Chi Trib, the lumbering behemoth of Chicago journalism, pursued further the story of Judge Holderman vs. U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald. Fitzg is not cooperating with the investigation, as he accuses others, says Trib, p. 1, under the head, "This time, allegations aimed at prosecutor: Judge says Fitzgerald's office stalling probe of aide's alleged violations."

But don’t all prosecutors accuse others of not cooperating? That’s not their job? But this one "has received national attention for aggressively investigating the leak to a reporter of the identity of a CIA agent," we read in 7th ‘graph. Currently beleaguered MainStreamMedia (MSM) does not like this, and it’s on the mind of reporters and editors if not of readers. Instead, why not, in ‘graph 7 or earlier something like: Fitzg "is making Chicago and Cook County prosecutorial history by pursuing corruption among elected officials"?

This would, I think, represent what’s in the minds of most readers, rather than the Valerie Plame case in Washington, which is thought to threaten freedom of the presses for those who own them.

Additionally, a recurring Chi Trib stylistic quirk turns up here: We are told early on that Holderman is respected but has a temper problem. That generic statement is unsupported until the end of the story, when we are filled in nicely about the temper, or more precisely temperament, problem – but are not satisfied as to his being respected. Why not early on, at first reference to his temper problem, lay in quick reference to the 1999 Council of Lawyers complaint, the late fill-in?

This from today's Wall St. Journal makes a very important point, that free markets erase poverty better than government social programs. It undercuts leftist thinking but also puts Catholic "preferential option for the poor" in a different light than usual:

Policy makers who pay lip service to fighting poverty would do well to grasp the link between economic freedom and prosperity. This year the Index [of free economies worldwide] finds that the freest economies have a per-capita income of $29,219, more than twice that of the "mostly free" at $12,839, and more than four times that of the "mostly unfree." Put simply, misery has a cure and its name is economic freedom.

See The Fire Ant Gazette for this quote plus commentary.

The Volokh Conspiracy has us figured, I fear:

When I lived in New Haven and watched the New York TV news, I was struck by the different assumptions about city problems in NY compared to Chicago. In Chicago, the mayor takes the credit and blame for everything, and the news media assume that the mayor should stop every major strike, even private sector ones. In Chicago, the mayor is "Big Daddy." While one, of course, sees some of the same in New York, there is still a significant difference of degree. New York being less provincial than Chicago, sometimes the news media actually assume that New York City departmental personnel are responsible [or treat major local events as being outside the local government's scope of responsibilty].

The spirit of Xmas

Chi Trib columnist Eric Zorn on 12/23/04 took aim at Christians with their backs up about Christ being frozen out of Christmas, choosing a very fat target for his opening shot. This was "Jeff from Memphis," calling in to a talk show to complain that Christmas has been "taken over by the Kwanzaa group and some of these other radical groups." Zorn saw his opening and took it. "Ooo, 'the Kwanzaa group' is it now?" he wrote, and off he went:

"'The Christmas group' pulled the same sneaky trick in the 4th Century" by co-opting winter-solstice traditions for their own purposes, he wrote, unloading a point he seems to have been dying to make, gleaned from his research on sneaky groups over the centuries. Ooo, Kwanzaa group = 4th-century Christian church. Ooo and double-Ooo.

"Jesus is not 'the reason for the season,' as so many from 'the Christmas group' have smugly informed me in recent weeks," he wrote indignantly. It's "the return of the sun in this hemisphere," celebrated in other ways -- Zagmuk, Sacaea, Saturnalia, Kronos, Yule, by Mesopotamians, Babylonians and Persians, Romans, Greeks, and pre-Christian Germans respectively.

Well thank God, if I may use the expression, for someone finally giving it to smug Christians with their cruddy 2,000-year-old viewpoint.

He is quite irritated about hearing people say "Merry Christmas" aggressively, performing an "in-your-face sack dance . . . meant to underscore Christian dominance in American society." What the heck is a sack dance, for one thing? And what's this "dominance," which has him mad as hell and unwilling to take it any more?

