Oprah quits and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley is displeased (only he'd put it a little differently)

According to Chicago Mayor Richard "Have a Nice Day" Daley, you can just blame (credit) that dad-gummed media again for chasing that Windy City institution Oprah off of television after compiling a personal federal reserve of only about $2.3 billion.

Oprah has announced she'll close down her daily syndicated chatfest in 2011 (see her tearful announcement video below). But she likely won't be gone long. O, gee, whatever will she call her own channel?

The diva of daytime TV, who's seen the ratings slip some since her prominent presidential campaign involvement, says she's retiring because it's time to leave and it's cold in Chicago and it's warm at her palace in Montecito, California. Also, she's got her man in the White House now.

Chicago's Democrat mayor hasn't been in a real good mood since his president failed to acquire the 2016 Summer Olympics for his adopted hometown.

According to Da Mayor, the real issue over the global star's departure is the stink the media churned up over the city closing down North Michigan Avenue for two days in September to accommodate Oprah's season-opening show taping.

The Chicago Sun-Times quotes the longtime mayor son of a longtime mayor as putting it this way:

She loves this city, and I will be talking to her, but again, that became a big rhubarb of the Chicago press: Beat up Oprah. And so, you keep kicking people, and people will leave. Simple as that.

Speaking in his usual straight face, and strangely in the past tense, Daley....

... also said: "I think she was the most successful woman that we will ever know in the history of this country." That should warm up the temperature for her -- and the rest of the planet.

According to sympathetic city officials always eager for the municipal publicity, the 48-hour closure of that main drag cost only $54,832, which Oprah's company repaid. So what's the big deal? asks the head of the Democrat machine that allowed Barack Obama to emerge on the South Side as long as he didn't make too many waves.

That price to the city, however, doesn't count the cost of increased blood pressures in thousands of notoriously genial Chicago drivers forced to divert to crowded State or Wabash Streets. No reimbursements there.

The mayor's theory may be right, although that would not account for why he and his late father stuck around town for so very many years despite their share of media bashings, scandals, trials and the like. If you have an opinion to share with the mayor, his door is always rarely open. But Daley's office phone is: 312-744-4045.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Photo: George Burns / Harpo via Associated Press; Chicago Tribune (Mayor Daley on a good day).

Sarah Palin's 'Going Rogue': A powerful testament to a good woman's endurance in a mean world of politics

"Reviewing" Sarah Palin's new book is quite an assignment. There are a lot of pages. And not many pictures. But here goes:

Despite the involvement of a professional ghostwriter, Republican ex-Gov. Palin has penned one of the most powerful pieces of personal or political literature in a generation of American books. It's "Going Rogue: An American Life" (HarperCollins, $28.99).

Her behind-the-scenes memoir -- you may have noticed a photo of the cover above -- is flying off store shelves across the country even as you read this. (Now, see video below.)

It's a 413-page masterwork of personal and political insight that makes Dick Cheney's upcoming memoir look like a Golden Book. Based on the first 48 hours of....

... sales reports, HarperCollins has already ordered additional printings. And Palin is destined to become a millionaire. Again.

With her trademark down-to-earth tone and gee-gollys, Palin takes her readers inside a compelling personal quest from her loving family's upbringing through the....

Did ex-Ensign aide break law by contacting old boss?

Thus far, the fallout from Sen. John Ensign’s extramarital affair – and the admission that his parents paid his mistress and her family $96,000 after she left his employ – has mostly been in the court of public opinion, as The Ticket has reported.

Could a newspaper story today have far more serious consequences?

Let’s recap: Doug Hampton and his wife, Cynthia, both worked for Ensign, Doug as a high-ranking aide in his Senate office. In spring 2008, the couple said they were pushed out of their jobs because of Ensign’s affair with Cynthia.

Ensign (see photo) made some calls to his Nevada buddies to find Doug consulting work. Two major campaign donors, NV Energy and Allegiant Air, contracted with Doug Hampton. He then made a number of calls and e-mails on their behalf, including to Ensign's then chief of staff, John Lopez.

