By Steve Rhodes

Still catching up from the long weekend, in which freedom was both celebrated and stymied. Fortunately, we got through it by using our handy BBQ Talking Points, and diverting discussions towards Freedom Museum Exhibits We’d Like To See.
1. “During his long career in public service, House Speaker Dennis Hastert has amassed a multimillion-dollar fortune through real estate holdings that belies the humble image of a former small-town high school wrestling coach,” the Tribune reports on its front page today.
Gee, where do you think that image came from?
2. Hastert “declined to be interviewed” for the article, because a newspaper has no business prying into the financial affairs of the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
A more satisfying response would have been answering a reporter’s knock on the door of his 127-acre, $4.5 million suburban estate with narrowed eyes, a pull from an imported cigarette, and the line, “What took you so long?”

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Posted on July 6, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

A lot of catching up to do. Chicago convention officials argue that Las Vegas is way too fun a place to hold a convention – and the Sun-Times agrees! The Tribune editorial page is alternately naive and a killjoy. And when President Bush says “freedom is on the march,” he means right to its room until it behaves itself.
1. “Las Vegas and Orlando are all the rage right now, but McCormick Place is on pace to make 2006 at least a near record and could barely handle any more shows,” the Sun-Times says on its front page today, ballyhooing its “Special Report” ghost-written by the city’s convention and tourism bureau.
The story asserts that chief convention competitors Las Vegas and Orlando “are all the rage right now,” as if the conventions flocking there are just part of a fad, rather than a long-term trend that has, in particular, made Las Vegas the convention king that Chicago once was.
Instead of giving Las Vegas its due, the Sun-Times desperately quotes a plastics show manager finishing up a show at McCormick Place complaining that “In Vegas, there’s a thunderstorm every afternoon, and the water leaks through the roof. Can you imagine the disaster I would have?”
Huh? I thought Las Vegas secured its roof.

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Posted on July 5, 2006

By Natasha Julius

While the nation celebrates independence, we’ll be monitoring these events – as well as breaking news that could impact your freedom – from our Weekends & Holidays Desk. The Papers will return on Wednesday.
Market Update
Constitutional Integrity saw an unexpected surge on the domestic market when a hostile takeover bid was resoundingly defeated. Still, it appears the international markets are cautious in embracing the news, noting the determination of industry insiders to divide and conquer CI at all cost.

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Posted on July 3, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

In a federal courtroom downtown, Chicago’s patronage system is on trial. In the County Building a few blocks away, Cook County’s patronage system flourishes before our very eyes.
There ought be no mistaking the fact that the planned elevation of Ald. Todd Stroger to the presidency of the Cook County Board is part and parcel of the same job-rigging ethos that has Mayor Richard Daley’s former patronage chief and three other aides in the dock.
Both are about the hijacking of your government by privately run but publicly funded political machines – The Cook County Democratic Party and The Richard M. Daley Party – which use your tax dollars to further their own interests – and only their own interests. Your interests are secondary, at best, and only considered to the extent that they need to be manipulated to keep the Party going.
The hallmarks of democracy that America purports to herald and promote around the world – free, competitive elections, separation of powers between branches of government, accountability through transparency – do not exist here. I am only the billionth person to compare the Cook County Democratic Party to the old Soviet Central Committee, not because it’s so facile but because it is so perfectly apt.
Apologists like Paul Green ask silly questions like, “Who does it better than Chicago?”
A better question, if we’re talking about governance, and we are, is, “Who doesn’t?”

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Posted on June 30, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Bill Beavers is a real piece of work. Todd Stroger isn’t. See The [Stroger] Papers for our round-up and commentary.
1. Ald. Toni Preckwinkle (4th) shows she is savvier than some reporters and editors in town. “Unfortunately, there’ve been a number of deliberate media diversions to get public attention away from what’s going on in federal court,” she tells John Kass.
2. At least they’re paying attention to Steve Stone in Pittsburgh.
3. The Sun-Times trumpets one group’s findings that “Chicago has more green roof space than any other city in North America.”
But shouldn’t the measurement be a percentage of all roof space, rather than raw square footage?
I mean, I’m looking at this chart and thinking it sure must not be hard to edge out other cities in the top 10 such as Suitland, Maryland and Ashburn, Virginia.
4. Presidential signing statements.
5. “Twice a year, Michael Hasco visits McDonald’s restaurants to observe how workers squirt ketchup onto hamburgers. He thinks there might be a better way to do it.”

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Posted on June 29, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

The latest scheme to emerge from the John Stroger fiasco is so rich you almost have to admire it. Let’s take it one scoundrel at a time.
* Ald. Bill Beavers would leave the city council to take over Stroger’s seat as Cook County commissioner from the fourth district – but not the board’s presidency. “Beavers, 71, has long made known his desire to retire,” the Sun-Times reports. And the Cook County board is apparently a good place to retire to.
* Mayor Richard M. Daley would then appoint Beavers’s daughter, Darcel, to Beavers’s 7th Ward aldermanic seat.
* Ald. Todd Stroger, John’s son, would then become the Democratic nominee and frontrunner to replace his father as Cook County Board president. Apparently the law doesn’t require that the board president actually be a sitting board member. Without a board seat, however, Todd Stroger would not have a vote. So he’d kind of be in retirement too.
* Mayor Richard M. Daley would then appoint – is there another Stroger? – a replacement for Todd Stroger on the city council. Which could come pretty close to Daley achieving his goal of appointing the entire city council. By statute, all wards would then merge into one and martial law would be declared.
* John Daley, the mayor’s brother, would see his influence grow as chairman of the county board’s finance committee, given the vacuum created by a Todd Stroger figurehead presidency.
One ward boss told the Sun-Times that “Everyone knows Todd is weak, but out of deference to John they’ll go along with it.” Another source who is one of the Democratic committeeman who will vote on the plan said that “People are willing to let [Todd] come on the job and learn because of John.”
So presiding over the $3 billion budget of the 19th largest government in the United States is both a retirement and training center. You might call it cradle-to-grave service.

