Author: Jim Bowman

Jim Bowman covered religion 1968-78 for the Chicago Daily News, since then has written books, articles, etc., mostly on corporate history but also on religion (Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968), and more recently on politics (Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters -- Lulu.com, Kindle). Longtime Oak Park, Illinois, resident, he lives now on Chicago's North Side, where four of his and Winnie's six children live close by.

Propaganda by Chi Trib for transgender bathrooms

Front Page Chi Trib Saturday 5/14 quotes affirmation for opening up bathrooms and locker rooms in schools and gymnasiums:

“By affirming transgender students and guaranteeing them these rights, we’re not denying anyone else’s rights. And sometimes I think that gets missed.”

— Jennifer Leininger with the Gender and Sex Development Program at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago.

She also called the federal directive “groundbreaking.”

It’s a ukase, isn’t it? The boy president running wild in his last year in office, flashing his pearly whites ear to ear, having his way with pen and telephone.

And the Trib socks it to us on a Saturday morning in May. Page One, story of the day, complete with four-column, above-the-fold shot of real, live transgender poster boy, a handsome lad shown here.

Alex Singh

“Not denying anyone else’s rights,” says the sex-development specialist, ignoring the right to privacy argued by bathroom originalists — the cornerstone of abortion rights, by the way, for what that’s worth.

Behold cultural Marxism, everything up for grabs, life is flowing like a river, never the same, keep the bourgeois enemy on his toes. What Obama and his uber-promoter Axelrod had in mind it seems ages ago by “hope and change”?

And there’s uproar from right and left at Trump’s vagueness and populism. O. and A. paved the way.

The Lurie woman’s quote fits this story, with its impressionistic argument — heavens, just reporting a social phenomenon, you know — one school official after another telling us they are already doing what Obama has ordered under threat of cutting off funding if they don’t do. Federal money, federal control.

In the story’s 1,300 words, there’s reference in a few lines to Palatine parents’ suit claiming ‘”intimidating and hostile” environment for students who share the locker room with the transgender student.’ That’s it for anything to counter the theme. Privacy is nowhere mentioned.

It’s an obvious, amateurish piece, a recounting of bullet quotes gathered by suburban reporters acting on orders.

Getting it right, we trust, and why not? They looked around and found these blokes, with nary a mumblin’ word of dissent.

And the whole story placed to count! Assuming so much, hitting readers over coffee with its multiple-point type blaring “Many schools ahead of transgender decree,” playing readers.

Trib columnists Huppke and Zorn  have chimed in to approve the great bathroom decree, or at least pooh-pooh objections. Readers expect that. But to deliver a front-page headline story that argues without declaring its intentions? Stuff it, please.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Ryan had a meeting . . .

. . . and The Disruptor did some listening, to good effect.

Here’s the key point: Mr. Trump is not going to give up his economic populism or his America-first foreign policy. He has represented himself as the voice for the ailing American middle class.

He is a disrupter. He will always be the outsider. And when elected he will follow through in Washington. Count on it.

The “disruptor” tag was given him by Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the GOP House leadership member from Washington state, in an NBC News interview with Luke Russert.  Larry Kudlow is delighted, likening him to the

many fabulous tech companies that disrupted the economy (Microsoft in its heyday, the all-powerful Amazon, and a laundry list that’s too long for this column).

Such disruptors

create winners and losers, but overall are remarkably positive for the country, middle-class folks, the economy, jobs, and wages.

Kudlow says:

Hats off to McMorris Rodgers for being the first member of the Republican leadership to understand that Mr. Trump, the ultimate outsider, is going to be a disruptive force when he gets to Washington. That’s a good thing. It will finally relaunch America in a positive direction.

New Gingrich calls Trump “someone to kick over the kitchen table.” Called him that in February, in fact, and more recently, in his admirable laid-back manner, on Fox Business channel.

more more more to come in this fascinating race for the big white house on Pa. Ave.

Now I know what Orwellian means

Chi Public Schools have new guidelines for how you must talk or face consequences:

According to the new guidelines:

the intentional or persistent refusal by students or school staff to respect a student’s gender identity (for example, intentionally referring to the student by a name or pronoun that does not correspond to the student’s gender identity) is a violation of these Guidelines, the Student Code of Conduct, and Comprehensive Non-Discrimination, Title IX and Sexual Harassment Policy.

CPS warns that “violations will result in appropriate consequences for offending staff and students.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/12/chicago-students-now-required-to-adopt-transgender-newspeak/#ixzz48YwKw5kC

This do beat all.