He quotes a columnist about a "revolt" by Christians, and then scurries for the high ground of the detached who really has opponents' better interests at heart: "It's sad to see these angry people turning a glad tiding into a battle cry."

Glad tiding? Zorn is turning Christian? No. Dickensian maybe. He's a Bob Cratchit fan and loves that cheerful bearing up under hardship, the born-lame Tiny Tim on Bob's shoulder and all? He's for "seasonal jollity" and the "true spirit" of Christmas, urging Christians to observe it. The reason for it is something else.

Just why the heck is Tim cheerful, for instance? Good genes? That old winter solstice? Zagmuk, Sacaea, Saturnalia, Kronos, pre-Christian Yule? What the heck is the reason for the season, anyhow?

Funny, funny . . .

Funny 1: Chi Trib head, p-1, about heavy snow in Mich. City, IN:

"Snow's White Dwarfs Town"

Funny 2, in not same way: Obit writer says deceased "had a plethora of hobbies," intending to say nothing bad about the dead. But a plethora is too much,"an excessive amount," as in a plethora of complaints. One is reminded of the golden moment of moviemaking when El Guapo's lieutenant in "Three Amigos" laughed at the word and El Guapo asked him what it meant. to the lieutenant's chagrin.

Chi Trib has p-1 story, "School district spending gap widest in years," meaning between highest- and lowest-spending districts, both of them with almost the same test scores! The same-scores news is in the 8th paragraph, where it is presented as raising "a more fundamental [than spending gap] and politically sensitive question: What does it cost to . . . educate a child?"

I'll say it raises that question. And others too, for readers who turn to the jump page, 16, where they may read that the lowest-spending district, in far South Suburban Frankfort, saves money by partnering with the park district for maintenance and program space and with the library, has higher than average class sizes and less experienced (and so less expensive) teachers, and puts more kids into a building, as 900 in one elementary school.

Good for Diane Rado and Darnell Little for bringing these things out. But that 8th-paragraph item, given good attention in several more paragraphs, actually should be the lead item: Money Doesn't Matter in Top and Bottom Spenders or something like it. That's man biting dog and thus news.

The current headline, on the other hand, as above, is (a) old stuff, even with the "widest in years" part, and (b) possibly phony.

The spending gap is not new, for one thing; so this head is as much propaganda as news.

The gap between top spender and least spending, $20G to not quite $5G, for another, ignores the substantial gap between top and #2 spender, $20G to $17.4G -- not mentioned in the story at all but shown in a jump-page table. So the top spender, a district near extra-expensive Lake Forest with only 130 kids, is an aberration and nothing to build a story on.

Instapundit has item about alternative weekly in Nashville busted for taking prostitution ads, heads it "More crushing of dissent in John AshKKKroft's America," crossing out the last two words and subbing "Phil Bredeson's Tennessee," referring to the governor on whose watch this happened. He comments:

Okay, Bredesen undoubtedly had nothing to do with this. But, then, John Ashcroft often got blamed for things he had nothing to do with, too. And how can anyone expect an alt-weekly to stay in business without sex ads?

Is that a trenchant observation, or what?

The sports page remains the truly entertaining part of a newspaper. Chi Trib columnist Mike Downey keeps up the tradition of Warren Brown, John Carmichael et al. He's not as dry as they, but this is in-face time for writers all over; so he does pretty well in the more or less detached manner that sits well with discriminating readers.

Today he has the first nay-saying I have seen about Magglio (Maggs) Ordonez, who just left the Sox in mid-level dudgeon with harsh remarks about management, mainly the GM. Downey lists various things to show Maggs's not being fair or even truthful, but one stands out: he made $14 mil last year.

