"Price Gouging" the right thing!

I love these Mises people, who get to the heart of economic nonsense as taken for granted by MSM poo-bahs.

Turnaround?

Amazing Chi Trib story about victory in Iraq battle.  250 enemy dead!  Not a body-count story about our losses nor picture of grief-stricken survivors with story of how loved was the dead soldier.  A war story, that is, not the usual anti-war story.  What happened?!

 

However, do not be overly alarmed.  Liz Sly and editors managed to keep focus with this lede:

Two U.S. soldiers died Sunday when their helicopter crashed and about 250 insurgents were reported killed . . .

You can't win for losin' sometimes

MICKEY KAUS: "Labor costs--and specifically work rules--are part of what's killing all the unionized auto manufacturers while their non-unionized competitors thrive." Work rules, I think, are more damaging than pay issues because they cost flexibility and make it harder to introduce new technology.

— from the very helpful Instapundit, which most mornings beats your daily newspaper, or at least is more rewarding (except for obits, and local crime, politics, teams).

This retrogressive, feet-dug-in unionism, I fear, is the problem.  What Walter Reuther the Socialist got his arm broken for in 30s picketing v. Big Capital became a millstone around neck of the masses, who profit most from growing productivity.  Life’s a B, ain’t it?

Tags: Mickey+Kaus, Instapundit, labor+unions, Walter+Reuther, United+Auto+Workers

Club news

Was a gathering of newsgatherers last night at Holiday Inn atop Sun-Times on the river — 15th floor, vu is stunning.  Chi Headline Club gave out lifetime achievement honors.  It was a combination of -atti's, liter- and glitter- (we all dressed nice) and newshounds past, present and to come.  The young were adequately represented.

These were clubbable news people honoring their own, as people do.  It was a high-church affair but not solemn high.  It helps when the honorees are people who talk straight and seem to say what they mean.  No cutesy needed apply.

* WGN radio farm-matters announcer for 47 (!) years Orion Samuelson announced himself "a Norwegian, so only halfway there" at 72.

* News writer and editor with three Chi dailies from the '50s, retired since '88, Ed Baumann [correction here:] said it had been his good fortune to spend half his life in the "second oldest profession in the world," adding, "Think what heights I might have attained if my parents had had a girl,” here earlier misinterpreted as a crack at gender-based affirmative action. 

* Fotog Jim Frost of Sun-Times and TV newshen cum Sun-Times columnist Carol Marin looked appreciatively to their families there present.

* Chi Trib Sci writer and Pulitzer prize winner Ron Kotulak I am sure said something while I went to the men's room, where a nice young man said hi to me, which is more than I get at the men's room at Schaller's on Halsted.  And more than I require.

Clarence Page of Chi Trib and syndicated-column and TV talk show fame lately and Trib plus Chi's Channel Two fame back in "jurassic" times, as he put it, set the tone or picked the key -- better flat than sharp on such an occasion -- for the event.  He held up the literate part very well, moving things along briskly:

-- Big affirmative action newsroom-hiring vehicle of the 60s was the urban riot: “Monochromatic" LA times drafted a messenger to go into the zone and see what the brothers were doing, got a byline promoting him to ad salesman.  The entrepreneurial Louis Lomax pitched a black-Muslim story to Dan Rather and got the assignment himself as free-lancer because (alas) Elijah Muhammad would not talk to a white reporter.  (Not sure I'd talk to Dan Rather either, but that's another question.)

-- "We used to be colored," said Page, riffing on the Great American Name Game.  Then Negro, then black -- "I mean black," he said, looking grr-threatening for a second.  Then African-American --he called up his mother when this happened, delighted he was finally up there with other hyphenated people, Irish- and Italian– and the like.  Finally “people of color.”  "Full circle," he exulted.

It just shows to go you: tone conquers all, and humor and common sense.  There's a lesson for us there.

Tags: Headline+Club+of+Chicago, Orion+Samuelson, Ed+Baumann, WGN+radio, Sun-Times, Carol+Marin, Ron+Kotulak, Chicago+Tribune, Clarence+Page, Louis+Lomax, Dan+Rather, people+of+color

Best reason around, given by smartest guy around . . .

"Do you think Hillary Clinton would make a good president?" [Wolf Blitzer asked Dick Cheney]

"No, I don't."

