“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. 

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?

No reason for Social Security reform to be a partisan issue, says Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner. 

In fact, there is a long history of Democrats offering workers more choice, ownership and control over their retirement funds.  Democrats like former Senators Robert Kerry and Patrick Moynihan were among the earliest proponents of individual accounts. The Democratic Leadership Council and its think tank arm, the Progressive Policy Institute, have been supportive. Even former president Bill Clinton was willing to consider the idea. Some Washington observers believe that only the Lewinsky scandal preventing him from endorsing individual accounts.

That woman in the White House.  Drat!

James P. Pinkerton in his Newsday column puts Deep Throat in perspective, noting this among other things about Watergate:

As an impressionable teen back then, I remember the chairman of the Watergate investigating committee, Sen. Sam Ervin (D-N.C.), declaring that the scandal was “the greatest tragedy this country has ever suffered, [worse than] the Civil War.”

At the time, I took those words to heart, mostly because there was no voice in the media to simply laugh out loud in derisive response. Watergate was worse than the death of 600,000 people in the War Between the States? Worse than the Depression? Worse than any number of disasters, epidemics, lynchings and assassinations? Please.

As for W. Mark Felt, the #2 FBI man now self-exposed as Deep Throat,

he’s a strange kind of hero. In 1980, he was convicted of ordering FBI agents to burgle the homes of political dissidents. Isn’t that kind of close to what Nixon’s men were guilty of? And after decades of denial, at 91, now he comes forward – or at least his daughter does, on the stroke-ridden old man’s behalf. As she explained to Vanity Fair, “Bob Woodward’s gonna get all the glory for this, but we could make at least enough money to pay some bills.”

And Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher, telling of his “secret life with W. Mark Felt,” notes that Felt is a man who “truly knew a thing or two about illegal break-ins,” thanks to his heading up FBI’s “notorious COINTELPRO domestic spying-and-burglary campaign” about the time he was giving good stuff to Woodward and Bernstein.

AP story in today’s Sun-Times about Topeka legislator who once said giving women the vote showed “men weren’t doing their jobs” as heads of families, of which women are to be hearts, has critic predicting trouble for her in seeking statewide office, describing the critic as exec director of “a group fighting conservatives in politics.”

That’s not a liberal group?