Tag: Blithe Spirit

Rewarded for failure

Now and then I dip into Steve Sailer’s America’s Half Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s Story of Race and Inheritance for its lucidity and intelligence but mainly to add to my understanding of what makes Barack tick. 

Based on this analysis, he will be due for another promotion if he fails at president:

Obama’s career largely consists of failing upwards. He undertakes careers — community organizer, antidiscrimination lawyer, leftwing charity chairman, South Side politician — to fulfill the dreams from his father, to help “in your people’s struggle,” but doesn’t accomplish much of significance in that overwhelming undertaking.

In fact, he may make things marginally worse — the fundamental flaw in Obama’s career philosophy is that each of his jobs has been intended to help poor blacks get more goodies out of whites, but government handouts undermine black moral fiber, leaving the black community worse off morally than before the Great Society.  . . . .

Yet, Obama is then rewarded by white people with a promotion anyway. They like his style, even if he doesn’t get any results.

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Illinois a toss-up for U.S. senate

This race remains close:

The U.S. Senate race in Illinois is now a virtual toss-up, with Democratic State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias holding a slight 44% to 41% lead over Republican Congressman Mark Kirk.

Tough nut for Repubs to crack, this Illinois.  It’s also blue and heading for fiscal trouble.  Fear not.  The incumbent Dem governor has the answer:

SPRINGFIELD – — Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn pitched a 33 percent income tax increase Wednesday, framing the debate as a choice between finding more money or hurting schoolchildren.

Ah yes, the children.  Teacher unions too, but forget that.

In any case, we have here the marvelous religious-style faith in taking money out of private hands and giving it to our noble, trusted Bureau-Dems.

Nothing’s too good for children and poor people, you see.  But it’s a misplaced faith:

There is a distinct pattern throughout American history: When tax rates are reduced, the economy’s growth rate improves and living standards increase.

Good tax policy has a number of interesting side effects. For instance, history tells us that tax revenues grow and “rich” taxpayers pay more tax when marginal tax rates are slashed.

This means lower income citizens bear a lower share of the tax burden – a consequence that should lead class-warfare politicians to support lower tax rates.

This will never play with Dem netroots, SEIU, IEA and the like.  So?

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Illinois for Brady

Hello, everybody in Illinois and all the ships at sea: Brady is up by 10 over Quinn!

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely voters in the state finds State Senator Bill Brady leading [Gov.] Quinn 47% to 37%. Six percent (6%) prefer some other candidate, and nine percent (9%) are undecided.

It’s the first week there’s been a Republican candidate.  Brady won by a whopping 193 votes over an opponent who’s on board now with his candidacy.

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What did they hear and when did they hear it?

Here’s how Chi Trib told about three witnesses telling Cicero cops about the Valentine’s Day fire-setters, boldface added:

Two days after the fire, three people reported to Cicero police that they had heard Myers and Comier discuss burning down the building, authorities said. One of the witnesses agreed to wear a wire and record conversations between the two men, according to court documents.

Same thing, Sun-Times:

Two days after the blaze, three people told Cicero police they overheard Myers and Comier talking about their part in the fire. Investigators wired one person up, and that person recorded a series of conversations with the two defendants over five days, . . . .

Me, I read the Trib story first and wondered when they had overheard (more precise than heard, hence better communication) M. & C.  They reported two days after the fire, but they had heard?  When?

Then I read S-T, its overheard and talking about their part in the fire, vs. discuss burning down the building, as if they had yet to do it, and “of course,” I said:  They heard it after the fire.  And I continued with the story, which I found satisfactory if gruesome.

Another difference.  Trib on the perpetrators’ vulgarities:

“Where the (expletive) did you get that I’m going to get you $15,000?” Lacy quoted Myers saying. “At the best you get $5,000.”

and

In one taped conversation, [Comier] explained how he ignited the blaze with a mixture of gas and oil that would mask the accelerant’s smell, according to documents.

“I dumped it on there, threw a match and that was it,” he is accused of saying. “I thought this (expletive) out for too long.”

S-T, offering better detail:

Comier was recorded saying he set the fire “in a different way,” blending oil and gasoline, which he believed would hide the gas smell.

“I thought this s— out for too long, man,” Comier said, according to Lacy.

and

Myers and Comier apparently had different ideas about Comier’s compensation from the insurance money, according to the transcript Lacy read.

“Where the f— did you get that I’m going to get you $15,000?” Myers is caught on tape telling Comier, Lacy said. “At the best you get $5,000. At the least you get $3,000.”

