Month: June 2005

Quick, Mrs. Durbin, his medication!

Here’s what Dick Durbin said, for the record:

(6-14) Durbin: “If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime–Pol Pot or others–that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.”

Columnist Phil Kadner has the quote in Daily Southtown.  So does Sun-Times and Chi Trib.  And needless to say, so does Aljazeera.   It’s a quote read ‘round the world.  Howard Dean should watch his back; Durbin of Illinois is coming on hard.

Quick, Mrs. Durbin, his medication!

Here’s what Dick Durbin said, for the record:

(6-14) Durbin: “If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime–Pol Pot or others–that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.”

Columnist Phil Kadner has the quote in Daily Southtown.  So does Sun-Times and Chi Trib.  And needless to say, so does Aljazeera.   It’s a quote read ‘round the world.  Howard Dean should watch his back; Durbin of Illinois is coming on hard.

Coyotes OK, says expert

Check out Gary Wisby’s story on coyotes as way to keep geese from multiplying, in which he seeks to shoot down pet-owners’ concerns, citing an expert:

[H]umans have more to gain than to lose from the presence of coyotes, who seem to be adapting nicely to the habitat we share. On the rare occasion that an urban coyote kills a cat or a small dog, it makes the newspapers. But in the meantime the animals are performing a public service every day by curbing overpopulations of geese, rats, rabbits and other prey.

“We’re starting to show the ecological roles that coyotes play besides eating people’s pets,” Gehrt said.

Coyotes OK, says expert

Check out Gary Wisby’s story on coyotes as way to keep geese from multiplying, in which he seeks to shoot down pet-owners’ concerns, citing an expert:

[H]umans have more to gain than to lose from the presence of coyotes, who seem to be adapting nicely to the habitat we share. On the rare occasion that an urban coyote kills a cat or a small dog, it makes the newspapers. But in the meantime the animals are performing a public service every day by curbing overpopulations of geese, rats, rabbits and other prey.

“We’re starting to show the ecological roles that coyotes play besides eating people’s pets,” Gehrt said.

Gitmo et al.

1. Reading the breathless account of what captive jihadists say — all part of the drum beat of optimism from NY Times-Democrat, do we not wonder whatever to do?  Close Gitmo?  Move it?  Release the Jihadists, some of whom don’t know any better?  Impeach Bush & Cheney, who by the way won handily in 2004?  It’s a world-class conundrum.

2. “It’s freedom of speech,” said radio host Al Franken, who had just got a Freedom of Speech Award, when urged to end a too-long tirade vs. Bush admin and war.

“It’s not freedom to kill everybody’s evening, so why don’t you wrap it up,” replied the MC. 

There are limits, in other words?


3. Re: Coyotes, from Reader Marta:
Unfortunately your instant rebuttal [they don’t bother people] isn’t completely accurate — two children were mauled by coyotes that wandered close to an elementary school here in California a couple of years back.  A bigger problem is their habit of eating household pets — I’ve lost a couple cats to coyotes.  I can sort of justify it — circle of life and all that, but I still went through the pet grieving process associated with the loss of a furry family member.
4. The 23-year-old Bears lineman caught with loaded gun is “from another state and not familiar with what’s going on here,” his lawyer said (here and here).  The state is Arizona.  After high school, where he was also a star volleyballer, he played for U. of Washington.  He weighs 300 pounds now, is 6 feet 2 inches high, broad-jumped farther than any other lineman in Bears training camp.  At U. Wash. he had to sit out a year because his high-school core-curriculum grade point average was lower than the 2.0 required by NCAA’s Proposition 48, covering college admissions for student athletes.  Nor had he scored 700 on the SAT or 15 on the ACT, thus further failing the requirement.

The rule affects black players far more than whites:  In a recent year, 87% of freshman held back were black!  These and the other 13% spent their first year on campus acquiring grades from the college of their choice so that the college could profit from their performance on the gridiron, which says a lot about (a) academic hard work by footballers or (b) colleges’ eagerness to get over the Rule 48 hump by making sure grades get good enough or courses are easy enough. 

