“What does peace look like?” ask Peace Fair promoters. 

Try a nation run by German Nazis or Russian Communists or Sadaam the Sadistic and his Wretched Sons. 

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Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Trapani wastes no time getting out of town, on board
JIM BOWMAN
Tuesday, September 06, 2005

TRAPANI TRANSPLANTED Elmwood Park must be pleased as punch to have former Oak Park village president and trustee Joanne Trapani, a new resident, on its Plan, Zoning and Development Commission (PZD). She was introduced at the Aug. 1 meeting of the Elmwood Park trustees, its minutes say. She bought a house in Elmwood Park 10 days after the April 5 Oak Park election. Her first PZD meeting was to be Aug. 8. The next is set for Sept. 9.

END OF OP AS WE KNOW IT? Ex-Oak Park trustee Barbara Ebner wrote both newspapers saying the village-manager concept is jeopardized by New Leadership trustees’ suggesting a hiring commission and regionalization of trustee accountability. She says the first takes from the manager what belongs to him, the second makes aldermen out of at-large trustees responsible to the whole village, not just part of it. This is sniping of a high order. It gets to mindset, even philosophy.

HOMER NODS (SAID HORACE), BUT CONCORDIA? The Concordia U. motto “Empowering the mind, Enriching the spirit” should be the other way around, “Enriching the mind, Empowering the spirit.” The mind is well stocked or isn’t, the spirit is willing or isn’t, or so Matthew (26:41) and Mark (14:38) tell us.

WHATEVER DID IT WANT? The Village of Oak Park called Aug. 18 at 9:43 a.m. asking how I was doing that day. It had a young female voice: “This is the Village of Oak Park.” When I suggested in slightly raised volume—nothing like when I tell the dog across the street to shut up—that it not ask me that and get on with its business, it hung up.

DIG THAT NUTTY EMERSON Here in Oak Park, there was once a Hawthorne School and once an Emerson. We know that, but do we know that Hawthorne considered Emerson and his friends “queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved [seeing themselves as] important agents of the world’s destiny, yet [were] simply bores of a very intense water?” We didn’t, but now we do, thanks to an essay by Christopher Benfey in the Times Literary Supplement last December.

WHO’S IN CHARGE? Lines formed to the right and the left (not sure who’s right, who’s left) at a District 97 board meeting last June in the matter of teacher and principal evaluations. Peter Barber (yay Beye!) and Julie Blankemeier, both newly elected, stood for getting in on the process early and often. Marcia Frank, not newly elected, demurred: “We at the board are not conducting the evaluation. … [W]e’re micromanaging if we decide what needs to be evaluated.”

That’s about as old a school conundrum as there is: Do parents trust the professionals or would they rather count the cards? Do parents think only of their own kids, not of all kids, and don’t know how to take care of all, as only the pros do? Or are teachers their surrogates, responsible to them whatever their training? When Dist. 97 solves this conundrum, it should issue an all-points bulletin to school districts coast to coast.

JAVA JIVE Caribou on Lake Street, late fall, 7 a.m. Handsome couple behind counter. Very personable guy. Customer says a cup of regular for here, man asks if he wants award-winning Colombian, brandishing announcement of Caribou’s award. Customer says yes, man gives him a cup, says he gets three refills. He says he would never drink that much, but it’s nice to know.

ROMANTIC SPOKEN HERE In his novel Waverley, Walter Scott, creator of the historical novel as we know it, depicts his hero as romantic by upbringing, thanks to his seat-of-pants, highly literate but unsupervised and largely unstructured schooling. The lad’s tutor, with other fish to fry, let him have his head. It’s like most Oak Park kids these days. One of the best of Oak Park elementary-school teachers some years back encouraged students to “create” (not discover) knowledge, she told me.

YOUR SOURCE FOR EVERYTHING Bowman’s blogs—Chicago Newspapers; Blithely, Blithely; and Oak Park, Home of Edgar Rice Burroughs—are linked at www.jimbowman.com.

Fred Barnes said it last night on Fox News: Bush may be low in popularity but high in power in Wash.  In today’s WSJ Opinion Journal, he spells it out.

Mr. Bush knows how to win elections. And he knows how to drive his agenda, especially in Congress. Last winter, bills curbing class-action lawsuits and reforming bankruptcy law–both favorites of Mr. Bush–were enacted. Then, during a two-week span in July and August, he won congressional approval of the controversial Central America Free Trade Agreement, overdue energy legislation and a highway bill slimmed down to meet his specifications. The day Cafta passed, thanks to aggressive lobbying by Mr. Bush himself, his job rating was at 44% in the Gallup Poll, the lowest point of his presidency.

He has reason now to “feel burdened but still optimistic . . . politically bruised by his administration’s response to Katrina but hardly crippled.”  Supreme Court appointments that effect or restore a conservative, non-collectivist tilt; estate tax abolition that puts profits where they belong, at home and not in Washington; overall tax and immigration reform, etc.

