Ronald E. Yates's Blog, page 58
September 4, 2020
Anne Keegan: An Original Lost to the Ages
The other day I was thinking about some of the most interesting people I met and worked with during a 27-year-career as a reporter and foreign correspondent with the Chicago Tribune.
One of the first names that popped into my head was Anne Keegan, a one-of-a-kind reporter, and columnist for the Tribune. Anne and I worked together for several years before I was posted to Tokyo as the Tribune’s Far East Correspondent.
She was a true original. When she passed away at 68 in 2011, after a lingering illness, it was still a shock. That same day I posted about Anne on my blog.
Since then, the Chicago Headline Club has created the Anne Keegan Award for distinguished journalism about ordinary people in extraordinarily well-reported and well-written prose–Anne Keegan’s specialty.
Some of you may not have seen that original post, so I thought I would share it with my followers again.
At the end of my post is a short YouTube video produced by Anne’s husband, Len Aronson. Take a look. I think you will enjoy it.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Anne Keegan: An Original Lost to the Ages
Today I learned that Anne Keegan, a friend and colleague from my days with the Chicago Tribune, passed away. What a loss to Chicago journalism.
[image error] Anne Keegan
How can I describe Anne Keegan? She was a walking, talking paradox. She could be tough, with an ability to display, at a moment’s notice, the vocabulary of an angry truck driver or Marine drill sergeant. But she could also be sensitive and pliable, almost nun-like in the deep felt emotions she (occasionally) wore on her sleeve.
She was what some people call a jelly bean. Hard on the outside, soft on the inside.
It was those qualities that made Anne Keegan a first rate reporter and a great writer. In fact, she was one of the greatest writers I ever had the pleasure of working with at the Chicago Tribune–which once upon a time, was a truly great newspaper.
The 1970s and 1980s were Anne Keegan’s prime years at the Tribune–though they could have stretched on into the 1990s and even 2000s had the paper’s editors made an effort to understand her and find a way to use her enormous and unique talent. As it was, Anne left the paper the same year I did (1997) when it became clear that the Tribune had long ceased to be a writers’ paper in favor of one that encouraged predictable and formulaic journalism that made the bean counters and stockholders happy at the expense of originality.
During the 1970s and 1980s Anne was given a front page column at the Tribune–testimony to her talent at storytelling, which at its heart is what great journalism is all about. I first learned of Anne’s wonderful talents when I was working as the paper’s weekend city editor under managing editor Bill Jones.
Jones had an eye for talent and he knew how to encourage it and nurture it. Later editors at the Tribune seemed mystified by anybody who was the least bit iconoclastic, which is what Anne definitely was. Jones was not afraid of iconoclasts.
On Saturdays and Sundays when the paper was essentially in my hands I was blessed to have a group of reporters on the City Desk who were some of the best to ever wield a notebook and pen in Chicago. There was Mike Sneed, now a successful columnist at the Sun-Times. There was Jack Fuller, who went on to become the Tribune’s editor and then president and CEO of the Chicago Tribune. There was Bill Gaines, who would go to win two Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting. And there was Anne Keegan.
My job was easy. I would come in on Saturday morning and announce that we needed a good local story for the front page of the Sunday paper. After everyone had finished their coffee and read through the Sun-Times, Chicago Daily News and Chicago Today (in those days there were four competing dailies in Chicago–not to mention City News Bureau and the Chicago Defender), I would simply say: “Go find me a good reader for the front page.”
Keegan and Sneed would be out the door in flash. And invariably, one of them would return with just what was needed.
I recall once when Keegan was on assignment to do a story on truckers who were angry about something–it may have been the 55 mph speed limit imposed during the first oil crisis in 1973. She called the office from a pay phone at a truck stop to dictate a story. After she had finished one of the truckers she was writing about grabbed the phone and asked:
“What kind of girl reporters does the Tribune have? This one can out-swear all us!”
Then, I heard Keegan’s unmistakable voice in the background: “Don’t call me a girl, you asshole!”
I laughed out loud. That was Anne Keegan, alright. She could hold her own with any potty mouthed truck driver.
The story she wrote belied her skills with Anglo-Saxon expletives. It was fair, provided context and was even, by Keegan’s tough standards, a little sympathetic.
In the mid-1970s I was posted to Tokyo as the Tribune’s Far East Correspondent and Anne and I never really worked together again.
However, I followed her career and she followed mine. A few times Anne came to Asia to write stories about a range of topics such as S.E. Asian refugees.
Invariably, as she did in Chicago, Anne would unearth characters who found their nirvana in places like Bangkok.
Her stories about some of these people were wonderful studies of the human condition and spirit–people such as A. J. “Tiger” Rydberg, a gruff, rough and tumble construction worker who built airstrips all over South Vietnam during the war.
In the 1970s and early 1980s Rydberg operated a watering hole in Bangkok called the “Tiger’s Den” for former CIA Air America pilots, off shore oil riggers, itinerant hacks and various and sundry soldiers of fortune. Anne discovered “Tiger” and told me about him.
“Look him up, Yatsie,” she said. (She always called me Yatsie, never Ron). “You’ll like him.”
I did look him up and she was right, I did like him.
“You work with Anne Keegan?” Rydberg asked me when I introduced myself to him in his Tiger’s Den. “What a broad! She can out-cuss me and I thought I knew every swearword in the English language.”
She also did a wonderful story on a Chicago priest, Father Raymond Brennan, who operated an orphanage for Thai children in the Thai coastal city of Pattaya, some 120 miles southeast of Bangkok. Her powerful story, along with Tribune photographer Val Mazzenga’s riveting photographs, resulted in an avalanche of donations for the orphanage that housed about 150 homeless children.
After Anne left the Tribune she continued to write. In 2007 she published “On the Street Doing Life,” a book about former Chicago cop Mike Cronin who spent years working on Chicago’s rough, gang-infested West Side. It is a gritty story about a cop walking a fine line between toughness and fairness. Eventually Cronin rose through the ranks to head two of the Chicago Police Department’s top units: Narcotics and Gangs. Cronin did all of this despite the fact that he lost a leg in Vietnam and had to convince the Chicago Police Department to hire him despite his disability.
[image error]
Anne also wrote a children’s book called “A Cat for Claire” that, at first glance seems like a significant departure from the kinds of stories she was famous for. In fact, however, that book displays Anne’s “soft” side–a side of her character that she was very careful about sharing. In this case the book was written for her granddaughter.
Another side of Anne Keegan’s disposition was her almost total lack of ego–a rarity in newsrooms then and now. She never boasted about her work or sought celebrity from her ground-breaking stories; never blew her own horn; never allowed herself to become the story, the way so many journalists do today in this self-absorbed era of tweeting and ubiquitous social media.
As she once told the Chicago Reader: “I may have led a very interesting life, but there are people whose stories are far more fascinating than mine.”
And nobody told them better than Anne Keegan did.
September 1, 2020
The Cowards of ‘Cancel Culture’
All they care about is “canceling” those who disagree with their perverse dogmas. In this case, the person they are now trying to cancel is FOX News anchor and commentator Tucker Carlson. Fortunately, they have neither the brains nor the wherewithal to accomplish the cancellation of Mr. Carlson or the termination of his highly popular television show, Tucker Carlson Tonight.
The Cowards of
‘Cancel Culture’
BY: VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Each generation deals with its own manifestations of age-old mob frenzies, bullying and public shaming. Salem, Mass., had its witch trials in the 1690s. The 1950s endured its McCarthyism. And we now are enduring our “cancel culture.”
But 21st-century public shaming reaches not thousands but tens of millions. And it does so instantaneously on the internet and on social media — too often, all under the cloak of masked Twitter handles.
[image error] Victor Davis Hanson
Our generation’s bane is a many-headed hydra of doxing, revenge porn and canceling out the careers of public figures. Smears are predicated on the assumption that those targeted will panic; they will apologize and seek penance, reducing themselves to timid careerists and fawning toadies. The aim is electronic Trotskyization — making one disappear from computer screens as if they had never existed.
Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson is now the mob’s latest target.
His sin?
In our times of urban riot, arson, looting and violence, Carlson noted that Kenosha, Wis., had “devolved into anarchy because the authorities in charge of the city abandoned it. People in charge, from the governor of Wisconsin on down, refused to enforce the law.”
That was a factual statement. It was not just his own personal observation. Carlson’s point was borne out both by the furor of the anti-police protesters who quickly screamed for help when hurt, and by those who took up arms to protect stores when no police were to be found.
