Mean ol’ Cheney

In Chi Trib possession are many pix of V.P. Cheney, but the one they like best is here, curled lip and all, or was there  5:19 PM CST today.  Personally, I picture him looking at Leaky Leahy, the slimy senator from Vermont, with this look on his face, and find it appropriate.

Political funeral

They came not to bury politics but to practice it, says Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell of the Coretta Scott King obsequies in Atlanta.  “No one says a mean word at a funeral. Even gang-bangers hold their anger until the casket is removed from the sanctuary.”  But it didn’t work that way this time. 

[I]t was selfish and embarrassing to see so many . . . dignitaries use her funeral as their bully pulpits.

 

At a political gathering, it’s fair game to criticize the president.

 

But it was tacky and disrespectful for anyone to launch into a political attack at a funeral.

Rev. Joseph Lowery, for instance:

“We know there were no weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq],” he said. “We know there are weapons of misdirection right down here,” Lowery taunted.

And Jimmy Carter, who “also got in his jabs, criticizing the Bush administration’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina victims.  ‘We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi to know that inequality existed,’ he said.”

 

Neither was Mitchell impressed with him who has been acclaimed the first black president: “As often occurs when Former President Bill Clinton shows up, black folks acted as if he had emancipated the slaves.”

 

“You used to know what to expect at a funeral,” she says.  People “are not there to gawk. They have some connection to the family and they are there to help the relatives bear their grief.”

 

“If politicians and civil rights leaders wanted to call Bush out,” she concludes, ”they should have called him at the White House.”

 

Amen, sister.

Political funeral

They came not to bury politics but to practice it, says Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell of the Coretta Scott King obsequies in Atlanta.  “No one says a mean word at a funeral. Even gang-bangers hold their anger until the casket is removed from the sanctuary.”  But it didn’t work that way this time. 

[I]t was selfish and embarrassing to see so many . . . dignitaries use her funeral as their bully pulpits.

 

At a political gathering, it’s fair game to criticize the president.

 

But it was tacky and disrespectful for anyone to launch into a political attack at a funeral.

Rev. Joseph Lowery, for instance:

“We know there were no weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq],” he said. “We know there are weapons of misdirection right down here,” Lowery taunted.

And Jimmy Carter, who “also got in his jabs, criticizing the Bush administration’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina victims.  ‘We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi to know that inequality existed,’ he said.”

 

Neither was Mitchell impressed with him who has been acclaimed the first black president: “As often occurs when Former President Bill Clinton shows up, black folks acted as if he had emancipated the slaves.”

 

“You used to know what to expect at a funeral,” she says.  People “are not there to gawk. They have some connection to the family and they are there to help the relatives bear their grief.”

 

“If politicians and civil rights leaders wanted to call Bush out,” she concludes, ”they should have called him at the White House.”

 

Amen, sister.

Zorn today

If I had written Chi Trib’s Eric Zorn’s column today, “Standing up for message behind cartoons,” and just before key-clicking it home did a final check, I would have re-cast the part about inking one’s thumb after voting – which does not do justice to the life-and-death Iraq voting climate and the vote’s historic significance — but would have changed nothing else.  I don’t want to overdo this, but it’s as if Zorn’s newspaper career has led to this column, which oh so neatly presents the situation, or state of the question, as we philosophy students used to say, argues it and concludes:

I’m on the side that says if your good ideas can’t peacefully win out over my bad ideas, maybe your ideas aren’t so good.

 

I’m on the side that says that any belief worth having-be it love of a country, of a deity, of an ideology or of a person –must be strong enough to absorb criticism and be impervious to mockery.

The column is also posted on his blog site, “Change of Subject,” where you can post your own comments.

Zorn today

If I had written Chi Trib’s Eric Zorn’s column today, “Standing up for message behind cartoons,” and just before key-clicking it home did a final check, I would have re-cast the part about inking one’s thumb after voting – which does not do justice to the life-and-death Iraq voting climate and the vote’s historic significance — but would have changed nothing else.  I don’t want to overdo this, but it’s as if Zorn’s newspaper career has led to this column, which oh so neatly presents the situation, or state of the question, as we philosophy students used to say, argues it and concludes:

I’m on the side that says if your good ideas can’t peacefully win out over my bad ideas, maybe your ideas aren’t so good.

 

I’m on the side that says that any belief worth having-be it love of a country, of a deity, of an ideology or of a person –must be strong enough to absorb criticism and be impervious to mockery.

The column is also posted on his blog site, “Change of Subject,” where you can post your own comments.