That's been known, of course. But wouldn't it be good to state that early and often in any pro-sports employment story, as in "Magglio Ordinez ($14G/yr)" stated routinely, just as "R.-Ill" or "D.-Mo." is routinely stated for a member of Congress. We still love those guys and root for them and sympathize with them in their various troubles, but perspective is important too.

Elsewhere in Downey, and this is delicious, is his notation that in San Francisco, where hero Barry Bonds has recently claimed the lotion he used was not illegal, the Giants will continue to sell hot dogs without telling people they contain "potentially harmful carbohydrates." Yes! Not to mention calories.

D. also notes the Marquette students who want teams to be renamed Warriors, as in Ojibwa, etc., dropping the current, correct Golden Eagles name, which in Wisconsin, says D. is the only thing "not named for a Native American." This is not noteworthy, except that it leads a reader to recall that our so-called Native Americans (not native-born, like Downey, me, and many others) are actually our Oldest Immigrants, going back a very long time. They came from the northwest, I believe, paddling the Bering Straits, which couldn't have been an easy journey. But this is the sort of observation I do not expect to find in a newspaper, not even on the sports page.

From Peggy Noonan's Wall St. Jnl column today about Hillary C.:

She is inevitable as a candidate, but not as a president. There will be serious drawbacks and problems with her candidacy. When she speaks in a large hall she shouts and it is shrill; she sounds like some boomer wife from hell who's unpacking the grocery bags and telling you that you forgot not just the mayo but the mustard.

Chi Trib page one has big feature w/pic about Hmongs in Twin Cities area – "We are Americans ourselves now. How can Americans hate us?" is quote from a "community leader" in St. Paul, over heartwarming four-column color shot of kindergarteners catching snow on their tongues. "The killing of six hunters stirs fears of a setback," apparently in Hmong-acceptance levels, reads the subhead

So six hunters were shot dead by a Hmong, and the talk is about people hating Hmongs. Where is story about why this guy went postal with a hunting rifle and whether other Hmongs are prepared to do the same?

This is journalistic do-goodism. Front-Pagers of yore were sneaky, unprincipled sensationalists – I know this because I saw Chicago the musical – but at least they defined news as man biting dog and not as an exercise in social work 101.

There was a news story, of course. It ran 11/23, with this at its tail end:

Vang had been arrested once before, on Christmas Eve 2001 in Minneapolis, after brandishing a gun and telling his wife he was going to kill her, said Ron Reier, a spokesman for the Minneapolis Police Department.

He was arrested on a felony complaint of domestic assault, Reier said. After being held for at least 36 hours in that incident, Reier said Vang was released after his wife declined to cooperate with authorities.

You wouldn’t know about that from this 12/4 page one feature.

RADIO DAY . . . Radio talker Bill Bennett on WIND competing with Don & Roma on WLS, both AM in Chicago, is like Shakespeare vs. Mickey Spillane. Bennett has a working philosophy of being guided by callers. Always reasonable, never cranky, smart guy, lots of experience. Caller the other day said he’d heard Katie Couric on the NBC Today show listening respectfully to NBA player Riotous (But Still Righteous) Ron Artest and the players rep. Artest waved his new CD for viewers, making a fifteen-minutes-of-fame sales opportunity of being suspended for fighting fans in the stands. The players’ rep, Billy Hunter, connected the players’ riot to the Iraq war, implying that we are desensitized to violence and that’s why Artest et al. fought fans. (I did not make that up.)

Matt Lauer on the same show, on the other hand, hit Artest hard with his record of suspensions for bad behavior, including smashing a TV camera. Artest responded that he had paid (been fined) $100G for that smashed camera and asked mockingly, "Where’s the camera at?" Laura Ingraham, whose show follows Bennett’s on WIND, made much of that. She’s funny and works off good insights, as how silly it is to blame the culture for one’s actions when conservative culture warriors have been mocked and scorned for decades for knocking the culture. She is a sort of Ringling Brothers to Bennett’s Shakespeare.