But what put Carlson’s neck in the mob’s noose was his further observation about the police: “They stood back and they watched Kenosha burn. So are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder? How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”
Note that Carlson was simply repeating an age-old adage that when the police do not hold a monopoly on the use of force, others less trained, often more unsavory, fill that void. Therefore, we should not become suddenly shocked that pre-adults convince themselves that they are needed to protect businesses as general lawlessness escalates on its way to murder.
Again, Carlson’s point was not to condone the 17-year-old shooter — a criminal court will adjudicate his innocence or guilt. Carlson simply noted that both the teenager and those he shot are the tragic results when supposed adults in the room — governors, mayors, district attorneys, police chiefs — fail to guarantee the civic rights and tranquility of American citizens. Does anyone watching the last three “summer of love” months believe authorities have protected small businesses and kept the calm in Portland, Seattle, Chicago or Kenosha?
[image error] Rittenhouse (seated) Shoots Man Pointing a Pistol at his Head
Almost immediately the Twitter global throng mobilized to equate Carlson with the shooter himself, to render Carlson not just untenable as a news anchor but toxic to his advertisers. Or, as a former Obama official tweeted, “Tucker straight up endorsing vigilante murder on the show tonight. What advertisers are still ok with this?”
Note how the pack has not only tried and convicted Carlson as an abettor to murder. The horde also has prejudged the shooter as a murderer — before a court has even heard evidence of whether he was attacked and, in panic, shot in self-defense, or instead gratuitously killed without need.
How ironic that the Twitter mob deplores vigilantism yet its brand is an electronic lynching without weighing evidence or cross-examination — all from the safety of their smartphones.
Carlson’s mob knows all this.
But they also assume that their scatter-gun tactics of character defamation usually work — although, recently, a variety of intellectuals and writers such as J.K. Rowling, Steven Pinker or Yale classics professor Joshua Katz have said “no” and scattered the mob.
And this election year, Carlson is a big target, given his growing cable news audience and his often-scorching commentaries about the past three months of escalating urban violence.
The cancel culture feels that if it can take out Carlson, it can wound its old nemesis, Fox News, and send a warning to any other journalists who dare argue that blue-state officials are either oblivious to the dangers of unchecked rioting or see it as apparently useful in this contentious election year.
Part of the intensity of venom shown Carlson reflects Democratic fears that the news cycle is changing. Polls suggest that keeping mum about the silence is backfiring politically.
The recent warnings from Nancy Pelosi that presidential campaign debates should be cancelled, from Hillary Clinton that Joe Biden should not concede even if defeated, and from CNN’s Don Lemon that it’s time for Democrats to condemn the violence, all reflect the fears of the mob as it lashes out.
Target Carlson is not alone, of course. This same week, social justice warriors took out a University of Southern California business professor for a lecture on cross-cultural speech patterns. His crime? Professor Greg Patton cited a Chinese word (na ge) for “that,” which to the outraged seemed similar in sound to an American racial slur.
Professor Patton was quickly unplugged from his virtual classroom by the officious dean of the USC business school, for the apparent thought crime of supposedly employing a coded slur.
Anyone who watched Patton’s classroom video knows that such a charge is an outright lie. The slur was similar to the late 1990s’ Salem witch-style epidemic of destroying the careers of any bureaucrats who had once naively used the ancient English adverb “niggardly” (meaning “stingily” or “greedily”) that linguistically has nothing to do with the N-word.
We have not just created millions of bored, ignorant online scolds but, rather, sleepless and vicious character assassins. They notch their smartphones with the names of their victims.
How ironic that, as bullies, they melt away when called out, while destroying the very institutions of tolerance and free speech they, too, will miss when the mob devours its own — as it eventually always does.
Victor Davis Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, columnist, and farmer. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for National Review. He is a Senior Fellow in classics and military history at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
August 30, 2020
We Are Being “Gaslighted” by the Media
I really enjoyed this perceptive piece on “gaslighting,” by Rip McIntosh and I wanted to share it with ForeignCorrespondent followers. Rip refers to the 1930 play, Gas Light, as the source of the term “gaslighting.” But my introduction to gaslighting came from the 1944 film “Gaslight” starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, and Joseph Cotton. If you haven’t seen it, get thee to Netflix and order it. It is very well done.
The point of Rip’s piece is this: even though we live in an era when there are no more gas lights in our homes, we are nevertheless being “gaslighted” by a variety of sources, including the media. Read on to discover how that is happening.
Gaslighting
by
Rip McIntosh
Have you ever asked yourself, ‘am I crazy?’ If you have ever asked yourself that, you’re not crazy. You’re most likely being gaslighted. Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse aimed at controlling a person by altering reality to the point where the person will doubt their own sanity.
The term “gaslighting” comes from a 1930’s play called Gas Light. The main character in the play literally tries to drive his wife crazy by gradually dimming the gas-powered lights in their home. When she notices the lights dimming, her husband not only denies that the lights are dimming, he convinces her that she is imagining it to the point where she questions her own sanity.
We are living in a perpetual state of gaslighting. The reality that we are being told by the media is at complete odds with what we are seeing with our own two eyes. And when we question the false reality that we are being presented, or we claim that what we see is that actual reality, we are vilified as racist or bigots or just plain crazy. You’re not racist. You’re not crazy. You’re being gaslighted.
New York State has twice as many deaths from Covid-19 than any other state, and New York has accounted for one fifth of all Covid-19 deaths, but we are told that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has handled the pandemic better than any other governor. But if we support policies of Governors whose states had only a fraction of the infections and deaths as New York, we’re called anti-science and want people to die. So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy?
No, you’re being gaslighted.
We see mobs of people looting stores, smashing windows, setting cars on fire and burning down buildings, but we are told that these demonstrations are peaceful protests. And when we call this destruction of our cities, riots, we are called racists. So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy?
No, you’re being gaslighted.
We see the major problem destroying many inner-cities is crime; murder, gang violence, drug dealing, drive-by shootings, armed robbery, but we are told that it is not crime, but the police that are the problem in the inner-cities. We are told we must defund the police and remove law enforcement from crime-riddled cities to make them safer. But if we advocate for more policing in cities overrun by crime, we are accused of being white supremacists and racists. So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy?
No, you’re being gaslighted.
The United States of America accepts more immigrants than any other country in the world. The vast majority of the immigrants are “people of color”, and these immigrants are enjoying freedom and economic opportunity not available to them in their country of origin, but we are told that the United States is the most racist and oppressive country on the planet, and if we disagree, we are called racist and xenophobic. So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy?
No, you’re being gaslighted.
Capitalist countries are the most prosperous countries in the world. The standard of living is the highest in capitalist countries. We see more poor people move up the economic ladder to the middle and even the wealthy class through their effort and ability in capitalist countries than any other economic system in the world, but we are told capitalism is an oppressive system designed to keep people down. So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy?
No, you’re being gaslighted.
Communist countries killed over 100 million people in the 20th century. Communist countries strip their citizens of basic human rights, dictate every aspect of their lives, treat their citizens like slaves, and drive their economies into the ground, but we are told that Communism is the fairest, most equitable, freest and most prosperous economic system in the world. So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy?
No, you’re being gaslighted.
The most egregious example of gaslighting is the concept of “white fragility”. You spend your life trying to be a good person, trying to treat people fairly and with respect. You disavow racism and bigotry in all its forms. You judge people solely on the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. You don’t discriminate based on race or ethnicity. But you are told you are a racist, not because of something you did or said, but solely because of the color of your skin. You know instinctively that charging someone with racism because of their skin color is itself racist. You know that you are not racist, so you defend yourself and your character, but you are told that your defense of yourself is proof of your racism. So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy?
No, you’re being gaslighted.
Gaslighting has become one of the most pervasive and destructive tactics in American politics. It is the exact opposite of what our political system was meant to be. It deals in lies and psychological coercion, and not the truth and intellectual discourse. If you ever ask yourself if you’re crazy, you are not.
Crazy people aren’t sane enough to ask themselves if they’re crazy. So, trust yourself, believe what’s in your heart. Trust our eyes over what we are told.
Never listen to the people who tell you that you are crazy because you are not, you’re being gaslighted.
August 28, 2020
Auf Wiedersehen, Germany?
A few weeks ago President Trump ordered the removal of about 12,000 American troops from Germany, leaving about 24,000 still on the ground there.
About half of the troops being withdrawn will return to the U.S. The rest will be redeployed to other NATO member nations such as Belgium, Italy, Poland, and perhaps a few Baltic countries.
This move by President Trump infuriated German Chancellor Angela Merkel because she insists removing the 12,000 Americans will not only weaken the NATO alliance but will hurt the German economy because many businesses that serve U.S. bases will be shuttered.
