Progress Illinois

Yesterday's "Tuesday Commentary" on WTTW's Chicago Tonight went toTribune columnist Dawn Turner Trice, who voiced her hope that Chicago police will "step up" in the face of the city's rising violence without resorting to brutality. She also took aim at Mayor Richard Daley's ridiculous statement last week that fear of unfair media coverage has made officers timid, calling this suggestion "nothing short of shameful." Watch it:

Also of note, in a Sun-Times op-ed last Sunday, Chicago activist and journalist Jamie Kalven (full disclosure: he's my father) responded to Daley's remarks:

It is a first principle of our democracy that public officials in whom we vest substantial power must be subject to public scrutiny. This principle applies every bit as much to the police officer on the street as to the high government official.

We give the police great powers -- to arrest and detain, to use force, and, under certain circumstances, to kill -- and we allow them considerable discretion in performing their duties. Public scrutiny is the necessary antidote to abuses of those powers.

For Daley to suggest that officers must be sheltered from core democratic principles in order to show up for work is a diservice to both the police and the communities they serve.

It's great that the Tribune's Swamp blog is publicizing John McCain's latest lie about Iraq, in which he falsely credits America's troop surge for the "awakening" of Sunnis in Anbar province. As MSNBC's Keith Olbermann noted last night, the Anbar Awakening in fact began long before the troop increase.

But rather than directly address McCain's revision of history, the Tribune's Mark Silva decided instead to report on MSNBC's segment about McCain's lie. Indeed, Silva refers to Olbermann's statement that McCain got "the basic timeline and history of the surge entirely wrong'' as an "assertion."  And check out the headline:

Why the quotation marks? This isn't a he-said/she-said debate. McCain is wrong -- plain and simple -- and the Tribune should say so in its own words.

Below are a few links laying out why McCain's claim is flat false.

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Bad news for Chicagoans who value the Fourth Estate: Maurice Possley, a Tribune investigative reporter who helped bring about the state’s death penalty moratorium, is resigning from the paper before it trims roughly 60 newsroom staff positions.

From Crain's:

Mr. Possley’s decision was based on what he referred to as the “stunning . . . dismantling of our newspaper in such a short time,” according to his note.

“I always had envisioned retiring from the Tribune, but events of the past year, including (Editor) Ann Marie (Lipinski’s) resignation, convinced me that now is the time for me to seek my fortune elsewhere,” Mr. Possley wrote.

It's been said before, but the decision by Sam Zell and the Tribune front office to focus on a not-so-snazzy redesign of the paper just isn't a sound use of resources. Steve Rhodes elaborates:

Redesigning newspapers, by the way, as the Trib is now doing, will not garner many new readers no matter how snappy. It's too late for that. The cycle of habit has been broken. The purpose of the print product now ought to be as a supplement to the website. And putting consumer and entertainment news front and center is an awful idea. Strip the paper down to news and news only. You can't compete with stale entertainment news. Then develop new print products, like a sports weekly, a photo weekly, a local Onion . . . it's time for newspapers - and their websites - to disaggregate. Ironic, isn't it?

Today, the Tribune editorial board gets really excited about T. Boone Pickens, the former oil man who's pushing a new proposal to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil. I saw Pickens' first TV spot over the weekend. Have a look:

I have to admit, the first 50 seconds of the ad impressed me. I liked the emphasis on the "transfer of wealth" and thought this line was solid: "This is one emergency we can't drill our way out off." That was followed by Pickens' mention of harnessing wind power, which is fantastic.

But then he proposed "using America's abundant natural gas as a cleaner, cheaper alternative to foreign oil."

Oh, T. Boone.

Here's the Tribune's summary of the so-called "Pickens Plan":

He proposes replacing the 22 percent of electricity the nation gets from natural gas with wind energy. That would free up that natural gas to become an alternative fuel for cars. He says cars running on natural gas could cover 38 percent of U.S. transportation needs.

Climate Progress' Joseph Romm explains why this proposal is problematic:

Seriously, though, it’s great that gazillionaire TBP is talking up peak oil and joining the wind power bandwagon (see “Wind Power — A core climate solution“). And it’s great he plans to spend tens of millions of dollars pushing this idea and delivering the mesage that $15 billion dollars for the wind production tax credit is peanuts compared to the $700 billion this country is going to spend on foreign oil this year.

But if you want to displace oil, the obvious thing to do is use of the wind power to charge plug-in hybrids (see “Plug-in hybrids and electric cars — a core climate solution“), multiple models of which will be introduced into the US car market in two years. Indeed, with electric utilities controlling the charging of the plug-ins, they can make optimum use of variable windpower, which is mostly available at night time. That would be win-win-win.

