Chicago’s Humboldt Park is in danger of being overrun by Yuppies, say some Puerto Ricans in today’s Chi Trib — a story, by the way, visible only among print-edition stuff and reachable only using the search window, meaning it’s gone from on-line items as such, maybe because late-arriving higher-up editors don’t like it. 

[This is wrong, web editor Charles Meyerson informs me:  “You, sir, are wrong.  . . .  The story has been played prominently on the Web site all morning — featured as one of the lead items in the chicagotribune.com front page Business section.”  Yes, moved to business-technology half-way down the screen shot, nowhere near as visible and eye-catching or space-taking as in p-1 hard copy, where it’s 13 by 7 1/2 inches, just below the logo, with two big color photos and two more on back page front section, where it has 12 by 8 inches to roll around in.  Believe me, it’s a play to die for in what the man threw on my walk this morning, vs. what’s reachable by not only the search window, as I say incorrectly — sorry about that — but otherwise only by careful scrutiny of web page.  THAT’S NO EXCUSE: I SHOULD LOOK HARDER!

[Moreover: Meyerson is senior producer of the Trib site and asks that I

excise that whole “late-arriving editor” fantasy, or at least correct it in context.

[I can do that: A long time ago, newspapers had night editors who, while in touch with the main editors by telephone, could be countermanded by the 9–5 (or later) editors, probably in their morning meeting, dubbed a “circle jerk” by one young city desk man who later became city editor.  At these meetings, sometimes influenced by the newspaper’s owner-publisher who heard something last night at a party, stories rose and fell.  Once I was a winner here, not a loser: something I’d called in got overlooked by the night man but given nice play for home-delivery Red Flash.  Continue now with this fascinating account.]

I saw a story shrink once.  It was about black Christians celebrating wildly in church — authentic as hell, full of speaking in tongues and shaking and swaying, but my Chi Daily News editor, the late Daryle Feldmeir, was embarrassed by it.  It confirmed too well what some whites thought about blacks, he told me when I entered his office to inquire what was happening.  This was in the days of seven editions, and the Red Streak final had reduced the front section’s back page, full of John White photos, as I recall, to a column or two.  This was white liberal protection of minorities, 1970s-style.  It still happens, of course.

“It’s taken 40 years for us to establish where we are today,” said Enrique Salgado, who heads the local Chamber of Commerce. “Once this is gone, you lose the concentration of the Puerto Rican community in Illinois.”

So what?  Does this Salgado think PR’s can’t manage cultural permanence on their own without him and other xenophobes? 

It’s gotten nasty, in fact:

Developer Anthony Zaskowski said he felt pressured to give in to community protests over a project to build condominiums near North and Artesian Avenues that would have blocked a mural featuring Pedro Albizu Campos, a hero in Puerto Rican history.

After a land swap with Zaskowski in 2004, the lot is now a small urban park.

“We were forced to settle this thing,” Zaskowski said. “We lost a lot of money.”

This is a picture, of course, of a community so unsure of itself it needs clout to survive.

Ald. Billy Ocasio (26th) said he is fulfilling residents’ wishes “for the culture to remain alive.”

Citing a ward policy that forces developers to set aside a third of their projects for affordable housing, Ocasio said, “If you take a look at what’s happening, you have a plan that is able to allow people who want to stay, to stay.”

Whenever you see “affordable housing,” look out.  It means low-cost housing, for one thing, and government interference in the economy, for another, with resultant screwing things up, including killing of prosperity for all concerned.

Good story by Antonio Olivo, by the way, who if he wonders what happened on-line can probably look to late-arriving editors, the 9–to-5 ones who sit in big offices.

Army Gen. John Craddock, the leader of U.S. Southern Command, said the men were not among detainees seeking U.S. court reviews of their cases and had not yet appeared before controversial military trial panels. Craddock insisted that the three, although not accused of any crimes, were enemy combatants and terrorists.  [Italics added]

But as many detainees pass their four-year mark in captivity without formal charges, human-rights activists and defense attorneys said the prisoners have grown despondent over being detained without charges and without imminent prospects of a court hearing.  [Take that, Craddock and Harris, you Bush pawns.]

