Chicago - A message from the station manager

The [Tuesday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

1. Easter Violence Raises Question: Has God Given Up On Chicago?
Hard pass.


2. South Shore Is Chicago’s Eviction Capital.
“According to data obtained from the sheriff’s office, no Cook County zip code has seen more evictions than South Shore, 60649, since the office began tracking these numbers in 2011.
“Last year the sheriff’s office conducted 382 evictions in the area bounded by Stony Island Avenue, the lakefront, Jackson Park, and 79th Street – eight times more than the average.
“Between 2014 and 2016 the neighborhood saw about 20 percent more evictions than the second-busiest zip code, 60619, which includes parts of Chatham, Avalon Park, and Greater Grand Crossing.”
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“This data only presents a partial picture of the the magnitude of the eviction problem, however, since it doesn’t account for what researchers call ‘forced moves’ – those spurred by sudden spikes in rent prices and chronic maintenance problems – or for people who leave on their own after losing eviction cases in court.”
3. Ex-CBOT Chair Arbor Still Dodging Arrest, Divorce Payout.
“In the four years since commodities trader Patrick Arbor fled the country and moved his assets overseas to avoid a big divorce payout, the former Chicago Board of Trade chairman has waged a mostly losing battle in court.
“But Arbor arguably is still winning the war against ex-wife Antoinette Vigilante.
“Vigilante so far has recovered only a fraction of her $18.2 million divorce judgment against Arbor, which is how people in these types of disputes tend to keep score.
“In the meantime, the 80-year-old Arbor has continued to travel between Europe, Mexico and the U.S., successfully avoiding a Cook County arrest warrant for civil contempt of court stemming from the divorce case.”
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“Lawyers for Vigilante say they believe Arbor even slips in and out of Chicago occasionally before they can alert authorities to his whereabouts.”
4. Sean Spicer Should Tell His Boss To Take This Job And Shove It.
In this column, the Trib’s Dahleen Glanton issues necessary – but insufficient – caveats about how Spicer is a grown man who knew what he was getting into when he took the job as Donald Trump’s press secretary.
First, she assumes that Spicer’s resume, which includes five years as communications director for the Republican National Committee, somehow reflects on his character – which it might, but not in the way Glanton thinks.
She also blames Spicer’s embarrassing – even laughable, as illustrated best by Melissa McCarthy – performance on having a bad boss (the president).
But here’s what I take issue with the most:
“The press secretary’s job is to spin that to the media so that the president comes out sounding smart.”
I’m sorry, but that’s not the press secretary’s job at all. The (taxpayer-funded) press secretary’s job is to answer reporters’ questions in lieu of the president, who presumably is so busy running the world (and, in Trump’s case, golfing) that he can’t answer questions every day, or even every week or month, by his or (in the future) herself.
Spin is not part of the job description. Honesty is. I know this sounds quaint, but the media’s normalizing of spin and deceit as all in good day’s work in politics is partially how we ended up in this so-called post-truth, alt-facts world.
Hence, this tweet:


As I’ve said before, there’s actually something refreshing about the lies being so obvious, instead of hidden behind the rhetorical manipulations of people whose every intent is to deceive for political gain.
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“Spicer seems to be eager to trade off his own professional credibility for a boss who never had any credibility.”
What professional credibility?
“He attended Connecticut College from 1989 to 1993, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in government,” according to a Wikipedia passage footnoting the New York Times and the International Business Times.
“In college he was a student senator. In April 1993, an article in the student paper, The College Voice, referred to Spicer as ‘Sean Sphincter;’ Spicer submitted an angry complaint to the paper and followed up by pushing for college judicial action against the paper, for which he received further ribbing from the campus satirical publication Blats. The incident was later cited as the beginning of his contentious relationship with the media.”
Rightly so. The Spicer we see is the Spicer who has always been.
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“If it were me, I would have burst into that big Oval Office long ago and told my boss to take this job and shove it.”
Really? First, no editor has ever tried to make you write something that wasn’t true? The place I experienced that the most was at the Tribune!
Second, give up a table at the seat of world power? If Spicer doesn’t like his job, and Trump doesn’t like the job he’s doing with his job, a more likely outcome is simply shifting jobs. It sounds good to say you’d tell the president to take this job and shove it, but unless you fundamentally disagree with Trump’s noxious positions – and there’s no reason to suspect Spicer does – requesting a new assignment would be more productive.
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Would it be petty to mention that Glanton was just a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary (losing out to, um, Peggy Noonan)? I feel like it be conspicuous not to.
5. Rahm Emanuel Cracks Down Yet Again On Party Buses.
Maybe make them like casinos – they can only operate in standing bodies of water.
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New on the Beachwood today . . .
Chicagoetry: People Made Of Rain Could Wreck God
Roaming self-contained cities of withering pain.
The Bullshit Behind “Record Seizure” Headlines
Media-ready claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny.
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BeachBook
Stained Glass Windows With The McDonald’s Logo Yours For $150.

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TweetWood
A sampling.
I love Snopes, but sometimes it’s a real buzzkill.


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Too hard a truth for the media to face and explore with the same fervor they went after the economic anxiousness of the (white) working-class?


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I did Spicer and United in the same tweet and got nothing but crickets:


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The Beachwood Tronc Line: Whimsical.

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Posted on April 18, 2017