Before all of this happened, however, Germany concluded (over stringent American objections) an enormous natural gas deal with Russia that is currently under some U.S. sanctions. Russian energy exports to Germany are said to earn Russia $10 billion a year, with a likely doubling of that income once additional pipelines to Germany are completed.
[image error] Trump & Merkel Friends? Enemies?
While that deal angered Trump because he wanted Germany to buy its natural gas from the U.S., the main impetus for his extraction of American troops is this: Six years ago, all NATO members pledged to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense. Yet only eight of 30 so far have kept their word. Germany spends only about 1.4 percent of its GDP on defense.
As NATO’s largest, wealthiest, and most powerful European member, it sets the example for the rest of the alliance. Why should other NATO nations pony up 2 percent if Germany won’t?
Of course, President Trump doesn’t see it that way. Hence, the withdrawal of those 12,000 soldiers.
When I served in what was then West Germany in the 1960s during the height of the Cold War there were 250,000 American troops based there, along with another 100,000 or so French and British forces.
For those who do not know what the Cold War was (or who might have forgotten), it was an ideological conflict between the two world superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union that began in 1947 after World War Two and ended officially in 1991.
World War II left Germany a defeated and shattered land. Britain and France were drained and exhausted. America, which had remained intact during WW II, kept occupation troops in Germany until 1952. After that, under the auspices of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), the U.S. kept a quarter million troops in Germany.
NATO, an intergovernmental military alliance between 30 North American and European countries, was created in 1949. It is a system of collective defense in which its independent member states agree to mutually defend one another in response to an attack by any non-member nation.
With NATO in place, Germany quickly became the epicenter for the global conflict between Communism and Democracy, with East Germany a Soviet outpost and West Germany an American satellite. To say Germany was a tense place during the Cold War is putting it mildly.
To keep the Soviet and Warsaw Pact nations (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, and East Germany) in check, American, French, and British troops were spread out from the North Sea to Germany’s southern border with Switzerland and Austria.
But the focal point was something called the Fulda Gap, an area between the Hesse-Thuringian border and Frankfurt am Main. The gap consisted of two corridors of lowlands through which tanks could quickly move in a surprise attack by the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies.
It is named for the town of Fulda, which is nestled at the base of a natural gap in the hilly wooded terrain of West Germany. The Gap was strategically important because this is the corridor that the Warsaw Pact forces and the Soviet Union would have likely taken to invade Europe and cross the Rhine River.
For that matter, it might still be, though most military experts say in the improbable event that Russia attacks Europe the hot spot will not be the German border, but a more likely route will be from the east through the Baltic States or along the Russian border with Poland.
But in 1963, the Fulda Gap, which is just over an hour northeast of Frankfurt, was considered Ground Zero for both an attack and a nuclear war. It was something that was always on our minds because it meant that we would be thrown into the breach as cannon fodder.
As author Robert Kern wrote in his book, We Were Soldiers, Too:
“The brave men and women who served in West Germany were the first line of defense against the enemy horde that would come through the Fulda gap if hostilities ever began. Their mission was to hold that advancing horde for forty-eight hours until reinforcements arrived. None of them was expected to survive an invasion and they all knew it. This was what they had enlisted for, it was their job, and they did it proudly.”
How times have changed.
When I arrived in West Germany with the Army Security Agency in 1963, it wasn’t even twenty years since World War II ended. The scars of that horrendous conflict were still visible everywhere in Germany. Almost every city still had a few Bombed-out buildings and you could meet veterans of Germany’s World War II Wehrmacht in just about every bar and Gasthaus.
Fourteen of us lived in a small top-secret detachment in Bavaria and spent our time monitoring radio traffic between Eastern Bloc military units, listening for any sign that an attack was imminent. The 44 years between 1947 and 1991 were years of uncertainty when the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) hung over the world like a fissionable hammer supported by a few frayed filaments.
It was an anxious, uneasy time and the men and women who served in Germany were on the front lines. They would be the first to fight and first to die and they were told as much by their commanders.
Today, with American troops leaving, Germany is a very different country. When I was stationed there, I felt welcome and I formed many lasting friendships with Germans. My wife is German. We speak German together. My two daughters are bi-lingual and one has dual American/German citizenship.
I was sad to see recently that polls revealed Germans now are more anti-American than any other nation in Europe. And while about 75 percent of Americans believe the U.S. still has a good relationship with Germany, only about a third of Germans feel that way about the U.S.
Nearly half the German population in some polls want U.S. troops out.
It looks like they are getting their wish.
And frankly, I agree with both those Germans and President Trump. Why should the United States spend billions every year to maintain a military presence in a country that annually registers a $55 billion to $70 billion trade surplus with the United States and which imposes lop-sided tariffs and duties on American products?
The answer? We shouldn’t. And there you have it.
Auf Wiedersehen, Germany.
August 25, 2020
Elegy to Tribune Tower, an Archaic Newsroom, and a City Editor “Extraordinaire”
I posted the following commentary in 2018 when the Chicago Tribune moved out of Tribune Tower and into the One Prudential Plaza building a few blocks south of the Chicago River. I wasn’t there for the move, but it was nevertheless dispiriting and disheartening for me because in that building is where I cut my journalistic teeth. Why am I reposting this piece? I don’t know. Maybe it is because I recently heard from an old Tribune colleague and suddenly felt a wave of nostalgia for the old place. In any case, I hope you enjoy this look back at an iconic newspaper and the building in which it was once located.
Last week, the Chicago Tribune moved or should I say, vacated, the iconic Gothic landmark at 435 N. Michigan Avenue, known since 1925 as “Tribune Tower.”
I am one of an ever-dwindling cadre of former Chicago Tribune reporters, photographers, and editors who actually toiled in the “old” Tribune newsroom. I joined the paper in 1969 right out of the University of Kansas, and when I walked into the yawning fourth-floor newsroom on my first day, I have to admit I was (input an appropriate adjective here) overwhelmed, stupefied, staggered, dumbfounded, flummoxed.
The place was humungous. It was also louder than the “clatter wheels of hell,” as my grandpa used to say. Of course, I didn’t start my life at the Tribune in that vast cavity. No, not by a long shot. Instead, I was assigned, as were all rookie reporters in those days, to something called “Neighborhood News” off in a much quieter and less imposing area of the tower.
But nine months later, after I proved that I could write intelligible and accurate stories about the lesser regions of the Chicago Metropolitan area, I was hurled into the reportorial breech and found myself ensconced at an ancient battleship gray wooden desk that was shared by several reporters.
In those days, new general assignment reporters “hot desked it,” meaning you sat at a vacant desk as long as some old-timer sporting a fedora and smoking a big stogie didn’t tell you to move. (Yes, boys and girls, back then the Tribune City Room was saturated with cigarette and cigar smoke. And sometimes the drawers on those old wooden desks contained half full bottles of Old Grandad or Wild Turkey. Ah yes, it was a very different time).
[image error] The 1970s: Legendary Tribune Photographer Val Mazzenga discusses a photo with the photo editor
But I digress. In front of me on that scuffed and gouged wooden desk sat a big black Underwood typewriter. I was sure the damned thing was just daring me to write something on it.
I could almost hear it saying, “Go ahead, ya big Kansas hick. Write somethin.’ I dare ya!”
I’m sure I gulped several times watching the turbulent activity in front of me with reporters running in and out of the newsroom amid a discordant symphony of ringing telephones.
I wondered how long before I would be one of those reporters. My heart pounded. My palms sweated. My mouth dried.
I didn’t have to wait long. From about thirty feet across the room, I heard somebody shouting my name.
“Yates, Yates,” the voice said.
I jumped to attention, just like I did on my first day of basic training in the U.S. Army when a rock-solid staff sergeant with a tan campaign hat covering his square, close-cropped head, called my name.
[image error] The lobby of Tribune Tower
Only this voice didn’t come from my drill sergeant. It emanated from a bespectacled man in shirtsleeves sitting in the driver’s seat of the Tribune’s horseshoe-shaped City Desk. He was flanked on both sides by a squad of rewrite men (not many women back then), a photo assignment editor, and a bank of squawking radios blaring raspy police and fire department calls. A couple of the grizzled rewrite men even wore (you guessed it!) green eye shades.
The man impatiently calling my name was the Chicago Tribune’s Day City Editor. His name was Don Agrella.
I looked over at him just in time to hear him say. “Yates, take an obit.” I looked down at the black telephone on my desk just as it started ringing.
“An obit?” I found myself thinking. “Geez, what a start!”
