By Steve Rhodes

EDITOR’S NOTE: While our crack staff puts the finishing touches on our move to a new server this morning, I’ll be out tending to some Beachwood business as well as trying to find an adequate replacement for my favorite Just Tires store, which has been displaced by Brown Line construction. We’ve kept posting light this week as we’ve been transferring bits of data through the Internet universe, however that works. They keep me away from those things, and by “they,” I mostly mean our star art director Cate Nolan. But we have a lot of witty and incisive new material ready to go, and many new projects in the works. In the meantime, everything I wrote in yesterday’s column, appearing below, is still applicable.

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Posted on December 6, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

According to a post on Rich Miller’s Illinoize website, the following folks received write-in votes for various state offices in last month’s election: Cap’n Crunch; Kim Jong Il; George Carlin; “Me”; Penn Jillette; three pages of variations on Stufflebeam including Stumblebee, Stifflebean, Shacklebean, and Shufflebarger; SpongeBob SquarePants; and “We Deserve Better.”
The full post, by Jeff Trigg, is a nice little read, and makes me mad that I lost my sense of humor in the voting booth.
Mafia Mayor
“Despite progress in the wake of an ongoing federal corruption probe, Mayor Richard Daley’s administration has continued to violate restrictions on political hiring, according to a report filed Monday in federal court,” the Tribune reports this morning.
“The overt criminal activity,” court-appointed monitor Noelle Brennan said, “has ceased, but there are still pockets of resistance in the city.”
Like in the mayor’s office.

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Posted on December 5, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

1a. Worst Clinch Ever.
1b. Here lies Rex Grossman.
2. “On September 25, 1980, a full-page ad ran in the Chicago Tribune promoting four Led Zeppelin concerts that never happened.” (via Illinois Entertainer)
3. It’s Not My Job. (via Rick Kaempfer)
4. See also When Graphic Artists Get Bored.
5. This Is Our Country.

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Posted on December 4, 2006

By Natasha Julius

When Americans went to the polls last month, they signaled their frustration with President Bush’s bungled attempts to reign in the Axis of Evil. It seems the administration is listening, focusing now on another breed of rogue state. This week, we examine America’s plan to confront this new Triumvirate of Terror.

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Posted on December 2, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

1. Do you think if the Trib opened up their checkbook and bought the best journalists they could find they would see a return on investment? I do.
I mean, think about it. The corporate suite has decided that the best way to improve the Cubs is to invest more money in the product – but that the best way to improve their newspapers is to cut staff.
2. Which do you like better, Alfonso Sosa or Sammy Soriano? Either way, it will be fun having a 40-40 guy leadoff for a last-place team.
3. Clean government pays.
4. Vikings game plan: Get an early lead and force the Bears to pass.
5. I’d rather have Joe Crede than Aramis Ramirez.

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Posted on December 1, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Wow, it was a big day for The Combine. Former Gov. George Ryan won his bid to stay out of jail while his racketeering conviction is on appeal, but lost his pension. Bobbie Steele got her pension but unfortunately won’t be going to jail for the political fraud she has perpetrated on Cook County voters and taxpayers. Rod Blagojevich, who remains in office and out of jail pending indictment, conviction, and appeal, has once again broken his word, this time to Steele and John Daley. Daley’s brother, Richard, who also remains in office and out of jail pending indictment, conviction, and appeal, is piggybacking on the whitewash of his involvement in police torture as Cook County State’s Attorney by declaring he sees no evil in the police department despite a report of “continued indifference” to corruption in the department.
Bill Beavers said it all: “This is good Democratic politics.”

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Posted on November 30, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

With the mayor continuing to stand behind a man convicted of orchestrating a massively fradulent City Hall hiring operation, will the outrage directed at Todd Stroger now be directed at Richard M. Daley? Will the editorial boards and civic titans and smug North Siders decide that being governed by a criminal enterprise is too high a price to pay for pretty flowers and Olympic bids?
Because Richard M. Daley deserves the ire far more than Todd Stroger. Todd Stroger doesn’t know any better; Richard M. Daley does. Todd Stroger is a pawn in other men’s games. Richard M. Daley runs the game.
When Daley calls Robert Sorich a man of fine character – a man convicted on a mountain of evidence of criminal wrongdoing (on the mayor’s behalf) – well, it gives away the lie of all those impassioned promises of ethics reform Daley issues whenever things get too hot around him.
And everyone who supports this mayor is complicit. You can’t separate his achievements from the basic fact of his administration: Corrupt to the core. With a capital ‘C.’
You can’t bitch and moan about Todd Stroger without being outraged at Daley’s hand behind the curtain. You can’t scream bloody murder about Bobbie Steele’s shenanigans without understanding that Daley gives the blessing. It’s a sick, sick culture, oozing from here to Springfield. With Saint Obama uninterested and gallavanting around Iowa and New Hampshire, Daley is the one man who could stop it. That would make him a truly great mayor. What a legacy that could be. Instead, he condones what amounts to treason – the coup d’etat of Sorich & Co.; Stroger, Steele and Beavers; Reyes and HDO.
And while we’re directing anger this morning, why has there been such silence at the way Jesse Jackson Jr. and Luis Gutierrez froze the field of potential Daley opponents until it was too late for anyone else to put together a campaign? While the extent of the nationwide Democratic victory – meaning the U.S. Senate and what happend in statehouses nationwide – hadn’t been anticipated, there had been little doubt for a long time that the Dems would win the House. And yet, both Jackson and Gutierrez used their new majority power as an excuse to pull the plug on their mayoral candidacies. Thanks, guys.
The only one talking sense these days is Forrest Claypool.
Is it too late?
Run, Forrest. Run.

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Posted on November 29, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Item: “Prime Minister Tony Blair condemned the African slave trade and expressed deep sorrow for Britain’s role – but stopped short Monday of offering an apology or compensation for the descendants of those victimized by it.”
Item: “The homicide rate on the Ute Mountain Ute Indian reservation has soared to nearly 50 times the national average, prompting Colorado’s new U.S. attorney to label it the state’s ‘murder capital.'”
Item: “Last week on Dan Patrick’s radio show, ESPN analyst Michael Irvin jokingly suggested the success of Dallas quarterback Tony Romo could be due to an African-American heritage. ‘[There might be] some brother in that line somewhere,’ Irvin said of the white quarterback. ‘If a great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandma pulled one of them studs out of the barn . . . ‘”

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Posted on November 28, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

1. If only Abt had a liquor license.
2. I will never buy a Chevrolet or a John Mellencamp record again. Not that I ever bought either to begin with. But still.
3. Two people pointed out to me yesterday that the ranch in the latest of the Mellencamp commercials is the KK ranch. “Just one K short,” one said. Ain’t that America.
4. Michael Richards goes on Jesse Jackson’s nationally syndicated radio show to apologize and discuss last week’s racial tirade and the Tribune gives it a few wire service paragraphs on page 15 in its celebrity Personals column – right next to items about Mario Lopez and Karina Smirnoff going on vacation together and a Princess Diana benefit concert in the making. Ain’t that America.
5. The Beachwood Study Group solves Iraq.

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Posted on November 27, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

1. The Greatest Turkey Event in Thanksgiving Day History.
2. Thanksgiving Day Phone Call. (via Rick Kaempfer)
3. Rare breed of wild turkey ready for serving at Beachwood HQ.
4. “[T]he homogenized and sanitized history learned as children and revisited every Thanksgiving holiday bears faint resemblance to the actual people and dramatic events of that desperate time.”
5. Yuppie and The Chocolate Factory.

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Posted on November 23, 2006