Entries from February 2007
So what do noosepapers expect of hard-charging columnists when they go to the women’s section? If she’s a mother, they’d like something about breastfeeding in public, Debra Pickett found out at Sun-Times — as by Phil Rosenthal of Chi Trib, who ran this a day after Michael Miner blogged it at Chi Reader.
Once a weekly Page 2 columnist . . . and cast as one of [S-T’s] rising stars, Pickett had her column moved back into the Lifestyles section while she was on maternity leave. When an editor this week passed along [publisher] Cooke’s suggestion that she ought to write about breastfeeding in public, it was a stark reminder of what being in the Lifestyles section might entail, and she quit.
“I didn’t quit in protest over a single assignment,” said Pickett, the 34-year-old whose column was for a few years was called “Age 29.” “That seems to be the story going around, and it’s very `Norma Rae.’ … But the question was what were expectations of me going to be when I got back, and that was a pretty good illustration.”
Get personal, he said.
None of your business, she replied.
================================
Later: Automatic response from her Sun-Times address is “Debra is on maternity leave and will return to work in January.” Asked Phil Rosenthal, whose item is quoted above, about it. He: “She quit. It’s possible she doesn’t have access to her Sun-Times e-mail account anymore.”
===============
Yet more: As said above, Chi Reader’s Michael Miner blogged the story in detail. Among comments is this good one from “Insideout”:
And another good one from “Hobbes”:
The serendipitous beneficiary to this fascinating story is the kid. He now gets a full-time mom, who’s there whenever he needs her—not when she decides to bestow “quality time.”
Categories: Uncategorized
Lynn Sweet in “S.C. round goes to Clinton” dissects the process of hiring a “consultant” in S. Carolina, giving us inside-baseball stuff that newsies hash out over drinks. But the story is that the consultant, a state senator and pastor of a 10,000–member megachurch, endorsed Hillary after she hired him at $10,000 a month. This is the story in South Carolina, and it should be the story in Chicago.
[Later: It was the story in NYC too. What gives with Sweet, to ignore the main thing for the sake of some back and forth about pols’ negotiating?]
Same paper, Rick Telander excommunicates former all-star NBA player Tim Hardaway from his Church of the Open Mind — honored in his Sunday column in which he objects strenuously to Christianity in the locker room. “The world has not stopped” since the former NFL commissioner embraced his lesbian daughter and contributed to the death of “knee-jerk prejudice” vs. gays, he writes today in “Sport has heard the voice of hate.” As for being naked in the locker room with a homosexual man, Telander has the answer: “He can wear a towel.” Do knees jerk always in the same direction?
Categories: Uncategorized
What I like about O’Bama is, he’s so clean. Me and Biden, another Democrat. Where do the Democrats get these guys? It was Gore, then Kerry, fringe characters both, now who? Read Ann Coulter for the real scoop. She discusses “Jonathan Livingston Obama” in her latest column, on the mark as usual, but unfairly picking fruit that hangs low on the campaign tree.
His speeches are a run-on string of embarrassing, sophomoric Hallmark bromides.
In announcing his candidacy last week, Obama confirmed that he believes in “the basic decency of the American people.” And let the chips fall where they may!
Obama forthrightly decried “a smallness of our politics” – deftly slipping a sword into the sides of the smallness-in-politics advocates. (To his credit, he somehow avoided saying, “My fellow Americans, size does matter.”)
No fair. We should leave the guy alone. Basic decency, smaller is better: it’s what the people want to hear in Iowa. It’s what Mayordaley II wants to hear, assuming it means prosecutor Fitzgerald is put to pasture. Whatever.
One must add this from The Coulter:
Obama has locked up the Hollywood money. Even Miss America has endorsed Obama. (John “Two Americas” Edwards is still hoping for the other Miss America to endorse him.)
She’s listening:
I can’t wait for Obama’s inaugural address when he reveals that he loves long walks in the rain, sunsets, and fresh-baked cookies shaped like puppies.
As for where Dems (libs) get these guys, Coulter is worried:
Maybe they’re just running out of greeting card inscriptions.
That would be a shame.
Categories: Uncategorized
Folks, we may have a winner here. Check it out.
Categories: Uncategorized
Anne Keegan ain’t into thumbsucking in public. She thinks the reader wants to know the news, not her great thoughts on the matter. So in her writing, as in her book On the Street Doing Life, she
doesn’t once let the first person slip into her text. In her view, journalism is a “feeble attempt to find the truth,” and the truth is “what happened, and that’s all.”
