Hooker named Lay Person of the Year

From the Dekalb News, of New Boston, Texas. It’s rather more innocent than you think:

DeKalb News Reporter Rita Hooker has received a major award from the Kiwanis Club of DeKalb.At its regular meeting on Tuesday, July 21, Hooker was named the 2009 Lay Person of the Year by the Kiwanis Club.

Ms. Hooker was “pleased” to win the award, the article notes. Perhaps she should leverage her success into getting her paper to hire a copyeditor.

Over at the Washington Times, Jeremy offers his two cents on why the pro-union Employee Free Choice Act has stalled in the Senate:

Mr. Reid’s statement about Minnesota Sen. Al Franken’s victory after months of legal challenges over a close, disputed, and likely vote-fraud-riddled election sounded almost downbeat. “The challenges we face are not Democratic or Republican in nature. They are America’s challenges and they are too great to be solved by partisanship,” Mr. Reid argued. “Senate Republicans must understand that Sen.-elect Franken’s election does not abdicate them from the responsibility of governing.”

Remove the bipartisan boosterism and what Mr. Reid really meant is that he is not confident about holding his party together on tough votes. He’d like to have a way of avoiding the blame for that failure, but that’s become more difficult now that Republicans don’t have the numbers to filibuster.

Take the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). Right now, Capitol Hill is buzzing with talk of a possible compromise on the No. 1 priority of organized labor, but the bill still faces significant, perhaps perilous hurdles.

Read the whole thing here.

“Steal ideas from dead painters, then you don’t get sued.”

– Director Terry Gilliam’s advice to young artists on where to get inspiration.

Jumping Jack Flash was born this day in 1943. Don’t break a hip dude.

It’s gonna run on alternative energy, it’s gonna have a small carbon footprint, and it’s gonna be sustainable. When I was a kid, we called it a Schwinn.

– P.J. O’Rourke, explaining what kind of car the 2010 Obamamobile will look like.

While I have nothing in particular against the late Walter Cronkite, I just wasn’t that moved by his recent death. Most likely that is because I was too young to have seen him when he anchored the CBS Evening News. He was another generation’s icon.

It is not surprising then that while there was plenty of hagiography regarding his passing, a lot of the commentary was more about nostalgia for the bygone era when everybody in America watched the same news broadcast rather than any particular achievement of Cronkite’s.

As Reason’s Jesse Walker points out, that wasn’t necessarily such a great thing. In that spirit, I’d like to offer a somewhat more dyspeptic take on Cronkite’s life and career from a story a few years back by the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson:

Cronkite is a kind of synecdoche for American journalism. His career traces the arc of the news business over the last 70 years, from the grubby, slightly disreputable trade of the early 20th century to the highly serious, obsessively self-regarding profession it has become, here in the first decade of the twenty-first. A college drop-out, plucky but unimaginative, Cronkite knocked around a series of newspaper jobs in the 1930s, followed the troops into Normandy, worked for a wire service after the war, and filed workmanlike copy all the while that was notable for nothing in particular. Then came television, and celebrity, which he acquired thanks to the unprecedented reach of mass media rather than through any peculiar merit of his own. From the 1960s onward Cronkite was transformed by some mysterious process into a figure implausibly larger than a newspaper hack, a spiritual force as imposing and weightless as a dirigible. He was an oracle, a teller of truths, the conscience of a nation, “the most trusted man in America.”

Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

– Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes, (1930-2009).

There was a fascinating article in the Washington Post today about the probable next leader of the hermit kingdom that is North Korea: Kim Jong Il’s youngest son, Kim Jong Un.

It’s fascinating for two reasons. The heir is only 26 years old and intelligence agencies are convinced that as a teen he was secretly enrolled in a Swiss school. The article talks to the usual variety of foreign service types who have focused on Un and gets some amusing responses:

A senior U.S. official says he appears to have “the same interests as most 26-year-olds,” noting that these do not generally involve nuclear strategy.

His biggest interest was basketball. Un showed up at the school with several pairs of new Nike sneakers. And he apparently had the skillz to pay the bills:

Though generally quiet in class and sometimes awkward, particularly around girls, Pak Un showed a different personality on the basketball court, former friends recalled. He fell in with a group of mostly immigrant kids who shared his love of the National Basketball Association. Kovacevic, who shot hoops with the North Korean most days, said Pak Un was a fiercely competitive player.

“He was very explosive. He could make things happen. He was the playmaker,” said Kovacevic, who now works as a tech specialist in the Swiss army. “If I wasn’t sure I could make a shot, I always knew he could.”

Marco Imhof, another Swiss basketball buddy, said the Korean was tough and fast, good at both shooting and dribbling. “He hated to lose. Winning was very important,” recalled Imhof.

And why is Kim Jong Il’s youngest the heir apparent? Because the eldest got grounded by Daddy for going out without permission:

Kim Jong Il’s eldest son, Jong Nam, was for a time viewed as a likely heir but apparently bungled his chances in 2001 by trying to sneak into Japan under a fake Chinese name on a bogus Dominican Republic passport. He told Japanese immigration officials he wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland.

I watched a History Channel documentary on the Chicago gang wars of the 1920s. (Apparently, the channel’s programmers ran out of Hitler-related stuff …)

Anyhow, there were two main gangs. One was largely Irish and controlled the North of the city. It run buy Dean O’Banion and later, after he “retired”, Bugs Moran. The southern gang was Italian and run by Big Jim Colosimo and after he also abruptly “retired”, Al Capone eventually took it over.

One fascinating aspect of the documentary was that both gangs were mostly compromised of old-fashioned Catholics and this informed their activities in interesting ways. O’Banion was linked to no less than 60 murders but refused to get involved in the prostitution racket because he considered that immoral. He had contempt for the Italians as bad Catholics because they ran brothels. Moran felt the same and that contempt was one of the reasons why they clashed with the Italians so often.

Colosimo was whacked by his own guys - most likely Capone - because he resisted getting into the bootlegging business after Prohibition started. Apparently he thought bootlegging was immoral. After he was whacked the church refused to bury him in consecrated ground. This was not because of his vast and well-known criminal activities but because he had divorced his wife of 18 years to marry a showgirl.

USA Today reports:

Before the recession, Carol Miller-Woods, donor coordinator at North Hudson IVF in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., got about eight calls a week from potential egg donors. Now she gets that many daily.

She also has gotten calls from at least 100 men inquiring about donating their “eggs.”

“Times are that tough, I guess,” she says.

Read the whole story here.