Picking up messages at home has been an adventure lately. You never know who’s going to call. But it was still disconcerting to hear the former president of the United States, Bill Clinton, on the other end of the line, putting in a plug for “my good friend, John Stroger.” Sen. Dick Durbin called as well?#34;twice. It’s enough to make a voter feel important. Not exactly sure why Clinton was shilling for Stroger, who isn’t exactly a paragon of principle, but that’s politics these days … taped endorsements over the phone.
Even Village President David Pope is getting into the act, taping a phone endorsement for Stroger’s challenger, Forrest Claypool. He didn’t call him “my good friend,” however.
Harmon-ious
Don Harmon is an astute politician and more organized than most. Instead of taped phone messages, he mailed out a sample Democratic ballot to constituents with his endorsements checked. No surprises (he did endorse himself?#34;twice), but on two races he didn’t make a choice. One was Cook County Board president, featuring Bill Clinton’s good friend John Stroger and his opponent, Forrest Claypool. Harmon also abstained from the 8th District State Rep race between incumbent Calvin Giles, who only recently discovered, it seems, that his district runs through South Oak Park, and challenger LaShawn Ford, an up-and-coming West Side Realtor. Significant non-endorsements or just undecided?
Personally, we hope Claypool won yesterday’s primary contest partly because then a guy named Forrest would be in charge of the Cook County Forest Preserve District.
Qualified welcome?
On Feb. 6, the Oak Park Village Board of Trustees voted in favor of a proclamation “Welcoming the Seventh Quadrennial Gay Games Sports and Cultural Festival to the Chicagoland Area.” They also issued a proclamation supporting Black History Month and noting the passing of Coretta Scott King. The latter passed on a voice vote, but Trustee Ray Johnson asked that the Gay Games proclamation be voted on by individual roll call in order to leave no question about where the board stands on an issue that raised a teapot tempest when it was first announced. Trustee Elizabeth Brady voted in favor but said she thought the roll call approach diminished the importance of the other proclamation. That raised a few hackles among the Oak Park Area Lesbian and Gay Association. In the March OPALGA newsletter, board co-chair Brad Bartels, who is also active with the VMA, wrote about the incident and included an e-mail request for clarification to Brady about just what she meant by her comments, which, Bartels wrote, “certainly left this member of the Oak Park host committee questioning whether the gains achieved by our LGBT community in Oak Park in the late 1980s and 1990s are being touted when convenient, but not heartfelt.”
Bartels noted, “To date, I have not heard back from the trustee.”
The proclamation, by the way, states, “Our community supports the ideals set forth by the Games and warmly receives their participants and spectators to a community that shares their spirit of sportsmanship and congeniality in an environment of zero tolerance for discrimination and hatred.”
A pool, a fish, and a tournament
Forget the primary?#34;what about the NCAA tournament? Local licensed sports merchandise wholesalers and web maniacs Rivalfish, Inc., announced they are hosting “the most memorable office pool in the history of March Madness.” According to Jonah Ansell, one of “three sports fanatics who refuse to move past the best four years of our lives,” the pool is titled “A Babe, A Dog, and a Dick” and pits “a Lincoln Park bombshell and a slobbering canine against Dick Vitale’s tourney picks.”
Ansell claims their sports humor site, Rivalfish.com/rivalroom, “has quickly become the leading daily sports humor publication in the country.” Six of the writers, he notes, are OPRF grads.
If you want to follow the pool’s progress, the web address is www.rivalfish.com/rivalroom/2006/03/babe-dog-and-dick-round-1-day-1.
According to Ansell, “At Rivalfish, we think victory is a bit sweeter when you’ve embarrassed an opposing team and all its fans on national television.”
Don’t we all.