By Natasha Julius

Once again, the Weekend Desk will be fully staffed to monitor breaking events important to your life. And important events breaking your life. These developments are already on our weekend radar.
Market Update
Securities markets weren’t sure how to react to the news that the U.S. military had liquidated a major insurgent holding. As other big corporations can tell you, investors don’t always respond well to such volatility.
World Cup Sock ‘Em
In the grand tradition of dealing with jobs Americans don’t really want to do, the U.S. is apparently hoping a bunch of Mexicans will kick Iran’s ass for us. No word yet on any need to clobber Angola or Portugal.

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Posted on June 9, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

NOTE TO READERS: I’ll be tending to Beachwood Reporter-related business for the next couple of days. The Papers will return on Monday. And, of course, the acutely-observed news roundup of our very own Natasha Julius, The Weekend Report, will appear in this space in the interim.
But that doesn’t mean you have to go now.
Please take this time to re-acquaint yourself with the rest of the site. We’re working on some tweaks to eliminate – at least for now – some features that never got off the ground, and to re-evaluate and improve others. (Check out our new Michael McDonald Alert System; this is a preview of an upcoming change of concept in our much-neglected Forums. It’s also long overdue recognition that it’s Michael McDonald’s world, we just somewhat-subliminally live in it.)
Also, while we have a great team of brilliant misfits whose genius will never properly be appreciated in the soul-crushing real world – you know, the kind of people who used to populate newsrooms before they were gentrified – we still need more help. We’re looking for section editors to really take hold of some of these pages, and in particular drive our ongoing features, such as Taxi Cab Journal and the quite-unfortunately dormant What I Watched Last Night.

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Posted on June 8, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

The mayor’s brother, John, the Cook County Board commissioner who got his public, taxpayer-supported job because he is a Daley and who in turn has leveraged both his family name and his chairmanship of the board’s finance committee into an insurance business that has made him a wealthy man, said Tuesday that a call for a hearing about the condition of ailing board president John Stroger was “a goddamn disgrace.”
Then he leaned back in his cushy leather chair with the defiant-but-slightly-emotionally-injured look of someone speaking out in vain against a great injustice – the injustice of insisting that one of the central precepts of democracy is knowing just who is running the government and how.
The arrogance is breathtaking, isn’t it?
Whether the proposal in question put forth Tony Peraica, fellow board member and Republican challenger for Stroger’s position as board president, was the right way to go is debatable.
But it would have been nice to see Daley debate it. Apparently, though, we don’t pay him to thoughtfully consider proposals and debate the issues and act in the best interests of the public as opposed to the private club that is the Daley Party of Cook County. We pay him to sit there and try not to be too much of an embarrassment.

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Posted on June 7, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Well, it’s been a glitchy few days here in The Papers division of The Beachwood Reporter, culminating with this column going blank this morning, but we think we’ve got everything fixed. The rumor that we were testing out a Beachwood Select model requiring payment for access to the daily column is not true, though it does give us an excuse to once again ask for a donation through our Beachwood Membership program. Perhaps we can dedicate some funds to our Technical Glitch account.
Also, I’ll be appearing on a panel on Thursday about “Emerging Online News Outlets” as part of the Community Media Workshop’s annual Making Media Connections conference. I will be joined by Naz Hamid of Gapers Block and Brian Sobolak of Chicago Bloggers. Kristina Findlay of Kathy Schaeffer and Associates will moderate. The panel is scheduled for 1:45 p.m. at Columbia College, 1104 South Wabash Avenue.
And now, let’s get caught up.
1. If you don’t get just a little verklempt reading Mary Mitchell’ s column about the friendship between her African-American father and the Jewish son of the man he worked for, then you’ve got a hole in your soul.
2. Moonlight Greenberg.
3. What did the mayor know, and when did he know it? I’m not referring to the ongoing City Hall corruption trial in federal court laying bare the political machinery that has perverted your local government in the Daley years, but the hopefully-soon-to-be-released Burge report.
4. Would the death of 17-year-old Nicole Alaniz be less tragic if she wasn’t an honor student and therefore not, by some people’s definition, “promising”? The Tribune thinks so.
5. So it turns out that George W. Bush isn’t even a very good guy to have a beer with. In fact, he’s a prick. Why did it take so long for Elisabeth Bumiller at The New York Times (or anyone else) to tell us that? Perhaps Bumiller was frightened.
6. From Popular Science (via CNN): “Mysterious Red Cells Might Be Aliens.”
KEY EXCERPT: “[Godfrey] Louis’s theory holds special appeal for [Chandra] Wickramasinghe. A quarter of a century ago, he co-authored the modern theory of panspermia, which posits that bacteria-riddled space rocks seeded life on Earth.
“If it’s true that life was introduced by comets four billion years ago,” the astronomer says, “one would expect that microorganisms are still injected into our environment from time to time. This could be one of those events.”
Does that explain Taylor Hicks?

