"Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art."
For the latest stuff no one else has, you must go to Scrappleface, where the motto is “We report, you decipher.”
Here’s the skinny on missile shield deployment negotiations in Eastern Europe. You find it there, but remember, you heard about it here. Unless you heard about it somewhere else.
High school election coming up in OP & RF, where the elite meet to learn.
For 10 or 15 minutes last night (3/3) at a forum sponsored by APPLE, the black parents group, at Oak Park & River Forest High School, six candidates for the OPRF board firmly assured 70 or so listeners of their full support, in some cases overriding support, for early-childhood education.
“It’s not an option to ignore any [educational] level,” said Rosa Higgs, a teacher. “I know that when I am on the board, OPRF will reach out to every pre-school. We are all one learning community,” . . . .
My Oak Park Items blog at the Wednesday Journal has the definitive account. Other issues: the black-white achievement gap, disciplining of black boys, honors courses and black students, outsourcing (privatizing) maintenance work.
If it’s any consolation to Oak Parkers, for whom crime has increased, consider this from Rasmussen, the pollster:
Nearly one-third of Americans (32%) say crime has increased in their communities in the past year, and 72% of those impacted say it is Very Likely that increase is related to the poor economy.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 54% say crime in their communities has stayed the same, and eight percent (8%) say it has decreased. Six percent (6%) are not sure.
The Oak Park story is scary enough:
There were 166 reported robberies last year in Oak Park, compared with 114 in 2007. Robbery arrests were also up. There were 48 last year, compared with the 36 the previous year.
On the other hand, “it’s safer today than at any point in the last four decades,” says village president David Pope. Last year’s (apparently overall) increase was only four per cent, and “crime totals” were the fourth-lowest in 27 years. Crime was “less than half of what it was in 1991.”
Hmmm.
Some columnizing here on an important subject:
Ladies and gentlemen of the central Oak Park chapter of Catholics and other Americans United for Separation of Abortion and Legality be seated. It’s time once again to engage in our favorite pastime, playing God! (Cheers, applause from small group huddled in church basement.)
We gather as usual to say we know when the unborn acquire rights, even if Obama as candidate has professed ignorance in the matter. Above his pay grade, he said. Let us for the sake of argument say we’re not sure either. Calling on an old but golden argument, let us consider what to do in such uncertainty, asking our president to join us.
. . . .
Good opening here to a Chi Trib story about business as usual in Washington under a recently inaugurated messiah:
As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama said that in overhauling health care he would make negotiations public—and even invite C-SPAN to air the talks on television.
Yet in recent months, lobbyists and health insurance company representatives have been meeting behind closed doors—with the White House’s knowledge—in Sen. Edward Kennedy’s office to debate options for a new health system.
As a candidate, Obama pledged to cut “earmarks” for lawmakers’ pet projects to pre-1994 levels. But the president soon is expected to sign a bill laced with more than 8,500 earmarks.
Nicely done, putting data up front, a fairly classic noosepaper lede. But feeling the need to take the sting out of it, the writer — LA Times man Peter Nicholas, of the Tribco Washington Bureau — excuses Obama:
Transforming Washington’s political culture is proving tougher than Obama may have envisioned.
As if Mr. Obama went to Washington from the South Side of Chicago, where he has had unstinting support from the Democrat machine, and “may have envisioned” some sort of reformable situation.
Call this a quirk, even if it’s true you don’t want to be tendentious in a news story. And “may have envisioned” leaves open the possibility that he did envision it.
Note too that Nicholas was sounding an alarm last July:
In more than a year of campaigning, Barack Obama has made a long list of promises for new federal programs costing tens of billions of dollars, many of them aimed at protecting people from the pain of a souring economy.
But if he wins the presidency, Obama will be hard-pressed to keep his blueprint intact. A variety of budget analysts are skeptical that the Democrat’s agenda could survive in the face of large federal budget deficits and the difficulty of making good on his plan to raise new revenue by closing tax loopholes, ending the Iraq war and cutting spending that is deemed low-priority.
In today’s story, a think-tanker tells Nicholas, “It’s very different to make promises on the campaign stump than it is putting together an administration and running a government,” further to exonerate the man who didn’t know enough but promised change.
Of many reporters, if not of Nicholas, who foretold problems, it may be asked, where was such a commenter before the election, to help readers put campaigning in perspective?
Trouble with quoting her now is that it’s too much like saying boys will be boys, tut-tut. But campaign coverage should trumpet this insight, not save it for post-election stories that excuse the lies.
I had delivered to my doorstep this morning on this cold, clear Sunday a near-perfect White House press release, courtesy of Chicago Tribune. It begins with a straightforward lede, of press-office quality:
From front to back and on nearly every page, President Barack Obama’s new budget plan delivers a message that’s seldom been heard in American politics for more than three decades: It’s time for the rich to pay their fair share and lighten the load on the middle class.
“Seldom . . . for more than three decades” jars. Maybe “in” the last three decades?
And “in American politics”? She’s kidding. The left wing has been silent on the subject?
Let’s not quibble, however. At issue is whether Maura has that Chris Matthews tingle going up (and down) her leg or legs. Consider her declaration that “the new budget would [? in what circumstance?] focus [she means “bestow”?] more benefits on ordinary Americans and look to the affluent for more help in paying for them.
Thanks be to God!
The budget “lays out the facts starkly,” she says. Since Reagan cut taxes, “lower-class incomes have stagnated, middle-class incomes have increased only slightly, . . . the incomes of the richest Americans have skyrocketed.
That’s it. O. said it, it must be so. No independent verification needed for this fan. It’s in the budget book.
