Pajama revolution

Pajamas Media was formed after a TV News macher dismissed bloggers’ reporting as just something from a lot of guys “in their pajamas,” meaning they weren’t showing up at a news room or assignment desk or even calling in to say where they were, for gosh sakes.  He should never have said that.  Now he has this to contend with, complete with a call to arms against the establishment:

“The core of the American people has manifested itself most purely in blogs because elites for so long controlled all avenues of communication.  Those days are over now.”

— Tammy Bruce, Editorial Board

It’s slick, it’s sharp, it looks to bloggers for news and commentary, pulling together what they say on a given breaking topic.  Yes, Virginia, there is something new under the sun.

 

Established dog bites back

“So yes on the evidence this is FUD,” says L'Ombre de l'Olivier, meaning the "fear uncertainty and doubt" that attacks a “large incumbent company . . . when it sees a threat on the radar screen from a start up.”  He refers to the WaPo “hit job” on embedded blogger-journalist Bill Roggio — Bloggers, Money Now Weapons in Information War U.S. Recruits Advocates to the Front, Pays Iraqi TV Stations for Coverage, which Roggio rebutted in Disinformation Operations: Flaws in The Washington Post's article on Information Operations.

L’Ombre calls the WaPo story

fascinating stuff because the production of FUD is a sign of an organization whose product is facing a competitive threat that it can't beat head to head. I would say that Bill and Michael Yon, Michael Totten and, for that matter the Iraqi bloggers at Pajamas Media, are indeed a threat to the MSM [MainStreamMedia] foreign reporters. The reason they are a threat is that they are providing a better quality story. They don't make the elementary mistakes that MSM journos do such as calling a Bradley a tank or failing to note such inconsistencies from their sources. One could go on, but the fact is that Bill & co, as well other Citizen Journalist efforts are making it clear that journalism is not something that has, in the jargon, a moat or high barriers of entry. In fact thanks to the web it has about the lowest barrier of entry of any profession. All that is required is a story and an ability to write and the web then helps that story and writing ability, if either or both are attractive, to get wider coverage.

You don’t need a master’s from Columbia or Medill, you don’t need apprenticeship at City News.  No wonder the officially accredited take umbrage.

Get serious

ARE PHONE COMPANIES HELPING THE GOVERNMENT SPY?

One question arising from the revelation that the government monitored phone calls without court approval is whether phone companies cooperated

is online (email) head for Chi Trib page-one, top left one-column story by telecom writer Jon Van.  It’s punchy and gets right to it.  The hard-copy head is something else, vague and indirect:

Phone giants mum on spying
In past, industry has cooperated with U.S.

It’s as if you play it vague and indirect with breakfasters and Metra riders because Trib is comfy waking-up fare, but you don’t really get serious until you’re online.

Meanwhile, it’s the civil liberties angle again, not defense.  Is it ever defense?  Trib editors — news editors, that is — just don’t get it: a) we’re at war and b) there are other news-deciders to follow besides NY Times, whose sloppiness in reporting the NSA concoction has been amply debunked by Power Line, where you can find a really serious treatment of the subject.

Later:

Reader Bob asked, "Where  would Cynthia get such info?" 

I noted that as for cooperation with the Chinese, Drudge had it months ago, quoting a mainstream source.

Reader Cynthia:

Funny you should mention the Drudge Report. I was just in Japan, visiting some missionary friends, and another missionary I met while I was there loved having someone to talk politics with, and told me he really relied on Drudge to keep him informed of what was really happening in the U.S.

I will say, on behalf of Ms, that at least they just developed software that warns people when they are saying something unacceptable: putting in the wrong words prompts the error message "This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech from this item." Forbidden speech includes the Chinese for “democracy,” "demonstration", "democratic movement" and "Taiwan independence.”

A friend of mine who is very involved in the Libertarian party (started the Illinois chapter, in fact, and has been their candidate for Senator at least a couple of times) got rid of SBC as her ISP, she was so upset about their participation in Chinese censorship. While I confirmed the Microsoft story myself before saying anything (I do know that rule), my friend has such good contacts that it didn’t seem necessary to check on the SBC story — and having traveled quite a bit in China myself, I can’t imagine anyone being allowed to operate any business there if they didn’t cooperate. China’s government knows we’re drooling over China as a market, and they don’t feel any pressure to alter their humans rights position.

