NY Times goes to smaller page size, will tighten editing.  Horrors!

“It’s an insult to the people doing substance here,” an unnamed Timesperson tells the [NY] Observer. Restaurant critic Frank Bruni [however,] isn’t alarmed by a smaller Times. “Do you succeed in reading 95 percent of the paper every day? It suggests to me that we could lose 5 percent and probably live.”

Let’s hear it for Bruni.  Less space for the in-print bloviators, please, and this goes for the well-meaning straight-news writers too.  Write tight!

They should all bone up on their Strunk & White.

Get this: Bobbie Steele is talking Petraica.

Steele refused to predict that Todd Stroger would be slated. But she said a lot of Democrats are upset at the prospect that he will be the candidate and those people are prepared to vote for Republican Tony Peraica, a county commissioner from Riverside.

“A lot of people are saying that they’re going to cross over,” Steele said.

Steele also refused to say whether she would support Todd Stroger in November if he were slated. “I will support … the candidate that I feel is best. And I’m not saying who it is,” Steele said.

[Rep. Danny] Davis said today that he would support Todd Stroger if the younger Stroger wins the party’s support for the November election.

Meanwhile,

Ald. Todd Stroger (8th), John Stroger’s son, is expected to be named the nominee by Democratic committeemen Tuesday. However, U.S. Rep. Danny Davis also is pushing for the nomination.

Danny’s going for broke?

Here’s the Democrat-Stroger business in a nutshell, in today’s S-T:

Enough is Enough… It’s Time for Reform

“Here’s the most brazen and outrageous thing about the powerbrokers who are orchestrating the coronation of Ald. Todd Stroger to his father’s seat as Cook County Board president: They’re not even pretending they have the public’s interest at heart. Instead, it’s all about quid pro quos, tit-for-tats and raw me-first politics, without even an insincere wink at good government. They are arrogant and unafraid, because they think the voters can’t or won’t do anything to stop them. When will voters decide enough is enough?”
–Chicago Sun-Times, 7/16/06

And yes, that’s Tony Petraica’s picture.  Smart money is on T. Stroger, I hear, but his press releases give way to no man.

In the middle of a speech at American Thinker by a Marine general is this simple statement that tends to absolve Mainstream Media of a charge of disloyalty but convicts them of being newspeople trying to sell papers and draw viewers:

In Iraq, the media talks about the casualties. They seldom report the successes. I don’t think that this is intentional. It is just more difficult to quantify progress and reduce it to a sound bite.

He is Major General Michael Lehnert, who heads California bases, talking to civilians about how to view the military.  Good stuff.

Dennis Byrne explains it all to GW Bush.  In today’s RealPolitics.com, he has “Save Patrick Fitzgerald,” in which he notes this man’s recognition factor nationally as in the Plame Leak investigation and World Trade Center cases (the first one, when we luxuriated in the criminal-case phase of our invasion by Islamo-Fascists) but statewide as putter-away of George Ryan, Mayordaley II apparatchiks, and others. 

It’s the second venue that Byrne wants to tell GW about, especially since he seemed surprised at a Chi reporter’s question, Was he going to reappoint Prosecutor Patrick?  The man is not being apprised of our state and local situation and instead goes local with Daley at his birthday dinner.  He should go local with people disliked or at least not recommended by Kjellander, the Illinois fixer whom Rove seems to consider very important.  More than Prosecutor Patrick, whom Byrne would like to see saved.

This stuff from Byrne goes a bit of the way to filling a huge gap in right field national blogospheric coverage where Chicago should be.  We do not get our fair share of same.  The big blogging guys rarely cite Chi Trib or Sun-Times.  Left or right, it’s the coasts, stupid, when it comes to keeping us informed.  Face it, Chicagoans, Cook Countians, Collar Countians, we are generally dissed by bloggers nationally.  RealPolitics. com seeks to repair the omission with Byrne’s stuff.