“Hello,” the voice on the other end said, “this is Weinstein’s Funeral Home on West Devon. Are you ready?”
That was my introduction to the Chicago Tribune’s city room and Don Agrella, a man I wrote about a few years back and who I called “a City Editor Extraordinaire.”
There is no way I could begin to talk about the Chicago Tribune abandoning Tribune Tower without talking about the man who, in my mind, will always personify it.
Here is that piece. I hope you enjoy it. It’s a look back a much different era in newspaper history.
————————————————————————————————————————————————
OK, right off the bat, I will tell you Don Agrella would have yelled at me if I ever called him City Editor “Extraordinaire.”
But the fact is, Agrella, who passed away at 92 in 2011, was an extraordinary Day City Editor and newsman. For about five years he was my boss at the Chicago Tribune. Between 1969 and 1974 I worked for him as a general assignment reporter, rewrite man and assistant city editor. During those five years, he provided me with a newspaper education that just doesn’t exist anymore.
Agrella’s trademark in the newsroom was to assign reporters to stories by yelling: “Hat and Coat!” as in, “Yates, hat and coat!”
Never mind that I or few other reporters my age in early 1970s ever wore a hat.
That would be my signal to trot over to the Tribune’s gray U-shaped wooden city desk where Agrella would issue my marching orders: “Go cover this (fill in the blank) speech, fire, trial, meeting, press conference, etc. and let me know if it’s worth anything.”
Only once during my budding career as a general assignment reporter for the Tribune did I dare return and declare: “It wasn’t worth a story.”
“Is that right?” Agrella replied. “Well then, why in the hell does the Sun-Times have a story and what about this City News copy I am holding?”
All I could do is gulp. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think it was worth a story.”
“In the future, you go cover the story, call me, and I’ll decide if it’s worth anything,” he told me. “That way, you won’t have to apologize anymore.”
Then, noticing that my 6’4″ frame seemed to be sinking into the newsroom floor, he took pity on me.
“Look, it’s my job to decide if something is worth a story. It’s your job to report. OK? Let me do my job.”
Then he smiled. “Now go and write me a 4-head.” (A 4-head was a short, 3-paragraph story that usually wound up somewhere in the back of the paper).
I went back to my desk and wrote what was (in my mind at least) the best 4-head story Agrella had ever seen.
The Tribune newsroom in those days was alive with sound. No cubicles. No cell phones. No computers. No carpeted floors. Just lots of noise—as in the clacking of typewriters, telephones ringing off their hooks, editors yelling at reporters and reporters yelling “copy” at copy boys (and girls). In those days yelling “copy” didn’t mean to go to the copy machine and make a copy. It meant: “get over here and pick up this story I just finished and distribute it to all the relevant editors.”
Back then, we wrote on 10-page thick “books” that were cranked through typewriters. You had to pummel the keys so that the carbon paper in between those ten pages could produce nine legible yellow copies of your story that could then be distributed to and read by the plethora of relevant editors scattered throughout the newsroom.
Newsrooms forty-eight years ago were studies in semi-controlled mayhem. How anybody ever worked in them, let alone wrote anything of quality baffles me today. But, work we did and the stories produced were often damned good ones too.
Don Agrella saw to that. He was a tough taskmaster. He did not suffer fools nor did he tolerate sloppy reporting.
“You sure about this, Yates?” he once asked about an exclusive story I had just put in front of him.
“I am,” I replied.
“Would you bet your mother’s life on it?”
“I would,” I said with nary a hesitation.
“OK,” he replied. “But don’t forget, you only have one mother, but there are a million stories out there.”
I have to admit, that gave me pause. But on I soldiered. “Damn it, Don, it’s a good story.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t good…but is it accurate?” he demanded.
Accuracy was at the top of Don Agrella’s list of reportorial essentials. He might accept a poorly written story (he could always have a rewrite man or woman rework it), but God forbid that it be inaccurate.
And one thing you learned early on in dealing with Don Agrella: you never lied to him. Don wanted to trust his reporters, and if he couldn’t take you at your word, you were on bad paper with him. I witnessed a few reporters fall into that trap and few, if any, ever climbed out of it and into Don’s good graces again.
Between 1973 and 1974 I became a City Editor myself. I was the weekend version of Don Agrella, assigning reporters to stories on Saturday and Sunday and putting together a local report. I am sure I could never have done that job had I not had the experience of watching Don Agrella at work.
In 1974 I was promoted to Foreign Correspondent and went off to Asia. I never worked for Don Agrella again.
But one day in 1975, when I returned to Chicago for a few days after covering the fall of Saigon in April of that year, Don grabbed me and took me aside.
[image error] L to R, Bernie Judge, Metro Editor, Ed (Lou Grant) Asner, City Editor Don Agrella
“You did a great job covering Vietnam,” he told me. “And just so you know, the Sun-Times never had a story you didn’t have. It looks like you learned something in my city room, after all, Yates.”
A few years later, while I was based in Los Angeles for the Tribune, I met with actor Ed Asner, who at the time was playing the part of Lou Grant, City Editor of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune. It was 1978, and Lou Grant was one of the top TV shows in America.
Asner asked me if I thought his portrayal of a tough city editor was accurate. I told him he should go to Chicago and watch Don Agrella at work. He actually did do that, and one day, when Don wasn’t expecting it, Asner walked into the Tribune city room and yelled; “Agrella, Hat and Coat!”
I wish I could have seen that. I’m sure Don thought it was a hoot.
When Don retired from the Tribune in 1979, it was unquestionably the end of an era. He was an old-school newspaperman leaving at a time when the business was on the verge of changing in ways that make many veteran hacks like me, sad.
Once in the 1990s a bunch of us Agrella disciples gathered for lunch at Ricardo’s (once a classic hangout for Chicago news people). Don was in town from Florida where he had retired. I had just returned to Chicago from Tokyo where for the past seven years, I had been the paper’s Chief Asia Correspondent and Tokyo bureau chief.
“Well Don,” I asked. “Are you ready to come back to the Tribune city room?”
“What city room?” he replied. “The place looks like an insurance office. I couldn’t work there. There’s no noise.”
I realize today that I was one of the lucky ones. I got to work in a REAL big city newspaper newsroom with its clamor and clatter and its palpable turmoil and tension. I can still recall the muffled grumble and shuddering of the newsroom floor when the vast banks of old presses started six levels below.
When the Tribune’s presses began to roll it was the highpoint of the day because on those presses was the culmination of a day’s hard work by a legion of highly dedicated and talented people.
Yes, I was one of the lucky ones. Not only did I get to work in a noisy, dynamic newsroom, but I got to work for Don Agrella: a City Editor who was, without a doubt, indeed “Extraordinaire.”
(Click on the link below to view a video in which a few of today’s Tribune staffers share memories of working in Tribune Tower. Sadly, few, if any of the zany characters that made working in the old pre-computer newsroom an unforgettable experience, are around to share their memories.)
August 24, 2020
A Biden-Harris Win Will Lead America Into Socialism & We Will Probably Never Recover
Today, I am reposting a commentary from my cousin, Steve Baldwin, a former California state assemblyman and former executive director of the Council for National Policy and Young Americans for Freedom. His commentary is a powerful indictment of the Biden-Harris presidential ticket. Please read on. You won’t be disappointed.
I have little doubt this coming election is a tipping point in American history. I believe the evidence shows that a Biden-Harris victory will lead America down a socialist road from which we will probably not recover.
I say this because the Democrats will likely stack the Supreme Court with at least two more justices to obtain rulings such as the legalization of all illegal aliens physically within the U.S.A., thereby creating millions more likely Democratic voters.
The Dems will also push for a court ruling that abolishes the Electoral College, claiming it is “racist” because it protects rural areas from being dominated by urban area voters.
Moreover, assuming the Dems also take control of both houses, they will vote to make Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., states, giving the Democrats four more U.S. senators.
These actions are not imagined by the right; instead, they are commonly discussed at conferences and in blogs by the same hard-core leftists who now surround Biden and Harris. Combined, these actions would give the Dems permanent control of the U.S.A.
A Biden-Harris victory will ensure that the Republican Party will never win the presidency again, and America will gradually be transformed into a socialist semi-dictatorship in which opponents will be spied on, censored, harassed and even jailed based on trumped-up charges and bogus claims of “hate speech.”
People who scoff at this have no idea how common such a scenario is throughout world history. Moments of freedom and liberty, undergirded by a Constitution that guarantees us a slew of rights, are quite rare in human history, and such moments almost always come to an end.
It is in the hands of the voters and whether independent and undecided voters will drink the Kool-Aid or break from the dominant phony media narrative and vote to re-elect Trump.
