“Mayor Daley Summerdale” registers zilch on Google News, about 30 on Google Web, beginning with a U. of Chicago Press site for the Royko compilation, One More Time, and ending with http://www.gamblingmagazine.com/articles/53/53-178.htm, site of a 1999 Gambling Magazine interview with the prolific and dogged and professionally expert Richard Lindberg. 

Chi Trib went for the hat trick, or maybe trifecta (horse bettors have to help out here), with this pair, yesterday and today, of page one smash-’em stories:

* Sunday’s was about a black man brutalized by drunken whites who got short jail terms in Linden, Texas, described by the Texas NAACP head as one of “a few areas in Texas that have kind of bypassed the civil rights era.” Linden, said the NAACP man, is “an island of the ’50s.” One of a few, an island: unusual. What then is the significance of this story for a Chicago, as opposed to a Texas, newspaper? It does rub raw sores of discontent among most readers. Is this what reporter Howard Witt and his editors have in mind?

* Monday’s, with the startling head “Critics: Pentagon in blinders: Long before 9/11, the military was warned about low-tech warfare, but it didn’t listen” is about “maverick officers, active and retired . . . agitating for change,” including “a chief warrant officer in the Marine Reserves who focuses on gang crime in Chicago as a sergeant in the city’s Police Department [who] recently returned from Iraq after leading a Marine unit against insurgents.” Other “mavericks” are quoted, in their journal articles and in personal interviews. The problem goes back to the Viet Nam war, the article, by Stephen J. Hedges, says. Back to Gen. Billy Mitchell being court-martialed for his stubborn support for developing air power in 1925, it might have said, lending context. Buried in the story is 3rd Cavalry’s commander saying they are learning how to do it in Iraq, which would have made a Wash Times lead. All in all, Hedges did a lot of reporting but was given an awful lot of space — more than 2,200 words! — and (naturally) used it all up. Are there no editors below O’Shea at Chi Trib, any beside the one who devised that sock-’em-bust-’em head, picking on a time-honored fat target?

No reason for Social Security reform to be a partisan issue, says Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner. 

In fact, there is a long history of Democrats offering workers more choice, ownership and control over their retirement funds.  Democrats like former Senators Robert Kerry and Patrick Moynihan were among the earliest proponents of individual accounts. The Democratic Leadership Council and its think tank arm, the Progressive Policy Institute, have been supportive. Even former president Bill Clinton was willing to consider the idea. Some Washington observers believe that only the Lewinsky scandal preventing him from endorsing individual accounts.

That woman in the White House.  Drat!

James P. Pinkerton in his Newsday column puts Deep Throat in perspective, noting this among other things about Watergate:

As an impressionable teen back then, I remember the chairman of the Watergate investigating committee, Sen. Sam Ervin (D-N.C.), declaring that the scandal was “the greatest tragedy this country has ever suffered, [worse than] the Civil War.”

At the time, I took those words to heart, mostly because there was no voice in the media to simply laugh out loud in derisive response. Watergate was worse than the death of 600,000 people in the War Between the States? Worse than the Depression? Worse than any number of disasters, epidemics, lynchings and assassinations? Please.

As for W. Mark Felt, the #2 FBI man now self-exposed as Deep Throat,

he’s a strange kind of hero. In 1980, he was convicted of ordering FBI agents to burgle the homes of political dissidents. Isn’t that kind of close to what Nixon’s men were guilty of? And after decades of denial, at 91, now he comes forward – or at least his daughter does, on the stroke-ridden old man’s behalf. As she explained to Vanity Fair, “Bob Woodward’s gonna get all the glory for this, but we could make at least enough money to pay some bills.”

And Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher, telling of his “secret life with W. Mark Felt,” notes that Felt is a man who “truly knew a thing or two about illegal break-ins,” thanks to his heading up FBI’s “notorious COINTELPRO domestic spying-and-burglary campaign” about the time he was giving good stuff to Woodward and Bernstein.

 

WJ column June 2005

RACIST SCUM:

Breathes there an Oak Parker with soul so dead, who never to himself has said, “I love diversity”? Of course not. Nonetheless, there are racists among us who joined white flight out of Austin, making that neighborhood slide into rack and ruin.

Take the white newlyweds who set up connubial housekeeping in 1969 in an apartment at 334 1/2 North Lotus, in an 18-unit building. The building was all white because Baird & Warner as management company was keeping it that way by not advertising vacancies, because the largely Catholic-funded and St. Catherine of Siena rectory-based Alinsky-style Organization for a Better Austin (OBA) had told it to.

