Dino Dini’s barber shop is in its last days.  He’s retiring after 40 years at 66.  So are his barbers Frank, 89 (!), and Tony, 69.  It’s here and here. That didn’t keep recruiters away.  Two were there this afternoon, checking on their plans: retirement, retirement, retirement.  So the recruiters were going away empty-handed.  What then of the shop?  Dino has had four or five inquiries, none of which have led to a lease with Kehoe & Co., the building managers.  The building, a big one, on the SW corner of Marion & Chicago, was bought a few years ago by a group of investors.  There apparently is no replacement barber shop in its future.

Meanwhile, a half mile south, also on Marion — on the pedestrian mall, from Lake to the tracks — rents are going up, says one merchant, and the smaller shops will probably be moving.  A very big condo development is going up just beyond the viaduct, on the SE corner of Marion & South Blvd.  Its units will not be going for peanuts.  Its residents will be flocking to nearby shops which will reflect their ability to pay more.

Times are a-changing in OP.  Weep and wail if you must, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it, not while there’s a tax base to keep in mind for our schools and parks and library, to name three OP-required amenities of the first water.  Goodbye, Dino.  Enjoy your retirement.  And haircut-seekers, take note: Saturday the 17th is the last day.  Dino will take his chair.  The other two are pretty well spoken for by loyal customers, a number of whom shook hands with Dino and the other two on their way out this afternoon.

Alderman Natarus of the 42nd ward took a header yesterday in council chambers during debate on whether to call for immediate pull-out from Iraq.  Sun-Times, relying on the highly professional Fran Spielman, gives the debate its own story.  (The alderman is o.k., by the way.)  She quotes opponents of the resolution — it passed 29–9 — to good effect:

Balcer of the 11th  (the Daley ward, for non-Chicagoans) recalled “demoralizing” protests when he was serving in Viet Nam, from which he “still carries scars.”  Cardenas of the 12th said, “We can’t turn our backs [on our troops] and say . . . that the lives that were lost were for no reason.”  Burke of the 14th, saying he had opposed the war from the start, said, “anything we do to dilute or . . . undermine [soldiers’] morale is wrong.”  Preckwinkle of the 4th (liberal Hyde Park) and Stone of the 50th were quoted in support of the resolution, Stone having oddly changed his mind when he saw 25 coffins being returned to Cleveland — as if he did not know soldiers die in war.

Chi Trib, on the other hand, collapsed the alderman-collapsing and pull-out vote into one story (Trib usually does not give the same weight to local coverage as S-T) and also quoted both sides but not Balcer the ‘Nam vet with bad memories of protest, characterizing the Burke statement with a “Burke fumed” (earlier “declared”) when the eminently useful “said” was applied to all others.  In fact, it’s even “said” when Cardenas yelled “Call 9–11!” when Natarus fell. 

It’s a little thing that injects color in the midst of data.  Anyhow, Burke fumes a lot, doesn’t he?  He generally looks as if he’s about to fume or just did.  It’s his nature.  Between the two stories, S-T’s is more interesting, though the pull-out ordinance sponsor, Moore of the 49th (Loyola U. territory), gave his rationale in the Trib for all to cheer or jeer: “It is the obligation of elected officials closest to the people,” he said [declared? noted? proclaimed? intoned?] to goad president and Congress to do the presumably right thing.

Yes, and it’s also a neat distraction from corruption in city hall.  Not that Natarus collapsing isn’t too, but it’s hard to plan that.

So what do you think, Chicago Newspaper readers?  Would you like Sun-Times and Trib exchanging front pages on the day before publication, as NY Times and Wash Post have been doing (secretly) for 10 years?  Editor & Publisher has the story.  Something in the back of my 73–year-old mind with 63 years-plus newspaper-reading experience tells me that you would not, but rather that it’s scandalous that it happened.  What think you?

Later: Reader Bill asks whatever happened to the scoop concept?  To which I noted that the Editor & P story discussed it amazingly as reflecting long-time “rivalry” between NYT and Wash Post, but it’s a price-fixing story in my book.

Dominican U.’s easement-seeking enters a new phase, as here, where we read in Wed. Journal of OP&RF:

With the belief that any legal uncertainty over the ownership of a small swatch of wooded land along Thatcher Avenue has been resolved in its favor, Dominican University will move ahead with zoning applications to build a parking garage and classroom building on the west side of its River Forest campus.

. . .

At the heart of the matter is village approval for a driveway curb cut along Thatcher Avenue between Division Street and Greenfield Avenue. If that driveway is OKd, it would allow new access to the west side of the campus and lead to construction of a 550-car parking garage and a new Academic Building.

Legal advice and Forest Preserve District support in favor of DU is bolstered by heavyweight political support from county commissioner and Elmwood Park mayor Peter Sylvestri.  River Forest village administrator Chuck Biondo says RF is aboard.  It’s all in the wake of extensive protesting by OP resident Victor Guarino and others who argued last March that the land belongs to the Forest Preserve: “There hasn’t been a thorough enough study of this.” Characterizing the current turn of events as “very complicated,” Guarino insisted that the Cook County Board of Commissioners, which administers the Forest Preserve district, has never told the university that it owns the property.