But if you are still undecided about who to vote for, I urge you to take a hard look at how the Biden-Harris ticket will act on four critical issues that will dramatically affect America should they win this November.
Cronyism, Corruption, and Entitlement
Biden has been in government for over 40 years with no discernable legislative accomplishments either as a senator or as Obama’s vice president.
This is quite strange. Biden seems to have spent most of his time in government enriching himself and his family members. The media played down or ignored Biden’s involvement with Ukrainian corruption. Still, it was Biden who publicly boasted about withholding foreign aid to Ukraine if the government didn’t fire the prosecutor who had begun an investigation into the shady energy company where his son Hunter served on the board.
Indeed, it has now been revealed that many of his family members used his position as a senator and then V.P. to enrich themselves. James Biden – Joe’s brother – was one. And Joe’s sister Valerie had her snout in the trough as well: Indeed, most of Joe’s children became wealthy off of their father’s position.
Moreover, the Biden kids have used their name to avoid prosecution for crimes anyone else would have been punished for committing.
It should also be pointed out that the evidence is now clear that the Obama-Biden team was calling the shots for the entire “Russiagate” scandal, clearly the most serious effort in American history to rig an election.
This scandal involved their appointees at a half-dozen agencies who collaborated to create a phony “Trump is controlled by Russia” narrative to influence the 2016 election, and then used this same narrative to remove Trump after the election. There is simply no way dozens of political appointees would engage in a felonious conspiracy without “cover” from the Obama-Biden White House.
Let’s also not forget the Obama-Biden administration’s efforts to use the I.R.S. to harass conservative groups, covering up the Benghazi scandal that left four Americans dead and wiretapping and harassing journalists who refuse to toe the party line.
This is the kind of corruption and entitlement mentality that permeates Washington, as exemplified by the Bidens, but this pattern of conduct also tells us how he will govern.
Due to his declining mental abilities, Joe Biden will not be involved in setting policy. Instead, he will use his presidency to enrich himself and his family further while his V.P., Kamala Harris, a far-left ideologue, will set policy for this administration.
And we should also expect a Biden-Harris administration to use the power of the federal government to harass opponents, interfere with elections and spy on politicians and journalists who don’t go along with their plans.
Crime and Defunding the Police
One of the most significant issues of this campaign is law and order.
If our government can’t maintain order in our cities, then many other issues become moot. You can’t have a strong economy if people fear going to work.
But it appears that Biden and Harris have sided with the looters and thugs who have brought devastation to our inner cities, destroyed thousands of businesses, injured over 700 police officers and killed dozens of people, most of them minorities.
The Biden-Harris campaign desperately wants the support of the far left, which includes the Black Lives Matter/Antifa anti-police movement, but does not want American voters to know they support much of its agenda, such as the abolition of bail, cuts to the police and restrictions that will make it almost impossible for law enforcement to maintain order.
Biden’s own “unity task force” with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a paper containing all the buzzwords the far left embraces that will have the effect of dramatically weakening law enforcement in the U.S.A.
But there are other clues where Biden stands on this issue.
It was recently revealed that Biden staffers were pouring money into the Minnesota Freedom Fund. This fund pays off the bail of those rioters arrested for property destruction and other crimes.
Biden now opposes the entire notion of bail, which is part of the B.L.M. agenda. This means, of course, that potentially dangerous criminals will be released immediately after being arrested. A Biden staffer was also caught smearing the police in a social media post but was not fired.
Needless to say, staff members who are anti-police and pro-rioter would not be working for Biden unless he agreed with them on this issue.
As a former prosecutor, Harris claims to be pro-law and order, but she also promoted the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which, by the way, has paid for the release of an actual sex offender.
So much for Harris standing up for the safety of women.
And Harris said that “we need to reimagine how we are achieving public safety” because “we have confused the idea that to achieve safety, you put more cops on the street.” This, of course, is all code for cutting police budgets and regulating the police to the point they are no longer effective. She has also marched with protesters.
This is why many of the national policy unions and associations are now endorsing the Trump-Pence ticket.
A Biden-Harris victory will mean rewarding cities that cut their police budgets with federal aid. It will mean that protesters convicted of crimes on federal property, such as courthouses and national monuments, will be released. It will mean we will witness a slew of congressional legislation and presidential initiatives that will regulate police to the point they will no longer be able to control violence in our cities.
Illegal Immigration and Border Control
Unlike Trump, Biden supports health care benefits for illegal aliens and opposes Trump’s border wall. Clearly, Biden has no “core values” and changes his views to whatever his consultants tell him to. Indeed, just a few years ago, he enthusiastically bragged about his support for a 700-mile wall and stopping illegal immigration.
Harris also supports a wide range of benefits for illegal aliens, including education, welfare, and health care. As San Francisco district attorney, she even oversaw a program that allowed “illegal immigrants to stay out of prison by training them for jobs they cannot legally hold,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
When the “caravans” full of thousands of illegal aliens started to flood into the country, Harris opposed beefing up border security. She also says she wants to “decriminalize border crossings,” which essentially means we will no longer have a border. Furthermore, she’s compared I.C.E. to the K.K.K.
The Biden-Harris view of the concept of citizenship and border security will send a signal to the world that America no longer enforces border security and will reward those who trek northward with an array of free benefits.
The result will be a tidal wave of millions of illegal aliens that will overwhelm our health care system, our schools, our criminal justice system, and our welfare system. This mentality will eventually cost our country trillions of dollars, and it will not be sustainable.
Economic Freedom and Prosperity
First, people need to be reminded that the Obama-Biden years did considerable damage to our country economically.
That administration did everything possible to regulate and tax businesses, thereby creating the most anti-job environment since the Great Depression. In fact, the Obama-Biden government averaged 1.5 percent G.D.P. growth over its seven years, one of the worst G.D.P. records in history.
By 2016, the real unemployment rate was over 12 percent, according to Democratic economic adviser Leo Hindery. Indeed, only 62.6 percent of Americans were working by 2016, the lowest rate since the 1970s. A significant contributor to the sluggish economy was the Obamacare program, which created new taxes and regulations for employers.
Not once did Biden do or say anything critical of the Obama economic agenda, and, of course, he enthusiastically supported it. Indeed, there is no record of Joe Biden during his entire tenure as vice president promoting or initiating any policies that would result in job growth.
Moreover, since Biden has become the Democratic nominee for president, he has moved even further to the left, attempting to obtain the support of his party’s socialist wing. This is evidenced by the agreement he made with Bernie Sanders to support his socialist agenda.
Indeed, Biden has now proposed massive new government programs with a price tag of over 10 trillion dollars and called for reversing Trump’s tax cuts to supposedly help pay for these programs such as the “Green New Deal,” socialized health care, free universal pre-school, etc.
And Harris is just as clueless on the economy.
Her first economic-oriented announcement as a presidential candidate in 2019 was to call for a massive hike in the federal minimum wage and force all employers to pay salaries many cannot afford to pay without going under. Apparently, Harris, who knows absolutely nothing about economic policy, seems to know precisely what wages employers should pay their employees.
Naturally, Harris also supports the elimination of all private health care, assuring Americans that the federal government will do a better job providing this service. Right.
And both Biden and Harris have come out in favor of laws that ban independent or “gig” contractors with the intent to force all American workers to become corporate employees. There is no good economic reason for doing this, aside from appeasing one of the biggest donors to their campaign, organized labor.
Unions can’t easily organize gig workers, so they want them eliminated. But Biden and Harris do not seem to understand or care that such laws will have a devastating impact on millions of American workers who work on their own or work for companies who use a “gig” model such as Uber.
With a Biden-Harris victory, some of the biggest tax hikes in history will have to occur to pay for a socialist domestic agenda.
Every American who owns a house or has a job will be dramatically affected. Those who work hard will be punished with new taxes and fees, while those who don’t will be rewarded by a massive expansion of welfare programs. The biggest wealth redistribution in history will transpire, with the result being the return of America to a permanent recession, even worse than what we suffered through during the Obama era.
Of course, many other issues demonstrate the danger of a Biden-Harris victory, such as Biden’s support for communist China, a country that has been working to destroy the U.S.A. for decades, his support for gun control, his support for reversing Trump’s abandoning of the Iran nuclear deal and his long history of lying and plagiarism.
Then there is Harris’ failure to prosecute child molesters in California, her support of abortion up until birth, her bigoted attack on Catholics, her unconstitutional attack on gun stores as a prosecutor, and her support for biological males competing in female sports.
