No-news Sunday

Both major all-metro dailies looked tired today — a beautiful Sunday morning, yes, when people, or “folks” as Obama always says, are out and about early, with little time for Chi Trib and Sun-Times. But how boring and inconsequential can you be, even on a late-July Sunday, and still lay claim to excellence, not to mention stay afloat financially?

So: weak outing for the two major metros today.

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* But first, not part of their weak outing, Obama is widely quoted saying he “gave the impression [he] was maligning” the Cambridge MA cop and department, a day after telling a prime-time national audience that the cop acted “stupidly.” Q: How does O. sound when he really does malign someone?

Plus: To say you give “the impression” of doing something implies you did it inadvertently. He makes inadvertent statement on prime-time national TV? Does he do that often? Also when he negotiates without preconditions with the Iran president et al.? Q: Is he ready for prime time?

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Getting back to the two majors, Sun-Times got to p. 5A (Sneed item) with first news of the day, after:

* Pure puffery for the Urban League’s president who is candidate for governor, with flattering head shot (“Convention a boost for Senate bid?”),

* Report of hackneyed advice in a “Latina” adress to grads of an online “university” (!), namely, guess what?, don’t drop out.

* Health story, on 5A, recounting a (self-promoting) Chi doc (who supplied his nicest head shot), disputing a “nationally known” doc about letting babies cry.

Finally the Sneed column, with its usual heard-on-the-Rialto stuff, including birthday hellos to Sandra Bullock and Mick Jagger (permitting an editor to run head shots of those consummate newsmakers), but — and this the news — a not-bad item about Michelle O’s wearing a $2G (!)sweater made in France, which I take as nouveau riche extravagance. Maybe it’s not such a bad country after all, eh Michelle?

And at least Sneed keeps it short and more or less newsy, something worth the 90 seconds needed to read it.

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As for Chi Trib, it was time to take dry cleaners to the cleaners again with an old pollution story, “Cleaners leave toxic legacy,” a longtime staple of ecology crusading — DRY CLEANERS SAY NEW EPA RULES ARE LEAVING THEM OUT TO DRY, July 4, 1993; A DRY RUN – CLEANER PRESSES CASE FOR NON-CHEMICAL METHOD, June 9, 1993; DRY CLEANER LOSES BID TO ADD MACHINE – ARLINGTON BOARD SHIFTS ON VARIANCE, May 24, 1991 to name a few stories — and just the thing for Sunday morning breakfast, when we all want to get mad as hell at Koreans.

More:

* “Human cost of budget crisis” on page one has same old artsy (mournfully gazing into distance) shots of Suffering People — black male schozophrenic looking like a youthful Paul
Robeson doing “Old Man River,” a mentally handicated adult woman, an autistic girl with Afro features. Read it and weep.

* John Kass on page 2 with expose of yet another state boondoggle, with graduitous reference to Bad Bill Cellini, super-connected and under indictment.

* Michelle again! In major headshot-decorated story about how she bobs her curls, etc. on p. 3. (Axelrod, stop them; she’s overexposed.)

* On p. 4 the polluted dry cleaner sites, listed and mapped and bemoaned.

* Story of hotel strikers now six years on the line — included here because they were happily ignored a few weeks ago by Society of Midland Authors on their way to their annual dinner, as they were by thousands of others before them who continue to use the worn-looking, even seedy Congress Hotel.

* On p. 6 at the bottom a many-paragraphed (one per sentence) Mary Schmich column sucking her thumb — “We talk a lot about untangling the mess of race in this country” — giving us an over-back-fence chat available in any neighborhood. She has words meant to sooth a savage breast. (But for police union waiting presidential apology for “stupidly,” go to Trib’s web site, we are told in a bottom right column inch.

* On p. 8 Annie Sweeney, late of Sun-Times, has story with a head for the ages, “Few surprises in state traffic study.” [I give up, Trib online ed., where is it?]  Thanks of course to a copy editor with a grudge against Annie, for all we know. Q: If there are few surprises, why bother? This is a news-paper, not one that announces no news today.

Sometimes I think they are just all tired out at these papers, undermanned (womanned) and overworked and suffering a malaise . . . .