Division Street

At the Beachwood, including:

1. Miss Manners on patriotism.
2. Kim Wilde’s Kids in America.
3. Regulated Militia Well. A poem.
4. 13 Anthems. Including The Respangled Banner, The Alphabetically-Spangled Banner, The Star-Spangled Forecast, and The Redacted Banner.

Posting here at Division Street will resume later today.

A nice nugget from Lynn Sweet on Saturday: “Pfleger is the subject of a documentary being made by Chicago-based David Axelrod, Obama’s top strategist. On Friday, Axelrod told me in an e-mail that the film project has ‘been dormant for much of the last two years due to other commitments.’”

Working title: Irony Man.

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More on Pfleger (and his weird apology on Sunday blaming YouTube) over at the Beachwood.

Including:

* I think everyone’s missing the point about Mayor Richard M. Daley speaking at Northwestern’s commencement. Does NU president Henry Bienen believe that Daley is a good role model for ethical public service?

* Tony Rezko’s Las Vegas gambling debts.

* Children’s Museum parody songs.

Over at today’s Beachwood Reporter.

Please visit, and then return here for more political blogging throughout the weekend, after I duck out for some coffee that sadly won’t be from Dunkin’ Donuts.

“Mayor Daley said today he asked a City Council committee to put off until June 5 a showdown vote on his plan to build a $100 million Children’s Museum in Grant Park because too many aldermen were out of town, and he wanted to give every one of them a chance to be heard,” the Sun-Times reports.

1. Except Joe Moore. Daley has already turned his microphone off.

2. The previous statement by Daley flak Jackie Heard that the delay was “not a request on our part” is now inoperative.

2. Daley says it’s “not my way” to “ram” something through committee. He’s right. He just sends the bulldozers out instead.

3. “[Ald. Bill] Banks insisted that aldermanic prerogative does not apply on an issue that involves a showcase park on Chicago’s front doorstep.” But mayoral prerogative does.

4. “Banks said he simply wants to have a majority of the 14 committee members present for the vote.” That didn’t stop the zoning committee from moving forward on other items of business, including a controversial senior housing proposal in the 50th Ward. (see third item)

5. This also puts in dispute the contention made by aldermen in this week’s Beachwood Reporter/Chicago Talks investigation that only “routine” matters are moved by committees without quorums.

(more…)

An investigation by Chicago Talks and published jointly with The Beachwood Reporter shows that the Chicago City Council’s committees frequently meet without quoroms and conduct business anyway, a clear evasion of the law that could make the full council’s actions subject to legal challenge.

Similarly, our investigation found that Chicago City Council committees frequently fail to keep minutes of their meetings - and sometimes even basic information such as which members were actually in attendance.

Please give it a look-see - and see what our fair aldermen have to say for themselves.

Only two members of the Daley-appointed Chicago Plan Commission had the brains and the guts to vote last night against the Children’s Museum’s Grant Park land grab: Doris Holleb and Lyneir Richardson. I’ve got more over at the Beachwood today, including why Leon Finney Jr. is today’s Worst Person in Chicago.

“[S]ources said Zell has rejected the state’s proposed terms because it relies on a novel and untested financing plan: the sale of individual seats at Wrigley as if they were condominiums.”

Which would make Cubs fans feel right at home.

* “The [Chicago City] Council’s Human Relations Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing today on a resolution ‘opposing any U.S. attack on Iran,’” Steve Huntley writes this morning. “The full Council could vote on it on Wednesday. The results are a foregone conclusion. Today’s hearing features among its witnesses the anti-war figure Scott Ritter and John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago professor known for seeing ‘Israel lobby’ machinations behind U.S. foreign policy.”

So that’s why the city council doesn’t have time to hold hearings on the various scandals emanating from City Hall; it’s too busy overseeing America’s foreign policy!

* And unspinning Sneed on Puerto Rico.

All in The [Tuesday] Papers at The Beachwood Reporter.

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I’ve got a lot of fun stuff about Indiana in my Beachwood Reporter column today. Head over there, then come back here. I’ll have some new posts this afternoon.

* “Obama ‘Appalled’ By Ex-Pastor’s Comments” (NBC5)

* “Obama’s Promise Fades” (Toronto Globe and Mail)

* “The Rev. Wright Has A Right To Defend His Reputation” (Ruben Navarrette)

* “New Pastor To Head Obama’s 8,000-Member Chicago Church” (AP)

* The view from Indiana.

* And North Carolina.

* And my column over at The Beachwood Reporter.

It just happened at a press conference in North Carolina. And Obama really let his old friend have it, calling Wright’s appearance on Monday at the National Press Club a “spectacle” and saying “The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago.”

That claim will be tested: Has Wright really changed?

Obama also defended himself from Wright’s charge that Obama had merely been acting as a politician in previous distancing from Wright: “What particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing.”

Responding to a question from a reporter, Obama said: “I did not vet my pastor before running for the presidency.” He did, however, disinvite his pastor from speaking at the speech in Springfield where Obama launched his campaign for admitted political reasons, so it’s not like Obama didn’t know his spiritual advisor was controversial.

Obama clearly is trying to put this behind him once and for all to cauterize the political wound and move on, but he’s lost a significant force in his life in the process. I don’t know if it’s unprecedented, but . . . wow. (I wrote about Wright this morning at The Beachwood Reporter.)