"Why?"

"Because she's a Democrat."

Truth Detector: Drive-By Hysterics Over Cheney Interview.

In fact, I was saying that very thing just the other day . . .

Tags: Hillary+Clinton, Dick+Cheney, Wolf+Blitzer

Sartre smoked

* The cigarette was brushed out of Jean-Paul Sartre's hand for an exhibition in 2005.  Sartre smoked, but not in the commemorative picture years after he died.  He was also one of the great sexual athletes of history.  So was his lifelong love, Simone de Beauvoir, a switch-hitter whose girl friends captured Sartre's fancy now and again.  One of these resisted his advances and near broke his haunted heart, however.  It was not easy being a king of sex, so uneasy lies the head wearing that crown.

— from Jean-Pierre Boule’s review of TETE-A-TETE: The lives and loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, by Hazel Rowley (Chatto and Windus) in TLS 3/17/06

* We hear complaints about senseless acts of violence, but never praise for sensible ones.  Is this wise?

* At Bread Kitchen during Xmas week, “Tum te tum tum” (Drummer Boy) overhead for the thousandth time this season is bad enough.  But what of the woman at the next table picking up on it and humming along lightly?

* Comedian Shelley Berman had a shtick where he spoke of dropping ashes in his lap while driving.  Parked at a light on a busy street, he brushed furiously at his lap, looked up and there was an elderly female bus passenger looking at him censoriously.  Likewise, I looked down while on a Bread K stool and saw that my belt was undone and my fly was unzipped.  Oh boy.

* Old joke, but in view of recent highly publicized developments, is it time to revive "Crook County" as replacement name?  No?  Whatever.

Tags: Jean-Paul+Sartre, Hazel+Rowley, Drummer+Boy, Shelley+Berman

Lit'ry matters

* U.S. southern novelist Walker Percy was a medical doctor.

* Longfellow is the most put to music of English-language poets.

(Items from Times [of London] Literary Supplement, hereafter TLS)

* The idiosyncrasy of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry may be explained by the “constraint” of Jesuit life.  Toeing the line in all else, he broke out in his verse.  (You could say he sprang out with his rhythm.)  Indeed, the tension he experienced — conflict between vocation and creativity — may have been productive.  (Simon Humphries, “A Eunuch for God,” TLS 12/22&29/06)

* In Honor: a History (Encounter), James Bowman (no relation) displays “a propensity to be judgemental and didactic.”  (Ditto Harvey C. Mansfield in Manliness [Yale].)  Thus reviewer George Feaver, retired poly sci prof at U. of British Columbia and this year at UT-Austin, who was left with “nagging suspicions” about Bowman’s judgment of U.S. military decisions, having read to the end of his “dense, discursive account of the alleged ‘decline and fall’ of Western honour.”

In this and other matters, Bowman offers a “gloomy reading” of history, “overly selective” in Feaver’s view, as in its ignoring the civil rights revolution of the ‘60s and “real-life heroes” such as Martin Luther King and the New York firefighters on 9/11.  Feaver closes with commendation of both books, “despite their shortcomings [for reminding us] of the importance of remembering the past, and standing up for beliefs central to the achievement of our civilization.” (“Limp Responses,” TLS 12/22&29/06)

* Reviewing Patrick Wyse Jackson’s The Chronologer’s Quest: The Search for the Age of the Earth (Cambridge), John North says J. has “useful things to say,” albeit with “a weakness for discursive irrelevance.” 

Whether J. displayed this weakness or not, I do not know, nor do I know if other reviewers’ comments are well-aimed, but I do find that phrase helpful.  May writing teachers and editors everywhere hold discursive irrelevance to be a weakness not a strength. (TLS 1/12/07)

Tags: Walker+Percy, Longfellow, Gerard+Manley+Hopkins, James+Bowman, Honor, writing+teachers

Movie, No-Child

Hot tip: See the movie Station Agent as soon as possible.  It's on DVD.  A dwarf stars or co-stars with a grief-stricken 40-something soulful good looker and a 20-something handsome bloke with a hot dog stand.  Dwarf lives in abandoned station, he and the good looker find relief from their troubles with help of the handsome bloke.  How do you expose the sorrows of afflicted people without maudlin display?  See this movie to find out.  Beats Sun Also Rises (novel) or at least matches it.