 

“People have been indefinitely detained for five years without any prospect of ever going home of ever seeing their families or ever being charged or having any resolution,” said Jumana Musa, an advocacy director for Amnesty International in Washington. “There is no question serious psychological trauma comes from that.”  [Jumana Musa said that?  Well that’s another story.]

[Adm] Harris said one [of the suicides] was part of a Taliban uprising at the Qala-I-Jangi prison in Afghanistan, where CIA operative Johnny “Mike” Spann was killed in 2001, becoming the first U.S. combat casualty in Afghanistan. Another was a member of Jamat al Tabligh, an Islamic group the military considers a terrorist organization. The other was a “mid- to high-level” Al Qaeda operator, he said.

A “stench of despair” hangs over the Guantanamo Bay prison where three detainees committed suicide this weekend, a defense lawyer who recently visited the U.S. jail in Cuba said as calls increased Sunday to close the facility.

Quite an upbeat p-one Chi Trib story here, in which we read about progress in Iraq, with only secondary, brief reference to the usual day’s death toll.

The U.S. military pressed its offensive against Al Qaeda in Iraq on Friday, staging an additional 39 raids based mostly on information uncovered during the hunt that led to the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a U.S. air strike.

The fresh raids came as Al Qaeda in Iraq issued urgent appeals for money and volunteers to fight American forces, a day after the news of al-Zarqawi’s death left the organization without a clearly identifiable leader.

is the lede, details follow:

Maj. Gen. William Caldwell displayed a suicide belt, explosives and Iraqi army uniforms uncovered in 17 raids conducted soon after al-Zarqawi’s death. The raids targeted people whom the U.S. had been monitoring in the buildup to the strike, which was delayed until al-Zarqawi had been pinpointed because they were giving “indicators at different points in time as to where Zarqawi might be,” Caldwell said.

An additional 39 raids were conducted Friday, some of them directly related to information obtained in the earlier raids, Caldwell said without giving further details.

That’s us.  They?

[A web-site] statement in the name of Hamil al-Rashash (Holder of the Rifle) struck a more desperate note [than one by head of the Iraqi Mujahadeen umbrella group pleading for volunteers].

“Help, help! Support, support!” it said addressing the Islamic ummah, or community. “Assistance, assistance! Where is your money? And where are your men? There is no excuse for you.

“America won’t benefit you. History won’t be merciful to you. Wake up before it gets too late and before all the curses of Earth and heaven fall upon you.”

A bit of analysis in mid-story points out the role Zarqawi played:

As for leadership, it is unlikely Al Qaeda will quickly be able to replace al-Zarqawi with someone with the same name recognition and appeal to the global Islamist community, experts say. Helped in part by the repeated condemnations of U.S. officials and by his own headline-grabbing tactics, such as the gruesome, videotaped beheadings of hostages, al-Zarqawi had catapulted to worldwide fame over the past two years. [Italics added]

In a war of nerves as well as physical devastation, such things matter greatly.  Let’s hear it for experts, this time anyhow.

There are holes in the Haditha massacre story, which has been changing, even in Time Mag.  They are discussed in American Thinker by a Wash DC lawyer, Clarice Feldman, drawing on extended discussion (and exposure) at Sweetness and Light, which in addition to inconsistencies has the Time skinback:

In the original version of this story, TIME reported that “a day after the incident, a Haditha journalism student videotaped the scene at the local morgue and at the homes where the killings had occurred. The video was obtained by the Hammurabi Human Rights Group, which cooperates with the internationally respected Human Rights Watch, and has been shared with TIME.” In fact, Human Rights Watch has no ties or association with the Hammurabi Human Rights Group. TIME regrets the error.