Now.  Why make the reader supply the (fucking) expletive?  It’s a matter of smooth, rapid comprehension, which S-T facilitates.

Yet another thing, same exchanges.  S-T account is richer in detail and directness, which if you don’t see, I’m not going to bother to explain.  Composition by committee at Trib?  Could be.  Three bylines there are, plus two more acknowledgments at the end:

Stacy St. Clair and Gerry Smith are Tribune reporters. Victoria Pierce is a freelance reporter. Tribune reporter Ray Gibson and freelancer Joseph Ruzich also contributed to this report.

S-T?  Either somebody on rewrite is being overlooked or “KARA SPAK Staff Reporter” is Da Woman on this one, all alone, tapping out something readable. 

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Notre Dame paper to law prof: “You’re out!”

You’re a law prof emeritus and still teaching at ND and think that gets you into the student newspaper?  Think again, Bud:

Notre Dame Paper Snubs Prof’s Column Upholding Church Teaching on Homosexuality

 blares LifeSiteNews.

The editor of the University of Notre Dame’s campus newspaper has refused to publish an installment of a former ND professor’s biweekly column because he said the column, which defended the Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexuality, required a “differing viewpoint” as a counterbalance.

Charles_Rice

Charles Rice resigned as columnist for The Observer.  He’d been one since 1992.  The editor, Matt Gamber, “personally had some concerns with the content of the column,” he had told Rice in an email.  He had no problems with Rice’s data, which he told him were “factually correct” — as opposed to how else correct?

But  he “did not feel it lent itself to creating a productive discussion, all things considered, and “was a bit concerned with certain language as well.”

Now that’s what I call giving it to him straight from the shoulder.

“In the future, if you would like to examine this topic, we thought it might be beneficial to do so in a point-counterpoint format, perhaps with an author of an opposing or differing viewpoint. That way, each ‘side,’ to speak, would have the opportunity to present relevant facts, evidence and analysis to define its position.”

Hey, give one “side,” you ought to give the other.  This is a newspaper editor?  Does he give a damn about circulation?  What the damn fool ought to do is put Rice’s column on P-1, across the top, for cri-iy, letting chips fall and awaiting a deluge which becomes another huge P-1 play next week full of excoriation and contumely.  Does he want this stuff discussed, or doesn’t he?  What’s he afraid of, rocks through his dormitory window?

This is not an editor but a wuss.

The column is here.  Decide if I’m right or not.

In any case, Rice was having none of it:

“In a university that claims to be Catholic, I am not willing to restrict my presentation of Catholic teaching to a format that treats the authoritative teaching of the Church as merely one viewpoint or ‘side’ among many.” 

Hell, that’s another issue that ought to be joined, not swept under the rug.  It’s a Catholic university, which means it’s also a university, where issues are joined, hot buttons are pushed, and debate ensues.  Where did this kid get his earlier training, at a School for Diplomats (who hate hot buttons).  He’s not a diplomat in this case, more a dip.

That is to say, Gamber should welcome Rice’s apparently controversial assertion that RC authority trumps all and ask for comments, beginning with the presumably RC university officials.  Here is a hotter button than homosexuality as promotable, privileged, whatever.

Rice says the Catechism considers

homosexual conduct to be “acts of grave depravity,” and that while the inclination to homosexual acts is not a sin, it is also intrinsically disordered.

Open this up for discussion and see what happens.  Maybe it’s been done in the Observer.  If so, do it again.  I do not think the matter is closed.  It’s not global warming, is it?

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Rahm v. Barack’s altar servers

Jonah Goldberg in Chi Trib discusses the clash of idealism and realism in the Obama White House, where the true believers clash with Rahm Emanuel. Obama

wants to be “transformative” like Ronald Reagan. But such a transformation requires an electorate willing and capable of being transformed. Obama and his acolytes misread the public, thinking voters were as worshipful as they were.

Some of us never were, but lots were. Trouble is for the true B’s,

Emanuel’s understanding of the political landscape puts him in the reality-based community. And that is a community the Obama cult refuses to join.

It’s just as well.  Either way, it’s bad for the U.S., whether more or less socialism.  The former is not passing, as we know.  The latter might, and that would be very bad.