The Montana story, yes!

Chi Trib big page one head with beaucoups de pix, 30 head shots of the kind they run of U.S. military casualities hits the breakfast-table and strap-hanger reader this morning smack dab in the eyeballs— hot, HOT news about World War I (One!) civil liberties violations in MONTANA!  “JAILED FOR THEIR WORDS: A law passed during World War I pitched Montanans into prison for critical remarks; law students are seeking clemency for them”  Wuxtry, wuxtry is right.  Wow.

Go to page 18 for rest of hard-copy story and see new head, “SPEECH; Patriot Act is like sedition laws, some say,” and it all becomes clear: agenda alert! agenda alert! Left-wing, pseudo-liberal, anti-war bias!  Left-wing, pseudo-liberal, anti-war bias!  (The Trib web site buries this story, by the way.)

But wait.  Maurice Possley, writer of all 1,493 words of this story, not counting generous captions under nine page-18 pix, helped edit a book on the subject during a sabbatical-teaching stint two years ago at U. of Montana.  And he had this in the bottom drawer for a while, and many are on vacation during these CHRISTMAS holidays, so what the hay, goose this story.

The really grand thing is, it fit the zeitgeist embraced by apparently most Chi Trib editors and writers perfectly, namely left-wing, pseudo-liberal, antiwar . . .  But wait.  Said that already, didn’t I?

Same day’s hard-copy Trib has Charles M. Madigan trying to get something going on “national health care”! Yes, but we call it Hillary-care where we come from, and recall it bombing a few years back for lack of political support.  We expect the Madigan treatment to be even-handed, of course, like his Sunday Perspective section.  And that last calls, I fear, for Irony Alert!  Irony Alert!

Rudolph cooked

* Late entry for lead of the year just in, page 2 of Chi Trib, AP story from Alaska by Rachel d’Oro about animal researcher checking out reindeer meat as tasty and good for you, with view to steaks and chops:

 FAIRBANKS, Alaska -- He has a long beard, wears a red parka and hangs out with reindeer just a short sleigh ride from an interior Alaska town called North Pole.

That's where the resemblance ends.

* Ditto for positive-news story out of Iraq, at least for Trib, on page one, by Aamer Madhani, “Among Iraqi army units, 1 really earns its stripes: Tiger Battalion has grown from shabby militia to role model for building the fledgling force,” with this lead:

MUQDADIYAH, Iraq -- As Iraqi army Capt. Saddam Ismail Abid commanded a vehicle checkpoint in this northeastern city one recent day, he was more like the sheriff of Mayberry than a member of Iraq's most hunted fraternity.

Drivers shook his hand, acquaintances peeked out of their cars to offer him kisses on the cheek and a few neighbors even pulled over to chat with him about his recent wedding. Abid was so relaxed that he said he didn't believe it was necessary to wear his body armor.

"There is nothing to be afraid of," Abid explained. "Muqdadiyah's people love the Tiger Battalion."

* But yesterday Sun-Times Controversy section ran a Salon-dot-calm counterstrike vs. “Neocon” pre-emptive strike on Spielberg’s “Munich” without running the pre-emptive strike.  We heard the rebuttal but not the original, which had not been reported by S-T.  Why not both together?

* Robin Williams “mostly tries to keep politics out of the show after he did a few jokes about Bush's brainpower at a base in 2003 and got a chilly reception,” says a UK Guardian story out of Washington about stars’ unwillingness to perform for troops in Iraq.  Once there were Bob Hope, Duke Ellington, The Marx Brothers, Judy Garland, and the like.  Now there are Williams, 50 Cent, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, and their like.

Note the antiwar Williams as a regular.  Ditto Al Franken.  But it’s dangerous to be there and unpopular as a cause among Hollywood-ites.  Some or many don’t want to seem to seem to be endorsing the war, says Wayne Newton, who took over from Bob Hope as chief USO recruiter.