Wash Post’s Dan Balz has a different “take,” as they say in Hipsville:

When terrorists struck on Sept. 11, 2001, Americans came together in grief and resolve, rallying behind President Bush in an extraordinary show of national unity. [Blah blah blah]  But when Hurricane Katrina hit last week, the opposite occurred, with Americans dividing along sharply partisan lines in their judgment of the president’s and the federal government’s response. [Blah blah blah]

His headline is “For Bush, a Deepening Divide — Katrina Crisis Brings No Repeat of 9/11 Bipartisanship.”  Is the wish father to the thought here?

Hey, it’s all about bipartisanship, smooth sailing, COOPERATION WITH THOSE WONDERFUL DEMOCRATS.  But can’t wonderful people be misguided too?  There’s “deepening polarization of the electorate” that has left him “with no reservoir of good will among his political opponents.”  RESERVOIR OF GOOD WILL?  WHOM IS THIS FELLOW KIDDING?

He takes 1,029 words for this analysis.  Barnes takes more but says more, going lighter on the grand fluffy statement.  Anyhow, take a look.  We (I) report, you decide. 

 

 

“Mr. Bush, tear down that levee” is blogger Rishon Rishon’s plea, based on New O’s having outlived its usefulness — except maybe for the French Quarter.  Let the Mississippi “take its natural course,” he urges.  It’s a move that “should appeal to both small-government supporters and environmentalists.”

If this isn’t thinking outside the box, what is?

An ABC-Wash Post poll — “Bush Not Taking Brunt of Katrina Criticism” — has pundit-stunning results about who’s blaming whom for the Katrina aftermath. 

Three out of four think state and local govts. were NOT adequately prepared for the hurricane.  Two out of three say the feds were not adequately prepared.  Forty-four per cent blame Bush, 55% do NOT. 

Another case of NOT believing what you read in (most) newspapers.  It puts vent-rant by Sun-Times woman Sweet et al. in perspective, does it not?  Those people are talking to themselves and their friends, which is good to keep in mind.

 

The AP story Bush Chooses Roberts, Weighs Other Vacancy pretty much routinely tosses this off:

Like Rehnquist, Roberts is deeply conservative.

I’m trying to remember when AP et al. of the mainstream said anyone is deeply liberal.  It’s not how they talk.

CHI NEWSPAPERS: . . . Lynn Sweet has a scoop Sunday 9/4/05 in a column that her eds. gave top billing in Sun-T’s fairly new and rather good Controversy section.  Eds. called it “For this one, BUSH deserves the heat.” The scoop was the no-holds-barred self-revelation. It came by way of an atrocious pseudo-journalistic self-therapeutic outpouring which she began, “I want to vent.” This comes under her pic in which she’s looking at the camera with a very hard look.

Now newspaper professionals are supposed to tell about the world, not about themselves, which is why this is pseudo-journalistic, and from a Washington bureau chief no less. And from one only days removed from holding N. Shore Dem Rep. Schakowsky’s hand in public, helping her to get over her husband’s guilty plea for stealing money for the sake of his own emolument and continued operation of his “public interest” organization, non-profit of course (nothing so sleezy or infra dig as for profit). Her Schakowsky column was just what the spin doctors ordered. Schakowsky could not have been more pleased. In fact, Sweet often produces p.r. releases under guise of columns, as Chicago Newspapers pointed out in her glowing account with publicity shot Aug. 11 of one Christine Cegelis, a Democrat going for Henry Hyde’s congressional seat in DuPage County. She hadn’t chosen the picture, she responded in an email, nor did on Sunday she place her column about Bush, nor give it such BIG PLAY. She writes the columns, however. I call it pseudo-journalism. 

It’s also exhibit #1,379 (applied locally) of Newsweek Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas’ claim or admission that mainstream media are worth 15 points to a Dem presidential candidate, later knocking it down to five, while still saying they “absolutely” wanted Kerry to win.

This time around, Sweet tears into Bush’s “flim-flam” (is that venting or not? she said that she would do it, and indeed she did). He went for photo-ops clumsily, she says. He indulged in “overwhelming understatement” of the problem — didn’t bite his lip, as the old actor Bubba could do so well.  She even gets “weapons of mass destruction” into the picture. Remember them? (Venting here: they are still on her mind.) But cable TV is bigger than ever, and he can’t get away with it any more.

Along the way of her vent, Sweet offers doomsday analysis of the State of Bush, including the dire effects of the Cindy Sheehan performance, she being “the face of the anti-war movement,” home life shot to hell and all.

But would not we more likely be convinced of Sweet’s analysis if it were not part of self-therapeutics? No wonder she resonates with Sheehan, and maybe with the hysterical, cussing and weeping on radio Mayor Nagin, whom she does not mention, much less suggest as part of the problem, having presided over a city that was already chaotic in some neighborhoods, thanks to a culture of lawlessness unhampered by police or courts, a city that had created its own witness protection program.

Nope. She may have presented her column as about her, but it’s all about Bush, who again lied while people died? Something like that.  The woman is overwrought.

