Peoria Pundit

I’m using the public computer at OSF Medical Center (known to locals at
St. Francis Hospital). I spent about two hours in Dad’s room in the
cardiac care intensive care unit. A very lovely and talented nurse named
Alice let me stay as long as I was quiet and didn’t get in the way (I
hope I’m not getting her in trouble).

I spent about five minutes with him today before the day shift nurse
sent us out (he can only see two people at a time, and only for 15
minutes every two hours.

Dad is lucid, although his throat still hurt from the tube and the
medcation was still giving him drymouth. He’s in some pain of course;
they cracked his chest open, so it can’t be helped.

He was even cracking a few jokes.

Everyone from doctors to nurses to orderlies say he’s doing very well. I
doubt he’s going to be walking around today like they were saying yesterday.

Overall, I have to say that I’m very pleased with his progress.

As an aside, how cool is it that I’m blogging from the hospital? With my
cell phone and a fresh notebook, I could set up shop here.

Also, Alice the nurse is a St. Louis Cardinals fan. So, I am officially
going to root for the Cards to make a comeback and whip the Red Sox by
winning four games straight. This is not an action I take lightly. It
symbolizes how happy I am with the care he is getting here at St. Fran.

Dad is recovering from quadruple bypass surgery.

He was under the knife for more than four hours.

All the doctors and nurses tell us he his stats are excellent. He can
barely talk because of the tube he had down his throat. He’s obviously
very uncomfortable, mostly from having to lie on his back. They also say
they hope to have him walking around some tomorrow, if you can believe
it. My sister, who is a nurse, says that he is doing as well as can be
expected.

Obviously, I am going to miss work until the worst is over. I need to be
with Dad and the rest of the family. I called in and told them I was
taking a day off under the Family Medical Leave Act. I’ve been at my job
for more than one year now, I believe I qualify now.

If anyone reading this has any experience with FMLA, drop me an email or
a comment.

And of course, posts will be limited. And I thank everyone who has
written to express their best wishes.

My nephew Neil and niece Tasha with Dad at a Peoria Heights High School junior varsity football game last year.

http://peoriapundit.com/images/dad_sm.jpg

He’s in the hospital, being treated for chest pain. There’s blockage in
an artery near his heart. At last report, they can treat it with
medication and the prognosis is good. But he will need an angiogram,
which is a procedure that is not without risk.

I’m linking to some of my favorite articles I’ve written about him, or
where he’s mentioned.

There won’t be other posts anytime soon. I’m kind of busy now and don’t
have time or energy for nonsense. There won’t be any commenting on this
post.

‘Somebody moved my cheese’

Dinner at Hooters has Dad eating crow

Forty years ago today …

Good eats

Cat-astrophic pratfalls

It’s 4:30 a.m. I can’t sleep. I’m cobbling together some links for a a
post. I’ve got one of those Dick Clark television blooper programs
running in the background and I hear him how pretty the birds are in
Southern Illinois, but how they can cause chaos in the newsroom.

I look up to see former HOI News’ reporter Rebecca Somach screeching
like a school girl when some tiny little bird flew into the newsroom.
Some intrepid reporter she is.

If you’ve ever seen WHOI office, you would realize that the entire
newsroom fits into the basement of what was once a medium-sized home in
Creve Coeur. Apparently, someone forgot to close the screen door.

Heh.

I can’t make too much fun at her expense. I always get someone else to
kill the spiders.

BTW: I forget … whatever happened to Ms. Somach? Is she still working
in the media? If so, where at?

Related posts:
No explanation

PJS: New deal could help quench thirsty budget

This is just the sort of forward thinking, investigative article I’ve
come to expect from veteran JS reporter Elaine Hopkins. She had some
questions: How much money does District 150 get from its soda vendor
contracts, how much is it per student and how does it compare to other
districts. Then, she answered it:

The district, with more than 15,000 students and 3,000 employees,
receives only about $120,000 a year in profits and donations from
vending machine companies, shows an examination of records acquired
through the Freedom of Information Act.