This is the most far-left ticket to run for the presidency, and vice presidency in American history and a victory by Biden-Harris will have severe consequences on the future of America and upon the quality of life for our children and grandchildren.
Steve Baldwin is a former California state assemblyman and the former executive director of the Council for National Policy and Young Americans for Freedom. He has been published in numerous publications and is the author of “From Crayons to Condoms, The Ugly Truth about America’s Public Schools.” He is a contributing editor to The Western Journal.
August 23, 2020
Sweden: Lock-down Facts the Media Won’t Tell You
I am reposting this fascinating report from AND Magazine that examines the facts about Sweden and the China COVID-19 virus. It is a far cry from the hysteric and deceitful reporting from America’s legacy media. But most of all, it is backed up by facts and figures.
American news organizations seemed intent on making sure the United States didn’t follow Sweden’s laissez-faire management of the virus which quite clearly has worked. Instead, they preferred to encourage and promote the lock-down of the country.
I wonder why? Could it be the 2020 Presidential election and their objective to derail Donald Trump’s reelection? Surely not. Read on.
Sweden: Lock-down Facts the Media Won’t Tell You
by Chet Nagle
“There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted” Arthur Schopenhauer, German Philosopher
Sweden, a nation with a population less than that of Los Angeles, is a highly developed industrial country that is famous for inventing, designing and producing things like the adjustable wrench, ball bearings, pacemakers, dynamite, the Gripen jet fighter, the SAAB automobile and highly advanced naval vessels and submarines.
As their history also tells us, Swedes are not given to mass hysteria, fear, or believing in hasty actions. So, when COVID-19 appeared they examined the threat and dealt with it calmly and logically. Unlike the U.S. and other industrialized countries, they did not lock down their country.
Instead, the Swedish government simply banned meetings of more than 50, asked citizens to use social distancing, and asked senior citizens to avoid contact with others as much as they could. Masks were not required or even suggested. Instead, Swedes were asked to exercise, work, keep their businesses open, and lead their lives as if they were experiencing an annual flu season. Schools, shops, restaurants, and industry remained open.
[image error] Typical Stockholm Street
Despite the admiration the media and progressive politicians have for Sweden’s quasi-socialist economy, often urging us to “be more like Sweden,” in this case they savagely lambasted the Swedes as being a danger to themselves and others for not following the advice of medical experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci and vaccine experts like Bill Gates. Their selected data analysts also predicted Sweden would suffer an enormous death rate, become a dangerous COVID-19 hot spot and economically implode.
As headlines collected by The Epoch Times newspaper show, the U.S. media has been savage in their criticism of Sweden’s no-lockdown policy:
Sweden becomes an example of how not to handle COVID-19, CBS News
Lack of Lockdown Increased COVID-19 Deaths in Sweden, U of V Newsroom
Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale, New York Times
Sweden Stayed Open And More People Died Of Covid-19, But The Real Reason May Be Something Darker, Forbes
Sweden hoped herd immunity would curb COVID-19. Don’t do what we did. It’s not working. USA Today
Sweden’s coronavirus death toll is now approaching zero, but experts are warning others not to hail it as a success, Business Insider
Lack of COVID-19 Lockdown Increased Deaths in Sweden, Analysis Conclude, Virginia.edu
Sweden COVID-19 Deaths Linked to Failure to Lockdown as Country Prepares for Second Wave, Newsweek
Sweden Tries Out a New Status: Pariah State, New York Times
On the other hand, sources more credible than the U.S. mainstream media are far less dire with their analyses of nations that did not lock themselves down. An article in The Evening Standard (UK) has that attitude. It describes a study in the Lancet’s online journal EClinicalMedicine:
“Lockdowns made little difference in the number of people who die from coronavirus, a study has claimed. Researchers from the University of Toronto and the University of Texas found that whether a country was locked down or not was “not associated” with the COVID-19 death
“Experts compared mortality rates and cases in 50 badly-hit countries up until May 1 and calculated that only 33 out of every million people had died from the virus… The study found that imposing lockdown measures succeeded in stopping hospitals from becoming overwhelmed, but it did not translate into a significant reduction in death rates.
“Government actions such as border closures, full lockdowns, and a high rate of COVID-19 testing were not associated with statistically significant reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality.” THE EVENING STANDARD (UK)
Whatever differing studies, opinions, and statistics may conclude, the graph below shows the effect that Sweden’s no-lockdown policy has had on the actual number of Swedes who died of COVID-19.
Now approaching zero, the Swedish death rate due to COVID-19 is lower than that of Britain, Spain, and Belgium – all of which locked down. The virus is definitely not raging out of control in Sweden and, in fact, Sweden would have done even better if its national healthcare system had not rationed medical treatment for nursing home patients in the first months of the year, a problem rarely mentioned by U.S. media or progressive critics. Sweden, to its credit, quickly increased its national healthcare system’s limits for seniors.
What did Sweden’s doctors understand before their government decided on a no lockdown policy? The Swedish medical establishment, unlike ours, recognized that COVID-19 is just another member of the flu virus family, whether modified by Chinese laboratories or not. The difference is that the new virus is more communicable, but not more deadly. They reasoned that a lockdown would, therefore, be counter-productive and not lead to the “herd immunity” that occurs naturally when people are exposed to the virus in everyday activities, as has happened in every “flu season” around the world since the 1918 epidemic. Of course, exposure to any flu virus can be particularly dangerous to the elderly or those with existing conditions such as obesity, diabetes, heart problems, and asthma.
This is shown in graphs created by J.Kim and posted on 4 August on the Maalamalama news site under “pandemic lockdowns.” The graphs are from data by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Folkhälsomyndigheten, the Public Health Agency of Sweden.
The first graph (below) compares Sweden’s mortality rate for COVID-19 to the U.S. mortality rate for the common flu. In the group of all ages younger than 60, the Swedish mortality rate of COVID-19 was less than 1/3rd of the American mortality rate for the common flu! And, unlike the U.S. common flu mortality rate in the 60-79 age group, the vast majority of Sweden’s COVID-19 deaths occurred in those older than 80!
The second graph (below) compares the mortality rates of COVID-19 in Sweden with that of the U.S. as of July 2020. The graph shows that the U.S. COVID-19 mortality rate for those younger than 39 was 0.58% – more than 1,230 times greater than the 0.00047% mortality rate in Sweden. In the age groups of 40-59 and 59-69, the U.S. death rate from COVID-19 was respectively 215 times and 211 times greater than that of Sweden. These vast differences can only be explained by the open and free society resulting from Sweden’s no lockdown policy, and that if you are healthy and reasonably cautious your chances of dying from COVID-19 are far less than dying from the common flu.
As for economic damage caused by COVID-19, Sweden has suffered a GDP drop of 8.6%. That looks bad until you remember the European Union’s entire GDP fell 12.1% in the same quarter. The fall in Swedish GDP can be mainly attributed to a contraction of commerce with the EU and global trading partners whose economies are suffering from their lockdowns. Nevertheless, as Tyler Durden of Zerohedge.com wrote on 29 July, “…every day for the past two weeks, Swedish company after Swedish company has beaten expectations. From telecoms equipment maker Ericsson to consumer appliances manufacturer Electrolux via lender Handelsbanken and lock maker Assa Abloy, Swedish companies have delivered profits well above what the market was expecting, even if in some cases that merely meant a less precipitous decline than analysts predicted.”
Additionally, a report about Sweden’s GDP from Capital Economics, a British business advisory firm, stated: “While Sweden has not been immune from COVID, despite its light-touch lockdown, we expect it to be the best of a very bad bunch this year.” The report adds that: “One possible reason why Sweden’s economy has weathered the pandemic fallout better than other Eurozone countries is that it has kept its primary schools open, allowing parents to continue working instead of taking time off to stay home with children.”
Every working parent of an American child knows that to be true, except for our teachers’ unions. For them, the COVID-19 school lockdowns represent an opportunity for extortion. On 3 August, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board wrote: “…an alliance of teachers unions and progressive groups sponsored what they called a “national day of resistance” around the country listing their demands before returning to the classroom. They include:
Support for our communities and families, including canceling rents and mortgages, a moratorium on evictions/foreclosures, providing direct cash assistance to those not able to work or who are unemployed, and other critical social needs
Moratorium on new charter or voucher programs and standardized testing
Massive infusion of federal money to support the reopening funded by taxing billionaires and Wall Street.”
American children, their parents, and our economy are hostages to the leftist ideology of our schoolteachers.