“The Bushes were managing images . . . This MBA president needs to manage people,” she writes. Well he is the chief executive, isn’t he? So what? Sweet drops all pretense of objectivity. She’s venting to the girls and boys in the coed dorm. But never fear: on Monday she’s back on the beat, calling them as she see’s ’em. At least the objectivity format will be more or less back in place.  (She came back with another Democrat-oriented column, about Sen. Barack Obama on his way to Houston to be with Bush I and Clinton for a photo-op session — oops, not that, rather, to help out, you know.  She reverentially, even worshipfully, lobs qq at Obama, who obliges, as if it’s news that he does not blame the Feds more than local New O. pols, for instance.  What a guy and what a gal.)

In the end, for her Sunday column she calls on another detached professional, “Barbie Zelizer” (does Barbie sign her journal articles that way?), a professor at Penn, “a scholar [let’s hope, if she’s a Penn prof] whose specialty is the impact of images” — “Gender and Atrocity: Women in Holocaust Photographs” is one of her studies — and guess what she says? The pictures of the hurricane aftermath send “a different message than what is being touted [hey, the professor talks like a headline!] the official line of the administration.” Presented, she means; she’s a clear thinker?  Big on images.

Let us not carp, however. Sweet got her quote. End of story, end (we hope) of vent, which by the way is called a rant in the blogosphere, but never in mainstream media hard copy, which abides by more rigorous standards, does it not?

 

“Let ’Em Gouge: A Defense of Price Gouging” is good libertarian, capitalistic stuff from Cato Institute.  For instance:

[M]any of those . . . who will curse a blue streak if you put them in front of a camera and ask them about “Big Oil” are as we speak putting their houses on the market and enthusiastically gouging the living daylights out of anyone looking for a new home.

Who, me?

Point: getting the highest price is what we have come to expect and practice.  Oil companies are a fat target, but

no one ever rages against real estate price gouging. In fact, the opposite is the case. Business reporters gush about returns and politicians pledge to do whatever it takes to keep the real estate bubble afloat.

What fools we mortals be.  In any case, gouging is

good for everyone in the long run. Gougers are sending an important signal to market actors that something is scarce and that profits are available to those who produce or sell that something.

Yes.  It’s signals like this that tell us where to invest our moola.  A planned economy leaves such figuring up to commissars, who are notoriously no good at it.  The conclusion is clear:

Blame not the price gouger. Blame the government that won’t let the price gouger do his job,

by controlling prices and rationing.  Tell commissars, czars, whatever we call them, to take a hike. 

Northwest Oak Park’s Catholics flock to and generously support St. Giles, which is a monument not only to Catholic faith and culture but to the rise (mostly) of the Irish from proles to bourgeois, and I don’t mean petit.  It’s a grand structure, a “plant” to warm cockles of pastors’ hearts for these 70 or so years.  But what of St. Giles the man?

It’s his day today.  Those in the know and on the go read Saint of the Day for their information, which is “shrouded in mystery,” but so what?  I love a mystery, and so do lots of people. 

Giles died in or around 710 (we think).  One thing is for sure.  He was “one of the most popular saints in the Middle Ages.”  He hosted pilgrims on their way to Compostella in Spain and the Holy Land in a monastery he built.  After he died, he was listed among the 14 Holy Helpers, who were good to pray to when sick or dying — when a fellow needs a friend, to be sure.  St. Christopher, who came a-cropper due to historians’ shooting down his existence, was one of the 14.

In any case, Giles was very big in Sweden, Hungary, and parts of Germany and eventually got a reputation for helping the poor and disabled.  He couldn’t save his monastery hostel, however.  It fell apart some centuries after he died.  It was a sort of sic transit experience (there goes glory), which shows saints have them too.  St. Giles, pray for us.

GW taps his father and Bubba to help in fund raising for New Orleans.  They worked the tsunami beat and have gotten to know each other and enjoy ea. other’s company, per reports.  Conservatives have asked what’s going on here.  Apart from fund raising for big causes, at which Bubba is probably pretty good, there’s the marginalizing of nutty Carter, with his certifying foreign elections of tyrants and thieves, not to mention other quirks and follies dating ‘way back.  Ignore the guy.  Do not add to his cachet in a slightest bit.  Keep him in Plains if possible.  He’s a nuisance and in his way a menace.

“I have consolation in knowing my son died a hero. And also we have a volunteer Army. No one came and forced my son, no one came and forced Casey. They volunteered for the mission. They were trained soldiers. They knew they weren’t going to Boy Scout camp. They knew. They had all written their wills. We said the I love you’s and be safe, don’t be a hero, and come home.”

That’s gold star mother Diane Ibbotson, of Albion, IL, talking to a Chi Trib editorial writer.  Her son died while trying to save Casey Sheehan, who had died trying to save others in the Baghdad Sadr City battle.  She has another way of grieving, helping her husband work their farm, volunteering at a church and nursing home.  Watching the History Channel account of  D-Day, she and her husband “take comfort in the idea that one day the battle that claimed the lives of their son, Sheehan’s son, and other sons will be remembered.”