5/08/2006

Score four for Trib

Chi Trib today has two good stories and two good columns that struck the eye.  Probably more.  One story kicks off the Robert Sorich trial in federal court (where else?), all about City Hall patronage and job-stealing — that is, being sure jobs go to friends, which requires stealing them from qualified non-friends or neutrals.  It’s by Dan Mihalopoulos, Laurie Cohen and Todd Lighty, who do an excellent job summing up a citizen’s case, much of it the government’s too, against the newly constituted Dem machine.  It’s here.

The other story is another in an unannounced series about how farming out Austin High students to other schools has unleashed mayhem, this time at Clemente High.  Stephanie Banchero has this one.  An idea of what’s happening:

This year, nine teachers, an assistant principal and two deans were threatened or hit. Students were stabbed, choked and robbed, school reports show. A schoolyard brawl sucked in 40 students.

Amid all this, the principal of 10 years abruptly quit in March without a specific reason.

The columns are by Charles Krauthammer and Dennis Byrne, Trib’s Monday morning reliables, the former on Jews facing 1938 again, when Hitler promised their extermination and the world yawned.  Now it’s the Iranian president, soon to be nuclearly armed and happy to find so many Jews concentrated (no camps necessary) in one place, namely Israel.

Byrne’s is about pols lying in their teeth with (a) phony immigration legislation calling for unenforceable voluntary exile-taking by some 1.6 million Mexicans and others and (b) a new state budget that does it with mirrors but is declared marvelous by legislators who, Jack Horner-like, put their thumbs in pies and say what good boys they are.  Bully for them.

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