By Steve Rhodes
1. The Tribune blows it in its big front-page profile of mayoral press secretary Jackie Heard, in The [Sunday] Papers.
2. “Call To Limit Cases Amuses Public Defenders.”
3. “Bush ‘Signing Statements’ Deemed Unconstitutional.”
The rest of his administration to follow.
4. “Some big American cities are flourishing as at no time in recent memory. Places like New York and San Francisco appear to be richer and more dazzling than ever: crime remains low, new arrivals pour in, neighborhoods have risen from the dead,” The New York Times reports in “Cities Shed Middle Class, And Are Richer And Poorer For It.”
“[T]he rich pour into what some economists now call ‘superstar cities,’ places like New York, San Francisco, San Diego, Boston and Washington.”
Boy the mayor’s been busy.
5. “I’m a Realtor, so I understand a thing or two about the good and bad sides of ‘neighborhood changes.’ And I am SO, SO SICK of yuppie types who want to move into a ‘charming old ethnic neighborhood’ because of its ‘local color’ and ‘urban feel’ – then, five minutes after unpacking, start agitating for removal of precisely the qualities that gives the area in question is ‘charm’ and ‘feel’! Gosh darn, those ethnic businesses are so full of ethnics! And the churches have the audacity to announce themselves with their bells! (I won’t even begin to go into the history of the significance of church bells here.)
“And how many folks who grew up in Chicagoland, and think of Western Avenue as Car Lot Central, know about how ‘gentrification’ is causing the removal of the bread-and-butter economic underpinnings of that street and the neighborhoods it goes through? How naive I was a few years ago when a couple of clients, checking out a new condo development, asked me, ‘So when is that car dealership next door going to leave?’ I told them, in effect, that Western Ave. has historically been zoned for car sales and they should learn to live with it. Silly me – never underestimate the power of newbies-with-money to petition for removal of a long-standing local business! Within a couple of years after completion of the condo project, the car store was gone and replaced with a ‘Build to Suit’ vacant lot!”
6.“I’ve got nothing against Britney, I just didn’t understand why she would choose to do a song like “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” when rock doesn’t even touch her life in any aspect.”
– Joan Jett, in an interview with the Sun-Times’s Jim DeRogatis
7. Don Rose’s “No Way Daley Was Clueless This Time” is not about the police torture of black suspects that occurred while Daley was the Cook County State’s Attorney, but about the mayor’s illegal patronage machine. But with renewed attention on Daley’s two terms as the state’s attorney, you have to wonder what he did with his time over there. The special prosecutors who issued the Burge report last week let Daley off-the-hook for not following up on allegations of police torture in part because he was a delegator. Rose notes that Daley “was shocked and angered to learn that the Duff fmaily, who threw parties for him and donated heavily to his campaigns, was running multiple financial scams on the city. Amazingly, though he was state’s attorney for nearly a decade, he didn’t know those same Duffs were prominently connected to the mob.”
8. “Every four years we hear from politicians from both parties about how they want to be our friends,” said Vietnam veteran Donald Smithenry of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Department of Illinois. “I think it is lip service on both sides. Politicians tell us what we want to hear.”
9. Jon Yates’s piece on Sunday about his “What’s Your Problem?” column notes that customer service columns are nothing new for newspapers, reaching back into the past to cite the Action Line that ran in the Tribune in the 70s, but failed to acknowledge current-day The Fixer that runs in the Sun-Times.
10. Amtrak ridership at record levels. Who knew?
11. Gov. Baloneyvich.
12. Media as business watchdogs.
The Beachwood Tip Line: Mmmm, baloney . . .
Posted on July 24, 2006