Stroger’s the man!

While recovering from being aghast at the Murtha story, I gravitated to Sun-Times for what turned out my biggest laugh of the day so far — it was only noon on a Sunday, and church, though satisfying in its way, afforded no laughter as such.  It was the endorsement of Todd Stroger for county board president.  For what well considered reason? 

Because he’s saying nice things about reform and can achieve it BECAUSE HE’S A DEMOCRAT!  “If change is going to happen in this Democrat-dominated body, it’s going to come from within the Democratic party.”  Hoo-hah a thousand times.  Lakefront libs may go for Stroger for the sake of abortion and gaiety and disarmament, as Don Rose says, but nobody, I mean nobody says Stroger’s the man for the sake of reform!

Peraica the Republican will be hamstrung and hogtied — “his agenda would founder on the rocks of the county’s Democratic domination, paralyzing his tenure” — because Dems will oppose his every effort, says S-T, but Todd S. will have his way, getting them to give up hundreds of jobs!  And to make sure he does this, assuming with S-T that he will have anything to say about it, S-T says, “We’re going to assign extra reporters to watch him to make sure that he follows through on his promises.”  As for Peraica, whom S-T endorses for continuing board membership, “[w]e trust [he] will continue to prod Democrats to change the government.”

Is this a newspaper editorial or an early Halloween trick?  What’s going on at S-T?  They have these pseudo-boffo front pages with twice-size head shots about nothing since the editor’s back from New York — why did they take him back, anyhow?  And now this journey into absurdity.

The good part is their news coverage, which has been keeping the heat on Todd S. and friends.  As Jay McMullen used to say about Daily News non-endorsement and other editorials in opposition to Mayordaley I, what he was writing from City Hall would prevail, which it did.

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Later, from Reader NJT: 

Regarding the unbelievable endorsement of Todd Stroger for President of the Lake County Board by the Chicago Sun-Times, on the WLS Don and Roma show this morning, Don intimitated hearing from several sources that the Sun-Times’ endorsement of Todd Stoger was mandated by the publisher of the paper.  Being that so many of its readers are liberals and African Americans, the paper was fearful of a boycott of readers or advertisers had they endorsed the Republican candidate.  According to Don, the liberal reporters at the CST are steamed about the Sun-Times’ endorsement after their harsh criticism of Stroger and the exposure of his inaptness over the past several months through their reporting.

St. John Murtha

Chi Trib’s page 3–dominating story “`And they call me unpatriotic’” about John Murtha, “the gruff Marine and Vietnam War veteran,” is laughably partisan, a feature story in search of an op-ed page or maybe Trib’s own Perspective section, where reporters get to sound off.  The difference is, we know it’s sounding off in Perspective, whereas on page 3 of the front section, even on Sunday, we do expect news with at least a patina of fairness and balance.  As it is, we have a campaign piece for Murtha and/or a daub of anti-war puffery.

It’s all Murtha — “spin from the White House” is the claim of chaos ensuing an Iraq pullout — and Geo. McGovern.  Both are presented as heroes, with naught about chaos that ensued our Viet Nam pullout and certainly nothing about Murtha’s Abscam history that might for some readers, maybe, influence their respect for his credibility.  The picture is a heartbreaker — grieving gold star mother leaning on Murtha in tears — a sort of photo essay in itself.  There’s no other side to this story as reporter Tim Jones has crafted it.

Just checking

Reading along in my EntireWeb email message, I ran across this, done in a hurry and spell-check-proof.  It’s kind of nice, actually, with lots of possibilities:

1. Sound like your dad: be an authority

Authority is essential. You need to speak (well, write) with an air of authority. Talk about your chosen topic in a manor that draws upon your knowledge & experience. Be passionate, too. People will pick up on this and feel compelled to read on. But don’t try too hard. No one likes a zealot!  [Italics added]

It’s that manor — the one to which I was born?  Or that to which I aspire?  And what may that be?  Lots here, more than meets the I.

Sign up here for the EntireWeb newsletter, which actually has a lot of good stuff, eye swear.  In it, for instance, you find this:

6. Back to basics: break out the dictionary and check your spelling

Spell check your copy. There’s nothing worse than bumping through a website when nearly all of the web pages are chock-full of typos. No amount of design niceness will make up for that. Plus, you lose credibility. No excuses .. oh, and grammar, too. ‘Nuff said.

I’ll say.

 

The lining’s the thing to bring down a king (GW)

Forbes has good stuff on the economy — how much, much better off we are than in 1967.  (Rush L. spotted it.)  For instance:

Mr. and Mrs. Median’s $46,326 in annual income is 32% more than their mid-’60s counterparts, even when adjusted for inflation, and 13% more than those at the median in the economic boom year of 1985. And thanks to ballooning real estate values, average household net worth has increased even faster. The typical American household has a net worth of $465,970, up 83% from 1965, 60% from 1985 and 35% from 1995.

. . . without realizing it.  For instance:

A Parade Magazine survey (a good source for all things median) performed by Mark Clements Research in April showed that 48% of Americans believe they’re worse off than their parents were.