Rather than bidding out a districtwide contract, individual school
principals and building operators negotiate their own arrangements
with vendors. Collectively, they bring in about $8 per student.

Other districts that bid vending contracts make much more per
student than District 150.

Pekin High School, with an enrollment of about 2,100 students, bid a
vending contract that nets about $100,000 yearly. The money, about
$48 per student, is earmarked for technology and other purposes.

Rockford District 205, with 28,300 students, has a 10-year, $7.5
million contract with Coca-Cola, said Pete Keffer, director of
finance. That averages out to about $26 per student annually.

District 150’s longtime practice of allowing each school and
building to arrange for vending machines makes it difficult to trace
records on those transactions, and the funds are not subject to
outside audits. Documents obtained through the FOI Act, for example,
do not reveal how much the vending companies receive from the
machines or how the proceeds to the schools are computed.

People need to realize just how much hard work goes into gathering the
information for a story like this. If I know District 150, the probably
dragged their heels through the entire FOIA process and did its best to
find reasons to not release the information.

NOTE: The fact that any government needs a Freedom of Information Act is
an obscenity. When a member of the public wants to see a public
document, the government needs to hand over a copy of the document -
minus a reasonable duplication fee — no questions asked. Failure to do
so should be grounds for immediate termination.

Putting the journalism of the article aside, I have problems with soda
machines in schools. I’m a diabetic. I used to drink nothing but
straight Coke, and I’m sure that having soda machines in the hallways at
school would have aggravated the problem I have now. I’ve substitute
taught in schools that do have have soda machines. The kids drink them
in class.

I’m just not comfortable pimping the future health of children in order
to keep school boards, teachers unions and taxpayers from facing
uncomfortable truths about spending and taxes. If money was the only
consideration here, the cheerleaders might as well be selling lap dances
at basketball games.

And remember, the money kids spend on sodas in class is money they won’t
be spending at the corner store on the way home from school. That means
less money for privately owned merchants, and less sales tax revenue.

There is no such thing as free money.

The district would be better off getting a handle on administrative
costs. And, it’s time for the City of Peoria to start finding wayt to
help — not hinder — District 150 schools.

Note: This post was retrieved from Google’s cashe. Original comments are
missing.

/Journal Star/: Anti-Kerry program will air locally

/A television program that reportedly accuses Democratic
presidential candidate John Kerry of betraying American prisoners of
war during the Vietnam War is set to air in the Peoria market.

The Baltimore-based Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns WYZZ-TV,
Channel 43, airing in Peoria and Bloomington, has ordered all 62 of
its stations to show “Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal.”

The Los Angeles Times reported that the program features former POWs
who accuse Kerry, decorated for his service in Vietnam with the
Navy, with worsening their ordeal through his protest of the war
after he returned home.

The program is set to air at 7 p.m. Oct. 22 on Channel 43, said

Kevin Harlan, general manager of WMBD-TV, the outlet that operates
the Sinclair station in this market./

Sinclair has the right to order its stations to play any damn thing it
wants to air. I just hope the GOPers who are chortling over this don’t
go crying foul when someone airs the “Fahrenheit 911″ on election eve.
And the Democrats who are trying to get the government to stop broadcast
of this documentary on “fairness doctrine” grounds shouldn’t be crying
censorship when the GOP tries to keep Moore’s documentary off the air.

Christ, this is the filthiest presidental election I can recall.
Probably because both candidates are week in so many areas, and because
the stakes are so damn high.

As I’ve said before, I have huge problems with the Bush administration’s
handling of the situation now that major fighting is over. But we needed
to take out that bastard on humanitarian grounds along, not to mention
national security. Bush understands that, and Kerry … well, he may or
may not understand it. The problem is that he thinks France and the U.N.
should have veto power on actions the U.S. needs to take — or believes
it needs to take — to protect its own people.

Feh.

