“Easiest dollar I made all day,” I told a fellow customer at Einstein’s after telling the young counter woman I was a dollar short on my change and receiving from her the dollar. Then I sat down and realized I’d been charged for a large coffee when I had ordered small with the comment that I’d be refilling it here, so why get large? Back I went to the counter for the easiest 30 cents I had made — or it turned out, would make — all day. The 30 cents was retrieved, as had the dollar, from the transparent plastic tip collector on the counter. Reflection: One may ask why if one is to sit drinking his endless-refill cup he would order a large, unless he was to supply the office when he got there.

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 The folks here at Einstein’s are people for whom the sheer rationality of doing things in organized fashion is a heavy burden. We know the feeling, do we not? It explains why some do well in business (or almost anything else), why some spend their days doing what others tell them to do (or else), why some fly high and others fly low. Not entirely. We also have life’s sharpies, corner-cutters who excape tedium, penury, and even the limitations of a modest life style. Chicago and Cook County politically connected chiselers come to mind, proficients of the wink and nod who appear regularly in the paper and less regularly in the courts and jails — wholly federal, we should note, since these matters are never grist for state and county mills of justice. Never. It’s enough to make a big-government advocate out of you.

“It pains [Chi Trib’s Eric Zorn] that ‘gay rights’ is still an issue,” but he still does not think it a good idea for teachers to impose a protesting “day of silence” on students as was done last week at “thousands” of schools nationwide, in part because he sees the counter protest “day of truth” in the offing.  In this sauce-for-goose, sauce-for-gander situation, he rejects “indoctrinating [his] kids on controversial socio-political matters,” period and says he’d be “just an opportunist” to buy into this one because he agrees with it.

Fair enough.  But are schools value-free?  He’s not saying that, but it’s worth asking.  The “day of silence” in itself is nothing to be upset about, but silence about what?  To what end?  If fairness and a spirit of tolerance is the goal, fine.  But to specify the object of tolerance is another story.  How about a debate?  That’s the way of a democratic society.  Invite debaters on both sides of, say, how much tolerance of gays is in order?  Even to raise the question is to get in trouble, however.

* “The charge that he improperly sought to influence intelligence conclusions is a serious one, and it is reasonable to assess his conduct in these encounters. But no one should be surprised to find that episodes of conflict have occurred in this environment over the course of a four-year tenure,” said Sen. Lugar in his day-before-vote preemptive strike toward confirmation of Bolton to UN job — italics added.  No one should be surprised at a lot of things that engage editors, reporters, and headline writers, De Lay’s junkets and relatives on campaign payroll, for one thing.  Washington is regularly awash in such things, is it not?

* Delayed congrats to Paige Wiser, who I think has been influenced by that Austen woman, on her 2^nd child. In her Sun-Times column before taking leave a few months back, she gave all the wrong reasons for having a baby, then says, “It’s too late now” and took leave.

* U.S. out of U.N., U.N. out of U.S.? Great slogan but won’t happen. If it did happen, however, why not Haiti? Think what U.N. headquarters would do for the Haiti economy. And those many UN third-worlders would feel more at home there.

NOT! They may be third-worlders, but like globetrotters everywhere, they would rather live (it up) in New York – assuming they needn’t reside in Fort Apache or some other impacted part of town, which is a very safe assumption.

This from John Leo on Terri Schiavo etc. is noteworthy in many respects, but for purposes of this blog especially so in his description of media bias. He notes reference to Florida rallies as “religious roadshow” and calls it “a term unlikely to have been applied to Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights demonstrations or any other rallies meeting CBS’s approval.”

“More important,” he says:

it was hard to find news that Michael Schiavo had provided no therapy or rehabilitation for his wife since 1994 and even blocked the use of antibiotics when Terri developed a urinary infection. And the big national newspapers claimed as a fact that Michael Schiavo’s long-delayed recollection of Terri’s wish to die, supported only by hearsay from Michael’s brother and a sister-in-law, met the standard for “clear and convincing evidence” of consent. It did nothing of the sort, particularly with two of Terri’s friends testifying the opposite. The media covered the intervention by Congress as narrowly political and unwarranted. They largely fudged the debates over whether Terri Schiavo was indeed in a persistent vegetative state and whether tube-feeding meant that Schiavo was on life support. In the Nancy Cruzan case, the Supreme Court said that tube-feeding is life-support but some ethicists and disability leaders strongly dispute that position.

