“Public Broadcasting Monitor Had Worked at Center Founded by Conservatives” at NYT site says the Corp. for Public Broadcasting got a right-winger to keep tabs on Ur-lib Moyers.  It’s putting a guard dog in charge of the coop, rather than a fox?  Will have to work on the simile, but in the absence of direct divine inspiration in the matter, it makes sense to hear what the opposition says.  It is lib bias we have to worry about, after all.

Having asked how much safer Chi streets would be if Chi Trib devoted as much ink and space to crime-problem solutions as to legal-system abuses (see below), I must alert readers to John Leo’s 6/12 column in which he talks up Rudy Giuliani as crime-stopper:

Giuliani successfully assaulted, though he could not completely defeat, the intractable reactionary liberalism that brought New York City to its knees. Before he was elected in 1993, there were more than 2,000 murders a year there, compared with under 600 today.  . . . Giuliani changed all that. He marginalized the city’s racial arsonists, like Al Sharpton, by simply ignoring them and refusing to reward them for disturbances and threats. He ended Mafia control of the Fulton Fish Market and the private trash-hauling industry, two achievements long regarded by nearly everyone in New York as impossible. . . . Nationally, crime fell just 5 percent between 1993 and 1996, while dropping 35 percent in New York.  . . . The old order still snipes at Giuliani and refers to him as Mussolini, but he was an inspiring figure even before 9/11, and certainly after.

How far would such analysis (and reporting!) go with Chi Trib editors?

 

“I’m sure I would have missed it — God knows when,” said the man in Bread Kitchen, thanking the counter woman for pointing out his umbrella, which he had left on a table.

 “I have learned from my statement that historical parallels can be misused and misunderstood,” said the Illinois senator. “I sincerely regret if what I said caused anyone to misunderstand my true feelings: our soldiers around the world and their families at home deserve our respect, admiration and total support.”

That would be our man Dick now, wouldn’t it?

No one “who has been part of a gay subculture or who has lived promiscuously as a heterosexual [should] be admitted [to a Catholic seminary], no matter how many years [previously] that might have occurred,” Cardinal George said during the bishops’ meeting in Chicago.

In this extraordinarily badly written Chi Trib story, by Margaret Ramirez, billed as religion reporter (a slot that has seemed an afterthought to Trib editors since Steve Kloehn left the beat a few years back [later: make Manya Brachear a nice exception to this]), we don’t know if he said it from the podium or in an interview.  The quote above is doctored (here) for clarity’s sake, but as printed, probably accurately, it sounds off the cuff — not that George is the most articulate of speakers or incapable of making off-wall statements.

In any case, what he said justifies neither lead paragraph — “As the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops gathered in Chicago Thursday for a meeting to review their sexual abuse policy, Cardinal Francis George said homosexual men should not be admitted into seminaries” — nor headline — “George: Seminary no place for gays.”

Ramirez’s analysis is like a cartoon: broad outlines of issues are offered, with reference to what “is being debated,” “critics [who] have charged,” “others [who] have said,” and the like.

The zero-tolerance ban may violate Catholic teaching “on redemption,” she writes — an odd usage that implies salvation itself is threatened by church discipline and imposing of penance for sin.  Ramirez may get things just enough wrong no matter what she writes about, but that’s little consolation to readers of news about religion and the church.