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

In Sun-Times we find a good word for No Child Left Behind in story about on-line parental notification.  (Child, we have your parents' email address, so don't try anything and shape up.) 

 

No-Child has been "a key driver" of education software systems, says an analyst — the writer using a familiar barely-English term — emphasizing as it does data, reporting, and accountability.  This barely-English slip aside, it's a very good story by Sandra Guy. (WHICH I COULD FIND ONLY BY USING GOOGLE, BY THE WAY, NOT THE VERY BAD, VERY CLUTTERED, SUN-TIMES SITE, FOR WHICH THE BUSINESS HEIRS OF CONRAD BLACK SHOULD ASK THEIR MONEY BACK.)

 

She got a good quote for closer from a Naperville schools staffer speaking in favor of new systems: "You spend more time weighing the hog [testing students] instead of feeding it [teaching them] if you don't have the technology."

 

(NEITHER COULD I FIND STAFF EMAIL ADDRESSES, SUCH AS ARE READILY FOUND ON CHI TRIB SITE.)

 

Later: I found them out.  You search the writer, go to his or her bio page (a nice touch), and on the side is email link.  For Sandra Guy, for instance, go here.  There.

Reverse Spin: Obama on wrong side of history

This gent says O'Bama [my quirky spelling: I can do it, it's my blog and no stinking editor is going to correct it] has talking points down cold but nothing else.  I agree with him and feel the bi-racial, Hawaii-raised, Harvard-alum, offspring-of-Ph.D. community can do better.  We will have to hunker down and wait.

One Jimmy bought, sold, delivered

Egad, did I read in this morning's Chi Trib or Sun-Times about Jimmy Carter, author of heavy anti-Israel book, being on the take (big-time, to use a once going phrase of choice) from A-rabs and Muslims?  For a long time, even to saving his peanut farm in '76?  As at Belmont Club?

 

Let me check before I say it’s so.  (Checking, wait.)  Nope, it ain't in either paper, or it escaped the long arm of Google, which has nothing on the subject in either paper.

 

Nor is anthing from either paper among the blogs, again says Google.  

 

Oh well, just another case of what interests mainstream editors.  Ho-ho-ho-hum.

 

OR: It’s the usual lag between mainstream and digital coverage.  Ho-ho-ho-hum 2.

 

It is not easy teaching the old dog something new.

Obama drugged, Jesus risen, Hitler studies, Irving's Dresden, Foie gras in Chi, Macy's, Revolutionary stew

* Barack O's drug use is less the issue here -- vs. various scandals or non-scandals that have bothered campaigns for many decades -- but his being author of self-revelatory book with literary value (ck: have to read the copy of Tales from Father that I got for my birthday).  this is the new thing he brings. 
See: "Past drug use may test Obama" at http://www.suntimes.com/news/sweet/197111,CST-NWS-sweet04.article

 

* Two Jesuits on bodily resurrection of Jesus, some time past:
1. Don't play logic game, said one, a theologian and university chair-holder, when I put it to him, did J. rise bodily or didn't he?  (He's not with Aquinas et al., who put logic up there with the best of mental exercises.)
2. Doesn't matter to me, said another, a publisher of spiritual books.  (He's not with the fanatical Paul, who said we are the most miserable of people if J. did not rise.) 
See: tenacious if quirky memory of James H. Bowman, ex-SJ.

 

* Hitler studies?  Whence came he philosophically?  Try Mark Dery's Shovelware, 8/7/05 http://www.markdery.com/archives/blog/dept_of_hitler_studies/ and find extremely wry commentary on swastika as brand, etc., all based on absolute-evil concept, with references to the devil, yes.  Not much help here.

 

Or Don DeLillo's novel White Noise http://www.amazon.com/White-Noise-Contemporary-American-Fiction/dp/0140077022 whose main character announces himself on p. 4: "... I am chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the College- on-the-Hill. I invented Hitler studies in North America in March of 1968. ..."  Nor here: it's a riff on evil again.  We know he was evil.  We wonder how he got that way, something beyond unhappy childhood and the rest.  Anybody?