This bad academic showing by blacks is “hugely discriminatory,” however, says The National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), which “works to end the misuses and flaws of standardized testing and to ensure that evaluation of students, teachers and schools is fair, open, valid and educationally beneficial.”    Yessir.

5. Have you ever considered 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?  If headline after headline blared the message about what works in Chi and elsewhere, like how Giuliani cleaned up Times Square?  Wouldn’t that grab the strap hangers on their way to the office?  And help circulation while we’re at it, if you please?

Gitmo et al.

1. Reading the breathless account of what captive jihadists say — all part of the drum beat of optimism from NY Times-Democrat, do we not wonder whatever to do?  Close Gitmo?  Move it?  Release the Jihadists, some of whom don’t know any better?  Impeach Bush & Cheney, who by the way won handily in 2004?  It’s a world-class conundrum.

2. “It’s freedom of speech,” said radio host Al Franken, who had just got a Freedom of Speech Award, when urged to end a too-long tirade vs. Bush admin and war.

“It’s not freedom to kill everybody’s evening, so why don’t you wrap it up,” replied the MC. 

There are limits, in other words?


3. Re: Coyotes, from Reader Marta:
Unfortunately your instant rebuttal [they don’t bother people] isn’t completely accurate — two children were mauled by coyotes that wandered close to an elementary school here in California a couple of years back.  A bigger problem is their habit of eating household pets — I’ve lost a couple cats to coyotes.  I can sort of justify it — circle of life and all that, but I still went through the pet grieving process associated with the loss of a furry family member.
4. The 23-year-old Bears lineman caught with loaded gun is “from another state and not familiar with what’s going on here,” his lawyer said (here and here).  The state is Arizona.  After high school, where he was also a star volleyballer, he played for U. of Washington.  He weighs 300 pounds now, is 6 feet 2 inches high, broad-jumped farther than any other lineman in Bears training camp.  At U. Wash. he had to sit out a year because his high-school core-curriculum grade point average was lower than the 2.0 required by NCAA’s Proposition 48, covering college admissions for student athletes.  Nor had he scored 700 on the SAT or 15 on the ACT, thus further failing the requirement.

The rule affects black players far more than whites:  In a recent year, 87% of freshman held back were black!  These and the other 13% spent their first year on campus acquiring grades from the college of their choice so that the college could profit from their performance on the gridiron, which says a lot about (a) academic hard work by footballers or (b) colleges’ eagerness to get over the Rule 48 hump by making sure grades get good enough or courses are easy enough. 

This bad academic showing by blacks is “hugely discriminatory,” however, says The National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), which “works to end the misuses and flaws of standardized testing and to ensure that evaluation of students, teachers and schools is fair, open, valid and educationally beneficial.”    Yessir.

5. Have you ever considered 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?  If headline after headline blared the message about what works in Chi and elsewhere, like how Giuliani cleaned up Times Square?  Wouldn’t that grab the strap hangers on their way to the office?  And help circulation while we’re at it, if you please?

Taylor Street that great street, Hillary C., Boggles, Skiles

1. Folks on Taylor Street knew George A. Prado, the Hispanic Dem Org official arrested yesterday for selling heroin, had a lot of money for a $62G-a-year city hoisting engineer — he had offered Judith Pedraza $1.2 million for her place at Taylor and Bishop, driving up one day in his Mercedes — but they thought he had won the lottery, Pedraza told Sun-Times.  Erroneously. 
 
2. ”Don’t think that Hillary has the women’s vote,” a disgruntled California Democrat told Robert Novak.  ”I will never forgive her for sticking with her husband after he humiliated her. It’s something I can’t get over.”  http://www.suntimes.com/output/novak/cst-edt-novak09.html
 
3. Sun-Times letter writer Susan House’s mind “boggles” at what coyotes could do for the city’s rabbit-infested parks and thus wins an Items Usage Award for knowing that “boggle” is primarily intransitive and was solely that before being sloppily mongrelized by our orally fixated society, most of whose denizens read a book once but found it borrrring.  Her letter at http://www.suntimes.com/output/letters/cst-edt-vox09a.html is of a piece with her verbal acuity.
 
