By Steve Rhodes
1. “We have a quarterback who’s lucky he made it through college,” a Barrington contractor tells The Indianapolis Star.
2. Barack Obama’s endorsement of Mayor Richard M. Daley has very little to do with the mayor’s campaign, but everything to do with Obama’s campaign. Is Barack Obama just a pretty new face on the same old politics?
3. Mark Brown says the private correspondence of former Daley patronage chief Victor Reyes, made public in the court files of Robert Sorich’s appeal, shows how the city really works, but that there’s no smoking gun. It’s all a smoking gun! That’s like saying we found the bullets, and we found the gun, and we found the fingerprints, and there’s a dead body, and there is a motive, but there’s no smoke coming out of the barrel so we can’t be sure. I mean, c’mon!
4. My favorite Brown finding: Rosemarie Andolino, who is in charge of the bungled O’Hare expansion, reminds Reyes in a letter “of her upcoming family vacation to Caracas, Venezuela, and that she had spoken with him about asking the lobbyist for American Airlines to upgrade their four seats.”
Nice.
A real mayor would send Andolino packing.
5. “Hillary’s Reputation Both Helps & Hurts 2008 Bid.”
Other candidates unburdened by strange paradox.
6. Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s lottery dreams made the front page of The New York Times. The Times wasn’t clear about the news peg, but Crain’s reports that on Monday the state released “a 17-page request for qualifications from interested bidders, who are required to respond by Feb. 20.”
The Beachwood Lottery Affairs Desk is already preparing its offer.
7. Richard Roeper once asked Rich Little if he did impressions of anyone still alive.
8. I hope Rick Telander applies the same skepticism toward Chicago’s Olympic bid as he demonstrates here in an item about the economic boost of Detroit hosting a Super Bowl. Plus, it was only a few years ago when Chicago, not Detroit, was the nation’s murder capital. For a few years running.
9. “Among the biggest worries associated with bringing the Olympics to Chicago in 2016 is the fear that area residents will be socked – and shocked – with an unexpectedly high bill for playing host,” the Sun-Times editorial page says today.
“Mayor Daley and his Olympic boosters have tried to ease those fears by vowing the use of private dollars, but it would be naive to think that no public funds will be spent.”
Alternative way of putting it: “The mayor is being disingenuous at best to claim the city can host an Olympics without taxpayers bearing part of the cost. Maybe he ought to tell us how much we’re in for.”
10. The editorial concludes: “If winning the Olympics leads to the type of horse-trading, dealmaking and ultimatums that Chicago is accustomed to . . . ”
You mean it hasn’t already?
“. . . the Olympic motto of ‘swifter, higher, stronger’ will also be an apt description for our runaway Olympic bill.”
But Obama says we have such a well-managed city!
11. Coming soon: An Olympic TIF.
12. Lynn Sweet corrects a scurrilous Mark Steyn column that Sun-Times editors saw fit to publish claiming Obama was educated as a Muslim fundamentalist (read: terrorist) – and that the Hillary Clinton camp leaked the revelation. Further explanation of the origin of the smear, and how the right-wing message machine works is here.
13. On Saturday the Sun-Times “Consumers Benefit From Free-Market Competition” by Jim Prendergast, who was identified as the executive director of Americans for Technology Leadership.
Just so you know what passes for legitimate commentary in the oldstream media, Americans for Technology Leadership is best known as a Microsoft front group that once sent homespun letters using the names of dead people to state attorney generals engaged in an antitrust lawsuit against the software company.
14. You know we’re living in bizzaro world when the mayor touts Block 37 as an example of his administration’s achievements. “Look across the street,” Daley said last week. “There’s no other city doing what we’re doing in the country right there.”
What, trying to recover from decades of mismanagement so infamous that the parcel became a national symbol of failed urban redevelopment and inspired a book about its history as a microcosm of greed and stupidity destroying cities? Or just the most recent part about the city untangling itself from an imploding development company?
In fact, the very name “Block 37” is so tainted that if you enter it into Wikipedia, you are redirected to an entry for its new name, “108 North State Street.” Nice job, city staffers!
15. “That one square block, there’s more cranes there than any other city in the country,” Daley continued. “Look at it. And that’s what we’re really proud of.”
If Daley said the soil of Block 37 was really chocolate, would the media report that unchallenged as well? Because I’m pretty sure there aren’t more cranes on Block 37 than in any other city in the country, nor more cranes than on any other city block in the country, if that’s what he meant.
16. The Tribune‘s Dawn Turner Trice is joining the Pickett/Mancow commentary rotation on Chicago Tonight, in an effort clearly aimed at destabilizing The Beachwood Reporter through mania-inducing psy-ops.
17. Something I find interesting about Hillary Clinton is that her qualifications or ability to be president has never been questioned. Even before she was a senator.
18. But the most important decision a president makes is whether to go to war. Making the war a litmus test – in fact the best character question we have – is absolutely legitimate. And Clinton failed.
19. On Chicago Tonight last week –
CTA chief Frank Kruesi: We certainly are not a third world transit agency. In fact, we’re one of the top transit agenices in North America.
Ald. Joe Moore: One wag suggested calling the CTA a Third World transit system was an insult to Third World transit systems.
When the head of your transit agency has to debate whether it’s better than those in the Third World, it doesn’t really matter what the answer is technically.
20. “Recently Divorced Michael Jordan Announces Plans To Return to Marriage.”
21. Colts fans are just like us.
The Beachwood Tip Line: Anti-partisan.
Posted on January 23, 2007