RUSHING THINGS . . . . Reading Chi Trib, I found quite an item in the obits. Advice: always read the obits, an ongoing chronicle of comings and goings, emphasis on the latter, in which the noosepaper almost always gets it right, even dousing some of its endemic, genetic, inbred zest for gossip and other bad news.
This item, however, in the obit for an apparently admirable woman who died at 91 after a long life as wife, mother (of 5), widow, and school teacher, has the news that Oak Park has a “Rush West Suburban Hospital.” This encompasses a major change that no local paper has uncovered, since West Sub has been owned by the Resurrectionist Sisters for several years and Oak Park Hospital has been a Rush Medical Center affiliate for as many.
TELEPHONY . . . . Meanwhile, back at the old homestead, we are without landline telephone, having had AT&T in our house yesterday to digitalize us stem to stern. Painless as it occurred, painful in the aftermath, as James, who was a pleasure to have around for five or six hours, had not connected my desk phone to anything and (not his fault) had left us w/o a dial tone while central office finished the digitalization.
My subsequent mistake was to make two calls to the U-Verse help people when one would have been enough. The first gave me Ashley, who correctly decided our internal connection problems called for a repair person to make a house call, which he or she will do tomorrow afternoon, the earliest time available. The second, made for no good reason to tell them we had a dial tone (which turned out illusory) gave me Gregory, who incorrectly analyzed the problem and wanted to cancel my repair person, which I did not do, arguing that I still had the office-phone connection problem. More later . . . .
STIMULATING . . . . Again to Chi Trib, where Jonah Goldberg’s column leapt at me off the page with his quite readable notations about government knowing best (not) and “everybody” knowing what works (not). Everybody knew Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, for instance, everybody in Dan Rather’s CBS shop knew those Texas National Guard memos were legit — everybody knew until everybody didn’t.
So it is with the grand moguls of government-directed finance — or Citigroup– and Robert Rubin-directed, for that matter — how things will or would work. Stimuli don’t work, at least didn’t since World War II, Goldberg says, citing economist Bruce Bartlett. Why he doesn’t note its most famous failure, under FDR, I don’t know.
Blithe Spirit 