Chi Trib Magazine’s cover story yesterday is seductive because it moves along and reads well, but it’s still a puff piece for a politician — Attorney Genl Lisa Madigan.  “Not everybody expected Lisa Madigan to do a good job as attorney general. Some thought she’d be an outright flop” is the nearest it comes to a mumblin’ word of negativity. 

Still, it’s what we have come to expect from the magazine, which operates in its own sphere, as the space it inexplicably occupied when on the Sunday after 9/11 four years ago, it ran a cover story about Bill Ayers, former fugitive from Feds, in which he had kind words to say about terrorism.  The Trib apologized for the piece in run-of-paper, page two; the Mag has its own “preprint” time table, and it was scrap the issue with all its ad wealth or ship it and apologize.  A no-brainer, that.

It’s awfully tacky of me to bring this up, but with her regular (St. Clement church) mass attendance getting several paragraphs and her mother’s Catholicity including Jesuit college graduation also in the running, is it too much to ask that the c– and a-words might have turned up?  Choice and (oh, how hard a word to say) Abortion?  And her being solidly in the camp of C. when it comes to A.?  And having promised to her Planned P. supporters when running for A.G. that she would emulate her friend Elliott Spitzer, NY state AG mentioned in the article as corporation-buster and consumer advocate, and go after abortion counsellors who suggest alternatives to pregnant clients?

That, my friend, is a no-brainer: You’re damn right it’s tacky, and shut the heck up!  OK, ok, ok, ok, ok . . . I don’t mean no trouble.  Really I don’t.  I don’t, I don’t, I don’t . . .   Sighhhhhh.

Let us hear it now for Dennis Byrne in Chi Trib with his “GULF COAST CRISIS: Spreading blame from pillar to post,” in which we read a truly helpful solution:

Abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency and give its job to the media, Rev. Jesse Jackson and other know-it-alls who accused Hurricane Katrina rescuers of incompetence, indifference or racism.

Yes, but putting FEMA down is a serious recommendation by Jacksonville State U. econ teacher Christopher Westley at the Mises Institute site.  “What if there was no such thing as FEMA?” Westley asks, intending to say, I’m sure, what if there WERE no such thing as FEMA, because there is one and the condition is contrary to fact.  He delivers a list of things FEMA did badly or didn’t do well, including the off-again, on-again $2,000 federal donation to survivors, saying its director Mike Brown (who later resigned, as we know) would have gotten a Ken Lay-style indictment to contend with if he were in private business.

If there were no FEMA, no such wealth distribution (to say nothing of the waste) would take place, while much of the currently squelched efforts by private individuals, non-profits, and firms would be flourishing all along the Gulf Coast.

FEMA was being generous with “other people’s money.”  Its concern as a public agency is primarily public relations, not public relief, concerned about

drawing attention away from decades of federal levee management and federal flood insurance programs. This is about not losing the black vote in the city that practically invented vote-buying. Even if relieving human suffering is on FEMA’s radar screen, it is far down its list of major priorities.

We can’t be sure if he’s right about particulars in his own indictment, because he relies on MSM, which got fairly hysterical in the last week or two and were commended for it by the lately somewhat worked up Editor & Publisher, the trade gazette whose editor urged news anchors to gin up opposition to the Iraq war.  Objectivity is becoming the hobgoblin of superstitious men, to adapt Emerson, who said it about “a foolish consistency” and probably meant it, such was his peculiar mindset.  But this FEMA-basher makes good Mises-style points about government inefficiency.

On the other hand, consider this about the Katrina relief effort so far from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:  “Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge” got it wrong, says Jack Kelly, meaning these MSM’ers I mention above — MainStream Media performers, for you uninitiated.  It was one of the worst ever, said various instant hurricane mavens.  No it wasn’t, says Kelly, it was one of the best responses ever.

“The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne.”

He’s quoting a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief and ticked off the record this time.

[It] took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 2002. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.

. . . . More than 32,000 people have been rescued, many plucked from rooftops by Coast Guard helicopters.

The Army Corps of Engineers has all but repaired the breaches and begun pumping water out of New Orleans.

