Cherry River Blog

Senator Ted Kennedy's Legacy

2009-08-26T13:37:00.003-05:00

In reference to the many retrospectives coming forth on Senator Ted Kennedy's Senate career, I'd like to add another vital item.
Kennedy was one of the most rabidly anti-gun elected officials ever, as one would expect from a left-winger with a longing for the benevolent dictatorship characteristic of that political bent.
With the considerable power he had amassed, Kennedy was responsible for a remarkable wave of anti-gun legislation, along with a secondary wave of anti-gun sentiment he fostered by his very success.
The flip side of this legacy, though, is more beneficial to America in a larger sense.
In 1968, when the gun bans reached their takeoff power, the vast majority of Americans owned guns, knew about guns, and knew damn well that they were not raving, homicidal maniacs perpetually on the brink of insane violence brought on the presence of a firearm.
The same is still the case today, even though that majority is no longer overwhelming, and perhaps may have even slipped into a large minority. We're not sure- polling methods are usually highly suspect on this topic.
The impact of our elected officials, as led by Kennedy, insisting we were both a menace to humankind, and that the rights outlined in the Constitution were of no consequence, served to start millions of minds thinking... thinking about why we were supposed to believe all this nonsense.
I can testify in my own case, as a Boomer launching into adulthood in a very left-wing environment (the far north side of Chicago), my upbringing as a free-thinking liberal lefty was utterly demolished by Kennedy and his gun controller friends, along with his plans for registration and then confiscation of every gun in civilian hands.I knew at the most basic level that I wasn't the homicidal maniac I was told I was; I knew that someone telling me that was not to be trusted.
I never read the Constitution with any seriousness until the onslaught of gun control that inundated us in the early and middle '70s; I submit that many millions of other Americans found themselves at the same point. Ronald Reagan's election, marking the beginning of the end of postwar progressive takeover of America, had plenty to do with gun rights, and by extension, a need felt by most Americans to reel in invasive and confiscatory Big Government.
While I don't consider myself a radical, hardline gun owner, I do know that I voted for Reagan in significant part because of gun control, as advanced by Ted Kennedy.
If Kennedy's legacy could be said to be that he got so many Americans to take a closer look at the Constitution and the Americanism it represents, then that could said to be a positive, no matter how unintentional.

The natural mechanic

2008-12-22T14:48:00.008-06:00

My father was a mathematics wizard. Yes, he was quite a few other things, too, not the least of which was a sports guy, as in team sports. He was extremely well-spoken, patient to a fault, and blessed with an active, not to say devilish, sense of humor.
But most of all, he was a math guy. Mathematics lived inside his mind as casually and easily as birds in the sky and fish in the sea. He saw numbers clearly and grasped their interaction so intuitively that he could practically do what might nowadays be called "amazing calculator tricks".
Long division to several places, in his head? Took a few seconds, but no problem. And no errors, either. Ordinary addition and subtraction seemed not even to need actual thought. Suddenly, there was the sum or remainder.
He spent his adult life in the insurance business, in the days before small computers and tiny calculators, and so this gift was of great assistance in daily life. He could stun customers with his lightning-fast calcs, done longhand on paper in the most beautiful cursive script you'd ever see (as the old nuns had pounded into him, he might say), and assimilate sporting statistics and rearrange them in a blink to prove a point, tag a trend, or spot a shortcoming.
In other words, he was a damned smart guy. Yes, you may misinterpret that with the other meaning as well, with no offense; he'd likely have agreed.
But what he wasn't, was a mechanic, or more specifically, a natural mechanic.
Nearly everyone will agree on that as a concept: that some humans have a brain built in a way that gives them a natural and effortless grasp of the interaction of physical objects, in much the same way as my dad seeing a page of numbers.
Some people even refer to those so equipped with a bit of, dare I say, reverence, as if the comprehension of mechanical parts interacting was some sort of special gift, like an ability to see into the future, or win at casino gambling, or to hit the curve ball. I don't think there's too many folks who don't, at one time or another, didn't wish for the appearance of a "natural mechanic" to cure some ill with a machine or structure.
It gets delicate, here, for Your Correspondent, wishing to proceed with the modesty of mien he was raised to have, but still, in his mind, being a natural mechanic himself. Fine. So I can go around the corner a little bit and mention that one of my brothers is a natural mechanic, and who followed in his father's mental footsteps by also being a gifted athlete and an exceptional mathematician.
But his father wasn't a natural mechanic. We would joke, lovingly, that he could barely operate a screwdriver, and only if you handed it to him facing the right way. A power drill was an object of great caution, and a power circular saw was simply to be shunned.
So where did his natural mechanic son come from? He can look at building and see things all the way through and top to bottom, and formulate answers to the problems as easily as putting a toothbrush in his mouth. The father? Never happened.
Two smart guys, two quick, effective thinkers, two highly analysis-capable minds. Two different sets of skills.
Quite a mystery to ponder, but one that has illumination value for some other difficult-to-understand seeming contradictions.
There, so while you, dear reader, are pondering all this, Your Correspondent is going to move on to another mystery, very much in the public square: anthropogenic global warming.
"Anthropogenic" means caused by human activity. In other words, AGW holds that humans, and specifically their "carbon" emissions, are causing a sudden, spectacular, and ultimately destructive increase in the planet's temperatures, so badly that a horrifying change in the entire planet's ecosystem is catastrophically nigh.
Like many another recasting (see post elsewhere here), this is frequently shortened both to simplify and to misdirect as "global warming". The basic tenet of AGW, and please don't drop off that "anthropogenic" part, because it's critical, is that humans are wrecking the planet. Not only that, but that the day of overwhelming cataclysm is due almost any month now, and only by reverting to the ways of our cave-dwelling, early-hominid ancestors can this light-switch-sudden change be mitigated to any degree.
AGW has become something akin to a cult. Never mind the science that has been cited to support the concept of worldwide climate catastrophe (let's call it "WCC" for fun), because the real guts of the AGW movement is the need for penitence, every bit as much as prudence.
And underlying that penitence is simple statism: the desire to put more and more of human activity under the positive control of the State; the spread and centralization of government.
The most obvious indicator of the cultiness is that now, to discuss the process of WCC via AGW in any curious or inquisitive way to commit heresy. AGW high priests have literally said, in public and being recorded, that there's "no question" to the science that proves their theory.
No, it's not even a theory: it's a proven fact, a fait accompli, a done deal.
Even the most non-scientifically-minded person should be given pause upon hearing so rash an assertion. Nowhere ever in the history of human science has any proposition been in the realm of"no question". That is exactly what scientific thought abhors: an absence of curiosity.
Insisting there's "no question" ought to, to any thinking person, delegitimize any statement purporting to be based on science.
Still, the anthropogenic global warming juggernaut roars on, crushing the curious and flattening the flouters with a righteous fury any old-time evangelist would be proud of.
But, with the actual science of AGW disintegrating week by week, and here I refer you to the reports of the NASA data most commonly cited as the true evidence being shown to be faulty, to a fatal degree (I'll take that pun, there), you would think somebody'd be starting to ask why the bum's rush, why no skepticism, why no dissent allowed?
Well, that's the way cults work, especially those emanting from the progressive corner of world view and political thought. Flagellation of America, be it the chief executive, the military, the economic system, the very concept of American exceptionalism, is the hoitiest of the toitiest, the loftiest of the most absolutely hippest, the smart set's take on just about anything about the US of A.
Well, automobiles came from the US, this thinking goes, as does large-scale electrification, and all the other horrors believed to be caused by the Great Satan, and so it must be, automatically, wrong. Not just wrong, but immoral, and for good measure, planet-wreckingly immoral.
Make no small accusations!
But, as few mainstream media consumers and Hollywood-movie-goers are aware, that factual basis for this deep belief is indeed being questioned. Real scientists, most notably those with actual experience in the natural sciences (as opposed to those with 28-million-dollar homes bought with speaking engagement fees) are either jumping off the AGW bandwagon, or still insisting there was never even a running board's worth of space on it in the first place.
The debate should be raging, but isn't. In schools, where rigid doctrinaire thought is being implanted with unconcern, children have been so drowned in the religous dictates of AGW that anything they might do that could be seen as disputatious would be stamped out in two shakes of a teacher's marker pen.
So, you may ask, what the heck does this all have to do with the concept of natural mechanics?
Simple- find one, ask him or her if he or she is good with AGW as a done deal, and I can assure you that are quite unlikely to be answered in the affirmative. Planet-wrecking warming being caused by little bitty humans spewing microscopic amounts of carbon?
Man, it just doesn't seem to figure. It's just not... natural.

Inversion therapy

2008-12-19T10:03:00.005-06:00

I was brought up to consider all of my actions on the basis of what's known as the Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
But my dad had another perspective to overlay the Rule: when you're trying to consider a situation, event, remark, or pretty much anything in human interaction, try reversing the positions of the people involved. If A does X to B, is it proper for B to do X to A?
That kind of inversion has a great deal of utility now in the times of Presidential transition in shedding light upon the derailment of civil discourse in the discussion of President G.W. Bush.
The shoe-throwing incident in Baghdad, Iraq this past week could hardly have been a better illustration of how wrong the apprehension of Bush has been.
We've been deluged with news media reports of celebratory responses to the news of the shoe assault. No doubt that happened, to some degree. Perhaps even to a somewhat considerable degree. But it hasn't been anything like the universal sentiment that has been portrayed.
While beyond the comprehension of the Bush-hating news media, much of the world has been dismayed by the assault. And that's what it was, in reality: an assault upon a lawful head of state. Despite the insistence by thousands of unhappy Americans declaring the Bush "isn't my president", the real-world fact is that he is the President of the United States, and an attack upon him is still an attack upon a head of state.
The none-too-great lethality of the attack is of some import, but not as much as the basic fact: The Chief Executive of the US was assaulted.
Fine, now let's apply my dad's inversion therapy, updated for 21st Century American politics.
If an "enraged" Iraqi journalist, devasted over the desolation of his destroyed country after President Obama precipitously removes the American military despite the Iraqi (and world's) asking that they stay long enough to complete securing the victory acheived in mid-2008, beans Obama with his footwear, will that be a happy, even hilarious chuckle moment for the same folks who are displaying such unconcern, if not outright pleasure, for the same thing being perpetrated against Bush?
The obvious other flipper is to look at what happened to the thrower, who now, not incidentally, has apologized for his juvenile behavior (hear about that on CNN? The Trib's front page? Thought not.). His arms were not pulled out. His genitals were not removed with a torch. His eyes are still in their sockets and fully operational. And his wife was not raped and dismembered in front of him by a dozen Iraqi soldiers.
In fact, he was simply taken into a functional legal system and is going through the process, as he no doubt knew in advance would happen.
He knew he wouldn't be harmed. He knew he'd be fine.
He, better than practically anything else on the front pages, showed that we'd won, and the war against Iraq was over.
So the cacklers are going to go whistling right past the obvious: the "war" is over. The good guys won.
And George Bush just laughed at yet another crazed assault upon the guy who made the assault survivable.

