By Steve Rhodes

1. The way campaigns used to be covered.
2. “Asked if he would run his campaign any differently now [without Jackson or Gutierrez in the race], Daley didn’t miss a beat,” the Tribune reports. “‘I have not announced whether I am running or not,’ he shot back.”
So it could be Dorothy Brown vs. Bill “Dock” Walls? Hmmm, maybe I dismissed Dock Walls too hastily . . .
3. And then Daley picked the corned beef out of his teeth from the fundraiser for a campaign he pretends doesn’t exist.

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Posted on November 10, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

‘ll get to K-Fed and Streisand and the continuing implosion of the Sun-Times and the Tribune Company’s mission to alienate every reader it still has and every journalist it still employs soon enough, but today it’s still politics.
D-Rum
“This little-understood, unfamiliar war – the first war of the 21st century – it is not well known, it was not well understood; it is complex for people to comprehend,” outgoing SecDef Don Rumsfeld said Wednesday; the AP report that ran in the Sun-Times called Rumsfeld “a victim of a war he contended the American public simply did not understand.”
“It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”
– Rumsfeld on Feb. 7, 2003, to US troops at Aviano Air Base, Italy, a month before the war started.

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Posted on November 9, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

It wouldn’t be Election Night in Cook County without the words “chain of custody.”
Although, to be fair, voting problems were reported nationwide. Can’t we just contract our elections out to Google? Seems like a company whose technology can search millions of websites for the term “vote fraud” in .04 seconds and deliver 907,000 results could probably figure out how to transmit voting results from Schaumburg to downtown in under three hours.
Here are some other observations on three hours of sleep. I mean, who could go to be with Tony Peraica storming the citadel?

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Posted on November 8, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Today, millions of Americans will do the wrong thing.

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Posted on November 7, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

There are three big stories this morning that belong on any Chicago newspaper’s front page: The sentencing of Saddam Hussein and the reaction thereof in the streets of Iraq; the latest campaign developments before tomorrow’s election, and; the Bears embarrassing first loss of the season to the lowly Miami Dolphins.
Endorsing one side in a dispute over a child abuse case does not make the list.
No-brainer
The Tribune played the Hussein story at the top of its front page – as did virtually every newspaper in the country – and in the free world. The Sun-Times put it on page 8.
Guilty, Guilty, Guilty
Tribune editorial: “Saddam Hussein: Guilty.” Indeed – of crimes against humanity carried out in 1982. Curiously, the editorial page then didn’t support invading Iraq, nor for the next 20 years. In fact, here is Don Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam in 1983. Here is Ronald Reagan with Tariq Azziz in 1984.
“The administration had U.S. intelligence reports indicating that Iraq was using chemical weapons, both against Iran and against Iraqi Kurdish insurgents, in the early 1980s, at the same time that it decided to support Iraq in the war,” National Security Archive Senior Fellow Joyce Battle told the Washington Post. “So U.S. awareness of Iraq’s chemical warfare did not deter it from initiating the policy of providing intelligence and military assistance to Iraq. There were shipments of chemical weapons precursors from several U.S. companies to Iraq during the 1980s, but the U.S. government would deny that it was aware that these exports were intended to be used in the production of chemical weapons.”
So . . . when are we going to try Saddam’s accomplices?

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Posted on November 6, 2006

By Natasha Julius

Sample Ballot
Vote early and often; after all, it probably won’t count anyway.

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Posted on November 4, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

ABC News political director Mark Halperin was on Charlie Rose last night explaining that, sure, John Kerry didn’t say what he was accused of saying, and no honest, serious person believes that he did. Nonetheless, Halperin argued, Kerry got what he deserved because he failed to properly manage the media’s reporting of what was never true in the first place.
That’s where we’re at, folks.
The truth doesn’t matter; managing the spin does. And when the media blindly buys into one party’s spin instead of doing their job and vetting political claims, it is incumbent on targets of spin to satisfy these dimwits by doing things like apologizing in just the way reporters demand for what the reporters reporting the apology know was an offense that never actually occurred. But reporters now operate on the playing field of political strategists – the most cyncial creatures on the planet – instead of dragging the vipers onto the playing field of journalism and giving them the shellacking they deserve.

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Posted on November 3, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

“Does anybody really think Kerry meant to insult the troops by implying that if you’re not educated, you’ll end up as a soldier in Iraq?” Richard Roeper asks this morning (second item). “Does anybody believe Republicans were really offended?”
Yes. Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Sun-Times.

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Posted on November 2, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

John Kass would do well to apply the same formidable powers of skeptical, politically-knowing observation that he uses in assessing Illinois politics to his pals in the national Republican party – and his colleagues in the media. Anyone watching the video of John Kerry’s speech in Pasadena could see that he was obviously referring to the president and not the troops when he joked that if you don’t do your homework you wind up stuck in Iraq. Sometimes the story isn’t the trumped-up offense that political operatives and White House strategists pretend has occurred, but the despicable fact that they are making the charge and, in this case, exploiting our soldiers, in the first place.
Look at the slide from U.S. Central Command that accompanies this story and tell me if we should be arguing about anything John Kerry has said lately as opposed to what he said 35 years ago, when he said, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
Grow up, people.

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Posted on November 1, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

1. From the just-released 2006 Crime and Justice Index by Chicago Metropolis 2020:
* Whites make up 70 percent of drug users in Illinois; blacks make up 80 percent of those imprisoned on drug charges.
* An African-American in Illinois is as likely to serve a prison sentence as go to college.
* Illinois was singled out by Human Rights Watch in 2000 for having the highest incarceration rate of black male drug offenders than any other state.
* People convicted of drug offenses now make up 40 percent of all prison admissions in Illinois. In 1985, it was 8 percent.
* 42 percent of adult inmates tested below the sixth-grade level in 2005.
* Youths who have been exposed to gun violence are twice as likely as others to be violent. One in four children studied in Chicago South Side neighborhoods had witnessed a shooting. One in three had witnessed a stabbing.
* Schizophrenia, major depression, bipolar disorder, and post-traumatic stress are two to four times more prevalent in jail and prison populations than in the general population.
2. “There is no unanimity of opinion on the reason crime rates have fallen here and nationally, but experts usually point to the aging population, longer prison sentences, improved economic conditions, or a combination of all three,” said Paula Wolff, senior executive at Chicago Metropolis 2020, in a news release.

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Posted on October 31, 2006