Category: Blithe Spirit

Mort and Charles lose their groove

Last night Fox commentaters Mort and Charles — Kondracke and Krauthammer respectively — let it all hang out about town hall protestors. Mort got very excited, blinking disapproval at twice the usual rate, and Charles called the town-hallers’ display of indignation “a mistake,” as if GOP strategists had called the shot, one that cost the Republicans popularity during the past week by deflecting attention from the presumably unpopular Dem health-care initiative or “reform,” as they call it.

When Charles noted that GOP Sen. McConnell, minority leader, had said the demos were a bad idea, Mort spouted, “Oh come on!” which did much for the panel’s calm exchange of ideas. Did Mort think he was in a Tea Party town hall? He got indignant and excited over other people getting indignant and excited. McConnell should have got indignant and excited too — he did this once in fourth grade but gave it up as a bad idea — Mort apparently thinks.

The Republican party is “afraid of Rush Limbaugh,” further spouted Mort — are things going bad at Roll Call, where he works? Something must explain his unbridled indignation and excitement at this grass-roots indignation and excitement by taxpayers.

It was a “bad idea,” Charles said, as if the RNC had got the idea and acted on it. Charles also, albeit without indignation and excitement, was chastising citizens who just don’t know how to act. They are not his kind of people, it is become clear. Their kids don’t go to Harvard, for one thing. Tsk, tsk.

Later: What the heck was Charles talking about, it being bad strategy to go ballistic at town halls, in view of this from Rasmussen?

Public support for the health care reform plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats has fallen to a new low as just 42% of U.S. voters now favor the plan. That’s down five points from two weeks ago and down eight points from six weeks ago.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that opposition to the plan has increased to 53%, up nine points since late June.

More significantly, 44% of voters strongly oppose the health care reform effort versus 26% who strongly favor it. Intensity has been stronger among opponents of the plan since the debate began

Support for Congressional Health Care Reform Falls to New Low – Rasmussen Reports\

This shows no diminution of anti-reform sentiment, as Charles (and I suppose Mort, though his bluster makes it hard to figure) claimed.

Chi Trib’s terrifying alter ego

A liberal friend of mine cancelled her Chi Trib subscription some time back, indignant over its front-page policy of mimicking Sun-Times with sensational grabbers.  The Trib soon thought better of that adventure and at least modified its incipient tabloidism.

But I think something else had her and has other libs cobbed, and it’s John Kass, who combines slam-bang coverage of the Mayordaley II machine with national-framework conservatism.  And I’m not sure which gets them madder, though you’d think the vigilance over Chicago politics would be a no-brainer favorable vote.

Not so, I have come to believe, because so-called social issues and love of government have come to trump all, and Mayordaley II is correct on all related points, willing at least to overlook stuff that sent his father up the wall — race– and gay-related matters come immediately to mind — and love of government remains a rock-solid foundation for him as it was for his father.

His motto could be “Holy mother the state,” to quote Dorothy Day, the reformed Marxist and uncanonized Catholic laywoman saint, and that suits today’s libs.

Anyhow, today’s Kass has MD-2’s “terrifying alter ego” Mayor Chucky, as in horror-movie anti-hero, with

aggravated facial expressions . . . hand waving, great circular motions from the shoulder . . . sneering, the finger pointing, and finally, the angry lip curling

asserting itself in a news conference — scheduled to talk about something else, for gosh sakes!

It happened when Chi Trib reporter Dan Blake and ABC-Channel 7’s Charles Thomas “figured they should act like reporters, not press agents” and asked him about insider-developer (plus Board of Ed President and Olympic committee ethics czar) Michael Scott Sr.’s painfully obvious cashing in on the coming Olympics.

The mayor refused to discuss it.  Blake asked when he would discuss it.

“Oh, I do it every day  . . .  You’ve been with me every day. NEVER insult me with that question! You’re insulting me because every day I’m here, you’re never here. And don’t print that! So I know, you’ll print it.”

Kass:

Huh? What? All Blake asked was a legitimate question about when the mayor would answer a legitimate question.

The mayor discussed it the next day,

but only long enough to deny, deny, deny and say reporters were making it all up just to hurt his feelings and ruin everything. “You come to conclusions, you’re trying to hurt [Olympics year] 2016. I don’t know why. … You come to conclusions!”

Kass:

What will happen if Chicago actually wins the 2016 Olympics?

We’ll have lots and lots of insider deals.

And we’ll have lots of Mayor Chucky.

Kass names Blake and Thomas but not the other mainstreamers on hand going along with the MD-2 program for the day — not his skywalking atop Willis Tower of a day earlier, but infrastructure developments.

Whatever “the stunt of the moment,”

reporters . . . give oodles of coverage to the news managed out of the mayor’s press office.  . . .  And then you see the stunt on TV, the ribbon cutting or the meet-and-greet with the children or the seniors, and you think you’re actually watching the news. [Italics added — it’s why people turn to the ‘Net]

But criticizing fraternity members even anonymously, is to enter dangerous territory.  Kass sounds ominously like those who accuse mainstreamers of bias towards their favorite party and their favorite political philosophy. 