 

* Holocaust-denier and currently jailed David Irving's The Destruction of Dresden gave Kurt V. Jr. the data for his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five, as the # of dead, 135G in bombing of D. vs. # of dead, 71G-plus, in b. of Hiroshima.  (Item from N.B. column by J.C. in Times Lit Supplement, 3/17/06)

 

* Sell no, give yes: That's foie gras in Chicago, where inspectors gave up on imposition of fine because ordinance applies only to what's sold, not to what's given away, as f.g. with other dishes at Bin 36 restaurant.  But nobody said it was easy being a legislative meddler: Alderman Joe Moore (sponsor of ordinance), tear down that law!  Or at least fix it, for gosh sakes, to cover shameless defiers of same on technicality and at same time defilers of animal rights!  [Ald. Joe sees no need for fixing it, by the way.] 
See: "Their goose isn't cooked" at http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/195054,CST-NWS-foie03.article

 

* Heard in nursery: "Mommy, Mommy, please take me to see Santa Claus at Macy's iconic State Street location?" 

See: Chi Trib cutline 1/3/07, p. 1 top left under pic of new store manager, who may be a mommy herself but definitely has the capacity to be one biologically speaking. 
See: "Macy's learning what's in a name" at http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0701030050jan03,1,3348903.story?coll=chi-news-hed

 

* Meanwhile, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez appears in ads for Mexican restaurant saying, "Long live socialist revolution."  "People took offense," says manager.  It's Las Palmas, 1835 W. North Ave.  The ad's designer said there's an "abstract but real" connection between ads and Las Palmas.  The ad is part of "a melting pot of ideas."  A pot of stew, perhaps?  That's it!  Las P. should offer revolutionary stew, a mish-mash of goulash.  They can serve it on a silver platter, with abstract but real silver soup spoons inscribed with the provocative but intellectually tasty question, "Were you born with one of these in your mouth?"  The implication would be that now you pay for the sins of your parents and grandparents. 
See: "Eatery's ads turning stomachs" at http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/195085,CST-NWS-palmas03.article

Beware what they imply

This ain’t from a Chicago newspaper, and it’s a longer excerpt than I usually fall prey to, but it’s quite good about the importance of party affiliation as way to cut through “superficial campaign positioning” when judging national security issues, and it’s beautiful in identifying B. Obama as our decade’s Jimmy Carter:

Hillary has been posing as a foreign policy moderate for some time now.  Obama is apparently as left as left can be, yet he covers this stance with soothing moderate rhetoric.  In a way, Obama is the new Carter.  Carter won, despite his relative obscurity and inexperience, because he was the breath of fresh air needed by a country exhausted by Watergate.  Carter’s religious convictions and seeming moderation were emotional balm for a traumatized nation.  It never occurred to anyone that Carter’s foreign policy might make the first serious break from America’s Cold War toughness.  Best keep all this in mind when listening to Clinton and Obama.  They’ll jump through campaign hoops to prove their toughness.  But in the end, we’ll get a Jimmy Carter foreign policy from either one of them.

Thus Stanley Kurtz in “NRO Corner.”

Columnist on wry

Neil Steinberg’s wife heard him on the radio.

"You sounded good -- very cheerful," she said.

"I was just feigning cheerfulness," I admitted.

"Well, feign it when you get home, too," she said.

It works for me, she said.

From his parents do we know him?

Clarence Page asks if we know Obama’s middle name, gives it, says now we know.  OK, but do we know he’s the son of two Ph.D.’s?  Now we do.  The Hussein middle name is easily dismissed.  So what?  Lots of people have it.  But two Ph.D.’s for parents?  Not only rare but instantly controversial.  Do we really want so academically infected a person to rule us? 

Besides, his hot-seller book is brainless, to go by Dick Morris’s account of it:

In reading Senator Barack Obama’s #1 bestseller, The Audacity of Hope, one begins to wonder whether he is another cynical politician or just a helplessly naïve neophyte.

Morris, a Clinton specialist from a ‘way back, excerpts with alarming aim:

Sometimes he sounds downright juvenile. Consider this missive, which opens chapter five: “One thing about being a U.S. Senator - you fly a lot.” Brilliant! It gets worse: “Most of the time I fly … in coach, hoping for an aisle or window seat” (But not always.) “ … there are times when … I fly on a private jet.” Then, “the flying experience is a good deal different.” Wow.

