Tom Roeser does this alderman up very nicely in his blog item about “the lucky sperm club” of public office heirs:

The fastidious, preening Edward, his white hair in a blow-dry pompadour, his chiseled face held high at a jaunty angle, wearing a flowing $150 green tie from Stuart’s on Michigan avenue, acts as to the manor born as he strides up to the altar in a $3,000 suit at St. Peter’s each noon in Lent to receive the sacrament to which he believes he is thoroughly entitled as a Burke.

Alderman Eddie, a.k.a. Mother Burke, our Carrie Nation of the dining room table, is the main character of several whom Roeser names to go with our incipient latest of the breed, Young Stroger. 

 

Claypool making noises:

Commissioner Forrest Claypool, who lost the Democratic primary to John Stroger, said letting ward bosses decide who’s [on] the ballot shows “a remarkable, almost breathtaking contempt for the voters and taxpayers of Cook County.”

Beavers too:

Asked Monday, [Ald.] Beavers quickly denied there was anything misleading, saying “oh, hell no,” before calling Orr a “little poop butt.”

“What does he care?” he asked.

Orr:

Orr said his office still hasn’t received a signed and notarized “withdrawal of candidacy” form needed to remove Stroger’s name from the ballot.

That’s adding confusion to a situation that has been confusing from the start, causing Orr to call it all “very embarrassing” and “bush-league political stuff.”

And Danny our boy, beloved of some goo-goo libs for no apparent reason:

Davis said he’s fighting “the wheeling and dealing” the Stroger camp has been engaged in since John Stroger suffered the stroke.

. . . says Mark Brown, who at the end of his description and attempt to figure out the Stroger in Wonderland happenings says something that must be occurring to lots of people beside Tony Peraica:

All I can say for an absolute certainty, though, is that this situation has been nothing but good for the Republican nominee, Commissioner Tony Peraica, who is looking more and more like a contender.

In Oak Park, for instance, lawns were loaded with signs for Forrest Claypool, Stroger’s opponent in the recent primary.  Will those become Peraica signs this fall, even in Democrat Oak Park?

OP business owner Paul Hamer —  has Frame Warehouse on Harrison St. — on retrieving freebies to developers through added sales tax:

People do not realize how small the sales tax pie is that goes to our village. It’s only one percent of the total 8.76 percent collected [that is, one% of purchase amount]. That means a business with a million dollars in sales only generates $10,000 for our community. The total sales tax deposited in village coffers for the entire downtown business district in 2003 was only $350,000. In our $100 million village budget, that’s nothing.

As for the Shops of OP, whose developer got lots of freebie help:

 2003 Actual real estate taxes from The Shops: $ 353,238

 2003 Projected real estate taxes with no public investment: $284.534

 Gross yearly Shops tax increase: $68,704

But there’s also the debt servicing by the village, which has led to a net yearly loss of $263,060

Would the developer have paid $6.5 million of his own money to make $20 million? [counting his recent sale of The Shops for $20 mill]  I think so. There was no need to ever get us involved financially.

Which leads to the question why the village trustees felt themselves competent in this matter in the first place.

The Shops didn’t increase our sales tax base, didn’t increase our real estate tax base enough to cover our costs, and has not led to a downtown revival—all the things that were promised to us.

………………

The TIF district tax hole that previous village boards have dug for us is deep, and it is not totally clear to me how we will be able to dig our way out without severe sacrifices to local public education or dramatic local tax increases.

This is almost at the end of the Sun-Times story about feds investigating Blago and friends as in letter to AG Lisa which she released, we assume partly to cover self for not continuing to pursue them with her own investigation.  Such as it was, we are tempted to say:

The release of the letter was not viewed as a positive development within the U.S. attorney’s office. While publicizing an investigation can bring potential witnesses forward, it can prompt people to shred documents, get lawyers and get their stories straight before investigators visit them.

Maybe this should have gone higher in the story?

[W]itness is journalism’s irreducible core. And sportswriters are the most old-fashioned of journalists and athletes the most old-fashioned of other people. Clubhouses are where jocks and scribes circle and sniff each other. Mariotti boasts of his sources in other places, but he’s remarkably estranged from this environment, where the circlers and sniffers ultimately piss on the same hydrants.

Is it not curious that three newspapers are mentioned as running the SWIFT (not swift boat) story about how we track Al Quaeda finances — NYTimes, LATimes, Wall St. Journal — but not Chi Trib, which had it page-one same day as its sister paper, LATimes?  Trib ran the LAT story, yes, filling its role as LAT-Midwest, but is it not a major daily, worthy of being mentioned, even excoriated with the others by admin-supporters? 

It’s that old third-city syndrome, yes, and non-coastal sucking of hind titty when it comes to respect, yes.  But has the Trib sunk to virtual nonentity status, with all its resources? 

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Ron Cook’s column about Ozzie Guillen using “unconscionable term” — “fag,” which Cook does not use — had this headline in Pittsburgh yesterday:

Cook: It’s appalling Guillen will be at PNC Park

But this in Chicago today (Sun-Times):

Baseball needs to learn to deal with criticism

The latter is about as weak as you get.  Why not take that “appalling” and stuff it in Chicago readers’ faces?  I have a million answers to that question.

Asked last year if she was offended by White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen’s cuss words, Sun-Times columnist Carol Slezak said no.  Nor had she ever seen him acting badly toward women writers, she said on another occasion, again in response to a male writer’s question.

