Chicago - A message from the station manager

By Steve Rhodes

We know her now as an ethically challenged stumblebum lurching from one mini-scandal to another. But there was a time when Dorothy Brown was perceived as an up-and-coming independent with the potential to one day challenge Mayor Daley. Which she did. She failed miserably, but unlike what the usually dead-on Ben Joravsky says here, her attacks against Daley were ferocious. It’s just that the media wasn’t listening – and/or didn’t care. Let’s take a look.

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Posted on January 26, 2010

Mystery Senate Primary Debate Theater

By Steve Rhodes

The three major Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate (no Jacob Meister or Robert Marshall) appeared on Chicago Tonight last night in a revealing discussion led by Carol Marin. Let’s take a look, with my own comments yelled at the TV inserted. (Remarks from all involved edited for clarity, convenience and sanity.)
*
Cheryle Jackson: [Massachusetts] was a change vote much like the vote for Obama . . . it was very much about jobs . . . and a sense that people in Washington are not addressing these issues.
Marin: But Obama was the change agent. How did he fail?
Alexi Giannoulias: Voters are angry. Angry at reckless Bush-Kirk economic policies . . .
Rhodes: Massachusetts voters are angry at Mark Kirk!

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Posted on January 21, 2010

Gov. Fester

By David Rutter
Am I the only one in Illinois who watched Gov. Quinn’s State of the State fireside chat and thought, hey, doesn’t he look a lot like Uncle Fester with just a little more hair?
And then I snapped out of that reverie and realized it was just the mesmerizing quality of Quinn’s off-the-3-by-5-note-cards address that allowed my mind to wander if not wonder. While I did my level best to pay attention to the important points the governor was making, I was defeated by two liabilities: He didn’t actually say anything, even though I was listening real hard. And, two, he made me sleepy.
I get nearly the same effect while watching the Bob Ross Joy of Painting series on public television. The fact that Bob had been dead for 15 years while his career rolled on to even more sublime heights never diminished the soothing quality of his shows. He had a voice like maple syrup, and I guess his artwork was acceptable if you acknowledged it was dumbed down enough that even I might have been tempted to take a crack at the easel. He did great clouds and mountains. He loved titanium white. His tubes of oils apparently contained no capability to paint humans.

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Posted on January 18, 2010

The State Of The State Is Inept

By The Beachwood State Desk
Usually we wouldn’t post a politician’s press release here unless we were being ironic. In this case, though, the Dan Hynes campaign has hit the nail that is Pat Quinn on the head. So with just a little enhancement on our part – namely, providing links – we’ll make an exception.
From The Dan Hynes Campaign
Early reviews are in and already political analysts in Illinois are taking Governor Quinn to task for a “rambling” speech that was “short on substance.” Instead of focusing on his solutions to fixing the state’s numerous problems, Governor Quinn missed yet another opportunity to lead.
Among the early assessments:
* ” . . . there were no new ideas and little vision.” – Rich Miller, Capitol Fax Blog
* “Illinois is in the middle of a massive budget crisis, but you wouldn’t know it from the first 45 minutes of Gov. Pat Quinn’s State of the State address. Quinn delayed talking about the no-easy-answers topic of the budget until near the end of his speech, after such vital topics as the fact that he was once named ‘Mr. Soybean’ by a state association.” – Deanna Bellandi, Associated Press

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Posted on January 14, 2010

Carp vs. Pols

By Scott Buckner
It has been some years since I covered a news event, so I forgot how easily 11 elected officials and government agency representatives can spend two hours saying nothing new about things we already know because they’ve already said them before. Such was Tuesday morning’s emergency summit on the potential infiltration into Lake Michigan by Asian carp, held appropriately at the John G. Shedd Aquarium.
If people who write for blogs and other websites actually do so sitting in their underwear in their basement as some people in the traditional media seem to believe, they do it because they’ve wised up: Let the suckers from the “real” media suffer through plan commission meetings. I spent several years as a newspaper reporter suffering through meetings like that, but something compelled me to change into some actual clothes, hop on a South Shore Line train, and suffer through this one, too.
The possibility occurred to me that some Shedd employee would ask for my official Real Reporter-Guy ID that entitled me to be there (“Vas? No papers? Ve haff vays of dealing mit interlopers like you. Hans, introduce Herr Buckner here to ze shark tank, yah?”), so I intentionally dressed down with the idea that I’d stand toward the back of the room and blend in with the guys setting up camera equipment and see how it went from there.
That’s where I noticed that Channel 7’s Hosea Sanders either has really big feet or just likes to wear unusually long shoes. Still, the guy’s one hell of a snappy dresser.

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Posted on January 14, 2010

Stimulus Stats Saved Or Created

By Michael Grabell/ProPublica
When the White House unveiled its nearly $800 billion stimulus package last year, it promised not only to create and save 3.5 million jobs but also to open the books and prove it. But counting jobs turned out to be a lot harder than lining up a work crew and tapping hardhats.
Now, the White House says it will no longer keep a cumulative tally of jobs created and saved by the stimulus. Instead, it will post only a count of jobs for each quarter.
And instead of counting only created and saved jobs, it will count any person who works on a project funded with stimulus money – even if that person was never in danger of losing his or her job.

