Personal Aside: Tribute to Maureen Murphy…Mah Name is T. Boone Pickens and Ah’ve Been in Oil Mah Entire Lahf. But What About Noooclur, T. Boone?...Jim Lah-rah, the Phoniest Media Establishmentarian.

Maureen Murphy, R.I.P.

Here is how I started my program on WLS-AM Sunday night:

I am sorry to announce the untimely death of Maureen Murphy at age 56 following a long illness. In a very short time…far too short a lifetime…she compiled an outstanding record of selfless service to her family, her church, to the pro-life movement and to government. She was: Republican State Representative from Illinois’ 36th district from 1993 to 1997, during which time she served as chairman of the House Revenue Committee…member of the Cook county Board of Review from 2002 to 2004, the first woman, first suburban resident, first Republican, to hold the post…Cook county Republican chairman from 2002 to 2004, then first woman to hold that post. She was Worth township Republican committeeman, previously serving on the Evergreen Park high school board (elected in 1982) and as Worth township clerk elected from 1985 to 1989. She was a lifelong resident of Evergreen Park.

Most important, at least to me, she was a dedicated member of her church, a daily Mass-goer and communicant. She was an outstanding leader and strategist in behalf of the unborn. She was dedicated to her family, her husband Jack and her four sons.

My condolences to her family and her many friends

Mah Name is T. Boone Pickins…

By now you’ve seen and heard the TV and radio commercials where this 80-year-old (let’s hear it for this age at least!) with a rich Oklahoma accent says “Mah name is T. Boone Pickens…and ah’ve been in oil mah entire lahf.”

He tells us we now import almost 70% of our oil…that is costing us $700 billion a year, $7 trillion over the next ten years…World oil production has peaked at 85 million barrels a day while demand is still growing. Output may never go up again.” Sounds good but here comes the very simplistic part:

“We now produce 22% of our electricity with natural gas. I want to replace that 22% with wind energy and move the natural gas over to the transport sector where compressed natural gas can replace oil. That will lower our oil imports by 38%. The federal government says it’s possible. It’s right here in this study--`20% Wind Energy by 2030’ put out by the Department of Energy…”

The question I have is this: why isn’t he supporting nuclear power? Well, he tells us he is not happy about uranium supplies and costs. But he’s spending $10 billion on his 4,000 megawatt wind farm about the same as it would cost to build 4,000 MW of nuclear capacity. But when you bring windmills online it will mean building a entirely new cross-country transmission system,; transmitting electricity across the country or even halfway will mean we invest in a totally new infrastructure of 765 k V liknes to cover long distances without losing power.

Listen, unlike T. Boone I don’t have a couple of billion lying around to prove my skill in drilling but I’m his age and old enough to know the enormous store of energy that is unleashed in the nucleus of the atom. Smart as he is, T. Boone is foolish not to reckon on the untapped benefits of nuclear energy.

The Greatest Media Establishmentarian.

How the hell do you get Jim Lah-rah out of Jim Lehrer? Especially if you were born in Wichita, Kansas and spent a lot of time in San Antonio, Texas? Answer, when you turn phony Eastern. Lah-rah is one of the sublime innocents in national media. He absolutely does not realize the extent liberal bias has made in the media and in him.

Not Jim Lah-rah. At the end of his daily PBS show, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, the hidden studio announcer gets it worse…”Jim Laaaaah-raaaah.” Call it phony public television pronunciation.

No, Jim Lah-rah, age 74, doesn’t think media have been biased toward Barack Obama. Uh-uh. “There’s an ebb and flow to the news and it will dictate how much news coverage there is going to be.” Oh, I see, just like the tide of the ocean. The more we hear about the errors of JFK, his lack of nerve to require air power to back up the Bay of Pigs, which produced the feeling within Nikita Khrushchev that here was a callow youth with style and little else in the presidency…which led to the Berlin Wall…the acknowledgment by Kennedy to James Reston that in order to show Khrushchev our firmness we would have to add more men and arms to win the Vietnam war…which led to our pulling missiles out of Turkey on the q-t to make a show of our going eyeball to eyeball with the USSR and they blinked—when they didn’t…the more we hear of these entirely historically documented mistakes, the more we hear that Kennedy was still a great..or memorable…president from the establishmentarians of the likes of Jim Lah-rah.

Times are changing as the disillusionment with the “mainstream media” holding back on the Edwards disclosure. Oh that horrid old National Enquirer, you see. But the National Enquirer was just ducky when it unveiled Rush Limbaugh’s drug taking, wasn’t it? Then it was entirely acceptable. The sad thing is that the old generation of stuffy liberal journalists will have to die before a new breed takes over who understands a story is a story. By then nobody will remember Jim Lah-rah of Wichita and San Antonio who has dolled pronunciation of his name with a fancy eastern accent.