Brain drain of prosecutors in Cook County

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

From any reasonable point of view, there should be some balance between how much the public pays to prosecute criminals and free the indigent innocent.

That's not the case in Cook County, where assistant state's attorneys are paid less than public defenders. It's not because public defenders are paid too much; they earn every penny they make for the important job of representing defendants who cannot afford counsel. Rather it's because when compared with prosecutors in the nation's other large counties, assistant state's attorneys here are underpaid and overworked.

Cook County assistant state's attorneys have disproportionately heavier caseloads than in other large counties. Here they close more cases and have more statutory duties.

The disparities are causing more assistant state's attorneys, including some "first chairs" or lead prosecutors, to leave for better paying jobs, while making the recruitment of new prosecutors more difficult, Cook County State's Atty. Richard Devine said in an interview. "The balance in the criminal justice system is vital. When you tilt it and higher pay goes for defense than for prosecution, then we've got problems. We're seeing an accelerated rate of resignations; it isn't dramatic yet, but I anticipate that we'll see a brain drain."

How it got this way is clouded in the arcane politics of the Cook County Board, where political preservation and advancement seem to trump the public interest at nearly every turn.

*When the board passed the budget in February, the state's attorney's office lost 100 people (out of a staff of about 800), including 44 prosecutors and 10 investigators. With about 540 lawyers, the public defender's office is smaller, but it lost proportionately fewer lawyers than the state's attorney's office.

*The typical prosecutor's annual pay before then was about $63,000, compared with $73,000 for public defenders. Since then, prosecutors received a raise that would bring them closer to "parity" with the public defenders, but they still lag about 8 percent behind. This while the total number of active felony cases per attorney is 50 in the public defender's office and 109 in the state's attorney's office.

*In Cook County, the prosecutor's office costs each citizen $23.07, which is in the low-end among big-county annual costs and compares with Manhattan's $48.97 and San Diego County's $43.62. The average caseload each prosecutor carries in Cook County is 600.17, among the nation's highest, which compares with San Diego's 88.32. The average number of filings per prosecutor here is 533, also among the highest, compared with San Diego's 150. The average number of cases closed per prosecutor here is 434 misdemeanor cases and 73 felony cases, also among the nation's highest, compared with San Diego's 32 misdemeanors and 46 felonies.

With the defections, declining staff, large workload and static salary, morale in the office is "horrible," said state's attorney spokesman John Gorman. But morale could improve if the County Board, at one of its two July meetings, approves a cost-of-living increase that would help catch them up. The $8.7 million needed, Gorman said, could come from the county's "814 account," which is money set aside for raises for county employees. Apparently how much is in the account is somewhat foggy, as Gorman said, "we've heard figures from $37 million to $16 million." There may be enough votes to pass the raise, but a veto by County Board President Todd Stroger would require a four-fifths vote of commissioners to override, a virtual impossibility. The county's budget is heavy with red ink and opponents of a raise for prosecutors easily could depict achieving parity between assistant state's attorneys and public defenders as just another special interest pleading. Indeed, striking a balance between all the needs competing for county money is a challenge for even the most dedicated County Board and skillful County Board president, let alone for Stroger.

Yet, Devine sees salary parity as a high priority compared with other needs because an effective criminal justice system requires balance between resources for the prosecution and the defense. "Prosecutors can vote with their feet," he said, "and unless the County Board acts, we will have a loss of talent that will seriously impact the prosecution of criminals in this county."

Revisiting Brown Using Common Sense

By Dennis Byrne
RealClearPolitics

"The premise is laid for the resegregation of America and the denial of opportunity. ... Inheritance and access will not be counterbalanced by equal protection." - the Rev. Jesse Jackson on the Supreme Court decision that race alone cannot be used to assign students to schools.

Oh, baloney. It does nothing of the sort, and Jackson knows it. So do the ideologues that are piling on the court's 5-to-4 majority with veiled predictions of a return to the days of Jim Crow and the intentional legal discrimination against African-Americans. According to these doomsayers, the landmark case, Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, which banned racial segregation in schools, has been knifed. Hooded cross-burners to follow.

If anything, the Court's decision voiding racial assignment plans in Louisville and Seattle affirms and polishes Brown by extending the equal protection provisions of the Constitution's 14th Amendment beyond minorities, to everyone, including white students. The clarification was long in coming.

Read more at RealClearPolitics

Waxman’s truth

By Dennis Byrne
Political Mavens

Yes sir, you can depend on Rep. Henry Waxman to get to the bottom of things. The California Democrat has his House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sniffing around Vice President Richard Chaney’s office for proof that liberal hatred of the man is warranted.

So, appearing Wednesday night on the PBS Newshour, Waxman was discoursing on Chaney’s supposed disregarded of the law, when he dropped this on the viewers:

Now, the truth of the matter is that we've had leaks from this vice president's office, including most recently the leak of a covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame Wilson, by Scooter Libby [Cheney’s former chief of staff].

Actually, “the truth of the matter” is that the original leak came—as every news report in the country noted—not from Libby, but from Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Libby was convicted, someone needs to remind Waxman, of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to investigators—all serious enough.

Read more at Political Mavens

Children at glorious play

Planning, organizing doesn't leave much room for fun exploration

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

The music freed the children to dance.

Scores happily spun into freewheeling exhilaration -- twirling, jumping, somersaulting, cartwheeling, silly stepping and rolling about in the grass. Others were zooming in and out under the tall oaks, back where the adults sat, reserved, listening to the music of the County Sky Band. Among them, a few toes tapped out the beat.

The scene -- a live music concert in a suburban village green -- was of children in the throes of spontaneous play. Unplanned. Unscripted. Unrehearsed. They were toddlers, preschoolers and preadolescents, but none older. If you wanted to know when we lose our inhibitions, you had only to ask the age of the oldest frolicking child on the village green that pleasant evening last week.

The scene is repeated here, and elsewhere I'm sure, for weeks during the summer. Last week it was the music of Shirley King, daughter of famed blues singer B.B. King, that set the children dancing. And in the following weeks, it will be '50s, big band and more. The children don't care; they'll frolic to it all. They danced for an hour and a half, stopping only when parents decided "it's time to go," or, finally, when the concert ended. They were as inexhaustible as they were inspiring and comforting -- by showing that children still could be children.

How glad I was that children still could discover spontaneity. On their own. Without a "program" carefully tended by staff or volunteers. Without some Institute for Fostering Impulses in Childhood showing up and instructing the children. They instinctively knew what to do and how to do it.

My only fear, sitting there, listening and watching, was that some adult, well-meaning of course, would rise from his chair and go over to try to organize the children. "OK, you guys over here will twirl," he'd say, separating them into groups, "and the rest of you will whirl." No one, to my knowledge, came by to check if it was "quality play."

This is not a knock on the countless classes and organized activities that enrich the lives of millions of children. I grew up when and where there were none, and it would have been nice to have a few around. There are valuable things to learn in an organized setting: how to cooperate and how to compete, how to get along and how to stick up for yourself.

This, rather, is for the benefit of children who have no room for spontaneity in their lives; whose every waking moment is scheduled; who have no idea what unstructured play is; and whose constant companions are electronic gizmos or the playmates in a shared, organized activity.

Psychologist David Elkind, author of "The Hurried Child" and "The Power of Play," sticks up for those deprived children by lamenting the absence in their lives of self-initiated play. Elkind blames not a lack of imagination on the part of the children, but "parent angst" about preparing their children for, well, everything.

For some parents, self-guided childhood exploration can be a scary thing. For children, too. But it's part of growing up. It fosters creativity, as anyone whose mother berated him for being a "stick-in-the-mud" and sent him out to play knows. When we were growing up in the city, that meant finding something to do out back in the alley or deploying to the empty corner lot to play war in the remnants of the victory garden. Later in the suburbs, it meant finding something to do down by the creek or getting lost in one of the disappearing fields of tall corn. By today's standards, a lot of what we found to do would be considered illegal or -- worse -- "inappropriate." That's sad.

It also fosters independence, as in "figure it out for yourself." It fosters imagination and courage, as in creating heroic scenarios in which you, say, come to the rescue of (can I say it?) settlers surrounded by Geronimo's braves in war paint. It fosters what today would be called "negotiating skills," by learning to make and keep friends on your own and playing together without supervision. It fosters a sense of consequences, by taking dumb risks and figuring out how to extricate yourself from their results. Or getting stung for them.

It fosters separation from parents, and for some, that might be the scariest thing of all. It shouldn't be. It's the best way to grow up.

Who's the meanest of them all?

By Dennis Byrne

Political Mavens

It didn’t take Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial cartoonist, much imagination to create this cruel slander:

It depicts President George W. Bush as a beach lifeguard, peering through binoculars from his “embryo guard” stand. Out in the surf are three drowning people, one calling out, “I have cancer!” another, “Help, I have Alzheimer’s!” and the third, “Help, I have Parkinson’s!” Bush is on his cell phone telling someone, “All quiet here.”

It’s a mediocre effort as far as editorial cartoons go, something that you can expect when it’s based on the kind of ignorance that Rogers puts on display. But what really stands out is the cartoon’s “mean-spiritedness,” a vice the political left often ascribes to Republicans and Conservatives, because they supposedly hate such concepts as civil rights and equality and such people as immigrants, minorities, and impoverish. The people who hate Bush are, we’re supposed to believe, noble, caring and compassionate, never uttering a mean word.