Times, they are a'changing

Sun-Times and NYTimes circulation drops recently reported — 21 percent drop in average weekday circulation for six months ended in March 2005 for S-T, “sharp” 4th-quarter earnings drop for NYT [see: http://www.imediaconnection.com/news/7670.asp] — relate to online competition.

“Advertisers are following consumers online,” says Shawn Riegsecker, president, Centro, a local advertising buying service specializing in online advertising with “over 1,300 local sites encompassing online newspapers, TV and radio sites, alternative weeklies and business publications,” says Imedia Connection — http://www.imediaconnection.com/news/7379.asp.

“That's why,” says Riegsecker, “this is less about . . . bad news [about] newspapers, and more about which newspapers will begin to assert [put] their premium brands online - and how quickly and strategically they'll do it."

In other words, they should get on-line or get lost.

DePaul File 1 etc.

* See here http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/12/22/181923.shtml for more on DePaul U. as stifler of freedom. 

* And consider this about Maureen Dowd, of Are Men Necessary? and NYT fame:

IS MAUREEN DOWD NECESSARY?   J. Peder Zane has her number :

American journalism has a proud tradition of balloon-busters, but Dowd is H.L. Mencken without the piercing observations, Dorothy Parker without the brilliant wit. Her prose is filled with moral indignation, yet her cheap shots lower the level of discourse that she wishes were higher, and her focus on personal peccadilloes trivializes the pressing matters of state she pretends to care about.

This is my problem, not Dowd's. I'm expecting too much from her. Think of her not as a leading pundit but a stand-up comic with the best gig in America and her work can hold your interest for a few minutes twice a week. She might even make you laugh before you reach the end of her column and all memory of her words vanishes. Poof!

Posted by Don [Luskin] at 11:57 AM | link  

* One of the other James Bowmans, this one of the East Coast, remembers the movie “Elvira Madigan” as what caught raw, young fancy in days gone by.  This Bowman’s a kid, but the Bowman whom you know from these pages worked with kids in those days and imbibed their enthusiasms.  See here: http://www.nysun.com/article/24896

* Meanwhile, the other Journal, Wall Street (as opposed to our esteemed Wednesday J. of OP&RF), is glad the judges called the White House on the Padilla matter.  Key judge in this, btw, is Michael Luttig, who was on the short list for recent US Supreme Ct nominations.  He’s one of them, in other words, but spoke sharply to WH.  See here: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/?id=110007720

more more more before the creeks run again . . .

Sadaam tortured, GI's killed: Chi Trib fair and balanced

A couple of Chi Trib stories today, encountered by page 11 of front section, demonstrate or at least illustrate something or other about editors’ and others’ mindset.  Page 3 has, top left, two-column head, “Hussein: U.S. jailers beat, tortured me,” with subhead “3 describe brutality of ex-dictator’s regime.”  Aamer Madhani’s lead justifies that: he subordinates “terror dispensed by Sadaam Hussein’s intelligence apparatus” to “the former Iraqi president said that he and his co-defendants have been beaten and tortured by their U.S. military jailers.”

Which is a laugh, right?  Or am I not attuned to the mainstream-media zeitgeist? 

Point: Reverse head and subhead and you have something closer to reality, ditto with lead.

Story two, on page 11, is by Trib-owned Baltimore Sun writer out of Burlington, Vermont: “The high toll on small state,” with subhead “Vermont, where war sentiments run hot and cold, has the most GI deaths per capita” and takeout quote above the head: “’All of this news of dying . . . now we’ve reached the tipping point.’  — Nancy Brown, Vermont coordinator of the national anti-war organization Military Families Speak Out.”

It’s stories like this that show why TribCo bought this Baltimore paper — so it could get Vermont stories that fit the above-mentioned zeitgeist.  How about all this news of dying on mean streets of Chicago, tied in with breakdown of family life and denigration leading to loss of traditional values? 

Nope.  This writer and these editors want to puff the antiwar movement, or so it appears.  Coming up (not): a Vermont story about military families that support the war.