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Posted on January 12, 2010

The 2009 Chicago Psych Olympics

By The Beachwood Mental Health Desk
An annotated chronology.
JANUARY 2009: Dr. Terry Mason, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health, announces the impending closings of four mental health centers, as reported here by Megan Cottrell in the Chi-Town Daily News, on January 13th.
Also:
* Mental Health Clinics Under Attack . . . Again!
* Daley Blames “S-A-T-E” for Cutting Health Clinics. Audio here.
DALEY: “The state of Illinois funds those centers. We did not cut. They have cut state mental health facilities all over the state. That is state money. Underline that, S-A-T-E. It’s called state money.”

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Posted on January 11, 2010

Convention Wisdom

By Steve Rhodes
With McCormick Place cycling back into the news lately, I thought it would be a good time to go back and take a look at the piece I wrote while at Chicago magazine about the convention complex in October 2004. It’s not online (sigh), so I’ll just present excerpts here. I’ve left out sections on political scandals at McCormick Place as well as Mob ties, how trade shows are arranged and set up, and some of the color gleaned from the month when I went to every show I could there. Instead, I’ve tried to streamline the story here to what seems most relevant today. The piece was called “The Toughest Game In Town.”
*
One morning last spring, 200 or so people gathered in a parking lot on the Near South Side to celebrate the groundbreaking for an $850-million expansion of the McCormick Place convention center. Under a white tent, the Eddie Harrison Jump Stars Orchestra entertained, while guests sampled from buffets of fancy snacks – vanilla creme-filled profiteroles with a dark chocolate glaze, lemon meringue tartlets, and cracked telly-cherry peppercorn infused long-stem strawberries with creme fraiche.
The waitstaff wore black uniforms and white gloves. Souvenir paperweights filled one table; a model of the new building sat on another. Television personality Bill Kurtis emceed the event, championing the “growth of an industry that has helped define our town for decades – the convention and visitors industry.” Leticia Peralta Davis, who was chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority is in charge of McCormick Place, promised a grand future. “On this very site, for decades to come, new products will be unveiled, new inventions that will make the technology of our era seem primitive by comparison,” she said. The addition, she vowed, would even have transformative powers: “Take my word,” she said. “The neighborhoods around us will be reshaped and reborn, in architecture, in culture, and commerce, thanks to a burst of energy that will grow outward from this innovative new building.” In all, the morning was filled with the kind of civic boosterism that accompanies huge projects, years in the making, that are expected to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the city.
Convention officials needed the good vibe. The groundbreaking came amid a flurry of bad news for McCormick Place. The expansion had already been tainted by bid-rigging charges involving the project’s main contractor and Scott Fawell, Davis’s predecessor. Fawell is now passing time in a South Dakota prison, having been convicted on a wide range of fraudulent schemes he perpetrated while working in the secretary of state’s office. The Chicago Sun-Times had recently reported on union workers with Mob links who continued to plague the convention center. McCormick Place was already operating at a deficit, and Davis had already laid off 15 percent of the work force (116 jobs, including 13 unfilled positions) the previous summer. The exposition authority was still coping with the loss of its $5-million annual state subsidy, and a chunk of state funding for the city’s convention and tourism bureau was in danger during the latest budget battle in Springfield. A fight was heating up over convention costs and union work rules – thought to be costing the city business – that within days would be joined by the mayor and the governor. And, as if to rub salt in the wounds, the National Hardware Show, which left Chicago after 28 years due to a precipitous decline in attendance, had just held its first event in Las Vegas, and it was a smashing success.
“We’ve living in a brutally nasty competitive environment,” says Heywood Sanders, a public administration professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and a leading expert in the convention industry. “And it’s not clear that adding space gets new business.”

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Posted on January 6, 2010

The Cook County Wars

By Dick Simpson
When it comes down to voting patterns, Chicago aldermen are easily dominated by Mayor Richard Daley, who has ensured the city council serves as a rubber stamp of his policies.
The reverse happens when the president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, Todd Stroger, gavels a meeting into session. Members of the county board are in full-scale rebellion with Stroger at the helm, sharpening their rhetorical weapons and casting, more often than not, nay votes on his priorities.
As he wades into a re-election campaign that could make or break his political career, Stroger must contend with the realities of his diminished executive power. He can’t wield the bully pulpit like other politicians and he can’t browbeat commissioners into sticking with him.
Take a look at the numbers my colleagues at the University of Illinois-Chicago and I recently compiled.

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Posted on December 28, 2009

Blago’s Computers

By The Beachwood Tech Support Affairs Desk
Two of the eight computers (and a safe) reported stolen from the office of one of Rod Blagojevich’s attorneys earlier this month have been recovered. Whew!
Here’s what the Beachwood Tech Support Affairs Desk has learned is on the computers.
* Spreadsheet of salon appointments.
* Yelp reviews of federal prisons.
* Sortable enemies list.
* List of working families he’s helped.

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Posted on December 17, 2009

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