Tag: Chi newspapers

Whose kind of Terror Town is Chicago?

Eight shot last night in Terror Town, in Chicago’s once-white-posh South Shore neighborhood, of 19 shot in nine hours.  Coming up in tomorrow’s Sun-Times, a story about GUNS. 

Of course.  Mediums love stories about guns.  Allows them to be righteous about bad guys who supply them.  But what about shooters? 

They profile victims all the time, wringing hands about innocent people or kids who never had a chance, etc.  But do they profile shooters?  Why not?  Do him, his family, his neighborhood, IN DEPTH, as they say, or in shallow, early and often.

Blaming usual suspects if they must — gun suppliers, bad schools, right-wingers who lack sympathy, etc. — but while they are at it, the culture of dependency, the role of welfare in rewarding the father-free and in making fathers superfluous, the constant blame-whitey chatter from “Rev.” Sharpton and his ilk.

I ask too much and get carried away.  I have in mind a consulting of William Julius Wilson and his ilk, and a polling of pastors in the ‘hood.  I remember one I talked to decades ago after his long, long service, who told me of the pressure politicians put on him to gain his pulpit.  Someone candid but not blowing his horn.

A story featuring the pastors, and not just the ones who stage and lead marches, but ones the reporter — Chi Trib’s “Seeker” will do, or one of Sun-Times’s shoe-leather wearers-out, door-knockers, telephone-callers — finds by asking around, starting with denominational execs at to who’s who and trying at all times to separate wheat from chaff among them.

Can be done.  Beats the usual guns story, which I’m betting will quote Fr. Pfleger.  If the next guns story doesn’t quote him, I will eat my delete key.

 

 

 

Why not to call the president a communist

The provocative Cliff Kincaid wonders why “self-styled conservative media personalities feel it necessary to protect the President”:

“With more than four years of research into Davis, and more revelations coming, the burden of proof is on Barack Obama to prove that his communist connections, which continued from his growing-up years in Hawaii to college to Chicago, were the result of innocence or naïveté.
 
That will be hard for him to do, since he concealed the identity of Davis in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, calling him just “Frank” and depicting him as a poet and writer.
 
He knew that Frank Marshall Davis was an associate and mentor and that he had to protect his communist identity from public scrutiny.”

It’s the audience, stupid.  Everyone has one, and everyone limits himself to what’s acceptable to it.  The wider the audience, the more severe the limitation.

Or, as I just tweeted, the author Paul Kengor is given huge audiences — by Hannity and O’Reilly — and Cliff Kincaid complains.

Economy, economy, economy

Well well well, two U. of Colorado fellows say Romney wins handily in November.  Smart guys!

Using a state-by-state analysis of unemployment and per-capita income, academics Kenneth Bickers and Michael Berry of the University of Colorado project that Romney will win 52.9% of the popular vote and 320 electoral votes. The political scientists discuss their findings here.

Their forecast suggests that President Obama will lose in almost all of the swing states, including North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida…

But the polls?

Bickers said much of the polling thus far means relatively little, with much of the electorate still not focused on the race. [He and Berry] said their model focuses on the preeminent issue of the economy. Applied retrospectively, the model [picks] the correct winner in every presidential contest going back to 1980, they said.

NBC’s Chuck-You Todd (R. Limbaugh’s name for him) says the economy’s being underplayed — not by media but by the candidates.  To which Laura Ingraham: What about the major media “obsessing” over the Mo. senatorial candidate and his “legitimate rape”:

Todd: Well, this is a chicken and egg conversation. This is a distraction. I don’t think it’s a distraction you can quote, blame on the media . . .   It’s not media bias, . . . it’s what they’re covering, and the fact is we are under-covering the economy, . . .  but you cover the campaign that is in front of you.

They cover what’s there.  It’s the game they play.  Lemmings don’t go off on their own.  It never enters their minds.  That’s our major media.  It’s their nature.

Vote stealing in Wisconsin

Asked commenter Maggie M. to clarify something a while back, and she did so, offering this which stands by itself and explains itself.  Make it by Maggie and me; I couldn’t resist adding here and there:

 I’d like to know what the real election results are minus the fraud that the Democrats have perfected over the decades.

For instance, Bush lost Wisconsin in 2000 by 10,000 votes — they have same-day registration, where you can present any kind of bill for an address and get registered; it was reported that college kids were being bussed around to vote multiple times.  ACORN had been registering phony names, etc. 
 
2008 At least 33,000 ACORN-submitted registrations in Milwaukee have been called into question after it was found that the organizations had been using felons as registration workers, in violation of state election rules. Two people involved in the ongoing Wisconsin voter fraud investigation have been charged with felonies.
 
2004 The district attorney’s office investigated seven voter registration applications Project Vote employees filed in the names of people who said the group never contacted them. Former Project Vote employee Robert Marquise Blakely told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he had not met with any of the people whose voter registration applications he signed, “an apparent violation of state law,” according to the paper.
As we heard and read during the recall, the Racine County vote was filled with enormous discrepancies.
 
Wisconsin passed a Voter ID law in 2010 to go into effect for the 2012 election.  A [Democrat-led] Dane County Circuit Court judge has blocked the law and will not bring it up for judicial review until after the Nov. election.  [italics added]
 
So much for knowing the will of the people.
Thank you, Margaret.

The Sgt. Friday approach to knowing things

Have been wondering about fact-checking operations, which claim to have the strict facts when it’s often a matter of argument threads, as opposed to spelling a name or getting a date right — except, of course, when there’s argument about a name or a date. 

Hence, I much support this from Red Statesman Erick E. in piece about Rep. Todd Akin’s rape comments.  (And is E.E. sure about spelling of his first name?) 