Read more at Political Mavens.

Who's Todd Stroger?

What's that you say? Cook County Board President Todd Stroger snuck out of his office for prostate cancer surgery without telling the public?

It has created quite a tempest in Chicago, about whether the head of a multi-billion-dollar agency governing one of largest counties in the nation owes it to the public to disclose his illness. My only question:

Why does it matter?

Todd Stroger's alleged guardianship of Cook County government has been a joke. A public health care system "in crisis," a huge budget deficit, a bloated payroll openly larded with his relatives in high-paying jobs and with party loyalists. Pathetically, the doctors at his own county hospital--the one named after his father, John--said he ought to go to another hospital for an operation that even a Stroger spokeswoman called "routine."

It doesn't matter if Stroger is at his desk or not. Cynics might even say that the county is better off with him not present.

Everyone wishes him well, knowing--even if Stroger himself and his staff are unwilling to publicly acknowledge--that cancer of any form is a serious matter. And certainly one that requires an elected official to disclose it.

Stroger's attempt to get away with acting as if he has no accountability to his constituents is deplorable. But more deplorable are the Democrats who sheep-like put an obvious incompetent like Stroger in office. They would have elected Dora the Explorer if she was running on the Democratic ticket.

City congestion takes toll on common sense

Instead of forcing the public to pay for downtown's density dilemma, maybe Chicago should stop bribing businesses to set up shop there


By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

There's something appealing about taxing cars and trucks that traverse the Loop, as Ald. Edward Burke (14th) suggests: It would tap suburban and other drivers who supposedly don't pay for those city streets.

It would satisfy Chicagoans who believe suburbanites are moochers, enjoying the city's benefits and amenities without paying for them. Burke himself suggested as much when he pointed out that suburbanites don't pay for the city's vehicle sticker.

If nicking suburbanites for the costs of clogged downtown streets is the real purpose of Burke's proposed ordinance, why not go all the way: Impose a whopping toll or fine only on anyone who drives into downtown without a City of Chicago sticker? That way Burke would get the huge revenue stream he wants for the money-sucking CTA, and Chicagoans themselves would get to enjoy a less congested downtown, without having to pay a toll. Except that such a scheme probably would be illegal, because (A) public streets by law are equally public, and (B) the taxes of every motorist in Illinois help pay for city streets.

But there's something appealing about a downtown vehicle toll: The people -- whether Chicagoans or suburbanites -- who are creating the problems (congestion, pollution) would be paying for the privilege. It's not dumping the costs of those streets on the rest of us who infrequently or never drive downtown. It's the same idea as the Illinois toll roads: The folks who use them have to cough up.

Of course, downtown interests fear that a downtown toll could hurt their businesses. For them, congestion isn't such a bad thing. In fact, when you think about it, what's so bad about downtown the way it is? Downtown, with its attractiveness and vitality, eclipses just about any other big-city downtown in America. In fact, the hustle and bustle is part of the attraction of downtown. Remember what State Street was like when it became a mall? There were no cars on it, and few shoppers. So, perhaps we should just learn to live with the congestion, as most people have.

Maybe a vehicle congestion tax isn't such a good idea after all. If congestion is the real problem with downtown, then maybe we should rethink what downtowns should look like.

Today's downtown is a hand-me-down from the late 19th Century, when technology forced people into more face-to-face communications. You could use the telegraph (assuming you wanted to wait for the messenger) or a novelty called a telephone, which wasn't so grand because the person you wanted to speak with didn't always have one. Sellers, buyers, suppliers, traders, lawyers, clerks -- they all had to communicate with each other, and that meant they had to be near each other, if not face-to-face. Also, people couldn't commute long distances; they could live no farther than the end of the horse-drawn streetcar line. Thus, skyscrapers and high downtown densities.

But those densities might be obsolete thanks to the telecommunications revolution. You can go through an entire day at the office without actually seeing a seller, buyer, supplier, trader or lawyer. It's why Sears could move its giant merchandise group out, over the horizon, to Hoffman Estates. It's as if congestion is the price we pay so some people can "do lunch" together.

So, it is fair to ask, why does government continue to subsidize these densities? The subsidies flow in the form of tax-increment financing districts, direct grants, huge mass transit subsidies and the likes of Block 37 -- the city's long-delayed attempt to play developer. The costs of TIFs fall on other government units, such as schools, and neighborhoods that long are denied the increased tax revenues that they otherwise would receive from the properties.

Yes, the subsidies bring jobs and the prestige of corporate headquarters. But they also bring the supposedly dreaded congestion.

If the goal of the tax is a less congested downtown, maybe we should stop trying so hard to lure more businesses there with big pots of money. Let the chips fall; let businesses pick locations that conform to the economics of a modern telecommunications society.

Sure, we would lose businesses that we had to bribe to locate downtown. But then government wouldn't need to impose a tax to help solve a problem it helped to create. And maybe we wouldn't be arguing about doing silly things, such as imposing a downtown vehicle toll.

The Do It Yourself Sopranos

By Dennis Byrne
PoliticalMavens.com

After a brilliant run, Sopranos creator David Chase dropped from exhaustion at the finish line.

The non-ending ending, in which nothing about the major characters is resolved, was quickly praised after the HBO’s acclaimed series ended Sunday night as brilliant and triumphant.

The praise is as deserving as cheers for the emperor who paraded around sans clothes. It’s as if Chase ran out of ideas, threw up his hands and told his viewers to “take it from here.” We could understand exhaustion as an explanation; the series was one of television’s most masterful.

But many reviewers indeed took it from there, hailing the ending’s ambiguity as a metaphor for, well, everything in life. As if there’s something creative about concluding that “life goes on.” Or not.

We already know that, from our own mundane, drab lives, and so we turn to the lamp keepers of the imagination—writers, artists, performers, producers—to fill in the blanks. Chase had done the job wonderfully and consistently over the years, so we expected much.

Just like other great epics and works of art, skillful endings often are what have made great works of art deserving the honorific, “classic.” Without the final movement, Ode to Joy, Beethoven’s Ninth would be merely great symphony instead of the masterpiece it is. I seem to recall that Shakespeare’s great plays had endings. Movies, books—most have endings too.

Read more at PoliticalMavens.com

No place for politics in stem cell science

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

Just as lawmakers around the nation, including Illinois, were rushing to spend millions of your tax dollars to kill human embryos for stem-cell research, they were undercut by some inconvenient and untimely news:

Scientists may have found a better way to create the immature, pluripotent stem cells that, by growing into healthy tissue to replace diseased cells, promise great advances in treating or curing some major human diseases.

As the Washington Post put it: "Three teams of scientists said ... they had coaxed ordinary mouse skin cells to become what are effectively embryonic stem cells without creating or destroying embryos in the process -- an advance that, if it works with human cells, could revolutionize stem-cell research and quench one of the hottest bioethical controversies of the decade." Much work remains to be done before scientists can conclude that it will work with humans, but it bolsters the argument that there are more ethically pristine ways of creating stem cells without killing embryos.

Significant numbers of scientists believe that the less controversial route to creating stem cells is possible, but their voices have been drowned out by politicians who would have it that if you're opposed to embryonic stem cell research, you're a "right-wing nut" who opposes all stem cell research.

Sadly, the new stem cell discoveries are not likely to slow this runaway train. The House last week and the Senate earlier passed legislation that would expand federal embryonic stem cell funding, but President Bush has promised a veto and a congressional override is in doubt.

In Illinois, the legislature has approved funding, and Gov. Rod Blagojevich has promised to sign it. Democrats will see no reason to hold off on the propaganda blitz in favor of ESC, seeing as how its more extreme proponents have bamboozled the public into believing that the only way to create effective stem cells is through ESC research.

Successful uses of adult and umbilical cord blood stem cells in various therapies are too numerous to recount here. It only needs to be said that ESC has not yet produced a single success, while non-ESC research has. Politics and ideological opportunism explain much (but certainly not all) of the insistence on federal funding of ESC research (even though there is no federal ban on private or state ESC funding.) Politics because too many people want to prove that Bush and persons concerned about the ethical implications of ESC would rather have people suffer and die. Ideology because they need to dump on the argument that human personhood begins at conception. (There's no argument that human life begins at conception; the argument is over when a human life becomes a person, endowed with human-rights protections.) In a word, the argument is about abortion.

ESC proponents will argue that whatever the successes of non-embryonic stem-cell research, such as that announced last week, it should not preclude embryonic research. The logic -- which is appealing -- is to proceed on all fronts and let the best technology win.

That, however, suggests that science has no room for ethical considerations. The consequence of accepting that premise is appalling; it would permanently end any discussion about the ethics of cloning, Josef Mengele's horrific experiments on Holocaust victims and all nuclear weapons research.

Understand what I'm saying before you reach for your keyboard: The science is unsettled about whether non-ESC research is as promising as or superior to the embryonic kind. But at this stage, the research tends to favor the non-ESC kind, in terms of proven advances and practicality. In these circumstances, it makes more sense to invest in the path that is less fraught with the kind of moral battles that tear at our fabric. Unless, you're more interested in scoring political points.