Obama’s first book got a rave from the Time Mag cover-story writer-cum-sycophant — it “may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”  Give him credit for the “may be.”  Otherwise, just gasp.

Or accept it.  In the Time writer’s account, Obama does come to life.  Ditto in lawyer-novelist Scott Turow’s Salon story.  The more recent book is the one that made him the big money, however.  And helped his candidacy.  Bad books do that.  He has all that education to live down.  The American people get suspicious.  Ever since Woodie Wilson the Princeton president. 

Can we imagine ourselves electing another in his image?  Dems give us Gore and Kerry, Repubs give us GW, whom I vastly prefer.  But the son of two Ph.D.’s?  That’s the thing to learn about the Big O.  See how that flies once he’s on the hustings full-time.

Trouble, I got trouble

It troubles me that a certain sentiment “troubles” Dawn Turner Trice in today’s Chi Trib.  Her issue is Bill Cosby talking up hard work and perseverance to school parents when he recently settled a sexual harrassment suit.  She is troubled by people’s paying it no attention because they like Cosby’s message.

She’s come a long way since January, 2001, when she gave considerable ink to a similar view about Rev. Jesse Jackson, exposed as a philanderer and father of an illegitimate child.  Rev. J. had “taken a jump [actually several, over many months] and left a package,” realizing concerns voiced by an A.M.E. pastor in Iowa City about a handsome visitor who was giving his pretty daughters some attention in the summer of ‘63.

Not a problem, according to one of Trice’s sources in a Tribune piece.

"You deal with this the same way you deal with Bill Clinton," [Lorn Foster, an American politics professor at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.] said. "You teach fallibility."

In that respect, Foster said, almost every newsmaker in the 20th Century has had indiscretions and public failings.

"Really, if you use that criteria for not teaching Jackson . . .  how do you teach Franklin Delano Roosevelt? How do you teach JFK?" Foster said.

Trice was not troubled by this, but she is by Cosby-excusing.  Almost six years have elapsed, and that may be why.  Who knows?  In any case, my being troubled at her being troubled has less to do with Cosby vs. Jackson — middle-class values vs. victimhood in rebellion — than with a writer trying to disguise her feelings.

You can condemn someone faintly but tellingly.  That is, you can be troubled when you’re actually pissed off, or should be, based on the data you present.  In which case as a writer, you’re in trouble.

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

Later, from Nancy from Lake Bluff:

Where was Dawn Turner Trice during all of Bill Clinton's transgressions?  I suppose she agreed with what Clinton stood for, so all else was forgiven.

She was confusing as hell about Clinton and other private-lives revelations in June, 2004, when she felt “conflicted” about what matters, picking and choosing as to what would make her vote this or that way.  This girl drives you nuts with her self-analysis, telling us how she feels all the time.  What is this, a sleepover confab or a newspaper column?

 

Otherwise, nothing on the record.

In the tank

Let’s hear it for Gurnee neighbors of Chi Bears DT Tank Johnson for calling the cops about his pit bulls, pot smoking, and gunfire.  Ditto for Gurnee and other N. Suburban cops who knocked down his front door to get the loaded guns, etc. and rescue the two kids from accidentally getting plugged. 

Bad cess to Tank for failing to adapt to new surroundings, i.e. middle-class, law-abiding, orderly behavior as practiced in crispy-clean ‘burb as opposed to gun-totin’ SW U.S., where he came from and pot-smoking friends of which he has too many.

This is the issue here, not repressive gun or drug laws, which often deserve to be the issue.  Adapting to surroundings is the thing: when you move into a neighborhood where people’s accepted ways of doing things are new to you, study these ways and adapt, unless you reject them as incompatible with your mores and moral code.  In that case, either get out or hunker down for a long-haul squabble if not fight to the death. 

Ah, but nobody thinks Tank Johnson was making a statement for gun and drug law reform.  Nobody.  He was just sloppy about running his own household, including, by the way, his not being married to the mother of the two little kids, which says something about his casual approach to a life of orderly behavior. 

He is not a globe-trotting Hollywood star spouting geopolitical opinion and ignoring protocol which most have to undergo in adopting foreign-born kids.  Nothing so vulgar.  He is nothing but a slob with bad habits who doesn’t know how to live — not in Gurnee, anyhow, which he is in process of discovering.  Pray for Tank’s enlightenment in the matter.

