"The Schiavo case is only slightly more consequential" than Eric Zorn's pet, the U. of Illinois mascot case, he says today.

Just when I decide I will pay no more attention to him, a headline rips my attention away from something substantial, in this case

Eric Zorn: "Just another skirmish in the culture war"

in a Tribune email.

I leave it to you to plow through Z's head-tripping convolutions to discern his argument, which usually is a triumph of logic over experience but may not be that much in this case.

"It hasn't happened in the 46 other states that have a system that allows people to obtain a permit to carry a concealed firearm," says NRA man Todd Vandermyde in Sun-Times, referring to Mayordaley II's "more arguments settled with firearms. More bodies in the morgue and more gun victims in the rehab hospitals" when concealed-carry laws pass.

Is this a good follow-up for Illinois newspapers, to look at what's happened elsewhere? As a noosepaper reader, I think so.

HAH! I THOUGHT OF IT AND YOU DIDN'T, OR IF YOU DID, I GOT COLUMN SPACE AND YOU DON'T! . . . Got instant reaction to random shootings? Don't? Try Dawn Turner Trice in today's Chi Trib, where it's a matter of "Want security? Treat mental illness."

"If we fail to discuss mental illness, its devastation and the lowly place it continues to occupy in our health-care system . . . we miss something huge," she says. Security remains "paramount," but we have to go preventative.

A doctor tells her 60 percent of children of depressed parents are going to battle depression "during their lifetime" but if identified they "may never become" ill. He's right, but so what? He didn't ask to be asked by Trice about it.

Did she talk about mental illness at tsunami time? Why not? Her response is typical instant expertizing by columnist, which should have instant penalty imposed by the American Society of Prevention of Stupidity by Columnists. A day's pay, minimum.

Better she talk about the tragedy of life, even its sweet mystery, and not the supposed "myth and mystery" in which mental illness is "still shrouded."

Docs have long wait lists, insurance is inadequate, Trice has her cause for the day -- mental illness and the inadequacies of the health system! She has bounced from shooter headlines to an issue!

WINNING IS WHAT? . . . U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel says he comes from the "Vince Lombardi wing of the Democratic Party: Winning is everything," says Chi Trib with ill-disguised approval or at least conspicuous non-disapproval. Can we imagine reading that about Karl Rove?

Later: The head was unfortunate, because the story stands up, if somewhat laboriously. Take a look.

The Chi Trib (Co.)-owned LA Times is raked over righteously and it seems rightly indignant coals by radio man Hugh Hewitt here . He is madder than hell about a p-1 story that as he quotes it is a puff piece for our friends the North Koreans -- just folks, after all, like us -- sans context, as if Ed Murrow had told how warm-hearted those Nazis are. FYI Trib Co. leadership, says Hewitt.

I told Dennis Byrne he would be disappointed to hear that I did not read his entire column in today's Chi Trib to the lady of our house after dinner tonight, only selections. Such as his compromise proposal whereby a fetus's being brain dead or alive suffices to bring us together on whether to respect his life or not.

Why didn't I think of that? I asked my helpmeet. Because I am stuck in Vatican-style (old Europe) thinking, I told her. Look to the American experience for a decent solution, I said.

Seeking common ground, he argued that brain life would qualify the fetus as belonging to the "community," whereby hangs the tale in contemporary parlance.

Fanatical pro-choicers will not buy it, he wrote, but they can be properly marginalized, he implied, once the issue becomes once more debatable and debated, I mean once we (thru the Supreme Ct) return choice to voters by overturning Roe-Wade.

Very good column, hung on the Hillary-as-veering-right peg. Byrne closes by urging her not to oppose Bush's pro-life-leaning judges, who will return choice to voters.

Scare headline here: "Shiite with ties to Iran poised to be Iraqi leader" for story from Baghdad by Liz Sly in Chi Trib in which she says:

it is now almost certain that Iraq's first elected prime minister in half a
century [Al-Jaafari] will be an Islamic scholar with close ties to Iran, a leader whose party once carried out terrorist attacks against U.S. targets

in third paragraph, adding immediately:

But al-Jaafari, currently one of two vice presidents in the interim
administration, also is regarded as one of the more moderate of the Shiite
Islamist politicians, a pragmatist who has tempered his views as he has risen to the top of the political establishment in the new Iraq.

In a recent interview at his offices in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, he said his priority is to see a constitution that enshrines equal rights for all of Iraq's ethnic and religious groups.

