Chicago Daily Observer

Creative Loafing Inc., which owns the Chicago Reader and five other alternative weeklies, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Monday in Tampa, Florida, where the company’s headquartered. CEO Ben Eason didn’t want to put a number on Creative Loafing’s total debt, but it grew considerably last year when the company bought the Reader and the Washington City Paper, and today it “owes more than it can pay back.”

In a telephone conversation with executives of his newspapers, Eason sounded relentlessly chipper, and he emphasized that all his company seeks from bankruptcy is the opportunity to restructure its debts. Liquidation is not being considered. “This is a profitable business,” he declared. “The company has a good cash flow. It has a good market position. Online revenues more than doubled in the last year.” But print revenues have fallen off dramatically over the past year at Creative Loafing and throughout the newspaper ... Read More...

“Anyone who wants to pull troops out of a vitally important country where we’re finally winning and send them to a marginal country where ultimate victory is impossible must be a Democrat.”

“Thanks to the surge, whose effectiveness my opponent refuses to admit, the Iraqis now see a way forward to peace and democracy. If they are correct, Iraq will set an example for the entire Muslim world of a nation prosperous, pious, progressive, and free. This is an outcome my opponent was unable to imagine and cannot imagine yet. For some reason, he’d rather fight in Afghanistan, a primitive collection of clans and warlords on the fringes of Arabia that for centuries has defied every attempt to civilize and reform it, chewing up and spitting out every invading army that tried. Osama bin Laden is nowhere to be found in Afghanistan, and neither is the future of the Arab-Muslim ... Read More...

Mary Mitchell wrote a puzzling column for the Sunday Sun-Times. Her subject was the appearance of the president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, at the UNITY conference of minority journalists in McCormick Place. Mitchell wondered what he was doing there, given that Wade was the first foreign head of state UNITY had ever invited to speak, since he’s “been accused of unfairly suppressing journalists by locking them up and threatening them.”

And sure enough, during an interview Thursday with a group of journalists he “showed shocking disdain for journalists in his own country,” asserting that the “Senegalese press is infiltrated by politics. I am telling you if you do not give them information, they are going to invent it. They insult people. They accuse people when they don’t even have any proof.”

But what troubled Mitchell more—she found it “appalling”—is that Wade’s speech Friday was disrupted. Someone shouted, “I ... Read More...

If you ever find yourself singing Chicago’s praises to the folks who wish you’d come back home to Topeka, without actually believing a single word you hear yourself saying, then I have just the article for you. Salon’s “Look Homeward, Obama,” by Dan Conley, a former speechwriter for Mayor Daley, is as dewy-eyed a portrait of our city as you’ll find this side of a City Hall press release. Conley’s larger point is that when Obama preaches the politics of consensus he should be taken seriously, because . . .

Because “anyone who doubts that a toxic political environment can be overcome should look to Chicago. Consensus has become more conspicuous than conflict. Deal-making is more important than showboating. In short, the city’s politics has become post-partisan. It’s a concept that should be familiar to anyone who has followed Obama’s presidential bid.”

I left a message with the public editor, Clark Hoyt, and sometime later his assistant, Michael McElroy, called back. “I know the number and so obviously it’s easy for me,” he said, in attempting to explain why the Times was too obtuse to put its main number where people would see it. (It’s 212–556-1234, by the way.) “I’m looking right now,” McElroy said as we talked. He rummaged around the Times site for a while and then gave up, allowing that he couldn’t find it. “That’s something I’ll tell Clark. That’s not a good thing.” Human contact “certainly has been pared down a lot,” McElroy conceded. “The biggest thing is more of a preference for e-mail. They try to make it where an editor’s not having to answer phone calls.”

. . . your own opinion doesn’t count for much. A couple of weeks ago Barack Obama whomped Hillary Clinton in North Carolina and lost to her narrowly in Indiana, outcomes that were generally expected. Overnight, the media (and apparently the Democratic Party) decided that was that—Obama had wrapped up the nomination. The tone of the coverage underwent a sea change. Clinton was now an object of affection and indulgence:

My column on Wednesday argued for Clinton to gracefully exit the stage now that it looks like there are no more rabbits to pull out of her electoral hat. But readers—not all of them women—pushed back. Let her quit when she’s good and ready, many argued. She’s earned that right. Carol Marin, Sun-Times.

The ruling halting construction of the soccer field the Latin School is underwriting at the south end of Lincoln Park might keep a similar project at the north end of the park from getting under way. Soccer fields #1 and #2, two sloped dirt fields laid out side by side just east of Lake Shore Drive and south of Foster Avenue, have been used for about a quarter century by Region 418 of the American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO). They’re the two biggest fields 418 plays on, and “the conditions are unsafe, terrible,” says 418 commissioner Rich Costello. Region 418 decided its kids deserve better. So 418 approached the Park District and struck a deal: It would pay $500,000 up front—which would cover the next four years of annual permits —and the Park District would grade the fields and install artificial turf.

Can you imagine the founding fathers making war against England without maligning King George III in the process? Or Barack and Hillary volunteers refusing to talk trash about their opponents? And when neighborhood groups get up in arms, do you suppose moderation is the watchword? Democracy is rude.

Developer James Jaeger was called “greedy,” “very sneaky,” and “evil” last year when he pursued a zoning change that would let him put up a seven-story multipurpose building at 1820–42 W. Irving Park Road. Neighbors who believed such a building would be too big for the location fought the proposal, and in the end the local alderman refused to give Jaeger his variance. So he knocked two stories off his design and construction is now under way.

The Sun-Times gets to dump another salary—Cheryl Reed, the editorial page editor, has quit, and quite spectacularly.

A couple of weeks ago I heard that she’d turned in her resignation—she couldn’t have been a happy camper after layoffs cost her about half her staff. But she was talked out of it (by publisher Cyrus Freidheim himself), and editor in chief Michael Cooke issued a memo telling the staff to ignore the rumors: “She’s with us for the battle.”

Bruce Sanford touches up the federal suit against Illinois chief justice Bob Thomas