Discussing specialized business weeklies with an expert, I learned recently that reporters for one such chain are paid more than those for the dailies in the same cities.  Was not surprised, I said: they are better qualified and more sophisticated, writing as they do for a more discriminating audience.

Think Bay Fang in today’s Chi Trib, with her piece on Washington’s “Vulcans,” who find themselves on the hot seat in these days of the Democrat majority.  It’s foreign-policy coverage for dummies, rehearsing the rehearsed.

And for a certain kind of dummy at that.  What is there about the story that the “senior Democratic congressional aide” quoted anonymously would not like?  He who framed the story for Fang:

“There is a real sense among Hill investigators that, after six years with a Republican Congress, administration officials became accustomed to having their explanations accepted at face value,” said one senior Democratic congressional aide. “Many of the prior inquiries pulled punches, failing to ask the hardest questions, and now that’s coming back to haunt them.”

Moreover, whose idea was the story, Fang’s or the aide’s? 

Also, where in the story is “Democrats claimed” or “alleged,” to go with generic Republican objections — “Republicans called it a fishing expedition . . .  . have accused [Rep.] Waxman [chief interrogator] of partisan pettiness . . . “

Nothing so story-framing available from a senior Republican aide?

And how about this one? 

Vice President Dick Cheney, a charter member of the group, is still in office, but he has some of the lowest popularity ratings of anyone in the administration.

Charter member?  This is columnist’s language, not news writer’s.  Still in office, is he?  I wondered why he keeps turning up on Fox.  Popularity down the toilet?  Ah-hah, Waxman’s revenge.

One more carping criticism of this column-article.  “Prewar claims, later discredited, that Iraq sought uranium from Niger,” tossed off as easy as can be: That’s how WashPost’s Pincus said it in July, 2003, going with “a senior administration official.”  It’s how we say it these days in all the best noosepapers.

However, Bush’s claim was that Iraq tried to buy uranium in “Africa,” citing British intel that named Congo, Somalia, and Niger.  British press then focused on Congo, for what that’s worth, and the famous (infamous) Joseph Wilson reported that “a sale couldn’t likely be completed in Niger,” never disproving the attempt, according to DailyHowler.com.

By now in any other context but interest in the Democrat zeal to interrogate, it would be inside baseball.  Good enough for dummies, however.

Lewis Lazare is the first (I think) to see the emperor’s nudity in the matter of that pesky Olympics logo that has to be removed, and along the way cites mayoral-office heavy-handedness in public relations:

So, Chicago, how does it feel? We’re still nearly nine years way from possibly hosting the 2016 Summer Olympics, and already we have a huge gob of egg to wipe off our collective faces.

On Wednesday, the powerful International Olympic Committee reminded the Chicago 2016 Olympic Committee what it should have known: that cities bidding for the Olympics may not use Olympic colors or symbols (the torch) in their logos

The mayoral clumsiness?

Do [Pat] Ryan and Daley need to shake up their staff after this logo setback? And before going any further, perhaps these two 2016 committee leaders, if indeed that is their role, should rethink the fascistic (how very Richard M. Daley, right?), hamfisted approach to public relations that has characterized the committee’s efforts so far.

It’s the Second City way, I fear.  Some years back, doing an advertorial for Forbes, I was instructed by the Hall apparatchik, eager to burnish her credentials, to interview Bill Daley, then pres. of Amalgamated Bank.  I was happy to do, having taught him all he knows (I bet) about creative writing at Ignatius a long time ago.  But the Forbes contact was appalled.

“The mayor’s brother?  Why?”

In due time Chicago and New York went head to head on the whole tone of the piece — hamfisted, you see — and NY/Forbes knuckled under, at the expense of readability and credibility.

Ill. Gov. Blagojevich, seeing he would lose yesterday’s senate vote about his tax plan, urged them beforehand to vote against it, on trumped-up last-minute consideration that more time was needed to consider it. 

Blagojevich sought to minimize the vote’s impact. Beforehand, he suddenly asked lawmakers to vote against his plan as a signal that they think it’s too soon to take a firm position.

More time for him to pass out key favors, rather.  It’s how George Ryan did it: pass out the goodies, call it Illinois First, and watch your legislation go sailing through.  Statesmanlike conduct!

