A poll I recently conducted on behalf of the Public Service Research Foundation found that a 56% majority of workers who are not organized wouldn’t vote to organize — while just 35% would consider doing so. And for America’s organized labor movement, that’s a significant problem.

— John Zogby in Wall St. Jnl 8/8/05

* Neil Steinberg on not being able to tell the late Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw apart, they being “both trim, blandly handsome guys who read the news.”  Or is it Tom Jennings and Peter Brokaw?  In any case, they are or were barely distinguishable, colorless individuals.  On the other hand, what do we want in a reader?

* Mark Brown on not liking Ike cap because it’s a waste of taxpayers’ money, along with dozens, maybe hundreds of highway-paving extravaganzas elsewhere.  It’s an Oak Park project, he lives there, so he feels obliged.  Column is worth reading in part because he quotes a man from Taxpayers for Common Sense, which has hit this highway bill hard.  If it’s a harbinger of more commentary on excessive government spending, it’s interesting.

* U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer quoted on learning, “sort of,” from laws of other countries when interpreting our constitution, as he did in a 2002 Death Row case.  It’s in a speech he gave to lawyers in Chicago.  But if Your Honor pleases, learning is one thing, citing as evidence is another.  This is a rhetorical stunt in which one casually plays down the reality of the situation.  Not entirely honest, Your Honor.

* Story about dangerous Tennessee convict escaped with his murderous wife in which a sheriff’s spokesman said the escapee “has no care or concern on what he does to anyone.”  (Italics added.)  No.  It’s care or concern “for.”  The harassed spokesman is hardly to be blamed.  Ever since Joe Garagiola, baseball announcers have been speaking of one’s record “on the season,” which is Exhibit A, this being summertime, for my case for the Demise of the Preposition.  Yes.  The language will fall to pieces less through misuse of big words than of little ones. 

Tenses too, of course.  The historical present has taken over the presentation of earthy comment and narration by John Madden and others and is finding its way into less frenetic disquisition by non-sports figures.  More to come, I hope, concerning both of these disaster areas — prepositions and tense.

* Jeb Bush of Florida quoted saying NCAA “insults” Florida State U. and the Seminole Indians of Florida by penalizing use of Seminole as name for FSU teams.  NCAA is telling both communities, “You’re not smart enough to understand this.”  The Florida Seminoles have signed off on using their name.  They are OK with it, or as we used to say, it’s OK with them. 

See also, while we are at it, Chi Trib’s Mike Downey on the Notre Dame leprechaun — “No blarney: Leprechaun must go” — as grossly insulting to all red-blooded Micks.  

As a proud Irish-American, I demand that you make the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame get rid of that stupefying, stereotypical mascot of theirs. And that little jig of his. And I mean pronto, if you’ll excuse my use of Indian lingo.

Ladies and gentlemen of the NCAA, I implore you. Do that thing you do. Do what you did Friday, when your executive committee announced that it no longer would tolerate any “hostile and abusive racial/ethnic/national origin mascots, nicknames or imagery.”

A leprechaun is all that.

He is mischievous by nature. He is up to no good. He clearly is abusive. Have you ever seen him treat Notre Dame’s enemies with any kindness?

Etc.  Yes.  Tell it to my O’Hara in-law and the many others who once were ND leprechauns, while you’re at it.  I for one will not be doing so.

* Last but not least, read (right away) Leslie Baldacci’s remarkable broadside against ladies of the office parading downtown as if they were ladies of the street:

Since I started working downtown in July, I keep wondering, “Where is the hooker convention?”

Who can help but notice all the women walking the streets of our city in broad daylight dressed like, well, streetwalkers? Where are they all going? Where’s the party?

Thus it begins.

Ladies [she concludes], if sexual power is what you are trying to muster, you have it all backward. If you squander your power on the street, handing it over to total strangers like it is worth nothing and means nothing to you, it will mean nothing. Lingerie is something you reveal when the time is right to bring a man to his knees. What will you have left in your arsenal when you need the heavy artillery in the boudoir? Nothing at all.

Bravissimo, Baldacci!

“Morale Woes Rattle [Illinois Natl] Guard” is James Janega’s banner headline story today in Chi Trib, worth reading because of Janega’s credibility as sometime-embedded battle-scene and behind-scene reporter with months of Iraq-coverage experience.  This story is out of Chicago; it’s based on a 29 Jan 05 memo out of Springfield, “Operation Strength Readiness,” downloadable in .pdf format.  It has a # of names blacked out, and “soldiers fear retribution if they speak out” is a jump-page head:

Soldiers in interviews said they have not raised critical questions over readiness for fear of retribution from Guard leadership.

says the text.  This is Bureaucratic Rot 101, as in my Bending the Rules: What American Priests Tell American Catholics (Crossroad, 1994), where most of the veteran pastor interviewees preferred anonymity.  Most prefer not to be personally rattled, for good reason.

It’s a six-plus-month-old memo, however, sent as Janega says, “to begin correcting the problems,” and deep in the story, including its last paragraphs, are command-level quotes about efforts (one of them at least mildly laughable: special football jerseys for units with top personnel-retention scores) to repair the situation.

The memo . . .  comes as the Army National Guard is undergoing convulsive changes to make it more responsive to sudden wartime call-ups.

Nationally, surveys of returning troops find similar trends, and the number of new recruits has been falling in active-duty military, reserve and National Guard units.

The Illinois Army National Guard in particular has grappled with leadership and staffing issues in recent years . . .