The Incomparable Iowahawk turns 5

2008-12-17T10:00:00.003-06:00

Listen, we all know that the Internet has allowed the creation of a huge number of wonderful weblogs, scores or even hundreds of them intelligent, knowledgeable, peripatetic, and capable of knocking down untruths, false memes, faulty convential wisdom, and the myth of journalistic ethics. Your Correspondent will immediately cite Powerline, Instapundit, Jules Crittenden, and another half-dozen as the best of the best.
And while comparisons are indeed odius, they don't get any more olfactorily offensive than suggesting that there's a better observational blog, satire division than Iowahawk.
He, David Burge, is celebrating his fifth anniversary of being loose upon the 'nets, and I can only hope as a keyboard-pecker of grossly inferior skill, talent, and hope, to someday do a set of words that can come within an Iowa Interstate 80 mile (they are especially long, aren't they?) of Iowahawk's worst.
Yes, this is a crude attempt to gain entrance to IH's hallowed blogroll, and maybe even a blurb-out listing, but I still stand in awe of the capaciousness of mind that Mr. Burge has demonstrated to a barely worthy Web world and hope that he finds even greater success in the many half-decades to come.

One mystery solved

2008-12-17T08:16:00.006-06:00

Of all of the unclear things about the corruption arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, to this observer the biggest mystery has been: why an arrest (instead of a grand jury indictment), and why so soon?
The arrest method, done just before sunrise on a Tuesday at the Governor's home in Chicago, was extraordinary all by itself. Federal prosecutors nearly always prefer to have politicians turn themselves in at a Fed office. This takes some of the onus off the prosecutor's office and puts it on the accused. Knocking on a front door (after a cell phone call) in the dark is simply unheard of for a sitting official of any import.

But something went wrong with the Blagojevich investigation, that much has been obvious from the moment of the arrest. Not nearly enough has been made of this in the media/punditocracy storm. While the gaudy, top-of-the-story lede about "selling the seat" has grabbed the attention, to the detriment of the attention needing to be paid to the surrounding graft and malfeasance, the actual taking into custody portion is still the bright light in the sky no one's looking at.

Clearly, the prosecution had much more to come, and with the network of wiretaps and surveillance blanketing the players, one would have hoped the Feds could have snared more than one of the miscreants right smack in the act.

That didn't happen, and a lot of bad acts didn't happen, didn't get recorded, and didn't get anyone busted.

Well, now the Wall Street Journal has come out with an article describing how it was our good friends at the Chicago Tribune who yanked the rug out from underneath Fitzgerald and derailed the whole investigation. Yes, that same Tribune so vociferously attacking Blagojevich while preening and congratulating itself for being a vital cog in the bust.

It even ran an article itself, boasting how the Tribsters showed such excellent judgement as they withheld a story to let the prosecutors go deeper into the sewer.

Except, they didn't. They broke their story prematurely, on the Friday before the arrest, and sent the cockroaches scurrying from the light they then knew was about to be turned on them.

It's hard to describe how enraging this is. If it's true, and the WSJ quotes the Trib editor responsible with words that indicate they knew what they were doing, there's a whole world of questions for the Tribune, not the least of which is: Are you a co-conspirator in this mess?
Yes, the obvious first conclusion is that the paper did what it did for money. Plain old greed. The paper's failing financially, and they thought they could grab a few more bucks by popping early.

That's nice, and credible, and fits nicely with so many of the Trib's writers sneering at corporations and their vile profit-driven amorality.

But given it's the Chicago Tribune, and Barack Obama is involved, any sane person has to stop, hold their nose, and look again.
The first thing that occurs to this observer is that the Trib is protecting their guy Obama. They've always been there for him, most grossly with the takedown of Obama's senatorial opponent back in 2004, when they used their front page and the credibility of their ostensible major news media podium to wipe out Republican candidate Jack Ryan. We're still waiting for the Trib to publish any credible evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of Ryan, even these four years later, but that didn't stanch the flow of accusation cascading from the Trib's front page.

Now, with their man on the verge of "assuming power", as they so love to put it, legitimate scandals are erupting all around him, stuff that should have seen the light of day while big-time journalists were working their typing fingers to the bone proving that Sarah Palin is a stupid goof. The Blagojevich scandal cuts close to the Obama myth, but it's slicing up Obama's closest contacts, not the least of which is Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff (maybe).
We've already noted Emanuel's sudden and unusually uncharacteristic disappearance from the news media. There are reports circulating that he's appeared in numerous instances in the Blagojevich tapes.

Would the Trib have taken down the investigation just to protect Emanuel? For heavens' sake, that doesn't seem like it would be worth it, not if even gaudier busts were coming in the next few weeks.

I'm going to hold on before making up my mind about the real motive, but plain greed and saving the Rahm just aren't enough to satisfy.

Weaving around in Springfield

2008-12-16T12:14:00.007-06:00

Today, the Illinois State House of Representatives began initial committee meetings to initiate an impeachment against Governor Rod Blagojevich.
In a land where things disappear with amazing alacrity, so has the "request" made by the Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan to the Illinois Supreme Court to precipitously remove the governor on the basis of his being "disabled".
It's possible that the chorus of thousands of wags pointing out his "disability" was the same as Madigan's, and scores of other Illinois politicos', might have slowed that train down just as it was clearing yard limits and making it out onto the main line.
When even leftist rags like the Chicago Tribune take a breath and a second look, you know the "request" plan had to be really stinko.
With The Obama's thunder being smothered day after day by the emanations from the sewer he just was sent from, the President-elect trotted out Chicago Schools boss Arne Duncan to be his secretary of education. Despite what non-native viewers might think, Duncan's actually clean, and has half a brain, and a good work ethic.
The tough part for the rest of the country is that Duncan's effectiveness bodes ill for those who believe that the Federal government has no business interfering in education in the first place, as, some may point out, it has no Constitutional authority to do.
Since expanding the power and control of the central government in his own image is Job One for Obama, though, having a non-putz running a bureaucracy that has enormous power, even more money, is shot through with teacher's union tentacles, and lives on top of a pretty cloud where grubby conservatives can't reach, isn't so great.

Meanwhile, back on the corruption beat, the real news of the day ought to be the new shining of a bit of a light on Machine (and Obama) fixer Tony Rezko, whose sentencing (following his conviction on Federal corruption charges) was mysteriously, and suddenly, put off Monday. Persons revolted by the staggering corruption in Illinois have reason to cheer that; maybe he's back to thinking about talking again, something the Feds, and all right-minded folks, really want. He could give forth with some really interesting stuff, the prosecutors may think, and might get some indictments some extra horsepower to climb the mountain of Machinery in front of them.
It's hard not to imagine that this latest change in Rezko's status is connected to Blagojevich's arrest. Who knows who might clear his throat and begin singing?
Oddly, I don't get that there's too much danger for the president-elect. It doesn't seem Fitzgerald and his merry band want to get after O, perhaps because he really hasn't done anything, legal or criminal, or anything in the way of "accomplishment" (save conning folks out of a cool billion). Or, maybe it's just common sense not to sniff too close to the new boss.
But the total media disappearance of major Obamite Rahm Emanuel is almost shocking. A guy who never could pass a news camera by without saying something fraught with powerful importance suddenly going mute, and invisible, is an eyebrow-raiser.
We've been assured Emanuel's not done anything "wrong", and specifically in the course of the passing on of Obama's former US Senate seat, but... there were lots of wiretaps going on out there, and their centerpiece, Blagojevich, talks to lots of folks in the course of things.
Now, Obama assures us that he's had an investigation done and everything's fine.
It's probably a good idea to have your own people investigate themselves, as it must simplfy things quite a bit. One has to appreciate the energy savings of it all. Very green.
But like every other thing Obama's given forth with since he got within a month of his elevation to the Oneness, there's a snagger line in there. This one's nearly unfathomable: that he'll release the results of his investigation "in a week".
A week? What the heck is that about? What happens in a week? The Rezko sentencing isn't happening soon, supposedly. Blagojevich isn't resigning in a week. Well, who knows, about that, either.
Why a week? Man, that's a juicy little nugget.
Or not. It could just be more bumbling from the guy whose been in the vicinity of more scandals between Election Day and Inauguration Day than any president ever.

Law? What law?

2008-12-15T10:18:00.003-06:00

Today, December 15th, is the Bill of Rights Day in the United States, celebrating the ratification of the first ten amendments to the original Constitution. While drafted and debated with a certain amount of controversy- some of the Founders felt that there was no need to enumerate the obvious, and in so doing, constraints upon those rights could grow up around the edges of the Bill of Rights- the Ten were voted in on this day in 1791.
While the modern assault upon those ten and many another is ongoing, an unusually brazen one took place here in northeastern Illinois over this past weekend.

Launching off what must have appeared to her to be overwhelming public demand, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan held a heavily-covered press conference outlining a "request" she had officially made upon the Illinois Supreme Court to forcibly and immediately remove Governor Rod Blagojevich from office.

Long-time Chicago observers found themselves on guard at once, seeing that the Attorney General had by her side former Congressman and judge Abner Mikva. Those not so familiar with Mikva, or with a benevolent view of the old Machine judge, should pay more attention to his presence.

Of course, his main purpose at the press conference was to lend some august-seeming weight to Madigan's plans. He's a big-shot famous judge, right?
Well, yes, but he's also a pretty good representative of the worst of mid-level leftist judicial activists from the '60s period. Prior to that, as a Congressman from Chicago, he was so far, and so staunchly Left that we had to imagine even his Boss, Richard the First, had to shake his jowly head at Mikva's proclivities for the authoritarian State.

He was the perfect "bookshelf backdrop" for Madigan's assault on the Illinois Constitution, and the notion of representative government in general.

Madigan filed a request saying that the Governor should be removed at once, owing to his being "disabled". There is a provision in the Illinois Constitution that a chief executive can be removed for "other disabilities", and Madigan made her determination that in fact, the Supreme Court should take that action.