. . . and how it’s envy that drives discontent.  For instance:

And because people generally judge their fortunes not in absolute terms, but by comparing themselves to others, the super-success of the top 1% can make Mr. and Mrs. Median feel relatively poorer.

Come to think of it, when was the last sermon you heard decrying envy as a deadly sin?  Or decrying sin, period, for that matter.  (Don’t get me started.)

Geo. Will calls it seeing “lead lining[s] on silver clouds.” It’s a politically induced or at least aggravated malady.  For instance:

Nancy Pelosi vows that if Democrats capture Congress they will “jump-start our economy.” A “jump-start ” is administered to a stalled vehicle. But since the Bush tax cuts went into effect in 2003, the economy’s growth rate (3.5 percent) has been better than the average for the 1980s (3.1) and 1990s (3.3). Today’s unemployment rate (4.6 percent) is lower than the average for the 1990s (5.8) — lower, in fact, than the average for the last 40 years (6.0).

“Some stall,” says Will.  He calls it “economic hypochondria,”

a derangement associated with affluence, is a byproduct of the welfare state: An entitlement mentality gives Americans a low pain threshold — witness their recurring hysterias about nominal rather than real gasoline prices — and a sense of being entitled to economic dynamism without the frictions and “creative destruction” that must accompany dynamism. Economic hypochondria is also bred by news media that consider the phrase “good news” an oxymoron, even as the U.S. economy, which has performed better than any other major industrial economy since 2001, drives the Dow to record highs.

The news media?  There he goes again, blaming the messenger for bringing (or accentuating with major stories and big headlines and heart-rending shots of people doing badly) lies.

Attic problem

We have solved the problem problem.  Nothing is a problem any more: it’s problematic.  So welcome Chi Trib sportswriter Phil Rogers: Cubs’ hiring Piniella (since accomplished) could be “problematic.”  More of this to come, I’m sure.

Trib for Duckworth

You’d think there’d be something in this Trib endorsement of Duckworth about her being parachuted into the district by Rahm Emanuel and having no experience in public office.  Wait, that latter sow’s ear is made a silk purse: she’s a refreshing change from politicians!  And Roskam once was venal!  And she’s an apt successor to Henry Hyde, “one of the great voices of conservatism” and a politician since he was in knickers!  Zowie!

Crime story

What newspapers do #575: They sneak in their points with pointed coverage, as in today’s Chi Trib, where editors give a huge ride to Kim Barker’s story on an aged Gitmo detainee never charged after three-plus years detainment. There’s a huge 9×7 color headshot of the man, back home in Afghanistan.  The story takes up pretty much all of page 8 with a “What is my crime?” head. It doesn’t take an advanced degree in anti-Bushism to see that something went wrong in this case. It’s the sort of miscue or evildoing that, like shit, happens and newspapers hop on — justice system gone awry, etc.

But 1400-plus words? Really, on what happened to one man in the war on Islamic fascists? Or on terror if you want the going terminology? Newspapers go for human interest, of course. But why this one, this way?  (Web site buried it, by the way.)  As a paradigm of what’s bad about our detainee policy, that’s why. But this is not argued, and even if it were, it would be less argued than cried out by the Passionate Observer Who Hates Injustice. Oh the chicanery of it all. Why not just engage in a blogger’s rant? What’s the difference, apart from a sort of reasonable tone meant to mask bias?

While the details of [the aged detainee] Khan’s Guantanamo experience are hard to verify, his complaints raise questions about who has been sent to the detention facility and how thoroughly the charges against them are investigated, just as a law approved by Congress late last month sets up military tribunals to try some of the detainees. President Bush is scheduled to sign the bill into law Tuesday. [Italics added]

Details hard to verify?  Details, shmails, if you have a good story that fits editors’ bias and passes as more or less conventional wisdom.  Raise questions?  Why, if details are not only hard to verify but impossible, else why wouldn’t Trib smoke them out?  Here’s some digging, however:

Sam Zarifi, Asia research director for Human Rights Watch [where anti-Bushite extraordinaire George Soros is much involved, FYI], said Khan’s case appears familiar. He said reviews of unclassified transcripts from tribunals and review board hearings for many of the detainees indicate that some were arrested because the U.S. military does not understand Afghan political rivalries.

“This really fits a pattern of problematic allegations and process at Guantanamo,” he said. “It seemed to be arbitrary who was picked up and who wasn’t.”

It seemed to this fellow anyhow.  The problem here is that a boy (girl) was sent to do a man’s (woman’s) job.  That is, the tools that your working reporter brings to such stories are not adequate, nor maybe is the medium.  Kim (he? she?) worked diligently, talking to lot of people having decided, it seems to me, that she smelled a rat.  A kink in the armor of our people who run Gitmo and prosecute badly. 

It’s daily newspaper-itis here, which is not fatal except when someone uses it to get free of the bee in one’s bonnet.  Barker and Trib’s credibility is at stake here, because they are not disinterested observers.