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Posted on June 6, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

The Tribune continued this weekend to be the most aggressive outlet in town on the biggest business story around these parts – the state of the Tribune Company.
Kind of creepy, isn’t it?
The company announced last week that it would cut costs by $200 million, which means a significant number of jobs will be eliminated; sell up to $500 million of assets, which means a handful of TV stations across America will have new owners soon; and repurchase up to 25 percent of its own stock – at a cost that could top $2 billion. The move is intended to mollify investors and keep Wall Street – and possibly takeover sharks – at bay. The company will be assuming such a heavy debt load that its credit rating will be downgraded to junk.
This is a big deal, bigger than many folks in Chicago may realize, because the Tribune Company is no longer just the pathetic hometown owner of the Cubs and the Tribune and good ol’ WGN, but a national power whose media properties, company officials boast, reach 80 percent of U.S. households.
With two articles leading the paper’s Sunday business section, the Tribune has now published five pieces on the company’s latest gamble, including two analyses by business media columnist Phil Rosenthal. The Sun-Times, on the other hand, has been oddly AWOL, relying on wire stories from AP and Bloomberg to break the news and then pretty much giving up. Even Crain’s, which predicted the company’s sale of assets last October, settled for a couple non-consequential Web-only stories last week. There is no Tribune news in this week’s new edition.
It’s a sad state of affairs when the only local reporters covering the Tribune Company are from the Tribune Company.
At any rate, the great parlor game is now underway: Just what will TribCo sell?

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Posted on June 5, 2006

By Natasha Julius

We were hoping we’d be tracking the firing of Dusty Baker, the retiring of Jennifer Aniston, and the impeaching of George W. Bush by now – because hey, in a way, the Weekend Desk is all about dreaming – but instead we’re left with horror metal and another Homeland Security department screw-up, which, come to think of it, are kind of the same thing. Except that one is trying to frighten us. The other does it by accident. Here are the stories we’ve deployed our Weekend Desk staff to monitor in order to determine whether you should go back to your job on Monday or move your family into an underground shelter.
Market Update
It was a short week on the U.S. Foreign Reputation floor as investors sought to cash in on substantial gains before the market closed early in observance of shame.
The Little Apple
We were shocked to learn this week that U.S. Department of Homeland Security doesn’t think there are any landmarks in New York City. What, they dismantled this too while they were tinkering with the Constitution? And surely this is still there, right? It sure seems like Homeland Security isn’t on the ball when it comes to threats in midtown Manhattan. This terroristic suicide campaign was allowed to continue for days unabated until these Navy SEALS extricated the suspect and rescued a public held hostage in a daring raid. And this woman‘s 15-year reign of terror on our senses only came to an end when local authorities agreed to a sweetheart deal resulting in a mere 30 minutes of community service nightly. It’s getting harder and harder these days to figure out who the real enemy is.
Kiss Off
After Finnish heavy metal band Lordi captured the 2006 Eurovision Song Content last weekend, a magazine in their native country has come under fire for publishing a picture of the band’s lead singer without his signature fright mask.

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Posted on June 2, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

The funny thing about the unmistakably looming presence of Mayor Richard M. Daley in the City Hall corruption trial taking place in federal court is that it is the defense – representing four former Daley aides, including Robert Sorich, once the mayor’s patronage chief – not the prosecution that keeps bringing his name up.
So much so that, at one point in the trial, lead prosecutor Patrick Collins complained to Judge David Coar – out of the presence of the jury – about the defense’s frequent references to Daley, arguing that the jury might get confused about who is really on trial here.
(That seems inexplicable to me, but perhaps it is Collins’s belief that the defense wants to make the jury jump the hurdle of Daley’s popularity by lumping a conviction of Sorich and the others with the belief that the mayor has also done wrong.)
Coar in turn demanded that defense lawyer Thomas Anthony Durkin explain the relevance of the mayor to the case. In the sidebar discussion that followed, Durkin opened the door to calling on Daley to testify.