Meanwhile, if you want ongoing, daily critique of TV people like Couric (and often Lauer), you do not go to mainstream media (MSM) reps but to Media Research Center (MRC), whose web-based reporting is based entirely on this day this, that day that. Picky, picky, in view of one MSM media reporter in an email to me some months back. It's called inductive reasoning, I replied. MRC’s Brent Bozell et al. – another site is Accuracy in Media – nail the daily cases of left-wing bias. I would have thought a nod in that direction was in order by the MSM fellow, but he did not want to hear about it.

Jim Romenesko, of Poynter Institute, has quite thorough web-based coverage of (mostly left-oriented) media shop talk. It’s a good place to find MSM replies to bloggers and others, but it’s usually no place to find what MRC and Brent Bozell discover from their right-wing (majority-voter) perspective. Romenesko does a good job telling what LA Times and Wash Post writers say about bloggers, for instance.

One of the latter has a very long column billed as "Unconventional Wisdom," in which he delivers conventional wisdom about bloggers – "spectacular lack of judgment . . . abundant arrogance" – repeating the objection that they should never have run with those exit polls. This is an aside, however: the column is about exit polls, as for instance, that Republican voters are traditionally underrepresented in them, and networks’ unwillingness to ignore them this time, though cautioned to do so by a major exit pollster. The columnist is Wash Poster Richard Morin, q.v.

Chicago, get ready for chaos, warns suburban moneybags fellows with whom Sun-Times Saturday columnist Tom Roeser had lunch with. Daley II riding for a fall with multiple scandals, signs of mismanagement. Two congressmen in the wings, neither of them a Harold Washington. Daily crisis press conferences a-coming, Louis XVI revisited.

FOUND IN FALLUJAH . . . Run quick, Chicagoans, and get yr Trib with its p-1 James Janega latest from Fallujah, where Marines found torture chambers and terrorist banners and more.

(It’s P-1 in hard copy, with jump to last pg of first section, story of the day, paired with Liz Sly’s out of Baghdad, an overview about coming elections, but it’s hard to find on the Trib’s web site, whose p-1 has the black-victim picture Trib editors love to run, going with YESTERDAY’S p-1 hard cover story with frightening, not to say scare, headline, "Poor live housing nightmare while investors reap benefits." Wait, Chi Trib site caught up to its hard copy sometime after 6:30, when it still had yesterday’s stories. Something wrong here: is this a Toonerville Trolley of a news operation, or isn’t it?)

Janega’s "Blood, knives, cage hint at atrocities: Tip leads U.S. to alleged al-Zarqawi house of torture" – a much more matter-of-fact announcement than yesterday’s – is his usual telling what he sees and hears. It closes with what’s written on the wall of a "dungeon-like room, pitch-black" except for Marines’ flashlights next to "a bloody fingerprint" – in English and Arabic the cryptic words:

"Put . . . "
"Kept . . . "
"Plan . . . "
" . . . to pass on"

– all in English and Arabic – and beside them one more word, "written only in giant Arabic loops:
"’Hope.’"

Janega also tells of:
* "a steel bar bolted into the bathroom wall," from which "a chain dangled,"
* "a cage tucked into a corner, cobbled together from rusted bits of wire, chicken coops, broken crates and twist ties . . . tall enough for a person to stand in,"
* "a disassembled hand grenade, rubber gloves and numerous bottles of chemicals," including potassium cyanide identified by a translator, who "at that point Sunday afternoon . . . was the only one who could talk."

PROBLEMS, PROBLEMS: “Most agree on this: The United States has an image problem,” says Sun-Times’s Lynn Sweet in today’s column over-ambitiously entitled, “What in the world awaits Condi?” as in Condoleezza Rice, our new sec. of state. Muslims and Canadians do not approve of our war in Iraq, for instance. Golly.

The goal is "to advance U.S. interests and security and to provide the moral basis for U.S. leadership in the world” by “public” diplomacy, says Sweet. An undersecretary’s position, currently empty, would normally handle this.