I'm also trying to say something more: The politicalization of science by the left to further its political goals ought to end. We've seen it with global warming (the science on whether we're causing it is not settled), the link between abortion and breast cancer (competent studies do show a possible relationship), and assertions that the over-the-counter Plan B contraceptive has no impact on the sexual behavior of young adolescents is without the support of a valid study.

Most of the public is illiterate enough when it comes to science. To compound it by twisting science for political purposes doesn't help.

Scary thought: Al Gore could be in charge

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

If Al Gore had been president ...

President Al Gore today asked the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution of "concern" over the nuclear arms race between Iran and Iraq.

"Both countries are perilously close to possessing nuclear weapons," Gore said at a White House press conference. "Nuclear warfare between these two historic enemies would be a tragedy for everyone."

President Gore requested the resolution after the countries' two dictators, Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, renewed threats of annihilation against each other over disputed Persian Gulf territory. Two decades ago, the two nations fought a prolonged war involving the use of chemical weapons over dominance of the strategically important gulf region, and both nations years ago dropped any pretense that their nuclear programs had peaceful purposes.

Gore said former President Jimmy Carter, who now is Gore's UN ambassador, would present new, softer language than what's contained in the 14 previously rejected resolutions proposed by the United States. Gore indicated that the resolution would drop a U.S. request for a multinational summit of Middle East nations and instead seek mediation by the International Anger Management Institute.

Former Sen. Fred Thompson, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, said in response, "Great, just what we need, another futile request for a feeble declaration from an international body incapable of agreeing on the time of day. Ever since 9/11, the Gore administration's toothless foreign policy has led to more attacks by Islamic terrorists, killing thousands more Americans on our own soil and worsening the sectarian violence in the Middle East.

"All because no one seems capable of saying, 'Enough.' "

Gore has persistently argued that only multilateral talks involving the European community and all Muslim countries can settle the growing conflicts that threaten to drastically reduce the amount of crude oil available to a worsening American economy. Because of the uncertainty of supplies from the region, mandated caps imposed on U.S. off-shore oil fields, a moratorium on all domestic crude oil exploration and new production, and the crippling of domestic refining capabilities by a host of new government regulations, the nation now finds itself in the grip of an unprecedented energy crisis, with average gasoline prices soaring to a near-record $8.35 a gallon. As unemployment climbed to 9.3 percent -- the highest since the early 1980s -- and energy-driven inflation has bounded to 9.1 percent -- reminiscent of the "stagflation" that characterized Carter's presidency -- Gore's presidential approval ratings have hit a rock-bottom 25 percent.

Despite the dire economy, Gore renewed his threat to veto any legislation that would lessen costly measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as required by the Kyoto treaty. "This will be seen by our allies as a betrayal, and tarnish America's good name worldwide," Gore said. The president sidestepped repeated questions about why America should carry the burden, even though no European nation has met carbon dioxide emission standards, and China and India, which have leapfrogged America as the world's leading polluters, have not attempted to control their emissions.

Gore also threatened to veto the so-called USA Patriot Act, proposed legislation that would strengthen America's intelligence-gathering capabilities. A bipartisan coalition crafted the legislation in the wake of repeated terrorist attacks on American cities, including the horrific use of hijacked airplanes to destroy the Capitol and Chicago's Sears Tower. One of the most important features of the Patriot Act would be the interception of communications between domestic terrorists and Al Qaeda operatives operating freely in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In other matters, Gore:

*Said he would present a "comprehensive" proposal to deal with the genocide in Darfur "at the appropriate time." He specifically ruled out the use of force because "it wouldn't look good." Besides, "we can handle only one genocide at a time," referring to Hussein's continued slaughter of Kurds and Shiites.

*Warned against any Israeli attempts to use force to stop Iraq and Iran from developing nuclear weapons. "Israel must understand that force would doom hopes for a multinational summit to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian-Lebanese-Syrian war. The American people want a realistic foreign policy, one that rejects the use of force in any form," he said.

*Said he would not comment on a newly published book, "An Assault on Reason," by his defeated 2000 and 2004 presidential opponent George W. Bush in which Bush assailed the Gore presidency as "the worst in history." Gore, however, cracked a smile when a reporter reminded him that Bush said the book was not "political."

When is opinion actually grounds for a hate crime?

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

Decades ago, north suburban Skokie, a predominantly Jewish community that included a significant number of Holocaust survivors, banned a hateful bunch of neo-Nazi morons who wanted to march in the village.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the village, and U.S. District Judge Bernard M. Decker, in a decision upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, struck down the ban. "It is better," Decker said, "to allow those who preach racial hatred to expend their venom in rhetoric rather than to be panicked into embarking on the dangerous course of permitting the government to decide what its citizens may say and hear. ... The ability of American society to tolerate the advocacy of even hateful doctrines ... is perhaps the best protection we have against the establishment of any Nazi-type regime in this country."

Apparently, the constabulary in northwest suburban Crystal Lake disagrees, seeing fit to arrest two high school girls for handing out allegedly anti-homosexual literature at their school. We have to say "allegedly" because the specifics of the girls' pamphlets have not been disclosed because they are "evidence," the police said. We are to believe that two girls are such a big threat to the commonweal that they should be arrested on -- get this -- felony hate-crime charges.

As a sideshow to this circus, one of the girls has been locked up until trial because the judge decided the girl's supposed unhealthy home environment and lengthy juvenile record did not allow home detention. Thus, for exercising her right of political speech, she has ended up in the slammer.

Even the most blindly ardent advocate of hate-crime statutes should be able to understand the problem here. The underlying charge against the girls is disorderly conduct; the two girls may or may not have violated that law. But the seriousness of the charge has been jacked up beyond reason to a felony because of a viewpoint that they expressed.

They did not physically endanger or attack anyone, if the news accounts are accurate. They did not incite a riot; they did not cry "fire" in a crowded theater. They expressed an opinion. We are constantly advised by devotees of ever tougher and more expansive hate-crime legislation that it poses no danger to free speech or expression. Such arguments are revealed by the Crystal Lake case to be a load of malarkey. But if you express a concern about the 1st Amendment impacts of hate-crime legislation, you become a prime target for an unconscionable political attack.

For example, Michael C. Dorf, writing in FindLaw.com, just knows that President Bush is anything but pure of heart in opposing a new attempt to expand federal hate-crime legislation. "The true grounds," he said, "for the president's threatened veto appear to be simpler and more odious [than legitimately arguable reasons]: The Bush administration aims to curry favor with voters who oppose any legal recognition for same-sex relationships, even protection against private violence." We all should be blessed with such an ability to peer into people's hearts.

The problems with federal hate-crime laws are many, including using interstate commerce clauses or the 13th Amendment to justify them. Not the least of the problems is how to decide who qualifies for hate-crime protection, without becoming arbitrary. Congress defines a hate crime as one "in which the defendant intentionally selects a victim, or in the case of a property that is the object of the crime, because of the actual or perceived race, color, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability or sexual orientation of any person."

What qualifies these categories of people, we're told, for hate-crime protection is the history of persecution they've suffered. The rest of us don't qualify if hate motivates a crime against us, because we (presumably) are not a part of any group that has been historically persecuted.

How do you know which groups have been persecuted enough to qualify for protections against hate crimes? Why are protections provided for sexual identities, but not for the homeless? How about protections against crimes of hatred based on economic class?

The response is that the protected categories are selected to deliver a message that helps to protect everyone else in a traditionally despised group.

But that response is insufficient: If a crime motivated by hate is bad for one person, under the equal protection of the law concept found in the Constitution, it is bad for everyone. If we're going to have hate-crime laws, they should protect everyone. Not just the groups that cynical politicians want to cultivate for votes.

Chicago Secretly Plans to Sell Assets to Fund 2016 Summer Olympics

By Dennis Byrne
Budget and Tax News

Months after Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley began promising taxpayers they would not foot the bill for the 2016 Olympics, the city secretly drafted a plan to sell public assets to help fund the Games and pledged to cover $500 million in any losses.

City officials revealed the plans and pledge in March, after a visit from Olympics officials. On April 14, the U.S. Olympic Committee selected Chicago, over two-time host city Los Angeles, to represent the U.S. in the bid for the 2016 Olympics and Paralympics. The final choice of host city will be made by the International Olympic Committee in October 2009.

Covering the losses and selling public air rights over near-downtown property were ideas developed behind the scenes in response to the United States Olympic Committee, which has demanded financial assurances that Chicago can pay for the multibillion-dollar event and any cost overruns if the city wins the bid to host the Games.

“We definitely want the government to have skin in this game,” said a committee spokesman, referring to financial backup from a city legendary for cost overruns on big projects, such as the ongoing expansion of O’Hare International Airport and the glitzy lakefront Millennium Park, which opened four years late and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget in 2004.

Read more at Budget and Tax News

Saying 'no' in U.S. has political price

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

Now that we've plunged into a candidate's premartial sexual activity with his wife as a legitimate presidential campaign issue, is there anything left that doesn't require disclosure?

How many times does the candidate and his spouse or "partner" do "it"? Mike Wallace (him again) has brought us to this idiotic state by casually asking Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney whether he and his wife, Ann, engaged in premarital sex. Romney, presented with this question on CBS' "60 Minutes," may have been the first person in the world to provide this bit of information to 14 million people. His answer was no.

Romney was asked this caught-ya-with-your pants-down question because he is a Mormon, a religion that has strictures against sex out of wedlock. As PublicEye, CBS News' watchdog, put it, Romney's answer goes to how serious a Mormon he really is and Mormonism "is an issue for many voters."