The Pickens Plan, however, is based on the utterly impractical idea that “Harnessing the power of wind to generate electricity will give us the flexibility to shift natural gas away from electricity generation and put it to use as a transportation fuel.”

Uhh, never gonna happen, T. Boone. Never. The most obvious reason is the gross inefficiency of the entire plan.

Read Romm's whole response. He goes on to explain why the government is never going to spend the money necessary to convert to natural gas vehicles and why such a conversion would do little to curb greenhouse gases.

Yesterday, John McCain came out and proposed to balance the federal budget by the end of his first term. Today, the Chicago Tribune editorial board lapped it up:

Since winning the nomination, Obama reportedly has been moving toward the middle of the political spectrum. But on the budget, he still sounds left of center, with no interest in eliminating deficit spending.

So it was heartening to hear that at least John McCain is determined to restore fiscal discipline—and not in eight years, as he had previously suggested, but in four. On Monday, he released a plan that explains how he will manage the economy and says flatly, "John McCain will balance the budget by the end of his first term."

The board tempers their excitement with the acknowledgment that McCain has laid out virtually no plan for how to reach this budgetary bliss. Perhaps that's because it's politically unfeasible, a rather important point the Tribune considers only after heralding McCain's announcement.

In a post we highlighted in the Early Bird, the Center for American Progress' Wonk Room suggests that McCain will face a deficit of $700 billion, thanks to his extension and augmentation of Bush's expiring tax cuts. A "generous estimate" of the savings from McCain’s proposed spending freeze would be $50 billion, leaving a budget hole of $650 billion, a whopping total that could not even be erased by eliminating 10 whole cabinet agencies (Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, HUD, Interior, DOJ, Labor, Transportation, Treasury and the EPA).

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In a great post over at Urbanagora, Kiyoshi Martinez uses the Huffington Post's impending arrival on the Chicago media scene as an occasion to examine the current state of the Sun-Times, the Tribune, and various online outlets. As he notes, Arianna Huffington picked a really interesting time to jump into this pond:

I think the decision to target this city in particular shows a shrewd familiarity of the weaknesses of the two daily papers and their online properties. It seems almost paradoxical that at a time when two newspapers face financial turmoil, one of the largest news and political sites decides it's a good time to move in.

Martinez also highlights how Chicago's two major dailies have utterly failed to embrace the new media environment:

Rarely does the Tribune or Sun-Times link outside of their Web site to local bloggers or other Chicago-media sites (i.e.: EveryBlock, Chicagoist, Gapers Block, Chi Town Daily News). Nor do they embed YouTube videos, make use of Flickr, be active on Twitter or actually understand the concept of creating a community on their Web sites through commenters. And we haven't even talked social networking yet.

Instead, they build walled gardens, which defeats the philosophy of the Internet. Making things worse is that most of their new media content, such as videos, cannot be embedded to a reader's blog or shared easily. And the Tribune removes its articles from the public view after little more than a week, meaning that search engines can't index it and send them more page views and more revenue.

Read the whole thing here. And also make sure to check out the comments section where, interestingly enough, an argument breaks out over ... whether Martinez's post was too lengthy for the internet.

In a front-page article today, the Tribune's Mike Dorning tells readers today what we at Progress Illinois pointed out over a month ago: by activating under-represented communities, Barack Obama can dramatically alter the electoral map.

From the article, headlined "Obama's 10 Percent Solution":

If Obama could inspire just 10 percent more Democratic voters under 30 to go to the polls than did four years ago, that alone could be enough to switch Iowa and New Mexico from red to blue, the analysis suggests.

Just a 10 percent increase in turnout among blacks would make up more than 40 percent of Bush's 2004 victory margin in Ohio and more than 20 percent of the Republicans' 2004 victory margin in Florida.

Turnout increases of 10 percent of both young voters and African Americans could virtually eliminate the Republicans' 2004 victory margin in Ohio and go a long way to closing the gap in Colorado, Nevada, Missouri, Virginia and--a bit more of a stretch--possibly North Carolina.

Think these goals are unattainable? The Tribune highlights Jesse Jackson's 1984 presidential run, which also focused on registering African-Americans and young voters of all races. The Rainbow Coalition couldn't secure the nomination, but black voter registration and turnout both went up 11 percent from four years prior.