“There is a sense of urgency,” she says, felt by whom she does not say. She discusses this “public” diplomacy in spin-control terms: counter the lie right away, nip lies in buds.

But then she notes that the “regarded” Colin Powell, apparently meaning well-regarded, did not travel enough and so neglected “personal” diplomacy, staying home to protect his Rumsfeld-threatened turf. But Rice’s turf is not threatened. So:

“Rice should start traveling.

“A lot.”

(Paragraph structure in original.)

The unfilled-undersecretary-post problem is left behind.

Definitely.

Then (no transition) we are told about Congr. Henry Hyde, who “wrote . . . public diplomacy-related provisions in” (into?) a bill intended to reform our intelligence operation.

What's more, we have not enough translators. This problem is “massive,” in case you thought the lack of both public and private diplomacy was big.

Wait. “Back on [to?] public diplomacy.” Period.

(Sweet’s mother was scared by a telegraph operator, as boys in the 40s gibed about an untoward penchant: the penchant-holder’s mother had a nasty fright during pregnancy, leaving the holder with said penchant. If a kid repeated himself, his mother had been scared by a broken phonograph needle. Not brilliant but serviceable on the playground.)

Then Sweet speaks of a “Broadcasting Board of Governors” and its “startups” since Sept. 11, 2001.

“But public diplomacy is more than just good PR,” she writes, meaning radio programs – the “startups” just mentioned. Then she names more things to do, including “grants to developing nations to develop its [their?] own free press, putting content on the Internet and increasing money into [italics added] Arabic and Chinese language training. It's the whole message.”

I’ll say. But excuse me. I have to go increase some money into the parking meter. They are nasty about that stuff in Oak Park, demonstrating no diplomacy whatever.

Can't imagine who's doing a better job in Fallujah than Chi Trib's James Janega, here with another day in the city that became a battlefield. He eyeballed the aftermath in houses, spotting family pictures and sandbags (used by insurgents), dusty Koran and English-speaking textbook, prayer rug and teacups, a can of men's black hair color with "Happy Days Again" written on it in English.

In one such house, he writes, an insurgent waited in the dark and when a five-man U.S. squad opened the door, rolled a grenade toward them that killed one and wounded four. Claim cards are left in each house so that the owners can eventually be compensated by us.

EMBEDDED . . . Chi Trib's James Janega showed up for work again in Fallujah, hanging out with GIs including Sgt. Marc Veen, 24, of Chicago, watching him at his rooftop post plugging an enemy sniper. "He would have gotten one of my buddies," Veen told him.

He was with them as they rested or slept. One marked a grenade he meant to launch later. "This is 4 my buddy," he inscribed. His buddy had been killed the previous day. "It hurts," said the sergeant, from Norristown, Pa., who'd been at it for three days. "I can't really think about it because I have to look out for my guys."

"Grief he pushed off," wrote Janega. "Rage he kept."

The dead buddy's wife (now widow) "lives across the street from my wife," the Pa. sergeant said softly. "I'm all about fighting."

Later the chaplain, preaching in a ruined kitchen, quoted St. Paul: "I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me." He spoke "with his right hand raised and eyes clenched shut, ignoring muffled blasts from the street."

"We pray to the heavenly father for our wives, our children, our parents. . . " he said. "Give us victory, victory, victory."

=======
A few weeks ago, in Chicago, Janega was reporting on what Judge Anne Burke told Loyola U. audiences about clergy abuse and bishops. I noticed a change in the electronic version, with the notation that a mistake had been corrected and thought, that's 21st-century journalism: mistakes can be corrected.

I emailed Janega to that effect, and he got back, full of apology for making the mistake in the first place. He surprised me with that. Reporters err; it was correcting the error that had struck me. The guy is conscientious, as is clear from this battlefield reportage.