As a legal brief, Madigan's paper is laughable. It cites little in the way of factual support and really, no legal window dressing at all, beyond "I said so." It's so brazen that even the Mainstream Media hordes preparing to adore her as they did her Machine predecessor on the national scene had to pull up short.

The urge to protect the Cook County Democratic Machine and it's fledgling president runs strong among our esteemed pontificators, so strong that the complete vaporization of Blagojevich in order to protect the Obama cannot possibly happen soon enough.

So, in the grand tradition of the modern statist (think prosecutor McCoy on television's bone-chilling "Law and Order", many modern American's concept of the American legal system), Madigan took prompt and precipitous action.

The fact that this plan has so many flaws the Internet is groaning under the load of lawprof blogs and even other responsible commentator's howling about the extra-legality of it didn't slow the Attorney General in the slightest. Coolly facing the media hordes, she went on an on about how she's representing "the people" of Illinois and so she's the good guy here. One gets the idea that she's just as dumb, just as clueless, and just as arrogant as her target, Blagojevich.

Even in the background, the Machine pretty boys, hacks, and Wizards of Oz have been slewing around crazily trying to find solid ground to stamp their foot down on. Lt. Governor Pat Quinn, shortly to be Governor himself, once said that there should be a special election, at the soon-upcoming and convenient date of the spring primary elections here in Illinois.

He quickly departed that island for the next, as has so many of his cohorts, and then Madigan was trotted out with her Draconian plan.

Of course the Dems don't want an election- they're manuevering themselves into a position to lose the dang thing, despite the staggering incompetence of their Republian Party opposition.

Especially with a new storm cloud seeming to be brewing over the other Big Star from the Machine, Rahm Emanuel, laying things out in public are counter-productive for the Daleys and their operatives, from Obama through Madigan and down to the last ward committeeman on the city's northwest side.

Many other commentators have already visited how the AG plan is mostly intended to insulate the state's Democrats from the embarrassment of impeaching, convicting, and removing the governor they just rammed down our throats- twice. Furthermore, Madigan's father, the Speaker of the Illinois House, Michael Madigan, would have to be the one putting together the impeachment, shining way too many lights upon himself, his daughter, the Democratic Party, and the Machine that runs the whole thing.

A week ago, Your Correspondent was fairly sure Madigan planned to use the governorship to launch her presidential aspirations. That comes in part from our conviction that Americans much prefer to elect governors, actual chief executives, to the White House, and not gasbags from the US Senate. Perhaps this past election has undone that paradigm, what with a gaggle of gasbags clogging up the presidential field, with only two governors, Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Sarah Palin of Alaska, figuring in at all.

Therefore, it now seems possible that Attorney General Madigan feels her future is best served by vaulting into the Senate and leaving the governorship in the hands of Pat Quinn, where it's about to easily fall anyway. That way, she can avoid the trap of actually doing anything of consequence, as her predecessor Obama craftily did on his way to the Big House. Sorry, White House.

It's hard not to point out the franticness with which the Democrats at all levels are insisting that this senatorial appointment must happen at once! at once!; that Illinois' citizens are being denuded of their rightful representation by the vacancy of the junior Senate seat on Capitol Hill.

For goodness' sake, folks, Barack Obama never did a thing with the seat anyway, and racked up one of the worst attendance (and work-) records in modern Senate history. He wasn't there, so someone not being there now's no big deal.

Excepting, of course, that with the US Senate close to being filibuster-proof upon the balance having swung so close to a Dem supermajority, they fear losing total control of all branches of the Federal government and so, risking the total power to rule that their Obama needs.

Where was Illnois' Attorney General?

2008-12-11T07:58:00.006-06:00

As the Blagojevich scandal breaks wider and more noisily across the media world, observers are being treated to a steady stream of the visage of, mentions of, and quotes of the Attorney General of Illinois, Lisa Madigan.
Nearly every of these mentioning incidents includes how it is widely believed that Madigan will end up being the next governor of Illinois, at least, once the pesky Lt. Governor Pat Quinn is disposed of.
These mentions follow hot on the heels of a similar torrent of mentions of Madigan being Barack Obama's successor in the White House. The Illinois governorship is just a launching pad, as it was supposed to have been for former fair-haired boy Rod Blagojevich.
To new onlookers, some background is essential. Madigan is the offspring of Illinois House of Representatives Speaker Micheal Madigan, arguably the most powerful person in the state outside of Richard Daley. Since nothing happens in US legislation without the House of Representatives of whatever jurisdiction, Madigan the Senior's power over the doings of the state is considerable, almost to the point of final.
Mike Madigan and Rod Blagojevich weren't natural-born enemies, both being Chicago-born creatures of the Cook County Democratic Machine, but became so once Blagojevich got into the governorship and began to display his intemperate ways and bumbling self-absorption. Then, given the ascension of Lisa Madigan to the Attorney General's office, an elevation in the Chicago tradition of political royalty passing the scepter down the line, it is considered likely by several political reporters in Chicago that Madigan's antipathy towards Blagojevich was increased by Mike Madigan's desire to see Lisa continue to rise in politics.
So it stands now, with the junior Madigan's mug everywhere now pontificating in knowledgeable high legalese about how Illinois shall rid itself of Blagojevich. Last evening, we watched the local public television station's civic affairs show, Chicago Tonight on WTTW. Madigan was paired as a guest with former governor Jim Edgar, now two governors back, and who may have left office with a clean reputation intact, as improbable as that may seem.
Host Carol Marin, always an advocate for the Democrat, posed the question to Madigan about the possibility of Madigan's advancement to the Mansion. Madigan smiled coyly without a blush or any guilt, apparently unaware that publicly campaigning to unseat the current governor and then making herself governor with the aid of the immense power of the House Speakership was any sort of conflict of interest.
Not than any Machine pol gives much thought to conflicts of interest as bad things.

So here's my question, for Madigan the Junior and her supporters for elevation:
Where the hell has the office of the Attorney General of the State of Illinois been through all this? Why do we have Federal agents and prosecutors investigating and arresting Illinois officials in droves, and all we get from the AG's office is child-safety initiatives and senior-citizen support programs?
What in the world does the state's chief law-enforcement officer, the AG, do, if not attack corruption and the violation of the people's trust?
Where have you been, Attorney General Madigan? There were laws being broken. Aren't you supposed to be doing something about laws being broken?

One would think a State Attorney General who was awash in images of Federal prosecutors and investigators doing the law-enforcement work the SAG ought to have been doing would be too embarrassed to even been seen.

Not in Chicago. She's out campaigning for governor.

Confusion among the Commentariat

2008-12-11T07:18:00.004-06:00

While I had already begun a piece focusing on the misconceptions flooding across the national news media and punditry about the Real Meaning of the arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, as usual, the superb John Kass, lonely voice of clarity at the Chicago Tribune, got there first in this morning's edition with the comment, regarding the mystification of these wise ones at Blagojevich's behavior, that "the pundits who make such diagnoses have never talked to a Chicago Machine politician in their life".
Of course, the first thing hitting television screens and front pages is that Barack Obama had nothing whatsoever to do with the charges, and likely wasn't even aware of the existence of Rod Blagojevich upon the planet. Nor were any of his aides, handlers, advisers, family, pets, or gym buddies. Furthermore, the stress was upon the fact that the charges outlined in the US Attorney's list did not include any against Obama, and the prosecutor specifically said Obama wasn't charged.
The obvious conclusion from the wall of separation hastily erected is that all these pundits were absolutely right all along that Barack Obama had nothing to do with Chicago politics, the Cook County Democratic Machine, or any other of these irrelevant little instances of official indiscretion.
Obama's first stumbling reactions during what his own machine had planned to be a rollout of global-warming hoaxster Al Gore and the president-elect's massive new plan for combatting anthropogenic global warming by expanding the role and power of the State were actually humorous. The old stammer was back, searching for lawyerly cracks to slip through, as he showed that in the clinch, he had no idea what to say.
"No idea" is a concept constantly being advanced by Obama's camp and acolytes. He had no idea that Blagojevich was corrupt. He had no idea that the Machine that sent him is so corrupt even jaded federal agents run out of polite language to describe it.
That's all part of the blanket of protection Obama's been afforded. He had no idea his close friend and real estate partner Tony Rezko was a crooked fixer of political payouts. He had no idea that getting into a contractual bed next to Rezko would be any sort of an issue.
He had no idea Jeremiah Wright said bad things every week for the twenty years he cited Wright as a mentor.
He had no idea that William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn had done bad things, or that the things they'd done were bad anyway. Nor did he have any idea that draining off a hundred million dollars to float a silly "education" scheme by the old Weatherman was in any way improper.
He had no idea that flying around on billionaires' private jets and not reporting the actual expense as campaign contributions was illegal.
He had no idea that the District of Columbia's draconian gun ban was unconstitutional, at least, not until the Supreme Court timidly pointed out that it was.
Apparently, having no idea is fine with his disciples, since they had no idea of what went on in Illinois politics' inner core deep in Chicago from whence their candidate came.

Now, for goodness' sake, if any readers still think the whole Blagojevich thing is just a bit of roadside inconvenience for the Obama, something that just happened to someone else somewhere else, get with Kass' work and read, read, read. You really need to know this stuff.

Illinois Governor Arrested

2008-12-09T13:45:00.005-06:00

Today's biggest news story, across town and across the country, is the arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich for some fairly spectacular corruption charges.
The centerpoint of those being reported is that Blagojevich allegedly demanded compensation for the appointment to the seat in the US Senate vacated by the President-elect.
In reality, the charges are far more wide-ranging than that, and include criminal acts already accomplished, and not just planned as the Senate allegation is.

Rod Blagojevich is yet another Cook County Democratic Machine operative, and as such, most close observers of Illinois politics not attached to the Machine already assumed that Blagojevich was on his way to join many another of recent Illinois governors. Just in Your Correspondent's lifetime, three have gone to the Big House: Otto Kerner, Dan Walker, and George Ryan. Certainly, if Blagojevich should join that muster, it would have to be some sort of record somewhere.

Actually, northeastern Illinois politicians take the long ride to Oxford (Wisconsin Federal Pen) in rather large numbers. The most well-known of the recent convicts is actually not a politician, per se, in that he has not been elected. But Tony Rezko's position in the Machine, called a "fixer", is just another job opportunity for the people who've been "sent".

