Chicago - A message from the station manager

By Steve Rhodes

Well, we’ve finally achieved bipartisanship; both parties are against the president.
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Arenda Troutman says she’ll stay on the ballot despite the federal bribery charge against here. Mayor Richard M. Daley says he’ll run again too despite the allegations against him.
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Daley and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels have made their wager over the Bears-Seahawks game. Daley is putting up three Streets & San workers, one wrought-iron fencing contract, and two cases of denials against Nickels’ one-year Prozac prescription and a fish market.
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“I was wondering if Daley’s airport expansion plans call for an actual terminal for UFOs to land instead of circling . . . ”
– Brian Rhodes (my brother)
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And now a vibrating bag found at O’Hare. Area 94? O’Hare 51?
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Saw a commercial last night for Lunesta, the sleep-aid drug, warning that side effects could include drowsiness.
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Saw that Boniva commercial again where Sally Field says that her girlfriend has to set aside time every week to take a pill. Yeah, that’s half a second a week she’ll never get back.
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READER FEEDBACK: Two responses to the Boniva item.
1. “On Boniva – that same line in the ad bothered me, too. Then I decided there must be digestive consequences to taking it (???) but I didn’t want to know badly enough to look it up and expose myself to the gory details.”
2. “Uh, Steve, I don’t know whether you’ve checked the Fosamax web site, but there’s a bit more to the non-Boniva osteoporosis pill than just swallowing it. Thanks for making fun of zillions of women facing likely hideous injuries, without first finding out what the deal is.”
I certainly didn’t mean to make fun of anyone. As near as I can tell, the thing about taking one of these pills is that you can’t lie down for 30 minutes afterward. I’m not sure why someone would have to “set aside time” each week to account for this if you take the pill at any time other than before bed, but maybe there are “gory details” I’m not aware of. In any case, the commercial sounds ridiculous, though admittedly it’s not aimed at me. I just chalked it up to the kind of melodrama more often associated with the miracles of mundane products featured on infomercials, but if I missed the mark on this, my apologies.
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Who hired Arenda Troutman’s lawyers?

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Posted on January 12, 2007

The [Thursday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

1. To support the president at this juncture requires us to believe that George W. Bush is smarter, wiser, and more visionary than the following people: The distinguished members of the Iraq Study Group; Colin Powell; Chuck Hagel; George Will; Jon Stewart; your barber; Gerald Ford; your bartender; Al Franken; Jacques Chirac; Thomas Friedman; your 12-year-old daughter; Brent Scowcroft; Barack Obama; the Beachwood Weather Monkey; William F. Buckley; Ted Kennedy; Neil Young; the illegal immigrant who tends your lawn; George H.W. Bush; Al Franken; the vast majority of the American citizenry; the vast majority of the rest of the world; the aliens who visited O’Hare recently.
I just find that hard to believe.
2.Now, it’s one thing to sell oats before the horse has eaten them, and another thing to sell them after.”
3. Whoa. “A partial examination of about 1,100 signatures submitted jointly by Walls lawyer Sidney B. Smith and Daley lawyer Michael Lavelle found problems with 40 percent,” the Sun-Times reports. “The remaining 60 percent were deemed legitimate.”
Forty percent of the mayor’s signatures were no good?
4.Your Travel Time Home Will Double,” the Sun-Times reports, referring to the impact of the CTA’s next phase of Brown Line reconstruction. Jeez, I was joking yesterday when I wrote that the re-opening of the Kimball station would be followed by the closure of the rest of the system. When reality outpaces sarcasm, it’s time for somebody to lose their job.
5. Your doin’ a helluva job, Frankie!

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Posted on January 11, 2007

The [Wednesday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

Our confidence in the FBI’s ability to, say, do its part to protect us from terrorism isn’t exactly at an all-time high upon learning of its apparent inability to read maps.
According to various reports, the sting set up by the agency to snare Ald. Arenda Troutman involved a parcel of land that wasn’t even in her ward.
Troutman’s lawyer, though, errs when he thinks that’s a point his client’s favor. “That should prove to everyone that there was nothing fraudulent going on,” Sam Adam Jr. told the Tribune. Adam said Troutman knows exactly where the boundaries of her ward are.
That’s all the more damning, though. Troutman actually had the gall to (allegedly) accept a bribe to develop a property that wasn’t even in her ward! It turns out the parcel in question is in Shirley Coleman’s ward – and Coleman wasn’t even offered a cut!