Puff Central

The city has a new screamer.  Sun-Times has raised the decibels.  And is sounding them in populist manner:

“NOBODY’S WORTH $27 MIL. PER YEAR: Spotlight on Execs’ Monster Salaries on Eve of Big Hike in Your Electric Bill” [Grrrrrrrr]

It’s the Michael Cooke-just-back-from-New York Effect.  See the lede.  It’s journalistic demagoguery:

Stock prices at a near-record high.

Robust profits.

And a top exec who pulled down more than $27 million last year.

Hardly signs of a company on the brink of bankruptcy, according to a growing chorus opposed to ComEd’s impending rate hike for its 3.7 million customers.  [Italics added, chorus being cheered on by S-T]

Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn [proven rouser of rabble who once proclaimed, “There's no nice way of doing things,” referring to his tactics] is urging people to fight the hike, blaming it on “inflated egos with inflated salaries.”

“It’s hard to get a violin out for anyone who makes $27 million,” he said Sunday, deriding the compensation package of John W. Rowe, CEO of Exelon, ComEd’s parent company.

As if Rowe’s $27 mill would cover the rate hike.  As if it’s a Mom & Pop place.  This from the man who led a constitutional cutback of the legislature characterized by veteran Springfield correspondent Charles N. Wheeler III 20 years after its approval as “perhaps the most regrettable example of short-sighted anger in state history.”  Sun-Times is in his corner.  Has Editor Cooke studied Illinois legislative history?

“Nobody’s worth that much, I’m sorry,” said Pat Lydon, 61, a legal secretary from Old Irving Park who was visiting downtown Sunday [about Rowe’s compensation].

He did, eh?  Wow.  That does it.  Quinn and the Citizens Utility Board and the two governor candidates had me wondering, but now I’m sure.  Thanks, Sun-Times!

The heck with Forbes Mag, saying as reported by S-T, that ComEd under Rowe (since 1984) was the nation’s best-managed utility in 2005.  So what!

 

Murtha in news

AP sent out a story 10/14 about Rep. John Murtha’s Wash Post column in which he objects to his and other Dems’ being called “Defeatocrats” by Republicans because they want to pull out of Iraq.

Rep. John Murtha, a decorated Marine veteran who favors withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, wrote an essay for Sunday’s Washington Post blasting Republicans for referring to him and other Iraq war opponents as “Defeatocrats.”

Why not?  He’s in the news for his anti-war statements.  But would it be fair to cite his Abscam history here too?  To do so would ruin or at least hurt the story, and drama’s the thing.  So say it this way without Abscam. But there’s supposed to be a public-trust factor here: fairness and accuracy and the like.  And Abscam is in the news too.  Consider this from Wash Times on Oct. 5:

Rep. John P. Murtha’s Republican challenger “>has accused him  of negotiating a $50,000 bribe and of trying to cover it up for 26 years. 

A recently released FBI video recorded in 1980 shows the Pennsylvania Democrat talking with an FBI agent posing as a representative to an Arab sheik who offers Mr. Murtha $50,000 in cash in exchange for private immigration legislation.

“When you see the video, there was every intent of taking the bribe,” said Diana Irey, a Washington County, Pa., commissioner who is running to unseat Mr. Murtha. “For 26 years, John Murtha has been living a lie.”

This story is nowhere to be found in Chi Trib or any other newspaper in the EBSCO database, which I found compliments of the Oak Park Public Library, where I hold a card. Why not found?  At best because it did not seem significant to any editor, while Murtha’s battling the White House — that’s news? — does.  At worst?  Skip it.

 

Nazis controlled media

Columbia U. Republicans recovered from disruption of their last speaker a week ago to host three reformed violent radicals:

Each of the speakers stressed the impact of indoctrination in their youth. Hilmar von Campe explained that the Nazi system of political indoctrination operated not by issuing commands but by controlling key institutions — such as the media and military — that effectively manipulated public opinion. The Nazi idea, he said, “was for you to do voluntarily what they wanted you to do.” Under the influence of such indoctrination, von Campe came to believe that World War II was not a war incited by Nazi aggression but a patriotic war to preserve German sovereignty. As a soldier, “I was in my mind defending the country, not fighting for the Nazis,” von Campe said.

I told my students at De Paul U. a few years ago that they were being manipulated, which was news to them.  That control of the media fits with today’s overwhelming leftist bias.

Another speaker got to the point about academia today in the U.S.:

Shoebat noted that the radical recruitment and indoctrination he underwent as a young man [among Palestinians, indoctrinated in anti-Jewish thinking] was also happening in the United States. This happened through clandestine support by Islamic radicals for Middle Eastern terrorist groups; through preaching by radical clerics; and, more subtly, through American universities. In the latter connection, Shoebat singled out several professors — including Richard Falk, a professor emeritus of International Law at Princeton who once referred to Ayatollah Khomeini as a “moderate” and described Islamist Iran as a “model of human government,” and Columbia’s own Rashid Khalidi, who routinely deplores Israel as a “racist” and “apartheid” state — as examples of professors who prefer to suppress the truth about Islamic fundamentalism rather than confront it.

What was it they used to say about anti-Catholicism as the anti-semitism of the intellectuals?  For the political left, it’s just anti-semitism.