Tag: Blithe Spirit

Did not find this in Chi Trib

This I lift as is from Instapundit, who got it from here:

“WHAT IS HAPPENING OVER HERE:” An email from a soldier in Iraq. “Gen Petraeus is treating the war like a counter-insurgency rather than a stability operation. . . . there is a HUGE difference between the two. . . . However, you don’t see Harry Reid talking about this. When I saw what he said, it really pissed me off. That guy does not know what is going on over here because he hasn’t bothered to come and find out. The truth on the ground in Al Anbar is not politically convenient for him, so he completely ignored it.”

Not only does Harry R. not get it, but neither do Chi Trib et al.*  Didn’t Pelosi tell Petraeus she couldn’t fit Petraeus into the House schedule?  Yes, at first, but now she thinks he might have something to say, to add to the good stuff she got from the Syrian guy, Bashar al-Assad.  No babuschka this time, however.

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*I’m saying this without a site search, which last time I tried it had an AP story that if it ever appeared in hard copy was very hard to find.  I read the Trib’s hard copy every day, though not word for word, and I know what they play.  Heads and location and story size and big fat picture all go to tell us, this is important.  If the story is hard to find, it isn’t, to them at least.

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What do you know? Chi Trib gives Reid a pass . . .

It’s irritating and borderline repulsive that Chi Trib has run nothing of its own on Sen. Harry Reid’s saying the Iraq war is lost, just an AP story 4/20 about Bush denying the claim, responding in gentlemanly fashion:

“I respect the Democratic leadership,” he said. “We have fundamental disagreements about whether or not helping this young democracy is . . . the consequences of failure or success . . . .”

I did clean that up a bit: AP unsurprisingly lingered on the warts and blemishes of Bush’s spoken word. 

The Trib, on the other hand, protected Reid on the day, of the AP story — Gonzales in the dock was Trib editors’ interest — running nothing in hard copy. 

This is how it’s done.  Reid commits a major gaffe from which he backtracked within hours, but nothing is said.  Today we have him featured, statesmanlike, on P-1 with his measured comments about Bush and the war. 

Chi Trib just knows what’s fit to print, doesn’t it?

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Obama and Rezko: Sun-Times a no-puff zone . . .

Yesterday’s Chi Trib p-1 headline story on Obama’s wife was classic puffery. Today’s Sun-Times story about Obama and the indicted Tony Rezko is what Chicago newspapers are supposed to be doing.

For more than five weeks during the brutal winter of 1997, tenants shivered without heat in a government-subsidized apartment building on Chicago’s South Side.

It was just four years after the landlords — Antoin “Tony’ Rezko and his partner Daniel Mahru — had rehabbed the 31-unit building in Englewood with a loan from Chicago taxpayers.


Rezko and Mahru couldn’t find money to get the heat back on.


But their company, Rezmar Corp., did come up with $1,000 to give to the political campaign fund of Barack Obama, the newly elected state senator whose district included the unheated building.


That’s the lede. The choicest excerpts have to do with legalistic stonewalling by Obama’s people:

Obama . . .  was associated with the firm for more than nine years, his staff acknowledged Sunday in an e-mail response to questions submitted March 14 by the Sun-Times. They didn’t say what deals he worked on — or how much work he did.


And:

For five weeks, the Sun-Times sought to interview Obama about Rezko and the housing deals. His staff wanted written questions. It responded Sunday but left many questions unanswered. Other answers didn’t directly address the question.

Among these: When did Obama learn of Rezmar’s financial problems? “The senator had no special knowledge of any financial problems,’ Gibbs wrote.

Did the senator ever complain to anyone — government officials, Rezmar or Rezko — about the conditions of Rezmar’s buildings? “Senator Obama did follow up on constituency complaints about housing as [a] matter of routine,’ Gibbs wrote.


Did the senator ever discuss Rezmar’s financial problems with anyone at his law firm? “The firm advises us that it [is] unaware of any such conversations,’ Gibbs wrote.

There is much, much more, from Obama going to work for these people as part of his own ballyhooed war on poverty to his getting a sweet deal from Rezko on his Hyde Park mansion, with lots of donations and fund-raising in between.  The two have been very close.

Obama apparently — hell, obviously — turned a blind eye while Rezko took public money and paid no attention to the buildings that housed, or stored, people in need of so-called affordable housing. Rezko and friends apparently — hell, obviously — took one look at Obama as a black Harvard law star and saw him as marketable.

In the words of Paul Powell of Springfield-looting fame, they smelled the meat a’cookin’. So do a lot of people.

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Carpentersville immigrants

Chi Trib uses both “illegal” and “undocumented” for immigrants without portfolio who live in suburban Carpentersville — six to four in favor of the latter, depending on point of view. 

When referring to the three newly elected or re-elected aldermen who favor the ordinance called the Illegal Alien Immigration Relief Act and its supporters, “illegal” wins.  When people apparently of Mexican origin are discussed, it’s “undocumented.”