Disputed OP condo development . . .

. . . in 400 block of N. Maple has townhouses next door, on NW corner, at Superior. Across the street is a house garishly festooned with anti-war messages, including a banner in German stretching its width. This is Oak Park’s best-known incipient development because it’s too big for neighbors’ taste and they have been complaining and the village board has been discussing.

If the developer were to trade it for the also much-discussed Colt Building on Lake Street a few blocks away, as he is reported in Wed Journal to have said he might, his fame would go off the charts for at least 15 minutes, probably 15 months until he had completed transformation of the Colt into lavish condos with shooting gallery on first floor — just kidding, all you literalists out there.

Do those anti-war signs and banner violate an ordinance somewhere, somehow, by the way? Remember the Greek restaurateur who was given a hard time because he ran Greek letters across his garish awning on OP Ave. across from the Green Line stop? Commercial establishment, yes, but do we want garish signs on residential blocks? Especially one where neighbors have made such a case against a new building with too many units? I don’t know the answer, as one or other trustee has said he doesn’t know the answer to other, less pertinent, conundrums.

As for Trustee M., one who has said he does not know answers, for him I have some characteristically good advice: Go easy on your trademark frontal attack at board meetings or you lose your shock appeal. Getting in the face of the mild-mannered board president, for instant, suffers from the same law of diminishing returns that devalues currency. From respect born of discomfort, other trustees’ response could degenerate to there-he-goes-again. It’s a problem.

As it is for bloggers, who on the formality scale of one to ten come to two or three.  They have no time for vast ideas, only half-vast ones, it seems.  I don’t know the answer.

Tribes punish

No better account of neighborhood tribalism in the big city is readily available than this in Chi Trib about the Bridgeport Squealer who talked to Feds and even wore a wire when meeting with another Bridgeporter, both in City Hall employ.

There were harassing phone calls and slashed car tires, [his lawyer] said. There was also graffiti on [his] house. And finally, last Easter morning, there was a large bottle tossed through the glass front door of the home he shares with his wife and three young children . . .

. . . .

[His] wife, Christine, who also grew up in the neighborhood . . . wrote of the couple's loss of friends and said that most of the harassment was kept from their twin 6-year-old boys and their 4-year-old until the bottle was thrown through their door and the noise was so loud that one of the twins awoke crying.

Christine Katalinic wrote that she was infuriated. She said she ran to his room to find "a frightened young boy sweating under his covers in fear." Even now, they are sometimes afraid to be downstairs alone, she wrote.

AP in Sun-Times:

Katalinic and his wife and children became the target of community harassment that ranged from phone calls in the middle of the night to slashed tires and graffiti.

[Judge] Coar said he could understand if Katalinic lost friends because he had violated the law.

''But for people to turn against him or any other person because they owned up to a crime and breached this unwritten code of silence is shameful -- absolutely shameful,'' Coar said.

Not what we usually mean by grassroots democracy.

Points made inadvertently

“Internet chatters posing as journalists” is Harry Jaffe’s phrase in a 11/16/06 Washingtonian piece about how MainStream Media won the election and bloggers et al. lost.  “Major news organizations and experienced journalists” had the stories that persuaded voters.  He goes on to cite anti-admin (& other GOP) stories — Abramoff corruption, secret prisons, phone call monitoring and others.

In time, journalists freelancing as bloggers on the Internet might have greater impact on American elections, but if last week’s voting is any indication, the political landscape is still being painted by the reporters working for major media outlets.

He rejoices in mainstream dominance because it’s under credible attack by web-based independents who never went to journalism school and do not submit to gatekeeping by people such as Dan Rather.  But crowing over such a victory would have been unseemly indeed a few years ago.  Jaffe would not have bothered. 

That’s one thing.  Another is that he rejoices in Mainstreamers’ victory for what party?  Why, their party, what else?  Go MSM Dems!

St. Luke, St. Luke, St. Luke, St. Luke, darn it!

Scripturally illiterate copy desk alert:  If Andrew Greeley attributed the Christmas narrative to St. Jude, as here in Sun-Times, he deserved protection from sounding like an idiot.  If he didn’t, as is much more likely, the reporters Shamus Toomey and/or his editors deserve excommunication or worse from the Society of Newspaper Copy Editors, which if it does not exist, should.