“There is going to be one question I’m not going to ask,” the Scooter Libby judge told the court, looking over questions submitted by jurors. “I’ve concluded that that question is not appropriate and therefore you should not speculate as to what the response would have been.”

What was he talking about? A moment later, Walton told the jurors: “What Mrs. Wilson’s status was at the CIA, whether it was covert or not covert, is not something that you’re going to hear any evidence presented to you on in this trial.”

In other words, Byron York explains in Wash Post, keep blinkers on, because all that matters is whether Libby lied.  So what if the whole business began with her being covert?  Prosecutor Fitzgerald says Libby lied to protect his job, which he would have lost if discovered to leak classified info.  But he won’t put that to the jury, only “that there was an investigation into whether the law was violated.”

Clever rascal.  It almost makes you sympathetic for Chi pols who do time after Fitzgerald prosecuted them.  Almost.

So what do noosepapers expect of hard-charging columnists when they go to the women’s section?  If she’s a mother, they’d like something about breastfeeding in public, Debra Pickett found out at Sun-Times — as by Phil Rosenthal of Chi Trib, who ran this a day after Michael Miner blogged it at Chi Reader.

Once a weekly Page 2 columnist . . . and cast as one of [S-T’s] rising stars, Pickett had her column moved back into the Lifestyles section while she was on maternity leave. When an editor this week passed along [publisher] Cooke’s suggestion that she ought to write about breastfeeding in public, it was a stark reminder of what being in the Lifestyles section might entail, and she quit.

“I didn’t quit in protest over a single assignment,” said Pickett, the 34-year-old whose column was for a few years was called “Age 29.” “That seems to be the story going around, and it’s very `Norma Rae.’ … But the question was what were expectations of me going to be when I got back, and that was a pretty good illustration.”

Get personal, he said. 

None of your business, she replied.

================================

Later: Automatic response from her Sun-Times address is “Debra is on maternity leave and will return to work in January.”  Asked Phil Rosenthal, whose item is quoted above, about it.  He: “She quit.  It’s possible she doesn’t have access to her Sun-Times e-mail account anymore.”
===============

Yet more: As said above, Chi Reader’s Michael Miner blogged the story in detail.  Among comments is this good one from “Insideout”:

The breastfeeding story idea gets at everything that is going haywire these days at the Sun-Times. Where did all the news go? The front of the paper is filled with wire and the news of the absurd. The editor and publisher are too busy hobnobbing with the powerbrokers (Daley, Blagojevich, Natarus and Burke) to care about writing critically about them. Instead, let’s try the Tribune for mismanaging the Cubs. Or put a Sam Zell puff piece out front. An “independent newspaper”? Hah! Not long ago, the paper used to be one of the 10 papers that “did it right.” Where has that paper gone?

Lynn Sweet in “S.C. round goes to Clinton” dissects the process of hiring a “consultant” in S. Carolina, giving us inside-baseball stuff that newsies hash out over drinks.  But the story is that the consultant, a state senator and pastor of a 10,000–member megachurch, endorsed Hillary after she hired him at $10,000 a month.  This is the story in South Carolina, and it should be the story in Chicago.

[Later: It was the story in NYC too.  What gives with Sweet, to ignore the main thing for the sake of some back and forth about pols’ negotiating?]

Same paper, Rick Telander excommunicates former all-star NBA player Tim Hardaway from his Church of the Open Mind — honored in his Sunday column in which he objects strenuously to Christianity in the locker room.  “The world has not stopped” since the former NFL commissioner embraced his lesbian daughter and contributed to the death of “knee-jerk prejudice” vs. gays, he writes today in “Sport has heard the voice of hate.”  As for being naked in the locker room with a homosexual man, Telander has the answer: “He can wear a towel.”  Do knees jerk always in the same direction?

What I like about O’Bama is, he’s so clean.  Me and Biden, another Democrat.  Where do the Democrats get these guys?  It was Gore, then Kerry, fringe characters both, now who?  Read Ann Coulter for the real scoop.  She discusses “Jonathan Livingston Obama” in her latest column, on the mark as usual, but unfairly picking fruit that hangs low on the campaign tree. 

His speeches are a run-on string of embarrassing, sophomoric Hallmark bromides.

In announcing his candidacy last week, Obama confirmed that he believes in “the basic decency of the American people.” And let the chips fall where they may!

Obama forthrightly decried “a smallness of our politics” – deftly slipping a sword into the sides of the smallness-in-politics advocates. (To his credit, he somehow avoided saying, “My fellow Americans, size does matter.”)

No fair.  We should leave the guy alone.  Basic decency, smaller is better: it’s what the people want to hear in Iowa.  It’s what Mayordaley II wants to hear, assuming it means prosecutor Fitzgerald is put to pasture.  Whatever.

One must add this from The Coulter:

Obama has locked up the Hollywood money. Even Miss America has endorsed Obama. (John “Two Americas” Edwards is still hoping for the other Miss America to endorse him.)