I’d like to see a brief explanation why one and not the other.  As it is, we have Trib as split personality.

We also have wooden rhetoric such as one frequently does not find in blogs, for instance, which usually employ a more direct expression. 

Flippancy is there too, of course (as in newspapers), but that’s hardly the goal.  Rather a simple directness.  A copy editor could supply it if a reporter, pulling many things together for a story and in this case two of them, does not.

As for the reporting, I would have liked a response by Carpentersville authorities to a question, not asked, about long-time residents, presumably with clearance from our government, feeling unwelcome.

The response would have fit nicely after this, high up in the story:

“This was pretty bad,” Hilario Savedra, 62, said of Tuesday’s vote, pausing amid a flow of pedestrian traffic at a popular grocery store in the Meadowdale Shopping Center.

“I’ve been in this community for more than 20 years, and I hate to think someone will tell me I’m no longer wanted here. This is my community, too.”

At almost the end of the story, we have this:

Some longtime residents such as Mike Connolly search for middle ground. Carpentersville has plenty of legal Hispanics, and it would be unfair to lump them with the undocumented, he said.

This implies that somebody in Carpentersville is ignoring legality.  But legality is at the heart of the problem.  I think the story could have made that point more clearly, again in no more than a sentence, if that.  And again we look to the copy desk.

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Muslim activist boldly answers critics in Chi Trib

Softball pitcher of the week award goes to Chi Trib’s Noreen Ahmed-Ullah for her 3/25/07 email interview with the Chicago CAIR director — Council on American-Islamic Relations. Her questions win her this accolade:

Why CAIR? What are CAIR’s projects? “Tell me a bit about you,” etc., all leading up to the really tough one, “What is the source of the latest criticism/accusations being against CAIR on the national level?” which have never been reported by Chi Trib (!) and which the CAIR man, Ahmen Rehab, answered with alacrity. 

Those are “urban legends,” he says, traceable to “a single and homogenous [sic, both as to misspelling and misuse: single things are always homogeneous] source of interlinked individuals and groups [some single source] with such deceptively benign names as the Investigative Project, the Middle East Forum, Jihad Watch and Americans Against Hate.”

They “typically flourish in the unmoderated [oh my], chaotic world of the blogosphere; they attempt to sell themselves to political and media circles as experts on Islam and terrorism and as patriots who are looking out for American interests.”

Not so, says Rehab, desperately seeking rehabbing with the help of Chi Trib.  Rather, they are “career Islamophobes who are deathly afraid of Muslim-American enfranchisement [they seek depriving Muslims of the right to vote?] and its possible effects on the Israeli lobby’s interests. [Italics added, and there’s the obligatory Israeli reference].

Chi Trib’s Ahmed-Ullah even gives a web address for further CAIR info.

Couldn’t she have asked him his favorite color or candy bar while she was at it? Do we maybe wonder if such amateurism might not be what Sam Zell has in mind when he speaks of his wanting his new property to be “relevant”?

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Pratfall in Damascus, says Wash Post

Wash Post has Mrs. Pelosi in its sights:

The really striking development [in her attempt at “Kissingerian” shuttle diplomacy] is the attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president. Two weeks ago Ms. Pelosi rammed legislation through the House of Representatives that would strip Mr. Bush of his authority as commander in chief to manage troop movements in Iraq. Now she is attempting to introduce a new Middle East policy that directly conflicts with that of the president. We have found much to criticize in Mr. Bush’s military strategy and regional diplomacy. But Ms. Pelosi’s attempt to establish a shadow presidency is not only counterproductive, it is foolish.

Not only this, she got the message from Olmert wrong, wrong, wrong.

The really urgent question is, is she as dumb as she looks right now?

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Read all about this: Chi Trib stories rock!

Just sat and read with pleasure two Chi Trib stories, one about Sam Zell, new owner of the company, the other about people moving out west where there’s land, lots of land under starry skies above, at half the price.  It’s goodbye, Naperville, this family of five, hello, Yorkville, where the local farmers are courteous but not full of welcome. 

Sam Zell, on the other hand, finds a welcome mat out for him at Chi Trib, to judge by this account of how as self-described “grave dancer” he is really a skilled physician for ailing enterprises.  Read them and decide with me that Trib can do a very nice thing when it wants: the stories grind no axe, are clear and interesting.  Readibility, yes.

Patrick T. Reardon and Charles Leroux did the moving-west story, Michael Oneal and David Greising did the Zell story.

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Dump Hillary?

Dick Morris again:

The fault lines between [Dems] willing to fund the war without a withdrawal amendment and those who insist on a date certain for a pullout will define a growing split within the party akin to the one that drove students into the streets of Chicago outside the party convention in 1968.

My italics.  The image of a bare-chested facially contorted protestor giving cops the finger is one that Hubert Humphrey supporters won’t forget.  Their man went down because of those guys.  And Nixon won.

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