Entries associated with the tag "Tom Roeser":

Somewhere beyond the vast and gentle sands, sails bob on the horizon and fleecy clouds pause at a distance, letting the sun splash on the play of happy children who weren’t aborted. Jack Higgins drew this idyllic shore Sunday in the Sun-Times. Only one adult is in sight in his cartoon -- Henry Hyde, sitting blissfully in the lifeguard’s chair, a moppet in his lap. If such a moppet ever sat in yours you’ll take Higgins’s point.

The tribute to Hyde on Tom Roeser's blog says the late author of the 1976 Hyde Amendment "passed legislation that not only defended rights but saved millions of lives." Can this be true? -- Hyde’s amendment simply forbade the use of federal funds to pay for abortions.  But The American Prospect told us in May that "studies conclude that between 18 and 35 percent of women on Medicaid who would have had abortions if government funding were available -- at least 64,000 women a year, according to a conservative estimate--instead carried their pregnancies to term." That’s some two million children in all, all frolicking on the beach, their impoverished mothers nowhere in sight but hardly missed thanks to the vigilant Henry Hyde.    

Roeser says Hyde had his own vision of the thanks he’d get, and it was less romantic than Higgins’s only inasmuch as he did not expect it from the living. According to Roeser, "Henry told me one day . . .  that the great incentive to be pro-life is this: that no matter how we may have messed up earlier in life, if we defend the unborn children, his great expectation is that when the most unworthy of us arrives Up There, they will hear a chorus of angelic voices. They will be the voices that were stilled by abortion but who will greet us." For Hyde himself, Roeser predicts more--"an orchestral symphony the size of the Mormon Tabernacle choir."

All those poor pregnant women asked for was a choice, but little did they dream what it is: for their children either paradise on earth at Camp Hyde or a seat in a celestial choir. Their burden has lifted.

I take it back. I wrote the other day in this blog that the journalistic day is over when a big Chicago story wouldn't be complete until so-and-so had his or her say on the subject. Henry Hyde died Thursday and my first thought was this: Must read Tom Roeser. Roeser, full of years and beans, writes the most fully realized blog I know. He's a ruminator, his decades in politics the cud he now chews twice, and he's spellbinding. His blog gives him all the time and space in the world, and he's taking it. Roeser, who wears his values on his sleeve, admires some people and despises others; he admired Hyde enormously.

His entry on the late congressman doesn't disappoint. "There will not be his like in the Congress again soon. Perhaps never," Roeser writes. "Some thoughts: I hope that Congressman Rahm Emanuel has retained some portion of the innate grace from his ballet dancing past not to attend Henry’s wake or funeral. But if he goes it will be typical. Typical because as everyone in Washington knows including the media that will not publish it, Emanuel, once President Bill Clinton’s assassin (felicitously called his political director) looked skyward in innocence as porno-magazine owner-editor Larry Flynt disclosed that decades earlier Henry had an affair from his Illinois legislature days--which was supposed to tit for tat, to even things up with a president who allowed himself to be pleasured in an anteroom off the Oval Office by a courtesan intern paid by the taxpayers . . . on occasions enjoying himself with her even when a House member was on the phone talking to him about the possibility of war . . . who then lied about it under federal oath, lied to the people and then admitted he lied."

In Roeser's long, sympathetic account of the central role played by Hyde in Clinton's impeachment, Emanuel pretty much tried to blackmail Hyde into backing off. Roeser writes:

"Twice the bad-breathed one approached him. The second time he said fundamentally this--This is the real world, Henry and just as you prepare to bring impeachment think of what our disclosure will do to you and your family. You go to Mass now every morning and to communion, too. Well think of what those in the pews will think as you go up there to receive the Eucharist Henry; think of what they will say. They will say this is Henry Hyde the adulterer. Think what your grandchildren will say and think about you forever, Henry. Do you understand?

"Henry did and carried out his duty. The Flynt charge was made. It hit Hyde harder than he thought it would. It stayed with him for life. Once he told me that he had been hit by the 'Irish sickness,' i.e. depression. Much later he began to physically fail after an operation. He began to fall. He had to get a wheel-chair."