Your Correspondent could never hope to catch up to Chicago Tribune stalwart, political feature columnist John Kass. In some ways, a successor the wonderful Mike Royko, author of the Chicago explication "Boss", Kass has been on the point of all journalists, local and national, in keeping track of all the ins and outs of the Machine. His columns tell a decades-long tale of connections and corruption, of Outfit (as the Mafia is known around here) and Big Labor attachments and infiltrations that defy human comprehension.

The current governor, now in his second term (yes, he got re-elected... a cause for wonder, too), is a typical Machine product manufactured for national consumption.
Glib and photogenic, Blagojevich married the daughter of long-time Machine alderman Richard Mell, Patty, and was quickly started on the now-familiar path. First an Illinois State Representative, with a campaign platform that consisted of little more than stringent gun-control proposals, he was then inserted into the second point of his career path, the governorship.
Almost from the moment he took office, he was being systematically "mentioned" for the US presidency. Given his photogenic appearance and ability to speak in public with a modicum of apparent intelligence, he fit the familiar profile of Daley sendees being dispatched Washington-ward in order to do the bidding of the Mayor.

Other recent operatives issued forth along with Blagojevich include former US Senator Carol Moseley Braun, a repeated Presidential mentionee who skulked from office after a large amount of stupid and conflcited public behavior got enough headlines that the Machine threw her overboard.
The most obvious of this cohort is of course, President-elect Barack Obama, who, similarly equipped with with charm, charisma, and that same ability to speak seemingly intelligently, with added bonus feature of being half-black, went on to the White House in order to help keep his Mayor out of prison, and swimming in a large pool of federal money to save the failing City and County.

Already obvious as Blagojevich's replacement is Illinois State Attorney General Lisa Madigan. The daughter of the imperious Illinois Senate President Michael Madigan and a dutiful Machine operative, she is placeholding in the Springfield equivalent of Press Release Heaven.

The state AG really doesn't have to do much besides get on television. It goes without saying that the staggering corruption and criminality of Cook County rolls merrily along without the slightest thought of the AG intruding in any way. I can't recall a single instance of the State Attorney General's office even presenting so much as a single word about pursuing corruption on the northeast corner of the state.

Madigan is frequently mentioned as Obama's successor, too, and not "just" in the US Senate. With a clear path to the Illinois Governor's Mansion about to open before her- the current Lt. Governor, Pat Quinn, is hard to imagine as holding on to the governorship once Daley settles upon Madigan- she should be able to continue her constant stream of press releases about child-safety initiatives and senior-assistance programs as the media horde is carefully prepped and assembled into the same sort of juggernaut that placed Obama on Pennsylvania Avenue.

More will come out about Blagojevich's misdeeds, alleged and accomplished, but, mysteriously, those around him are somehow being treated in the media as surprised, and innocent, bystanders.
Already, Richard Daley's gotten on the radio to say "these things happen", and "it's just an individual thing", as if the environment in which Blagojevich's sort of activities are just ordinary, every-day, business as usual. Obama will portray himself as surprised and saddened, and Madigan will be nowhere near the investigation or the charges.

What, one wonders, an Attorney General is for, but apparently an Illinois AG need not be able to detect the sort of doings that propel the likes of Moseley Braun, Obama, Bloagojevich, and Madigan towards national eminence.

One wonders if the non-Chicagoans on the national scene who believe that the Machine's new President is something new and special will be able to make the logical connection. We will just submit that these folks should just remember Obama's predecessors like Moseley Braun and Blagojevich.

Mumbai

2008-12-04T15:39:00.005-06:00

The terror attack on the Indian city of Mumbai (or Bombay) of late November, 2008 is past and just now are some of the background facts starting to emerge from the fog of the war on the ground there.
One of the first things Americans might be inclined to ask, as are the pundits and journalists a-commenting apace, is whether the same attack can or will happen here.
I might as well cut to the chase and say "no".
There's no such thing as certainty, and a really bad judgment call on the part of a mid-level Al-Qaeda or other terror group manager might produce one anyway, but an open-air attack with small arms upon a metropolitan center? It would be hard to imagine anything stupider or more likely to fail.
There's one, simple, two-word refutation that could all by itself close down such a debate, but I shall save that for later.
The overwhelming characteristic of this attack was the dependence upon there being both an unarmed citizenry and an almost-unarmed, and unaggressive, local police and security apparatus. These attackers knew full well they faced no opposition whatsoever, a concept fully borne out in the real-life results. They were able to land, advance, control territory, move freely, and command local conditions with veritable ease. There was no opposition. They had practically nothing to fear, in terms of the success of the terror attack.
Possibly the nadir of the Indian resistance to the attack came from the moment described in the now-famous words of the photographer on the scene who lamented that the police there did not draw or fire the weapons they had, despite his urging them explicitly to do so. Further, viewing some of the local video footage that's starting to get around, it can be seen that nearly all of the police on the scene were more likely to remain behind cover than to present themselves.
All this, against a paltry score of attackers. I assume that many, as opposed to the stories that concluded there were only ten, since the implausibility factor escalates too fast to keep up with.
Historian and small-arms expert Col. Jeff Cooper once wrote about the advent of the repeating pistol that a man armed with two Colt's was a squad-level problem within a hundred yards.
In the descriptions of the Mumbai attack, we are being given to believe that a policeman armed with a 15-shot Browning HP could not at least impede somewhat a two-man fire team distracted by dozens of onlookers in a screaming mob. The final evidence, on the videos and sprawled across the sidewalks, says that this was indeed so.
The totality of the stories coming out suggest that virtually no resistance was offered to the attackers at any level once they had completed their raid on the police headquarters and up until the time the federal "commandos" completed wiping out the attack (after, shockingly, days' worth of time gone by).
Furthermore, no evidence whatsoever has suggested that any non-official Indian offered any resistance, either.
Simply put, this wouldn't happen in America. The differences between the American culture and the pallid remants of the British world could hardly be more stark. Our sophisticated Brit friends have, since the horror of the Second World War, gone far down the path of disarmament, and the consequent emasculation of their society's will to survive through self-defense.
English intellectuals and politicians boast of how they've installed peace and safety across their part of the planet, most loudly by amplifying the power and importance of the State at the consequent expense of the power and importance of the citizen. In England as in India, the official line is that there is no need for self-defense, and that the State will provide all the protection the citizen needs. Whether it be by usurping the individual's ability to choose and use medical care, to gun bans so stringent as to bring tears of joy to the eyes of Marxists and statists across the Western world, down to the actual criminalization of that most basic human right, that of self-defense, the rise of the State has sucked the self-reliance out of the people and left them helpless in the face of evil.
Ask the average American if it should be a felony including life imprisonment for using strong, and potentially deadly, force to resist a violent criminal attack inside one's own home, and you will be met with a blank stare. Yet, that is the reality of the British (and Indian) mindset, and law. Strike a rapist in your bedroom with a baseball bat, and you may expect to do serious time in prison.
With that in mind, the pictures of hundreds of helpless- in their own minds- Indian citizens, civilian and official alike, begins to be somewhat more comprehensible, if no less appalling.
America has been well-saturated with the same statism and more of it continues to pour down upon American heads every day. Enough of the old Americanism remains, though, that even the haughtiest of urban elites would, upon being assaulted in the manner of Mumbai, be calling for a reply with force.
Can anyone here imagine a group of ten ordinary American police officers standing, cowed, behind building corners and simply watching such a slaughter? I doubt it. There may be tactical considerations, and some reasonable self-preservation making a degree of caution possible, but a two-man team with AKs and grenades would not last long even in a place like Los Angeles. Transplant that same situation into most of the rest of America, that beyond the deep-urban elites, and the conclusion of the attack would be swift, brutal, and total, and not in favor of the attackers.
Let those same terrorists figuratively come ashore in a place like Pennsylvania, Texas, or Wyoming, and the police would be arriving only in time to distribute body bags and take pictures.
There's a reason the United States has never been invaded since it emerged from its infancy: Americans have a culture that still, despite all of the modernization (especially since the Television Age), prizes the individual citizen, enough to not just allow, but insist that Joe and Jane Citizen are actively responsible for both their own safety and the safety of the society at large. The preamble to the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights, so often misconstrued into nonsensical statist gibberish by intellectual leftists, clearly states that the purpose of the basic human right enumerated there is "the security of a free state".
Americans, on the whole, actually believe that, and believe that a free citizen is, as a part of his or her citizenship, charged with a certain amount of responsibility as a citizen to act towards the security of that free state. Indeed, one can imagine a pack of AK-wielding terrorists landing in boat upon the shore of Lake Michigan and wreaking some sort of death and destruction. But not for long, and should they have the temerity to go beyond the urban limits, they would be meeting their fates with shocking speed.
I promised the two-word proof to this attitude and here they are, still visible in the scarred forest floor of Shanksville, Pennsylvania: Flight 93.

The end of a lifelong habit

2008-07-11T08:31:00.003-05:00

Your Correspondent has been reading a daily newspaper every single morning for nearly a half-century. Born in part of a habit developed as a paperboy (for the younger person out there, a boy employed by a news agency to deliver newspapers directly to homes) wrapping Tribs and Suns at 5am, and in part from an early-ingrained affection for reading, this habit is as crucial to a day-beginning as coffee or a shower.
But it's no longer the same thing. For most of that time, the words on the papers had a verity. It was non-fiction. It was technical, as might be described by the term "technical writing", a concept that holds much appeal to your correspondent, who would like to aspire to earning a living as such a scribe.
The stuff on the page, now, isn't non-fiction anymore. There may well be real facts, or at least factoids, sprinkled around, and they may indeed serve as legitimate points, topics, and stories.
But there's no way to be sure, not without checking. There may be declarative sentences in those columns of words, but taking them as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, just can't be done.
Marveling at the breadth and depth of the impact of the internet, a favorite pastime here, can never escape the biggest impact of all: the access to information, far, far more than any ordinary citizen could have ever imagined before.
Recall the Tribune's coverage of the spring, 2008 Iraqi offensive against the Sadrist holdouts in Basra. Consistent with the Democratic Party's party line, accepting blindly at face value that the whole enterprise was a smashing failure, the Trib ran two articles by their correspondent Aamer Mahdani depicting the whole effort as a near-catastrophe. There were a few sprinkles of facts, mostly amplified far out of proportion but plausible to a gullible and under-informed readership (and editorial staff), cited to illustrate the failure.Of course, all of that was nonsense; the offensive was a significant success. Like virtually every other military operation in an urban area in the history of humankind, it was fraught with error and misapprehension. That part, though, was all that was reported, by the Democrat partisans and the old time media like Mahdani and the Tribune.If I had a subcontractor or employee working for me, who did two days' worth of work that was so wrong, so far from the correct way to do the job that it was entirely useless, that person would be gone from my employment forever (even not withstanding this reporter's previous egregiously wrong work on world affairs).
Not at the Tribune. A few weeks later, a major, front-page "news" story by this same author, going through the same editors, regarding the Iranian belligerence crisis a-building, began with a full paragraph about the Iraq campaign, and what a failure it was, and capped with citing the AP's faux-combat death toll (it's actually all deaths, including vehicle accidents unrelated to combat, and represents an inflation of nearly a third).
All this comes to mind in preparation for today's Second Amendment Freedom Rally in downtown Chicago, a few hundred yards from Tribune Tower. We wait with bated breath to see what the Trib does with this story. A mass of Brady quotes interrupted by an occasional nugget about the actual event of the day? Sadly, it's what the existing pattern would lead us to expect.