Then he lost the vote, 170–0 (!) and had the further unmitigated gall to look on the bright side:

“There’s ups and downs, but (I) feel good about it,” Blagojevich said after an appearance in Chicago. “Things went pretty well today.”

He is the boy who got a pile of manure for his birthday and jumped for joy because he knew “a pony can’t be far away.”

Smile and the world smiles with you, Guv.  Cry and you cry alone.

This by Carol Marin tells us yet more about the increasingly visible clay feet of our Afro-American Idol Who Would Be President:

Barack Obama tells us he is the messenger of a new kind of politics.

Open. Transparent. Different.

But put the pedal to the metal and ask Illinois’ junior senator new and serious questions about his radioactive, federally indicted, former friend Antoin “Tony” Rezko, and suddenly this gleaming presidential hopeful and paragon of new politics behaves just like any other dissembling, dismissive Chicago pol, ducking the discussion while pretending not to.

It’s her follow-up on the Tim Novak two-parter in their paper, Sun-Times, including this tidbit:

Here’s a candidate who these days is on camera more than many TV anchors, whose staff is putting out press releases faster than IHOP cranks out pancakes, and yet, the senator just didn’t have time, his staffers claimed, to stop and talk on Monday even though he was in Chicago giving a speech at which, conservatively, there were 30 reporters and 15 cameras.

We didn’t know it then, but while Novak and I were staking out the senator’s big, black SUV parked outside, he was giving a quiet private interview to the Tribune about the wrongheadedness of the Sun-Times’ story.

Meanwhile, an Obama staffer, sent to watch us, nimbly Blackberried our movements to someone inside.

Suddenly, bodyguards pulled the SUV down into a parking garage, grabbed Obama, and with wheels squealing, sped out and away.

This guy doth not protest enough.

This I lift as is from Instapundit, who got it from here:

“WHAT IS HAPPENING OVER HERE:” An email from a soldier in Iraq. “Gen Petraeus is treating the war like a counter-insurgency rather than a stability operation. . . . there is a HUGE difference between the two. . . . However, you don’t see Harry Reid talking about this. When I saw what he said, it really pissed me off. That guy does not know what is going on over here because he hasn’t bothered to come and find out. The truth on the ground in Al Anbar is not politically convenient for him, so he completely ignored it.”

Not only does Harry R. not get it, but neither do Chi Trib et al.*  Didn’t Pelosi tell Petraeus she couldn’t fit Petraeus into the House schedule?  Yes, at first, but now she thinks he might have something to say, to add to the good stuff she got from the Syrian guy, Bashar al-Assad.  No babuschka this time, however.

—————————

*I’m saying this without a site search, which last time I tried it had an AP story that if it ever appeared in hard copy was very hard to find.  I read the Trib’s hard copy every day, though not word for word, and I know what they play.  Heads and location and story size and big fat picture all go to tell us, this is important.  If the story is hard to find, it isn’t, to them at least.

Yesterday’s Chi Trib p-1 headline story on Obama’s wife was classic puffery. Today’s Sun-Times story about Obama and the indicted Tony Rezko is what Chicago newspapers are supposed to be doing.

For more than five weeks during the brutal winter of 1997, tenants shivered without heat in a government-subsidized apartment building on Chicago’s South Side.

It was just four years after the landlords — Antoin “Tony’ Rezko and his partner Daniel Mahru — had rehabbed the 31-unit building in Englewood with a loan from Chicago taxpayers.

Rezko and Mahru couldn’t find money to get the heat back on.

But their company, Rezmar Corp., did come up with $1,000 to give to the political campaign fund of Barack Obama, the newly elected state senator whose district included the unheated building.

That’s the lede. The choicest excerpts have to do with legalistic stonewalling by Obama’s people:

Obama . . .  was associated with the firm for more than nine years, his staff acknowledged Sunday in an e-mail response to questions submitted March 14 by the Sun-Times. They didn’t say what deals he worked on — or how much work he did.

And:

For five weeks, the Sun-Times sought to interview Obama about Rezko and the housing deals. His staff wanted written questions. It responded Sunday but left many questions unanswered. Other answers didn’t directly address the question.