When you're done with Roeser's long tribute to Hyde, wander around in his blog. Because of time spent in Minnesota, he has a lot to say about Hubert Humphrey, most of it affectionate, and some sharp observations to make about Gene McCarthy. A few days ago he was writing about Humphrey, McCarthy, LBJ, and Vietnam, and explaining why Ron Paul reminds him less of Robert A. Taft than he does McCarthy. You can disagree with Roeser on a lot of things, and think you don't care which dead senator a marginal GOP presidential candidate most resembles, but Roeser will catch you up in his enthusiasms. Is blogging something else that's wasted on the young? 

Debra Pickett resigned from the Sun-Times Monday afternoon, minutes after being asked to do a story she thought was preposterous.

“I laughed,” says Pickett, recalling her response when features editor Christine Ledbetter called with the assignment to breast-feed her infant son in public places and write about it. "I have to say I didn't take it terribly seriously." She'd seen other Sun-Times stories begin with an "outrageous premise" then get negotiated into something not beneath the dignity of adults. Some other day, she and Ledbetter might have begun negotiating. But not this time. Pickett, who was due to return from maternity leave February 26, tells me, “I said, ‘Well, there’s probably a conversation I need to have with Don Hayner before I can talk to you further about this assignment.'” Hayner’s the managing editor. Pickett had been trying to reach him all day. "I felt the ground had shifted a little bit under my feet while I was gone," she says, and she wanted Hayner to tell her where she stood. Her resignation was already a possibility, perhaps even a likelihood. The breast-feeding assignment shifted the ground a little more. She called her husband, an Amtrak executive who was on a train between Washington and Philadelphia, and they talked. Then she reached Hayner. She didn't ask where she stood. She quit.

The idea for the breast-feeding story came from editor-in-chief Michael Cooke, who says it was simply an idea -- a paper could no more assign such a story than it could assign a reporter to pose nude for an art class. And just as it wasn't the story, per se, that drove her off, Pickett insists, it also wasn't a desire “to stay home and be a full-time mom to my baby.” It was simply this: “When it’s time to grow up and move on it’s time to grow up and move on.” In journalism, she observes, “people’s stars rise and fall.” Hers had gone up -- she “trembles on the cusp of stardom,” I wrote in 2002, when she'd been at the Sun-Times two years, her profiles of interesting people she met for lunch were making the Sunday paper worth reading, and her column had begun appearing Friday’s on page two. And then it started to head down. While Pickett was on leave the column, which she continued to write once a week, was moved back to the Lifestyles pages. "It's not where I wanted to be professionally," she says.

"She was a young, single Chicagoan," says Ledbetter. "That was the mantra for the column. She morphed into what she morphed into. If she chose to write about her boyfriend and her baby, those are Lifestyles topics." 

Pickett doesn't disagree. “As a columnist you get locked into a persona," she says. "There were a lot of serious things I was interested in that I wanted to write about which weren’t in line with the mission of the paper and my role at the paper. I’ve developed a strong interest in Africa and the AIDS crisis there. The dilemma was that for every column about that there were three columns about the boyfriend. That’s what people expected.”

She says the paper encouraged her boyfriend columns, which led to husband columns and baby columns -- three of her last four columns mentioned her son (whom, by the way, she does nurse in public places). “That’s what my unique signature was,” she says. “That’s what people came to expect and associate me with. That was fine, a lot of fun, but it’s not necessarily who you want to be your entire adult life.” By the measure of what it covers and with whom, the Sun-Times is a small paper. There’s not much opportunity for personal reinvention. “The Sun-Times has a great staff writing about politics,” Pickett remarks, perhaps wistfully; an assignment to go forth and breast-feed is a pretty blunt way of being told your services won't be required for that coverage. She says she wants to finish a novel she’s working on and supposes she’ll freelance. “I’ll certainly make some calls and have some lunches and conversations. This is very much a happy thing for me.”

"Sometimes she drew laughter. Sometimes she drew blood," says Cooke, recalling the lunching stories. "An editor can't ask for more than that."

UPDATE: Eric Zorn does a good job of thinking about Debra Pickett on his Tribune blog. Link here.

UPDATE: Wow! Blogger Tom Roeser has more to say about Pickett than you'd think any one person could, no matter how keen a cultural observer. "Bravo Pickett," he writes. "For the first time I find her interesting, not as a narcissistic marketing sell but for herself." Link here.