Oh, you mean as in: Lots of people have an "issue" with Mormonism because it -- as do many religions, millions of Americans and social commentators -- opposes pre- and extramarital sex.

This is a fight that a conservative candidate can't win. If he says he had premarital sex, he'll be nailed as a hypocrite because he has violated the precepts of his church. (If that reasoning is valid, then only atheists need run for president.) If he says he didn't have premarital sex, he's a hopeless, ancient moralist and, by extension, someone who would impose his religious views on the nation. (His denial also would unleash a pack of reporters trying to prove he did have premarital sex.)

In today's climate, it took guts for Romney to (admit to) (confess to) (make a clean breast of) being chaste. Like in a boys high school locker room, virginity is not a virtue to be disclosed. In fact, the words virginity and virtue are barely mentioned in the same sentence anymore.

As if to prove that virginity and abstinence are on the run, the new Democrat-controlled Congress is expected to kill a $50 million abstinence education program designed to delay sexual initiation, hopefully until marriage.

The programs include instruction on human anatomy, sexually transmitted diseases, building self-esteem and other techniques that will help combat the powerful peer pressure and cultural messages that encourage early sexual activity. This Title V abstinence program shouldn't be confused with "abstinence-plus" programs, whose basic message is, "Yes, well, abstinence is a fine idea in theory, but if you can't control yourself -- and you won't be able to -- here is how to sexually gratify yourself."

You can be sure that under the Democrats, such how-to programs will continue to be funded, but not the abstinence-only programs. Republicans, when they controlled Congress, at least let the two types of programs exist side-by-side. Democrats apparently can't tolerate kids being told both sides.

Rep. John Dingell, Democratic chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Title V funding, said it should be eliminated because it is a "colossal failure." He pointed to a recent congressional study that said so.

But it's not necessarily so. Ten scientific studies, according to the Heritage Foundation, have shown that "real abstinence programs can be highly effective in reducing early sexual activity." You can find studies that support both sides of the issue; but that doesn't mean Dingell should get away with pretending that all the science is on his side.

No, the problem isn't that the abstinence programs have been a colossal failure. If they have managed to hold back even a small part of the tide of the sexualization of children, they would be a colossal success. The colossal failure has come on the part of a culture that has no problem with the sexualization of children, by, for example, flooding entertainment media with messages that not just endorse sexuality but deride abstinence.

No government program by itself can hold back the tide; the reduction in single motherhood, increases in sexually transmitted disease and all the other disastrous effects of today's sexually obsessed society can only be stemmed by a change in culture. It takes, as it were, a village.

Papers were victim, not his lordship

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

Now, if that don't beat all -- Conrad Black's attorney playing the class-warfare gambit in the former newspaper baron's criminal trial.

The irony is: Who in the world, besides Queen Elizabeth II, lives and breathes class consciousness more than Lord Black of CrossHarbour? Here's someone who so coveted the privileges and recognitions attached to the upper classes and royalty that he renounced his Canadian citizenship in exchange for a lifelong peerage in the British House of Lords. But now that Black finds himself on trial in a backwater known as Chicago for allegedly illegally snatching some $80 million from the shareholders of his media empire, his lawyer, Edward Genson, suddenly wants everyone to believe that his lordship is just one of the boys. When the jurors were about to hear Black's estimate of his elevated self-worth -- in his own words -- Genson futilely protested:

"This ... appeals to class prejudice and I move for a mistrial." This is rich.

In question were Black's written thoughts to other executives about those pesky shareholders who dared question his proprietorship of their money. Their "agitations," as Black called them, should not "force us into a hair shirt." Everyone knew about our taste for the high life, Black wrote (much more elegantly than I have written here), and we need not "revolutionize" our style with a "Damascene conversion to vows of poverty."

A Chicago jury might convict him of being a popinjay, but here jurors -- commoners and vulgar class they might be -- are practiced enough to know that their duty is to weigh the case on its legal merits.

But we can ask if what he did, as described by the evidence and witnesses, was right. Let me explain. When I labored for the liege lord several years ago at the Chicago Sun-Times, Black's leadership talked reverentially about "proprietorship." I gathered it was a British notion, unfamiliar to us colonists, involving the exercise of certain responsibilities that come with ownership. For example, a proprietor is obliged not to turn the institution over to the serfs, err, employees. Turned loose, they, of course, would destroy the institution. Proprietorship requires that workers be underpaid and overworked. For the good of the institution.

For Black, the requirements of proprietorship apparently included selling off parts of the institution's assets -- a collection of smaller newspapers -- and pocketing the money himself. He built the institution with his own hands and he, by God, was not going to allow others, or the institution itself, to benefit from his perspiration. How did he do this? The buyers of the newspaper coughed up millions of dollars, in addition to the purchase price, to pay Black and his minions to stay away. For the millions of dollars, he signed "non-compete" agreements, promising not to return and set up competing newspapers. Never mind that some of the buyers didn't ask for such a guarantee. Black justifies these non-compete agreements with the premise that he was such a splendid newspaper proprietor, the buyers were scared out of their wits to engage in a head-to-head battle with him. This is a thought that some of us who labored for him find to be incredible. But then, we only saw what he was doing to the institution from the inside, and what do we know?

Black would have us believe that his prosecution is an example of how the "corporate governance" fad has run amok. In truth, he has touched on larger issues at the heart of the corporate governance debate:

On one hand is the view that the marketplace, if left alone, would correct the inefficiencies, mistakes or unethical acts committed by whoever is running a company, because a more competent or honest entrepreneur would gobble up the company to reap its unrealized potential. But, according to this view, the market has been stymied by excessive regulation, allowing executives -- freed from marketplace restrictions -- to get away with their excesses.

The other view is there's not enough government regulation.

Then there's the Black model: What works best is a proprietor who grabs as much as he can, and nuts to everyone else. For all his clever moves, the companies under his proprietorship -- as well as their shareholders, employees, suppliers and ultimately their customers -- are not the better for it. This is something that only a person totally consumed by class consciousness would fail to see.

Oath upheld, but at what cost?

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

Whatever your politics or your views on the Iraq war, the admission by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) that as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee he knew that America was duped into a war, but remained silent because he was sworn to secrecy, was a stunner.

"At the time of this debate," he recently said on the Senate floor, "I was a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. And I would read the headlines in the paper in the morning and watch the television newscasts and shake my head. ...

"The information we had in the Intelligence Committee was not the same information being given to the American people. I couldn't believe it. ... So in my frustration, I sat on the floor of the Senate and listened to this heated debate about invading Iraq thinking the American people are being misled, they are not being told the truth."

As many in his home state know, the idea that Durbin could keep his mouth shut about anything is a stunner in itself. He has been known to shoot it off frequently and disastrously. Witness the time he made the inflammatory and false comparison of the U.S. military's treatment of Guantanamo Bay detainees to the millions murdered by the Nazis, Soviet Gulags and Cambodia's Pol Pot.

So, what are we to think now? That Durbin willingly let thousands of Americans and uncounted thousands of Iraqis die when he knew the truth? Is he bringing it up now because he is seeking absolution? Was it just bravado, a childlike "I know what you don't know" moment? Was it a slip of the tongue; did he misspeak? Was it just a routine attempt to again make Bush administration officials look like liars, but he failed to think through the implications and consequences of what he was saying? Did it even occur to him that he was implicating every member of the Intelligence Committee for hiding the truth from the public?

Was Durbin's statement a fabrication? The assumption seems to be that this is a story that concerns only the right wing, because Durbin's statement received prominent play from the conservative Washington Times -- described (by liberals) as an "ultraconservative" publication -- from where it was picked up by conservative bloggers. Durbin's office played on a nasty right-winger theme; the first words of its written response were: "Right-wing publications of dubious integrity -- conservative blogs such as Power Line and the ultraconservative Washington Times ... " In other words, who is saying it is more important than what is being said.

Maybe Durbin's office should have looked harder because some liberal bloggers are even more upset with the idea that Durbin let President Bush get away with what they believe is an unconscionable lie. Was Durbin a part of the cabal? Do he and Vice President Dick Cheney have a secret handshake? They both have the same first names, have you noticed?

Actually, Durbin has stumbled onto a serious and difficult question: What was more important, his oath of silence or stopping a nation from going to a wrong, possibly, immoral war?

The question cannot be easily brushed aside. It is the kind of ethical question that comes up more frequently than we'd like, in both the public and private sectors. Durbin has inadvertently illustrated that such important questions are not always as black and white as antagonists would like to have them. We're all guilty of it, but few of us get to be guilty on such a monumental scale.

What if Durbin had stood up in 2003, before the war, and said: "As a member of the Intelligence Committee, I have access to secret intelligence reports. What you are being told by Bush, the British and most Western intelligence agencies are lies. If you don't believe me, here are the documents. Yes, they're classified, but in a democracy, truth is more important than is whatever justifies keeping these documents secret."

An illegal act? Probably yes. A patriotic act? You might say. Yes, Durbin voiced his concern about the quality of intelligence and going to war, before the war started, as his office reminds us. Yes, he voted against going to war. But could he have changed the course of history? I don't know what Durbin should have done. An oath isn't to be taken lightly; President Bill Clinton found that out when he was impeached, accused of lying under oath. But if the Bush administration's lies were as apparent and real as Durbin now says they were, and so much death and suffering were the knowable outcome of the bad intelligence, doing nothing is not something I'd want on my conscience.