“[Board president John] Stroger said [last] Wednesday that he never told Dominican University that they owned that land,” said Guarino. “We’re calling for an independent legal counsel to review this.”

Stroger doesn’t turn up in the latest story, being perhaps busy with other things such as allegations of corruption on the board he heads.

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

Elsewhere we read that “Planning is socialism,” a point of view that runs against the Oak Park and maybe River Forest grain these days.  It’s at http://www.mises.org/story/1910, which Calif. Assemblyman Ray Haynes [raysahay@aol.com], representing parts of Western Riverside County and Northern San Diego County, says in part:

Anyone who thinks that planning for “growth” is anything other than a exercise in futility is still experiencing the mind-altering visions that their college chemicals visited upon him or her so many years ago. Today’s planners meet in little rooms, draw pretty pictures on paper maps, use the prettiest crayons they can find, and — whamo — the city has a plan. Wonder and utopia are supposed to follow, and never again will the city experience traffic congestion or cosmic disharmony.

Ouch and double ouch from OP, where plans proliferate.  Haynes gives chapter and verse on how plans don’t work in California, concluding:

We know that socialism is a failed experiment, as demonstrated by the failure of the Soviet Union, socialism’s most devoted practitioner. My socialist colleagues in the Legislature, however, think that they are smarter than the Russians and that socialism will work here in California if we just have the right plan. The most recent polls tell us that the public is not satisfied with how we are doing our job. Maybe we should try something different, like freedom and free enterprise, the principles that made this country great.

As they said in the (mostly imagined) 60s barricades, right on!

“I’m glad you resurrected that albatross plan of Lisa re going after abortion counsellors who suggest alternatives to pregnant clients. She hasn’t done it YET, but why? Not change of heart — afraid of George?” asks astute and informed reader D., meaning Cardinal George, implying that he would go after HER if she went after THEM.  Hmmmmm, as my editor correspondent C. would say.

Chi Trib Magazine’s cover story yesterday is seductive because it moves along and reads well, but it’s still a puff piece for a politician — Attorney Genl Lisa Madigan.  “Not everybody expected Lisa Madigan to do a good job as attorney general. Some thought she’d be an outright flop” is the nearest it comes to a mumblin’ word of negativity. 

Still, it’s what we have come to expect from the magazine, which operates in its own sphere, as the space it inexplicably occupied when on the Sunday after 9/11 four years ago, it ran a cover story about Bill Ayers, former fugitive from Feds, in which he had kind words to say about terrorism.  The Trib apologized for the piece in run-of-paper, page two; the Mag has its own “preprint” time table, and it was scrap the issue with all its ad wealth or ship it and apologize.  A no-brainer, that.

It’s awfully tacky of me to bring this up, but with her regular (St. Clement church) mass attendance getting several paragraphs and her mother’s Catholicity including Jesuit college graduation also in the running, is it too much to ask that the c– and a-words might have turned up?  Choice and (oh, how hard a word to say) Abortion?  And her being solidly in the camp of C. when it comes to A.?  And having promised to her Planned P. supporters when running for A.G. that she would emulate her friend Elliott Spitzer, NY state AG mentioned in the article as corporation-buster and consumer advocate, and go after abortion counsellors who suggest alternatives to pregnant clients?

That, my friend, is a no-brainer: You’re damn right it’s tacky, and shut the heck up!  OK, ok, ok, ok, ok . . . I don’t mean no trouble.  Really I don’t.  I don’t, I don’t, I don’t . . .   Sighhhhhh.

Let us hear it now for Dennis Byrne in Chi Trib with his “GULF COAST CRISIS: Spreading blame from pillar to post,” in which we read a truly helpful solution:

Abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency and give its job to the media, Rev. Jesse Jackson and other know-it-alls who accused Hurricane Katrina rescuers of incompetence, indifference or racism.

Yes, but putting FEMA down is a serious recommendation by Jacksonville State U. econ teacher Christopher Westley at the Mises Institute site.  “What if there was no such thing as FEMA?” Westley asks, intending to say, I’m sure, what if there WERE no such thing as FEMA, because there is one and the condition is contrary to fact.  He delivers a list of things FEMA did badly or didn’t do well, including the off-again, on-again $2,000 federal donation to survivors, saying its director Mike Brown (who later resigned, as we know) would have gotten a Ken Lay-style indictment to contend with if he were in private business.

If there were no FEMA, no such wealth distribution (to say nothing of the waste) would take place, while much of the currently squelched efforts by private individuals, non-profits, and firms would be flourishing all along the Gulf Coast.

FEMA was being generous with “other people’s money.”  Its concern as a public agency is primarily public relations, not public relief, concerned about

drawing attention away from decades of federal levee management and federal flood insurance programs. This is about not losing the black vote in the city that practically invented vote-buying. Even if relieving human suffering is on FEMA’s radar screen, it is far down its list of major priorities.

