Tag: Blithe Spirit

Lying down on back and kicking feet in air

The LA Times editor who got the ax the other day became an editor gone wild about it:

“The current system relies too heavily on voodoo economics and not enough on the creativity and resourcefulness of journalists,” O’Shea said in a farewell note to his staff that said flatly he had been fired. Too often, he said, “we’ve been dismissed as budgetary adolescents who can’t be trusted to conserve our resources.”

When quite the opposite is true?  Or are they guilty of wanting to make money without consideration of the market?

It is “simply stupid,” [Jim] O’Shea [the editor] wrote, to consider closing foreign bureaus so the Times can afford to cover the presidential campaign and the Beijing Olympics. As for Tribune Co.’s new owner, real estate financier Sam Zell, O’Shea said, “When Sam Zell understands how asinine the current budgetary system is, he will change it for the better, because he is a smart businessman.”

Zell will take business advice from O’Shea?  Please.  Instead, elementary economics from the publisher who fired him:

In an interview yesterday, [David] Hiller said the rupture came over O’Shea’s demand for a modest increase in newsroom spending, but that this was just one among many disagreements.

“It was a regrettable and unnecessary line drawn in the sand,” Hiller said. “In the environment all newspapers are facing, it is wildly unrealistic to consider a budget increase at a time when revenue is falling.”

What?  You don’t spend more when taking in less?  What sort of mentality is that?

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Newspapers just fade away

Reader Margaret in response to my saying I go to Instapundit, Drudge, and one or two other ‘net sources “rather than my old reliable morning Trib or Sun-Times” — it’s how her household dropped Chi Trib:

Ditto — the Internet is always timely, self-correcting and if one is choosy about which blogs to visit, not Left-leaning or outright lying by shading the wording, delivery, or amount of news provided. 
 
During the 2000 election, when Drudge was providing links to the AP and Reuters, my husband and I would notice that the exculpatory last paragraph that both had to add to their sensational and twisted main stories (in order to maintain their claim to full coverage of events) would be copied at the Tribune with the last paragraph missing.  Regular readers did not get the part that unraveled the whole piece of slanted journalism. 
 
It happened over and over until we decided that we couldn’t support the paper any more.  The faster they die, the happier I’ll be.  Of course, then we will be a society depending on two entirely different sources of information, conservative vs progressive blogs.  If we are divided now, think of what that will mean?
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Freedom to be nice?

Here’s the crux of the matter, in a Dutch official’s warning about anti-Muslim film whose showing is expected to cause rioting:

‘It is difficult to anticipate the content of the film, but freedom of expression doesn’t mean the right to offend,’ said Maxime Verhagen, the Foreign Minister, who was in Madrid to attend the Alliance of Civilisations, an international forum aimed at reducing tensions between the Islamic world and the West.

How so?  Because freedom to offend is at the heart of free speech.  Rubber does not meet the road when no one’s offended, no one objects, only when someone objects.  Else it’s meaningless.

If he had talked up “fire” in a crowded theater, there would at least have been arguments to make.

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He will help us find ourselves?

New head man for Jesuits has non-Western tilt?

It’s been 46 years since Father Adolfo Nicolás first traveled to Japan as a missionary from Spain. His has been a long conversation, first in Japan, but also in Korea and more recently in the Philippines. It’s left him convinced that the West does not have a monopoly on meaning and spirituality, and can learn a lot from the experience of Asian cultures.

He’s Spanish-born Adolfo Nicolas,

ordained in Tokyo in 1967 and spent most of his career in the Far East – directing a pastoral institute in Manila, in the Philippines, and holding leadership positions in Japan.

Let us not rush to judgment, but let us confess our bias toward Western values and suspicion of those who lean East.

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NYT on Fred

More on Fred T., this from the poo-bah of mainstream newspaper journalism:

Fred D. Thompson, 65, is plying the comeback trail in South Carolina, his poll numbers showing a tease of life — he is, statistically speaking, tied for third in recent polls — and his country wit growing more serrated.

It’s nicely done, by one Michael Powell. 

Meanwhile, back at the Chicago Tribune ranch, Fred finally gets a story, by Lisa Anderson:

With his young wife, Jeri, and two small children in tow, the veteran actor, lawyer and former U.S. senator from Tennessee — the candidate billed as the second coming of Ronald Reagan when he entered the race — vehemently emphasized his vision, consistency and clear conservative values to supporters at The Beacon restaurant in Spartanburg on Friday, telling them “That’s why we will win.”

Now really.  “Vehemently”?  He gets vehement?  How about “vigorously”?  Or even “forthrightly.” 

Point is, Chi Trib will be the last to know if Fred has winning touch:

Fred Thompson, the actor and ex-U.S. senator from Tennessee, has yet to justify the advance billing that suggested he is the second coming of Reagan.

is how its Tim Jones said it yesterday.

A more sympathetic observer has him shining “at the last minute,” however.

in the final appearance of Thompson’s South Carolina primary campaign, in a packed room at Greenville’s Embassy Suites hotel. At that appearance, Thompson was so good, so energized, so non-laid-back-Fred, that many of his supporters wondered where the man had been during the campaign.

That’s Byron York of National Review Online.  Hey.  Pay your money and take your choice.

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The PB strikes back

The U.S. Episcopal church is going after its breakaway conservatives.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, head of the 2.4-million-member U.S. church, last week slapped Bishop John-David Schofield, leader of California’s 8,000-member Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin, with an “inhibition.”

It ordered him as of January 11 to “cease from exercising the gifts of ordination in the ordained ministry of this church” and stop all “episcopal, ministerial and canonical acts.”

That happened because the Fresno, California-based diocese last month seceded, becoming the first Episcopal diocese to do so, and aligned itself with the conservative Anglican Church of the Southern Cone, based in South America.

Schofield told the Episcopal leadership neither he nor the diocese were under their jurisdiction any more.

The civil courts may be courts of last resort.

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Ceremonials, yes

Clergy abuse rears its ugly head in the Bishop Braxton case:

BELLEVILLE, Ill. (AP) An advocacy group for victims of clergy abuse wants Roman Catholics across southern Illinois to earmark or cut back their tithings to the church until complaints that the bishop misspent money is sorted out.

Pastoral groups in the 104,000-member Diocese of Belleville want Bishop Edward Braxton to address claims that he bought ceremonial garments with about $8,000 in donations to a Vatican world outreach fund.

And the Belleville News-Democrat reports Braxton also may have bought a wooden chancery table and chairs with $10,000 from a fund for children and adults.

Braxton isn’t discussing the complaints publicly.

His ilk is usually above all that public discussion.  Bishop Ed, formerly pastor of Oak Park’s St. Catherine & St. Lucy parish, can afford to ignore this, because he has friends in high places.

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Preacher talk

Obama’s minister has a way with words.  Listing O. as a black savior along with slave-rebellion leader Nat Turner and Martin Luther King, he said there have always been reasons not to follow them.

Some argue that blacks should vote for Clinton “because her husband was good to us,” he continued.

“That’s not true,” he thundered. “He did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky.”

Zowie.

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