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Posted on January 10, 2007

The [Tuesday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

Political scandals in Chicago, which in my mind includes state government, come with an unerring ability to add to the already-rich vernacular of fixers and operators scheming in any manner of way to get a little on the side. Who can forget such timeless classics as former Chicago treasurer Miriam Santos’s FBI-recorded squeeze on a contractor/contributor, “Now it’s time for people to belly up,” followed by “I am human and probably the first woman to go to jail for PMS-ing”? And sometimes the phrase-making comes from prosecutors, as in U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s description of Tony Rezko’s dealings as pay-to-play on steroids.
We can now add Ald. Arenda Troutman’s instant classic, recorded by the FBI, “Well, the thing is, most politicians are hos.”
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!
Let’s take a look at some of the other highlights from the Troutman follies.

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Posted on January 9, 2007

The [Monday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

The continuing delight that is the story of the UFO spotted hovering above Gate C-17 at O’Hare airport has captured the wonder and imagination of Earthlings far and wide, with one notable exception: Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg.
UFOs, Steinberg writes (second item), frighten him, because they show just how far we haven’t come from primitive beliefs.
I suppose you could work up an argument like that, but I think just the opposite is true. While I don’t believe the vast majority – if any – of the people spotting UFOs are actually seeing alien spaceships, it’s folly to believe that in an apparently infinite universe there is no other form of life, nor a form of life that one day might actually pay us a visit.
To believe that our pathetic lives are all that is out there – that in the incomprehensible vastness of endless space only one civilization has come to be, and it spends most of its waking hours watching American Idol and Dancing With The Stars – is actually a belief I find far more primitive than believing other beings could have invented space travel that likely doesn’t involve taking one’s shoes off before boarding. In fact, it is the possibility of alien life forms that shakes our most primitive belief systems – religions – to their roots.
So I’m leaning toward the explanation that space people could have indeed visited O’Hare, only to be frightened and confused by the Burrito Beach in Terminal 3. Until proven otherwise.

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Posted on January 8, 2007

The Weekend Desk Report

By Natasha Julius

Happy New Year, everyone! From noisemakers to newsmakers, we’re back to watching the stories that you need to follow.
BCS Election Show
On Monday, delegations from Ohio and Florida will battle for ultimate college football supremacy. While each state has been influential in previous national struggles, only Florida managed to pull off an upset. Call us crazy, but our money’s on the Gators in overtime.
Wet, Hot American Summit
Faced with the possible resignation of a high-profile underling, President Bush this week promised to stop fondling the help. Sources close to the situation, however, note that the president’s one-time executive assistant may still launch a sexual harassment suit claiming that Bush’s closeness forced him from his job.

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Posted on January 6, 2007

The [Friday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

The Tribune nicely dismantles this morning what is obviously a disingenuous ad campaign by ComEd in favor of dramatically raising your electric bills disguised as a grass roots effort fighting for some kind of utility justice.
The paper’s reporting shows that Consumers Organized for Reliable Electricity, which has been placing full-page ads in the Tribune, Sun-Times, and newspapers around the state, as well as airing scare-mongering TV commercials, is a front group funded by . . . ComEd.
“But ComEd’s name is nowhere to be seen as the voice-over raises the specter of the disaster to come if the Illinois legislature extends the freeze on electricity rates next week,” Crystal Yednak writes.
ComEd President Barry Mitchell, who deserves a phone call from every ComEd user in the state, doesn’t see anything wrong with the deception.
“Every organization that runs ads and performs activities doesn’t put a disclaimer with respect to all their funding sources,” he told the Trib. “That’s a violation of the First Amendment.”
Ah, yes. Barry Mitchell, First Amendment Freedom Fighter. I think the Society of Professional Journalists is considering him for an award this year.

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Posted on January 5, 2007

The [Thursday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

Is the Chicago area unprepared for a mass disaster or terrorist attack? I have no idea. I do know that Cook County can’t successfully transmit election results via cell phones and the CTA can’t keep its trains on their tracks, but then again the U.S. Department of Homeland Security isn’t exactly doing a bang-up job either. I’m not sure they get the benefit of the doubt on this one.
My sense is that when the mayor says “We have done a tremendous job [but] if they are talking about the region outside of Chicago, about some issue, that is different,” he means that the city has its shit together but it’s the county and outlying areas that have their problems, and I can believe that as long as Robert Sorich had nothing to do with hiring anyone involved in protecting us.

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Posted on January 4, 2007

The [Wednesday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

On the Friday before New Year’s Eve weekend, the campaign of Mayor Richard M. Daley announced the mayor was once again refusing to debate his opponents.
“There is no need for Daley to engage in a public debate since he has answered more questions than any local elected official during his nearly two-decade reign, campaign manager Terry Peterson said,” the Sun-Times reported.
I didn’t know that was the standard.

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Posted on January 3, 2007

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