“If the country is going to recover from this economic crisis, Obama argues, that is going to have to change,” she writes.
And who is she to argue? She quotes him: The nation “has grown and prospered when all Americans have shared in the opportunities created by our economy.” Or, gosh darn it, to cut through the standard Obama overwriting, people have profited when the nation has prospered.
And oh my, get that “have shared in the opportunities.” He’s for equal opportunity, apparently. Probably not.
O. is “gearing up for a fight” with his all-purpose bad guys, “special interests and lobbyists” (though not with the lobbyists he has recently hired).
So is Maura. “To be sure,” she writes, “some Republicans denounced the shift in priorities as class warfare.” Some. (And all but three rejected the recently steamrollered spending bill.}
Moreover, “some economists” said higher taxes “could” reduce rich people’s “entrepreneurial energy.” Come on. She means would dry up investing.
“Many economists, on the other hand,” don’t think so. They say overall and middle-class prosperity have happened simultaneously. No kidding. “During the economic boom that followed World War II, income inequalities eased as the middle class prospered.” Really. Inequality didn’t increase when the middle class prospered?
“And those in the upper income brackets were heavily taxed” in this period, she says, again equating simultaneity with causation. Anyhow, “most wealthy Americans found ways to shelter much of their income from the highest rates.” In which case, what’s the point of raising their rates?
She found two of the many at the Brookings Institution, which Christian Science Monitor recently called “centrist” but Seattle Times called “left-leaning” (which I have found more common). Pay your money, take your choice. Maura takes a pass.
Obama will “undo the Bush tax cuts,” one of the two explains. He is Roberton Williams, of the Tax Policy Center, a Brookings operation, though Maura does not say so.
“Obama wants to help people afford college,” Williams told her. “His focus is on . . . long-term investment potential and have major, major social benefits.” Sure, like crushing deficits to be paid off by generations to come.
It is indeed a two-headed monster, this budget: presumably an economy-helper and definitely a social-welfare promoter. In any case, O. demonstrates a “laserlike focus on bolstering the middle class as a long-needed correction,” she writes, allowing that “others see in it the seeds of new inequalities.”
One of these would be the (right-leaning) Heritage Foundation fellow, who has two paragraphs at the end in which to state his case if not make it. He makes a key point point, that almost half the citizenry will pay no taxes in the Obama scheme of things. If he went further and noted that demagogues, I mean Democrats, will have the electorate where it wants it in that case, Maura ignored it. If he didn’t, he should have, because Obama is on the way to locking in the non-taxpayer majority for future elections from now forever more.
That’s the politics of it. I do not expect Maura and Chi Trib or LA Times to buy into that version. I do expect them to do more than provide for us hard-copy breakfast-table readers an almost entirely White House version.
Something had to be there to snuggle next to the 9–by-18–inch Macy’s ad on page 7, section 1, final edition, delivered to my doorstep, and Maura Reynolds supplied the supporting copy, as the ad people say. That was not her doing, of course. But really, John Kass can’t carry the whole paper, can he?
Even Obama has an earmark in this spending bill:
Big story just breaking… Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel each have at least one earmark in the omnibus spending bill before Congress.
Update: The story also includes the discovery of the name Obama in the section of the bill dealing with education money.
Update II: CQ Politics has posted the story noting that President Obama appears because the bill “is an accumulation of leftovers from 2008 — spending measures that weren’t enacted before the 110th Congress expired.”
Crafty fellows and gals.
La. Gov. Bobby Jindal is up for tonight as post-mortem Republican commentator after Big O. He’s a hot item and has some quite good things to say.
“We want the president to succeed,” he [told fellow governors yesterday]. “But let’s be clear we have a completely different philosophy about the best way to succeed.”
He poked some holes in the gigantic stimulus bill just passed by Congress and said it was clearly filled with attempts to create “temporary two-year work programs rather than real jobs.”
Recalling the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” pork-barrel earmark in Alaska, Mr. Jindal called the president’s major initiative “a stimulus package to nowhere.”
“If you want to build a road to connect an industrial site with its market, fine. But don’t just build it to build it,” he [said].
This from John Fund in WSJ.com’s Political Diary today.
Salman Rushdie has it right about “Slumdog,” which he says “piles impossibility on impossibility,” among other ridiculosities placing characters at the Taj Mahal, 1,000 miles from the previous scene.
Well it is an adventure story, light on probability but heavy with shock effect. When has that not been a winning formula?
But I missed the Taj Mahal scene, partly because I had enough of the impossibilities, partly because the sound effects (at Oak Park’s Lake Theatre, packed for the occasion) were deafening, and partly because the subject matter constituted an emotional beating-up that I was not in the mood for and trust I never will be.
Indeed, my life partner and I split somewhat after the blinding-with-acid scene, which was not my idea of fun, though hundreds on the scene disagreed, remaining in their seats.
Neither did Rushdie like the cinema-adapted “The Reader” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” telling an Atlanta audience they suffered the fate of movie adaptation that does no justice to the book.
The first he called a “leaden, lifeless movie killed by respectability.” The second “doesn’t finally have anything to say,” he said.
He’s probably right, but he might also have noted the orgy of self-congratulation nicely noted by a Detroit News man:
The tearful moments and peer hugging reeked of over-indulgent self-congratulation and carried all the sincerity of a corporate love-in. After each award, the stage looked like a crowded bus stop for famous people.
It’s a problem with industry and professional groups. The Chicago Newspaper Guild did a lot of that in years gone by, when winners sometimes took a long time telling why they won, careless about the chances of breaking one’s arm while patting oneself on the back.