Cartoon mania — more

The NY Press staff protested by walking out when the Press, an alternative weekly, decided NOT to run the offending cartoons — libs true to lib principles:

For all the talk of freedom of speech, only the New York Sun locally and two other papers nationally have mustered the minimal courage needed to print simple and not especially offensive editorial cartoons that have been used as a pretext for great and greatly menacing violence directed against journalists, cartoonists, humanitarian aid workers, diplomats and others who represent the basic values and obligations of Western civilization. Having been ordered at the 11th hour to pull the now-infamous Danish cartoons from an issue dedicated to them, the editorial group—consisting of myself, managing editor Tim Marchman, arts editor Jonathan Leaf and one-man city hall bureau Azi Paybarah, chose instead to resign our positions.

said the editor in chief in a release.  The NY Sun is a conservative week-daily, for what it’s worth.

Cartoon mania — more

The NY Press staff protested by walking out when the Press, an alternative weekly, decided NOT to run the offending cartoons — libs true to lib principles:

For all the talk of freedom of speech, only the New York Sun locally and two other papers nationally have mustered the minimal courage needed to print simple and not especially offensive editorial cartoons that have been used as a pretext for great and greatly menacing violence directed against journalists, cartoonists, humanitarian aid workers, diplomats and others who represent the basic values and obligations of Western civilization. Having been ordered at the 11th hour to pull the now-infamous Danish cartoons from an issue dedicated to them, the editorial group—consisting of myself, managing editor Tim Marchman, arts editor Jonathan Leaf and one-man city hall bureau Azi Paybarah, chose instead to resign our positions.

said the editor in chief in a release.  The NY Sun is a conservative week-daily, for what it’s worth.

Hard case

Don’t you Chi newspaper readers wonder sometimes why some people happy-birthday’ed by Sun-Times’s Michael Sneed are “ageless”?  Most have their ages behind their names, but some are special and suffer no such indignity.  Today’s “ageless” is Terry Durkin.  Who the heck is Terry Durkin?  Trying Google, one discovers:

 

An Indiana U. prof whom I have emailed asking if he’s ageless in Chicago.  He’s at The Open Source Lab, which sounds electronic. 

 

The MVP for 1982 for the Yale (U.) Bulldogs softball team, which means she’s a girl.  Ah-hah, we might be getting somewhere. 

 

A charter boat captain in Petersburg, Alaska, who promises “unforgettable fishing.”   Does Sneed fish?

 

A Clear Case product manager reachable email-wise at Rational-dot-com.  He has a 781 area code and is clearly (sorry) up to something electronic.

 

The founder (and charter member) of Pacific Southwest Railway Museum in Campo and La Mesa, California who unfortunately died in 2003.  It can’t be he.

 

A senior software analyst at Human Resources Canada who gave a speech in 1998 that referred early on to his being “in the middle of one of those sleeps where you are barely above the level of a coma” and being awakened by the ring of his telephone.

 

The first president-elect of PERS (Pacific Estuarine Research Society) at its formation in 1978.  PERS, for those with the need to know, is an Affiliate Society of ERF (the Estuarine Research Federation).  What would be ageless about him (or her; I’d rather not be fooled) is anything but clear.

 

Which leaves us all in the dark.  Will Sneed clear this up for us some day?

 

Wait.  Hold your horses.  I may have it.  What a fool I was not to tell Google it’s Terry Durkin Chicago I have in mind!  There it is, third in line, in an Eric Zorn blog, entitled, what do you know, “Aging the ageless,” in which, don’t tell me, Zorn outs Sneed’s ageless birthday boys and girls, including “gaming [gambling] industry attorney Terry Durkin,” whom he exposed on Feb. 9, 2005, a year ago almost to the day, that is, the day after Sneed wished him Happy Birthday, calling him ageless, as 48 whole years old!

 

There it is!  All comes to him who knows or learns pretty quickly how to make best use of Google.  Terry Durkin on this day is 49 years old, and he’s a gambler’s lawyer.  Very interesting.  He’s also into Sneed somehow.  She owes him, that is.  In short, he’s a SOURCE, and where would Sneed be without sources?  Case closed.

 

One more thing.  Zorn explains his interest in ageless birthdays as in the Sneed column here.  Look it up.  But the sad thing is that this citing of Zorn will go unnoticed by him unless he reads my Chi Newspapers blog because for quite a while he has had a block on my email, maybe because he blocks a lot of inconsequential commentators but maybe also because I have pissed him off in email exchanges, for which I am heartily sorry and to prevent reoccurance am embracing a firm purpose of amendment.  Better stop now.  This has gone far too long.  Cheers.

