Charles Krauthammer on Fox said the health care townhall protests were hurting their cause, but Gallup says otherwise:

PRINCETON, NJ — More than two-thirds of Americans (69%) are closely following news accounts of town hall meetings on healthcare reform, and while 34% say the protests make them more sympathetic to the protestors’ viewpoints and 21% say the protests make them less sympathetic, almost half either say the protests haven’t affected their views either way or have no opinion.

Charles is not the only one.  So think lots of others within the beltway.

I have long thought the left hijacked the term “liberal.”  This sort of thing confirms my belief:

A book discussion in Oak Park was canceled Monday after the village’s gay community took offense at the subject matter – that there’s a cure for gayness.

With gay community abuzz, event canceled

Later: Are there cafeteria liberals?

Last night the irrepressible Mort Kondracke further graced his Fox News panel slot with a blame-it-on-Limbaugh comment about denunciations of ObamaCare at townhall meetings.

The host Bret Baier had reported a flood of email objections to Kondracke’s and Charles Krauthammer’s slamming of protestors’ behavior — acknowledging neither the indignation it represented nor its grassroots nature.

Something from the urban trenches, Chicago-style:

The intern architect documents his day, excited by the opportunity to turn misfortune into fodder:

7:50am The doors open, and the line floods in from several points, and there is disorder as the line becomes a crowd.  I feel like I may have a chance at the front of the line, but this lasts for three minutes, the line re-forms exactly as it was outside the office.  These are not strangers to this process; they are indoctrinated.  The Dept. of Zoning has not asked these people to come early, they have done so out of necessity, and the response from Zoning has not been to change their protocol, but to open their doors and fill the list for the entire day before any other department even opens.

more more more here

Thanks, Obama . . .

We broke the bank! – Washington Times

Shared via AddThis

. . . with a modest hat tip to GW, truly a piker in the League of Big Spenders.

And hi to children and grandchildren, who will be reaping a whirlwind some day

A liberal friend of mine cancelled her Chi Trib subscription some time back, indignant over its front-page policy of mimicking Sun-Times with sensational grabbers.  The Trib soon thought better of that adventure and at least modified its incipient tabloidism.

But I think something else had her and has other libs cobbed, and it’s John Kass, who combines slam-bang coverage of the Mayordaley II machine with national-framework conservatism.  And I’m not sure which gets them madder, though you’d think the vigilance over Chicago politics would be a no-brainer favorable vote.

Not so, I have come to believe, because so-called social issues and love of government have come to trump all, and Mayordaley II is correct on all related points, willing at least to overlook stuff that sent his father up the wall — race– and gay-related matters come immediately to mind — and love of government remains a rock-solid foundation for him as it was for his father.

His motto could be “Holy mother the state,” to quote Dorothy Day, the reformed Marxist and uncanonized Catholic laywoman saint, and that suits today’s libs.

Anyhow, today’s Kass has MD-2’s “terrifying alter ego” Mayor Chucky, as in horror-movie anti-hero, with

aggravated facial expressions . . . hand waving, great circular motions from the shoulder . . . sneering, the finger pointing, and finally, the angry lip curling

asserting itself in a news conference — scheduled to talk about something else, for gosh sakes!

It happened when Chi Trib reporter Dan Blake and ABC-Channel 7’s Charles Thomas “figured they should act like reporters, not press agents” and asked him about insider-developer (plus Board of Ed President and Olympic committee ethics czar) Michael Scott Sr.’s painfully obvious cashing in on the coming Olympics.

The mayor refused to discuss it.  Blake asked when he would discuss it.

“Oh, I do it every day  . . .  You’ve been with me every day. NEVER insult me with that question! You’re insulting me because every day I’m here, you’re never here. And don’t print that! So I know, you’ll print it.”

Kass:

Huh? What? All Blake asked was a legitimate question about when the mayor would answer a legitimate question.

The mayor discussed it the next day,

but only long enough to deny, deny, deny and say reporters were making it all up just to hurt his feelings and ruin everything. “You come to conclusions, you’re trying to hurt [Olympics year] 2016. I don’t know why. … You come to conclusions!”

Kass:

What will happen if Chicago actually wins the 2016 Olympics?

We’ll have lots and lots of insider deals.

And we’ll have lots of Mayor Chucky.

Kass names Blake and Thomas but not the other mainstreamers on hand going along with the MD-2 program for the day — not his skywalking atop Willis Tower of a day earlier, but infrastructure developments.

Whatever “the stunt of the moment,”

reporters . . . give oodles of coverage to the news managed out of the mayor’s press office.  . . .  And then you see the stunt on TV, the ribbon cutting or the meet-and-greet with the children or the seniors, and you think you’re actually watching the news. [Italics added — it’s why people turn to the ‘Net]

But criticizing fraternity members even anonymously, is to enter dangerous territory.  Kass sounds ominously like those who accuse mainstreamers of bias towards their favorite party and their favorite political philosophy. 

If his reporting on civic corruption isn’t enough to make libs uneasy and send them scurrying to the NY Times comfort zone, his critique of the main stream, even if veiled, would be enough.  You don’t do that in j-circles. 

Probably not in j-schools either, where the first step of the Twelve, “My name is ____ , and I am a biased liberal,” is probably rarely taken.

So it is that Chi Trib, for all its fluff and relative unreadability (vs. Sun-Times, which has its own problems) has this alter ego — not only Kass but a fleet of energetic civic-corruption investigators — that terrifies true-blue liberal readers for whom the state is, sans irony, a holy mother.

This with apologies to those who, like Dorothy Day, reserve that encomium sans irony for the Church of Rome.

Censored account of Lincoln Park attackers?