Among these: When did Obama learn of Rezmar’s financial problems? “The senator had no special knowledge of any financial problems,’ Gibbs wrote.

Did the senator ever complain to anyone — government officials, Rezmar or Rezko — about the conditions of Rezmar’s buildings? “Senator Obama did follow up on constituency complaints about housing as [a] matter of routine,’ Gibbs wrote.

Did the senator ever discuss Rezmar’s financial problems with anyone at his law firm? “The firm advises us that it [is] unaware of any such conversations,’ Gibbs wrote.

There is much, much more, from Obama going to work for these people as part of his own ballyhooed war on poverty to his getting a sweet deal from Rezko on his Hyde Park mansion, with lots of donations and fund-raising in between.  The two have been very close.

Obama apparently — hell, obviously — turned a blind eye while Rezko took public money and paid no attention to the buildings that housed, or stored, people in need of so-called affordable housing. Rezko and friends apparently — hell, obviously — took one look at Obama as a black Harvard law star and saw him as marketable.

In the words of Paul Powell of Springfield-looting fame, they smelled the meat a’cookin’. So do a lot of people.

Softball pitcher of the week award goes to Chi Trib’s Noreen Ahmed-Ullah for her 3/25/07 email interview with the Chicago CAIR director — Council on American-Islamic Relations. Her questions win her this accolade:

Why CAIR? What are CAIR’s projects? “Tell me a bit about you,” etc., all leading up to the really tough one, “What is the source of the latest criticism/accusations being against CAIR on the national level?” which have never been reported by Chi Trib (!) and which the CAIR man, Ahmen Rehab, answered with alacrity. 

Those are “urban legends,” he says, traceable to “a single and homogenous [sic, both as to misspelling and misuse: single things are always homogeneous] source of interlinked individuals and groups [some single source] with such deceptively benign names as the Investigative Project, the Middle East Forum, Jihad Watch and Americans Against Hate.”

They “typically flourish in the unmoderated [oh my], chaotic world of the blogosphere; they attempt to sell themselves to political and media circles as experts on Islam and terrorism and as patriots who are looking out for American interests.”

Not so, says Rehab, desperately seeking rehabbing with the help of Chi Trib.  Rather, they are “career Islamophobes who are deathly afraid of Muslim-American enfranchisement [they seek depriving Muslims of the right to vote?] and its possible effects on the Israeli lobby’s interests. [Italics added, and there’s the obligatory Israeli reference].

Chi Trib’s Ahmed-Ullah even gives a web address for further CAIR info.

Couldn’t she have asked him his favorite color or candy bar while she was at it? Do we maybe wonder if such amateurism might not be what Sam Zell has in mind when he speaks of his wanting his new property to be “relevant”?

Wash Post has Mrs. Pelosi in its sights:

The really striking development [in her attempt at “Kissingerian” shuttle diplomacy] is the attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president. Two weeks ago Ms. Pelosi rammed legislation through the House of Representatives that would strip Mr. Bush of his authority as commander in chief to manage troop movements in Iraq. Now she is attempting to introduce a new Middle East policy that directly conflicts with that of the president. We have found much to criticize in Mr. Bush’s military strategy and regional diplomacy. But Ms. Pelosi’s attempt to establish a shadow presidency is not only counterproductive, it is foolish.

Not only this, she got the message from Olmert wrong, wrong, wrong.

The really urgent question is, is she as dumb as she looks right now?

Mrs. Pelosi, on her excellent adventure in Syria,

considers the visits to be an “excellent idea” and was [sic] hopeful of rebuilding lost confidence between Washington and Damascus.

“We have no illusions but we have great hope,” she said.

Based on what, she did not say, but I know what: she’s just that kind of person.  Don’t you just love her?

Dick Morris again:

The fault lines between [Dems] willing to fund the war without a withdrawal amendment and those who insist on a date certain for a pullout will define a growing split within the party akin to the one that drove students into the streets of Chicago outside the party convention in 1968.

My italics.  The image of a bare-chested facially contorted protestor giving cops the finger is one that Hubert Humphrey supporters won’t forget.  Their man went down because of those guys.  And Nixon won.