Month: September 2012

Where black doctors live or lived: shoot-’em-up

South Side neighborhood named after doctors (and other professionals) who lived there: an upper-middle black enclave.

Four people, including an 11-year-old girl, were shot and wounded late Sunday when a gunman opened fire at a family party in the Pill Hill neighborhood on the city’s South Side, Chicago police said.

The 10:45 p.m. shooting in the 9100 block of South Chappel Avenue was only a block from the scene of a fatal shooting earlier in the day, though police said it was too soon to tell if they were connected.

Yr black and successful? No place to hide.

Personal recollection: In the 70s in Oak Park, we would sit with black neighbors to talk about problems, block from city-limit Austin Blvd. One discussion, a black guy, a CTA bus driver, told of young male passengers boarding in Pill Hill heading north, kids he’d seen at church with their parents. On the way, they would pull out the hat that tilted a certain way said what gang he belonged to or some other identification. Young men on their way to where the action was.

Nailing newsies

Russell Shaw on overdoing it at National Catholic Reporter:

News that the doctrine committee of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops last year adopted protocols to guide its procedures and those of its staff set the juices predictably flowing at the National Catholic Reporter. An overwritten story on the NCRwebsite let readers know that this particular USCCB committee was “tasked with enforcing church doctrine.”

Enforcing? How do you do that with doctrine? This is the way we journalists talk when we don’t like something and want you not to like it either.

It’s the narrative, you know: God proposes, Vatican enforces. The perfervid approach.

Labor Day is Empty Chair Day!

Evil Blogger Lady on the empty-chair schtick:

I thought it was funny that night. But I did not realize how much it would upset the left! Even Barack Obama did not ignore it (which suggests it is worrying Obama 2012)… .

And Jennifer Rubin:

I was there and it was darn weird. But at times it was funny and devastating in its dismissal of the president’s excuses. And in clips and sound bites the day after the live performance, the oddness is diminished and the punch lines seem more biting. In simple terms, the movie icon encapsulated the message of the convention: If someone is doing a bad job, you have to fire him.

Yes.

She adds reference to Obama supporters’ “obsessive plea for more details about Romney’s policies.” Which he has given, she adds to that. But no matter: Chi Trib today has its “short on details” story (LA Times story)

And Richard Fernandez:

It was an old man’s delivery, but overstatedly so for effect. It was a cutting delivery and for that reason delivered in low key. But for all of Clint Eastwood’s rhetorical cleverness at the Republican convention it derived its effectiveness precisely because it wasn’t one of those “I take this platform tonight with pen in hand, bearing in mind the immortal words of Clancy M. Duckworth” type orations. It wasn’t the speech of someone who was running for office.

Rather it might have come from Mr. Weller down at the corner office musing on simple things to not very important people. How it wasn’t good form to mess things up continuously. How one might lose faith in a man who made one broken promise too many. How at the end of the day everyone either did the job or quit out of decency. Even Presidents.

Remember. Empty Chair Day tomorrow.

(H/T the irreplaceable Instapundit)