Updated: The event prouduced a turnout of 600 or so, a remarkably diverse group at that. One Tribune reporter was identified by the partisans and was spoken to. Given what ensued, the reporter's comment to the rallygoer, that "this wasn't the crowd we were expecting", was highly appropriate.
What ensued was nothing. The Tribune rigorously avoided mentioning the existence of the rally at all. Buried deep in an article on a completely different topic was a very brief mention of the rally, and that was all.
Contrasted with the paper's lavish coverage of "rallies" set up by causes the Trib chooses to advocate for, such as illegal immigration, the blackout is hardly surprising.
Yet the vaunted Editorial Board insists we readers are the dummies for questioning our intellectual and moral masters in mainstream journalism.
Controlling the message comes close to controlling the history.

The Tribune continues its war on guns and the law

2008-03-26T11:43:00.003-05:00

The Chicago Tribune carries on its all-fronts onslaught against the private possession of firearms on March 25th, 2008 with an editorial suggesting a number of things that simply aren't true.
In a fit of blogger laziness, I will just paste in my response:

To the editors:
Today, March 25th, 2008, the Tribune gave forth with an editorial taking a look, after a fashion, at the recently-argued Supreme Court case of Heller v. District of Columbia, the hugely important civil rights case concerning the Second Amendment in the Constitution's Bill Of Rights.
In it, the editorialist makes three mistakes, misapprehensions of what the underlying elements in this case are and what the law actually is.
Given that the Tribune rarely prints any sort of article on the subject of guns, gun rights, and gun law that does not contain significant errors of fact- look at the recent news article by reporter James Oliphant with its two factually incorrect elements, that the Constitution "gives" rights (it does not, and under American law, cannot), and that conventional wisdom holds that the "collective rights" interpretation of the Second is the correct one (it does not, not even among many leftists), one would not expect an editorial to be any more accurate. But accuracy is both critical and achievable.
The assertion that the opening clause of the Amendment, stating that a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, somehow introduces an ambiguity into the operative clause, that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, is just plain a misreading of ordinary English. The first clause illustrates why the main clause is important, but does not, under any rule of grammar taught in centuries, alter or dim its rather boldly clear meaning. Even this somewhat common misinterpretation had been pretty well cleared from most of thoughtful society. How it survives in an institution filled with people supposedly highly educated in functional English is surprising.
The editorialist goes on to posit the "militia-dependant" interpretation, the one also used by DC to some extent in its suit.
When the editorial states that the militia in American law is the "18th Century equivalent of the National Guard", it betrays a serious lack of background knowledge. The militia is no such thing. The militia is actually carefully and specifically defined in American law in numerous places, not the least of which is the Militia Act, a still-operable Federal law.
Further, there is a mountain of law and scholarship given the definition of militia in America, and it can be easily boiled down to this: the militia is any voter.By “voter”, the implication is that the person is a citizen, an adult, and has not been denied any portion of his or her citizenship (by such as a felony conviction).
The concept of militia does not require organization by any governmental agency, it does not require any specific number of citizens, and it does not separate citizens from government as two different kinds of entities. Underlying this is the main, and most important concept of Americanism, which is embodied in the all-important preamble “We, the People.” In American thought, the people are the government. When that basic concept is absorbed, then the meaning of the militia and how all citizens are part of it, and responsible for the security of the state, becomes abundantly clear.
The editorialist goes on to almost wistfully say that one wishes one could go back and query "Madison and Company" as to what they really meant. There is a mountain of evidence and scholarship on what the Founders thought, said, and meant. The first and most basic resource is the Federalist Papers.
Beyond that, this miraculous assemblage of great thinkers put out huge volumes of correspondence on the subject of the new country and the Constitution they put together.
Their thinking on the subject of an armed citizenry could hardly be clearer, and given their incredible foresight and ability to distill fundamental human rights concepts into the most practical form of freedom-based governance in history, it still takes one’s breath away today. We urge that the Tribune take a little time to look into the subject before running articles that appear on this side of the newsstand to be unaware of the foundation of America law and American thought.
Sincerely...

Obama-mania goes full-cult

2008-03-04T11:31:00.009-06:00

The March 4th, 2008 edition of the Chicago Tribune website included a feature entitled: "Test your Obama IQ", which contained seventeen multiple-choice questions about the most precious moments in the Obama's trek to the kingship. Each was more adoring than the last, leaving even the most fawning of the Trib's coverage of their Savior in the adulation dust.
Try this one: "What kind of car did Barack Obama buy to get him from Chicago to Boston to start Harvard Law School?"
Will there be a yellow-brick memorial of the Great One's early years, showing how he made this wonderful journey to become, wonderfully, even more wonderful?
Really, it would be humanly impossible to make this up, if one was trying to parody the collapse of morality within modern mainstream journalism.

Update: Yes, it can get worse. Also in the same online edition comes an article by Trib reporter Jason George, about a website named "I Dream Of Barack", in which participants, instead of seeking urgently needed mental health intervention, post what they say are their dreams about the Great One, with a decided tendency to include (based on the sample supplied) personal engagement scenarios (that's as polite a term as I can think of) bathing the dreamer in cascades of wonderfullness.
Your Correspondent apologizes for being unwilling to subject his own mental stability to any further shaking by actually directly perusing the dream-site. Tough is as tough does, but losing a perfectly good breakfast is more than this old nail-slugger's willing to give up for his readers.

More on Chicagoness, and the 2008 presidential election

2008-01-16T13:02:00.000-06:00

I'm a Chicagoan, born and bred, and still living in the County of Cook after 55 years of subjugation to the Throne of Daley Everlasting. Having also done business within the County as a remodeler/contractor, I've had some close-up perspective to fill in around my lifelong attention to things Machine.
Additionally, I am married to a daughter and granddaughter of old-time Irish Chicago policemen, a woman who also spent ten years toiling for a large, wealthy suburb as a mid-manager and who fled one Friday afternoon, exclaiming, "I'm becoming one of them!", her final tribute to government employment.
I mention all of this as background to my introduction of a point: As far as the 2008 election campaign/endless train wreck goes, a grasp of Chicagoness is critical to a full comprehension of what is about to take place. I have little doubt that either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton is going to be the Democratic nominee for president. What's important about Chicagoness is that both are Chicagoans (to some degree) but more importantly, both are products of the Cook County Machine. Clinton grew up inches from the Chicago line, and still consorts with her old local friends.
Clinton's easy, casual corruption, a long and should-be-well-known story, comes right out of her Chicagoness and growing up under the aegis of the Daley behemoth.
But more important is Barack Obama. I submit that few who are not Chicagoans really appreciate what he is: a well-designed and manufactured product of the Daley Machine. He was built for the specific purpose of keeping his master, and his many wealthy friends, out of prison.
Second on his task list is funneling enormous amounts of money into the county, which is far beyond broke, and beyond salvation, as well, owing to the assiduous purchasing of power by the Man. Chicago is beautiful, and broke. Daley needs billions to hold on and keep the lights on. Obama is merely the front man for that effort.
There was nothing accidental about his rise to prominence. Some of the most capable political operatives in the country seized upon his potential to create a nearly irresistible force in national politics.
The creators knew his one natural asset, his incredible, practically weapons-grade personal charm, was by far the most important thing. No buzz could ever take hold without something to initiate it.
I will cite as a personal example: a close friend works for one of the giant corporations who have early on established ownership of the President-to-be. I wish I could provide better context, but I cannot chance my friend's gainful employment at his beloved line of work.
Non-political, he was an instantaneous convert upon first meeting. The transformation was truly frightening. I tried to reason: everything you believe in as a (now-formerly) self-employed person is what Obama is against!
To no avail. The pod had done its work; the neuralizer had wiped out the past; the soma had undone the skepticism.
Multiply that by thousands and it's easy to picture the Freres Daley rubbing their hands with glee.
Into their new empty vessel they allowed some sophisticated-sounding stuff they remembered from the Sixties to be poured in, just so it all sounded nice and intellectual and elite-like.
One managed election process later, they had a newly-minted state senator, who, when he could be stirred into actually taking a stand, mostly just followed the party line demanding a total ban on firearm possession. Usually, though, a lowish profile and a set of "present" votes was plenty.
When the time came to spring the creation upon the broader public and insert him into the US Senate where he could start making some real hay, one small kink developed- the normally hopelessly inept Illinois Republican Party inadvertently nominated a superior candidate. Jack Ryan was not only far more qualified, with far more intellectual horsepower (a measure of work accomplished, remember), he was every bit as pretty and nearly as charming as the Daleybot.
This impediment was quickly dispatched with though, as the Machine enlisted the aid of the local newsrag, the Chicago Tribune, which they knew, of course, could not help themselves but to assist the ascension of one of their own, a "progressive".Furthermore, knowing the deeply-ingrained institutional racism of the leftist press, the fact that the candidate could be called "black", even if he wasn't, very, made the process a slam-dunk. No modern journo could help but be an advocate for the saintly victim, the put-upon Person Of Color.
Jack Ryan was taken out swiftly with a smear campaign that probably left even Ryan stunned, and he was plenty smart enough to know what he was getting himself into.
Even if the Daleyites weren't brutal enough, the infusion of Clintonites, most especially the savage Rahm Emmanuel, should have let him know how bad it was going to be.
It was bad. The Tribune ran daily front-page screamers about suspected problems with Ryan, while judge-shopping across the country (who paid for that? The Trib? Soros/MoveOn? The DNC?) in a frantic effort to find dirt.They never actually did, but with the trumpets blaring that candidate Ryan was being investigated, and Seriously Wrong Things were sure to be found, the tide of public opinion began to slip away from the hapless Ryan. Merely having totally overshadowed the Machine product in every way imaginable was no match for the war-sized headlines.Finally the Tribsters (or whoever they hired) managed to get Ryan's divorce papers unsealed. Right there was enough to power days' worth of headlines. When the nasty bits were finally opened to public view (destroying the son's life, too), all they had was the unsubstantiated claim made by the wife's divorce attorney, refuted by Ryan, that he had asked her to have intercourse with him, her husband, in an inappropriate place.
Lacking anything other than this assertion, the Trib went so full blast that even the ordinarily-politically-savvy Trib columnist John Kass crumbled and began to whimper that maybe Ryan (who he respected and favored) should step aside.
It took about three weeks to demolish the decent Ryan. It took merely hours for the Party to appoint Alan Keyes, a talk-show-host/intellectual from Maryland, to the now-absurd candidacy. Apparently no one else was willing to step in front of the Daley/Emmanuel firing line.
Even running virtually unopposed, Obama struggled to get two-thirds of the vote in a very blue state with the assistance of a machine capable of delivering tens of thousands of “extra” votes.
Obama still has not yet won an actual, contested election (can’t count the Iowa primary caucuses). But given the nature of 21st Century media, it hardly matters. Oprah, Brian Williams, Barbara Walters, and the whole rest of the Lefty opinion-maker class has already swooned for the Obama charm, and in an environment wherein substance, stands, and common sense are just baggage to be concealed, the bandwagon has gone out on the road with nary a bump in the golden brick road ahead of it.
The Tribune has never stopped its advocacy. They did the clearing of the battlespace early on, as the current practice requires, and got most of that annoying corruption stuff out of the way and got on with the business of hyping without allowing any leaks of any position on any topic save that of "change". Now, they're content to run daily hagiographies with glamour shots of the product, usually with a microphone, smiling beneficently at the little people while expounding on how much better it's all going to be when he's running things.
In the end, it's hard not to think the Machine is getting its very own president.

