Although Paul Krugman and I sit on opposite sides of the political aisle, I occasionally find his commentary intriguing.  Here’s a great column by him:

Self-Inflicted Confusion

You have the right to choose, and so should this panda.

Barack Obama, in order to soften the blow of Hillary Clinton’s probable Pennsylvania win, has released some negative ads and coupled them with fightin’ words. The story is interesting, if predictable.

What’s funny is that The Washington Post and the New York Times are essentially running the same headline for this story right now on their respective Web sites.

Post: “In Pa., Obama Sharpens His Tone”

Times: “Trailing in Pennsylvania, Obama Sharpens Tone”

Headlines often do a great job of dumbing down stories and reporters can occasionally feel like their piece’s value is demeaned by a “Hillary Demands More Doughnuts” or “Obama: Highfalutin Speech, Lowfalultin Bowling Score”-style headline.

These two newspapers, though, have literally chosen the same verb and direct object to describe Obama’s nefarious plot to bridge the polling gap. Maybe it’s not sensationalism, but it is a demonstration of how some media pigeonhole stories. If they published these headlines independent of each other, that’s just bizarre proof of verbal tunnel vision. If it’s no coincidence, then shame on some anonymous, late-shift, copycat copy editor.

I suppose the Times deserves some credit for tossing the pronoun. And, of course, you have to applaud the Post for an effective, albeit unpretty, abbreviation.

If there could only be one columnist to represent conservatism, it would have to be George Will.

Here’s two reasons why:

Horrors of a ‘Crisis’
Candidate On A High Horse

Kelley Quinn, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Office of Management and Budget called me Friday about this editorial. She characterized it as “frustrating.” Come to think of it, so do I.

Anyway, she mentioned that Illinois First Lady Patti Blagojevich has been a big supporter of 4-H in the state. As mentioned in the editorial, 4-H is one of the programs that is in serious jeopardy because of the governor’s threats to University of Illinois Extension office funding. I asked Quinn what the First Lady thought about this. Quinn said she didn’t know and that the two haven’t even met. That’s fair enough I suppose, but surely that might be a pretty relevant question to ask, especially considering that the First Lady got a degree in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Turns out I’m not the first to think this. From Sharon Mosley via The Herald & Review:

University of Illinois Extension Unit Leader Jim Looft asked the board to support a letter writing campaign to urge Gov. Rod Blagojevich to return $12.5 million to the Extension budget. Shelby County’s share of that money is $82,000 and without it, Looft said Extension would not be able to stay open in Shelby County.

“Our future has a lifecycle, and I can tell you it won’t be long,” he said.

Looft said 4-H families, farmers and members of its HCE program also would be contacted to urge Blagojevich to release the funds.

“The governor has done this sort of thing before and backed down, but we don’t know if he’ll back down in this case,” he said.

The board noted that First Lady Patti Blagojevich has been active in encouraging 4-H participation throughout the state.

“Perhaps we should contact her,” Amling said.

“I’m sure it couldn’t hurt,” Looft agreed. “But without this money you won’t see 4-H at the State Fair, something she has taken an active interest in.”

Not a bad idea at all.

If that’s what a 5.4 earthquake feels like, color me underwhelmed.

Maybe I’m just weird but that didn’t really strike fear into my heart.

You know, obviously, HOORAY WE SURVIVED!!!!

But I’m just gonna go back to bed.

What did everyone else think?

We hardly knew ye.

After catching multiple reports of a loose cougar in Chicago over the course of the last two days, I was unsurprised to see that this poor guy - unnamed and ungendered, as of now - was shot dead by police in the Roscoe Village area of Chicago early Monday evening.

The best sentence in the entire article is a paraphrase of something James Reynolds, a local yokel who caught sight of the beast, told the reporter:

He knew it was a cougar because he had seen it on the Discovery Channel, he said.

And I always said television was doing no good.

Another highlight is slightly reminiscent of an old South Park episode, where some hunters, looking to kill animals out of season, pretend to act in self-defense in order to bring home the prize. “They’re coming right for us!”, yell out-for-the-weekend hunters Jimbo and Ned.

‘It was turning on the officers,’ Ryan said, adding that no officers were hurt. ‘There was no way to take it into custody.’

