By Steve Rhodes
1. “The game opened with the Chicago Bears as 3-point home favorites over the New Orleans Saints, but by Monday morning the odds were all over the place,” reports Covers.com.
That’s because the only thing that prevents the Saints from being the favorites is the Bears’ home field advantage.
2. And yet, this year’s Saints are better on the road (6-2) than at home (5-4).
So this is where it ends, Bears fans.
3. Thought while looking at Paige Wiser’s Golden Globes red carpet report in the Sun-Times: Black-and-white newspaper pages might as well be black-and-white TVs.
Especially when it comes to, um, a photo-driven feature. Newspapers: Bringing you yesterday’s technology tomorrow.
4. “We’ve got a fight on our hands on every issue that we bring to City Hall,” local union leader Dennis Gannon tells the Tribune.
5. “I can ‘Bearly’ contain my excitement over the Bears kicking the Seattle Seahawks’ butt on Sunday with a 27-24 victory that went into overtime,” writes a well-paid adult columnist for a (theoretically) major metropolitan newspaper. “Words simply can’t describe this city’s collective glee and joy over that win, which puts our Bears in the NFC Championship Game Sunday against the New Orleans Saints at Soldier Field. I am ‘Beary’ happy . . . because they are ‘UnBEARlievable!'”
6. SMU isn’t sure it wants the George W. Bush library after all. “How would the institute affect the intellectual integity of SMU?” one faculty member worries, according to a New York Times report.
“Once completed the $500 million George Bush Library will become the number one (#1) US edifice terrorist target in the world,” a lawyer who lives near SMU wrote to the mayor of Dallas.
Another local wrote to the Fort Worth newspaper that Dallas was already infamous for the JFK assassination; “now it probably will be known for honoring the worst president ever.”
Maybe they should just build it in Crawford, where no one will have to see it.
7. “The worst thing about Islamic oppression of free speech is that it muzzles both believers and non-believers alike,” Neil Steinberg writes.
Christian and Jewish oppression too.
8. Does the 17 percent across-the-board cut Todd Stroger is asking for include his salary and the salaries of county commissioners? (inspired by Barry Aldridge)
9. The Tribune produced a smug editorial on Saturday about Chinese officials telling merchants to be cordial to visitors for the Olympics in the Beijing – as if something like that would never happen here. “And so we have another reason to bring the Olympics to Chicago: Midwesterners don’t need a crash course on how to be kind to strangers,” the paper proclaimed.
Yes, Chicago is so well-known for its friendliness to outsiders.
And aren’t we the place that doesn’t want nobody nobody sent?
And since when does Chicago represent “Midwestern values” anyway? I mean, this isn’t Iowa.
10. “The Tribune and other newspapers have been repeating the administration’s comparison of George Bush and Harry Truman without underlining its utter absurdity (‘In Policy Mirror, Bush Reflects On Truman,’ News, Jan.7′),” writes Melissa Macauley, associate professor of history at Northwestern.
And aren’t the same people on the wrong side of history in each instance?
11. “Cheaper Drugs Would Come At A Steep Price,” Peter Pitts writes in the Sun-Times.
Yes, that’s right. More inexpensive drugs would be bad for us.
Just who is making such a counterintuitive argument? Pitts is identified at the end of the piece as director of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. What the Sun-Times doesn’t tell you is that the “center” is funded by the drug industry and/or health-care corporations. (Its advisory board includes Joseph Bast, president and CEO of the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based right-wing think tank where Sun-Times business editor Dan Miller was once an officer.)
It didn’t fly in Kansas City, and it shouldn’t fly here.
12. “Ex-Cons OK’d To Run For Alderman.”
A) Current cons, too.
B) Future cons, too.
C) Other offices, too.
13. So Virgil Jones gets to run for alderman again. “It means to me that since I am a believer in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that there is still a God that does not allow injustice to prevail,” Jones says.
A) Because injustice has never prevailed in this world.
B) Because we all know how, with everything else going on the world, God was particularly concerned with Virgil Jones’ ballot status.
C) Or maybe God just has a soft spot for ex-con ex-aldermen.
D) Or maybe Satan won this round.
14. By the time FBI agents entered the home of Ald. Arenda Troutman, documents had been shredded and, apparently, drugs had been flushed down the toilet – a drug-sniffing canine reportedly “alerted” in the bathroom.
Jeez, maybe next time the FBI should call ahead and make an appointment, or just let Troutman do the search herself.
15. “The alderman says she’s easy to find since she has an open-door policy,” Steve Warmbir writes in the Sun-Times. “A process server in a federal lawsuit, though, has a different story.”
16. The best music writer in the city strikes again.
17. “3% Raises for Metra Chiefs.”
Why do the folks who think raising the minimum wage costs jobs remain silent when the wages at the top of the scale are raised? Don’t those raises also put people out of work?
18. “Most young people in Chicago have never witnessed a mayoral debate in their lifetimes,” writes Brian Brady, executive director, Mikva Challenge. In Baghdad, either.
Where are civic leaders – Abner Mikva, this means you – calling on Daley to debate? Calling on him to clean up his act, in fact? What kind of leadership is that? Think about what young Chicagoans are learning about how politics works? How government works?
19. Meet Terry Peterson – Daley’s campaign manager.
20. As a new Chicago resident, Jeff Clauser has some observations about the way we drive that he’d like to pass on.
(Apparently Clauser hasn’t been in town long enough to learn from the Tribune editorial page that we’re all about Midwestern heartland values around here.)
The Beachwood Tip Line: UnBEARlievable!
Posted on January 16, 2007