We can’t be sure if he’s right about particulars in his own indictment, because he relies on MSM, which got fairly hysterical in the last week or two and were commended for it by the lately somewhat worked up Editor & Publisher, the trade gazette whose editor urged news anchors to gin up opposition to the Iraq war.  Objectivity is becoming the hobgoblin of superstitious men, to adapt Emerson, who said it about “a foolish consistency” and probably meant it, such was his peculiar mindset.  But this FEMA-basher makes good Mises-style points about government inefficiency.

On the other hand, consider this about the Katrina relief effort so far from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:  “Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge” got it wrong, says Jack Kelly, meaning these MSM’ers I mention above — MainStream Media performers, for you uninitiated.  It was one of the worst ever, said various instant hurricane mavens.  No it wasn’t, says Kelly, it was one of the best responses ever.

“The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne.”

He’s quoting a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief and ticked off the record this time.

[It] took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 2002. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.

. . . . More than 32,000 people have been rescued, many plucked from rooftops by Coast Guard helicopters.

The Army Corps of Engineers has all but repaired the breaches and begun pumping water out of New Orleans.

Shelter, food and medical care have been provided to more than 180,000 refugees.

As for newsies beefing about how long it took — instant mavens all or most — consider what’s said by a former Air Force logistics officer with his advice “for us in the Fourth Estate” on his blog, MoltenThought.  “You cannot just snap your fingers and make the military appear somewhere,” says the AF man, Jason van Steenwyk.

Guardsmen need to receive mobilization orders; report to their armories; draw equipment; receive orders and convoy to the disaster area. Guardsmen driving down from Pennsylvania or Navy ships sailing from Norfolk can’t be on the scene immediately.

Relief efforts must be planned. Other than prepositioning supplies near the area likely to be afflicted (which was done quite efficiently), this cannot be done until the hurricane has struck and a damage assessment can be made. There must be a route reconnaissance to determine if roads are open, and bridges along the way can bear the weight of heavily laden trucks.

And federal troops and Guardsmen from other states cannot be sent to a disaster area until their presence has been requested by the governors of the afflicted states.

Uh-oh.  We know whom he’s talking about, the do-nothing governor of Louisiana.  She dithered, as we know, watching her mayoral counterpart dither too, leaving 200 or so school buses unused.  (Uh-oh the other way: Kelly reports 2,000, which is effectively rebutted at Media Matters but not before being widely and inaccurately reported, mostly by conservative outlets but also by George Stephanopoulos at ABC News.)

Tom McNamee is editor of the Sunday Sun-Times Controversy section that debuted in mid-July.  He and the paper’s higher-ups deserve credit for running stuff you find on Conservative Book Club reading lists and in Reason Mag, such as today’s excerpt from One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-reliance, by feminist antagonist Christina Hoff Sommers and American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Sally Satel, M.D. and “How Not to Fight Fat,” which makes fun of federal “disease detectives,” by the eminently contrarian libertarian Jacob Sullum, author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use (and he’s not talking about what you get over any counter).

The section also has a delicious religious joke, winner of competition organized by ShipofFools.com, which has an 1879 Reformed Baptist calling an 1915 version “heretic scum” and pushing him off a bridge — a guy he’d been trying to talk out of suicide before he found him out.

This Ship of Fools site is a gem, by the way — it shows how one thing leads to another, if the first thing is at all Internet-based.  It features “the Mystery Worshiper,” in the British Isles and elsewhere, which has included Chicago, where the RC St. Mary of the Angels in Bucktown and the Episcopal Church of the Ascension on LaSalle Street.  It’s lively, intelligent commentary, cleanly written.

Can’t say enough for S-T and McNamee for breaking new ground here.

If you want to read about people with guts and spirit in the midst of flooded New Orleans, try A do-it-ourselves shelter shines: A community bands together in civilized self-sufficiency, in stark contrast to the misery in official New Orleans shelters.  in The Baltimore Son, by Kelly Brewington.

“If the city and the state are stumbling or in over their head, then it’s FEMA’s [Federal Emergency Management Agency’s] responsibility to show some leadership,” said Jerry Hauer, director of public health preparedness at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Right, but by the nature of bureaucracy — following orders, scheduling things, etc. — it’s the rare director that jumps right in, knocking heads and getting things done.  (Is this Jerry Hauer such a director?)  Directors know that’s a good way to find oneself job-hunting.  It’s the nature of things, as hurricanes are in the nature of things.  And believe me, howls would have been heard from French Quarter to Latin Quarter and all other quarters of the continental U.S. if restoring order — a sine qua non in such cases and especially in this one — had resulted in shooting someone, assuming it didn’t and excepting New O. cops reportedly getting “at least five” bad guys, themselves shooters.

Note, by the way, that looking to feds is advised after “city and state are stumbling or in over their head.”  Who thinks they weren’t in this case.  The governor didn’t do this or that, thinking the mayor would do it.  The mayor wept and cursed on radio — both in over their heads every bit as much as New Orleans.

It’s all in an excellent short rundown by ABC, “Who’s to Blame for Delayed Response to Katrina? New Orleans’ Emergency Plan Not Followed, Federal Government Slow to Take Lead”, which is enough to make MSM-bashers like me think again.