Outrage misplaced over phony-ID raid

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

North Michigan Avenue merchants, joined by hundreds of nearby Gold Coast residents, today angrily marched in protest of a raid by heavily armed federal agents on a fake ID ring operating openly for months on the Magnificent Mile.

Asked why they weren't angered by the presence of the ring, headed by a murder suspect, operating so brazenly in their neighborhood, a spokesman for the posh shopping district explained: "Of course we didn't want the counterfeiters here. We're just objecting to the tactics [the feds] used."

Meanwhile, a similar raid on a gang of counterfeiters in north suburban Wilmette's lakefront Gillson Park drew similar howls of protest from hundreds of neighbors who stood in front of the swank Michigan Shores Club shouting, "No justice, no peace!"

"No, we didn't sanction the gang's operations, although we didn't mind undocumented immigrants coming here to be documented because we're open-minded," said a club member who, in his haste to join the protest, abandoned cherries jubilee to smolder, "We just don't want anyone with guns, much less big guns, in our community."

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Sorry, I couldn't help conjuring up those ridiculous images after some of those protesting last week's federal raid on the ring of ID counterfeiters in Chicago's mostly Hispanic Little Village neighborhood said -- predictably and irresponsibly -- that such a raid would never happen on North Michigan Avenue or in the suburbs. Which is to accuse the feds of something dark, something racist.

But would I be out of line here to point out that one reason that Michigan Avenue and Wilmette were not raided is because the counterfeiting rings aren't operating there? I'm just guessing here, but if the gangsters tried to set up shop there, they would have been turned in or, if you prefer, snitched out -- an act that has come into great disrepute among hip-hoppers and their fans.

Something tells me that the folks along Michigan Avenue and in Wilmette would not have tolerated the open sale of 100 high-quality fake driver's licenses, Social Security cards or green cards every day. I'm guessing that they wouldn't want to be in the place where "undocumented" persons from all over the Chicago area come to get documented.

This isn't something that happened surreptitiously in the dead of night. It happened in broad daylight and was well enough known to attract customers from well outside the community: not just Mexican immigrants, but from Pakistan, Poland and other countries.

If they heard about it, then people in the Little Village shopping plaza certainly knew about the high-stakes racket in their midst that allegedly was profitable enough to provoke a murder. Am I way off base here to suggest that such activities not only were tolerated but perhaps even condoned? Yes, maybe the gang terrorized the neighborhood with threats of violence for snitching, but then wouldn't the arms that the feds carried in the raid be reasonable for defense of self and the community?

As U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald tried to point out at a press conference defending the show of force and the raid itself, this story involves more than illegal immigration. It involves the easy availability of false documents, which, as we know, can give cover to terrorists. You'd think that Fitzgerald would get at least a little credit for doing exactly what should have been done before Sept. 11, 2001: helping to preserve the integrity of official documents.

By the way, fake IDs also threaten public safety and security in other ways. Here's another story, this time, not made up:

Six children, riding in a van with their parents on a Milwaukee-area interstate, died in a horrific blaze in 1994, after a heavy metal part fell from a truck, puncturing and igniting the van's gas tank.

Rev. Duane "Scott" Willis and his wife, Janet, escaped safely, only to watch helplessly as their trapped children suffered agonizing deaths in the conflagration. The truck was driven by Ricardo Guzman, who bribed employees of the Illinois secretary of state's office to get his illegal license.

Other truckers tried to warn Guzman on their CB radios that the metal part was dangling dangerously from his truck, but either Guzman didn't hear the warnings or, speaking only Spanish, didn't understand them.

Court ruling abets life, logic

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

Reacting to last week's Supreme Court ruling upholding a federal law banning partial-birth abortion in most cases, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said he agreed with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

As she emphasized in her dissenting opinion, Obama said, this ruling "signals an alarming willingness on the part of the conservative majority [on the court] to disregard its prior rulings respecting a woman's medical concerns and the very personal decisions between a doctor and patient."

Far be it from me to disagree with someone who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago and with my sister publication, the Los Angeles Times, which called the decision an "unconscionable U-turn" from past decisions, but they've got it wrong. Although not as wrong as the wild-eyed pro-choicers who should come down from orbit and first read the decision before they pronounce the end of womankind.

They might think the reasoning of the court's majority is overly clever, but it should be examined because its explanation needs to be understood about why it does not "disregard prior rulings."

The court argues that its latest decision -- Gonzales vs. Carhart -- not only follows the precedent of the landmark 1992 Planned Parenthood vs. Casey case, but also said that deciding Gonzales otherwise would have "repudiated" Casey. Writing for the majority in Gonzales, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy argued that Casey reaffirmed the "essential holdings of the 1973 landmark case, Roe vs. Wade," which included the principle that the state has "legitimate interests from the pregnancy's outset in protecting the health of the woman and [emphasis added] the life of the fetus that may become a child." Yes, Roe says the interests of the woman and the fetus can be balanced.

The court observed that, in accordance with prior decisions, restrictions that place "an undue burden" on the right to have an abortion are not permitted. In other words, a law that purposely places a "substantial obstacle in a woman's path" is not allowed. But if it doesn't -- and the court concluded that this ban doesn't because women arguably have other safe alternatives -- Congress can pass laws that "express profound respect for the life of the unborn." In concluding that the ban does not create an undue burden, the majority rejected arguments that the ban is "too vague," again citing previous decisions that set tests for "vagueness."

As important, the court said that the law was a proper response by Congress to a previous high court decision, Stenberg vs. Carhart, in which it found that Nebraska's partial-birth abortion ban violated the Constitution, as applied in Casey. The language of the congressional ban is significantly different than Nebraska's ban, the court pointed out. And Congress is not required to agree with the controversial "factual findings" set out by the district court in Stenberg. Also, Kennedy wrote, Congress has a right to state its own findings: that partial-birth abortion "is a gruesome and inhumane procedure that is never medically necessary and should be prohibited."

Casey, Kennedy said, "reaffirmed that the government may use its voice and its regulatory authority to show its profound respect for the life within the woman ... The act's ban on abortions involving partial delivery of a living fetus furthers the government's objectives. Congress determined that such abortions are similar to the killing of a newborn infant. This court [in Washington vs. Glucksberg] has confirmed the validity of drawing boundaries to prevent practices that extinguish life and are close to actions that are condemned."

There's one more point to be made about how this decision respects precedent: The heart of the pro-choice argument is that the ban fails to protect women's health and therefore is unconstitutional. But they never define "health" in the kind of detail that another high court decision does. Doe vs. Bolton, the companion case to Roe vs. Wade, makes it clear: Health is anything that a woman defines it to be, even if it is nothing more than her discomfort about her pregnancy.

If the rigid pro-choicers could acknowledge that an exception to the partial-birth abortion ban should be allowed (like the one that allows the procedure to save a woman's life) only in cases of the most serious health problems -- define it as you like and let's debate it -- then maybe we wouldn't have been in court fighting over this ban in the first place. If, as this court suggests, Congress and state legislatures are the proper places for this debate, perhaps compromise on this contentious issue is possible.

What Good Could Come From Airing the VT Killer's Video?

NBC played into this murderer's hands, and thus makes itself an accomplice to his horrific acts, by flooding the country with his images, making him a hero for every nut job in the country.

By Dennis Byrne
Editor & Publisher

So, what does it say about NBC that a sociopathic mass murder selected the network to let him get in the last word by airing his dangerous and perverted tapes.

If I were the decider at NBC, I would have said, "Not on my network, jerk." Instead, NBC played into this murderer's hands, and thus makes itself an accomplice to his horrific acts, by flooding the country with his images, making him a hero for every nut job in the country. When the shots ring out the next time, and students die in their classrooms, I hope NBC executives remember.

Read more at Editor & Publisher

Blame Rumsfeld for the VTU massacre

By Dennis Byrne
Political Mavens

Even before anyone knew the shooter’s name, John Nichols in the liberal Nation magazine on-line was urging us to check out Michael Moore for a better understanding of the shooting at Virginia State University.

While fairly criticizing the media for their instant analyses attempting to explain the reason for the shooting, Nichols offered up his own bizarre expert, Moore. “Do not doubt that the National Rifle Association is preparing its this-had-nothing-to-do-with-guns’ press release,” Nichols wrote. “…Many groups on all sides of issues related to guns and violence in America will be busy making their points, just as many in the media will look for one dimensional ‘explanations’….”

All true, but then in a perfect illustration of his point he suggests that we can all understand the massacre better if we took his “modest proposal: Instead of adopting a particular line, rent Michael Moore’s ‘Bowling for Columbine.’ Of course, there are those who will not be able to see beyond their rage at Moore to recognize the value of this particular film.” He continues:

Read more at Political Mavens

Can you read this?

A Chicago Tribune reader, like others, again [here and below] makes a reading error in a letter to the editor in response to my calling for the reporting of the good news coming out of Iraq: I didn't say that the bad news shouldn't be reported; I said that the good news should not be buried or ignored, as it seems to be in some corners. When I was taught journalism at Marquette University 40 years ago, reporting both sides of a story was called good journalism.