As if it were a surprise that the animal was a bit hostile to gun-toting, sharpshooter policemen who “shot holes in an air conditioning unit” outside one man’s house. It’s too bad. I’ll bet Jeremiah - yeah, let’s call him Jeremiah - could have made a fine pet.

Though I hate to fan the flames of Obama’s San Francisco-gate any longer, I can’t help but notice the way the news media are interpreting McCain’s response to his comments, which, by any standard, has been benign.

The Chicago Tribune, on the front of their site right now, is running a headline that reads: “McCain on Obama’s ‘elitism’: ‘I don’t now him very well.’” (If you can look past the unfortunate misspelling of “know,” it’s a pretty empty statement. No sensationalism here, folks.)

But at the front of the Washington Post’s site - which is generally less given to overplaying minor scandal - is this headline: “McCain Calls Comments ‘Elitist.’”

Of course, the difference lies in whether the term elitist is applied to Obama or to his comments. Both the newspapers, as well as McCain himself, thoroughly understand the implications involved in each. Calling Obama himself an elitist carries much more weight than branding his silly (bone-headed, untrue) comment elitist.

The Trib downplayed the whole affair, placing it at the bottom of a list of articles related to the current back-and-forth about classism, etc. It rests under a Hillary-bashing headline that read: “Shot-and-a-beer brawl.” But the Post put McCain’s response at the top of their similar thread, printing it in bold.

Perspective, perspective, perspective.

Can’t blame the Trib for running this photo lead on their site right now. Look at those eyes.

With the very large number of comments on my recent column (and none of them favorable I might add…), I feel it is necessary for me to clarify an underlying premise on which it was based.Beware, as I said in my comment below the column, this idea is distinctly conservative: If the establishment of the tradition was understandable at the time, AND the tradition causes no harm now, then the tradition should not be gotten rid of.

Hopefully knowing that I was operating under that idea will clear up some confusion…

Dan

Here’s the column: http://media.www.dailyillini.com/media/storage/paper736/news/2008/04/11/OpinionColumns/In.God.Do.We.Really.Trust-3318799.shtml

And the comments: http://www.dailyillini.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticleComments&ustory_id=9da5a6a7-8272-4412-9909-33878e0c6d3c

Note: I will post future comments in the comments section, too.

Buffalo Grove atheist Rob Sherman, who made a brief appearance in my column today, has accepted an apology by Rep. Monique Davis of Chicago. Davis, during Sherman’s testimony before a legislative body, told him he should “get out of that seat” and said it is “dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists!”

The tirade gathered national attention, but mostly negative coverage of Davis. In my column, I noted that Sherman had an insensitive and borderline racist comment on his web site that read:

Now that Negroes like Representative Monique Davis have political power, it seems that they have no problem at all with discrimination, just as long as it isn’t them who are being discriminated against

Early this morning, Sherman deleted that sentence from his web site. He called me this afternoon and told me that I had taken the comment out of context. I disagreed and suggested the possibility of his explaining the deletion on his site. So far, nothing. But I do have links to both versions of the site, thanks to a Google cache: pre-deletion and post-deletion. This is a limited time offer, because Google caches update every few days.

I emailed Tribune columnist Eric Zorn, who has been following this story extensively, and he responded that he has

interviewed Rob Sherman scores of times in the last 22 years and never heard him say anything even remotely racist or bigoted, which causes me to think this was simply a very inelegant, infelicitous attempt to make an argument

So perhaps the sentence is just a slip up. But I am a bit leery of any man who Googles his name often enough to find a column written about him at a college newspaper 150 miles away. (Update 4/12: Sherman apparently was not Googling his name in his pajamas, as I wrongly - and hyperbolically, I might add - suggested. In a phone call today, he said he found out about the column through Zorn. Which makes sense and is perfectly reasonable, though Zorn doesn’t seem to remember it that way. In an e-mail message yesterday, Zorn wrote that Sherman may “subscribe to “Google Alerts,” which is probably how he got wind of your column.” )

Sherman is also apparently more famous than I initially thought. He told me that I was probably “in diapers” when he started making appearances on television shows like Oprah and Crossfire.

In either case, Sherman, who is running for a seat in the Illinois House, did offer me a ride in the “Sherman-ator,” his mobile home campaigning vehicle, when I get home. And he lives pretty close, so maybe I’ll take him up on it.

In all its glory.