Quotables

This comes from Sun-Times sports columnist Rick Telander re. former Chicago Simeon High School basketball star Derrick Rose, the Bulls number-one draft pick:

In 2007 in Chicago, 32 school-age children were killed by gunfire. This year there have been 28 killed so far, with the youngest being a 7-year-old girl, waiting for an afternoon snack at a fast-food drive-through with her father. Gang killers are pretty bad shots, you know, so in places like Rose's Englewood neighborhood, nobody's really safe from the crossfire, not even on your own porch or in your own bedroom, unless its walls are metal-sheathed. Poverty is at the root of it all, of course. And the ease of getting guns.

'I'm tired of walking into classrooms where there's an empty desk and trying to talk to children and comfort them and make them feel better,'' Arne Duncan, the chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools, recently told the New York Times.

I give Duncan credit for at least taking some responsibility for these CPS students and for speaking out about guns.

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"It's all politics..."

From new-McCarthyite and neocon think-tanker (Manhattan Institute) Sol Stern responding to the UFT's Leo Casey, calling the union a shill for Obama and calling me a "good friend of the UFT" (which I am).

I can’t help concluding that the reason you launched this factually unsupported attack on me, is that the union is now shilling for Obama, as it previously shilled for Clinton. You still haven’t explained why you never said a word about the Clinton campaign’s overt efforts to link Obama with Ayers’ terrorist past, but then decided to dredge up an old article of mine which never even came close to making that link. I guess it’s all politics Leo, and politics makes for strange bedfellows. In that regard I see that one of your new boosters in this argument is none other than that good friend of the UFT, Mike Klonsky. Don’t you think Al would be turning over in his grave?

The Al, for the uninitiated, is the late Al Shanker, who probably IS turning over in his grave seeing his old buddy Stern in bed with the worst of the union busters. As far as the racist theorist Charles Murray is concerned (referred to in Stern's response to Leo Casey), he's a fellow, along with Stern, at the Manhattan Institute. I love Stern calling an election campaign, "all politics."