Chi Trib's James Janega rode a tank to work. If Sun-Times man Tom Fitzpatrick got a Pulitzer for on-spot reporting for his deadline piece on Weatherman rioting in Chicago in the 70s, what about the guy who tells us what the tank gunner says -- "Wow. We're the only ones left here" -- when word comes of enemy success up ahead in the mean streats of Fallujah?

Copy editing Chi Trib (somebody has to do it):

Consider this of 11/12/04, "Experts see states as force in fighting global warming," in which Stevenson Swanson and his editors can’t decide if he’s talking about warming or states or Bush, who won’t sign the Kyoto treaty.

NEW YORK -- [Delete: With the re-election of President Bush, state governments and big business will likely be the biggest forces pushing policies and developing innovative technologies aimed at reducing U.S. emissions of the gases scientists say are causing global warming.]

[Delete: That forecast by leaders in the environmental and business communities is based on the Bush administration's opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement that seeks to cut the amount of so-called greenhouse gases that enter the atmosphere, where they trap heat.]

The nation’s environmental and business leadership is unanimous in its opinion that what Bush won’t do about global warming, someone else will have to do, namely the states and big business. [If not unanimous, then what? Don’t just say leaders. How many, please, if that’s not too much to ask.]

The Kyoto treaty, which Bush rejected, requires industrialized countries to cut their emissions of carbon dioxide and other climate-changing substances on average by 5.2 percent below their 1990 levels.

[Delete: When the president] Bush [we know he’s the president] rejected the treaty in 2001 [Delete: he said the agreement was], calling it fatally flawed because it excluded developing nations [Delete: such as], including China and India. Forcing U.S. businesses to reduce their emissions while letting companies in those countries off the hook would drive up the cost of American products and cost jobs, Bush said.

[Delete: An August report by an administration official indicated that the buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere was the most likely explanation for global warming, a shift from the administration's previous position of emphasizing the scientific uncertainties of climate change.]

In support of Bush, the administration emphasized the scientific uncertainties of climate change but in August reported [Delete: report by an administration official indicated] that global warming [Delete: the buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere was] is the most likely explanation [Delete: for,] thus producing significant doublespeak. [just kidding about the doublespeak reference, which is what Swanson means or what he says means if he doesn’t know it but may constitute editorializing]

But Bush still believes that rejecting [Delete: the] Kyoto [Delete: accord] was [Delete: the] right [Delete: move], Environmental Protection Agency Administrator [top dog? source of just mentioned August report, unaccountably unsourced by Swanson?] Mike Leavitt [yes, top dog: I looked him up; he’s Michael O. Leavitt, former governor of Utah, though apparently just good old Mike to Swanson] told [Delete: The] Associated Press since the election. [Delete: in a postelection interview with]

In any case [got to have transition here, can’t just string things together, even if the items are pearls], the administration favors voluntary over mandatory measures [Delete: programs] to reduce the emissions from automobiles, power plants and factories that Kyoto supporters blame for warming. Moreover, the administration has [Delete:] also allocated several billion dollars to support [Delete: the] development of new technologies such as hydrogen cells that [Delete: would] power cars without producing carbon dioxide. But such technologies are thought to be many years away from widespread use.

. . . etc. etc., all to make Swanson’s meaning clear, so as to keep readers’ attention.
=================================
More more more, from (now) several blocks away, in the Apparel Center . . . Sun-Times religion writer Cathleen Falsani, who often takes a celebrity approach to her beat – her Hugh Hefner interview comes to mind. – had an 11/12/04 interview with a considerably more attractive subject, a woman who saved Jews from Nazis in the 40s. She opened with fairly feckless questioning: "What is morality? Who is moral? And whose morals are we talking about anyway" but then declined to enter this "Great Moral Debate of ‘04," writing, "I will demure."

No. She will be demure about it – reserved, modest, shy? Hardly. No "be" is missing, but an "e" has sneaked in to do damage to her message. She will "demur" – show reluctance. And even then she’s doing more than show reluctance; she is declining or even refusing.