Shelter, food and medical care have been provided to more than 180,000 refugees.

As for newsies beefing about how long it took — instant mavens all or most — consider what’s said by a former Air Force logistics officer with his advice “for us in the Fourth Estate” on his blog, MoltenThought.  “You cannot just snap your fingers and make the military appear somewhere,” says the AF man, Jason van Steenwyk.

Guardsmen need to receive mobilization orders; report to their armories; draw equipment; receive orders and convoy to the disaster area. Guardsmen driving down from Pennsylvania or Navy ships sailing from Norfolk can’t be on the scene immediately.

Relief efforts must be planned. Other than prepositioning supplies near the area likely to be afflicted (which was done quite efficiently), this cannot be done until the hurricane has struck and a damage assessment can be made. There must be a route reconnaissance to determine if roads are open, and bridges along the way can bear the weight of heavily laden trucks.

And federal troops and Guardsmen from other states cannot be sent to a disaster area until their presence has been requested by the governors of the afflicted states.

Uh-oh.  We know whom he’s talking about, the do-nothing governor of Louisiana.  She dithered, as we know, watching her mayoral counterpart dither too, leaving 200 or so school buses unused.  (Uh-oh the other way: Kelly reports 2,000, which is effectively rebutted at Media Matters but not before being widely and inaccurately reported, mostly by conservative outlets but also by George Stephanopoulos at ABC News.)

Tom McNamee is editor of the Sunday Sun-Times Controversy section that debuted in mid-July.  He and the paper’s higher-ups deserve credit for running stuff you find on Conservative Book Club reading lists and in Reason Mag, such as today’s excerpt from One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-reliance, by feminist antagonist Christina Hoff Sommers and American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Sally Satel, M.D. and “How Not to Fight Fat,” which makes fun of federal “disease detectives,” by the eminently contrarian libertarian Jacob Sullum, author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use (and he’s not talking about what you get over any counter).

The section also has a delicious religious joke, winner of competition organized by ShipofFools.com, which has an 1879 Reformed Baptist calling an 1915 version “heretic scum” and pushing him off a bridge — a guy he’d been trying to talk out of suicide before he found him out.

This Ship of Fools site is a gem, by the way — it shows how one thing leads to another, if the first thing is at all Internet-based.  It features “the Mystery Worshiper,” in the British Isles and elsewhere, which has included Chicago, where the RC St. Mary of the Angels in Bucktown and the Episcopal Church of the Ascension on LaSalle Street.  It’s lively, intelligent commentary, cleanly written.

Can’t say enough for S-T and McNamee for breaking new ground here.

If you want to read about people with guts and spirit in the midst of flooded New Orleans, try A do-it-ourselves shelter shines: A community bands together in civilized self-sufficiency, in stark contrast to the misery in official New Orleans shelters.  in The Baltimore Son, by Kelly Brewington.

“If the city and the state are stumbling or in over their head, then it’s FEMA’s [Federal Emergency Management Agency’s] responsibility to show some leadership,” said Jerry Hauer, director of public health preparedness at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Right, but by the nature of bureaucracy — following orders, scheduling things, etc. — it’s the rare director that jumps right in, knocking heads and getting things done.  (Is this Jerry Hauer such a director?)  Directors know that’s a good way to find oneself job-hunting.  It’s the nature of things, as hurricanes are in the nature of things.  And believe me, howls would have been heard from French Quarter to Latin Quarter and all other quarters of the continental U.S. if restoring order — a sine qua non in such cases and especially in this one — had resulted in shooting someone, assuming it didn’t and excepting New O. cops reportedly getting “at least five” bad guys, themselves shooters.

Note, by the way, that looking to feds is advised after “city and state are stumbling or in over their head.”  Who thinks they weren’t in this case.  The governor didn’t do this or that, thinking the mayor would do it.  The mayor wept and cursed on radio — both in over their heads every bit as much as New Orleans.

It’s all in an excellent short rundown by ABC, “Who’s to Blame for Delayed Response to Katrina? New Orleans’ Emergency Plan Not Followed, Federal Government Slow to Take Lead”, which is enough to make MSM-bashers like me think again.

