By Natasha Julius

EDITOR’S NOTE:
Stephen Colbert has been spotted in Chicago. Read about it in The [Political] Papers: A Colbert Report.
The [Sunday] Papers will be posted shortly.
The [Monday] Papers will be posted shortly thereafter.
In the meantime, here are the stories we kept an eye on for you this weekend. Our other eye was on the ponies.
Another Mission Accomplished
Apparently CIA chief Porter Goss has completed the Herculean task of reforming the agency in a mere 18 months. Or perhaps we should say he has presided over the end the major reform operations. No official acknowledgement yet as to the CIA being in a state of civil war; perhaps the administration has been too busy blaming the media for not reporting the good stories coming out of the CIA to notice.
Intervention
Saying he was mindful of other high-profile people who have wrestled similar demons, congressman Patrick Kennedy announced he is seeking treatment at the Mayo Clinic for his incredibly jacked-up hair. We wish him the best of luck for a full and speedy recovery. With the proper care and attention, he could be marked for greatness.
Mutually Reassuring Destructive Tendencies
A hearty thank you to Vice President Dick Cheney for busting out the administration’s new approach to foreign policy, the Nostalgia Doctrine. The threat of nuclear attack was much easier to cope with when the other side didn’t really mean it. But Porter Goss’s decision to accompany the new doctrine with briefings for the vice president that used old Movietone newsreels instead of more contemporaneous news sources may have played a role in his undoing.

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Posted on May 8, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

The moment when former CIA analyst Ray McGovern questioned defense secretary Don Rumsfeld after a speech in Atlanta yesterday was a remarkable one.
I saw it on one of the cable news networks and felt like I was watching history; that this exchange would go down in the books as one of those crystallizing events marking some watershed of a botched war and a historically failed presidency, re-broadcast for the ages perhaps alongside President Bush declaring “Mission Accomplished” and implying in a State of the Union address that Iraqi agents were traversing Africa in search of yellowcake they would soon transform into nuclear weapons that would threaten America.
It also felt like a succinctly culminating moment for the embattled Rumsfeld that could finally cost him his job, a low point for the administration that even the stubborn Bush would not be able to ignore.

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Posted on May 5, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Predictably, both the Tribune and Sun-Times editorial boards are up in arms about the state of today’s “young adults,” this time because of their apparent lack of geographic knowledge.
The familiar editorials they each run on the matter today seem to come from stock files in their libraries right next to the clip art, sprinkled anew every few years with pained attempts at updated cultural references and sent out to the masses as the wisdom of the elders.
(Note to Tribune: It’s “borrrrrring,” not “boriiiing.” Note to Sun-Times: The Daily Show is a popular satire on the news that is in large part making fun of you.)
Are today’s young people (18- to 24-year-olds) less geographically knowledgeable than those of previous generations?
We don’t know, because the newspapers haven’t offered a comparison.
Are they less geographically knowledgeable than older generations?
We don’t know, because the newspapers haven’t offered a comparison.
A cardinal rule of using statistics in journalism is that they are meaningless without comparison which provides context.
So it’s hard to know what to make of the fact that a bunch of 18-year-olds don’t know that English isn’t the most widely used language in the world. It’s Mandarin Chinese.
Did you know that? I didn’t.

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Posted on May 4, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

It’s hard to believe that U.S. congressman Bobby Rush is so dense as to not understand why accepting a million-dollar grant from AT&T’s charitable arm for his Englewood community center while sitting on a committee that helps set the nation’s telecommunications policy could be fairly construed as a conflict-of-interest, so we can reasonably conclude that he’s simply being disingenuous in his attack on Chicago Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet, who broke the Rush story last week.
Appearing on Chicago Tonight last night, Rush called Sweet’s story “shoddy journalism” and called Sweet “lazy” for apparently not calling the House ethics committee for a determination of whether Rush had a conflict-of-interest.
If she had called, Rush insisted, she would have learned that there was no conflict. Hence, no story.
Rush can’t really believe this. But instead of explaining why the confluence of events looks bad – particularly because he is the only Democrat to sponsor a controversial phone industry-backed bill – but is in reality an entirely up-and-up matter, Rush won’t even concede that it looks bad.
“No, it doesn’t look bad!” he exclaimed. “As a matter of fact, it looks pretty good!”