Micro-aggression at St. Ignatius

At the end of a story by Sun-Times’ Mitch Dudek, we find quite a good statement from Todd Stroger, whom Dudek asked about a teacher’s using the N-word in a history class:

Todd Stroger, former Cook County Board president and a 1981 Ignatius graduate, said using the N-word in an instructional setting is appropriate.

“I kind of relate it to when the Jewish people talk about the Holocaust, they say: ‘Never Forget.’ I think this is kind of the same instance for African-Americans in America,” he said.

“But you get some people who are trying to be smart alecks, and some people who are so naive and immature they don’t get it,” Stroger said.

Stroger stopped short of saying he experienced racism at the school. “There will always be people who are insensitive. … There was always somebody who would say something out of bounds, just trying to get your goat.”

“But I’d go back to high school at St. Ignatius in a heartbeat, if my wife would let me,” he added.

Not bad at all. Nice job by Dudek too.

Don Harmon: Profile in going along

Sun-Times man Mark Brown praises Oak Park Democrat Sen. Don Harmon for casting “a tough vote. A principled one, too” for a change in allocating state money to local schools because the change would short-change Oak Park schools.

Well. It pained Harmon to vote with the party “on a partisan 31-21 vote”? Not as much, we may be sure, as it would have pained him to vote otherwise, making it 30-22. Not near as much.

 

 

Another way to find a great (little) book . . .

Go to Amazon (you’ve heard of Amazon, right?), punch in “jim bowman” (caps don’t matter, of course), and there’s the great (little) book, for almost nothing:

Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to VotersKindle Edition

by Jim Bowman (Author)
See all formats and editions

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Got it? Get it. Good.

Trump-style candidate our only hope . . .

Meaning, if it weren’t he, it would have to be another “vulgar, abusive, nasty, rude, boorish and outrageous” candidate who “is also saying what he thinks and, more important, teaching Americans how to think for themselves again.”

We’ve lost the habit, said Paul Johnson in the April 19 issue of Forbes, even the ability to do so, having succumbed to a virulent social disease, namely

“political correctness” . . .  one of the most dangerous intellectual afflictions ever to attack mankind. The fact that we began by laughing at it–and to some extent, still do–doesn’t diminish its venom one bit.

PC . . . appeals to pseudo-intellectuals everywhere . . . . Any empty-headed student with a powerful voice can claim someone (never specified) will be “hurt” by a hitherto harmless term, object or activity and be reasonably assured that the dons and professors in charge will show a white feather and do as the student demands.

. . . [T]here isn’t a university campus on either side of the Atlantic that’s not in danger of censorship. The brutal young don’t even need to impose it themselves; their trembling elders will do it for them.

It’s insidious,

. . . usually the anonymous work of such Kafkaesque figures as civil servants, municipal librarians, post office sorters and employees at similar levels . . . the revenge of the resentful underdog.

It’s “triumphant” here, which is “remarkable, because America has traditionally been the home of vigorous, outspoken, raw and raucous speech.”

From the early 17th century, when the clerical discipline the Pilgrim Fathers sought to impose broke down and those who had things to say struck out westward or southward for the freedom to say them, America has been a land of unrestricted comment on anything–until recently.

Now we are “inundated with PC inquisitors, and PC poison is spreading worldwide in the Anglo zone.”

Enter Trump.

No one could be a bigger contrast to the spineless, pusillanimous and underdeserving Barack Obama, who has never done a thing for himself and is entirely the creation of reverse discrimination.

The fact that he was elected President–not once, but twice–shows how deep-set the rot is and how far along the road to national impotence the country has traveled.

National impotence, senility.

Under Obama the U.S.–by far the richest and most productive nation on earth–has been outsmarted, outmaneuvered and made to appear a second-class power by Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

America has presented itself as a victim of political and economic Alzheimer’s disease, a case of national debility and geopolitical collapse.

The non-Trumps?

None of the Republican candidates trailing Trump has the character to reverse this deplorable declension.

The Democratic nomination seems likely to go to the relic of the Clinton era, herself a patiently assembled model of political correctness, who is carefully instructing America’s most powerful pressure groups in what they want to hear and whose strongest card is the simplistic notion that the U.S. has never had a woman President and ought to have one now, merit being a secondary consideration.

The world needs a scare.

The world is disorderly and needs its leading nation to take charge and scare it back into decency. Donald Trump fits the bill.

Other formidable figures, including Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, have performed a similar service in the past. But each President is unique and cast in his own mold. Trump is a man of excess–and today a man of excess is what’s needed.

The whole argument made by the prolific journalist and popular historian Johnson is clearly based on a keen appreciation of how bad things are which I share.

For his editor (of Standpoint) son Dan Johnson, by the way, the Donald Trump solution is not recommended.