“The bunny problem in Millennium and other parks could be easily solved by a few resident coyotes,” she begins.  Among possibilities at which the mind boggles she names “a reduction in garden-pilfering rabbits . . . painted Fiberglas coyotes in the parks [and] naming contests.  . . . If there is an Adopt-a-Coyote program, I’ll be first in line,” she adds, offering from her Edgewater residence an unusually literate bite to relish at breakfast table or while hanging from a Green Line strap.
 
4. L’affaire Skiles as in Scott, the recently renewed Bulls coach, ended like any good melodrama, with the main characters living happily ever after and the chorus saying silly things.  Scott, Jerry, and John have the good ship Bulls on its way (http://www.suntimes.com/output/bulls/cst-spt-bull09.html and http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/sns-ap-bkn-bulls-skiles,1,493486.story), and yippee for them who are restoring my interest if not my faith in NBA ball.  But the commentators, God love ’em, gave their last going-bananas shot with uproariously contradictory assessments.  On Michigan Avenue Sam Smith confidently adjudged Skiles to have come to his senses as Smith had said he should, in a column hubristically titled “Luckily, Skiles sees cliff, doesn’t jump” (http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/columnists/cs-050607smith,1,1392498.column?coll=chi-sportscolumnist-hed), while at the Furniture Mart his mortal opponent Mariotti had Skiles staring down the normally unflappable Reinsdorf, in a column hubristically titled “Skiles brassy enough to make boss blink” (http://www.suntimes.com/output/mariotti/cst-spt-jay08.html).
 
The allegedly blinking boss was not amused, however,and did the actionable thing on a talk show, calling M-man a liar, as Chi Trib dutifully reported (http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/basketball/bulls/chi-0506090240jun09,1,520824.story), because he and Skiles had neither met face to face as M-man said nor haggled over contract in their telephone conversation as he also said.  That’s what “[his] newspaper” told him, M. told Chi Trib — without telling hundreds of thousands of readers, who read only of telephone talks in the above-linked news story, one must add.  However again, M. also said Reinsdorf will be hearing from M’s lawyers.  This could be a case of “Reinsdorf lied, Mariotti died” of embarrassment?  Smith should write a column urging Mariotti not to go there?

Taylor Street that great street, Hillary C., Boggles, Skiles

1. Folks on Taylor Street knew George A. Prado, the Hispanic Dem Org official arrested yesterday for selling heroin, had a lot of money for a $62G-a-year city hoisting engineer — he had offered Judith Pedraza $1.2 million for her place at Taylor and Bishop, driving up one day in his Mercedes — but they thought he had won the lottery, Pedraza told Sun-Times.  Erroneously. 
 
2. ”Don’t think that Hillary has the women’s vote,” a disgruntled California Democrat told Robert Novak.  ”I will never forgive her for sticking with her husband after he humiliated her. It’s something I can’t get over.”  http://www.suntimes.com/output/novak/cst-edt-novak09.html
 
3. Sun-Times letter writer Susan House’s mind “boggles” at what coyotes could do for the city’s rabbit-infested parks and thus wins an Items Usage Award for knowing that “boggle” is primarily intransitive and was solely that before being sloppily mongrelized by our orally fixated society, most of whose denizens read a book once but found it borrrring.  Her letter at http://www.suntimes.com/output/letters/cst-edt-vox09a.html is of a piece with her verbal acuity.
 
“The bunny problem in Millennium and other parks could be easily solved by a few resident coyotes,” she begins.  Among possibilities at which the mind boggles she names “a reduction in garden-pilfering rabbits . . . painted Fiberglas coyotes in the parks [and] naming contests.  . . . If there is an Adopt-a-Coyote program, I’ll be first in line,” she adds, offering from her Edgewater residence an unusually literate bite to relish at breakfast table or while hanging from a Green Line strap.
 