I could have added that Guillen is one of the most entertaining personalities I’ve ever covered [she wrote]. I could have said he is smart and honest and frequently offers insightful comments about both his team and the sport. I could have said he is the best thing to happen to the White Sox and major-league baseball in a long time.

That, with Mike Ditka’s endorsement of Ozzie as “real people,” also in today’s Sun-Times, goes a long way toward rebutting some of the foolishness being expressed — as by the Pittsburgh writer in same paper saying it’s not political correctness but business acumen that dictates a throttling of Ozzie, as if the first isn’t informing the second. 

How is it bad for business?  Have fans stopped coming?  Have players stopped playing and winning?  Foolish, foolish man.  On the contrary, “I am unaware of any anti-Sox or anti-baseball backlash as a result of his remark,” says Slezak.

GM Kenny Williams is worried, however, and speaks of imperilled “longevity” as manager of his team for him who offends.  He relishes Ozzie’s “color” and “flavor” but seems unwilling to let it go.  Same for

the rest of us, particularly many of us in the media, [who] are prone to getting carried away. . . .   [S]ome . . . have tried to link Guillen’s handling of the team’s recent beanball wars — neither of which was started by the Sox — to his gay slur. There is no connection, but that hasn’t stopped us from piling on. We’re good at that.

If Ozzie has to watch what he says, on the other hand, who decides? 

I vote for including the c-word, as in chick. I don’t recall having heard Guillen use it, but plenty of others seem to think it’s an acceptable term. (And I suppose it is, to barnyard fowl.)

Who’s to be protected?  Some are shoo-ins, as “gays and racial minorities.”  Caucasians?  Chubby guys like Bobby Jenks? 

Finally, I wonder if the context of the offending word or phrase will be taken into account. Because Guillen can be pretty funny. His pregame Q&A sessions with reporters can resemble a comedy routine, and comedians get away with insulting all kinds of people. I wonder if Guillen will be afforded that luxury now. (Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg recently ran a week’s worth of blond jokes in his column. If Guillen were to tell a blond joke, would he lose his job?)

Ozzie’s under a microscope nonetheless, and “will face even more intense scrutiny, and I’m not confident he can escape unscathed. I’m not sure any of us could.”

End of column, here excerpted at length and I hope capturing its logic, clarity, and expertise.  Who says girls can’t be sports writers?

As for the GM, Williams, he’s immensely successful and highly regarded but has his own demons to beware.  Just consider how he talks as quoted by Slezak and behold a man running scared for his own job and in fear of what others think:

“What I get concerned with more than anything is that my friend, my brother, is going down a road that does not necessarily lend itself to longevity,” Williams said. “We’ve all seen how the movie ends when things are flamed to the degree they are beginning to flame [to] when he says things that are controversial.”

. . . .

“We are trying to get him to understand that if he puts himself in that position, it will be, to me, one of the most unfortunate sports happenings in a long time,” Williams said. “We need people like Ozzie Guillen out there to give a little bit of color and a little bit of flavor to the game.”

Unless too many object.  Then we don’t need them at all.

Chi Trib media writer Steve Johnson oddly accuses Dixie Chicks fans of hypocrisy for not buying their records because the Chicks have embraced leftist views.  “Hypocrisy” is one of those words that cut deep.  It’s as if he was pretty mad and searched for what we have come to call a “hurtful” adjective.  For instance, “fag” as applied to Sun-Times man Mariotti, which he says didn’t hurt him at all — what would he say, “Oh. That hurt!”? — and anyhow its use is widely considered in newspapers as “hurtful” of “millions” of unnamed homosexuals, who don’t like it.

Or “racist” rather than “prejudiced”: it’s got more zing.  It’s hurtful but not banned.  “Fag” is.  So is “nigger,” which never got used in a complaint against its use by historian John Hope Franklin at Rainbow-Push headquarters Saturday.  This made sense, insofar as Franklin was objecting to its very use — by blacks making light of the old taboo — as if it were a magically hurtful (there it is again) shibboleth.  Hell, they stick pins in dolls, don’t they?  And what happens then?

The non-buyers of Chicks records — and we must wonder how many of them Johnson knows — are hypocritical because they like feminist themes but not when the Chicks do them because they do not like Chicks’ politics.  But he leaves out the possibility that feminism does not cover all faults, in this case regretting one came from Texas because that’s where George W. Bush came from.  Why does Johnson, an admitted expert in these matters, not allow that these fighting words from Lead Chick Maines have been perceived by Chicks’ fans as so hurtful (there again!) as to blind them to Chicks’ feminism?

There can be only one reason, dismissing the possibility that Johnson is dumb and can’t see this sort of thing, it being too complicated for him, and that is his own hurt incurred when Lead Chick Maines’ anti-Bushism was rejected in the first place.  The suggestion to be made is that Johnson look into his heart and see whether that is so.  Then he might see that it’s hard to enjoy Chicks’ music, feminist or otherwise, when one feels like throwing up when their name is mentioned.

Documentation:  For Steve Johnson’s column, rummage in the garbage for yesterday’s Trib or go here.  For Mariotti stories go here.  For Hope Franklin and the N-word, go here.  For Dixie Chicks and Bush, go here.  For Dixie Chicks more or less naked, go here.  For a funny story, go here.