Wuxtry, wuxtry, Bush broke law! Oh?

Power Line has an exchange between John Hinderaker and NY Timesman Eric Lichtblau, co-author of NSA-surveillance stories, that is a textbook-quality example of how to question a questionable story.  Hinderaker cites legal chapter and verse:

The November 2002 decision of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, in Sealed Case No. 02-001, where the court said:

"The Truong court [United States v. Truong Dinh Hung, 4th Cir. 1980], as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information. *** We take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President's constitutional power."

After several exchanges in which Lichtblau cited “the end of our original story last Friday [which] quotes from the FISA appellate decision that you cite” and the story’s discussion of “the debate over whether the program was legal.”

Hinderaker effectively asks why the Times hangs its story’s "scoop” quality on blind quotes from unnamed officials who had it wrong “while not pointing [that] out.”  

I don't think that a partial sentence from one of the controlling decisions, buried at the end of a long article and not repeated in subsequent articles, removes the incorrect impression you convey that the NSA program is, in all likelihood, illegal.

As the uber-blogger Instapundit would say, there’s more.  It’s textbook example, I say of how a newspaper overreaches.

Privacy Hypocrites [Pow!]

Michelle Malkin has this right: 

Allow me to sum up the homeland security strategy of America's do-nothing brigade, led by the armchair generals at The New York Times and ACLU headquarters:

First, bar law enforcement at all levels from taking race, ethnicity, national origin and religion into account when assessing radical Islamic terror threats. (But continue to allow the use of those factors to ensure "diversity" in public-college admissions, contracting, and police- and fire-department hiring.)  [Pow!]

Second, institute the "Eenie-meenie-miny-moe" random-search program at all subways, railways and bus stations. [Pow!]

Third, open the borders, sabotage all immigration enforcement efforts and scream "Racist" at any law-abiding American who protests. [Pow!]

Continue reading "The Left's Privacy Hypocrites"

DePaul's Klocek

“DePaul deserved to be hit harder, but this story is more of a human interest profile of [Thomas] Klocek,” says Richard Baehr today in The American Thinker about Ron Grossman’s Chi Trib Tempo piece “I’m not the ideal poster boy,” about the DePaul adjunct teacher who was suspended and asked to apologize to Palestinian-supporter students for objecting to their anti-Israel display at a student-activity fair and is suing DePaul. 

Baehr wonders if DePaul and some of its trustees had a hand in neutralizing — or neutering — the story, which is possible.  More to the point, Baehr says the story ignores highly prejudicial comments about Klocek by a dean, who “slandered Tom as a bigot and . . . accepted the students’ side of the dispute before hearing from Tom, and  subsequently cut off his health insurance, and prohibited him from praying in the DePaul chapel.”

In Grossman’s careful “he said/she said fashion” which Baehr implies did not do justice to the student-fair confrontation, Grossman could have used that zesty stuff about the dean (it seems to me), assuming the sources held up under his (cross) examination.  That he-said-she-said business is how it’s done, of course.  But Grossman does seem to have done the human-interest part to the detriment of the conflict part.  So it would seem, anyhow, to those who had already read about the DePaul political climate in American Thinker — “Ward Churchill speaks,” “The Growing Threat to Israel,” and “DePaul’s Jihad Against Academic Freedom” — as it surrounds and pertains directly to Klocek.

It’s hot stuff and quite prejudicial against DePaul, but detailed and coherent and worth quoting, which I will do here but not now, because it’s time for Pajamas Media wannabes to go to bed.

Pennsylvanian in exile . . .

. . . has these annual murder numbers, among others for other U.S. cities:

Chicago:

2003: 565

2004: 448

2005: 400+

and asks why anti-warriors are not worried about “THESE americans . . . killed right here at home”  — “a whole lot more than 2000 deaths” in Iraq.

See Pennsylvanian in exile for more, more, more. 

And here’s an idea for Chi Trib and Sun-Times: every hundred murders run pix and short bios of the deceased.  It’s just a thought, aimed at helping our doughty newspeople to serve and protect us.

White firefighters story!