Feldman winds up her version of Sweetness & Light’s coverage:

The sum and substance of this thumbnail sketch on the Haditha claims is that it follows so closely the template for the TANG [Texas Air National Guard] and [Valerie] Plame stories. Take a reporter with an anti-Administration agenda [apparently Time’s Tim McGirk, as in his at best weird Taliban coverage post-9/11], an interested group (think of the Mashhadanis [Reuters cameraman with insurgent ties and man who fed info] as the VIPS in the Plame case or Burkett and Lucy Ramirez in the TANG case) and a story too good to be checked and circumstances where the people attacked [Marines] are limited in what they can quickly respond to and you get a story which smells to me like it will soon be unraveled.

This time, I’m betting the consequences to the press which rushed to judgment will be more disastrous than it was to Dan Rather. I surely hope so.  [Italics added]

The story too good to be checked, yes.  Reporters and editors smell that meat a-cookin’, as if they were Springfield trough-feeders, and away they go.  I’m staying tuned.

Letters to Editor writers of the world who feel dissed, you ain’t heard nothing yet.  This about NY Times, item #1 in today’s Poynter Online Romenesko, takes the cake.  NYT has circled wagons to protect its Thomas Friedman, as explained by the man from General Motors:

I’ve spent much of the past week trying to get a letter to the editor published in The New York Times in response to the recent Tom Friedman rant (subscription required) against GM (see “Hyperbole and Defamation at The New York Times,” June 1).

I failed. This is my story.

For those of you who haven’t read it already, Mr. Friedman spent 800 words on the Times op/ed page to accuse GM of supporting terrorists, buying votes in Congress and being a corporate “crack dealer” that posed a serious threat to America’s future. He suggested the nation would be better off if Japan’s Toyota took over GM.

Mr. Friedman later acknowledged in television interviews that the column was a bit “over the top,” but that he wanted to get our attention.

He got it.

What Romenesko, much read by news people, picked out has the point nicely summarized:

You’d think it would be relatively easy to get a letter from a GM vice president published in the Times after GM’s reputation was so unfairly questioned. Just a matter of simple journalistic fairness, right? You’d also think that the newspaper’s editing of letters would be minimal — to fix grammar, remove any profane language, that sort of thing. Not so. Even for me, who worked for nearly 20 years as a reporter and editor, this was an enlightening experience.

We do live and learn, do we not?

The insurgent — and surging, at least in newspaper coverage — Tony Peraica makes a good point in his latest (12:42 p.m.) release about his defeated resolution calling not only for “public hearings and the subpoenas for medial [sic] records and testimony from medial [sic] experts” but also a “clause establishing a process for the temporary replacement of the County Board President, to be modeled after the U.S. Constitution’s 25th Amendment.”

“[S]hould the evidence adduced at such meeting suggest that the President and 4th District Commissioner [the ailing Stroger] has a present temporary disability which is likely to cease prior to December 4, 2006 [when the new president will be sworn in], this Board’s presiding officer (or acting presiding officer) shall request that the State’s Attorney of Cook County draft an ordinance for this Board’s consideration modeled after the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article V., Section 6 (b) of the Illinois Constitution providing for a process for the temporary replacement of a Cook County Board President or Cook County Commissioner during such time as that officer is temporarily unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.

This “would not only have put the Board on track to ending this current crisis, but it would have ensured that the voters and tax payers of Cook County would never again have to wonder, ‘Who’s in charge of Cook County government?’”

As matters stand, they don’t.

No one will ever be bored by this board, By JIM BOWMAN in Wednesday Journal of OP&RF, June 07, 2006

DIFFICULT MEETING: Oak Park Trustee Martha Brock saved the day, or night, at the village board meeting a month ago when she and Trustee Elizabeth Brady changed their minds about who should lead the Colt building redo. Brady had explained herself reasonably enough: matters of substance had combined with matters of politics. There was nothing substantive to add when Brock’s turn came.

But speaking after Trustees Bob Milstein and Geoff Brady, she saved the situation. The other two had called out an editor, a political opponent who had addressed the board, and fellow trustees in a remarkable display of pique, disappointment, and veiled or unveiled animosity, chilling the room, or at the least the one where I sat watching on TV.

Brock rambled a bit but did not hesitate. She got personal but not maudlin and not angrily defensive. Like an earlier speaker, she spoke of resigning. But she accused no one. It was not a masterpiece of argument but a candid, apparently guileless display that cooled things down. She finished, the meeting proceeded, business was completed, everybody went home.

