Tag: Chi newspapers

Why loans are so hard to get

Small-business people can’t get the loans they need, reports Sun-Times.

While credit has loosened since the height of the financial crisis, the dollar volume of loans and numbers of loans made by large banks to small businesses still remains well below the levels seen prior to the recession locally and nationally.

Well what I don’t know about bank lending would . . .  (you know the rest) and I hate to go out on a limb. . .

But low, low interest rates decreed by the nation’s fiscal authorities might have something to do with it.  Maybe? 

Emanuel attacks criminals? Sorry, no.

Had to read hard copy head for this Sun-Times story twice: “Emanuel leads attacks on criminals”  — SORRY — on Romney.
Same head,continued: “Dems concede excitement level lower than” — SORRY — unlike 2008.
 
It’s not lower.  It’s different.  Like level 2 for men’s shoes, level 3 for ladies’ undergarments.  It’s all in how you say things, not in whatever the hell you are saying.

And let us pass over in silence another Sun-Times hard-copy head, about what Obama plans for the convention this week: “MESSGAGE: LOOK WHAT I’VE DONE.”

It shows how hard it is to get good help these days.

Demographic here, reporting on Paraddidle Joe

Mature demographic!  That’s me!  As in Chi Trib hard-copy caption (for Hartford Courant article by Kevin Hunt):

. . . over-size, amped-up, large-print Clarity Pal cellphone [featuring] old-school style and substance.”

That’s me too!

Oh yes, the days of early clock radio, 1946 with three brothers home from wars and waking of a morning to “Paradiddle Joe . . . beats out the rhythm in a rudimental way . . . Paradiddle Joe all the day,”  about an indefatigable drummer.  Wake to that sound, you’re ready for anything.

Tony Pastor and orchestra, Johnny Morris on drums.  Yeah!

Labor Day is Empty Chair Day!

Evil Blogger Lady on the empty-chair schtick:

I thought it was funny that night. But I did not realize how much it would upset the left! Even Barack Obama did not ignore it (which suggests it is worrying Obama 2012)… .

And Jennifer Rubin:

I was there and it was darn weird. But at times it was funny and devastating in its dismissal of the president’s excuses. And in clips and sound bites the day after the live performance, the oddness is diminished and the punch lines seem more biting. In simple terms, the movie icon encapsulated the message of the convention: If someone is doing a bad job, you have to fire him.

Yes.

She adds reference to Obama supporters’ “obsessive plea for more details about Romney’s policies.” Which he has given, she adds to that. But no matter: Chi Trib today has its “short on details” story (LA Times story)

And Richard Fernandez:

It was an old man’s delivery, but overstatedly so for effect. It was a cutting delivery and for that reason delivered in low key. But for all of Clint Eastwood’s rhetorical cleverness at the Republican convention it derived its effectiveness precisely because it wasn’t one of those “I take this platform tonight with pen in hand, bearing in mind the immortal words of Clancy M. Duckworth” type orations. It wasn’t the speech of someone who was running for office.

Rather it might have come from Mr. Weller down at the corner office musing on simple things to not very important people. How it wasn’t good form to mess things up continuously. How one might lose faith in a man who made one broken promise too many. How at the end of the day everyone either did the job or quit out of decency. Even Presidents.

Remember. Empty Chair Day tomorrow.

(H/T the irreplaceable Instapundit)

Leftist Newsroom Chatter

About those liberal media folks, veteran of many newsrooms commenting on the Yahoo Wash. bureau chief, former ABC political editor, saying Republicans rejoice “when black people drown”:

I could write a thousand columns on comments like these, and similar comments I heard while in newsrooms over the years. In my newsroom there were people crying out loud and tears shed when George W. Bush was elected in 2000. There were cheers when Al Gore rescinded his resignation. It is the culture. Leftists live and thrive in this environment, and they are rewarded with advancements. Rarely are they held accountable because they know management is on their side.

The perp was fired, But the culture remains:

The bias is . . . too deep, too ingrained, and they really don’t want to change. It’s like telling a rattlesnake not to bite. They will cease to exist before they correct the culture.

Teachers: Ask us, don’t measure us; money is secondary

Chi Teachers president Karen Lewis and other teacher unionists in yesterday’s Sun-Times, “Cash upfront the way to get teachers to rack up better student test scores, study finds”:

* Karen L: Economists don’t understand us. 

(Teachers are different from you and me: they don’t care about money.  But they are like you and me: they prefer not to be held to account, would rather have a sure thing.  Hence their aversion to being measured.)

* Chicago Heights teacher, one of 150 studied by U. of Chi economists and discovered to be motivated by early bonus payout which they have to pay back if scores are not up to snuff: We were snookered (by U of Chi economists, who didn’t say they were economists — point mildly contested by experimenters’ spokesperson.)  It was a bad test.

How so?  Teacher: We thought they were education professors.  Ed profs would have asked us what works.  (But Econ profs study them, not what they say.)  They don’t understand us.  (We’re different.)

* Karen L: “Nothing is better [for a teacher] than seeing the light bulb turn on” in student head.  (Not even higher pay?  Then why fight City Hall on contract money?)

Concealed-carry shooter saves cop

Kills the bad guy after warning. Read all about it nationally. No? No.:

Only local station WAFB reported this incident. FBI Supplemental Homicide Reports show that private citizens killed police attackers only three times annually since 2000. Yet an unusual and compelling story of self-defense by a concealed carry licensee gets mentioned only by local media. Media blackouts allow anti-rights propagandists to continue claiming that self-defense incidents are rare, so banning concealed carry wouldn’t be an imposition.

Thing is, if it’s not reported, it didn’t happen.

(H/T: Instapundit)

2016: Obama’s America, not for the liberal faint of heart

Dedicated libs should not be allowed to see “2016: Obama’s America,” now showing in Chi area; it would be a health risk for them, because of its blasphemous nature as they would see it, regarding their hero Obama. Others? See it, soon.

Dinesh d’Souza has put together a film that offers a fresh framework for viewing Obama — anticolonialism. A key interview is with a Kenyan writer and activist who tells d’Souza about Barack Sr.’s anticolonial feelings and convictions. Israel is “a Trojan horse” for The West in the Middle East, for instance. And Barack Jr.? He and his late father, of “Dreams” fame, are as one in their thinking. Barack Jr. is an anticolonialist in his father’s mold.

Which after an hour or so of building his framework, d’Souza illustrates, telling us what to expect in 2016 if Obama is re-elected: sharply diminished role for the U.S. in the world scene because of unilateral nuclear disarmament and because of its crippling debt, which has ballooned already and will reach five times its current level by then.

It’s an effective campaign film here. The Yorktown AMC theater audience sat quiet as mice throughout — allowing for some candy-wrapper crinkling by a young person to my right. The crowd at this 11:50 showing pretty much filled the tiered “stadium seating.” Yesterday, Sunday.  Above link gives all Chi-area showings, including AMC Showplace Galewood, just off Central north of North Ave. a few minutes drive from Oak Park.

So stay away, committed Obama-supporters; it will be too painful. But flock to it, ye Obama-objectors and -suspectors and -neutralists in the matter. Eyeful and earful awaits ye.

NY Times in-house critic gets it just right

As NY Times public editor calls it a tenure (2 years of subjecting NYT stuff to his close scrutiny from within), he comes up with a very good short description of what happens when you put a bunch of contemporary libs together and give them a newspaper to run:

“When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so,” Brisbane writes in his final column. “Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.”

It’s the air they breathe.  They are hopeless.  Time to break up the Times.