By Steve Rhodes

“This is what change looks like,” Barack Obama said following House passage of the health care bill on Sunday.
On what planet?
“Here is the ultimate paradox of the Great Health Care Showdown: Congress will divide along partisan lines to pass a Republican version of health care reform, and Republicans will vote against it,” E.J. Dionne wrote over the weekend.
“Yes, Democrats have rallied behind a bill that Republicans – or at least large numbers of them – should love. It is built on a series of principles that Republicans espoused for years.”

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Posted on March 22, 2010

By Steve Rhodes

1. From the Office of the House Majority Leader:
Hoyer Encourages Focus on Teabaggers, Helps Distract from “Godawful” Insurance Reform, He Says
Washington, DC – House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (MD) released the following statement on Sunday after learning that Members of Congress were subjected to racist and inflammatory behavior at Saturday’s health insurance bailout reform protest:
“Thank god for the Teabaggers! Nothing unites like an enemy, and there’s nothing in our health insurance corporate bailout bill to unite us with anyone outside the Beltway other than the opposition of the Teabaggers. Gotta love em. Antiracism and antihomophobia are righteous and good, but they’re our god and guns over on this side of the aisle. I mean, have you seen the shit that’s in our bill? Not to mention what the president will unconstitutionally legislate on top of it? If Bush were pushing this bill (and why not?) all the liberals would denounce it. Why? Because we would tell them to. Do you think they would have called a privately run program for 3% of Americans a “public option” if Bush had called it that? And then fought to keep it in, and then fought to keep it out, at our command? What, of their own free will?
“But people can begin to have thoughts. And they will when they see the disastrous results of this bill, unless the states can get the Supreme Court to throw it out, which would just let us blame five black-robed Teabaggers! Nobody’s about to start thinking for themselves this month, however, not if we can keep telling them they’re united with us against a bunch of hateful racists, sexists, and haters of gays and lesbians. We all owe a deep debt of gratitude to Fox News for inventing the Teabaggers, and to MSNBC and the Democratic blogosphere for spending so much time building them into such an apparently large force. We hear more about the Republicans now than before the country voted them completely out of power. The Romans taught us the value of bread and circuses. We’ve got the circuses bit down cold.”
– via Reporters@lists.mayfirst.org

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Posted on March 21, 2010

By Steve Rhodes

1. “For months I’ve been reporting in The Huffington Post that President Obama made a backroom deal last summer with the for-profit hospital lobby that he would make sure there would be no national public option in the final health reform legislation,” Miles Mogulescu wrote this week.” “I’ve been increasingly frustrated that except for an initial story last August in the New York Times, no major media outlet has picked up this important story and investigated further.
“Hopefully, that’s changing. On Monday, Ed Shultz interviewed New York Times Washington reporter David Kirkpatrick on his MSNBC TV show, and Kirkpatrick confirmed the existence of the deal.”
Memo to progressives: Feel like a bunch of chumps, yet? If not, read on.

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Posted on March 19, 2010

By The Beachwood Accountability Desk

“It’s been three years since the release of the 2007 DGAP Report Card, and in that time Chicagoans have continued to contend with a government that responds primarily to financial and political clout, rather than the issues and concerns of ordinary citizens,” the Developing Government Accountability to the People coalition says. “Where residents have expected to be actively engaged in the implementation of equitable policies that benefit all residents in every neighborhood across the entire city, they have instead found themselves in a constant struggle against forces that ultimately exclude their voices from the democratic process.”
And how.
Here are excerpts from the mayoral report card the group issued Tuesday.

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Posted on March 17, 2010

By Steve Rhodes

I couldn’t decide whether the governor was a schmuck or a schmo watching him evade nearly every question asked of him by the tag team of Phil Ponce and Carol Marin on Chicago Tonight last night. I did decide, though, that if he mentioned how good and strong the people of Illinois were one more time I was going to reach through the TV and show him how good and strong my chokehold was. We’re not schoolchildren.
Here’s a slight reconstruction of my notes, with some of my own commentary thrown in:
PONCE: Why does your budget proposal only make changes to future pension payouts, not current payouts?
QUINN: It’s easier to get legislative votes.
RHODES: Then why not double pension payouts? That’s even easier!