News of Iraq

Columnist Dennis Byrne's recent piece on the April 9 Chicago Tribune Commentary page, about the good news coming out of Iraq, reminds me of a story about a discussion between an employer and group of employees.

The employees suggested that the employer should send along only good reports about the employees to any prospective new employer.

The employer responded:

"But what if we could prove the employee was a dangerously incompetent lout. You mean we couldn't send that along to the new employer?"

To which the employees said:

"Oh, but want about his good points?"

Thomas Amato

River Forest

Don't cut parents out of classrooms

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

"So, Johnny, what happened in school today?"

"Sorry, Dad, I can't tell you. They made us sign confidentiality agreements that forbid us from telling anyone what was said in class."

A couple of weeks ago I wrote, to the dismay and disagreement of a few, about how tough it is becoming for parents to be involved in their children's lives, what with "it-takes-a-village-to-raise-your-kids" adherents getting in the way. Now comes the ultimate:

North suburban Deerfield High School freshmen last month were required to sign a "confidentiality agreement" promising not to disclose to anyone what was said in a mandatory class involving one of the touchiest of subjects: homosexuality.

To be fair, the class was viewed in two ways:

•The school said the class was about building acceptance, tolerance and safety for bullied or marginalized students, such as gays. A panel of gay and pro-gay students explained to the students what it is like to be homosexual in an unfriendly, hostile or even threatening atmosphere and explored ways for students to become more accepting.

•North Shore Student Advocacy, the opponents, said the presentation by members of the Straight and Gay Alliance student group was an attempt to cast homosexuality in a positive light without presenting opposing views. The opponents feared that 14-year-olds who disagreed would be unfairly burdened with the label of hater or religious fanatic.

Which description is more accurate is difficult to determine, because parents have not been allowed to sit in on the class—which is understandable because there's nothing like the presence of parents to stifle discussion—and a promised videotape has not been made available. All the parents have to go on is what their children tell them, which is ironic because the children aren't supposed to be talking about it to anyone.

My first reaction was disbelief and outrage—at the unprecedented arrogance and stupidity of telling children that they can't talk about what's going on in school, even, presumably, with their parents. The know-it-alls were spinning out of control.

But a reading of the promise that the students were asked to sign indicates that it was more likely the result of a well-intentioned effort to protect children from being ridiculed and punished by their peers for what they say.

"We don't repeat what someone says in class outside of the classroom except if we have permission from the person that said it," the statement read. "We will not continue a conversation outside of class without permission from all the people that were involved during the class."

Such a promise, of course, makes it impossible to discuss what happened in class with the people who matter most: parents. The agreement may have been done without the intention of cutting out parents, which doesn't say much about how carefully this project was thought out. At best, the pledge was well intentioned but naive and ill-considered. At worst, it was really intended to hide a controversial issue from parents. To borrow from the Las Vegas marketing slogan: "What happens in school, stays in school."

Concerned Women for America a conservative advocacy group, later said the school principal told it that the pledge was a mistake. But I think there's a bigger mistake than the pledge itself: The project is an unrealistic attempt to create a non-judgmental environment about a complicated and controversial political, social, ethical and moral issue. Take another look at the pledge statement: "Each person has a chance to say what he or she wants without having it debated or denied or attacked, or agreed with or supported. It gets to stand on its own, without being taken over by someone else, either by cross talk [debating, denying] or piggybacking [agreeing, supporting]."

Here is an attempt to scrub a discussion clean of debate, disagreement or—astonishingly—agreement. It assumes that "choosing sides" is a horrible way to come to a mutual understanding.

This is not the real world. Nor is it right when one side is given an official platform to make value statements, as it was in the Deerfield class. Never mind the gross unfairness of it and how it biases the discussion against people who disagree with the appointed few. Worse, it reflects a fanciful belief that we can and must avoid "hurt feelings," even at the cost of an idea that the recently deceased author Kurt Vonnegut so dearly valued: That from cantankerous disagreement we can extract the real and true.

At least that's what I think, and if that causes hurt feelings at Deerfield High School, too bad.

And now, good news from Iraq

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces there, also reported the recent capture of "more than the usual numbers" of weapons caches. One consisted of more than 120 improvised explosive devices, some of which were the "particularly lethal" anti-armor munitions being used against U.S. troops.

Perhaps you're wondering what a straight news story is doing here, in a commentary section. It's because there doesn't seem to be enough room in the media's straight news sections to report positive developments in the Iraq war. So, as a reader service, I am writing a news story involving the possible saving of at least 120 GIs' lives.

This story is based on a PBS interview of Petraeus by Jim Lehrer and reporting by Sharon Behn of The Washington Times. (Yes, I know that liberals consider the Times to be a hopelessly biased conservative rag, much as many conservatives consider The New York Times to be a hopelessly biased liberal rag.) For what I can tell, no one reported Petraeus' comments with this emphasis.

"There have been some encouraging indicators in Baghdad, in terms of a reduction in sectarian murders," he said. "There have been some families returning; there have certainly been revivals in the markets," which he called one of the main measures of progress. He particularly noted the return of "tens of thousands" of Iraqis to an enormous, vibrant, milelong market because of increased feelings of security. "... [T]here are soccer leagues out here. The national soccer team is on its practice fields. There are signs of normality in Baghdad, albeit, again, in a city that may have been hit by violence on that given day." He pointed to a "major development" in Anbar province, a place that "many were ready to write off as a lost cause."

"[A]ll of a sudden you have cities all the way from the border, Al Qaim through Haditha, Hit, Ramadi and Fallujah, where tribes have volunteered for the Iraqi security forces." He said it is a "stunning development and reflects the frustration that the Sunni Arab tribes in Anbar have had with Al Qaeda and what Al Qaeda has done to them, to their sheiks, their families, their young men and, frankly, to their businesses and livelihoods. It has really had a devastating effect. And they have said, 'No more,' and stood up and voted with themselves and with their young men."

Petraeus corrected Lehrer's misimpression that large numbers of troops had been pulled out of the countryside to protect Baghdad. Actually, coalition forces are taking on the enemy as they have migrated out of Baghdad, as expected, pursuing them to new fronts.

Asked about how he can see any "progress" in the doubling of deaths among Iraqi police, Petraeus said, "One thing it tells us is that Iraqi security forces, certainly, are on the front lines and are fighting and dying for their country. They are committed to this endeavor." Meanwhile, the Iraqi government, noting the success of recent raids on death squads, eased the Baghdad curfew to 10 p.m. The action came as some Iraqis hailed the improved security. One woman, Layla, noted that shops were beginning to reopen on the shell-pocked main street of her neighborhood, which once bustled with juice stands, coffee shops, hamburger restaurants and small kitchenware stores.

So, where's the bad news in the story? Just as so many stories don't report the good news, I'm leaving out the bad. It seems only fair when The New York Times, for example, reported Petraeus' comments deep in a story headlined: "Bush Acknowledges Americans Weary of Iraq War." And only briefly, missing the positive comments. In the news business, what's "normal" isn't usually reported because, by definition, it isn't news. Unless it is in a country that is supposedly in ever-deepening chaos. Then the rare appearance of normality, indeed, should be news. But the appearance of normality in Iraq doesn't get reported. Maybe that means that the media consider the increasing normality in Iraq the norm. Or maybe it's just bad reporting.

Let parents rule on kids' issues

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

With the development of a vaccine that protects women against cervical cancer, some people think it is a good idea to require that all pre-pubescent girls be inoculated. That, indeed, may be a good idea. But would the advocates of such mandatory inoculations be as enthusiastic if a yet-undiscovered HIV-AIDS vaccine was mandated for high-risk groups, such as gays, IV drug users and women married to bisexual men? They too are endangered by a life-threatening disease, and if a vaccine can be forced on children, then why not adults?

Not that I'm seriously proposing such a measure; it's just a thought experiment that might illustrate some of the problems of finding the appropriate balance between individual liberty and government intrusiveness. More to the point: How much power should the government have in telling parents how to raise their children? Or the reverse: How much power should the government have to prevent parents from raising their children as they see fit?

Some legislation now being debated by Illinois legislators in Springfield illustrates the last point: House Bill 317 would give every girl the right to have an abortion without telling her parents. All they'd need do is tell a "specified adult family member or a member of the clergy." It's as if to say that notifying a sympathetic aunt is the same as notifying a parent.

This issue keeps popping up because years ago the legislature passed a law affirming a parent's right and obligation to know if his child is to have an abortion. But because a politically motivated state Supreme Court refused for years to issue rules to implement the law, it never took effect. Now, after a court more acquainted with its obligation to enforce the law issued the rules, the abortion lobby is pushing this bill that would invalidate previous ones. About two-thirds of the states have a parental notification law, and polls consistently show that wide majorities of the American public favor such notification. The pro and con arguments have been well trod; I'd just add an observation: Have parents done such a bad job of raising children that the job should be turned over to the children themselves?

House Bill 1727 would require libraries to install filters on their computers to protect children from Internet porn. It was introduced in the face of vehement opposition from groups with radical individual-rights agendas, such as the American Library Association, which believes that kids should have access to "anything they want" in their libraries, according to ALA literature. This is a parent empowerment act, which would help create a safer environment for their children when they are in their libraries.

Some folks think this is a conflict between free speech and parental rights. It isn't. There's no law or court decision that requires libraries to stock porn, whether on the shelves in their youth sections or on their child-accessible computers. That is so sensible that you're right to wonder why a law is required.