Changing the Eric Zorn subject

‘Swipe fees’ a hidden tax on the poor, most of all,

says Eric Zorn in Chi Trib, according to his columnar headline, which engages me not, mainly because I find myself distracted by a theme that pops uncontrolled into my head, namely that so many things are hidden taxes on poor and rich and us in between that I cannot count them. Start with inflationary spending and money-making, that is, printing of it, by federal govt. 

It’s such an old issue that I hesitate to raise it in such august company as Eric Z., but inflation cheapens the money we have and we lose buying power, which I can safely aver is what the economy is all about. I surely missed Z’s earlier column about inflation and when I get a minute or two I will find it . . . .

Inspired by experience

Sun-Times corrected this boo-boo, which can be found here, at a Google search page and was not wrong in hard copy: “It was Devine design.”

Yes, there was a state’s attorney named Devine, but no, it was not his design for Otis McDonald to become lead complainant in the case v. Chi’s gun ordinance in the U.S. Supreme Court.  McD had divinity in mind, not the immediate past state’s attorney. He and the ordinance and why he’s fighting it with help of “gun lobby” people is told in a quite good piece today by Mark Konkol, one of S-T’s hard-at-work conveyors of hard reporting. McD has had enough and isn’t taking it any more, that’s why. 

He’s a 21st-century urban hero who looks back on his sharecropper mother in Louisiana who cashed in her piggy bank, all $18, to buy him a ride to Chi in 1951, when  he was 17, so he could find, that is make, for himself a better life. He became a janitor at U. of Chi, making “waves on campus” by applying for a promotion to building engineer when no blacks were applying because it just wasn’t done. 

Now in his S. Side, Morgan Park neighborhood home, where he lives with his wife and daughter and has grandchildren as visitors, he is standing up to be counted as one who would be armed. As a kid in Louisiana — seven years old — he went into the woods and bagged all manner of wild creatures who could be eaten and skinned.

Out there by myself. I’d get me some rabbits, squirrels, ‘coons, opossums,

he told Konkol. When a kid tried to break into his garage, he levelled his long gun at him and counselled him henceforward to stay away, which the kid did. But when three guys blocked his car on his way to the Jewel, “cussing … saying, ‘I’ll put you down, you old gray-haired mothers-and-such; I’ll put you down,” because he’d done the good-citizen thing as Mayor Daley recommends, calling cops on gun-toters earlier, he had no way to defend himself. 

He wants that to change, so it’s McDonald vs. the city (and my own Oak Park, piggy-backing on Chi) at the high court. The mayor?  He wishes he could get him to “feel and see what” he sees.

‘Maybe he could come here and spend the night, especially during the summer, and listen to what I listen to out my window. If he could, and he was open to that, he would see what’s really going on in his city … and maybe he would understand where I’m coming from.’

Something like that would win some votes too.  Daley should take note.

Read it and weep

Toy Monster: The big, bad world of Mattel, by Jerry Oppenheimer, is scored by reviewer Eric J. Iannelli, in the 9/4/09 Times [of London] Literary Supplement for its triteness.  (On-line only for subscribers) “As befits such a seedy, tabloid-style expose, the writing is cliched and hyperbolic,” writes Iannelli, giving some juicy particulars:

Investigators are “hard-nosed”.  It is the “tired,poor, huddled masses” who immigrate through Ellis Island.  Japan is “the Land of the Rising Sun,” Germany is “the Fatherland” and Hollywood is “La-La Land.”

Etc.  A main character in this non-fic account “always got what she wanted” and “never took no for an answer.”  Her rise is twice described as “meteoric,” she “goes ballistic.”  And especially good are the verbs used instead of “say” or “said”:  “Very few . . . say anything. . .  they observe, maintain, intone or opine.” Ianelli still found the book “engaging,” even if “sensationalist” and “one-sided,” because it raises “legitimate concerns” such as “lavish executive bonuses . . . in the face of scandal and falling profits.” And nobody kept inserting “you know” in the middle of sentences or between them.  If you heard them talking live, ah, that would be a different matter, I’m sure.

Reckless driver bilocated

Nothing like variety in your daily newspapers. “Chicago woman charged with hitting trooper on Dan Ryan” (actually running her over) is of the 12500 block of South Wallace, says Chi Trib.  That’s 125th Street, or 125 blocks from Madison Street, give or take a few. The same reckless woman is of the 1200 block of South Kostner, says Sun-Times.  That’s roughly 12 blocks south of State and 40 or so west of Wallace. And this on a day when our Trib never arrived.  Instead, we got the New York Times!  Ladies and gentlemen, life in the big metropolitan area is not supposed to be that bad.