The best thing about the teacher unions’ blackmail is that it gives Americans a clear vision into the nature of those unions. They are allies of the political left and are teaching our children their views. The federal government’s reaction to their demands should be to give assistance to needy parents so they can afford to decide where to educate their children instead of paying blackmail to public school teacher unions.
From lockdowns to strikes by teachers, Sweden has shown us the way out of a desperate situation. Our economy has dropped almost 10% — or 33% on an annualized basis — the steepest decline in 70 years. That fall, on top of trillions of dollars in aid already paid to workers, businesses, and unrelated interest groups favored by Congress (e.g. aid to the Kennedy Center?) and a trillion more to come, the way forward has already been proven to us and the world.
The solution is to end the dangerous and costly political polarization of the virus by terminating lockdowns and masks, and by opening schools, restaurants and small businesses. Reopen America to prosperity.
Chet Nagle is a Naval Academy graduate, a Georgetown Law School graduate, and a Cold War carrier pilot who flew in the Cuban Missile Crisis. As an agent for the CIA, he worked in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and strange places like Bashkortostan. He was the founding publisher of the Journal of Defense & Diplomacy, a geopolitical magazine with readers in more than 20 countries. Returning to Washington, he became a global business consultant through his company Intel Research Corporation. He has appeared often on radio and television, is the author of Iran Covenant, and is now C.E.O of Ravenna Associates, a strategic communications company. He is a contributor and senior advisor to AND Magazine.
August 22, 2020
TO BE A DEMOCRAT TODAY, YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE…
I just received this commentary from former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. It is too good to ignore, so I am reposting it here. Enjoy.
TO BE A DEMOCRAT TODAY,
YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE…
By Mike Huckabee
“There’s no use trying,’ she said: ‘one can’t believe impossible things.’
‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’” – Through The Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
As I watch the nightly news from urban liberal war-zones like Portland or force my eyeballs to stay open through the Democrats’ virtual convention, I keep thinking, “We’re through the looking glass, people!” And that’s not just an expression.
I mean that, like Carroll’s mad Red Queen, in order to be a Democrat in 2020, you are required to believe an unlimited number of impossible things. The Party’s embrace of “Alice In Wonderland” level madness inspired me to start making a list of these impossible things.
To be a Democrat today, you have to believe…
That a pre-born human baby is not a human being deserving of protection from killing, and neither is a baby that was born 10 minutes ago if the mother decides she doesn’t want to keep it.
That capitalism, which has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and despair worldwide, is evil; but socialism, which has caused the oppression, impoverishment, starvation, and death of hundreds of millions of people over the past century, is the only hope of the future.
That the best solution for rioting, looting, arson, and violence in the streets is to defund the police.
That all the gains in the economy under Trump were really caused by Obama, but the worldwide economic crash following China’s unleashing of a pandemic was caused by Trump.
That Trump has a plan to rig the next election that involves making the Obama Administration remove thousands of mailboxes several years ago. Also, that the Post Office is removing little-used mailboxes in Oregon because the key to Trump’s reelection is for him to win Oregon.
And on that subject, that nobody ever complained about the US Post Office being slow, inefficient, and unreliable until Trump was elected.
That America is an oppressive, racist, white supremacist nation that’s the root of all evil in the world and its culture is inferior to that of other nations, including the many nations where people are willing to risk their lives just for the chance to come to America.
That Trump built “cages for children” on the border during the Obama Administration.
That viruses spread like wildfire at church services, but not at crowded protest rallies for left-wing causes. Also, viruses spread at bars that serve chips, but not at bars that serve sandwiches. Because “science!”
That people with male genitals are women just because they say they are, but people who say that actually having female genitals makes them women are intolerant, transphobic bigots.
Also, hospitals must be forced to give gynecological exams to “women” with male genitals, and taxpayers forced to pay for abortions for them.
Again on that subject, that someone born male who developed a muscular masculine physique before deciding he was a girl has no unfair physical advantage in sports over the much smaller teenage girl whose face (s)he is crushing into the wrestling mat.
That Trump botched the response to COVID-19 by xenophobically shutting down travel from China and crashing the economy with a shutdown, but Democrats would have prevented both the pandemic and the crash by not stopping travel from China and shutting down the economy sooner, harder and longer. Also, it’s absolutely impossible for Trump to keep people from crossing our border, but he could have kept a virus from crossing our border.
That an acceptable way to express how much you care about black lives is to burn black neighborhoods, loot black-owned businesses, and tear down statues of abolitionist leaders. Also, that all black lives matter except those of black cops, black Republicans, and black pre-born babies.
That free healthcare is a right, free college is a right, free food is a right, a guaranteed paycheck is a right, and citizenship for illegal immigrants is a right, but free speech and freedom of religion are not rights.
That the people who presided over the rise of ISIS, the Iraq and Afghan wars, a nuclear Iran and North Korea, and even Iran falling to the Mullahs in the first place, are trusted diplomatic professionals, while the man who crushed ISIS, dealt with Iran and North Korea, and crafted a historic Middle East peace agreement is a dangerous amateur who’s destroying our foreign policy.
That disproven rumors are evidence that Trump colluded with Russia to undermine a presidential election, but Democrats paying Russians for disproven rumors and using them as “evidence” to launch a Deep State coup is NOT collusion with Russia to undermine a presidential election.
That 2 + 2 only equals 4 because of white supremacy.
That there are 57 genders but only one acceptable political viewpoint.
That burning a flag is protected free speech, but objecting to someone burning a flag is not.
Okay, this could go on forever, so I’m going to stop at 20 and let you add to the list in the comments. Have fun, if that’s not impossible these days…
Mike Huckabee is an American politician and Christian minister who served as the 44th governor of Arkansas from 1996 to 2007. He was a candidate for the Republican Party presidential nomination in both 2008 and 2016.
August 21, 2020
Will 2020 be “Deju Vu All Over Again” of the Ill-fated 1876 Presidential Election?
Will 2020 be a Reprise of the 1876 Presidential Election?
What a question, you might ask. But let’s look at what happened in 1876 and then you can make up your mind.
The similarities between 1876 to 2020 are striking.
Let’s set the scene.
In 1876 the Democrats controlled the House. The Republicans controlled the Senate. The nation was in political and economic crisis, still staggering from the disastrous Panic of 1873.
Ulysses S. Grant was the incumbent Republican president, but at the last minute, he decided not to run for a third term. Of course, the scenario is different today. Donald Trump is running for a second term, not a third term.
(Historical Note: From George Washington until Harry S Truman, presidents could serve as many terms as they could win. President Franklin D. Roosevelt won four consecutive terms between 1932 and 1944. On Feb. 27, 1951, the 22nd Amendment was ratified which established a two-term limit for presidents.)
So, with Grant out of the picture, the Republican who did run in 1876 was a dark horse candidate named Rutherford B. Hayes. His Democrat challenger in the intensely disputed election was New York, Gov. Samuel Tilden.
Tilden was widely expected to win the general election against the little-known Hayes, who was a Civil War hero and Ohio governor.
Now here is where things get interesting. There are some political pundits today who say the 2020 election could play out in similar fashion to the 1876 election.
Just how might that happen? Let’s look back at the 1876 election.
When Election Day came, neither candidate had a majority of the electoral votes. Tilden had easily won the popular vote, but he needed one more electoral vote.
However, in four states, each party claimed that their candidate had won the state, which obviously could not be true. If the Democratic reports of the election were accepted, Tilden would be the President. If the Republican reports were accepted, Hayes would be the President.
The Constitution didn’t account for this scenario: There was no provision for settling a dispute involving rival electors. An additional problem was that the Vice President needed to certify the election. But Vice-President Henry Wilson had died a year earlier, and there was no sitting Vice President.
A special Electoral Commission of Senators, House members, and Supreme Court justices was appointed by Congress to settle the dispute and avert a constitutional crisis before March when a new president was supposed to take office.
The commission awarded all of the electoral votes of the four disputed states to Hayes in an 8-7 vote. The Democrats allegedly agreed to the decision in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana, marking the end of Reconstruction in the South, in what is called the Compromise of 1877.
That’s quite a legacy for Hayes, who essentially slinked into the White House via a backroom deal.
The second part of Hayes’ legacy was the fallout from Reconstruction’s end and the subsequent enactment of Jim Crow laws by Democrats that mandated racial segregation in the South and disenfranchise black voters. Under terms of the deal, Hayes removed the last federal troops from the South, and the rest, as they say, is history. Rather than the reconstruction of the south that ensured political and social equality for former slaves, the South entered a period of Jim Crow laws that didn’t end until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
Now, here’s another similarity between 1876 and 2020. After his controversial election, Hayes promised not to run for re-election.