She continues, “I made no judgments on anyone. None. Zero. Nor did I say, ‘I stood there, and gee whiz, I’m so scared.’ And ‘Gee whiz, I felt so sorry for that lady, and I cried when she said, “I don’t want to be arrested.”‘ I’m not a Gen Xer boring everybody with what I think. I wasn’t part of the show.”
This lady is this blog’s idea of professional. Even as a columnist, for Chi Trib in the 80s, she never wrote about herself, even when her editors said she “didn’t write enough silly stuff about [her] kids’ diapers. Or about [her] twins. Or [her] psychiatrist. Or how [she] found a coyote in [her] yard.”
Didn’t work for her genius editors, who put her on women’s news in ‘97, precipitating her departure. She went home and wrote about Cronin, the legendary cop who left a foot back in Viet Nam and got on the force because Mayordaley I spoke up for him.
The book, self-published, is based on her joining Cronin in his midnight rides in Drug Land, as in the now-gone Rockwell Gardens on Western Avenue, where she found herself once alone in a dark hallway with three big guys. She ordered them against the wall, bluffing until he returned. This time she had to tell about herself — or did she? Michael Miner in The Chicago Reader quotes her husband.
Is it in the book? One way to find out: buy it here for $13.50.
Later: Newspaper reader, of course, is what’s meant. For thoughtful, reflective stuff there are usually better places to go.
Categories: Uncategorized
Categories: Uncategorized
See Trib, see Trib web page. Top story is “Must-see machines” by auto writer Jim Mateja:
Have time for only the Cliffs Notes version of the Chicago Auto Show? Here’s a look at the Top 10 — plus one.
In adjoining column, under an axident update, is the day’s degenerate celebrity, dead on arrival at Fla. hospital:
Anna Nicole’s mother blames drugs
• Why her death had us talking
• Photos | Video
• Watcher: Anna Nicole’s baby
• Pop Machine: A tragic turn · No Comments
“The other day the oil companies recorded the highest profits in the history of the world. I want to take those profits. And I want to put them into a strategic energy fund that will begin to fund alternative smart energy, alternatives and technologies that will begin to actually move us toward the direction of independence,”
she told the DNC the other day, per Hillary Clinton: ‘Hugo Chavez in a pantsuit’. Italics added.
Did she wag her finger?
Categories: Uncategorized
Chi Trib, page one today, heart-tugging if not -breaking story of Marine who can’t get out of corps to donate a kidney to his desperately ailing father:
“He gave me life,” Drish said of his father.
As God’s instrument, some would say. Never mind. This is a war story after a pacifist’s heart.
Turning to page one of Metro section, you find another, Wheaton soldier killed in blast 26-year-old died hours after talking with his family. It’s the horrors of war, never talk of gains against the enemy or heroism for love of country, as you find in work of embedded bloggers, even a cartoonist, today’s Mauldin.
A reader notes [to Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds] that while big-media journalists are thin on the ground in Iraq, the blogosphere has sent so many people that it’s worked its way around to cartoonists . . . .
Elsewhere, we have Bill Ardolino, whose “citizen journalism” is on display here, in his “In Iraq Journal” story, “Insh’allah: A Nighttime Raid with the Iraqi Army.” This is awesome stuff, as any Young Person would say, complete with pix of jubilant Iraqi soldiers after successful mission. Why don’t we get stuff this good, on the spot, vivid, concrete, from our MainStreamers?
(One reason is their anti-warrior mindset. They dread glorifying combat, as they would put it, are deeply suspicious of U.S. intentions and performance, and THEY are calling the shots as to what we read and watch.)
Later: Sun-Times, more alert than Trib to blogosphere, has story about ex-GI who has a book out based on his blogging soldiers’ comments from and about Iraq.
Categories: Uncategorized
Today’s by Rick Telander in S-T is quite good. It’s about how Peyton Manning outsmarted the Bears, thinking all the way, changing plays as he called them, based on how Bears defenders were lined up. He analyzed what happened on that 2nd-quarter (ck) pass that I could have caught and scored on, so wildly had Bears pass defense lost its way:
‘They were in two different defenses on that,” he said. ”No question. They were in cover-2, and one safety was in man.”
Certain?
”No question.”
Excellent interview and overall column. Question persists: are Bears smart? Is Bears management imaginative enough to move them all the way? Smart enough to get to 2nd-best, which is smarter than all but one. But can you imagine Rex G. running things the way Manning did? He’s not that smart, for starters.
Categories: Uncategorized
Gibson said mainstream news outlets are 