4. L’affaire Skiles as in Scott, the recently renewed Bulls coach, ended like any good melodrama, with the main characters living happily ever after and the chorus saying silly things.  Scott, Jerry, and John have the good ship Bulls on its way (http://www.suntimes.com/output/bulls/cst-spt-bull09.html and http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/sns-ap-bkn-bulls-skiles,1,493486.story), and yippee for them who are restoring my interest if not my faith in NBA ball.  But the commentators, God love ’em, gave their last going-bananas shot with uproariously contradictory assessments.  On Michigan Avenue Sam Smith confidently adjudged Skiles to have come to his senses as Smith had said he should, in a column hubristically titled “Luckily, Skiles sees cliff, doesn’t jump” (http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/columnists/cs-050607smith,1,1392498.column?coll=chi-sportscolumnist-hed), while at the Furniture Mart his mortal opponent Mariotti had Skiles staring down the normally unflappable Reinsdorf, in a column hubristically titled “Skiles brassy enough to make boss blink” (http://www.suntimes.com/output/mariotti/cst-spt-jay08.html).
 
The allegedly blinking boss was not amused, however,and did the actionable thing on a talk show, calling M-man a liar, as Chi Trib dutifully reported (http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/basketball/bulls/chi-0506090240jun09,1,520824.story), because he and Skiles had neither met face to face as M-man said nor haggled over contract in their telephone conversation as he also said.  That’s what “[his] newspaper” told him, M. told Chi Trib — without telling hundreds of thousands of readers, who read only of telephone talks in the above-linked news story, one must add.  However again, M. also said Reinsdorf will be hearing from M’s lawyers.  This could be a case of “Reinsdorf lied, Mariotti died” of embarrassment?  Smith should write a column urging Mariotti not to go there?

Saving mayors Daley

“Mayor Daley Summerdale” registers zilch on Google News, about 30 on Google Web, beginning with a U. of Chicago Press site for the Royko compilation, One More Time, and ending with http://www.gamblingmagazine.com/articles/53/53-178.htm, site of a 1999 Gambling Magazine interview with the prolific and dogged and professionally expert Richard Lindberg. 

 
“Mayor Daley hired truck,” on the other hand, gets 78 news references, which is no surprise.  Why compare?  In the vague suspicion that the incumbent Daley might look to his father’s Summerdale, now a nothing as news but big (we might even say “huge”) in its day and quelled as ruinous scandal by the father’s appointment of OW Wilson as police superintendent.  Is the son that bold when it comes to a salvage operation?

Page one smasheroos

Chi Trib went for the hat trick, or maybe trifecta (horse bettors have to help out here), with this pair, yesterday and today, of page one smash-’em stories:

* Sunday’s was about a black man brutalized by drunken whites who got short jail terms in Linden, Texas, described by the Texas NAACP head as one of “a few areas in Texas that have kind of bypassed the civil rights era.” Linden, said the NAACP man, is “an island of the ’50s.” One of a few, an island: unusual. What then is the significance of this story for a Chicago, as opposed to a Texas, newspaper? It does rub raw sores of discontent among most readers. Is this what reporter Howard Witt and his editors have in mind?

* Monday’s, with the startling head “Critics: Pentagon in blinders: Long before 9/11, the military was warned about low-tech warfare, but it didn’t listen” is about “maverick officers, active and retired . . . agitating for change,” including “a chief warrant officer in the Marine Reserves who focuses on gang crime in Chicago as a sergeant in the city’s Police Department [who] recently returned from Iraq after leading a Marine unit against insurgents.” Other “mavericks” are quoted, in their journal articles and in personal interviews. The problem goes back to the Viet Nam war, the article, by Stephen J. Hedges, says. Back to Gen. Billy Mitchell being court-martialed for his stubborn support for developing air power in 1925, it might have said, lending context. Buried in the story is 3rd Cavalry’s commander saying they are learning how to do it in Iraq, which would have made a Wash Times lead. All in all, Hedges did a lot of reporting but was given an awful lot of space — more than 2,200 words! — and (naturally) used it all up. Are there no editors below O’Shea at Chi Trib, any beside the one who devised that sock-’em-bust-’em head, picking on a time-honored fat target?