HISTORICAL PRECEDENT: The affair was all about backing into a meat grinder. The butcher’s wife did that. The result was predictable: Disaster. So did our bold if misguided Board Majority back into a public opinion meat grinder. The result? Temporary setback apparently viewed as disaster. Two defected, leaving two others disturbing the ether with ineffectual haymakers.

But all four may take grim consolation from Oak Park political history. Officeholders and staff have had to swallow some bitter medicine over the years. At a hot District 97 board meeting a long time ago, a disgruntled parent asked a board member to step outside. (He didn’t.)

When the library board tried to close a branch, people demanded otherwise. The Village Manager Association, still chewing dust from the last election, lost a much earlier one over the firing of a garbage man. A lawsuit did the same for a hard-charging school board. Former officeholders have left town. You need insulation from the slings and arrows.

LANDMARK ALERT: Meanwhile, Oak Park’s Historic Preservation Commission convenes with statutory authority to declare your building a landmark with all the benefits and liabilities that includes—whether you like it or not.

That’s what Trustee Greg Marsey learned at the May 15 board meeting, where the 400 North Maple block condo development was discussed. Marsey asked and got it verified by Village Attorney Ray Heise, who admitted the coercion written into village ordinance—no, the owner cannot decline landmark status—only after noting that the owner is invited to participate in landmark discussions.

Marsey appeared stunned. President David Pope, trying to wrap up discussion, said he did not want to get into “nuance” at that point. But one man’s nuance is another’s heart of the matter. Someone can start the process for you the owner? And in the end you have to go along with commission and board decision, with drastic implications as to what you can do with your own property? You have in mind neither whorehouse nor shooting gallery nor saloon, but a spanking new building with toilets that work, but it doesn’t matter, or might not matter.

There was more. So clearly was the board moving to stop the Maple Avenue development that Trustee Baker volunteered on the spot to mediate in the matter of developer vs. NIMBY neighbors. He would recuse himself from voting when its landmark status came before the board, he offered, presenting himself as a neutral third party who would bring developers and neighbor to agreement.

But elected officials normally recuse themselves only when past activity indicates conflict, and they do it regretfully. They don’t do it ahead of time so as to adopt a new role that an official considers more important than the one he was elected to fill. Milstein dissuaded Baker from his bad idea, though without saying how bad it was.

Daily Kos, a left-leaning blog, commenting on the Zarqawi hit:

“Where is Osama? Where are the batillions [sic] of trained Iraqis? Doesn’t matter, we got this guy, right? We wrote a 25 million check as a reward, and get a new headline to bump off Haditha.”

Wow.  For him the big news is Haditha.  U.S. perfidy trumps victory, which he defines as “making a peaceful nation in a land fractured by ethnicity and then war.”

Don’t get me wrong Zarqawi is a great catch.  And I hope beyond my cynicism that this symbolic victory will do something on the street in Iraq.  But let’s make sure we have a plan for when it turns out, this guy wasn’t the be all and end all of our Iraq problems.

Let’s have a well-laid plan, even if the best-laid ones gang aft agley.  (We don’t care!)  Another trademark of the fussbudget left: The plan’s the thing.

Finance Committee Chairman Edward M. Burke (14th) has an ordinance pending that would ban Chicago grocers from selling meat treated with carbon monoxide to make it look pink and more appetizing.

 

Burke said it “might be a good jumping off point” to target french fries and other fast food that’s cooked in artery-clogging oil and food that’s processed or loaded with additives and preservatives.

• Ban the sale of foie gras (passed) • Ban cell phone use while driving (passed) • Force Chicago cabdrivers to wear uniforms (proposed) • Establish a 10-minute limit on outdoor dog barking (proposed)  [Ed.: Make it one minute] • Set a two-hour time limit on dog tethering (proposed) • Impound ice cream trucks that play music after 7 p.m. (proposed) • Ban parasailing and restrict skateboarding and in-line skating (proposed) • Require horses pulling carriages to wear diapers (proposed)