By Steve Rhodes

The NSA story has disappeared from the Chicago papers, but if you simply plug “NSA” into Google News you’ll find plenty of developments being reported elsewhere.
Here are a few we found, with assists also to Altercation and the Drudge Report.
1. The Washington Post reports that “Negroponte Had Denied Domestic Call Monitoring.” The Post‘s full collection of NSA stories can be found under the rubric “NSA: Spying at Home,” including links to what bloggers are saying about their articles.
2. An intelligence expert tells Salon that we’ll soon find out that Internet and cell phone companies have also cooperated with the NSA.
3. “NSA’s Data Mining Explained,” by CNET News.
4. USA Today reports that cooperating phone companies may face a growing legal problem.
5. Qwest calling plans.

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Posted on May 16, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

The NSA story gripping the nation continues to go MIA here in Chicago. For an analysis, read The [Sunday] Papers. Then donate to The Beachwood Reporter so we don’t have to sell your phone records to stay in business.
As for today’s papers, well, to my way of reading, the Sun-Times letters page is the most interesting page in all of Chicago on this gray day. Let’s take a look.
Noel Brusman of Hyde Park writes: “An article by Fran Spielman suggests that Rep. Luis Gutierrez has plans to run for mayor of Chicago, [and] that he thinks Mayor Daley ‘has wasted time and money on Millennium Park and attracting the 2016 Summer Olympics at the expense of public schools.’
“Well, now. Any Chicago resident with half a brain knows that making the city beautiful and attractive to visitors brings new money into the city. The beautiful downtown and neighborhoods not only enhance our lives, they bring others here to spend money. The tax revenues bring money to all city services.”
Brusman raises a good point. The mayor’s office should tell us just how much money they’ve been able to pour into the education budget because of Millennium Park. Or is it possible that the city’s share of the cost and its deficit-ridden parking garages have cost the schools some funding? Or is there no connection at all?

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Posted on May 15, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

If you turned to Chicago’s newspapers this weekend to learn more about the NSA’s controversial phone-call tracking program, you were severely disappointed.
As the debate raged on elsewhere in the country – in the nation’s elite newspapers, on the Internet and the cable news networks, and, from all available evidence, among the public itself – the papers here satisfied themselves with the barest of efforts.

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Posted on May 15, 2006

By Natasha Julius

The Beachwood Weekend Desk patrols the unsecure border of news and science fiction this weekend.
Orwell That Ends Well
Remember when you were a child and you received a really nice but completely age-inappropriate birthday present? Maybe it was a beautiful but fragile doll, or a complicated model airplane kit with dozens of tiny pieces. Whatever it was, you wanted it desperately and some kindly but misguided relative went a little overboard and bought it for you. So your parents, thinking they’d preserve the gift for a time when you could enjoy it without breaking it, took it away from you and hid it somewhere. Well, according to Michael Hayden, freedom’s kinda like that, too. If the pattern holds, by the time we get our civil liberties back we will have thoroughly lost interest.

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Posted on May 13, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Score one for White House media strategists who rushed the President in front of cameras yesterday to respond to an explosive USA Today story about the National Security Agency collecting phone records of American citizens.
That’s how a nimble Administration turns a headline such as “NSA Collecting American Phone Records” or “NSA Examining Your Phone Calls” into one like “Bush: No Laws Were Broken,” which appears across the top of the Chicago Tribune today.
(At least the Tribune decided the story was the most important one of the day. The Chicago Sun-Times thinks it’s more important that U.S. congressman Danny Davis might like to be Cook County board president.)
I understand the impulse that newspapers have in our new hyperspeed media environment to report beyond yesterday’s well-known events. But it’s one thing to be up-to-date and another to speed by the original story in the process.

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Posted on May 12, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Skip the newspapers today (jury selection in Sorich trial begins; United Airlines explores headquarters options; Daley distracts us with possible Olympics bid) and read these offerings instead.
1. The accused murderer of Chicago-based Time magazine reporter Julie Grace goes to trial today. You can read more about the case in this fine profile by Chicago magazine’s Jennifer Tanaka.
2. Publication of the online Will County Insider has been suspended. So has Steger Matters.
3. Yellow Dog Democrat points us to what looks like a fascinating new book arguing why government should not be run like a business.
4. Chicago writer and musician John Cook asks and answers the question “If You Don’t Like Rap, Are You a Racist?” in an article that scolds New Yorker music writer Sasha Frere-Jones and nicks one of my favorite music writers, Chicago’s Jessica Hopper.

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Posted on May 11, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Jury selection begins today in the federal corruption trial of four aides to Mayor Richard M. Daley, including Robert Sorich, who was once the mayor’s patronage chief.
Federal prosecutors rarely lose these cases, and the official preview of the evidence in the case is rather damning, not just to Sorich and his pals, but to Mayor Richard M. Daley.
Which makes me a little curious about what U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez is up to. He’s spent the last couple days campaigning for mayor – if you saw his appearance on Chicago Tonight last night (or apparently his speech the other day) – it’s nearly impossible to conclude that he’s not running for mayor.
The weird thing about Gutierrez’s nascent campaign, though, is that he’s not talking about corruption on the eve of perhaps the gravest moment for Daley.
Instead, he’s talking about how he would have spent his energies on Chicago’s schools instead of building Millennium Park or, now, chasing the Olympics.
A valid position, but a strange one to build a campaign around at just the moment when the Daley Machine may come tumbling down.

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Posted on May 10, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

To little apparent public reaction, the student newspaper at the College of DuPage published the now-infamous Muhammad cartoons on Friday, though the Chicago Tribune noted (in a brief report that I’m not sure even made the city editions) that the cartoons were hard to find on campus because “most of the free papers had been removed from distribution bins,” a circumstance under investigation by campus police.
You can see the cartoons with accompanying explanation by the editors of the College of DuPage Courier in this PDF.
It might seem like the editors of the Courier are late to the party, but the cartoons are still the subject of great debate even right here in Chicago.

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Posted on May 9, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Just hours ago, in The [Sunday] Papers, I noted in reference to the mayor’s sudden international travels: “We don’t know the rest of the [media] strategy his team has mapped out for presenting Daley as above and beyond the Sorich trial.”
In a revised edition cleaning up some typos, I appended the statement “But we will soon find out.”
I didn’t know it would be this soon. It looks like strategic leaking has begun. To wit:
“In a confidential, sworn statement to federal investigators, Mayor Daley said his Office of Intergovernmental Affairs recommended people for city jobs but did not order their hiring, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.
“Daley’s statement, made to investigators last year, runs counter to what federal prosecutors say was the case. They say the mayor’s IGA office routinely ordered city departments to hire or promote people based on politics.
. . .
“Daley said in the statement – the contents of which were previously unknown – that people did not have to do political work to get city jobs, according to people familiar with the matter.”
People familiar with the matter who are sympathetic to Daley, it would seem.

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Posted on May 8, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Mayor Richard M. Daley will return today from his sudden trip to the Middle East only to turn around and jet off to Beijing at the end of the week to study that city’s plans for the 2008 Summer Olympics in preparation for his own possible Olympics bid.
Is all this unexpected traveling a way for Daley to get out of town while former patronage chief Robert Sorich and three other aides go on trial in federal court for alleged “massive fraud” in city hiring?
While determining pols’ motives isn’t always possible, you’d think reporters who have raised the possibility would at least be able to nail down just when these trips got scheduled and put some tough questions to the mayor’s people. After all, it would be in their interest to clear up any misconception some of us might have.
Not only hasn’t that happened, but the coverage of the mayor’s trips has only confused the issue.
Let’s take a look.

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Posted on May 8, 2006