House Bill 466 would further limit the number of charter schools in Illinois, denying parents and their children greater choice in how they will use their tax money to educate their children. Charter schools have proven they can develop successful teaching methods and environments, if they are free of the suffocating and costly regulations of school bureaucracies and labor unions. And there's the obvious explanation for why the unions are so anxious to pass this legislation. That they are not even slightly ashamed to be demanding such anti-child, anti-parent legislation says much about their blind self-interest.

There is a constant struggle between just how much control government should have in child-raising. Sometimes government must step in, for example, to prevent abuse, to protect children against diseases and to provide a safe environment. But there should be no argument when government gives every child the right to a virtually secret abortion and to view pornography in public places with official sanction, while forcing most children to attend schools crippled by red tape and exhausted, unmotivated, uncaring or incompetent teachers.

Free Speech and the Right to Disagree

By Dennis Byrne
RealClearPolitics

If a high school gives students permission to openly express their support of homosexuality, then why shouldn't other students be allowed to voice their disapproval?

A federal court judge in Chicago might have to answer that question after a high school student in Naperville, IL, a suburb southwest of Chicago, filed suit charging that her civil rights were violated by school officials by not letting her wear a pro-heterosexual T-shirt last year.

Neuqua Valley High School's refusal to let Heidi Zamecnik, 17, wear a T-shirt saying "Be happy, not gay" on the back and "My day of silence, straight alliance" on the front was especially egregious because it came on the same day that the school permitted other students on the national "Day of Silence" to openly express their support of homosexuality.

Read more at RealClearPolitics.com

Games plan tough to follow

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

Hey, wait a minute. I thought that Mayor Richard M. Daley said holding the 2016 Olympics in Chicago wouldn't cost taxpayers anything.

Now we discover it could cost hundreds of millions. Of course, some cynics might say, Daley made the promise before the election (BE) and now it is after the election (AE) when everything said earlier is off the table. But I don't think the election had anything to do with it. He could have unveiled the complex financing plan the day before the election and who would have cared or understood?

A broken promise isn't the problem with the plan; it's the financing itself, which might be compared to a house of cards, if I understand it correctly. Which I'm not sure I do, but I guess that's the point. Columnists have more fun writing about outgoing Ald. Arenda Troutman's (20th) outrageous comparison of the 2016 Olympics with Adolf Hitler's 1936 version than trying to fathom the details of the Games' financing. You can skip a couple of paragraphs if you're not interested in details and take it for granted that if it involves local politicians, there's something odorous about it. So here goes:

The Metropolitan Pier & Exposition Authority (McPier), a city-state agency controlled by the city, sells the air rights it owns over land south of McCormick Place to a developer who builds walls of apartment buildings for the Olympians that are converted later to commercial housing, and McPier gives the money to the city, which gives it to Chicago 2016, the local Olympic organizing committee that likes to work out of the public view, which uses the money to help fund a temporary Olympic stadium, which later is converted to public use for concerts and so forth, but McPier retains a part ownership in the property, which it then sells outright or leases to an operations manager.

Now, if this and other aspects of the Olympic financing end up in red ink, Chicago must come up with $500 million in guarantees out of the public purse and who knows where else, but the mayor soothingly assures everyone that he remains committed to his promise not to use public money to support the Olympics. After the City Council was briefed privately about these and presumably the other intricacies--and surely, they understood them all--it later overwhelmingly approved the package like good boys and girls.

The public was kept in the dark until the Tribune sniffed it out. When asked later about his pledge that it wouldn't cost taxpayers anything, Daley responded, "we're not putting any actual money in," meaning, I guess, that selling public assets--the air rights--isn't actually putting any actual money into it. Maybe that's technically right, even though city, suburban and state taxpayers no longer own the assets--whose value may have spiked up to $100 million thanks to the Olympics-generated demand, even if Chicago is not awarded the Olympics. It's sort of like not actually putting actual money into the purchase of a new car when you trade in the old. I guess.

All of Daley's great assurances are not comforting when the cost of the 2012 London Olympics has tripled to $18 billion. In the face of this, we are expected to believe that Chicago can pull off the Games for $5 billion. Daley assures us, again, that 2012 and 2016 are not comparable, because Chicago would not be building a lot of new stuff, like London. We've already got the United Center, U.S. Cellular and Wrigley Fields, O'Hare International Airport and so forth, he said. "They had to build all the parks, all the transit," he said, as if the CTA will really impress the Olympic selection committee.

When Daley first suggested getting the Games here, I said the idea should be given a chance to prove itself. So far, the proof we've been allowed to peek at hasn't been all that convincing. But that apparently doesn't matter to the Olympic planners here; they said some secrecy is necessary because we don't want to give anything away to our competitors in Los Angeles.

But there's also some of the public-be-damned way the public's business is conducted here, based on the belief that the public, even if it could understand what's going on, would screw things up. That's too bad; the skepticism that they've already created with this approach hasn't served their cause well, because the project won't get anywhere without public support. At least that's the theory.

Handgun bans' logic got shot full of holes

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

Our good and well-meaning friends in Chicago, Wilmette and other towns that have outlawed the possession of handguns, even in the sanctity and privacy of the home, might want to notice that the nation's second-highest court has tossed out a similar weapons ban.

By overturning a Washington, D.C., handgun ban 10 days ago, the district's federal appeals court affirmed that bearing arms is an individual right, in existence even prior to the writing of the Constitution. The ruling puts the court at odds with 10 of the 11 other federal appeals courts, which have ruled that bearing arms is a just a collective right, meant only to ensure that the civilians who serve in state militias are armed.

This doesn't mean that the D.C. decision applies here, but the conflicting rulings invite the intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court, where three sitting justices--Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia and David H. Souter--said in a 1998 dissent that "bearing arms" goes beyond a collective right in the context of a well-ordered militia. Combined with the votes of recent conservative appointees, the high court could sweep away draconian laws that don't even allow the possession of a handgun to protect yourself and your family in your home.

Self-defense is hardly an esoteric legal question for Hale DeMar, a Wilmette resident who was fined $750 in 2003 after shooting a man who burglarized his home for two consecutive nights. DeMar's fine wasn't for defending himself but for possessing a handgun, meaning that he should have used a baseball bat, I guess. Or called out the militia. (The burglar, Morio Billings, recovered from his wounds and got a 7-year sentence. He got out after serving 2 1/2 years and was promptly arrested for burglary, in Wilmette.)

The idea that you can't use arms to protect yourself in your own home would have stunned James Madison and the other authors of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, if the appeals court's reading of history is correct.

The court's decision came in the case of a federal guard who was permitted to carry a gun at work but, upon application to the District of Columbia, was forbidden to keep one at home. The guard and other plaintiffs sued, claiming they had a right to possess "functional weapons" at home that would be readily accessible for self-defense. They weren't challenging laws against carrying a gun outside the home or other restrictions, such as handgun registration.

The district argued that the wording of the 2nd Amendment ("A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed") does not "bestow any rights on individuals except, perhaps, when an individual serves in an organized militia such as today's National Guard," the court said in summarizing the case. This is called the "collective-right" model, often cited by gun-control advocates, as opposed to the individual-right model, often cited by right-to-arms advocates.

Some collective-rights advocates go as far as arguing that the 2nd Amendment was written for the exclusive purpose of preserving state militias, and therefore individuals have no claim whatsoever on its protections. Some argue that there's no individual right because the "militia" of the late 1700s no longer exists; or that today's analogue, the National Guard, supplies its own weapons, or that today's weapons are different than flintlocks. To carry the logic of that last notion to its extreme, I supposed its proponents would argue that you can keep all the flintlocks you want at home.

The court swept away this logic with a close examination of the history, concluding: "The pre-existing right to keep and bear arms was premised on the commonplace assumption that individuals would use them for these private purposes [hunting, self-defense] in addition to whatever militia service they would be obligated to perform for the state." Self-defense, the court said, meant resistance to either private lawlessness or the "depredations" of a tyrannical government, foreign or domestic.

I'd add this to what the court said: Arguing that you have only a "collective" right to bear arms as part of a militia is as ludicrous as saying that the Bill of Rights protects your free speech rights only as a part of a larger group, such as the American Civil Liberties Union.

Self-defense is a self-evident human right. Thankfully, a court finally has reaffirmed that the Constitution and common sense are in alignment on your right to defend yourself, using reasonable force (i.e. a handgun, but not a bazooka) within your own home.

Moral musings instead of fiscal management

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

"What I'm proposing is big, and historic. It solves all the problems we've been talking about for 30 years."

--Gov. Rod Blagojevich, describing his budget

Nothing better reveals Blagojevich's delusions than that defense he made of his fantasy budget last week on WGN radio. Here we've been flailing away for 30 years trying to solve the state's health care, education, pension, deficit and other crushing problems. Until now. Fear not; here's Rod.

The sad part is that some people actually believe it. Perhaps even Blagojevich himself. Certainly, the education, health-care and labor union lobbies, among others, believe it, because they, like the governor, are committed to the idea that scattering lots of money their way will solve everything. Already, they're saying that people who love children must support the budget; implying, of course, that if you don't, you don't love children.

The proposals in Blagojevich's State of the State speech rest on his assertion that they are prescribed by "a moral imperative." Good versus bad. Virtue versus evil. I presume that those who indignantly tell me to stop imposing my morality on others now will turn their wrath on the governor.