A young ex-Jesuit seminarian was OBA point man for the building. The building’s manager, also young, had his orders: OBA was trying to keep the neighborhood from being overrun, and this building was to be a sort of rampart. This hard-nosed Alinsky approach was being applied on neighborhood issues in Woodlawn, where Nick von Hoffman, later a newsman and national columnist, was helping to start The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), and on Chicago’s Southwest Side, where the Organization for the Soutwest Community tried to stem the tide of white flight and black inundation. If politics ain’t beanbag, as we hear from its practitioners, neither was trying to keep Austin from going all black.

The newlyweds established their household in July. In October the woman drove past Austin High on time to be pelted with rocks by students getting out of class. The windshield of her Chevy Nova was shattered. She got back to Lotus Street in a hurry, ran up to their third-floor apartment, and knocked on neighbors Gretchen and Richard’s door across the hall. Gretchen called the man at work. He rushed home on the “L.” She was O.K., though shaken.

In January a first-floor apartment was burglarized and set afire; the racist couple told the property manager they were leaving, lease or no lease. O.K., he said, we’ll advertise the apartment. The heck with the OBA. The building would no longer be all white. The rampart was breached.

Among people who came looking was a man who asked why the couple was leaving. Burglary with arson, the white man said. Oh, we’re used to that, the other said. In due time, a woman with a child took the apartment. Unfamiliar with Oak Park and being told the rental office was on North Boulevard, she misunderstood and took a bus all the way to North Avenue. She became the first black tenant. The couple moved to Oak Park.

There they met other white liberals who had flown. One hosted a meeting at her very nice house where guests were asked to volunteer as bail-money-suppliers for arrested members of the Black Panthers at any time of day. The couple declined but in conversation learned that the hostess and her husband had left a South Side neighborhood when their black professional neighbors had told them it was time to go. She said nothing of any urge to tell the neighbors where to put their advice or to say, “Wait, this is my neighborhood, we ain’t leaving.” Actually, it wasn’t their neighborhood any more. It had become someone else’s.

WOMAN AT WINDOW:

A little past 8:30 on a recent week day morning at Bank One, a somewhat bent-over woman standing in line dropped her cane. A man behind her picked it up for her, they chatted. As they waited, she opened and shut several small purses, checking on the money in each. She volunteered that she was 90. No, he said, surprised. Where was she born? Down south, Mississippi. She had come to Chicago when she was 23. On the IC? he asked, meaning Illinois Central Railroad. She smiled. Yes.

On this day she hoped she would not have to pay another fare, referring to the two-hour free-transfer time on a CTA card. She had come on the “L” and would return that way, getting off at Cicero, where she would catch a bus, her little purses emptied, their contents deposited – if she could just find it all.

Each little purse, a sort of miniature carpet bag, snapped at the top. Each had bills folded inside. But she couldn’t find all the money and rummaged for it, muttering as she did so, blaming herself for misplacing things as she grew older. Maybe she had left it on the L, she wondered. She stepped aside from the teller’s window, letting the next customer get it.

Finally, “I’ve got it,” she said. The missing money, in one of the little purses. She moved back to the window, only a step away, to resume her business.

From John Leo’s latest in U.S. News, italics added:

Instead of trampling Newsweek –the magazine made a mistake and corrected it
quickly and honestly–the focus ought to be on whether the news media are
predisposed to make certain kinds of mistakes and, if so, what to do about
it. The disdain that so many reporters have for the military (or for police,
the FBI, conservative Christians, or right-to-lifers) frames the way that
errors and bogus stories tend to occur. The antimilitary mentality makes
atrocity stories easier to publish, even when they are untrue.  . . .  It’s
possible to read newspapers and newsmagazines carefully and never see
anything about the liberal indoctrination now taking place at major
universities. This has something to do with the fact that the universities
are mostly institutions of the left and that newsrooms tend to hire from the
left and from the universities in question.
……………….
 the biggest flaw in mainstream journalism today is the lack of diversity.
Much bean-counting goes on in regard to gender and race, but the new hires
tend to come from the same economic bracket and the same pool of elite
universities, and they tend to have the same take on politics and culture.

So it happens that Chi Trib’s Dawn T. Trice as a newbie in 1990 could not only get indignant over a Mike Royko column over his use of  “monkeys” as applied to blacks by a Los Angeles cop, but with others of her ilk could persuade a night editor to kill it, as in this Chicago Newspapers item of May 15, 2004.  In my lead, I made the point:

There are times when Chi Trib seems populated by graduates of politically correct campuses, editors and reporters who speak mostly to their own kind.