Sun-Times to the rescue: Sunday’s paper has “City owes white firefighters $3.7 million, jury says” on p. 10, front section, giving it more, if later, coverage than Chi Trib, as noted here yesterday.  It’s for “emotional distress to six white firefighters denied promotions 20 years ago,” which is a case of wheels of justice grinding slowly, to be sure.  The city threw out test results that showed not enough blacks winning promotions.

The argument in such a case is that if blacks don’t win their supposed fair share, there’s something wrong with the tests, as if there’s something wrong with starting assignments among the Chicago Bears linemen because not enough whites win them.

That’s-no-sow’s-ear-it’s-a-silk-purse dept: Chi Trib announcing demise of its WomanNews [sic] section with “Starting Wednesday, Jan. 4, WomanNews [sic] moves to Tempo, making Chicago’s favorite [sic] daily features section even better” on Tempo p. 1, 12/14/05.  I do believe WomanNews was discontinued as a section and some people were fired, but this makes that move a simple gain for Tempo.  Presto.

White men can't jump proven wrong

“6 white firefighters to get $3.5 million,” whispers headline in Chi Trib Metro page today, 12/17/05.  It’s an award decision about whites who said they’d been treated unfairly by affirmative action policies in Chicago FD.  City is to pay.  Big story, could be screaming head in Sun-Times, p-1 stuff in Trib.  But S-T doesn’t even have it.  We should be thankful for even small favors.

BAD NEWS TRIB

Chi Trib head 12/11/05, "Rosy job news feels thorny in Ohio: . . . national numbers mask local stories of work gone and hard times spreading," by Tim Jones, national correspondent: For every silver lining, there’s a cloud.

Trice-fooled, again

Once more into the breach, my friends, regarding Chi Trib’s Dawn T. Trice’s "From any angle, racial profiling is still wrong" of 12/10/05, this time as to her admitting she "might make snap judgments" about who’s a threat, but the government shouldn't, because "theoretically, it has to be far more judicious because the stakes are too high."

Apart from the redundancy – "theoretically, it has to be" – she has her straw man at the ready with "snap judgments," as if she has shown that most terrorists are not Arab or Muslim. She also seems to concede the value of quick decisions when personally threatened. (I hope she does.) That’s on a lonely dark street, for instance, where we have ourselves and those with us to protect. For the government it’s thousands, even millions, to protect.

The stakes are too high, all right.

Wuxtry! Not!

Start off each day with a song, Jimmy Durante told us long ago. Begin blithely, blithely, as one of my favorite blogs would have it. Yesterday the blitheness came unexpected. (It’s the best kind.) There on p. 12 of Sun-Times was a short AP piece about Bush’s popularity going up, reaching highest since last summer. Suddenly, last summer? No, suddenly this winter, he is doing better – five points better in a month! Fancy that!

He’s up to 42%, having gotten energetic in pushing his handling of Iraq and the economy, per an AP-Ipsos poll. In November he had 37% approval, this month 42%. Wow. His new aggressiveness is working. Wuxtry, wuxtry, read all about it. On p. 12 of S-T, six inches under a 4x4 pic, BUT NOT AT ALL IN CHI TRIB! Fancy that!

Whence the blitheness? Not from the news itself, of which I’d had glimmers thanks to Fox News (fair & balanced, you decide), but from the renewed realization of the thoroughly laugh-producing conclusion that Bad News papers can’t handle the truth, to use the Jack Nicholson phrase, or at least don’t think their readers can. And some of them can’t!

Those crazy pronouns

Revisiting ethnic profiling 12/8/05 – "From any angle, racial profiling is still wrong" – Dawn Turner Trice in Chi Trib says she’s heard from readers on how to stop "them" from hurting "us." These are her quote marks, and I swear, this is the strangest use of quotes I have seen in a long time.

If she’s giving exact words, she’s doing it for a pair of damn pronouns.

If she’s distancing herself from these pronouns, she really ought to say why, since the them-us distinction is elementary, to say the least.

Or is she showing quote marks as comedienne Joan Cusack and lesser performers indicate by raising two fingers on each hand and giving them a shake, with a zany look?

