By Steve Rhodes

1. Isn’t it funny how all these guys keep getting in trouble for helping the mayor without the mayor’s knowledge? It’s like an entire shadow government has been operating right under his nose!
2. The Sun-Times is once again passive about attaching Daley’s directly to a scandal, in this case the indictment of his former streets and san commissioner who also happened to run the Southeast Side branch of the mayor’s chief patronage army, the Hispanic Democratic Organization. The paper’s front page focuses on the least of the indictment – rewards to workers who mowed Al Sanchez’s lawn – and the editorial page boldly proclaims “Political-Hiring Watchdogs Still Have Work Cut Out” rather than, say, maybe the mayor having work cut out. Sometimes Teflon is applied, not worn.
3. “Incredibly,” the Sun-Times‘s editorial board states, “the city still doesn’t admit that it violated Shakman.”
Incredibly, the mayor still doesn’t admit that he violated Shakman.

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Posted on March 23, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

You know what? I don’t really have much of a problem with the “Big Sister” anti-Hillary ad. But as much as the ad effectively expresses a central notion of Obama’s campaign – that he represents a new day and a new way – it also begs the question of whether independent supporters of Obama’s campaign will practice what their man preaches. I don’t think this ad crosses any lines that ought not be crossed – though it may have been even more effective not just using Hillary as antagonist but the whole crew of (theoretically) stale Democrats – but what happens and how will Obama respond when the line inevitably does get crossed? He may have a lot of disowning to do.

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Posted on March 22, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

I will be out today, The Papers will return tomorrow – along with new offerings throughout the site. In the meantime, our terrific TV writer Scott Buckner checks in on Miami Inked and comes away suitably impressed – even if the tattoo artists he knows in Gary are just as talented. And from the random archives, we also present today Metromixology and Hipster 101.
The [Tuesday] Papers
1. Lazzarus on Captain America.
2. “Gonzales Aide Rated Fitzgerald Mediocre.”
Wow, tough crowd.
3. Conrad Black may be fighting for freedom in federal court here in Chicago, but his successor may have even bigger problems. The new boss of the Sun-Times Media Group, Cyrus Friedheim, was in charge of Chiquita from March 2002 to April 2004. Chiquita has admitted in federal court that it paid Colombian terrorists for years, including when Friedheim was at the helm, to protect its banana-growing operation. And now the president of Colombia wants his head.

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Posted on March 21, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

1. Lazzarus on Captain America.
2. “Gonzales Aide Rated Fitzgerald Mediocre.”
Wow, tough crowd.
3. Conrad Black may be fighting for freedom in federal court here in Chicago, but his successor may have even bigger problems. The new boss of the Sun-Times Media Group, Cyrus Friedheim, was in charge of Chiquita from March 2002 to April 2004. Chiquita has admitted in federal court that it paid Colombian terrorists for years, including when Friedheim was at the helm, to protect its banana-growing operation. And now the president of Colombia wants his head.

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Posted on March 20, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

The trial of former Sun-Times proprietor Conrad Black opens this week and is expected to last up to three months. As dazzling a megalomaniac as Black is, the gist of the matter is a rather dull series of financial deals that will be parsed within pennies of their lives, and when it’s all through we’ll have had our fill of audit committees and non-compete agreements. But the most important part of this story has yet to – and may never – be told, and that is a full accounting for what Black’s actions and, more particularly, those of publisher David Radler, wrought on the editorial integrity of the Sun-Times and the public discourse of our city. It’s clear that managers and staffers still at the paper were culpable enablers of the intrusion of Radler’s heavy, grimy hand in editorial affairs, folks who stayed silent even as they implore others to this day to have the courage to bring forward wrongdoing in their own institutions. The Sun-Times will not escape the taint of the Black-Radler years, nor a continued reputation as a house of ethical horrors and warranted suspicion of a yellow-bellied current management team and newsroom, until it reveals to the public the entire story of its editorial abuses.
It’s time for the paper to come clean if it hopes to start anew.

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Posted on March 19, 2007

By Natasha Julius

We’ll look up from our brackets long enough this weekend to monitor the essential stories for you.
Party On!
Just in time for the awesomest holiday of the year, a group of gloomy scientists has once again pointed out that we’re all going to fucking die of thirst soon if we don’t shape up. Don’t worry, though. The White House has promised to out all their spouses if they keep trying to crunch our collective buzz.

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Posted on March 17, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

1. In the wake of Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling homosexuality immoral, Neil Steinberg asked Barack Obama about his view of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Unasked and unanswered is why Obama also thinks homosexuality is immoral.
2. Mayor Daley says today that Chicago ‘s Olympic bid is nothing like the train wreck that is London’s Olympic bid. He’s right. London didn’t have to factor in the cost of handing out contracts to the mayor’s friends.
3. “Former Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.) said Tuesday that White House political adviser Karl Rove told him in the spring of 2001 that he should limit his choice for U.S. attorney in Chicago to someone from Illinois,” the Tribune reported this week.
“Fitzgerald said he believes Rove was trying to influence the selection in reaction to pressure from Rep. Dennis Hastert, then speaker of the House, and allies of then-Gov. George Ryan, who knew Fitzgerald was seeking someone from outside Illinois to attack political corruption.”
One might say that Peter Fitzgerald – whose seat Obama won after Fitzgerald decided not to run for re-election – was far more an independent reform politician than Obama. After all, unlike Obama, Fitzgerald not only appointed Patrick Fitzgerald to the U.S. attorney’s post (do you think Obama would have gone out of his way to dis the mayor and his cronies to hire an out-of-state prosecutor to clean up the town?), he took on pork in his own state and corruption in his own party.

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Posted on March 16, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

I just have to shake my head and mutter. It’s comical, but not really funny. What city has everyone been living in for the last 18 years?
“Taxpayers shouldn’t be continually surprised and chagrined that the mayor and the [Olympic] organizers have told them one thing and done another,” the Tribune editorial page bravely avers this morning. “Just don’t hide the facts.”
I’m sure the mayor will read that and have an epiphany: “Get Ryan on the phone! I want all the facts out!”

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Posted on March 15, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

The city council will approve the mayor’s Olympic financing scheme today under just the conditions he planned for all along: in the dark.
And just in time.
Because now the facts are starting to trickle out. Too little, too late, to be sure. But enough to mark the mayor as a liar, if only the media wasn’t so afraid of that word. After all, he did not tell the truth. And he was asked to multiple times.

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Posted on March 14, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown is entirely right to chide the city council on its complete failure to properly involve itself in Chicago’s Olympic bid, but when he says there are “questions they probably should have asked months ago along with some they still aren’t asking,” I almost choked on my breakfast.
The same, you see, could be said for his own paper and most of the local media, who seem to have forgotten long ago how to actually carry out the maxim they so often love to repeat about checking out your mother if she says she loves you.

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Posted on March 13, 2007