“What does peace look like?” ask Peace Fair promoters. 

Try a nation run by German Nazis or Russian Communists or Sadaam the Sadistic and his Wretched Sons. 

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Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Trapani wastes no time getting out of town, on board
JIM BOWMAN
Tuesday, September 06, 2005

TRAPANI TRANSPLANTED Elmwood Park must be pleased as punch to have former Oak Park village president and trustee Joanne Trapani, a new resident, on its Plan, Zoning and Development Commission (PZD). She was introduced at the Aug. 1 meeting of the Elmwood Park trustees, its minutes say. She bought a house in Elmwood Park 10 days after the April 5 Oak Park election. Her first PZD meeting was to be Aug. 8. The next is set for Sept. 9.

END OF OP AS WE KNOW IT? Ex-Oak Park trustee Barbara Ebner wrote both newspapers saying the village-manager concept is jeopardized by New Leadership trustees’ suggesting a hiring commission and regionalization of trustee accountability. She says the first takes from the manager what belongs to him, the second makes aldermen out of at-large trustees responsible to the whole village, not just part of it. This is sniping of a high order. It gets to mindset, even philosophy.

HOMER NODS (SAID HORACE), BUT CONCORDIA? The Concordia U. motto “Empowering the mind, Enriching the spirit” should be the other way around, “Enriching the mind, Empowering the spirit.” The mind is well stocked or isn’t, the spirit is willing or isn’t, or so Matthew (26:41) and Mark (14:38) tell us.

WHATEVER DID IT WANT? The Village of Oak Park called Aug. 18 at 9:43 a.m. asking how I was doing that day. It had a young female voice: “This is the Village of Oak Park.” When I suggested in slightly raised volume—nothing like when I tell the dog across the street to shut up—that it not ask me that and get on with its business, it hung up.

DIG THAT NUTTY EMERSON Here in Oak Park, there was once a Hawthorne School and once an Emerson. We know that, but do we know that Hawthorne considered Emerson and his friends “queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved [seeing themselves as] important agents of the world’s destiny, yet [were] simply bores of a very intense water?” We didn’t, but now we do, thanks to an essay by Christopher Benfey in the Times Literary Supplement last December.

WHO’S IN CHARGE? Lines formed to the right and the left (not sure who’s right, who’s left) at a District 97 board meeting last June in the matter of teacher and principal evaluations. Peter Barber (yay Beye!) and Julie Blankemeier, both newly elected, stood for getting in on the process early and often. Marcia Frank, not newly elected, demurred: “We at the board are not conducting the evaluation. … [W]e’re micromanaging if we decide what needs to be evaluated.”

That’s about as old a school conundrum as there is: Do parents trust the professionals or would they rather count the cards? Do parents think only of their own kids, not of all kids, and don’t know how to take care of all, as only the pros do? Or are teachers their surrogates, responsible to them whatever their training? When Dist. 97 solves this conundrum, it should issue an all-points bulletin to school districts coast to coast.

JAVA JIVE Caribou on Lake Street, late fall, 7 a.m. Handsome couple behind counter. Very personable guy. Customer says a cup of regular for here, man asks if he wants award-winning Colombian, brandishing announcement of Caribou’s award. Customer says yes, man gives him a cup, says he gets three refills. He says he would never drink that much, but it’s nice to know.

ROMANTIC SPOKEN HERE In his novel Waverley, Walter Scott, creator of the historical novel as we know it, depicts his hero as romantic by upbringing, thanks to his seat-of-pants, highly literate but unsupervised and largely unstructured schooling. The lad’s tutor, with other fish to fry, let him have his head. It’s like most Oak Park kids these days. One of the best of Oak Park elementary-school teachers some years back encouraged students to “create” (not discover) knowledge, she told me.

YOUR SOURCE FOR EVERYTHING Bowman’s blogs—Chicago Newspapers; Blithely, Blithely; and Oak Park, Home of Edgar Rice Burroughs—are linked at www.jimbowman.com.