I found those sentences after asking my usual “compared to what?”  Janega has it with this reference to the rest of the country.  It’s a specific enough reference for a newspaper story, which is not an encyclopedia article.  As for what to do and what’s been done about it,

. . . many personnel shortages in units have been fixed since the operations order was drafted, [Guard commander Maj. Gen. Randal E.] Thomas said.

Meanwhile, the Department of the Army has outlined a plan to change its focus to smaller, more easily deployable units. Under the plan, some 7,000 soldiers in Illinois’ 9,100-strong force will be shifted between units, in some cases eliminating understaffed units altogether.

I would like to hear more about this, and maybe I will in future Chi Trib stories, preferably by Janega and ideally with similar eye-catching placement in the paper.  Location, location, location, as retailers say.  Shelf position matters.  News retailers (editors) keep that in mind, don’t they?

 The fact that Souter decided — like Warren, Brennan, Blackmun, Stevens, O’Connor and Kennedy — that he would prefer to be a Philosopher King rather than a judge once he got on the court doesn’t mean you never can tell with any of these guys. It means you have to find judges who wake up every morning: (1) thinking about the right answers to legal questions; and (2) chortling about how much his latest opinion will tick off the left.

Uh-oh, Ann Coulter again, continuing to press (make) her case that John Roberts is a cautiously chosen U.S. Supreme Court nominee who can’t be trusted to be another Scalia or Thomas.  “READ MY LIPS: NO NEW LIBERALS” is her column title, again setting the mark for wit and perspicacity in the political-commentary arena.  In this column she shows how good Souter looked to conservatives based on his record as New Hampshire’s attorney general — tough on abortion, soft on lowering the state flag on Good Friday.

At one point, she writes,  again with wicked, well-aimed wit, “the only people more opposed to abortion than Souter were still in vitro.”  As for lowering the flag to commemorate Christ’s death, he said at the time that it

“no more establishes a religious position on the part of the state or promotes a religion than the lowering of the flag for the death of Hubert Humphrey promotes the cause of the Democratic Party in New Hampshire.”

He also “openly proclaimed his support for the ‘original intent’ in interpreting the Constitution.”  Then came his philosopher king turnaround, which Coulter deplores, needless to say.  She wants a different kind of justice, one who aggressively pursues constitutional interpretation over making things right as he sees fit.  She even gives up the pro-life issue:

 I don’t give a rat’s behind whether the guy is pro-life, whether his wife is pro-life, whether he used to be pro-life, whether he will become pro-life, etc. That tells us how he would vote as a state legislator. He isn’t being nominated for state legislator.

Let us remember that last sentence.  It’s very important and in typical Ann Coulter fashion encapsulates the essence of the question, if I may go redundant for effect.  Just this once, OK?

This by former OP trustee Barbara S. Ebner appeared recently in both local papers.  It is a good response to new leadership ideas in the Village board:

Please allow me to affirm that I am a true believer in the Council Manager form of government. It has stood us in good stead for 50 years and has moved Oak Park far ahead of its neighbors who retain the use of the aldermanic form. It has allowed us to become the diverse, welcoming, prize-winning village we are, while our neighbors to the south suffer from scandals, intrigue and party politics.

In that regard, several disturbing recommendations were made at the village board’s study session last Monday night. They were made by new trustees, and I would like to believe they were made from innocence, not as an attempt to change the government form. To my knowledge, we have had no referendum on changing our form of government. You were elected to serve under this form.

I will only address two of the issues that I see as challenging governance under our current Village Manager form. There are others, and I hope they will also be addressed.

First, a recommendation was made to discuss the forming of a Personnel Commission, although no specifics were given. Since commissions are formed to make recommendations to the board, such a commission has no function. One of the basic tenets of the Council Manager form of government specifically places all hiring and firing of staff in the hands of the professional manager. The single employee of the board, the Village Manager, is the only person such a commission would be responsible for. Unless, the board was to require a search for a new Village Manager, such a commission would have no tasks.

Second, a recommendation to give responsibility for a specific geographic area to each member of the board was made. Although the Council Manager form of government allows for such divisions, there is no place for such a system in Oak Park. We are a tiny, land-locked community. We have made diversity our single most important goal. Our geography is probably our least diverse aspect.

Trustees are elected to serve all of Oak Park. Their major function is to set policy, and approve a budget which reflects these policy decisions. Directing individual activities to a specific geographic area of the village can only mean making these individuals spokespersons for individual areas. In other places they call them aldermen.

It immediately puts trustees at odds with one another. Arguments over how many pot holes were tilled, streets repaved, etc. in a given area would only be the beginning. This is not the goal of our form of government. It can only make meetings longer, make it necessary to have more meetings and provide more acrimony, not less. This is exactly the situation that takes away time and energy from your ability to govern under the Council Manager form of government.

Allow me to quote from a document from the international Council Manager’s Association (ICMA org for those interested). “The council is the legislative body; its members are the community’s decision makers. Power is centralized in the elected council, which approves the budget and determines the tax rate, for example. The council also focuses on the community’s goals, major projects, and such long-term considerations as community growth, land use development, capital improvement plans, capital financing and strategic planning. The council hires a professional manager to carry out the administrative responsibilities and supervises the manager’s performance.”

First, do your job! Then allow the Village Manager to do his.

“They do not have a commission to solve society’s problems, as they see them, but simply to decide cases before them according to the rule of law,” [Supreme Court nominee Roberts] wrote to the [senate judiciary] committee, which will begin considering Roberts’ nomination on Sept. 6.

Say wha’?  The men and women in black don’t come with answers?  Subversive!