Debunking more canards

2007-11-23T10:06:00.002-06:00

In the controversy swirling around the US Supreme Court's electing to take on the Heller v. DC gun-rights appeal case, one of the best things that may come of it all is the bringing into the sunlight a lot of very important concepts- and, one would hope, the dismantlement of a number of misconceptions on the subjects of not only guns, but the US Constitution and human rights.
As one who has been involved in shooting sports and gun rights, I get to hear an impressive amount of sheer wrongness on the subject. Without really going into commentary on how American society has become so separated from its heritage since the end of World War II and the consequent rise of "media", television most especially, in the education of Americans about what a narrow coterie of fiction writers in California thinks it knows about history, law, and guns, debunking is the first order of business for persons concerned about the importance of both arms and the law.
One of the first things I will hear when in the company of liberals/lefties/progressives when the topic is raised is the familiar old bromide that "handguns are only for killing". In any technical or literal sense, that statement is false, and very much so.
In fact, few handguns are either designed or intended for killing anything. The small fraction that is are hunting guns, such as the well-known TC Contender, a large single-shot device normally equipped with a telescopic sight. Hardly the stuff of gangbanger fantasies.
A certain number of handguns are designed for target work. Many are of the .22 rimfire caliber, nearly the smallest commonly available one. What target handguns share is large size and features that work against both stealth and rapidity. Even a USPSA Open Division pistol is huge and heavy chunk, and not very useful for anything outside of its narrow realm of operation.
In fact, nearly all handguns are designed for personal protection. When one hears the statement that "Glock 9mms are only for killing", well, you're hearing something so far from the reality that it bears no relation to real life.
Personal protection handguns are designed and intended to stop. To stop a living thing, human or not, from doing what it’s doing, as quickly as possible. That is exactly, and only, why a law enforcement officer carries one, why a soldier carries one, and why a law-abiding citizen carries one.
In fact, killing is a problem for that purpose and all users of handguns for personal protection dread that potential side-effect. The use of a firearm may well constitute deadly force, but death is absolutely not the primary intent- stopping an anti-social activity is.
This is not a trivial or semantical issue- grasping this elemental truth is essential to the understanding of arms at all. Until a participant in the discussion on the right of humans to keep and bear arms can get past this critical thought-step, nothing that follows will be grounded in reality. In a non-military situation, to use a gun to kill a human being- for that express purpose- is a crime. It's homicide.
The police officer in the dark, stinking apartment hallway watching a gun pointed at his partner has no intent of killing the gun-pointer, no intent of committing a homicide. He wants to stop the miscreant, stop him from bringing harm to someone undeserving.
There is no difference in the use by civilians of handguns for personal protection- when the shopkeeper sees a savage, drugged-out robber pointing a shotgun at his spouse, he will use his gun to stop the robber, and killing would be a secondary, if awful, consequence.
I will add that I have two friends who both were faced with exactly these scenarios, and I can testify to their state of mind as regards whether they were stopping or killing. I hope the reader never finds him- or herself faced with the same sort of decision, and I am sure that the death of the attacker, should it be a consequence, will not be found anywhere as intentional.
Handguns are not for killing at all. They're for stopping. It's not a moral quandary about a law-abiding and righteous person taking a life- it's that person preventing harm to an innocent. With that foundational concept cemented into place, the issue of citizens bearing arms, including carrying in ordinary life, can be made clearer and more sensible.
Another question I will hear, then, is why carry? "I've never had a need for a gun" will follow soon. One widely-mentioned view holds that a "conservative is a liberal who was mugged", and that does have a certain amount of truth to it.
Another illustrative answer is that in fact, I've never needed a seatbelt in the million miles I've ridden in and driven automobiles... but I won't go past the foot of my driveway without wearing one. Same goes for riding in airplanes. Same goes for helmets on motorcycles. Same goes for business liability insurance.
Bond cards. Fire extinguishers. Criminal lawyers' telephone numbers.
The fact is, life has things go wrong, and some element of preparation for those things is just common sense. Never needed a gun? I did, and it served to help protect the safety of an innocent person, a neighbor. I didn't have to even touch the trigger in that case, and I am eternally grateful that was so, but not as grateful as the neighbor whose home was not invaded as a direct result of the presence of my gun, as she waited nineteen long minutes for the police to arrive.
In those discussions, what follows will be the insistence upon regulation of the right to arms- gun control. That is another issue where little knowledge is very often present, underpinning some pretty non-factual arguments.
I might as well dispense immediately with one more faulty "known fact", that gun-rights advocates demand a complete absence of regulation of the use and possession of firearms. I know and read thousands of gun-rights advocates. I have never heard one say such a thing, that no restrictions on the possession of firearms are permissible.
The bizarre and wrongful demonization of the National Rifle Association, an organization that is more concerned with the safe and lawful use of firearms than any other, and has been such a repository of expertise on firearms law that it formerly was frequently consulted by legislators to author and proof firearms legislation goes along with this.
Just like other basic rights, the right of the keeping of arms is related to upholding one's citizenship. The law provides the reduction of citizen's rights in the event of bad behavior. A violent felon may not own a gun, or vote, or get certain kinds of jobs, and so on and so forth. One may reasonably suggest restrictions on other, specific types of arms. Frequently we hear that rocket-propelled grenades are a good example of arms that ought to be prohibited. In fact, they are heavily restricted in the US and there's no problem in reality. Automatic firearms, machine guns as they are more commonly called, are sometimes cited as another type to be banned. But, the real-life fact is that there are hundreds of thousands of machine guns in private hands in the US and virtually none- as small a number as can be thought of- are used in violent crimes. There's no problem there, and imagining one where none exists probably serves more to illuminate the mind of the imaginer than any sort of solution to violent crime.
That same reality also pertains to personal carry by civilians. The real-life fact, again, is that ordinary citizens carrying personal protection guns are just about never- as close to never as a human activity could be- involved in committing violent crimes. 46 states issue permits for concealed carry (two have no restrictions on carry such as permits or licenses) and among those carriers, such a tiny percentage are ever charged, much less convicted, of a violent crime so as to be negligible.
While perhaps not a legitimate debating device, I can always point out to someone arguing against lawful concealed carry that I, as a permit-holder (non-resident permits) am far less likely, statistically, to commit a violent crime with a gun than my rhetorical opponent.
That does point to one of the odder things a gun owner is exposed to- the modern, "liberal" person who, upon discovering the presence of a gun, immediately insists that the bearer is about to shoot someone. I would like to write this off as more of the sort of view into the mind of the gun-ignorant, but it still is a cause for concern. Why would someone even think such a ridiculous thing?
Well, Hollywood, of course. There lies the primary fountain of firearms nonsense in this country and many others. I can recall a calm, thoughtful relative once asking me if it really was hard to shoot things, instead of how it looks on television.
Here's a simple, foolproof law of certainty for persons who don't know much, or anything about firearms: if you saw it on TV or a movie screen, there’s a better than 90 percent chance it's false. Whether the chilling totalitarianism of Dick Wolf's "Law and Order" television series or the latest Big Hollywood Star's anti-gun movie (Jodie Foster comes to mind), it's so full of nonsense that when an actual fact appears, it's a surprise.
Very much the same thing appears in the news business. I'm not here to explain what sort of person gravitates into journalism, but it does not require a statistician to discover that 80-90 percent of mainstream journalists vote straight Democrat, and spend their advocacy time on causes almost invariably well left of center.
Then, check out their editorials calling for the banning of guns of one type, another, or altogether. Those will have been preceded by news articles reading exactly like Brady Group press releases about how bad it is guns aren't outlawed. Then ask them one and all how many voted for G.W. Bush. Expect to hear some serious silence.
Thanks to the Internet, gun owners get their laughs at the ridiculous misrepresentations of guns, gun law, and gun owners almost instantly, now. And there are plenty of those laughs to be had. There are a lot of news organizations that couldn't put together a fully-factual, even-handed article on these topics even if they suddenly wanted to. I can refer you to my hometown Chicago Tribune again, where the journalists believe that the Brady Campaign, the current name for the largest (but not very large) anti-gun group out there at the moment feeds them solid and accurate information for publication, but the NRA, the Illinois State Rifle Association, and the other gun-rights groups present an extremist and minority distortion of reality.
Think about that- the Brady people know more about guns that the NRA people? How does that even make it through the smell test?
Possibly the most pervasive canard pushed by these groups is that of a huge, mysterious "gun lobby". With the current craze for casting corporations as entities with nefarious intent, shading the gun owners as part of this corporate-tainted political force is an easy sell for uninformed advocates trying to influence uninformed voters.
Gun owners constitute approximately half of the adult population of the United States. Suggesting that a group such as that comprises a "lobby" should be comical. Unfortunately, to many growing up and living in environments without experience of the realities of guns and gun ownership, most especially large urban centers like Chicago, hating corporate lobby-thingies is a facile thing. That doesn’t make it accurate.
There are several anti-gun organizations. At the moment, the Brady group, an amalgam and recasting of a couple of older and less-attractively named ones, is holding sway on mainstream media storylines about firearms. Others, broader advocacy groups of the progressive/leftist/liberal bent are strongly anti-gun as well- the inaptly-named American Civil Liberties Union is an especially loud one.
None come close to the dreaded NRA when it comes to being a grass-roots-up organization with an involved, informed, and participatory membership. Even at four million, the NRA represents a small fraction of gun owners, but compared to the anti-gun groups, it’s huge, active, and connected.
Yet, turn on CNN or open the LA Times and you’d think the NRA was a corporate-based bunch of mercenaries at the beck and call of firearms manufacturers. It would be hard to find a more inaccurate picture of a not-for-profit, but the deep and wide ignorance of mainstream media is so complete that I suspect that the journalists producing the anti-gun news articles are not even aware of the falsity of the assumptions underpinning their storylines.
The next time you see a Brady-type like Paul Helmke speaking through the media mouth that anti-gun laws bring safety and pro-gun laws endanger innocents, you’re getting nonsense that can’t be supported by fact or science. In the tidal wave of media demonization of the NRA, you’ll never hear the reality.
So here’s a set of questions you can answer for yourself and go around the mouthpieces: Where is the strongest, worst gun control in effect? Places like Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Where is the violent crime the worst? Where is the murder rate the highest? Those very same places.Try a different variation. What about the celebrated gun bans imposed on other parts of the Anglosphere, such as the U.K.? England now has some of the most onerous gun control in a democracy anywhere, put into place a decade or so ago. What’s happening to the violent crime rate? It’s skyrocketing, to the point where England has passed the U.S. for risk of violence. And it includes gun-involved crime, too. What’s worse is that it’s not confined to the deep-urban setting as it is in the US; it’s everywhere across the countryside. No place is safe.
How about the rapid spread of right-to-carry laws that swept the U.S. starting in the Reagan years? Did those states see increased gun-involved violence? Nope, far from it. Almost every place legal conceal-carry was liberalized, violent crime rates went down, and in some places, a lot.
How could a suggestion that gun-control laws prevent violent crime even be floated?
On a sea of canards.

