On the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, opposite the northern tip of Scotland, lines are drawn about building a wind farm that would harness the island’s natural resource — it’s a very windy place — and help the warming world.  Or would it?  Environmentalists find themselves between a rock and a hard place:

Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and other groups back the project. Lining up against it, the Scottish Wildlife Trust, Scottish Natural Heritage and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, among others, argue that the turbines will cause incalculable damage to the flora and fauna of the moor. The RSPB, which has been particularly vocal, speaks of “bird genocide,” and even the developers concede that the giant rotors are not ornithologically friendly.

Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s right.

The story is by Chi Trib’s man in the UK, Tom Hundley, and ran Friday with a wonderful color foto on p. 16 showing three residents and an ancient shepherd’s stone shepherd’s hut.  Readers of Walter Scott take notice of such a story: his The Pirate was set in the Shetland Islands, which are north of Scotland and were settled by Norwegians long before the English came.

Omaha schools are segregated after decades of federally imposed admission guidelines, but there’s nothing to be done about it, says fed court.  One of their ideas, Howard Witt relates, was to

Divide the Omaha Public Schools into three new districts, one mostly black, one mostly Hispanic and one mostly white, so parents of each racial group can control their schools.

Can’t do that, of course.  Official blackdom (NAACP) and Hispanicdom (Chicano Awareness Center) won’t let it.  The courts are acceding to their wishes or at least delaying judgment in the matter.

However, one part of that catches the eye of one who thinks schools are stand-ins for parents, who have primary responsibility.  It’s a sticky wicket, yes, and day to day school workings ought normally be out of bounds.  Indeed, overall schools policy is decided by people elected by parents and other voters.  But is there something to be said for parental choice on an individual household basis?  Try this on for size.

Let parents choose on this basis: a white, black, or hispanic school.  Any parent could choose any one of the three.  What a way to see what the people want.  The choice would be for a year.  Official black or other-dom would stand back and watch.  Prediction: Howls would arise from the various -doms, who would see their power slipping away.  They would never allow it.

Wed. Journal column is up:

MY NAME IS JAMES, AND I’M YOUR WAITER: And have some questions. How many Oak Park trustees does it take to pass an ordinance? Four. How many meetings? Don’t ask.  . . .

. . . followed by more more more

Come on.  The Sun-Times’s Mike Thomas doesn’t see Fox News as a corrective to the left– and Dem-leaning (fallen over) CNN?  Not to judge by his 10th-anniversary story with its headline that has Fox News “shooting from the lips” and asking, “Right making might?”  The story is chatty and eminently newspaper-journalistic but with head in sand.

The way critics body slam Fox News Channel, which turns 10 on Saturday, you’d think it’s the spawn of Lucifer himself — a swaggeringly jingoistic, missing-white-females-fixated, George W. Bush-toadying curse loosed upon the earth to wreak havoc. And maybe that’s true

is the lede ‘graf, with a “then again” follow-up says it may have “simply found a formula that sets it apart from the pack” etc. — without giving the formula.  The formula is its willingness to depart from the Dem-lib line.  Has Thomas looked in on Lou Dobbs lately?

The story is quick to note Fox ratings are falling faster than “its cable rivals,” without saying how far behind they are:

FOX – Aug 2005 — 1,001,000 — Aug 2006 — 933,000 – 7% drop
CNN – Aug 2005 — 433,000 — Aug 2006 — 584,000 – 35% increase
MSNBC – Aug 2005 — 220,000 — Aug 2006 — 277,000 – 26% increase

The writer asks around.

“They’ve found their audience,” says Jon Petrovich, sector head of broadcast and electronic media at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. “The proof’s in the pudding, right?”

The pudding?  “As Fox famously claims, [it’s being] Fair and Balanced.”  It’s a “much-lambasted” claim, “especially” (only? mostly?) by libs.  Example?  A glitch the other day when Mark Foley was labelled a Democrat.  That’s what drives libs nuts?  The occasional glitch?  Come on.

There’s nothing here about giving people what they want, just a sort of dancing around and mystification at success achieved by Roger Ailes, who “positioned Fox to the right of center,” per the Medill man, and thus supplied a gaping hole in coverage, say I; and in the process “poked a slumbering lion,” CNN. 

Poked a sleeping giant makes more sense, namely viewers who wanted a straighter version than is available from CNN, whose man in Baghdad, by the way, played along with Sadaam before the invasion, did he not, admitting it after the war.