Who knows? Trice goes oral-speech on us, flouting written-word conventions as if she doesn’t even know about them. You might say she translates the spoken word directly to the printed page without making it "writing," if you catch my "drift." (Wink-wink)

Defamation denied

Spent some quality time last night with blogger Carl Nyberg, of Forest Park, whose legal victory in a defamation suit is told in the latest Forest Park Review. In his Proviso Probe blog, Nyberg reported that the brother of the local high-school board president, Chris Welch, whom Welch voted to hire as a school custodian, had been indicted on a drug-related charge in 2003.

This was true, as Nyberg demonstrated by showing the Review a copy of the indictment. There was more to the suit, which Welch, now running for the Illinois legislature, dropped this week. It ain’t over till it’s over, however. Nyberg called the suit "harassment based on deliberately false statements" and said he hoped "the system will hold [the Welch brothers] accountable."

Welch has a history of suing opponents, having sued, also for defamation, a former school board president and two critics during his last campaign for school board president, the Review reported  Both suits were also dropped, "leading the defendants to speculate that they were sued in attempts to stifle further criticism.”

The quality time, by the way, was at the Wednesday Journal Christmas party at the Oak Park Conservatory, about which not enough good things can be said – it’s a gem, on Garfield west of East. The Journal publishes the Forest Park paper and several others, including the Wednesday Journal of OP & RF, which publishes my monthly column. For excellent catering, furthermore, run, don’t walk to Chew Chew Cafe, of Riverside (where WJ has another paper), who know how to do it. I came hungry and was not much good at conversation for the first half hour, eating. Nyberg caught me after that time.

He was defended pro bono by Latham and Watkins, whom he found by googling — asking for "Chicago First Amendment pro bono."  The search turned up four firms, whom he called, eventually finding what he wanted.

Wanna buy a baseball team?

Sun-T on Chi Trib troubles, 12/8/05, Eric Herman reporting: Trib Co. stock down 25% in 2005! It’s collapsing Wash Bureaus – Chi Trib, LA Times, et al. – into one, coverage to be "better than ever through greater collaboration," says Dennis FitzSimons, Trib chairman. (Who will be in charge there?)

Troubles are part of a national pattern: In two middle quarters of 2005, U.S. newspaper circulation fell 2.6% on average. Trib Co. might sell things off, maybe the Cubs!

Today's state of state, village, nation

Here’s David Diersen on Topinka et al.  Rather good.

GOPUSA ILLINOIS

-- Questions concerning the gubernatorial race - Dave Diersen

www.gopillinois.com

As of 7:30 AM today, the Illinois Republican Party (IRP) platform was still not posted on the IRP website.  Blagojevich and Topinka reject many important planks in the IRP platform.  Many of the people who support Topinka reject many important planks in the IRP platform.  Brady, Oberweis, and Rauschenberger support all the planks in the IRP platform.  Because Topinka rejects so many important planks in the IRP platform, to support Topinka is to reject the IRP platform.  Is someone who says they are a Republican really a Republican if they reject many important planks in the IRP platform and would rather see Blagojevich reelected than see Brady, Oberweis, or Rauschenberger elected?  What do you say to those who believe that Edgar almost ran and Topinka is running to stop Brady, Gidwitz, Oberweis, and Rauschenberger from being elected?

 

=================================

Plus good letter in Sun-Times taking on Andrew Greeley and other Bush-lied people, from Steve J. Ciszewski, in Lake View. “Is Andrew Greeley serious?” he asks.

To say that Bush lied is to say that he knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but proceeded to war anyway.

But the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Silberman-Robb Commission both found it a case of bad intelligence (not presidential dishonesty).  Neither found "evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities,” he writes, quoting the Senate committee.  Greeley et al. know better?

======================

Plus Sun-Times on Oak Park as suspected burial place of serial killer victims.  425 S. Kenilworth is the apartment where David Maust would have put the bodies, under flooring.  I know the block.  It’s rather densely populated, between Washington and Madison, with condo buildings much in evidence and a new one going up.  Michael Shields is quoted as former resident of the building with recollections that point to victim disposal.  I remember him from school-related parents’ meetings as apparently sincere and earnest guy.  Nothing in his reported remarks works against that impression I had of him.  He lives elsewhere in Oak Park, in a house, the S-T story says.

