By Steve Rhodes

You know, we here at Beachwood HQ are uncomfortable with self-promotion, but we’ve learned quickly that a little bit of it is necessary if we want to stay in business.
So let us once again call attention to our ongoing feature, The Dusty & Ozzie Show, which we describe thusly:
“Why The Dusty & Ozzie Show? Because one’s a bullshit artist and the other just spews bullshit. We’ll keep track and at the end of the season – if they both make it that far – declare which is the most unbearable.”
Now, those of you who foolishly trustied Dusty – like second marriages, the triumph of hope over experience – thought maybe we were being a bit harsh about such a cool dude as the toothpick-chewin’, incense-burnin’, curse-breakin’ Rev. Johnnie B. Baker.
And those of you who blindly love Ozzie – winning apparently is everything, and absolves individuals of responsibility for their homophobic, bigoted, anger management issues, despite what we teach our kids – maybe thought we were being a bit harsh about the call ’em as he sees ’em, take no prisoners, crazy train Blizzard of Oz.
But who’s sorry now?

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Posted on June 22, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

The prosecution in the ongoing City Hall corruption trial rested its case on Tuesday. More importantly, a Tribune report this morning sheds further light on the mayor’s political operation and the way it enmeshed city workers in a spoils system that left the city council cowering on the sidelines.
“Even as aldermen and committeemen remain the public faces of political power in Chicago, the true clout belonged to obscure city officials who could marshal their workers to campaign for Daley, judging by a hiring list allegedly kept in the mayor’s office,” the Tribune says.
The Tribune cross-referenced the Daley hiring list with a map it obtained of ward coordinators from the mayor’s 1995 re-election campaign, illustrating the way the mayor effected a major shift in the way political power is leveraged in the city.
In short, Daley appointed his own ward coordinators from his own operation – including the Hispanic Democratic Organization that he created – to run his political and campaign operations, squeezing out the traditional roles of aldermen, ward committeemen, and the precinct captains of old.
It was an ingenious – and even devious – way to consolidate power. Daley rewrote the rules. One alderman, astonishingly, described the result to the Tribune.

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Posted on June 21, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

The big news this morning is Chicago’s Fortunate 5,000, as revealed in a City Hall clout list introduced in federal court on Monday.
The list is of the sort we’ve become accustomed to around here – an accounting of job candidates for government jobs, their influential patron, and sometimes helfpul commentary, such as a note for one candidate describing him as arrogant, as if that would be an impediment with this administration. Oh, and a column recording when a candidate got their city job.
While this may seem like business-as-usual, don’t forget: The city has been regularly attesting to a federal judge that it has been following a decree prohibiting political hiring. The city defying a federal judge is not a pretty scenario.

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Posted on June 20, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

NOTE TO READERS: The [Monday] Papers have been delayed so long – due to unforeseen circumstances including a flat tire, some sort of yummy quesadilla and thai curry salad that came into my orbit and distracted me, and a series of slightly urgent phone calls – that I’ll just roll what I’ve got into The [Tuesday] papers tomorrow. I must attend to the Beachwood’s finance and marketing divisions this afternoon. Apologies, and we’ll see you tomorrow.
1. A map of The New Yorker‘s Cartoon Caption Contest winners. (via emdashes)
2. K-Tel Classics shut down.
3. So much for the Cuban Cubs. “Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has told associates that he has been unable to open any kind of dialogue with the Pirates’ owners about possibly buying the club. Meanwhile, a baseball ownership source says Commissioner Bud Selig, a conservative sort, is likely to dissuade any team from trying to sell to Cuban, the flamboyant Mount Lebanon native.” (via Hardball Times)
4. Among the Sun-Times letter-writers responding to Jay Mariotti’s column about Ozzie Guillen lambasting rookie pitcher Sean Tracey for failing to bean a batter: William Julius Wilson, the Harvard University sociology scholar formerly of the University of Chicago. What Wilson said: “I found Ozzie Guillen’s behavior sickening, to say the least.”
5. Where have all the UFOs gone?

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Posted on June 19, 2006

By Natasha Julius

We’ll be locked away by ourselves as usual this weekend, bent over our computer keyboards and squinting at the screen. So just remember, if there’s a tie on the door it means we’re working.
Market Update
On the American Quality of Life Index, Public Land Use has seen its credit rating junked after a leadership upheaval earlier this year. In spite of this, strong growth in the second quarter has seen share prices soar. However, many analysts suspect that key investors might be driving up prices to maximize sell-offs and profit-taking.