I don’t need to see this anti-Kerry video.

Anyone who didn’t know three months ago who they were going to vote for
is an idiot.

That’s what Mike Dimmick wrote at the top of his very first post

at The WEEK Link . He wrote that on
August 26. Since then, there have been 19 comments to that post. And no
new posts.

Perhaps, Mike and the WEEK crew simply are having
trouble thinking up topics. I mean, if its a good topic for the blog, it
just as well could be a topic for a Live at 5 segment. The trick, in my
humble opinion, is to

Here are some ideas:

? How you decide what restaurants for the “You Gotta Eat” segments.

? Q and A “interviews” with staffers.

? Answers to readers questions.

? Information that didn’t quite fit in the broadcast? Post it on the blog.

? Used info from the Web in a broadcast? Post a link on the blog.

? The funniest thing happened on the way to cover this story …

? And this is something you folks /really/ ought to consider: Letting
everyone on the staff blog. Blogger lets you sign up multiple members.
Why not let the camera people, for example, write about their jobs.

And finally, there is one idea that /almost/ goes without saying: Hire a
full time blogger/Webmaster. I know someone with a journalism degree, is
very familiar with Peoria and dabbles in Web-based journalism.

He has been known to blog nekkid
. But not at work.

It’s 4:30 a.m. I can’t sleep. I’m cobbling together some links for a a
post. I’ve got one of those Dick Clark television blooper programs
running in the background and I hear him how pretty the birds are in
Southern Illinois, but how they can cause chaos in the newsroom.

I look up to see former HOI News’ reporter Rebecca Somach screeching
like a school girl when some tiny little bird flew into the newsroom.
Some intrepid reporter /she/ is.

If you’ve ever seen WHOI office, you would realize that the entire
newsroom fits into the basement of what was once a medium-sized home in
Creve Coeur. Apparently, someone forgot to close the screen door.

Heh.

I can’t make too much fun at her expense. I always get someone else to
kill the spiders.

BTW: I forget … whatever happened to Ms. Somach? Is she still working
in the media? If so, where at?

Related posts:
No explanation

That’s not me saying that. It’s Merle Widmer who is a little annoyed at the hometown newspaper:

The Journal Star is using their position to help swing the election in November and is doing so in their usual manner of half-truths and selected material for the subscriber to read. They
sensationalize the horror of war to make it look like the current
administration did everything wrong. Why not put more pictures of
the 300,000 recently uncovered graves in Iraq under Saddam

Show more Front
Page pictures of the thousand of gassed Kurds and show the agony of their deaths and the suffering caused to their families by Saddam and his terrorist leaders. Show how Saddam hoodwinked the na? pacifist UN and tell how some UN officials profited from Saddam staying in power. Put these things on your front page in super bold print!

Also Russia, France and others were reluctant to see the Iraq regime toppled. Put that on your front page and explain the real reasons how some of these countries profited in trading with Saddam. Why not a headline on the front page that says “75,000 people a year die in the United States from alcohol related auto accidents and liver damage.”

How about this headline: “Five binge-drinking deaths by college
underclassmen in four states in less than one month.” as reported in
USA Today on 10/7/04? Why make it look like the all the suffering in
Iraq is because of the current administrations policies? Past and
present administrations can’t even stop unnecessary suffering here!

This followed a pretty thorough fisking of
columnist syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts.

As far as whether columnist selection determining bias on the part of a newspaper … I’m not sure. Pitts is an idiot, to be sure. I am more
concerned that of all its native columnists — Phil Luciano, Jerry Klein, Mike Bailey, Terry Bibo and Pam Adams
— only Mr. Klein can be said to have a conservative viewpoint, and he rarely writes about politics these days. Can the Journal Star find no one with a conservative or even libertarian world view to give voice to local issues?

I will mention that the Journal Star is one of those newspapers whose policy is to use the word “militant” to describe people who strap explosives around children, then send them to blow up school buses, discos and shopping malls.