The city has a new screamer.  Sun-Times has raised the decibels.  And is sounding them in populist manner:

“NOBODY’S WORTH $27 MIL. PER YEAR: Spotlight on Execs’ Monster Salaries on Eve of Big Hike in Your Electric Bill” [Grrrrrrrr]

It’s the Michael Cooke-just-back-from-New York Effect.  See the lede.  It’s journalistic demagoguery:

Stock prices at a near-record high.

Robust profits.

And a top exec who pulled down more than $27 million last year.

Hardly signs of a company on the brink of bankruptcy, according to a growing chorus opposed to ComEd’s impending rate hike for its 3.7 million customers.  [Italics added, chorus being cheered on by S-T]

Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn [proven rouser of rabble who once proclaimed, “There’s no nice way of doing things,” referring to his tactics] is urging people to fight the hike, blaming it on “inflated egos with inflated salaries.”

“It’s hard to get a violin out for anyone who makes $27 million,” he said Sunday, deriding the compensation package of John W. Rowe, CEO of Exelon, ComEd’s parent company.

As if Rowe’s $27 mill would cover the rate hike.  As if it’s a Mom & Pop place.  This from the man who led a constitutional cutback of the legislature characterized by veteran Springfield correspondent Charles N. Wheeler III 20 years after its approval as “perhaps the most regrettable example of short-sighted anger in state history.”  Sun-Times is in his corner.  Has Editor Cooke studied Illinois legislative history?

“Nobody’s worth that much, I’m sorry,” said Pat Lydon, 61, a legal secretary from Old Irving Park who was visiting downtown Sunday [about Rowe’s compensation].

He did, eh?  Wow.  That does it.  Quinn and the Citizens Utility Board and the two governor candidates had me wondering, but now I’m sure.  Thanks, Sun-Times!

The heck with Forbes Mag, saying as reported by S-T, that ComEd under Rowe (since 1984) was the nation’s best-managed utility in 2005.  So what!

 

AP sent out a story 10/14 about Rep. John Murtha’s Wash Post column in which he objects to his and other Dems’ being called “Defeatocrats” by Republicans because they want to pull out of Iraq.

Rep. John Murtha, a decorated Marine veteran who favors withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, wrote an essay for Sunday’s Washington Post blasting Republicans for referring to him and other Iraq war opponents as “Defeatocrats.”

Why not?  He’s in the news for his anti-war statements.  But would it be fair to cite his Abscam history here too?  To do so would ruin or at least hurt the story, and drama’s the thing.  So say it this way without Abscam. But there’s supposed to be a public-trust factor here: fairness and accuracy and the like.  And Abscam is in the news too.  Consider this from Wash Times on Oct. 5:

Rep. John P. Murtha’s Republican challenger “>has accused him  of negotiating a $50,000 bribe and of trying to cover it up for 26 years. 

A recently released FBI video recorded in 1980 shows the Pennsylvania Democrat talking with an FBI agent posing as a representative to an Arab sheik who offers Mr. Murtha $50,000 in cash in exchange for private immigration legislation.

“When you see the video, there was every intent of taking the bribe,” said Diana Irey, a Washington County, Pa., commissioner who is running to unseat Mr. Murtha. “For 26 years, John Murtha has been living a lie.”

This story is nowhere to be found in Chi Trib or any other newspaper in the EBSCO database, which I found compliments of the Oak Park Public Library, where I hold a card. Why not found?  At best because it did not seem significant to any editor, while Murtha’s battling the White House — that’s news? — does.  At worst?  Skip it.

 

Columbia U. Republicans recovered from disruption of their last speaker a week ago to host three reformed violent radicals:

Each of the speakers stressed the impact of indoctrination in their youth. Hilmar von Campe explained that the Nazi system of political indoctrination operated not by issuing commands but by controlling key institutions — such as the media and military — that effectively manipulated public opinion. The Nazi idea, he said, “was for you to do voluntarily what they wanted you to do.” Under the influence of such indoctrination, von Campe came to believe that World War II was not a war incited by Nazi aggression but a patriotic war to preserve German sovereignty. As a soldier, “I was in my mind defending the country, not fighting for the Nazis,” von Campe said.

I told my students at De Paul U. a few years ago that they were being manipulated, which was news to them.  That control of the media fits with today’s overwhelming leftist bias.

Another speaker got to the point about academia today in the U.S.:

Shoebat noted that the radical recruitment and indoctrination he underwent as a young man [among Palestinians, indoctrinated in anti-Jewish thinking] was also happening in the United States. This happened through clandestine support by Islamic radicals for Middle Eastern terrorist groups; through preaching by radical clerics; and, more subtly, through American universities. In the latter connection, Shoebat singled out several professors — including Richard Falk, a professor emeritus of International Law at Princeton who once referred to Ayatollah Khomeini as a “moderate” and described Islamist Iran as a “model of human government,” and Columbia’s own Rashid Khalidi, who routinely deplores Israel as a “racist” and “apartheid” state — as examples of professors who prefer to suppress the truth about Islamic fundamentalism rather than confront it.

What was it they used to say about anti-Catholicism as the anti-semitism of the intellectuals?  For the political left, it’s just anti-semitism.

Here’s a group worth noting and giving wholehearted support:

The Free Muslims Coalition is a nonprofit organization made up of American Muslims and Arabs of all backgrounds who feel that religious violence and terrorism have not been fully rejected by the Muslim community in the post 9-11 era.

The Free Muslims was created to eliminate broad base support for Islamic extremism and terrorism and to strengthen secular democratic institutions in the Middle East and the Muslim World by supporting Islamic reformation efforts.

The Free Muslims promotes a modern secular interpretation of Islam which is peace-loving, democracy-loving and compatible with other faiths and beliefs. The Free Muslims’ efforts are unique; it is the only mainstream American-Muslim organization willing to attack extremism and terrorism unambiguously. Unfortunately most other Muslim leaders believe that in terrorist organizations, the end justifies the means.  [Italics added]

Islamic reformation sounds good to me.