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Posted on May 3, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

The big hang-up a lot of folks seem to have when it comes to pro-immigration marchers and activists is the difference between legal immigrants and illegal immigrants. And that indeed is an important distinction. It explains the comparison of this movement to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
While not a direct equivalent, consider that in the civil rights struggle, African-Americans broke the law – practiced civil disobedience, such as sitting in the front of a bus or at the lunch counter at the local diner – to demonstrate both the rights that ought to have been theirs and the absurdity of the laws that made their actions illegal.
Our immigration laws are absurd.

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Posted on May 2, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

I find today’s immigration marches and rallies inspiring. How could they not be? Maybe I’m just a sucker for outbursts of civic engagement, but this is democracy at its best – right in the middle of a public debate over this nation’s laws. Democracy at its best – being practiced largely by folks who were not born in America (and many who are here illegally).
How great is that?

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Posted on May 1, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

The thing about the new Spanish-language version of the national anthem is this: It is beautiful. It is poetry. These people love America.
On Saturday, the Chicago Sun-Times did us all a favor and printed the lyrics, translated to English (via the Associated Press).
(“At night they said: ‘It’s being defended!/Oh say! Your starry beauty is still unfolding.”)
And it is.

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Posted on May 1, 2006

By Natasha Julius

Here are the stories that will haunt our dreams this weekend.
War Bonds
A new report released by the Congressional Research Service shows the cost of fighting a meandering war against an entrenched and determined enemy has risen dramatically in the last three decades, soaring 17 percent this year alone. The skyrocketing prices prompted President Bush to call for Americans to be less dependent on debt imported from unstable parts of the world. This weekend the search for alternative deficit sources closer to home begins in earnest.
Nuestro Himbo
On Friday, President Bush declared his opposition to a new Spanish-language version of America’s national anthem, stating that immigrants to this country should endeavor to learn English despite there being no legal reason for them to do so. We anticipate the president will put his money where his mouth is any day now.
A Day Without Boycotts
During the same press conference, President Bush disapproved of Monday’s planned Day Without Immigrants protest, saying he does not support boycotts. Apparently the philosophical differences between a planned public work stoppage and derelict absenteeism are too much for the president to reconcile, as it’s well-established that he has no objection to the latter.

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Posted on April 29, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

We are both amused and rankled to find Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg copying one of our ideas for use in his column today.
Or maybe his appropriation is “unintentional and unconscious.”
But his (Don’t) Ask Amy column item today sure looks familiar.
We inaugurated a regularly occurring “Answering Amy” item on March 4, in which, our usual description says, “we take one question posed each week to the Tribune‘s highly-paid, highly-marketed, highly-mediocre advice columnist and contrast her answer with ours.”
We haven’t posted an Answering Amy since March 24 – low-down in the column here – as I’ve pondered where to give it a home on the site and who to delegate the work to. Maybe this is just Steinberg’s way of applying for the job.

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Posted on April 28, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

The Fred Hampton Way saga not only appears to be over, but it appears to have ended without anyone learning any lessons.
White reporters and city council members in particular.
Chicago Sun-Times reporter Fran Spielman, for example, continues to telegraph where she and her paper stand on the issue with a story today that begins this way: “Unwilling to divide the City Council along racial lines on a vote she was destined to lose, Ald. Madeline Haithcock (2nd) on Wednesday gave up the fight to rename a West Side street after slain Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton.”
Why pin racial division on Haithcock?
Why not start this way: “White aldermen have successfully blocked an effort – initially approved without debate in committee – to rename a portion of West Monroe Street after slain Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, enraging black leaders and others who say their opponents engaged in racial fear-mongering and pandering to the police union.”
It’s not as if the rejection of Fred Hampton Way hasn’t divided the City Council along racial lines. But when white people have the upper hand, racial harmony has been preserved.

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Posted on April 27, 2006