How does one know this? One looks it up in the Compact OED, here and here. The origin "perhaps" of each is the Old French "demourer" – ‘remain, stay’, influenced by ‘mur’ – ‘grave.’ The noun "grave," so that one is quiet as ...? Or the adjective, so that one is very ("tres") serious. I do not know. I am a copy editor, not a lexicologist.

Check out David Sullum's today in which he contemns (subjects to withering contempt) tax-funded stadiums. Yes, many the taxpayer, even those rooting in person for the home team, will say yea to that, what with Reinsdorf and friends getting hundreds of million from Mother Illinois for that new thing at 35th & Shields.

But would it not be better if the goateed, bespectacled, earnest-looking (and well-informed) Sullum, a doughty libertarian, had NOT opened with the damning admission that he has gone just once in his life to a major league game and found it boring? Is there no libertarian editor who could have told him, I know what you mean, but you have friends out there for whom this admission constitutes a self-damning admission of unreliability?

Jacob, don't do it, they would have said. Skip the confession about almost never going to a ball game and being bored when you do. It's not worth it.

That said, Jacob makes hash of the publicly funded stadium, with special attention today to the imminent rise of the baseball Senators. Its 41,000 seats will cost a half billion-plus in public money raised by a new tax on business, that source of all wealth whom we love to hate. Not to worry, says DC Mayor Anthony Williams, 364 new jobs averaging $260,000 will supply the deficit. (But how many of those jobs are popcorn vendors, how many pouty superstars?)

Furthermore, cruddy Anacostia, where the stadium would be built, will rise with the new Senators, or Nationals or whatever. Yes, with baseball-season in-stadium eateries, etc. Stadiums are a bonanza for parking lot owners and people with big back yards they can pave over or rooftops from which paid spectators can watch the game if the team owners have not blocked their view with various devices. And bars to which game-maddened fans can repair afterwards, yes. This is neighborhood revitalization?

80 economists don't think so, Sullum tells us. Nothing notable will come of a new stadium, they told the mayor, who almost certainly pitched their letter forthwith into the nearest spittoon. Spending just moves around, they said, citing "a vast body of economic research." And it normally takes a very strong man to withstand that kind of pressure. In fact, 37 cities were hurt by presence of pro teams 1969-96, according to a Cato Institute paper that had something to say about "significant negative impact on the level of real per capita income." That sort of talk may go with spectacles and goatees and people who don't go to games, but should we ignore it?

Meanwhile, in DC Sullum wonders what other effects there will be, thanks to the expected tax on large businesses (whose owners are outnumbered at the pools by owners of small businesses and owners of no businesses) and its expected lowering of wages and raising of prices.

WLS's Don & Roma raised, dodged issue about 100 lb. female cop overpowered and disarmed by 230 lb. carjacker whom she had pursued into a vacant lot. Made whole issue the dumb one about who�s right, mother who says he�s a good boy or cops who tell bad things he did. Callers immediately raised the other issue, whether this cop was the man for the job. These (male) callers, some of them apparently cops themselves, raised the not-ready issue gingerly and secondarily at first. But it soon became top item, with Don saying several times he didn�t want to talk about it.

Eventually a man called saying he�s a veteran of eight (not nine or seven) bar fights, saying a good small woman or man can get the better of a much bigger guy with the right punch administered quickly. And Roma chimed in to say there are 65 male cops who would also have been disarmed by this big guy. So Chicago�s hot conservative couple dodged the obvious.

What were they thinking when they brought it up in the first place? Tiny female cop easily bested by big offender, and nothing is to be said about lack of physical parity? Callers are put off, Don not wanting to go there, Roma getting defensive? What�s up in Don & Roma Land, newly repopulated by them after long contract-fight hiatus? They sell well and are worth a lot, but was what they say on air part of the dispute? How big a part?

(Yes, these are not newspaper performers, but radio talkers are people too.)