The attackers — police said they believe the incidents are connected — have been described as men in their early 20s, police said.

We are to believe that the attacked had nothing more to report?  This leaves readers perhaps blaming blacks when attackers were hispanic, or vice versa.  This is not fair, nor does it help in spotting culprits, we might say profiling them.

A neighborhood jogger, 28, says he won’t give it up:

Zach Bornemeier, 28, who lives a few blocks west of the zoo, after learning of the attacks said he was unfazed and still plans to jog alone late at night along Stockton [where one or more occurred].

“It just sounds like to me just one group of punks,” he said, adding that he’s not going to change his lifestyle.

Punks?  Admirably circumspect, to be sure.  He plays them down, clinging to his late-night jogging, like candidate Obama’s Pennsylvania yahoos with their guns and Bibles.  Not savages?

Later: Comment on Channel 7 story:

usgirl4ever

8/3/09 8:01 AM EDT

Are the suspects black, white, latino, etc…….???? My god…for fear of being labeled “racist” you can’t tell the public what kind of person to look for? All because of our racist president!!

. . . violent robbers have savagely beaten four people in the neighborhood since Thursday, . . .

 

Police say the victims were all men walking in the early morning hours.  They were attacked from behind by a group of black and Hispanic [!] men in their early 20’s.

• 600 block of West Fullerton        July 30, 2009 at 2:00 a.m.
• 2100 block of North Stockton     July 30, 2009 at 2:05 a.m.
• 2000 block of North Cleveland   Aug 1, 2009 at 3:00 a.m.
• 300 block of West Webster        Aug 1, 2009 at 3:36 a.m.

She’s identified as “an Examiner from Chicago.”  Her home page is here.

Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the lede paragraph of the year so far:

“If you ever reach total enlightenment while drinking beer, I bet it makes beer shoot out your nose,” the comedic philosopher Jack Handey once theorized.

A messy eureka moment like that wasn’t the point for the White House beer drinkers Thursday night.

If you know and run into AP writer Calvin Woodward, please thank him for me.

Richard Frisbie, of Arlington Heights, IL, a writer whom I have known for years, primarily through our membership in Society of Midland Authors, cites a 1979 Florida case, “State vs. Brayman,” as one to keep in mind as we judge the arrest of Prof. Gates in Cambridge.

In it, Frisbie says in a letter to the Sun-Times,

a charge of “resisting a police officer without violence” was dismissed by Judge John J. King in a decision widely quoted in the press at the time.

I will take his word about that, but I would like to know how the decision fared in upper courts if challenged or to what extent it became precedent.

On the other hand, another letter writer, to the Canton, Ohio Repository, apparently no more a lawyer than Frisbie, cites another, later decision that supports the Gates arrest.

Terry v. Ohio is a famous U.S. Supreme Court case that defined “reasonable suspicion” and upholds law enforcement officers’ authority to stop, detain and frisk a suspect without arresting him, based on “reasonable suspicion.” [italics added]

This was in 1968.  The decision, approved with the sole dissent of Justice Douglas, has an enduring history:

Terry set the precedent for Michigan v. Long, 463 U.S. 1032 (1983). In an opinion citing Terry written by Justice O’Connor, the Supreme Court ruled that car compartments could be constitutionally searched if an officer had reasonable suspicion.

The scope of Terry was extended in the 2004 Supreme Court case Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada, 542 U.S. 177 (2004), which held that a state law requiring the suspect to identify himself during a Terry stop did not violate the Fourth Amendment prohibitions of unreasonable searches and seizures or the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.

All of that goes far beyond the Gates arrest; it’s about stopping and frisking on the street, for one thing, not on one’s front porch.  But it does provide perspective for the case my fellow writer Frisbie brings up and seems on its face to have more substance.

===============

Here’s a Florida perspective on the 1979 case in the Broward-Palm Beach New Times blog, including that

it’s worth mentioning if only to celebrate the verbosity of late Broward Circuit Court Judge John J. King.

He was verbose, I guess.

==================

While we’re at it in re perspective, let’s get down to the common-sense level, if we may, with this observation by Michael Barone:

Obama’s acolytes love to say that this case is a “teachable moment.” The one who needs teaching, it is clear, is not Sergeant James Crowley but Professor Henry Louis Gates. Gates proclaimed that he was being questioned because he was black—which was plainly not the case. Crowley was responding to a passerby’s report that a house was being broken into.

Moreover—and this is a point I haven’t seen others make—when Gates was shouting in the hearing of passerbys that Crowley was a racist, Crowley must have regarded this as a threat to his entire career. Allegations of racism could result in losing his job, being publicly disgraced, being unable to get another good job—the end of everything he’d worked for all his adult life. [italics added]

We’ve seen that, have we not?  From baseball exec to talk-show host, the wheels have grinded rapidly and small, until little or nothing is left of the accused.  Hmmm.  Was Gates yelling fire in the old crowded theater?

Gates . . . had the power to destroy Crowley’s career. And he seemed to enjoy wielding that power, or at least to be acting in reckless disregard of his capacity to destroy the professional life of another human being.

Yes, Gates was jet-lagged and presumably irritated that he was locked out of his house. But the possibility that Crowley was a decent professional, not at all a racist, properly investigating a possible crime, doesn’t seem to have occurred to him. Crowley was just one of the little people, a disposable commodity in the career of an academic superstar.

Barone concludes:

In other words, by saying the Cambridge police “acted stupidly,” [Obama] aligned himself with the culture of victimhood that Gates channeled when he faced Sergeant Crowley. And he aligned himself with a member of the academic elite who committed acts which threatened to destroy another person’s professional life. Not a pretty picture. It will be interesting to see who shows contrition after this afternoon’s beer session.