Does THAT sound familiar? If Biden beats Trump, he has promised to be a one-term president—that is, if he lasts through his first term.
I can hear Kamala Harris licking her political chops now.
Hayes kept his promise to be a one-term president and that helped restore the nation’s faith in the office of the presidency. During his time in office Hayes also attacked run-away patronage in the nation’s corrupt civil service system and triggered the recovery of the American economy.
Nevertheless, the results of the 1876 election remain among the most disputed ever.
Today, with the controversy over the mass-mailing of ballots to voters and the potential of voter fraud, you have to wonder that lies ahead after November 3.
Will the 2020 Presidential election come off without a hitch?
Or will we experience, as baseball Hall of Famer Yogi Berra once declared, “Déjà vu all over again?”
August 19, 2020
Interview with the Online Book Club
I am pleased to share this interview that I did recently with Sarah Creeley of the Online Book Club. I hope you find it thought-provoking.
Today’s chat with Sarah features Ronald E. Yates, author of The Lost Years of Billy Battles, Book #3 of the Finding Billy Battles Trilogy. The book has won multiple awards, including the Best Book of the Year from the Chanticleer International Book Awards and the Goethe Grand Prize for Historical Fiction.
1. Tell us about your first experience with writing?
I knew I liked writing when I was in the sixth grade. I loved writing stories, and I had a teacher (Mrs. Gooch) who encouraged me. My mother also bought me books and took me often to the library—a place that I found magical and magnetic. She often read to me, and when she did, I could “see” the stories unfolding before me. When I could read myself, I began to devour everything I could get my hands on. Reading took me places I could not, as a growing boy, otherwise go. I used to tell my journalism students at the University of Illinois if you want to write well, read well.
My training as a journalist has been invaluable. Journalism teaches you to use words economically, to be accurate, and to write fast. The transition from journalism to writing fiction has not been too difficult. Both utilize many of the same literary devices: transition, pacing, character development, etc. Ultimately, the goal is to tell a good story no matter if you are writing fiction or non-fiction. My experiences as a journalist have been priceless and vital as I transitioned from journalism to fiction. I think any author who started as a journalist will tell you that. Hemingway once said, “Everything I ever learned about writing I learned from the Kansas City Star style sheet and covering the streets of Kansas City.” I could say the same about my 27 years with the Chicago Tribune.
2. Where do you write? What does your environment look like?
I have taken over the upstairs bonus room in our house. It is about 400 square feet. In it, I have my rather prodigious library, a good sound system for playing classical music or jazz, a large screen T.V. for watching sports, Discovery, History, and National Geographic channels when I need a break from writing. My window looks out onto a plant and boulder-strewn foothill that rises in front of my house. Another window looks down onto the Temecula valley some 2,000 feet below. It is quiet and soothing. I couldn’t have a better place to write.
3. Over the years, what was the best piece of advice you’ve gotten?
I have received a LOT of advice over the years. For example, as I was being sent to Asia as a foreign correspondent by the Chicago Tribune, a crusty old editor gave me this advice: “When you get over there in Asia where people eat a lot of strange food and if you are ever offered something that you’ve never seen or eaten before, go ahead and eat it, because, in Asia, it’s not polite to turn down a dish from a host. And just remember this, everything tastes more or less like chicken.”
When it comes to writing, I was fortunate to receive this advice from Elmore Leonard several years ago. “You have to be mean to your characters. Don’t let ’em off easy. Hurt ’em, knock ’em around. Hell, even kill ’em. And remember this: life is hard, then you die.”
4. Let’s talk about your book The Lost Years of Billy Battles. You state that the book is “faction.” What do you mean by that?
I call my work “Faction,” because it is both fact and fiction. Some of the events in the book–especially those dealing with real people, did happen. Was my character directly involved in them? No. However, members of my family were native Kansans, and some of the experiences I write about did happen. I also used many of the expressions and adages I heard my great-grandparents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and even my parents use when I was growing up in Kansas. I also have woven some of my experiences covering war and revolution in Asia and Latin America into the storyline.
I was intrigued by the idea of a 19th Century Kansas boy forced to deal with a string of tragedies and misadventures who eventually makes his way to the Far East in search of himself. How would he handle himself in such strange places as French Indochina, the Spanish-controlled Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc.? I spent most of my career as a foreign correspondent in Asia and I often wondered what it would have been like to have been in that part of the world in the 19th Century. This book gives me (and my readers) an opportunity to find out.
5. Considering that this book is partly fact, which characters are based on real people?
There are several “real” people in the trilogy, including such western legends as Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday, and Bat Masterson. There are also other real people that Billy interacts with, including General Frederick Funston, George S. Patton (when he was a shave tail lieutenant), General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, Mexican revolutionaries Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. My fictional characters, such as Billy’s cousin, Charlie Higgins, and the baroness Katharina von Schreiber are composites of people I knew.
6. Which character was your favorite, and why?
Well, William Fitzroy Raglan Battles is the main character in the book, so naturally is my favorite. His father is killed during the Civil War, so he is reared by his mother, Hannelore, a second-generation German-American woman who has to be both mother and father to her only son. It is a tall order, but Billy grows up properly and is seemingly on the right path. His mother, a hardy and resilient woman, makes a decent living as a dressmaker in Lawrence, Kansas. An ardent believer in the value of a good education, she insists that Billy attend the newly minted University of Kansas in Lawrence. She is a strong influence in his life, as are several other people he meets along the way.
One of those he meets who is also one of my favorite characters is the Baroness (and widow) Katharina von Schreiber, who Billy meets on an ocean liner bound for the orient in 1894. Katharina is a strong woman of keen intelligence. While at first Billy and Katharina don’t hit it off, they are eventually flung together because of their unique backgrounds and the fact they are both at vulnerable places in their lives. Katharina and Billy become soul mates.
Another of my favorite characters is Billy’s semi-outlaw cousin, Charlie Higgins. Higgins is what they called a “shadow rider” in the old west. A man who lived his life on both sides of the law. Charlie and Billy are not only cousins; they are the best of friends. Charlie helps Billy out of several scrapes and is not afraid to use violence to do so.
7. Much of the book is in Mexico. How did you learn so much about Mexico and its history?
I spent a lot of time in Mexico (and other parts of Central and South America) as a foreign correspondent with the Chicago Tribune. I made it a point to learn as much history about Mexico as I could so I could better understand the country and provide a relevant background for the news stories I filed from there. I also learned Spanish. One of the things that I wanted to do with the entire trilogy was to focus on little-known historical events. Most of the events and incidents that Billy finds himself involved with were relatively obscure. They were not things that we learned very much about in our high school or college history classes. I love focusing on those types of events.
8. What was the hardest part of the book for you to write?
I always hate to kill off characters, but of course, death is a part of life, and no character in a historical fiction novel is immortal. So, I won’t say which characters I had to send to the “great majority,” but suffice it to say they were ones that I liked.
9. This is the last book in a trilogy, so what’s next for you?
I am currently finishing a novel about foreign correspondents in Asia. It is not historical fiction, and it is based on some of my own experiences covering war, revolution, and mayhem around the world. The working title is Asia Hands: A Tale of Foreign Correspondents & Other Miscreants in the Orient.
Here is a short blurb that will appear at the front of the book:
A mysterious object of unknown origin hidden in the heart of an impenetrable S.E. Asian jungle. A covert alliance of dangerous people determined to keep it concealed. Treacherous secret agents. Betrayal. Assassination. Murder.
It’s one hell of a story, and two foreign correspondents—one recently retired and the other approaching burn out—are on the scent.
Meet Cooper McGrath and Clayton Brandt.
They have just stumbled onto the biggest story of their lives—one that could have staggering ramifications for the planet and its people.
Now all they have to do is live long enough to tell it.
Will they meet their deadlines, or will they meet their deaths?
I like to end on some fun questions.
10. Cats or dogs?
Dogs. I have nothing against cats, but a dog seems more friendly and responsive than a cat. Besides that, I grew up with dogs and horses.
11. Black and white or color?
Color. I want to see every hue that nature offers us. Black and white seems just too limiting.
12. Notepad, typewriter, phone, computer, or a combination?
I have used all of the above at one time or another in my career as a journalist. Of course, now I use a computer, and I can’t imagine returning to a typewriter.
13. What’s on your nightstand right now?
I am beta reading a memoir by a Vietnamese-American woman named An Ngo Lang that tells of her harrowing escape from Vietnam when it was falling in 1975. I just finished reading “The Lost Side of an Orphan’s Moon,” by Caleb Pirtle III that I have just reviewed on Amazon.
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