at 11 a.m. on ESPN. NBC takes over at 1 p.m. The forecast is mid-70s. After all, it’s in San Diego.
Beachwood Baseball
* Jordan faxing in “I’m Back” this was not. In The White Sox Report.
* The team will start the week playing a game that doesn’t count and end the week with games that will count too much. In The Cub Factor.
* “I’m running out of superlatives for the Cubs at this point,” our very own Jim Coffman writes, “but so far the Cardinals are an even better story.” In SportsMonday.
Father’s Day Farce
“White House hopeful Barack Obama gave a tough-love but optimistic Father’s Day sermon at the Apostolic Church of God on Sunday, exhorting other fathers, especially African Americans, to meet their responsibilities,” the Sun-Times (and others, of course) reports.
As with his policy pronouncements, Obama’s actual record is missing from the reports:
“Earlier in their 15-year marriage, [Michelle] was often furious with her husband,” Vanity Fair reported in December 2007. “‘I have chosen a life with a ridiculous schedule, a life that requires me to be gone from Michelle and the girls for long stretches of time and that exposes Michelle to all sorts of stress,’ Barack wrote in his best-seller The Audacity of Hope.”
Available to reporters since it was published in December 2006.
“By the time their second child was born, he reported, ‘my wife’s anger toward me seemed barely contained. “You only think of yourself,” she would tell me. “I never thought I’d have to raise a family alone.”
“Mrs. Obama finally got tired of being enraged and miserable. ‘One day I woke up and said, I can’t live my life mad. This is just no fun,’ she reports. ‘For a period in my life, I thought the help I needed had to come from Barack. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, but he wasn’t there. So I enlisted moms and babysitters and got help with the housecleaning, and I built that community myself.’
“She also had to re-evaluate the gap between her own expectations and her husband’s far more flexible ideas about family life. ‘I came into our marriage with a more traditional notion of what a family is,’ she says. ‘It was what I knew growing up – the mother at home, the father works, you have dinner around the table. I had a very stable, conventional upbringing, and that felt very safe to me. And then I married a man who came from a very different kind of upbringing. He didn’t grow up with a father; his mother traveled the world. So we both came to this marriage with very different notions about what children need, and what does a couple need to be happy.'”
TV Talk
“Obama’s Message To Fathers: ACT LIKE A MAN (and turn off ‘SportsCenter’
– Sun-Times cover today
“Along the way, some unofficial rules have emerged between the candidate and his aide. From Mr. Obama: ‘One cardinal rule of the road is, we don’t watch CNN, the news or MSNBC. We don’t watch any talking heads or any politics. We watch ‘SportsCenter’ and argue about that.”
– New York Times, May 27
Divine Ruler
“[They ask] how do you manage all this, ‘folks talking about you on cable?’ I say, ‘Trust the Lord.’ I trust in the Lord. He looks after me.”
– Obama, according to the Sun-Times account
Solve Murder
“Renowned local street artist Brendan ‘Solve’ Scanlon was murdered in Logan Square Friday night,” Chicagoist notes. They have a link to an interview with Scanlon and photos of his work.
Super Mayor
“Mayor Richard Daley said Saturday he urged officials to stop construction of the CTA’s downtown ‘super station’ project to speed express trains to both Chicago airports because the plan’s technology was outdated,” the Tribune reported over the weekend.
And, um, “urged”?
Yes, I can see it now. “CTA chief Ron Huberman decided to go ahead with the downtown ‘super station’ despite Mayor Daley urging him to shut it down.”
At least the Trib had this:
“When CTA president Ron Huberman announced that the project in the Loop’s Block 37 was being delayed indefinitely, he made no mention of any switching or other technology issues that were holding back the project.”
That’s because Daley is making it up as he goes.
“But Daley said he agreed with the delay ‘because you cannot go with an old switch system. The technology has to be there.'”
He agreed with the delay?
Memo to reporters: If you can’t get to the bottom of a boondoggle by deadline, you aren’t required to publish spin just because officials spout it. It isn’t pretty, but you could even go with the CTA chief and the mayor giving confusing, conflicting accounts as to how the decision to shut down yet another overbudget, oft-delayed project came about. Report what you know, not what officials tell you.
*
“I said to them you can’t build a station without changing the technology,” Daley said. “I told them they had to stop.”
So . . . he didn’t “urge” and he didn’t “agree with.” It’s Daley’s project: He started it, he spent the money for it, and he shut it down. He’s accountable. Let’s just be clear.
Beachwood, Baby!
* Check out our new music feature, I Shot the Band. Our opening foray features local buzz band Company of Thieves.
* We have another new feature we’re calling Big in Japan, from Dan Simon, our new Tokyo bureau chief. His first dispatch about Kosuke Fukudome may surprise you.
* A final word on Top ChefThe Beachwood Tip Line: Scalloped.
Posted on June 17, 2008