Erick (sp?):

Politifact disagrees with the statement about Obama and infanticide, but as is often the case, Politifact is obfuscating what Barack Obama said to help a Democrat. Politifact is, after all, the Walter Duranty of fact checkers complete with a Pulitzer Prize.

Oh, and would Sun-Timeswoman Lynn Sweet, recommender of Politifact, take note?  Thank you, Lynn.  And Lynn, please broaden your list of resources.  Better recommend rabid promoters pro and con any position, keeping in mind Norman Mailer’s comment to Chicago 7 judge Julius Hoffman many years ago, “But Your Honor, facts without nuance are nothing.”  

Another point, Hegel, and Plato long before him, had it right about dialectics.  It’s a jungle out there, full of charges and counter-charges.  You have to be good at sifting things.  These fact-checkers claim a lot for themselves but sometimes offer a cookbook approach, comforting to some, indeed a naive approach. 

What we have here is a problem of communication, true, but more specifically one of epistemology. 

Think about it.

Chi Trib, please, be clear about the Servites

You’re a Chicago reader.  You’re a Catholic.  You have some idea of who’s who among priests and nuns.  You think Chi Trib does its homework when it prints a story.  Well not always!!!

Story today about mail theft of donations, a dastardly act that does more than steal money.  It steals trust in the U.S. Postal Service, one of the pillars of society. 

But what of the newspaper that leads off with “The letters to the Servants of Mary were mailed from across the country” by which it means “the Servites, headquartered . . . at Our Lady of the [sic] Sorrows Basilica.”  The Sorrows?  It’s not how people talk!

Reporter is Annie Sweeney, who’s not a new arrival in town, as are not the copy deskers at her newspaper.  It’s been many years since Ed Eulenberg of Chi Daily News chewed me out for getting a standard Jewish term wrong in a story — and he the cheeriest and gentlest of men.  Time was . . .

Anyhow, in this case, we have Servite sisters, headquartered in Ladysmith,Wisconsin, who are called Servants of Mary, and Servants of Mary, Ministers to the Sick, Kansas City-based, founded in 1851 in Madrid, Spain.

Just a bit of Internet searching turns them up.  It’s easier than finding lost mail, that’s for sure.

A mere bagatelle for smutty Tribune

Trib writers Rick Pearson and Monique Garcia having fun in story about Gov. Quinn and pension reform:

Back in the 1970s, Quinn was a populist organizer known for launching petition drives to cut the size of the Legislature and starting tea-bag protests over legislative pay.

And:

Perhaps in an era of tea party politics helping to drive Republicans in the national debate over the size and cost of government, the Democratic governor and his tea-bag protests may be back in vogue after all.

Urban dictionary definitions?

Tea bag:

(v). To lower your body as to dip the testicles into her mouth as the woman is tonguing the scrotum.
And:
(n. or v.) To place testicles in someone’s mouth and proceed in a up and down motion.
And:
Placing your testes inside someones mouth and raising and lowering them to look like you are making tea.
As in:
I proceded to tea bag the homeless man.
Enough.  You get the idea.  Nice going, Chicago Tribune.

Illinois issues, please, front and center

This is good reporting of Gov. Quinn’s bad day at the fair on Wednesday, but the lede is in the middle, I think.  Namely:

“I inherited a lot of problems that I didn’t create, but I’m here to repair and resolve them, reform them. And there may be some people perhaps in this audience even who aren’t pleased with some of those decisions, but I want to ask the people of Illinois today: Do you think it’s right that in 1992, some state worker who retired on a $60,000 pension — that’s 1992 and a $60,000 pension — that 20 years later, under the current pension rules that need to be reformed, that very same person is getting $120,000 from the taxpayers?

“I think most taxpayers and parents in Illinois, particularly those who are concerned about education, want to make sure we invest more money in education of our children and our students in Illinois than we put into the pension piggyback for retired state workers,” he said.

To be followed by an adaptation of the actual lede, noting that what he said was rendered inaudible to his live audience by the heckling and available only later only to sound-feed recipients among the press:

Union members heckled him while he ate his State Fair favorite for lunch: pork on a stick. A plane flew overhead towing a banner blasting him as anti-worker. A labor leader was stumped on whether he was a better governor than the disgraced Rod Blagojevich.

My lede would have put focus on issues rather than (in this case) bully-boy and -girl tactics by public-employee unions AFSCME, teachers’ Ill. Ed. Assn., state AFL-CIO, and others — which I find disgusting, but that’s another matter.

To get it straight, go to some other paper, says Sweet of Sun-Times

Lynn Sweet bemoaned dirty campaigning yesterday, offering odd advice to her readers: Go somewhere else to get things straight!

I am imploring you in the months ahead to do some homework. Do some reading up on what’s at issue in the now red-hot future-of-Medicare debate — and not on websites that masquerade as nonpartisan.

For starters, the folks at two independent fact-check operations — the Tampa Bay Times’ Politifact.org and FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center — sort out the political debate in thoughtful and simple language, and they have the guts to make the call.

Why wouldn’t she recommend her own newspaper, the Sun-Times?

Why the college-educated believe Obama

This letter-writer (Wall St. Journal, 8/16/12) puts it well:

Regarding your editorial “The Postmodern President” (Aug. 10): Perhaps Bill Clinton was the first postmodern president depending, of course, on what the definition of “was” was (or is). The reason that the Obama campaign’s loosely woven fabrications resonate with the public is [that] we have a rising population of postmodern, university-educated minds.

Interestingly, tea partiers are vexing to postmodernists because they cling to their guns or religion, i.e., absolute truths and unalterable, God-given rights enumerated in our nation’s founding documents. These are roadblocks to free interpretation and relative “truth.”

Doug Mainwaring, Gaithersburg, Md.

We are not supposed to be sure about things, you see.