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Posted on March 16, 2010

By The Beachwood Budget Bureau

We got nuts yesterday and went deep inside Gov. Pat Quinn’s budget proposal, from the fine print to the footnotes, and discovered a lot of cleverly hidden provisions that the media has yet to report on. So we will.
* All residents will be issued Super 8 VIP cards but some of them will be expired, subjecting motel guests to Quinn’s new Rewards Card Tax.
* In order to keep schools open, schoolchildren and their parents will be required to pay a Textbook Tax. Those using books that teach Creationism will pay double.
* Bill Brady will be placed in a new Political Opponents Bracket and taxed accordingly.
* Jason Plummer will be subject to the new Inexcusably On A Statewide Ballot Tax.

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Posted on March 12, 2010

By Steve Rhodes

Really, there’s so much madness among our pundits I could do this every day and not stay caught up. It’s exhausting, as reading lazy journalism often is, and I can’t get to nearly all of what I intended. But I promised a third installment so here it is.

Previously: Warren, Ponce, Washington. Telander, Roeper, Steinberg, Huntley.

Jim O’Donnell: Wow, Watergate was spoon-fed to the Washington Post! Yeah, it really wasn’t a tough story to crack.
Eric Zorn: “Critics snorted at and mocked the line in President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech in which he alluded to increasing public skepticism about health care reform legislation and said, ‘I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people,'” Zorn wrote recently.
“Well, here are a few news flashes for [Center for a Just Society Chairman Ken] Connor and scores of other indignant commentators who think that support for these bills has fallen below 50 percent because the public has studied and rejected them.
“A Kaiser Family Foundation poll released last month found that 58 percent of respondents either didn’t know or were unaware that the bills now in Congress would prohibit insurance companies from setting lifetime caps on coverage.”
Here’s a news flash for Zorn: The critics snorted and mocked Obama’s line because even up until then – and since with his pretend “summit” – he kept scheduling TV time and speeches and media appearances to explain his plan one more time, only this time clearly in a way that the American people would finally understand.

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Posted on March 1, 2010

By Steve Rhodes

Editor’s Note: The next installment of this feature will appear on Monday, not on Friday as originally planned.
*
Continuing this week’s wacky tour through the local commentariot.
Rick Telander: “Both [Derrick] Rose and Blackhawks star Patrick Kane are only 21 years old, and that’s something to think about right there,” Telander wrote recently.
“They’ve both had some slip-ups in their lime-lit lives, but I think back to my own self at 21, a second-semester junior in college. Oh, my God.
“Think back to yourself at 21. Or if you’re not yet 21, ponder the idiot you are right now.
“It is one of our eternal blessings that most of us get to grow out of our youth without the rest of the world much noticing or caring. My personal blessings were that I didn’t have any money and that cell-phone cameras didn’t exist.”
Or what, you would’ve been caught cheating on your college admissions test or punching a cab driver over a 20 cents?
No wonder professional athletes feel like they can get away with anything. Oh, the hardships they face!

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Posted on February 25, 2010

By Steve Rhodes

Where do they come from?
That’s the question the perpetually (and rightfully so) exasperated Bob Somerby frequently asks at the Daily Howler.
Where do our most well-known commentators who construct and endlessly convey the mediocre thinking that somehow passes for both conventional wisdom and insight at the same time come from?
And when Somerby asks that, he’s asking what planet?
Somerby would have a field day with the locals. Let’s take a look at some of their recent work.

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Posted on February 23, 2010

By Chris Clair
Updates appended.
–
Sent via e-mail on February 17 after reading about this in the Beachwood.
Dear Senator Cullerton,
I read with interest in today’s Chicago Tribune news of the Illinois Senate’s closed-to-the-media (and by extension the public) caucus meeting to discuss state and national budgeting issues. In particular I noted this quote, attributed to you:
“You’re missing the whole point,” Cullerton said.
“This is meant to be one where just the senators are there to get information, but where they can also feel they can ask questions and . . . have a free exchange of ideas without having to be worried about what the press might report.”
With all due respect, sir, it’s you who is missing the point; you and any of your senate colleagues who support a closed-door meeting to discuss issues clearly of interest to the public. I’m not sure which made me more angry: the meeting itself or your lazy, stupid and contemptuous justification for it. Ideas are free to be exchanged in any setting, regardless of who’s nearby and whether or not they’re carrying notepads and recorders. The only thing that prevents the free exchange of ideas in any setting is a lack of courage. The idea that elected officials need to be sheltered from the press to speak freely is laughable. Or maybe just cowardly.

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Posted on February 22, 2010