This year, Obama has hordes of resources, the Democratic Party infrastructure behind him, and over four months to organize. The results could be striking:

"Based upon the enthusiasm and the greater historical significance this time around, I certainly think a 20 percent increase in black turnout would be entirely within the range of possibility," said David Bositis, a research associate who studies African-American voting trends at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies

To play around with the numbers yourself, you can download Nate Silver's youth and minority turnout model here (last updated on June 11). To experiment with different scenarios, just change the turnout numbers in the yellow section at the top of the page. To recalculate the state-by-state projections, hit F9 on a PC, or Command + = on a Mac.

Image used under a Creative Commons license by Flickr user Tom of Lebanon.

Much like columnist Dennis Byrne, the Tribune editorial board is displeased that the recent security gains in Iraq are not being covered by the national press:

There are tremendously encouraging signs, though, that Iraq has come through the worst. The breathtaking violence that rocked the country after the U.S.-led invasion is ebbing. A government once derided as incapable of securing Iraq has an increasingly effective military. It enjoys more cooperation from the different ethnic and religious groups. Hotbeds of Sunni and Al Qaeda resistance have been defanged—and now rely on Iraqi forces to keep a relative peace. This nation's decisions about its commitment in Iraq need to acknowledge these specific realities:

Although the Tribune treated yesterday's massive bombing in Baghdad as a blip on the radar, the security gains it cites are indisputable and valuable. But while violence is down, the root causes of the war are still unresolved. As the AP notes in an article published Monday, the power struggle between Sunnis and Shiites remains fierce, political progress has lagged, and U.S. troops have suppressed violence in Baghdad in large part because rival communities are separated by a series of large blast walls. "Fear and distrust" of fellow countrymen and American forces still lurks in every quarter.

Moreover, the relative calm could break at any moment. While the Iraqi military has allowed the government to gain confidence, that support will be undermined if it doesn't deliver essential services and jobs to its citizenry and rebuild its broken infrastructure -- areas in which many of the militias have been far more effective. This will be tough to do as corruption and bureaucratic chaos have swallowed up most of the nation's windfall oil profits.

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Today's Tribune column from Dennis Byrne features another doozy of a thesis: the Iraq war will soon end in an American "victory":

[Barack Obama], his fans and much of the media haven't noticed in the heat of the presidential campaign, but the war is winding down, if not nearing its end. Fewer military and civilians killed or wounded; fewer insurgent attacks; more order and security, especially in such troubled areas as Basra and Sadr City; more reconciliation; improved quality of life, and—not the least—greater liberties.

Byrne is correct to say that violence in Iraq is down at the moment among both American troops and Iraqi civilians, an undeniably positive development. But as General David Petraeus himself said just a few short months ago, "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation," (the stated goal of the surge) or in the provision of basic public services. And many believe Iraq's relative peace could fracture at any moment:

“Compare the situation now to six months or a year ago, and it is much better now,” said Nabil Younis, a political scientist at Baghdad University. “But most people feel the progress is not real progress. They expect something to happen any day, any hour, any minute … and everything will collapse.”

The thrust of Byrne's latest piece is far from surprising. A review of his Tribune columns over the last five years reveals that he has consistently pointed to temporary developments -- from marginal gains in security to various elections -- as evidence that the United States is making tangible progress in Iraq. Meanwhile, during the same time period, an increasing number of soldiers and civilians have died and the country has slipped further into chaos.

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Appearing on WTTW's Chicago Tonight on Friday, Tribune editorial page editor Bruce Dold suggested that Barack Obama and John McCain share the same position on immigration. Watch that claim -- as well as Dold's assertion that Obama suffers from an "elitism divide" -- below:

Now on the one hand, you could argue that Dold's description of the two candidates' positions on immigration favors Obama. After all, Dold is essentially arguing that Obama isn't vulnerable on this "wedge issue" because of their purported agreement.

But I'd argue the contrary -- that Dold's characterization helps McCain.

Indeed, Dold is giving the Arizona Republican credit for his initial support of comprehensive immigration reform, while overlooking that he backed away from that position in a clear pander to GOP primary voters. Media Matters has this concise description of McCain's switch:

[D]uring the race for the Republican nomination, McCain reversed himself on the issue of border security, saying that "we've got to secure the borders first" -- a position at odds with his prior assertion that border security could not be disaggregated from other aspects of comprehensive immigration reform without being rendered ineffective. Indeed, McCain said in January that he "would not" support the comprehensive immigration reform legislation he once sponsored with Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA).

Every time a reporter or commentator overlooks McCain's flip-flops -- on immigration or the Bush tax cuts or the religious right -- McCain benefits. Independents and moderates continue to think that he shares their values, while the Republican base takes comfort in his decision to move in their direction.

It's the media's responsibility to remind the public of McCain's maneuvering. But more often than not, they turn a blind eye.