Hard case

Don’t you Chi newspaper readers wonder sometimes why some people happy-birthday’ed by Sun-Times’s Michael Sneed are “ageless”?  Most have their ages behind their names, but some are special and suffer no such indignity.  Today’s “ageless” is Terry Durkin.  Who the heck is Terry Durkin?  Trying Google, one discovers:

 

An Indiana U. prof whom I have emailed asking if he’s ageless in Chicago.  He’s at The Open Source Lab, which sounds electronic. 

 

The MVP for 1982 for the Yale (U.) Bulldogs softball team, which means she’s a girl.  Ah-hah, we might be getting somewhere. 

 

A charter boat captain in Petersburg, Alaska, who promises “unforgettable fishing.”   Does Sneed fish?

 

A Clear Case product manager reachable email-wise at Rational-dot-com.  He has a 781 area code and is clearly (sorry) up to something electronic.

 

The founder (and charter member) of Pacific Southwest Railway Museum in Campo and La Mesa, California who unfortunately died in 2003.  It can’t be he.

 

A senior software analyst at Human Resources Canada who gave a speech in 1998 that referred early on to his being “in the middle of one of those sleeps where you are barely above the level of a coma” and being awakened by the ring of his telephone.

 

The first president-elect of PERS (Pacific Estuarine Research Society) at its formation in 1978.  PERS, for those with the need to know, is an Affiliate Society of ERF (the Estuarine Research Federation).  What would be ageless about him (or her; I’d rather not be fooled) is anything but clear.

 

Which leaves us all in the dark.  Will Sneed clear this up for us some day?

 

Wait.  Hold your horses.  I may have it.  What a fool I was not to tell Google it’s Terry Durkin Chicago I have in mind!  There it is, third in line, in an Eric Zorn blog, entitled, what do you know, “Aging the ageless,” in which, don’t tell me, Zorn outs Sneed’s ageless birthday boys and girls, including “gaming [gambling] industry attorney Terry Durkin,” whom he exposed on Feb. 9, 2005, a year ago almost to the day, that is, the day after Sneed wished him Happy Birthday, calling him ageless, as 48 whole years old!

 

There it is!  All comes to him who knows or learns pretty quickly how to make best use of Google.  Terry Durkin on this day is 49 years old, and he’s a gambler’s lawyer.  Very interesting.  He’s also into Sneed somehow.  She owes him, that is.  In short, he’s a SOURCE, and where would Sneed be without sources?  Case closed.

 

One more thing.  Zorn explains his interest in ageless birthdays as in the Sneed column here.  Look it up.  But the sad thing is that this citing of Zorn will go unnoticed by him unless he reads my Chi Newspapers blog because for quite a while he has had a block on my email, maybe because he blocks a lot of inconsequential commentators but maybe also because I have pissed him off in email exchanges, for which I am heartily sorry and to prevent reoccurance am embracing a firm purpose of amendment.  Better stop now.  This has gone far too long.  Cheers.

Looney

Cartoons came front and center a week ago, with Muslims rioting and protesting.  But Chi Trib took until today, Tuesday the 7th, to come up with a page one story “Why [they] sparked furor: Islamic tradition and freedom of press clash over artists’ depictions of Prophet Muhammad,” by its dynamic religion duo, and they are good, Margaret Ramirez and Manya A. Brachear, who clearly were given the assignment.  It’s a fine Saturday religion-page story, full of citations from various academics and ethnic ax-grinders — it’s what you do to provide what an ad saleswoman once told me is ”editorial support,” for church-page ads.

 

But this one is just below the page-one fold (on a Tuesday) and a vivid, vivid color shot of a burning Danish flag — when was the last time you saw a really fiery Danish flag, a sure sign that’s something’s rotten in Denmark — the entire spectacle beneath a sparkling quote from some Catholic professor, drawn, I hope out of context because it tends to make a religious act out of rioting and destruction: “In Muslim culture, there is a very strong sense of the sacred.”

 

The sacred, yes, the last refuge of Islamo-fascists bent on destroying almost everything that makes life living, incited by clerics who phonied up cartoons of The Prophet to go with those that ran in the offending Danish newspaper — the one tut-tutted by Boston Globe and other first-amendment heroes for its impolitic behavior — and spread them around Muslim-land.  The rioters doing it in countries where nothing — nada, nihil. rien, zilch — happens without govt say-so.

 

Chi Trib would have us think we really know why Muslims riot, offering various repetitive statements of what is old, old news by now, that the Muslim world is more religion-oriented than we.  But nothing is said about radical imams who plot and scheme and incite riots.  There are days when I want my fifty cents back from 435 N. Michigan.