“The Schiavo case is only slightly more consequential” than Eric Zorn’s pet, the U. of Illinois mascot case, he says today.

Just when I decide I will pay no more attention to him, a headline rips my attention away from something substantial, in this case

Eric Zorn: “Just another skirmish in the culture war”

in a Tribune email.

I leave it to you to plow through Z’s head-tripping convolutions to discern his argument, which usually is a triumph of logic over experience but may not be that much in this case.

“It hasn’t happened in the 46 other states that have a system that allows people to obtain a permit to carry a concealed firearm,” says NRA man Todd Vandermyde in Sun-Times, referring to Mayordaley II’s “more arguments settled with firearms. More bodies in the morgue and more gun victims in the rehab hospitals” when concealed-carry laws pass.

Is this a good follow-up for Illinois newspapers, to look at what’s happened elsewhere? As a noosepaper reader, I think so.

HAH! I THOUGHT OF IT AND YOU DIDN’T, OR IF YOU DID, I GOT COLUMN SPACE AND YOU DON’T! . . . Got instant reaction to random shootings? Don’t? Try Dawn Turner Trice in today’s Chi Trib, where it’s a matter of “Want security? Treat mental illness.”

“If we fail to discuss mental illness, its devastation and the lowly place it continues to occupy in our health-care system . . . we miss something huge,” she says. Security remains “paramount,” but we have to go preventative.

A doctor tells her 60 percent of children of depressed parents are going to battle depression “during their lifetime” but if identified they “may never become” ill. He’s right, but so what? He didn’t ask to be asked by Trice about it.

Did she talk about mental illness at tsunami time? Why not? Her response is typical instant expertizing by columnist, which should have instant penalty imposed by the American Society of Prevention of Stupidity by Columnists. A day’s pay, minimum.

Better she talk about the tragedy of life, even its sweet mystery, and not the supposed “myth and mystery” in which mental illness is “still shrouded.”

Docs have long wait lists, insurance is inadequate, Trice has her cause for the day — mental illness and the inadequacies of the health system! She has bounced from shooter headlines to an issue!

WINNING IS WHAT? . . . U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel says he comes from the “Vince Lombardi wing of the Democratic Party: Winning is everything,” says Chi Trib with ill-disguised approval or at least conspicuous non-disapproval. Can we imagine reading that about Karl Rove?

Later: The head was unfortunate, because the story stands up, if somewhat laboriously. Take a look.

The Chi Trib (Co.)-owned LA Times is raked over righteously and it seems rightly indignant coals by radio man Hugh Hewitt here . He is madder than hell about a p-1 story that as he quotes it is a puff piece for our friends the North Koreans — just folks, after all, like us — sans context, as if Ed Murrow had told how warm-hearted those Nazis are. FYI Trib Co. leadership, says Hewitt.

I told Dennis Byrne he would be disappointed to hear that I did not read his entire column in today’s Chi Trib to the lady of our house after dinner tonight, only selections. Such as his compromise proposal whereby a fetus’s being brain dead or alive suffices to bring us together on whether to respect his life or not.

Why didn’t I think of that? I asked my helpmeet. Because I am stuck in Vatican-style (old Europe) thinking, I told her. Look to the American experience for a decent solution, I said.

Seeking common ground, he argued that brain life would qualify the fetus as belonging to the “community,” whereby hangs the tale in contemporary parlance.

Fanatical pro-choicers will not buy it, he wrote, but they can be properly marginalized, he implied, once the issue becomes once more debatable and debated, I mean once we (thru the Supreme Ct) return choice to voters by overturning Roe-Wade.

Very good column, hung on the Hillary-as-veering-right peg. Byrne closes by urging her not to oppose Bush’s pro-life-leaning judges, who will return choice to voters.