"We will not have any laws that oppose Islam," he said. "That doesn't mean we want an Islamic government. The majority of Iraqis are Muslims, and so it is natural that Islam should be the official religion. But the most important thing is to respect the freedom of religion of all Iraqis of
all ethnic backgrounds and traditions."

And farther down the Iran and terrorist links are handled nicely. He fled to Iran when his party faced death and destruction from Sadaam. As for the terrorism,

Al-Jaafari, a physician, has always denied any links to the attacks. Jawad
Maliki, a senior Dawa official, said the attacks were carried out by Dawa
factions that were co-opted by Iranian intelligence agencies, not the mainstream Dawa Party that al-Jaafari leads.

In 1989 al-Jaafari moved to London, where he distanced himself further from the Iranian-influenced Iraqi exile movement. He still maintains his family home in northwestern London, where his wife works
as a physician, and among Iraqi Shiites he is as closely associated with the
West as he is with Iran. (Italics added)

He is also a religious scholar, and while in exile in Iran he studied in the holy city of Qom, reaching the rank of mujtahid, one rung below that of ayatollah. That qualification will help him when it comes to steering Iraq's government in accordance with Islamic laws, said one of his top
aides, Adnan Ali.

"He's capable of defending Sharia law and he's a moderate," he said.

It's a good story. Why the headline, which misses its main point, that the guy looks good?

If Eric Zorn’s 2/10/05 Chi Trib column, “No eye-rolling: Daley Pledge may just work,” were well argued, it would be dangerous and subversive of good government, because he naively takes Mayor Daley seriously with his most recent declaration of good intentions as regards civic corruption and moreover expects it to make a difference. He presents interviews with several office holders as if their politic and self-serving responses make his point. They do not, because they are politic, except for one that is candid enough to provide good copy that makes the column interesting.

This is by the irrepressible Cook County Board president John Stroger, who, asked if he too would pledge to take no money from people doing business with his branch of government, declined to play to the Zorn-reader gallery and said he would make no such pledge but would follow the law in such matters.

The others – a Gov’s spokesman and three probable gov candidates – all to varying degrees said yes, which is not news. Candidates and office holders do not usually tell a reporter “nonsense” when he suggests taking a good-government (goo-goo) tack, but Zorn seems not to be aware of this.

Nor does he seem aware of how goo-goo professionals can be expected to respond to the sort of statement Daley made, faced as he was with gale-force winds of stinky-poo corruption blasts. Zorn quotes – yes! – the new Terry Brunner in our midst, Better Govt. Assn. director So-and-So, and Cindy-Something, of Illinois Campaign for Political Reform (not identified by Zorn, who is perfectly willing to let its name say it all), both endorsing Zorn’s respect for the “Daley pledge.” Or is the other way around?

Meanwhile, Zorn might refer to his own commendation at year-end 2004 of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald for “bipartisan nailing of corrupt hides to the wall,” wherein lies – with dogged newspaper coverage – the be-all end-all of anti-corruption work. That is to say, there would be no breast-beating and pledge-taking by Daley if it were not for law enforcement by an outsider with no ties to Daley.

Zorn should give this more mention and more prominence. The rest is frosting on cake – gooey and sticky and not very nourishing, especially in newspaper columns.
=================
LET US ADD THIS: Sun-Times editorial same day sang same tune. Daley "takes shot at real reform," said head. "There was no shrugging off the changes announced by Mayor Daley Tuesday," etc. We should not become "jaded to the corruption in City Hall" and should instead put on a happy face, as a cute circle-shaped yellow sticker is pasted to a bulletin board.

So what if it’s "a case of better late than never"? We still must hand it to Daley because "potential long-term consequences" of his pledge "are dramatic and far-reaching."

Yes! Like McCain-Feingold on campaign-donation so-called reform and its spawning of 527s such as the heavily George Soros-bankrolled moveon.org.

No! The mayor is "going beyond earlier unfulfilled promises of reform" in his pledge, says this very editorial in support of using a news conference as grounds for consolation.

Does not the Sun-Times know the man will promise anything to gain a minute’s advantage in his ongoing war with dogged journalism? What on earth is this reference to "skeptics" who say "the mayor hasn't gone far enough, that he has left himself loopholes"? It’s bad to be skeptical?

Sun-Times editorial writer, give us a break.

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.