Outside the Beltway, that might seem innocuous. But according to a N.Y. Times story, these were potentially criminal acts. The paper wrote:

Senate ethics rules and federal criminal law prohibit former aides, if they have ‘the intent to influence,’ from making ‘any communication to or appearance’ with any senator or Senate staff member for a year after leaving their jobs. A separate law required Mr. Hampton to register as a lobbyist if he intended to press a company’s case on Capitol Hill.

Hampton said he ignored the one-year lobbying ban on Ensign’s advice, while Lopez said their conversations were merely informational. Probably not the last time this distinction is debated.

Other tidbits in case you care about how the infidelity began and ended:

•  Ensign realized he had feelings for Cynthia Hampton when they attended a White House Christmas party together  in 2006, Doug Hampton said. There, they posed for a picture with President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura.

•  The $96,000 from Ensign’s wealthy parents was intended as severance, Cynthia Hampton said, though Ensign's attorney has described the payments as gifts.

•  Fellow Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma was a middleman when husband Doug Hampton sought financial compensation from Ensign for his wife's indiscretion. Coburn told Hampton that $8 million was too much, but passed on a lower figure to his Senate colleague: $2 million. Ensign severed the negotiations.

•  Allegiant Air, which eventually hired Hampton, let him go after the scandal broke. Both Hamptons are unemployed and planning to sell their home in Las Vegas -- which, long ago, the Ensigns had encouraged them to buy. Good luck in this Vegas housing market.

-- Ashley Powers

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Photo: Associated Press

Nevada scuffle -- Harry Reid vs. the Review-Journal

In some respects, Sen. Harry Reid’s summer vacation went well: The GOP’s top hope for ousting him bailed, and the Senate Majority Leader squeezed in some photo ops with former President Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore.

But the Nevada Democrat with the tanking favorability ratings can’t seem to make a trip home without a few verbal oopsies:

He described disruptive attendees at a healthcare town hall meeting as “evil-mongers.” 

He got into a kerfuffle with a potential Republican challenger over whether she supported mammograms. 

He reassured Nevadans that the “public option” was not “set up for people who are losers.”

But unlike the other slips, there’s a complex set of rivalries behind the biggest headline-grabber: Reid reportedly told his hometown paper’s advertising director:

“I hope you go out of business.”

Reid has a contentious relationship with the Review-Journal, whose libertarian-leaning opinion writers are no fans of him or President Obama.

So, the Reid folks say, when he made his comment late last month before a Chamber of Commerce lunch, he was joking.

In fact, Reid said at the event that he hoped the R-J (as it's often called locally) remained successful – because of its joint-operating agreement with the more Reid-friendly Las Vegas Sun. The crowd laughed, knowingly.

A few days later, however, a column by R-J Publisher Sherm Frederick characterized the going-out-of-business remark as a threat that was “ugly,” “boorish” and “asinine.”

This stirred up a blogosphere brouhaha.

In turn, Sun columnist Jon Ralston – no fan of the R-J – basically called Frederick's account a bunch of hooey, and posted a picture of Reid and the advertising director as proof. Whew.

Whatever the truth, here are a few things which all parties can probably agree on:

1) Reid’s remark was ill-advised, and

2) his 2010 re-electionrace could be particularly nasty.

In the meantime, this may call for a beer summit.

-- Ashley Powers

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Photo: Frederick in 2006. Credit: Bryan Haraway / For The Times

Newspaper corrects 'Jackass' Keith Olbermann mix-up (updated)

(UPDATE: An update and video have been added to this item below.)

Thank goodness The Times is the forthright, ethical institution that it is.

And when a mistake happens, the newspaper rushes to set the journalistic record straight with an honest repair.

Here is an actual correction from Page A4 of today's print edition:

FOR THE RECORD

 TV listings: The Prime-Time TV grid in Thursday's Calendar section mistakenly listed MTV's "Jackass" show on the MSNBC cable schedule at 7 and 10 p.m. where instead MSNBC's "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" should have been listed.