She’s listening:

I can’t wait for Obama’s inaugural address when he reveals that he loves long walks in the rain, sunsets, and fresh-baked cookies shaped like puppies.

As for where Dems (libs) get these guys, Coulter is worried:

Maybe they’re just running out of greeting card inscriptions.

That would be a shame.

Folks, we may have a winner here.  Check it out.

Anne Keegan ain’t into thumbsucking in public.  She thinks the reader wants to know the news, not her great thoughts on the matter.  So in her writing, as in her book On the Street Doing Life, she

doesn’t once let the first person slip into her text. In her view, journalism is a “feeble attempt to find the truth,” and the truth is “what happened, and that’s all.”

She continues, “I made no judgments on anyone. None. Zero. Nor did I say, ‘I stood there, and gee whiz, I’m so scared.’ And ‘Gee whiz, I felt so sorry for that lady, and I cried when she said, “I don’t want to be arrested.”‘ I’m not a Gen Xer boring everybody with what I think. I wasn’t part of the show.”

This lady is this blog’s idea of professional.  Even as a columnist, for Chi Trib in the 80s, she never wrote about herself, even when her editors said she “didn’t write enough silly stuff about [her] kids’ diapers. Or about [her] twins. Or [her] psychiatrist. Or how [she] found a coyote in [her] yard.”

Didn’t work for her genius editors, who put her on women’s news in ‘97, precipitating her departure.  She went home and wrote about Cronin, the legendary cop who left a foot back in Viet Nam and got on the force because Mayordaley I spoke up for him. 

The book, self-published, is based on her joining Cronin in his midnight rides in Drug Land, as in the now-gone Rockwell Gardens on Western Avenue, where she found herself once alone in a dark hallway with three big guys.  She ordered them against the wall, bluffing until he returned.  This time she had to tell about herself — or did she?  Michael Miner in The Chicago Reader quotes her husband. 

Is it in the book?  One way to find out: buy it here for $13.50.

Later: Newspaper reader, of course, is what’s meant.  For thoughtful, reflective stuff there are usually better places to go.

Romenesko leads with this item today in his Poynteronline column: Network TV commentator Charles (“Charlie”) Gibson said mainstream news outlets are “even more important” in the “Internet age.”  This is news that Gibson would say this?  How so?

See Trib, see Trib web page.  Top story is “Must-see machines” by auto writer Jim Mateja:

Have time for only the Cliffs Notes version of the Chicago Auto Show? Here’s a look at the Top 10 — plus one.

In adjoining column, under an axident update, is the day’s degenerate celebrity, dead on arrival at Fla. hospital:

Anna Nicole’s mother blames drugs
• Why her death had us talking
• Photos | Video
• Watcher: Anna Nicole’s baby
• Pop Machine: A tragic turn
• Tell us: Anna Nicole guest book

This is the Marshall Field & Co. system: Give the people what they want — hardly original in either context, retail store or newspapering. 

No problem: the web is where you go for the latest and the grabber.  You are on the go and want to be in the know.  Does the super-web-news source Drudge give you thumb-suckers for mulling over coffee?  Not on your screaming head or arresting graphic of Mars light flashing and turning.

Ah, but today’s Chi Trib hard-copy — what far more people read — has a HEALTH story for its main head: “Should age determine who gets a kidney transplant?”  This is its typography.  All caps?  Forget it.  Subhead: “Controversial proposal would put younger patients higher on waiting list.”  Gasp.

You can discover this at the site because Chi Trib has hard copy there for the day plus previous six days.  (Sun-Times does not, more’s the pity.) 

Below the fold is “Flexing their brainpower: Academic Decathlon stars bring honor to a struggling high school,” under big pic of black kids hugging each other in joy of academic competition.  Can’t say enough for this story, in a time of black athletes dominating most sports.  With all respect to these kids, it’s truly a man-bites-dog story. 

Where it goes on the web site — 10th place, just below TV’s Russert grilled in Libby trial — is another question.  Same for the kidney transplant item — just above the Russert-Libby story.

When I spoke the other day about my newspaper reading addiction, a writer-reader confessed to the same, but on-line, not hard copy.  It’s easier to find what you want online, to be sure, reading on the go, say on your notebook-laptop on the Green Line heading to work.  (Oh? How many do that?)  So NYTimes publisher may leave hard copy behind, he says. 

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” said [”Punch”] Sulzberger at Davos’ World Economic Forum.

“The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there.”

Meanwhile, today’s Chi Trib grabber for the real-life Green Line rider or muller-over-coffee is who gets the kidney, young sprout or old coot.  That’s the question for the day.  Or is the question how many will bother to read and/or mull?

“The other day the oil companies recorded the highest profits in the history of the world. I want to take those profits. And I want to put them into a strategic energy fund that will begin to fund alternative smart energy, alternatives and technologies that will begin to actually move us toward the direction of independence,”

she told the DNC the other day, per Hillary Clinton: ‘Hugo Chavez in a pantsuit’.  Italics added.

Did she wag her finger?