An ABC-Wash Post poll — “Bush Not Taking Brunt of Katrina Criticism” — has pundit-stunning results about who’s blaming whom for the Katrina aftermath. 

Three out of four think state and local govts. were NOT adequately prepared for the hurricane.  Two out of three say the feds were not adequately prepared.  Forty-four per cent blame Bush, 55% do NOT. 

Another case of NOT believing what you read in (most) newspapers.  It puts vent-rant by Sun-Times woman Sweet et al. in perspective, does it not?  Those people are talking to themselves and their friends, which is good to keep in mind.

 

The AP story Bush Chooses Roberts, Weighs Other Vacancy pretty much routinely tosses this off:

Like Rehnquist, Roberts is deeply conservative.

I’m trying to remember when AP et al. of the mainstream said anyone is deeply liberal.  It’s not how they talk.

CHI NEWSPAPERS: . . . Lynn Sweet has a scoop Sunday 9/4/05 in a column that her eds. gave top billing in Sun-T’s fairly new and rather good Controversy section.  Eds. called it “For this one, BUSH deserves the heat.” The scoop was the no-holds-barred self-revelation. It came by way of an atrocious pseudo-journalistic self-therapeutic outpouring which she began, “I want to vent.” This comes under her pic in which she’s looking at the camera with a very hard look.

Now newspaper professionals are supposed to tell about the world, not about themselves, which is why this is pseudo-journalistic, and from a Washington bureau chief no less. And from one only days removed from holding N. Shore Dem Rep. Schakowsky’s hand in public, helping her to get over her husband’s guilty plea for stealing money for the sake of his own emolument and continued operation of his “public interest” organization, non-profit of course (nothing so sleezy or infra dig as for profit). Her Schakowsky column was just what the spin doctors ordered. Schakowsky could not have been more pleased. In fact, Sweet often produces p.r. releases under guise of columns, as Chicago Newspapers pointed out in her glowing account with publicity shot Aug. 11 of one Christine Cegelis, a Democrat going for Henry Hyde’s congressional seat in DuPage County. She hadn’t chosen the picture, she responded in an email, nor did on Sunday she place her column about Bush, nor give it such BIG PLAY. She writes the columns, however. I call it pseudo-journalism. 

It’s also exhibit #1,379 (applied locally) of Newsweek Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas’ claim or admission that mainstream media are worth 15 points to a Dem presidential candidate, later knocking it down to five, while still saying they “absolutely” wanted Kerry to win.

This time around, Sweet tears into Bush’s “flim-flam” (is that venting or not? she said that she would do it, and indeed she did). He went for photo-ops clumsily, she says. He indulged in “overwhelming understatement” of the problem — didn’t bite his lip, as the old actor Bubba could do so well.  She even gets “weapons of mass destruction” into the picture. Remember them? (Venting here: they are still on her mind.) But cable TV is bigger than ever, and he can’t get away with it any more.

Along the way of her vent, Sweet offers doomsday analysis of the State of Bush, including the dire effects of the Cindy Sheehan performance, she being “the face of the anti-war movement,” home life shot to hell and all.

But would not we more likely be convinced of Sweet’s analysis if it were not part of self-therapeutics? No wonder she resonates with Sheehan, and maybe with the hysterical, cussing and weeping on radio Mayor Nagin, whom she does not mention, much less suggest as part of the problem, having presided over a city that was already chaotic in some neighborhoods, thanks to a culture of lawlessness unhampered by police or courts, a city that had created its own witness protection program.

Nope. She may have presented her column as about her, but it’s all about Bush, who again lied while people died? Something like that.  The woman is overwrought.

“The Bushes were managing images . . . This MBA president needs to manage people,” she writes. Well he is the chief executive, isn’t he? So what? Sweet drops all pretense of objectivity. She’s venting to the girls and boys in the coed dorm. But never fear: on Monday she’s back on the beat, calling them as she see’s ’em. At least the objectivity format will be more or less back in place.  (She came back with another Democrat-oriented column, about Sen. Barack Obama on his way to Houston to be with Bush I and Clinton for a photo-op session — oops, not that, rather, to help out, you know.  She reverentially, even worshipfully, lobs qq at Obama, who obliges, as if it’s news that he does not blame the Feds more than local New O. pols, for instance.  What a guy and what a gal.)

In the end, for her Sunday column she calls on another detached professional, “Barbie Zelizer” (does Barbie sign her journal articles that way?), a professor at Penn, “a scholar [let’s hope, if she’s a Penn prof] whose specialty is the impact of images” — “Gender and Atrocity: Women in Holocaust Photographs” is one of her studies — and guess what she says? The pictures of the hurricane aftermath send “a different message than what is being touted [hey, the professor talks like a headline!] the official line of the administration.” Presented, she means; she’s a clear thinker?  Big on images.

Let us not carp, however. Sweet got her quote. End of story, end (we hope) of vent, which by the way is called a rant in the blogosphere, but never in mainstream media hard copy, which abides by more rigorous standards, does it not?

 

“Let ’Em Gouge: A Defense of Price Gouging” is good libertarian, capitalistic stuff from Cato Institute.  For instance:

[M]any of those . . . who will curse a blue streak if you put them in front of a camera and ask them about “Big Oil” are as we speak putting their houses on the market and enthusiastically gouging the living daylights out of anyone looking for a new home.

Who, me?

Point: getting the highest price is what we have come to expect and practice.  Oil companies are a fat target, but

no one ever rages against real estate price gouging. In fact, the opposite is the case. Business reporters gush about returns and politicians pledge to do whatever it takes to keep the real estate bubble afloat.

