By Steve Rhodes
Sorry, The [Monday] Papers got lost in the shuffle and did not appear. But as always, you can still catch up with The [Sunday] Papers and The Weekend Desk Report. Even better, our Millennium Park package is already generating a hefty response. Please see Postcard Pablum: The Failure of Millennium Park; The Human Bean and the City; and Bean: A Love Story.
1. Hey, we made Wikipedia!
2. Funny kid pictures.
3. Bobbie Steele is out. The Sun-Times coins “quid pro Stroger.” (second item)
4. In New York City, a mayor whose name isn’t Daley but who still manages to do a decent job has put poverty at the top of his second-term agenda – in part as a strategy to improve schools.
5.The head of Northwestern Memorial Hospital is under scrutiny, The New York Times reports.
“Healthcare Research and Development Institute, a for-profit company that is owned by about three dozen hospital executives, but underwritten by 40 or so of its handpicked corporate members, all suppliers to hospitals.
“The Connecticut attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, is investigating whether the organization allows certain vendors to buy access to hospital leaders who are in a position to influence what supplies or services their institutions purchase. As a result, Mr. Blumenthal said, hospitals may not be getting the best deals, either in terms of cost or quality.
“‘At the very least it suggests insider dealings – an insidious, incestuous, insider system,’ said Mr. Blumenthal, who has issued more than 100 subpoenas, mostly to hospital suppliers, including several dozen last week.
“‘Its members are merely “trying to improve products and services in health care – not more complicated than that,’ said Gary A. Mecklenburg, the group’s chairman and a former chairman of the American Hospital Association, the industry’s largest trade group.
“But Mr. Mecklenburg’s own background highlights the overlapping interests that he faces.
“Mr. Mecklenburg not only runs a large nonprofit hospital, Northwestern Memorial in Chicago, but he also serves on the board of Becton, Dickinson and Company, a major supplier of medical devices to hospitals around the world, including his own. Becton, Dickinson pays the institute for marketing advice, and the institute pays Mr. Mecklenburg $50,000 a year, mostly for participating in two national conferences, according to the group.”
5. “This print media is fairly benign compared to Boston, Philadelphia, and New York.”
– Baseball analyst Steve Stone on The Score on Monday
6. “As professor John Decker reviewed bail guidelines and other criminal procedures one recent evening, some students in his DePaul University College of Law class had other things on their minds.
“One shopped on eBay for Cirque du Soleil tickets. Another switched between checking her e-mail and Fox News headlines. And, from the back of the room, a 24-year-old White Sox fan refreshed his screen to see whether the team was still ahead of the Pirates.”
Laptops in the lecture halls, ya gotta love it.
7. The Tribune missed a salient point in its story about political lies on Sunday featuring a “joke” the governor weirdly keeps telling: That he always describes the little girl in it as African-American, as readers of Rich Miller’s Capitol Fax Blog have known for a long time. Another point: The joke’s not even close to being funny, much less worthy as a standard speech opener.
8. Our very own Scott Gordon looks at the CTA’s recent history with the NTSB, and wonders if our local transit boys are listening.
9. “Arizona Ballot Could Become Lottery Ticket.”
10. “Chicago Lottery Ticket Could Become Ballot.”
Just a thought.
11. The money behind Bill Beavers.
12. Beavers raises money for Jesse Jackson Jr.
13. “The USA is becoming much more adult-focused after being centered on children for decades.”
Or is it become more focused on adults who act like children?
14. Add these two to the ignominous list of the guy who complained of the chocolate smell coming from the Blommer’s building and the guy who complained about that noisy racket coming from Lounge Ax. Sterilization of the city almost complete.
15. Mary Mitchell shows compassion for the woman who abandoned her son at the Taste of Chicago.
16. Vladimir Putin on 60 Minutes in May 2005, as reprised by The New York Times on Sunday:
“Democracy cannot be exported to some other place. This must be a product of internal domestic development in a society.”
“In Russia, the president is elected through the direct vote of the whole population – that might be even more democratic.”
“Four years ago, your presidential election was decided by the court. But we’re not going to poke our nose into your democratic system because that’s up to the American people.”
Putin recently said he didn’t want the kind of democracy America has brought to Iraq, either.
17. If your kid brought home this report card, would you be pleased?
18. Another way to construct a report card.
19. The City Hall press corps does this too, and it drives me nuts. Focus, people.
20. Also applies to the City Hall press corps.
21. Visit our archives, now available by section by month. If you like what you see, support us by buying a membership. If you would like to advertise, contact me for more information, including rates and a media kit. Spread the Beachwood love far and wide, we have bills to pay.
The Beachwood Tip Line: Asking Ellie daily.
Posted on July 18, 2006