Sun-Times talks sense about price-setting by government:

Freeze on electricity rates could leave us all in dark

Tempting as it may be to jump on the rapidly accelerating bandwagon calling for our electric rates to remain frozen, count us out. Sure, it’s good politics — cheap power for everyone!

more more more

Phila. Inquirer, Frank Wilson book editor, reviews a blog:

If you’re tired of negative media reporting coming out of Iraq (and, increasingly, Afghanistan), Matthew Currier Burden’s The Blog of War: Front-Line Dispatches From Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan will be a welcome respite.

A first for a mainstream daily?  One of the first?

Fr. Donald McGuire went to jail after being “evicted from a Jesuit nursing home,” according to the Wis. state Department of Corrections, says Janesville Gazette.  It was Terrace Nursing Home in Waukegan, Ill., whose “charter does not allow it to house a convicted felon.”  The home is described in part as a “religious nonmedical health care institution.”  It has 115 beds.  It is not listed on a “map” of Jesuit installations and so is probably not a Jesuit nursing home as such.  The nearest Jesuit installation is the men’s retreat house in Barrington.

McGuire’s probation, which he is serving during his appeal, will apparently be in Illinois.  Sent back to Wisconsin from the nursing home, he lived at a Lake Geneva motel but then was returned to jail Sept. 25 for refusing — on his lawyers’ advice — to take a lie detector test whose results could be used in a new trial if his conviction is reversed.  They cited his Fifth Amendment right to silence.

“The only way we can protect our client’s rights is by instructing him to refuse to participate or answer,” reads a letter from defense attorney Steve J. Watson to McGuire’s probation agent.

He has been meeting with Wis. probation officials but would not “participate fully in sex offender classes, sign related documents and take a lie-detector test,” according to a motion filed Tuesday by his appellate attorneys.

If he complied with the requirements, information from the sex-offender class or from a lie-detector test could be used against him in a new trial if his appeal is successful, the motion says.  A hearing is set for Oct. 10 to stay the probation, in addition to the prison sentence, pending appeal.  A stay would relieve him of the requirements which have led him to jail.

The suit claims the Chicago Province of Jesuits, Loyola University and Loyola Academy all “have information about a number of suspected child molesting agents that it has never disclosed to law enforcement or the public at large, causing people such as the plaintiffs to be harmed as children or vulnerable young adults.

. . . .
The suit alleges that the Jesuits received reports of McGuire’s alleged sexual abuse of minors from 1970 through the 1990s, but they failed to report this information to the police or the public.

. . . .
The suit seeks to have the defendants release the names of any agents of the order or the two schools who have been accused of sexual abuse of minors, and to share that information, as well as any other documents that are evidence of sexual abuse of minors, with law enforcement and the public.

The terrible, awful news from Lancaster area led me to recall what I saw of the Amish in a 2003 trip.  They were part of the scene at the Green Dragon:

. . . Back to Pennsylvania, which in its SE corner is quite traversible. Last night to a small-animal auction at the Green Dragon market near Ephreta, where Amish men and boys in straw hats, some of them black fedoras, others in usual straw, and a wide assortment of other citizens watched the chickens, doves, furry critters, etc. went to the highest bidder.

We sat in the bleachers and were careful not to scratch nose during bidding, lest we end up holding some hamsters at a price low but not low enough to justify the purchase. Mennonites and Brethren and even some apparent Yuppies there, women wearing lace beanies tied under chin, not bonneted like out and out Amish. Not Yuppies, who had their own uniforms but did not flaunt their circumstance.

Some of these Mennonites, Brethren, etc. apparently use the birth control method recommended by our family doc for many years, the late, great Gregory White MD, namely breast feeding. Yes, I know you call people using that method parents, but so what?

Much sobriety and serenity and indeed relaxation seen among all such folks I have seen on this trip. This Green Dragon market is Fridays only. There are at least three others in the general neighborhood, including Roots Market, near Manheim, to which vendors repair on their given days. We had root beer floats and (one of us) a hot dog at the round-stool winding counter where we might also have gotten a variety of hash house food.

And all over the place, families with kids, stopping at dozens of various counters for food, flea market items, antiques, clothing, you name it. It closed down about nine-thirty, with families who run booths sitting in back of theirs sampling the ice cream or pina colada drink, for instance. Friday night out in the great American boonies.

Into this idyl strode a demon.