What fools we mortals be.  In any case, gouging is

good for everyone in the long run. Gougers are sending an important signal to market actors that something is scarce and that profits are available to those who produce or sell that something.

Yes.  It’s signals like this that tell us where to invest our moola.  A planned economy leaves such figuring up to commissars, who are notoriously no good at it.  The conclusion is clear:

Blame not the price gouger. Blame the government that won’t let the price gouger do his job,

by controlling prices and rationing.  Tell commissars, czars, whatever we call them, to take a hike. 

Northwest Oak Park’s Catholics flock to and generously support St. Giles, which is a monument not only to Catholic faith and culture but to the rise (mostly) of the Irish from proles to bourgeois, and I don’t mean petit.  It’s a grand structure, a “plant” to warm cockles of pastors’ hearts for these 70 or so years.  But what of St. Giles the man?

It’s his day today.  Those in the know and on the go read Saint of the Day for their information, which is “shrouded in mystery,” but so what?  I love a mystery, and so do lots of people. 

Giles died in or around 710 (we think).  One thing is for sure.  He was “one of the most popular saints in the Middle Ages.”  He hosted pilgrims on their way to Compostella in Spain and the Holy Land in a monastery he built.  After he died, he was listed among the 14 Holy Helpers, who were good to pray to when sick or dying — when a fellow needs a friend, to be sure.  St. Christopher, who came a-cropper due to historians’ shooting down his existence, was one of the 14.

In any case, Giles was very big in Sweden, Hungary, and parts of Germany and eventually got a reputation for helping the poor and disabled.  He couldn’t save his monastery hostel, however.  It fell apart some centuries after he died.  It was a sort of sic transit experience (there goes glory), which shows saints have them too.  St. Giles, pray for us.

GW taps his father and Bubba to help in fund raising for New Orleans.  They worked the tsunami beat and have gotten to know each other and enjoy ea. other’s company, per reports.  Conservatives have asked what’s going on here.  Apart from fund raising for big causes, at which Bubba is probably pretty good, there’s the marginalizing of nutty Carter, with his certifying foreign elections of tyrants and thieves, not to mention other quirks and follies dating ‘way back.  Ignore the guy.  Do not add to his cachet in a slightest bit.  Keep him in Plains if possible.  He’s a nuisance and in his way a menace.

“I have consolation in knowing my son died a hero. And also we have a volunteer Army. No one came and forced my son, no one came and forced Casey. They volunteered for the mission. They were trained soldiers. They knew they weren’t going to Boy Scout camp. They knew. They had all written their wills. We said the I love you’s and be safe, don’t be a hero, and come home.”

That’s gold star mother Diane Ibbotson, of Albion, IL, talking to a Chi Trib editorial writer.  Her son died while trying to save Casey Sheehan, who had died trying to save others in the Baghdad Sadr City battle.  She has another way of grieving, helping her husband work their farm, volunteering at a church and nursing home.  Watching the History Channel account of  D-Day, she and her husband “take comfort in the idea that one day the battle that claimed the lives of their son, Sheehan’s son, and other sons will be remembered.”

Here’s a tale of two cities’ newspapers:  In Wash Times we read this head-plus-lede graf about Iraqi constitution:

Many hurdles ahead for Iraqi constitution
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published August 30, 2005

Iraq’s draft constitution faces a tricky but not impassable road to ratification in an Oct. 15 referendum that is seen as critical to the country’s political future and to the U.S. military mission.

Chi Trib did it this way:

IRAQ IN TRANSITION
Charter finished without Sunni OK
Shiites, Kurds risk rejection by voters

By Alex Rodriguez
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published August 29, 2005

BAGHDAD — Iraqi lawmakers finished drafting their country’s new constitution Sunday, ending a rancorous process that laid bare sectarian divisiveness impeding the country as it tries to forge a new democracy.

Do I detect a little pessimism here?  “Tricky but not impassable road to ratification” vs. “rancorous process that laid bare sectarian divisiveness”?  Which paper leans toward the dark side of the story?

Meanwhile, gas prices rise, but it’s Blago to the rescue:

Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Monday asked Illinois’ attorney general to investigate possible price gouging at gas stations as Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast, a crucial area for U.S. oil and natural gas operations.

More:

“While losing a significant portion of our nation’s domestic oil production will likely cause an increase in oil prices, it is critical that we ensure that no one be allowed to use this natural disaster as an excuse to exploit consumers,” Blagojevich wrote to Attorney General Lisa Madigan, also a Democrat.

But what are Blago and Lisa going to do about it?  Supply down, demand up, and prices with it.  Would they have us ignore that law?  Or don’t they believe in it.

I have a law that ought to be passed: all governors should take Economics 101 at the state campus nearest their home.

Blagojevich said that while most gas stations won’t use a natural disaster as an excuse to raise prices, “there are always a few bad apples.”

“Unfortunately, the actions of a those few bad apples could mean higher gas prices for drivers,” he said.

Well for cry-eye, it’s a few gas stations he’s worried about?  Why all the fuss?

“I think I know why” media ignore the “scandal” of lives lost in the wake of fuel efficiency on autos, writes Jay Ambrose for Scripps-Howard News Service. 

I think the fault lies with a widespread news-media mindset in which regulations are almost always the good guys riding down the hill to rescue the citizenry from that villain of villains: dastardly business practices. It’s very nearly unfathomable to some reporters that no matter how well-intentioned, sweeping governmental interventions in the world of manufacturing and commerce can do more harm _ snuff out more lives _ than any dozen corporate CEOs on the greediest, most callous or negligent day they have ever had.

What we need are more reporters, editors, and publishers who are sceptical of bureaucrats’ ability to decide what’s good for us — as opposed to ourselves acting in a free market.