Events

Heaven knows some teams need it. With baseball taking a three-day break for the All-Star Game (tomorrow night in St. Louis), we take a moment to reflect on how much worse things could be for the Cubs. They wound up exactly at .500, with 43 wins and 43 losses, tied with Houston and 3.5 games behind St. Louis (49-42). The real story, though, has to be how the Washington Nationals haved lost 61 games so far, the second time in a row they've dropped 60 before the break, putting them on course to lose120...

Via Calculated Risk, apparently Wells Fargo is suing itself over a mortgage foreclosure, which Fox Business columnist Al Lewis fails to understand, and so, because it's Fox, decides to criticize: You can't expect a bank that is dumb enough to sue itself to know why it is suing itself. ... In this particular case, Wells Fargo holds the first and second mortgages on a condominium, according to Sarasota, Fla., attorney Dan McKillop, who represents the condo owner. As holder of the first, Wells Fargo is...

What a brilliant idea. Get 30 brewers together under some tents, charge a reasonable amount ($40) for admission, and provide everyone with a 60 mL tasting glass. Yum. (For the most part.) Yesterday I went to AleFest 2009 in the shadow of Soldier Field, and in the aftermath of severe thunderstorms. (Note to self: bring dry socks next year.) I must confess to a slow but perceptible change in the sensitivity of my palatte as the afternoon wore on, but I did come away with some new beers to buy when I can...

Whole Foods recently opened its new, enormous Chicago store at 1550 N. Kingsbury St., on an old brownfield lot. The old industrial infrastructure surrounding the site—including a still-active spur line railway running down the center of Kingsbury St.—still has some, ah, quirks from the days before tens of thousands of shoppers went there every week. The intersection of Weed, Kingsbury, and Sheffield, for example, goes off in five directions, not including the three parking entrances: The store occupies...

Wow. You know you've jumped some serious GOP shark when even Peggy Noonan stomps on you: Mrs. Palin has now stepped down, but she continues to poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths. To wit: ... "The elites hate her." The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public...

Yesterday's post "Subsidizing rural folk" generated more commentary than usual. All of it was through my Facebook profile (I cross-post the Daily Parker there), so I thought I should copy it over here. Debbie K. of Highland Park, Ill., wrote: "In urban areas, cities maintain roads, or the Fed maintains freeways. There are more county roads to maintain in rural areas. A fact also conveniently left out of a similar story when in ran in the SF Chronicle about a week ago." I responded: "But that's the...

Roland Burris won't run for Senate after all: The decision, which is expected to be formally announced Friday, comes as a surprise to absolutely no one in local politics. ... Mr. Burris has raised almost nothing of the millions of dollars he would need for a serious campaign, and another well known African-American figure, Chicago Urban League President Cheryle Jackson, has formed an exploratory committee. So, with Madigan and Burris both out, the 2010 election campaign should be a hoot. I can't wait.

The New York Times has a must-read article today about disproportionately small shares of transportation stimulus money going to places that produce disproportionately large shares of GDP. More simply: we in cities are subsidizing rural roads: According to an analysis by The New York Times of 5,274 transportation projects approved so far — the most complete look yet at how states plan to spend their stimulus money — the 100 largest metropolitan areas are getting less than half the money from the biggest...

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick hypothesizes why Sarah Palin really quit: [W]hen the dust settles, the lesson may be that she was simply a woman who made no sense. Her meteoric rise and dubious fall will say less about America than you think, beyond the fact that America likes its politicians to communicate their ideas clearly. We will someday come to realize that while it's all well and good to be mavericky with one's policies, it's never smart to be mavericky with one's message. ...It's too easy to...

Chicago had its coolest July 8th in more than a century yesterday, capping the coolest summer (to date) in decades: For the 12th time this meteorological summer (since June 1), daytime highs failed to reach 70°F Wednesday. Only one other year in the past half century has hosted so many sub-70-degree days up to this point in a summer season -- 1969, when 14 such days occurred. Wednesday's paltry 65°F high at O'Hare International Airport (an early-May-level temperature and a reading 18°F degrees below...