“Among the five major dailies in the Chicago of my early boyhood, my father preferred the Daily News, an afternoon paper reputed to have excellent foreign correspondents,” says Joseph Epstein in Commentary. “Democratic in its general political affiliation, though not aggressively so, the Daily News was considered the intelligent Chicagoan’s paper.”

Something has happened, however.  Epstein cites all the familiar grim details about newspapers’ decline in our day:

Four-fifths of Americans once read newspapers; today, apparently fewer than half do. Among adults, in the decade
1990-2000, daily readership fell from 52.6 percent to 37.5 percent. Among the young, things are much worse: in one study, only 19 percent of those between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four reported consulting a daily paper, and only 9 percent trusted the information purveyed there; a mere 8 percent found newspapers helpful, while 4 percent
thought them entertaining.

He adds loss of advertising, draconic staff cutbacks, reduction in size of pages, UK parallels to all this.  His father read his Daily News religiously, but

Today, his son reads no Chicago newspaper whatsoever. A serial killer could be living in my apartment building, and I would be unaware of it until informed by my neighbors. As for the power of the press to shape and even change my mind, I am in the condition of George Santayana, who wrote to his sister in 1915 that he was too old to “be influenced
by newspaper argument. When I read them I form perhaps a new opinion of the newspaper but seldom a new opinion on the subject discussed.”

He gets the NY Times, reading it (a) to see who died, (b) to learn “if anyone has hit upon a novel way of denigrating President Bush; the answer is invariably no, though they seem never to tire of trying,” and (c) in general to stay abreast of what’s said, as Santayana did in 1915.  This daily exercise takes him a half hour.

For how long FISA takes to approve a wiretap, see Natl Review’s Byron York quoting the 9/11 Commission and other pretty good sources showing how long it takes, not for FISA to decide, but to ask it:

In 2002, when the president made his decision, there was widespread, bipartisan frustration with the slowness and inefficiency of the bureaucracy involved in seeking warrants from the special intelligence court, known as the FISA court. Even later, after the provisions of the Patriot Act had had time to take effect, there were still problems with the FISA court — problems examined by members of the September 11 Commission — and questions about whether the court can deal effectively with the fastest-changing cases in the war on terror.

Consider:

Coleen Rowley, the FBI agent who ran up against a number roadblocks in her effort to secure a FISA warrant in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the al Qaeda operative who had taken flight training in preparation for the hijackings. Investigators wanted to study the contents of Moussaoui’s laptop computer, but the FBI bureaucracy involved in applying for a FISA warrant was stifling, and there were real questions about whether investigators could meet the FISA court’s probable-cause standard for granting a warrant. FBI agents became so frustrated that they considered flying Moussaoui to France, where his computer could be examined. But then the attacks came, and it was too late.

Which is what Bush wants not to happen again.

If you were wondering how the NSA leaks endanger us, read this.  And weep.

Under fire from FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), DePaul U. has revoked its

vague ban on “propaganda” that it used last fall to silence student protest of a campus appearance by controversial University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill,

as mentioned below.  Read about it here and here.

Wisdom reigns among the heirs of Monsieur Vincent?

Meanwhile, FIRE’s “Spotlight: the Campus Freedom Resource” has lots more about DePaul and gives it a speech code rating of Red, which means it has “at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.”

What would St. Vincent say?

ChiTrib’s Steve Chapman says the NSA-eavesdropping leaks and the Valerie Plame leaks are different, because

unmasking Valerie Plame served no useful purpose. The leaks in this case, by contrast, served a function that is vital in a democracy: letting the public know that the government is secretly doing something it is not authorized to do.

How is this different from saying it’s ok to break the law because your motives are good?