Recasting

2007-10-22T15:34:00.000-05:00

Over the last twenty-five years or so, a sort of a movement-within-a-movement has steadily gained strength, to the point where's it's become almost mainstream. It goes by the name of "recasting".
As the Seventies drew to a close and the possible end of Modern Liberalism loomed on the horizon, its adherents faced with dread the coming of any sort of return to traditional American values. By the non-coincidence of the near-total possession of the arts and information media, the Left harked back to their forebears to relearn about the power of making the message and owning the (as it's now called) narrative.
From the start of the Soviet empire, the functional beginning of the Liberal/Leftist/Socialist/Statist movement, taking over the information delivery has been a key element of an ideology that would never, if brought into the light of day, have been saleable to Americans and other free-thinking peoples. There was no effort to conceal the concept of owning the narrative, not in the early years. Socialist propagandists blithely chatted on about how they were going to demolish capitalism (one of the early buzzwords of the Left, which may be loosely translated as "America").
Of course, as repulsive as Socialism is to a people who believe that individuals can, should, and must run their own lives in order to have a workable and free society, it was only a couple of decades before the need to be a bit stealthier with the takeover message became evident.
During an era of rapid advancement in the standard of living, the 1920s, Socialism's lack of progress in gathering in the actual intended benefactors of its beneficence, the unwashed non-elite, non-intellectual grubby masses, may have looked to be a march to oblivion.
The messiness and unevenness of actual freedom converged in a train-wreck that gave the movement new life- the Great Depression. A series of events not well understood in the rapidly-evolving process of capitalism led to a widespread calamity, made many times more calamitous by opening the door for Socialism and the nanny staters to get a foothold that continues to bedevil free enterprise to this day.
Socialism was ready to strike. It had put together a codified plan of considerable breadth and went about implementing it with what must have been glee.
The depredations of the Stalin regime could well mark the very worst point in human history. But ensconced in the isolation of its biggest and most fearsome adversary, the United States, a large number of people remained ignorant of the evil emanating from Moscow and its fellow travelers. Indeed, the New York Times, the most self-satisfied media organization of all, cheerfully dove headlong into enabling and assisting the rearrangement of the the narrative. Journalist Walter Duranty led the way with dispatches from the information battlefront extolling the virtues of the hoped-for world-engulfing wave of Communism that both deliberately concealed the ghastliness of real-life, practical Socialism and continuously sought to denigrate Americanism.
But the Soviet machine was far more peripatetic than just buying and operating a crew of mainstream media reporters and editors. Early on, it determined that crushing Americanism would require the use of marketing in the form of entertainment and so formed operations devoted to injecting Socialism into the American bloodstream painlessly, with the use of the popular arts. Few Americans today are even aware that famous folk signer Pete Seeger has been a member of the Communist Party for decades, and that his music, and the music he has helped to propagate, is that of undoing Americanism in favor of Socialism. Even today, Seeger, once public about his membership in the Party, will not renounce or deny it when pressed. Nor will he say that he has removed himself from it.
It must be mentioned that an aged and possibly slightly repentant Seeger, just recently in 2007, took a baby step or two back from his admiration of Stalin by stating publicly that perhaps a bit of rethinking of the processes of the Soviet machine might be needed.
And forty million hideously-departed innocents thank you, Mr. Seeger, for your consideration.
Meanwhile, try this test sometime, maybe in Chicago somewhere: walk up to someone and say: "Pete Seeger, the folksinger, is an avowed Communist and has worked his whole adult life towards his stated goal of bringing down the American way of life and installing Socialism." See what happens.
That's the power of the narrative working.
So now, when the narrative machine gets into gear and starts an information campaign like, say, the (most recent) attack on radio talker Rush Limbaugh over the "phony soldiers" comment, in which Limbaugh did indeed sneer at persons attacking American policy on Iraq while claiming falsely to be US military combat veterans, and then the Machine recast it into a national story on nearly every Mainstream Media front page saying that Limbaugh was calling any veteran who disagreed with the Iraq invasion to be a "phony soldier" (look it up- it's not what he said), there's no stopping the story.
For goodness sake, even the ancient and wobbling "Doonesbury" comic strip worked the canard today with a casual falsehood right there, on the narrative's mark.

Agenda journalism at the Chicago Tribune

2007-10-18T15:19:00.000-05:00

Residing in the Chicago area means being subjected to the Chicago Tribune and its various subsidiaries as the major media voice in the region.
Harkening back to the glory days of Woodstock and Watergate, the crew in the Trib's news shop has gotten ever-less apprehensive about using the force of their position to advocate on behalf of their chosen causes, all of which, surprise-surprise, fall into the Modern Liberal Orthodoxy.
Here's an analysis of a recent faux-news item, in the format of a letter to the editor:

On Wednesday, October 17th, the Tribune ran an unusual article on page two of the front section.
The headline was "Gun range in school is targeted as health, safety issue" and the byline read "By Robert Gutsche, Jr. Special to the Tribune."
The article concerned a school shooting range in east central Wisconsin, in the small city of Sheboygan.
No apparent reason for the appearance of this article as a "news" item was discernable. The events actually cited in the article are almost less than routine, bordering on completely unimportant.
The first thing a reader in Chicago would wonder is "why is this being printed in the news section of the Chicago Tribune, a hundred miles away from Sheboygan?"
A more careful inspection of the article seems to present some clues. From the first sentence, this article is posited as from the viewpoint of one specific person, the mother of a student at this middle school. It also immediately sets a tone of incredulity, based on a supposition of an extraordinary, and bad, occurrence. A tone of wonder is then presented ("I never would have suspected something like that...") to make clearer the point of view of the author, that of the existence of a bad condition or situation.
After throwing in one more indicator of a "problem" ("raised eyebrows") mention is then made of a not-similar air rifle range in Pennsylvania. The article then segues into a broad set of statements by Paul Helmke of the Brady anti-gun group. Interestingly, the writer chooses to use a Helmke quote that is very far from Helmke's normal public pronouncements on the topic of guns, one that appears to be intended to placate those who ordinarily would take exception to Mr. Helmke's public positions. It comes across as a hedging maneuver to defuse the expected derision from those who are all-too-well aware of Helmke’s usual misstatements and deceptions.
We are then brought back to the mother, who, we later learn, is a transplant from Chicago. Some discussion about "cleaning up the range" is brought forth, before the disclosure that the mother in primarily interested in closing the range and ending the programs that its use supports. "Guns and school don't mix" she proclaims, a point of view normally only heard in the most concentrated urban areas, like, say, Chicago. A little more information about the range as a public resource along with a passing mention of some minor, even irrelevant, operational issues is presented, and then the author launches a point of view of his own, barely connected in any meaningful way to the Sheboygan range. We are treated to the standard agenda-journalism cues such as "questions about the range..." and then a laughably strained effort to tie this facility to a school shooting halfway across the state, in a set of circumstances that bears absolutely no connection to the Sheboygan activities beyond the presence of smokeless powder. Then, going all the way to ludicrous, the author invokes the tragedy at Crandon wherein a police officer used a rifle to kill several persons, not in a school, and with no evident tie whatsoever to any public firearms-training program whether in a school or not. This portion of the article is then padded with yet another unrelated school shooting incident hundreds of miles away, again, with no connection to a firearms training setting, course, or range.
Finally, we are hectored by the agenda-journalist's favorite Greek chorus, the well-known but anonymous "critics". These experts insist that guns should not be "entering school doors at all", an absurd point, considering that the presence of firearms in schools has been going on completely uneventfully for hundreds of years in this country (and many others), and it is only very recently, since the beginning of the modern gun-banning movement exemplified by Helmke's tiny splinter group, that there has been any problem whatsoever.
Without even bothering to engage the flaws in that perspective, the reader is finally forced to ask: What is the Tribune doing here? Why are we being handed a thinly-disguised piece of agenda journalism draped around a trivial event a hundred miles away? Is there some connection between the mother and the author of the article? Or someone else, a writer, editor, or supervisor at the Tribune?
The real suspicion is that once again, the Tribune's news shop is using its position as a deliverer of news to advocate, and in this case, in the method being seen ever more frequently in the Tribune and like-minded papers: preparing a battlespace.
There just is no other good reason for an article like this to be placed in the newspaper except to engage in a campaign of advocacy, placing another piece of agenda marketing in a faux-news format to build up a crescendo of noise in support of a specific program. In this case, it's the Tribune's oft-and-clearly stated intention to get firearms banned in Illinois and the United States.
The more sophisticated among media people call it the "narrative", and so this trifle of a polemic appears to be, another piece in a wall of perspective-conforming bits of advocacy, and as is so often the case, advocacy for an unpopular and unpleasant cause.
One has to wonder why the people at the Tribune are willing to trade in the remnants of their journalistic credibility for advocacy. We hear that modern journalists believe that they are there "to make a difference", but the way things have slid off the edge, making a difference would be just plain reporting the news and keeping the agenda to ones' self.