If his reporting on civic corruption isn’t enough to make libs uneasy and send them scurrying to the NY Times comfort zone, his critique of the main stream, even if veiled, would be enough.  You don’t do that in j-circles. 

Probably not in j-schools either, where the first step of the Twelve, “My name is ____ , and I am a biased liberal,” is probably rarely taken.

So it is that Chi Trib, for all its fluff and relative unreadability (vs. Sun-Times, which has its own problems) has this alter ego — not only Kass but a fleet of energetic civic-corruption investigators — that terrifies true-blue liberal readers for whom the state is, sans irony, a holy mother.

This with apologies to those who, like Dorothy Day, reserve that encomium sans irony for the Church of Rome.

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Punks or savages?

Censored account of Lincoln Park attackers?

The attackers — police said they believe the incidents are connected — have been described as men in their early 20s, police said.

We are to believe that the attacked had nothing more to report?  This leaves readers perhaps blaming blacks when attackers were hispanic, or vice versa.  This is not fair, nor does it help in spotting culprits, we might say profiling them.

A neighborhood jogger, 28, says he won’t give it up:

Zach Bornemeier, 28, who lives a few blocks west of the zoo, after learning of the attacks said he was unfazed and still plans to jog alone late at night along Stockton [where one or more occurred].

“It just sounds like to me just one group of punks,” he said, adding that he’s not going to change his lifestyle.

Punks?  Admirably circumspect, to be sure.  He plays them down, clinging to his late-night jogging, like candidate Obama’s Pennsylvania yahoos with their guns and Bibles.  Not savages?

Later: Comment on Channel 7 story:
 8/3/09 8:01 AM EDT
Are the suspects black, white, latino, etc…….???? My god…for fear of being labeled “racist” you can’t tell the public what kind of person to look for? All because of our racist president!!
Thou shalt not say some things.
 
Later 2: The Channel 2 report uses the s-word:
. . . violent robbers have savagely beaten four people in the neighborhood since Thursday, . . .
 
Finally: Pin a medal on Examiner.com, where Deborah O’Malley reports:
Police say the victims were all men walking in the early morning hours.  They were attacked from behind by a group of black and Hispanic [!] men in their early 20’s.
She also provides a useful listing of locations:
  • 600 block of West Fullerton        July 30, 2009 at 2:00 a.m.
  • 2100 block of North Stockton     July 30, 2009 at 2:05 a.m.
  • 2000 block of North Cleveland   Aug 1, 2009 at 3:00 a.m.
  • 300 block of West Webster        Aug 1, 2009 at 3:36 a.m.

She’s identified as “an Examiner from Chicago.”  Her home page is here.

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Beer

Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the lede paragraph of the year so far:

“If you ever reach total enlightenment while drinking beer, I bet it makes beer shoot out your nose,” the comedic philosopher Jack Handey once theorized.

A messy eureka moment like that wasn’t the point for the White House beer drinkers Thursday night.

If you know and run into AP writer Calvin Woodward, please thank him for me.

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Duelling letters about Gates

Richard Frisbie, of Arlington Heights, IL, a writer whom I have known for years, primarily through our membership in Society of Midland Authors, cites a 1979 Florida case, “State vs. Brayman,” as one to keep in mind as we judge the arrest of Prof. Gates in Cambridge.

In it, Frisbie says in a letter to the Sun-Times,

a charge of “resisting a police officer without violence” was dismissed by Judge John J. King in a decision widely quoted in the press at the time.

I will take his word about that, but I would like to know how the decision fared in upper courts if challenged or to what extent it became precedent.

On the other hand, another letter writer, to the Canton, Ohio Repository, apparently no more a lawyer than Frisbie, cites another, later decision that supports the Gates arrest.

Terry v. Ohio is a famous U.S. Supreme Court case that defined “reasonable suspicion” and upholds law enforcement officers’ authority to stop, detain and frisk a suspect without arresting him, based on “reasonable suspicion.” [italics added]

This was in 1968.  The decision, approved with the sole dissent of Justice Douglas, has an enduring history:

Terry set the precedent for Michigan v. Long, 463 U.S. 1032 (1983). In an opinion citing Terry written by Justice O’Connor, the Supreme Court ruled that car compartments could be constitutionally searched if an officer had reasonable suspicion.

The scope of Terry was extended in the 2004 Supreme Court case Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada, 542 U.S. 177 (2004), which held that a state law requiring the suspect to identify himself during a Terry stop did not violate the Fourth Amendment prohibitions of unreasonable searches and seizures or the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.

All of that goes far beyond the Gates arrest; it’s about stopping and frisking on the street, for one thing, not on one’s front porch.  But it does provide perspective for the case my fellow writer Frisbie brings up and seems on its face to have more substance.

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Here’s a Florida perspective on the 1979 case in the Broward-Palm Beach New Times blog, including that

it’s worth mentioning if only to celebrate the verbosity of late Broward Circuit Court Judge John J. King.

He was verbose, I guess.