It's not the Worst Mistake in the World.

But without this kind of correction, online too, a few thousand people might have tuned into MSNBC, the Obama administration's favorite cable channel, expecting to see a "Jackass" show, and instead they'd have found Olbermann.

Worse, what if nobody noticed the difference?

(UPDATE 11:24 p.m.: It was only the bronze worse person of the day, but nearly half of Keith Olbermann's Friday night audience rushed to notify us on Twitter that in honor of this tiny little Ticket item the recovering sports announcer had declared us one of the day's three worst people in the world.

The TV host himself, like the techno-challenged John McCain last year, is afraid to Twitter. And, by his comments here, confuses the olde newspaper print world with online blogs. Which is understandable for his generation.

But both of those Friday Olbermann viewers said they were amused and suggested we add the video clip here. So for the millions of all ages who were watching Fox News and CNN, the Cartoon Network and everyone else we did:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

-- Andrew Malcolm

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It's always the media's fault; Robert McNamara talked about Vietnam

As The Ticket reported earlier, John F. Kennedy's secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, died today at 93. He was a key architect of the disastrous U.S. military involvement in Vietnam who later admitted his mistakes.

In this C-SPAN archive video from 1995, McNamara discusses with Brian Lamb the role of the often-attacked media in that Southeast Asian conflict, specifically about whether the critical American press coverage caused the loss. It's worth a listen in light of subsequent events.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Photo: U.S. Air Force

Video: C-SPAN

Washington Post cancels plan to charge lobbyists to attend 'salons'

“Appalled” and “disappointed” are among the words — at least the published ones — officials at the Washington Post are using today to describe actions by, well, the Washington Post. As the paper reports:

Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth today canceled plans for a series of policy dinners at her home after learning that marketing fliers offered lobbyists access to Obama administration officials, members of Congress and Post journalists in exchange for payments as high as $250,000.

Weymouth is quoted as being “disappointed,” and Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli is the one who is “appalled.” The salon plan was reported today by Politico.

In its own story, the Post says:

Two Post executives familiar with the planning, who declined to be identified discussing internal planning, said the fliers appear to be the product of overzealous marketing executives. The fliers were overseen by Charles Pelton, a Post executive hired this year as a conference organizer. He was not immediately available for comment.

White House communications director Anita Dunn said today that The Post Co. had approached officials at the Health and Human Services Department to participate in a Weymouth dinner later this month. But, she said, "no senior Obama administration officials had accepted any invitation for the 'salon.' " 

The paper’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, says in a commentary, "For a storied newspaper that cherishes its reputation for ethical purity, this comes pretty close to a public relations disaster."

-- Steve Padilla

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Obama scripts town-hall meeting on health care. What would Bush say?

Remember when public opinion turned so dramatically against the Iraq war that the White House only let invited guests attend George W. Bush's out-of-town speeches?

Well it seems like the same thing might be happening to President Obama's healthcare proposal.

As the Ticket reported yesterday, Obama answered questions at a town hall at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, Va., about protecting the uninsured, giving consumers a public option and converting medical records from paper to digital files. The White House portrayed the town-hall meeting as one in a series of public outreach events, a way for the president to keep his finger on the pulse of public opinion, and in turn to sway Americans on the complex and contentious issue.

This morning, the Washington Post is reporting that "of the seven questions the president answered, four were selected by his staff from videos submitted to the White House Web site or from those responding to a request for 'tweets.' " And the three audience members he called on randomly? The Post says "all turned out to be members of groups with close ties to his administration: the Service Employees International Union, Health Care for America Now, and Organizing for America, which is a part of the Democratic National Committee."

None of this would surprise any good White House advance staffer. Better to control the crowd, screen the questions, anticipate the topics. And, to be fair, a college campus in a Democratic county might be expected to produce friendly questioners.

The problem is that Obama himself made an issue of transparency, promising an administration that allowed the public to see what its government was doing. In fact on Jan. 22, his first full day in office, Obama issued a series of executive orders instructing government agencies to open their files, saying, "Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency."