Narrating the News

2007-10-11T20:16:00.000-05:00

On Thursday, October 11th, 2007, the Chicago Tribune responded to news reports based on the Pentagon's announcement that all US military services had exceeded their recruitment goals for the recently ended fiscal year. The government did note that there had been a reduction in the percentage of Army recruits with a high school education, from the previously very high 90% to a national-average-equivalent 79%.
It also noted that there was an increase in the issuance of "character waivers", usually used to allow a recruit in who had had minor criminal problems in their past.
However, this excellent news about the robustness of the US military was too much for the Tribune staff, who somehow managed to absorb the preceding facts, throw them into a high-temperature stew of semi- and unrelated facts, plus some factoids and carefully selected expert opinion, and then inverted the whole thing to arrive at the conclusion trumpeted by the headline and subhead:
"U.S. Army lowers its recruiting standards
More enlistees have criminal records, no high school diploma."
There followed a perfect recreation of a Bill Maher monologue carrying on about criminals being inducted and concluded the opening segment of the screed with the ever-mysterious but terribly serious "The startling figures come at a time when the Army is trying to grow amid persistent questions about how the armed forces can increase force size during a time of war without significantly lowering the quality of the recruits."
There is little surprise in a Tribune writer and editor being unaware that the US military is constantly trying to increase force size, wartime or not. It is indeed a "persistent" question, one that goes back to days of raising the Revolutionary Army.
One thing that is remarkable is the evidence that the Tribune has writers and editors are cognizant of the fact that the US is at war at all. Given the amazing dearth of information about the proceedings and process of the war against Islamofacism, it often appears the news shop in Tribune Tower is unaware of it. Surely, if they were, they would consider it "news" enough to report it, by, for example, carrying stories about what it is that our military is actually doing.
The daily got-blown-up items are pretty much the extent of the coverage, unless there's a newly-manufactured "grim milestone" ready to be trotted across the front page.
MoveOn and Democratic Underground don't produce any more twisted and tortured news items than this one, and while it was often thought in the past that much of the Tribune's front-page content was simply the slightly-worked-over emission of Rahm Emmanuel's fax machine, the increasing frequency of stuff like this thing makes it seem as though the source is getting to be the leavings of a Comedy Central fake news broadcast.
For those who are interested in getting to the actual, factual story behind this news item, we refer you to the excellent Mudville Gazette, absolutely the go-to source for news on the war in Iraq and elsewhere. Many consider it the granddaddy of milblogs and the one that set the information transfer world on its ear by finally opening a channel around the gatekeepers by presenting actual, near-real-time fact.
It's little wonder that so many of the Trib's writers project such hopelessness, anger, and just plain BDS over the subject of the war. Without getting anything but well-cooked shreds of disjointed fact-sausages to read, it would be hard to get a serious picture of the very serious events in the war.
Fortunately, the Internet has given voice to independent reporting able to see, comprehend, and transmit some worthwhile percentage of the large scope of things, people like Michael Yon and Bill Roggio and JD Johannes and dozens of others.
Otherwise, when a Tribune writer, working the DNC’s latest campaign, the Blackwater-is-Bush-evil line, gives forth with nonsense like "Blackwater killed scores of civilians" in an incident that included possibly 11 to 17 deaths in a still-unclear incident, there's no way to tell if it's just made up, or just malinformed.
"Gatekeepers", indeed.
Thousands of military and civilian people have cycled through Iraq and written about what they have seen and heard. The fact that the overwhelming majority of it is so far removed from the narrative we see on the Tribune front pages should trouble someone bragging about being a “journalist”. When a million Americans come back from a place and say in unison that “what’s going on there is nothing like what you see in the news”, that’s a crisis of world-threatening proportions.
Or perhaps cashing paychecks and swimming peacefully in the echo chamber is sufficient for a group of people our former-slacker nephew, freshly returned from a tour in Baghdad, now refers to only as “The Liars”. Capitalized.

Inventions and impatience

2007-10-03T16:41:00.000-05:00

Settling upon superlatives is a fascinating exercise. Sifting through all the knowledge in the history of the world (well, that's what you'd have to be doing, wouldn't you?) to arrive at a conclusion of momentousness ought to be a fine mental workout.
It would be hard to both be serious, and certain. But that doesn't take away from the value of the exercise; it just hauls one up a few inches short of the goal line of positiveness.
A favorite topic for this cogitation is The Most Important Invention Of All Time. Sometimes I think I may have moved a bit closer to conclusion, but not often. What I do know is that time and again, my default answer is the telephone.
Most inventions are something more on the order of evolutionary. A progression of thinking and improved mechanical technology allows an advancement to come together.It might be argued that the telephone is like that as well, an evolution of the telegraph. But it seems that there's a break- an enormous one- at the actual real-time transmission of a human voice.
It's not hard to picture a clear division in human history at the point telephony became possible. After that point, instantaeous interactive communication became possible, in the method most comfortable and efficient to humans, the spoken word.
At this later remove, it's becoming harder to solidly imagine the lack of the possiblity.Long distance travel is a good illustrator. A person traversing the Atlantic in the 15th century had no grasp of being able to communicate with another person back at home, at least, not beyond simple imagination. It could hardly have occurred to our sailor to be able to discuss something that way, with an active exchange and vocal inflection and instant absorption. The world view that would result from that would certainly have to be far different from ours. A person alive today has every expectation of a capability to converse with practically anyone else on the planet (so it seems), and in very short order.
If nothing else, conciseness would be expected to be an early casualty, eh?
It's hard not to take this a bit further and suggest that the instantaneousness of it all would necessarily breed impatience. I don't know if Joe Average 2007 is more quantifiably impatient that Joe Average 1807, but I can't escape the conclusion that he is.
The next communications step, television (can there be a word for that- say, "televisional"?) is a whole different concept, with a whole different reordering of world-view, and maybe not one that really would increase the impatience quotient.
But then follow along to the Internet...

Proselytizing

2007-10-02T20:58:00.000-05:00

From time to time, Your Correspondent will take it upon himself to advocate for good causes. At this very moment, one very good one indeed is in a fundraising process and may well deserve the Esteemed Reader's attention.
WDCB, the radio station of the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois is doing their semi-annual fundraising drive. I dare anyone of almost any musical taste to spend a week listening to it and not come away downright grateful such a resource exists.
At their website, there's a "Listen Live" link so that their programming is available around the planet.
www.wdcb.org

Chicagoness

2007-10-02T12:45:00.000-05:00

It seems it's hard for people who aren't very familiar with Chicago to understand the real essence of it. One might argue that the Second City complex is the most important thing, but I can't agree.
It's the fixed-ness, to coin a term, pronounced "fix-edd-ness".
Most folks in the western world think they understand corruption. And so they may. But unless it's Chicago corruption they've experienced, I respectfully suggest they don't get the full load.
The corruption here is so deep, so foundational, so inbred and ingrained that it's hardly recognizable to the denizens of northeastern Illinois. There's no assumption that corruption is not present in the public business, not ever. I don't mean the simple, pass-a-few-bucks or hire-a-friend's-spouse kind. Those exist but are almost superflous to the real, structural stuff.
When the government, say, of the large city, goes about building a football stadium for a private, for-profit corporation, in likely violation of the law, and at the taxpayer's very unwilling expense, there's not really any suspense about the outcome. It's going to happen, and a select group of vendors and suppliers is going to get highly lucrative contracts to make it happen.
If a buddy of the Man's wife needs a nice boutique business to rake in a few extra mil, then there's always the O'Hare Cash Cow. A quick couple of words and a giant non-competitive contract appears, ink dry.
Another guy needs some land to make a nice little development happen and so hires a fixer, sometimes called a rainmaker in fancier places. Suddenly, an old piece of taxpayer-owned real estate worth a million or two gets sold for one dollar. Yes, one dollar.
If there's a popular, even beloved, transportation asset that happens to be despised and (yes,) feared by the Man on the Fifth Floor, it's not a big deal for it to disappear.
Just wait for dark and send in the bulldozers.
The only surprise was that of the Man himself, that the subjects objected. He was truly miffed that they talked back.
For a long time, it was expected that a couple of aldermen every five years or so would be making the trip to the lovely Federal country club in Oxford, Wisconsin. Expected.
Hillary Clinton is a Chicagoan, despite having grown up in the adjacent bedroom suburb of Park Ridge. That Arkansas image is just a shawl that served for a few years on the way to the Big House.
She thinks like a Chicagoan, and acts like one. The casual corruption that has surrounded her since first getting near the power handles is something another Chicagoan perfectly well expects. Make a million on a shady commodities deal? Of course. Sell some prez-pardons for cash for the starving brother? It's a good thing.
But what seems to mystify so many onlookers is the statist thing.
That's my polite term for the love of control, the Utopian fantasy of an all-controlling State always doing the Right Thing.
Coming from a region where the goverment has a firm grip on the doings, comings, and goings of practically everything worthwhile, there's no evolving necessary to turn out to be a full-fledged statist. But of course the Man builds awful stadia and wrecks good airports. It's the natural order of things.
We'll be getting a chance soon enough to find out what this really means. The cause of the nanny state is about to get a huge boost.