Actually, the governor and I agree that the public policy is informed by morality. Most laws have some moral component, the most obvious being the one against homicide. But here's where the governor is wrong: Yes, we have a moral imperative to educate our children. But no, that doesn't mean that the means of getting there has equal moral certitude. My saying that Blagojevich's budget isn't the best way to do it doesn't make me evil. If it does, then I'll tell you what is immoral. It is wrong to:

- Promise things you know you can't deliver, as does Blagojevich; to make false promises to those who are desperate for help and to feed their cynicism when your promises are broken.

- Jeopardize the pensions of state employees with "the largest pension obligation bond in history" (this from House Speaker Michael Madigan), as it is stupid for you to pay off massive credit card debt by charging it to another card. Even if it's at a slightly lower rate, it still doesn't solve your problem, as Blagojevich would have us believe.

- Raise taxes so high and inequitably that it'll drive jobs from the state.

- Sustain ever-larger deficits, possibly leading the state into bankruptcy, while pretending that you're not.

- Propose all sorts of extravagant new programs without solving the problems at hand.

- Tell whoppers.

Take how he claims that he balanced the budget by eliminating the $5 billion deficit he inherited. Like statistics, budgets can be made to say anything. The truth is closer to Democratic State Comptroller Dan Hynes' figures, which show a fiscal year 2006 deficit of $2.3 billion.

Or take his claims about the "unfairness" of the state's income tax system. For all of Blagojevich's rhetoric, you might get the impression that individuals ("the people") are paying twice the rate of businesses. In fact, the state income tax rate for individuals is 3 percent of net income; for businesses, it is 4.8 percent.

Logic would dictate that if loopholes in the state tax code allow large businesses to "legally forgo paying billions in state income taxes," as Blagojevich claims, then you should fix the loopholes, not junk the entire system in favor of one that creates new problems.

Blagojevich, for example, insists that his proposal for taxing businesses transactions wouldn't drive away jobs. In other words, he says a new tax that supposedly will extract billions more dollars from businesses that aren't "paying their fair share" won't discourage businesses from staying in or moving to Illinois. Tell me, how does that work?

There's a reason why it's more reasonable to tax a corporation's net profits instead of its gross revenues from sales. A company pulling in a lot of sales revenues may actually be losing money on the bottom line. It's unfair to put an extra burden on firms that are breaking even or losing money, taxing them at the same rate as companies whose margins on sales are much bigger. It's the same reason that you're taxed on your income after deductions, instead of your actual wages.

Well, that's just a few of the many problems with this budget, problems that are causing members of Blagojevich's own party to balk. Even those who believe that government can solve "all the problems we've been talking about for 30 years" aren't biting.

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Fix Bad Government with More Government?

By Dennis Byrne
RealClearPolitics

The partisans who are scoring political points by gnashing their teeth over the outpatient failures at Walter Reed Army Medical Center are missing the point: The government did it.

It is especially aggravating because many of these same partisans want to turn the nation's health care system over to...the government.

Or have they somehow missed the fact that the care of veterans is the responsibility of the government? Do they somehow believe that a single-payer health care system, or universal health care, or whatever else they want to call it will be immune to the kind of bureaucratic insensitivity, apathy and bungling that is integral to government?

Would the stampeding fault-finders please explain to the world how they would ensure that civilian outpatients, under a bureaucracy rivaling the military's, would not be ignored in the same manner that the military bureaucracy abandoned the wounded veterans in Building 18? With hundreds of millions of civilian patients, instead of thousands of wounded veterans, would someone give us a clue how the government would keep track of them all? With outpatient veterans getting lost under mountains of paperwork and red tape, how would government be more responsive to the needs of hundreds

Read more at RealClearPolitics

Is Obama Black Enough?

By Dennis Byrne
Human Events

It turns out that Barack Obama is black enough to be President after all.

For a while there it looked like he wasn’t, at least among African Americans who said that he didn’t share their heritage of American slavery, and therefore couldn’t understand The Experience.

Many of these same African-Americans, however, called a white man -- Bill Clinton -- the “first black President” because he understood The Experience, even though he didn’t actually live it. That sentiment apparently had rubbed off on Hilary Rodham Clinton who, by extension, presumably was the first black First Lady and looked like she would inherit the black vote in her presidential quest.

But wait. Polling last week is showing that Obama is cutting into her popularity among black voters. A Zogby poll last Wednesday showed that Obama actually leads Clinton among black Democratic voters, 44% to 30%, compared with a January poll having her ahead of Obama 60% to 20%. A Washington Post/ABC News poll last Tuesday picked up the same trend, showing Obama closing in on Clinton.

This, of course, confounds certain black elites (activists and commentators) who obliquely questioned Obama’s racial authenticity. They explained that blacks would stay with Clinton because here’s a white person (Clinton) who has a better understanding of The Experience than a black person (Obama) who hasn’t had The Experience. This may be a good thing, because it shows that the race of the person is not as important as how the person votes on race. At least that’s what passes for progress these days.

Not that any of this conforms to reality or the rules of logic.

Read more at Human Events

Transit `reform,' yet again

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

Commuters will be happy to know why their CTA train and bus service stinks: It's the organization chart's fault.

And here you thought it was malfeasance, corruption or incompetence.

We have been told by legislators, consultants and assorted observers that the Toonerville Trolley, the Chicago Transit Authority's sorry excuse for "rapid" transit; crummy maintenance; decaying equipment; underserved neighborhoods and communities, and now, the tiresome warnings of fare increases and service reductions can be laid at the feet of how the Regional Transportation Authority is organized.

And therefore, for the third time in more than 30 years, we're about to have another political battle over a major restructuring of the region's mass transit system. And just like before, it eventually might not matter a fig because some politicians will see it as a way to grab extra power over the lode of jobs and contracts.

We're about to relive history, folks, and it ain't pretty.

Back in the early 1970s, when the remnants of a once glorious but bankrupt private transit operation serving the city and suburbs were wheezing their last breath, the government took over responsibility for funding and running it. Thus the RTA's creation.

Mayor Richard J. Daley first opposed its creation, not wanting to hand the suburbs (and Republicans) the slightest control over the CTA (even though it served about 30 suburbs). Eventually Daley saw that what the suburbs might do to him, he could do to them. So he supported its creation and engineered the installation of a public works commission to run it.

Thus began years of ineffectiveness, thanks to infighting over how to divvy up revenue and service between the city and suburbs and their political potentates.

The RTA, as created, was intended to exercise tight professional control over the operations and finances of the CTA and the suburban rail and bus operations. It didn't, and sure enough, a decade later, another financial crisis arrived. So did a major reorganization, which decentralized some of the RTA's powers, and pushed them down into the operating units: the CTA and the newly created Metra rail and Pace suburban bus operations.

Not unexpectedly, the wasteful duplication of service, contracting and administrative functions didn't end, but that wasn't the whole problem. Mass transit was underfunded, thanks in part to the reluctance to charge riders what they should be paying (more than what they are now), generous CTA labor contracts and high CTA absenteeism, among other systemic problems.

Those problems existed--and will continue to exist--because the political powers in this feudal system did not allow the RTA to impose a solution.

The promised benefits of consolidation, cooperation and coordination under the original RTA still echo in my ears from when I covered the agency's creation in the early 1970s. Riders were guaranteed some form of "universal fare card," which would permit easier transfer between bus and train systems, thus attracting more riders. And where does it stand?

Last year--32 years later--a consultant came up with some recommendations for finally getting it done. Last month, the RTA announced that a deal had been worked out--ta-dah--to install some CTA transit-card vending machines in two more downtown train stations, so Metra riders who ride the CTA in the second leg of their commutes don't have to go elsewhere to buy their CTA card.

Should have happened years ago. Pathetic.

This is more than a matter of rivalries between agencies. It is a reflection of the deeper political divisions that drive the agencies' actions and inactions. There is no one willing to crack down on the CTA--the main source of the RTA's problems--because no one dares take on the city's power, meaning Richard M. Daley's power.

And Daley can't reform, even if he wanted to, the CTA, as he claims to have done with the schools and the housing authority, without the legislature's help, meaning our money. But the state isn't in any better shape with Gov. Rod Blagojevich's extravagant and utopian promises for other pet projects. The pressure is on.

There'll be a lot of talk about giving the RTA a stronger hand, to improve coordination and so forth. But will it be all talk? More important, will a Democratic governor and a Democratic legislature really be willing to step over the line and crack down on the CTA, especially in light of Daley's landslide re-election?

Or will the legislature again just reshuffle the organization chart to make it look like something has happened, while continuing business as usual?

Hollywood in Fantasyland

By Dennis Byrne
RealClearPolitics

Among the environmental slogans sprinting across the big screen during the Oscar's paean to Al Gore was this stumper: We can reduce human greenhouse gas emissions to "zero."

I might have read it wrong; it might have said that we can reduce increases in the emissions to zero, which still is utopian silliness at best, or, if it were remotely possible, a formula for global economic disaster.

In any case, it is true. We can eliminate all human global warming emissions--if all 6.7 billion of us on Earth were dead. That way, there'd be no one around exhaling huge quantities of carbon dioxide, reportedly the most ruinous of the greenhouse gases.

Read more at RealClearPolitics