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Posted on June 2, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

When I first saw that Mayor Richard M. Daley used the word “silly” an estimated 20 times in response to a question at a press conference on Wednesday, I thought he might be referring to the behavior of reporters who cover him and the rest of City Hall.
I was wrong. But he might as well have been.
While Daley’s latest Rain Man routine got the press’s attention, the really outrageous thing he said yesterday got buried. And it was about the press.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Why do reporters just sit there and take it from this guy?

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Posted on June 1, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Are you excited about the new Treasury chief nominee? The Tribune editorial board sure is. They love Henry Paulson Jr.. Normally I wouldn’t weigh in on such a thing, but the Tribune‘s love letter to Paulson this morning was so off the mark it bears close analysis. Stay with me on this one.
“President Bush’s nominee to be the next treasury secretary has a history of speaking truth to power,” the Tribune opines. “We’d like to think that comes from the more than 20 years that Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO Henry Paulson Jr. spent in Chicago, a town that likes bluntness.
“Bush’s two prior treasury secretaries – the chief spokesmen for the president’s economic and tax policies – didn’t have Paulson’s top-drawer reputation. It was clear from the get-go that Bush’s first treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, never really bought into the Bush economic program, particularly tax cuts; O’Neill oddly let himself become a Cabinet back-bencher during a war.
“The second, John Snow, who resigned Tuesday, was ineffective – even sour – when he was sent out to sell Bush’s bold plans for revitalizing Social Security and the tax code.”
I would take issue with the notion that the job of Treasury Secretary is to be a press secretary, but let’s skip over that and get to the heart of the matter.
Paul O’Neill didn’t have a top-drawer reputation? He was the widely-admired CEO of Alcoa. But don’t take my word for it. A January 2001 editorial in the . . . Chicago Tribune . . . described O’Neill as “blunt-speaking,” you know, just how Chicago likes it. In fact, the editorial was titled “Listen To Truth-Teller At Treasury.”
Not only that, but the central theme of the editorial was that O’Neill had stated an uncomfortable truth at his confirmation hearing, one the paper said “President George W. Bush has yet to acknowledge: That big tax cut package Bush made the centerpiece of his campaign won’t do much to boost a slowing economy.”
Now the paper complains that O’Neill “never really bought into the Bush economic program, particularly tax cuts.”

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Posted on May 31, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

1. Who among the two personalities appearing on the front page of the Tribune‘s Tempo section today is more annoying, shock-jock Erich “Mancow” Muller or shock-matron Caitlin Flanagan? The voting starts now.
2. The Tribune Company announced today that it will repurchase up to 75 million shares of common stock because, well, nobody else seems to want them. The stock buys “reflect our strong belief that Tribune’s current share price does not adequately reflect the fundamental value and long-term earnings prospects of the company’s businesses,” said Dennis FitzSimons, the company’s chairman, president and chief executive officer, in press release.
In another move, FitzSimons will send Andy MacPhail to Wall Street to berate analysts for their unfair coverage of the company.
3. Betsy Hart, whose syndicated column appears in the Sun-Times, won’t read current fiction because, like, there’s no way it could ever be as good as the classics. She has, however, given in to American Idol, in part because she doesn’t detect any sexual innuendo on the show. I asked my senior staff for a punch line to this item, and features editor Natasha Julius responded instead with this far-better broadside:
“I’ve only seen American Idol once or twice, but I think we need to start the Betsy Hart Grandmother Watch, because if you can’t pick up on the blatant sexual innuendo of tarted-up teenage girls caressing microphones, Paula Abdul openly drooling at anyone with a penis (although to be fair the drool may be an involuntary function of being Paula Abdul), and the faux-homophobic banter between the gayest little host in Texas and that nasty British judge, how are you going to have a clue when your children start bringing their ‘friends’ home to ‘study’ in their room with the door closed?”
4. Among the goodies in the May/June issue of the the immensely pleasureable PRINT magazine is Dave Eggers’s explanation of how he came to use an Icelandic printer for McSweeney’s; a historical exploration of the color orange as “a branding tool of democracy” even before the Orange Revolution; a short but appreciative look at the new album covers of Nordic death metal bands Satyricon (Now, Diabolical) and Dismember (The God That Never Was); and why Planters does a better job of retro-packaging than Band-Aid and Morton Salt.
5. If you haven’t already, hoist a glass to Red Madsen.

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Posted on May 30, 2006