So, naturally, reporters jumped on the apparent discrepancy, led by veteran Helen Thomas, a thorn in the side to many a presidential administration, and CBS' Chip Reid. See what you think.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, deflecting the criticism, protested that the White House was not trying to manage the questions. Thomas reminded him that the Obama administration, unlike its predecessors, calls reporters the night before a press conference to tell them they will be called on, a new way of managing the topics.

Waving off the criticism and arguing that the healthcare forum would be expansive, Gibbs asked the reporters how they could make the case that the White House is muffling dissent when "you haven't heard the questions."

"It doesn't matter. It's the process," Reid argued. "Even if there's a tough question, it's a question coming from somebody who was invited or who was screened or the question was screened."

With the president's popularity dropping from his stratospheric inaugural highs -- the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll this week found that Americans are evenly split, 48 to 48%, on how Obama is handling the deficit -- the White House may be just trying to improve his standing by controlling the optics.

Saving his healthcare plan might prove more difficult.

-- Johanna Neuman

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Inside Obama's news conference: How and why he said what he said

Did you watch President Obama's news conference Tuesday? Oh, wait, that's right. You were among the thousands following the live-blogging here on The Ticket.

Even if you did see his news conference on TV or somewhere, take a look at this video here. At least the first few minutes, through his introductory remarks.

See if you notice anything different this time. We'll tell you what it is later on.

To change the subject from "Why won't the president speak out strongly against the brutality in Iran?" the president held his fourth White House news conference, originally scheduled for the Rose Garden, but it was too muggy and might have rained on the president's remarks and what a terrible metaphor that would have created for snarky bloggers to chew on for days.

So they moved the Q&A indoors. Not to the usual, more formal East Room, but to the media briefing room where the White House press corps sits every day, each in their familiar assigned seats, like athletes by their very own lockers. Home field for the media. And its members got a little testy with the chief executive. And he got a little annoyed at them. (See the smoking and McCain responses.)

Predictably, the president started off with Iran. (Full transcript is here.) Although....

John Edwards emerges to not talk about you-know-what and who

Speaking of Republican Sen. John Ensign's just-admitted extramarital affair, another John is back.

Democrat John Edwards of the my-wife's-cancer-was-in-remission-when-I-did-it televised confession has ended his public silence. He says he's not interested in the kind of reputation rehab that other philandering pols try over time. (Think Democrats ex-Pres. Bill Who's-Its and ex-Gov. Eliot Spitzer.)

Which no doubt is why Edwards suddenly granted an interview to the Washington Post's Alec MacGillis. With, however, just a couple of caveats:

No questions about his mistress Rielle Hunter (background on right).

No questions about her baby and whether he is the father.

No questions about terminally ill wife Elizabeth Edwards' recent memoir that prompted so much public attention and sent the ex-senator off to Central America to do good things out of sight.

And no questions about the federal investigation into whether the Edwards presidential campaign illegally spent political funds on Hunter.

Other than that, fire away.

Edwards claims there are only two reasons for him to be on the planet now: to take care of "the people I love" and to "take care of people who cannot take care of themselves." Edwards says he spends time in their mansion with his wife and two younger children and will return to El Salvador next month to volunteer.

He says he takes pride in pushing both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to talk more about poverty issues and declined to call his presidential race a mistake despite its high-wire counting on the volatile sexual affair not coming out. Unlike many observers, Edwards does not rule out a return to politics, if only as a policy advocate a la Al Gore without the melting glacier slides.

And he dismisses cynicism about his failed campaign. "It was real, 100 percent real," Edwards says. "I want them to be proud of what I stood for, and of what the campaign stood for. The stands were honest and sincere and idealistic. They were what America needed then and needs now." 

MacGillis also talks to others for their views of Edwards and his anti-poverty follow-throughs or lack thereof.

-- Andrew Malcolm

The Ticket goes inside politics, its strategies and human foibles several times a day. Click here for Twitter alerts on each new item. Or follow us    @latimestot

Photo credits: Associated Press (John and Elizabeth Edwards campaigning) (top).