Chicago - A message from the station manager

The [Thursday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

Spent the morning at the dentist and I’m gonna need a root canal on Tooth 18.
I asked the dentist if there was a downside to just pulling it because that would be less expensive and he said, “It’s a good tooth, I wanna try to save it.”
I guess dentists really do have a thing for teeth.
And he’s right, it is a good tooth. It’s done yeoman’s work for me over the years. But it’s not really earning its keep.


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By the way, Tooth 18 is the last molar in the very back, bottom row. But the next one closer to the front of my mouth is Tooth 19, so I don’t get their numbering system at all.
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Then I went to Walgreens to get three prescriptions filled, all tooth-related, and once again the pharmacy was a total shitshow. It’s been this way for several months, and it’s not the fault of anyone who works there, but I get the sense their staffing has been cut back. Maybe to prepare the company for private equity monsters? Who will only cut back staffing even more?
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While I was waiting for my prescriptions to be filled, I caught WGN-TV’s coverage of the Eddie Johnson retirement press conference. I’ll have more tomorrow or over the weekend, but . . . really? It reminded me of the highly choreographed goodbye to Forrest Claypool, in which Mayor Rahm Emanuel tried to create the storyline of a glorious and dedicated public servant finally stepping down to spend more time with his family instead of being forced out by a quite insistent scandal.
To wit:


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“Claypool walked out of the press conference without explaining why he resigned,” ABC7 Chicago reported. “Instead, the news conference focused on his career successes.”
You can see the resemblance to today’s affair. Johnson appeared with family members acting as human shields against the slings of an unfeeling press corps that would, theoretically, not dare to ask the “tough” (also defined as “obvious”) questions about his departure with them standing right there, while Mayor Lori Lightfoot played to the hilt the idea that the outgoing police chief had been some sort of iconic, transformative figure instead of the placeholder that he was. In effect, Johnson has already been the interim police chief ever since Rahm defied the law and his own police board – led by Lightfoot! – by plucking Johnson out of the ranks at the behest of the city council’s black caucus in an effort to both save his own skin in the wake of the Laquan McDonald murder and to install someone he could easily control.
Much to my surprise, the coverage I’ve seen so far – hardly exhaustive (yet) and including a WGN-TV package so syrupy you could pour it on pancakes – has elevated Johnson to a departing king of unheralded benevolence, instead of the hack ill-equipped to lead the department into federally mandated reform that he has been.
Dear media: Eddie Johnson did not lead the CPD into its tech age, nor did his “strategies” bring down crime. He did not “save” the city from “coming apart” post-Laquan (and in fact seemed to have played a role in falsifying the event), and he did not “rebuild trust with the community.” If he was even a sliver of that effective, his job status would not have been a persistent question during the last mayoral campaign.
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Back to Lightfoot, though: When she pleaded with the assembled press to keep its questions to the greatness of Sir Johnson in order for us to properly celebrate the man and all he had done for the city instead of asking her the exceedingly more relevant questions about the process going forward of replacing him – and how could anyone replace the man so honored today? – I nearly spit out my coffee, except that I wasn’t drinking coffee, I was in the waiting area of my local Walgreens waiting on three prescriptions. (To be fair, one was superprofen – prescription ibuprofen that packages four normal pills into one superpill for your pain-relieving pleasure.)
When it seemed – though I admittedly was not attaining a 100 percent quality viewing experience – that the press complied, I tried to focus instead on my comparably less painful tooth but alas, looketh away I could not. What the fuck is wrong with everyone?
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Mini-thread.


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Flight Note
Regarding the item on Wednesday about covering the crash of American Eagle Flight 4184, my dad tells me today he remembers that, and that I was standing in a lot of mud, and also that I traded something to someone in order to use their phone to call my reporting into the newsroom. I don’t totally remember that last part, but I don’t doubt it either.
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New on the Beachwood . . .
One Man Wonders About The State Of Chicago Sports
And that man is our very own David Rutter.
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Chicago’s Tree Trimming (Still) Sucks
“[M]any City trees have not been trimmed in over a decade.”
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ChicagoReddit

Worst Chicago apartment management from r/chicago


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ChicagoGram


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ChicagoTube
Djunah at the Empty Bottle on Monday night.

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BeachBook
The Daily Boris.

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How Mike Pence’s Office Meddled In Foreign Aid To Reroute Money To Favored Christian Groups.

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TweetWood
A sampling of the delight and disgust you can find @BeachwoodReport.


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The Beachwood Tip Line: Spare a dime.

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Posted on November 7, 2019