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Posted on June 16, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

I was going to write this morning about how White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen’s latest tempest seemed to pass by without critical press scrutiny.
I guess I was just being impatient. Newspapers – the print versions – still need a day to report and write, and a night to send it to the printer, and a morning to get it delivered to your home.
So this morning, Ozzie Guillen’s unhinged rip job of rookie pitcher Sean Tracey for failing to bean Texas Ranger veteran Hank Blalock in retaliation for White Sox bad boy A.J. Pierzynksi getting hit the previous inning, burst into full view.
The Sun-Times got the best of it, turning out columns by Jay Mariotti and Greg Couch, and follow-up stories by Joe Cowley.
It was Mariotti who nailed it.

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Posted on June 16, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

1. Wow, Tribune Company is really in trouble.
2. Not a good day for Mara Georges, who as corporation counsel is the city’s top lawyer. Georges is also a Mayor Daley loyalist who has been on the stand for a couple days in the ongoing City Hall job-rigging corruption trial. On Wednesday, defense lawyer Thomas Anthony Durkin questioned her about the city’s hiring of Andy Ryan, a 19-year-old son of a union official, as a building inspector.
“During cross-examination on Wednesday, Georges did not directly respond when Durkin asked whether she knew if Intergovernmental Affairs played a role in Ryan’s hiring,” the Tribune ‘s account reports.
“‘It would depend on what you mean by ‘played a role,’ she said.”
Georges has frustrated reporters for years with this kind of slipperiness in service of her see-no-evil routine.
Now it’s on display in a federal courtroom.
“Also Wednesday,” the Sun-Times reported, “Georges finished testimony but revised a critical element under defense questioning.
“On Tuesday, Georges said she was unaware of allegations of irregularities in city hiring until the FBI raided IGA offices last year.
“But she grudgingly acknowledged she was aware of possible irregularities in the 2004 hiring of [Ryan].
“‘Perhaps I was aware there was an allegation, yes,’ she said.”
3. The Schaumburg Space Needle.

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Posted on June 15, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Is the Chicago Tribune better than it has ever been?
I don’t think so either. In fact, it’s not even close.
But that’s the line editor Ann Marie Lipinski is peddling.
Lipinski made the improbable claim last week in a puff-ball interview with MarketWatch‘s Jon Friedman.
Here is what the paper has lost since Lipinski became editor in 2001:

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Posted on June 14, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

From CSI: City Hall to As The Cook County Board Presidency Turns, it’s John Daley Day in the papers this morning, a proclamation of sorts about the role the mayoral brother plays in local politics on your dime.
It is not a day that John Daley is celebrating. There will be no parade.
In the ongoing job-rigging trial of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s former patronage chief, Robert Sorich, and three other aides, a former Buildings Department official testified Monday that the FBI questioned him three times about John Daley, leading Sorich defense attorney Thomas Anthony Durkin to conclude that prosecutors “want to try to indict Mayor Daley and his brother John.”
Even worse, Durkin called John Daley “a mooch.”
Why?
John Daley is apparently that guy who always happens to be leaving work when you are and asks if you are going “straight home,” which is his way of asking if he can have a ride.

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Posted on June 13, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Ald. Bernie Stone is angry because 600 city bureaucrats have annual salaries of more than $100,000. He’s not angry because the salaries raise questions about the city’s budget priorities in doling out taxpayer money so generously. No, he’s angry because he and his fellow aldermen only make $98,125 a year.
It’s just not fair.
“My colleagues and I all passed the salaries of these people,” Stone is quoted as saying in the Sun-Times. “Why did we do it? Because we were asked to do it by the administration and we just followed along like little sheep. It’s about time that we stop following like sheep and stood up like men.”
To prove his manhood, Stone wants an aldermanic pay raise of $20,000 over four years.
As a reward for acting like sheep.
Except when it’s time for aldermen to stand up like men. (And women, we presume.)
Like when the issue is lining their own pockets.
“If Stone’s purpose was to infuriate and embolden aldermen, it was mission accomplished with Ald. Ed Smith (28th), chairman of the City Council’s Black Caucus,” the Sun-Times‘s Fran Spielman wrote. “He had no idea there were 600 bureaucrats earning more than he does.”
“It’s shocking,” Smith said.
Ed Smith has been an alderman for 26 years. That means he’s voted on approximately 26 budgets. He had no idea that 600 city workers earned more than $100,000 a year.
So, yes, it is shocking.
Not as shocking, though, as having aldermen who pay attention to the budget and put the concerns of the taxpayers who fund it above their own. That would be standing up like men.

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Posted on June 12, 2006