From reader Cal Skinner:

The only Chicago mention (or elsewhere, for that matter) that [Gov. Blagojevich’s] AllKids [health insurance program] includes for the first time those children in the US illegally was by Dick Kay on a WTTW show.  Don’t you think that ought to be at least part of the debate?

From Dick Kay, asked about this:

He has it exactly right! They will not apply under Kids Care because that is a federally funded program. All Kids is state-only and will cover illegal immigrants so long as they can pay the monthly premium and the co-pay. For that matter it would cover children of billionaires so long as they could pay the much higher premiums that would require. Our sister station, Telemundo, has done a couple of stories on the program.

From Rockford Register-Star columnist Chuck Sweeny just today: AllKids was a stealthy victory by Blago, an opening shot in his re-election campaign:

The governor?s plan to provide universal health insurance to 253,000 uncovered Illinois children and pay for it by putting Medicaid recipients on managed care, was dropped on the public Oct. 6 as a big surprise.

Soon the bill-signing, “ at a Chicago school or maybe at his favorite steel mill, A. Finkl & Sons, surrounded by smiling children with colorful balloons.”  Then the campaign:

When the ink’s dry, the governor will take the “All Kids” campaign on the road to sign up families in the run-up to the program’s July 1 start. That’s eight more months of campaign-style rallies paid for by taxpayers and amplified by your friends in the free media — that’s us. He won’t have to spend a dime of his massive war chest, which held more than $14 million as of June 30, and could hit $20 million by year’s end.

Smart guy!

Remember my wondering a few days ago if Chi Trib or S-T would report pseudo-Indian, accused plagiarist-college progressor Ward Churchill speaking at DePaul?  Then noting the next day that nothing had appeared?  Well there was a reason for that having nothing to do with editorial assignment.  It was that reporters were not allowed.  Nor were tape recorders.  American Thinker showed what amateurs can do on a website with its reporting of the Churchill talk by a non-reporter, a lawyer however, and so one expected to get things straight.  He had to finagle his way in at that and did not feel free even to take notes (!) on Churchill. 

He came up with this, in which Churchill is reported explaining away his “3,000 Eichmans” comment on the 9/11 victims and otherwise arguing his various positions.  The reporting is detailed and arresting; so much for amateurism, since people who can observe and listen and write clearly can do this work.  “We know you can write,” Daily News managing editor Daryle Feldmeir told me when I was hired without newspaper experience in 1968.  He had clips of mine from several magazines.  “But we don’t know if you can give us 500 words on deadline.”

The best part of the American Thinker reporting, by Chaya Gil, a Chicago attorney, is the ambience of it, where DePaul is shown as being so concerned about trouble or even publicity as to bar reporters — even Gil, who is apparently known at DePaul.  That being the circumstance, it’s not surprising that Churchill was misquoted, as he said back in Denver: what he said was in an email to him was presented by Gil as directly from Churchill.  It was about Hitler exterminating the wrong people and thus incendiary.  Churchill apparently reads The American Thinker and made a point to refute this allegation.

Thinker got to someone who had recorded the talk secretly, hiding the machine in his shirt or somewhere where the recording was muffled, and that recording finally, after much careful listening, backed up Churchill on this one point.  Newspapers can’t do this as quickly in hard copy.  But the upshot is that people who care about DePaul and Churchill and what happened have thorough reporting in difficult circumstances with honesty in admitting mistake and info about DePaul and it’s Toonerville Trolley administration. 

I’ll tell you what’s been a joy to watch, has been the daily 350 or so p-1 words summing up each Sox game in Chi Trib by Dan McGrath.  It’s been a lovely thing, to see copy so clean and substantive, enough to make E.B. White and his mentor William Strunk Jr. stand up in their graves and say Yippee, this stuff has no needless words.  See today’s if you don’t believe it.

From John Fund’s Wall St. Jnl piece:

“We spent about 1,200 hours together and had in excess of 6,000 agenda items, and I never knew where Harriet was going to be on any of those items until she cast her vote,” Jim Buerger, a former Miers colleague on the Dallas City Council, told the Washington Post. “I wouldn’t consider her a liberal, a moderate or a conservative, and I can’t honestly think of any cause she championed.”

Fund’s exertions bore no fruit.  He “called all over Texas and Washington in search of people she might have talked with about [her judicial philosophy].  No luck. In fact, it became clear Ms. Miers is a complete mystery.”

Somewhere I saw it said that Rove has been so busy with the Valerie Plame stuff that he hasn’t been doing his usual advising of GW, and Rove is reported as not having recommended Miers.  Reminds me of FDR’s pollster, the first to help a national politico, whom FDR did not have advising him during a difficult time when FDR made a lot of mistakes, as told in Mel Holli’s The Wizard of Washington: Emil Hurja, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Birth of Public Opinion Polling (Palgrave, 2002).

In any case, Rove or not, Miers appears devoid of philosophy, judicial or otherwise — in other words, a pedestrian individual, a girl picked to do a woman’s job, though why it’s a woman’s job this time around may be an important unanswered question.