========================

Plus Dennis Byrne in Chi Trib with common sense on profiling (a nice corrective to Dawn Trice’s quite skewed commentary of 11/28, already archived and not free).  Byrne says:

Paying more attention to people who look and act like they might be terrorists is sensible, not racist. I had hoped that this would have been accepted by now, but judging by the recent number of people who have been "deeply offended" by the idea, I guess it hasn't.

I especially like this, about reactions to Rep. Mark Kirk’s defending heightened scrutiny of “some” Arab men:

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said she was "deeply offended" by Kirk's remarks, and I'm deeply offended that she's deeply offended, so she should apologize to me.

This is good because more of us should be deeply offended about others’ playing to various audience by saying they are deeply offended.  I’m not quite deeply offended because more of us aren’t, but I am mildly irritated.  And wouldn’t it be nice if Rep. Jan and others would stop, count two, and then say they are mildly irritated the next time they start to say they are deeply offended.  And I certainly don’t mean to offend anyone by saying this, which would start another round, and I was tired two or three lines ago.

==================================

Finally, there’s the lesbian-insemination flareup in San Diego, where bad things are happening, such as the resignation of the bribed congressman, which you can find and read about on your own if you must.  This item is about the doctors who declined to inseminate on religious grounds and got the OK for this from a state court, which cited the woman’s being not married.  You can do that in California, that is, discriminate on grounds of marital status. 

 

The woman argued that she got turned down because of her sexual orientation, which is not permitted.  Her 15–year partnership with another woman did not qualify.  So there you have a rub in the gay-marriage issue: the married lesbian can force a doctor to inseminate her, the unmarried one cannot.  Is it not unlikely, however, that there was no way in San Diego, a city of 1,223,400 in 2000, to be inseminated except by these two doctors who refused on religious grounds?  The suit appears therefore to be a skirmish in the war for gay marriage.

Gay Chi priest

Sun-Times’s Cathleen Falsani got a heck of a quote, at the expense of attribution, from a gay Chicago priest commenting about the Vatican’s banning of deep homosexuals from the priesthood and seminaries.  The Vatican said bishops “cannot admit . . .  those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies, or support the so-called 'gay culture.' .”

Bunk, says the gay priest.

"In a nutshell to say, 'It's OK to be homosexual as long as you don't think like a homosexual, talk like a homosexual, act like a homosexual, hang out with homosexuals, or go to places that are known to be hangouts of homosexuals,' well, that's ludicrous on its surface. And I don't say that flippantly. Sometimes the cardinal says, 'Oh, that's flippant.' This isn't flippant. That's what the document says," the priest said, adding that he believed the "right wing" of the Catholic church had decided to make homosexuals "their scapegoats and whipping boys."

Chi Trib’s Margaret Ramirez and Manya A. Brachear in the meantime got one anonymous quote mild in comparison — "I find it kind of sad" — but scored a first as regards a working Chicago pastor if not for any Chicago priest ever in their quoting a gay pastor by name.

Rev. Michael Herman, a gay priest and pastor of St. Sylvester Church in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood, recently joined with other priests to form a group called Catholics Affirming Homosexual Leadership.

"People who have a sense of bigotry or have sense of hatred toward people who are gay, these documents give people a chance to get on their soapbox," Herman said. "My desire to speak out is to say `Wait a second. Is this a fair thing to say? Is it fair to isolate one group of candidates when these issues of maturity and integration are true of all candidates?"

Herman was ordained in 1989.  His consenting to be identified is a milestone in public discussion of gay priests.  It’s in sharp contrast to my experience eleven years ago in Oak Park, at the old Kroch’s & Brentano’s on Lake Street, where I was talking up my book Bending the Rules: What American Priests Tell American Catholics — available now as Priests at Work: Catholic Pastors Tell How They Apply Church Law in Difficult Cases — when I reduced a storeful of people to churchly silence with the mere mention of gay priests.