By Steve Rhodes
1. Boise State rocks.
2. First the hook-and-ladder, then the Statue of Liberty.
3. Greatest game ever?
4. Plus, they play on blue turf.
5. The Beachwood Crystal Ball Affairs Desk has determined when the governor will be indicted, when the Cubs will be mathematically eliminated from contention, and who the first Democrat will be to drop out of the presidential race.
6. “To fly 7 million light years to O’Hare and then have to turn around and go home because your gate was occupied is simply unacceptable,” O’Hare controller and union official Craig Burzych told the Tribune, setting the bar awfully high for quote-of-the-year so early into the competition.
7. If we all follow ComEd’s tips for cutting our electricity usage, could we cut our bills by the same percentage the company is raising rates by, and therefore bankrupt the company?
Let’s try.
8. “Knee-jerk reactionaries will clamor for Griese,” the Sun-Times‘s Brad Biggs writes, on a page opposite Jay Mariotti’s clamor for Griese.
9. President Bush called the execution of Saddam Hussein “the kind of justice he denied victims of his brutal regime.”
Seems to me it’s exactly the kind of justice Saddam doled out.
10. “It was something of a mystery how someone so coldly calculating could have so badly misjudged events that led to his removal from power. If he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, why not come clean?”
– The Tribune editorial page, still trying to justify the war instead of admitting it was wrong, by blaming Saddam for not doing a better job of denying he had WMDs, rather than Bush and Cheney for refusing to believe it.
11. We should never forget that Saddam was one of ours, which is clear just by reading between the lines of this Tribune report, much less taking a deeper look.
1963: “With U.S. support, the Baath Party overthrows the government but loses party months later.”
1979: “From his ascension to the presidency in1979, Western governments – including the United States – recognized Hussein as a ruthless strongman, but someone they could do business with.”
1980: “In September 1980, Hussein launched an invasion [of Iran], setting off an eight-year war that left at least 1 million Iraqis and Iranians dead. Through the war, the U.S. supported Iraq by providing satellite intelligence and refusing to sell the Iranian military spare parts for its mostly American weaponry.”
1983: The Tribune doesn’t mention this now-famous handshake between Don Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein, but it occurred just a year after the slaughter at Dujayl that Hussein was hanged for.
12. As usual Stella Foster’s political insights are dead-on: “Even though he came under fire for pardoning Richard M. Nixon, he still deserves the respect of all Americans for being a great humanitarian.”
13. If Gerald Ford had truly “healed” the nation after Vietnam and Watergate, he would have been elected president in 1976. Instead, he faced an unusually strong primary challenge for a sitting president, and lost the general election to Jimmy Carter 50.1 to 48 percent. That’s the sign of a pretty badly torn nation, and in fact, the whole rationale for Carter’s election was to elect someone who could heal the nation.
14. Pundits aren’t historians.
15.What’s next, the rehabilitation of Chester Arthur?
16. The Beachwood lab has determined that Jerry Ford plus James Brown actually does equal Jerry Brown.
17. When the Jordans got married in 1989, Bill Zwecker reports, “At that time and for several years thereafter, it was widely perceived that Juanita did everything in her power to snare Michael.”
No kidding. Elsewhere the Sun-Times reports that “They wed at 3:30 a.m. on Sept. 2, 1989, in the Little White Chapel in Las Vegas when son Jeffrey was 10 months old. She had filed a paternity suit against him,” but the real story is even less romantic than that. It took years of legal negotiations.
18. Jordan once said that without Juanita and his three kids, “I could have gotten myself into trouble. If I had been single, playing basketball and making a lot of money, I could have made some wrong decisions.”
Thank God marriage and family life kept Jordan from a life of gambling debts and meaningless affairs.
19. “I’ve always said women such as Juanita who are married to superstars who travel a lot should pack their man’s suitcase, pack the condoms and then go on a shopping spree because the devil is always at work,” says relationship expert Stella Foster.
20. When Stella Foster says “I am sure that the gossip rags will have a field day with this news,” does that include Stella Foster and the Sun-Times, which, um, had a field day with this news?
21. Do you think Stella Foster is the “close friend” speaking on condition of anonymity or “another friend” who asked for anonymity?
22. When Stella Foster says “I am sure that the gossip rags will have a field day with this news just like in 2002, when Juanita first filed for divorce – which shocked everybody, including close friends . . . [and the] gossip rags featured stories about Michael’s alleged dallainces with different hoochies . . .”, does she include herself for getting in trouble with Juanita back then for being an anonymous source – and for a news organization that wasn’t her own?
23. “It’s a commonplace of modern life that job security is a bygone relic,” the Tribune editorial page states today. But it’s also a myth, the page says. “In the globalized, fast-changing, fiercely competitive economy of the 21st Century,” the paper continues, “corporations are accused of outsourcing jobs abroad, jettisoning workers at the drop of a stock price, undermining union protections and generally putting personnel in constant danger of unemployment.”
All apparently untrue. And are you going to believe the Tribune editorial page, or the lying corporation it works for?
24. On New Year’s Day, the Sun-Times ran six pages of horoscopes.
25. “Forgiveness Is Best Resolution For 2007.” And here I thought it was vengeance.
The Beachwood Tip Line: Only if it makes you feel good.
Posted on January 2, 2007