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Posted on June 28, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

“Pathetic wannabes seems a more apt description for this group than homegrown terrorists,” a Miami Herald editorial says today of the motley crew from South Florida accused of aspiring to somehow attack the Sears Tower.
Still, the Herald, like other weak-kneed editorialists we know, concludes that “in a post-Sept. 11 era when the tripwire for being hauled in as a potential terror threat is hypersensitive, the men may have done enough to warrant being indicted and arrested.”
May have done enough? Now we’re not even sure their behavior reached the threshold of arrest?
At a fundraiser here for Republican congressional candidate David McSweeney, Vice President Dick Cheney called the Miami group “a very real threat.”
But it’s quickly becoming clear that a Caffe Mocha Breve Grande from the Starbucks there was more of a threat to the health of Sears Tower workers than these seven dwarves.

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Posted on June 27, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

The editorial pages of the Tribune and Sun-Times on Sunday both strain to assure readers that they should take the alleged plot to blow up the Sears Tower seriously, arguing that those exhibiting a little bit of skepticism – and apparently there are enough of us who do that each paper felt obliged to write editorials – do so at their own peril, and the peril of the nation.
I take the alleged plot with a measured bit of seriousness, but I find the stance of our local editorial boards to be far more perilous than the mopes in South Florida who probably couldn’t blow up a balloon, much less our most fortified, security-laden landmark.
Both editorials see a parallel between the Miami gang who couldn’t terrorize straight and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh in that both are “homegrown,” as if that’s enough to put them in the same class.
Both editorials also scold skeptics of repeating what they see as the grand mistake of 9/11 – a failure of imagination (they do this without irony, for those of you who may have noticed that the papers commit failures of the imagination on a daily basis). And this is what, at this late date, is most astonishing.

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Posted on June 26, 2006

By Natasha Julius

Market Update
Dazed by a string of unfortunate public statements, United States President and CEO George W. Bush floated the idea of a one-time citizen buy-back, saying the low cost of human life did not reflect the company’s core values. However, analysts warn the move did little to mollify investors who are displeased with the company’s fundamental business practices.
World Cup Suckers
After a devastating attack on U.S. interests overseas, Ghana has officially been decertified as a friend in the war on terror. In fact, at the time of this writing, we hear the United Kingdom is busily sexing-up a dossier on Ghana’s yellowcake distribution habits.

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Posted on June 23, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

1. Both papers put the alleged plot to attack the Sears Tower across the top of their front pages this morning. The Sun-Times‘s headline “Sears Tower Terror Plot” appeared in red. The Tribune‘s “FBI: Sears Tower Targeted” appeared in traditional Tribune black, but somehow appeared more ominous than usual. The Tribune has a special way of doing that.
But there sure seems like there’s less than meets the eye here. “[A] source said the alleged cell was not close to carrying out any attack,” the Sun-Times reported. “Another source . . . said the suspects had only devised a plot on paper.”
Hey, look, I don’t want to underestimate the motivations of those arrested, but I have friends who have devised plots on paper, possibly even involving the Sears Tower.
The Sun-Times article concludes with a Sears Tower executive saying that “despite new information, law enforcement continues to tell us that they have never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that has gone beyond criminal discussions.”
Likewise, the Tribune, which gave the top half of its front page to the story by including a large photo of three armed FBI agents standing around doing nothing, says in its second paragaph that “The suspects had ‘aspirations’ but ‘no means’ to attack the Sears Tower or other buildings, a senior federal law-enforcement source said.”
And then, a few paragraphs later: “‘There was no threat at all,’ the senior federal law-enforcement source said, referring to the Sears Tower.”
Then why am I reading about this on the front page?
Still, the Tribune found it useful to work up an “Inside America’s Tallest Building” graphic to go with the story. (I guess “Inside America’s Tallest Building Which Was Under No Plausible Threat” didn’t fit in the allotted space.)
This is not an uninteresting or unworthy story. It’s just not as worthy – yet, anyway – as Chicago’s newspaper editors seem to think. The story originated out of Miami. The Miami Herald headline? “Terrorism Raid Targets A Warehouse In Miami.” (You can see how it looks via the Herald link on the left rail of NewsDesigner.com.)
In the meantime, the Tribune says, “Chicago police said the city is not on increased alert despite the news.”
Chicago’s newspapers are, though. Despite the news.
2. “There’s no excuse for his choice of words,” White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf said in a radio interview Thursday about manager Ozzie Guillen calling Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti “a piece of shit” and “a fucking fag.”
“You have to separate that from the issue of the person he is talking about because that person is, indeed, a piece of garbage,” Reinsdorf added, according to a Sun-Times account, which curiously lacked responses from the paper’s sports editor Stu Courtney and editor-in-chief John Barron.
3. Meanwhile, Ozzie continues to alienate heterosexuals too . . .

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Posted on June 23, 2006