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While we’re at it in re perspective, let’s get down to the common-sense level, if we may, with this observation by Michael Barone:

Obama’s acolytes love to say that this case is a “teachable moment.” The one who needs teaching, it is clear, is not Sergeant James Crowley but Professor Henry Louis Gates. Gates proclaimed that he was being questioned because he was black—which was plainly not the case. Crowley was responding to a passerby’s report that a house was being broken into.

Moreover—and this is a point I haven’t seen others make—when Gates was shouting in the hearing of passerbys that Crowley was a racist, Crowley must have regarded this as a threat to his entire career. Allegations of racism could result in losing his job, being publicly disgraced, being unable to get another good job—the end of everything he’d worked for all his adult life. [italics added]

We’ve seen that, have we not?  From baseball exec to talk-show host, the wheels have grinded rapidly and small, until little or nothing is left of the accused.  Hmmm.  Was Gates yelling fire in the old crowded theater?

Gates . . . had the power to destroy Crowley’s career. And he seemed to enjoy wielding that power, or at least to be acting in reckless disregard of his capacity to destroy the professional life of another human being.

Yes, Gates was jet-lagged and presumably irritated that he was locked out of his house. But the possibility that Crowley was a decent professional, not at all a racist, properly investigating a possible crime, doesn’t seem to have occurred to him. Crowley was just one of the little people, a disposable commodity in the career of an academic superstar.

Barone concludes:

In other words, by saying the Cambridge police “acted stupidly,” [Obama] aligned himself with the culture of victimhood that Gates channeled when he faced Sergeant Crowley. And he aligned himself with a member of the academic elite who committed acts which threatened to destroy another person’s professional life. Not a pretty picture. It will be interesting to see who shows contrition after this afternoon’s beer session.

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Bernanke Stutters?

I know stutters and this ain’t it.  It’s the second item I’ve seen in last two days about Bernanke looking bad on this point — the other was being questioned by a Congressman — and each time he doesn’t.

Heat’s on him and Fed because it’s lending (creating) money and not just setting rates, and rightly so,  And bigger q. is what about the Fed in the first place?  But that’s a minority view, to be sure.

As for his argument about letting Congress decide monetary matters — rates — if we need a wizard, those bozos can’t be the one, but more to point, that’s not the law, he argues.

Mad Barney Frank at the monetary helm?  Hollywood Waxman?  God save us.

Bernanke Stutters, Stammers And Shakes His Way Through Questions On Audit The Fed Bill

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Four in an hour

These burglaries are on the north end of town, not northeast, where houses are especially nice and residents are generally more affluent.

Oak Park police have issued a neighborhood alert following four residential burglaries within a four hour period early Wednesday morning. The burglaries occurred within a roughly four square block area bounded by Division on the north, Chicago on the south, Oak Park to the west and Ridgeland to the east

Details:

Three of the homes were entered through unlocked rear doors, and one through an open window. Numerous valuables were stolen while homeowners slept inside.

Oh boy.  While they slept. 

Cops are on it.  Indeed, they have been getting results.  But those unlocked back doors bespeak a confidence in one’s safety that is proving unrealistic.

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Orwellian science adviser

This was above Obama’s pay grade as a candidate, but as president he found a guy for whom it wasn’t:

President Obama’s top science adviser [John P. Holdren] said in a book he co-authored in 1973 that a newborn child “will ultimately develop into a human being” if he or she is properly fed and socialized.

That was his studied opinion.  His co-authors were uber population panic-peddler Paul Ehrlich, of Population Bomb fame, and Anne Ehrlich.

In the 1970s and 1980s . . . hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,

Ehrlich wrote, in a prediction that bombed.

As for the newborn,

“The fetus, given the opportunity to develop properly before birth, and given the essential early socializing experiences and sufficient nourishing food during the crucial early years after birth, will ultimately develop into a human being,” John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in “Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions.”

He’s Obama’s kind of guy, apparently.

He also

advocated the “de-development” of the United States in books he published in the 1970s.

It would work this way:

“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States,” Holdren wrote in [another] 1973 book he co-authored with Paul R. Ehrlch and Anne H. Ehrlich.

De-development?

“De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation.”

Back we would go to our golden age of primitivism, including radical wealth redistribution.

“The need for de-development presents our economists with a major challenge,” they wrote. “They must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth than in the present one. Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential, if a decent life is to be provided to every human being.”

Fascism, I called it in a Wed. Journal column last October.  How else but by such control of people’s lives can this be achieved?

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Later: True, the wild scenario urged on us by the science advisor in 1973 is fascistic.  But from there to say O. is equally fascistic is a stretch, it occurs to me.  One thing at a time, in other words.  At issue here is the kind of adviser O. picks.  He’s at least comfortable with this kind of thinking.  At least.

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Keep those rules and regs coming . . .

New Jersey is surpassing Illinois as a citadel of corruption, and this woman knows why:

Sandy McClure, co-author of the book “The Soprano State: New Jersey’s Culture of Corruption,” agrees that big government is a big reason behind the state’s corruption problem.

“You have all these little authorities that everyone has to go to for permission,” she says. “Too much government means too many opportunities for officials looking to cash in. And there’s no way that the press can keep track of it all.”  [Italics added]

Every new ordinance means a new chance to bribe and be bribed, does it not?

 

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