Thoughts While Shaving—What Does WTTW Stand For?...So Skewed Left She Can’t Lay Straight in Bed…Lutherans Vote for Gay Clergy…All This and More.

WTTW: “Wilmette Talking to Winnetka!”

My thanks and deepest admiration goes to Pat Hickey, conductor of his own blog and brilliant columnist for The Chicago Daily Observer for thinking of this one. Pat never fails to amuse me in his website “With Both Hands” for his cleverness and insight. This epigrammatic WTTW formulation which really captures the elitist nature of our haughty liberal Chicago public television station deserves the world cup, Patrick. I do believe it’ll catch on. When `TTW contacts you for a donation, use that on `em…pointing out the one-sided “Chicago Tonight” telecasts, Joel Weisman and the trained seals going arf-arf for a fish, the shallow one-sided advocacy for gay “rights”…the big salary for manager Dan Schmidt which is partially paid by taxpayer dollars…the abject political correctness…Nurse Ratched who never, ever does get back to a guest who has a conservative view…the New Yawk voice of the behind-the-scenes announcer extolling “the News Hour with Jim Lahrahrharahrah.” It’s Lehrer. Sound your “r’s.” He’s from Kansas, for God’s sake.

All the stuff that is so veddy-veddy secular upper class.

Can’t Lay Straight in Bed.

A number of people have criticized me for writing that WTTW-Sun-Times-NBC 5 maven Carol Marin is so skewed Left she can’t LAY straight in bed. They agree that the ideological bent of Marin is lefty but point out it is ungrammatical: it should read: “so skewed Left she can’t LIE straight in bed.” Everybody had fun with it but one virulent critic, named EA, wrote that I should retire from writing if I can’t do grammar right: but then she’s a guilt-ridden liberal bore who knows all about race since she has a black friend. Answer: critics are right —but it is an old Northwest Side of Chicago saying which…as an old Nort’west side boy… I presented just as my family and neighbors used to say it.

Lutherans Vote for Gay Clergy.

Not long ago the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) voted to allow…get this…“life-long, monogamous, publicly accountable” homosexual clergy. But the decision has bad repercussions for the church despite the huzzas from liberal mainstream media. Local congregations will not have to decide whether to go along with the decision or not and be part of the ECLA. A voting member of the Virginia synod, Robert Benne, said he was exhilarated that the ELCA had finally taken a stand—BUT. But his church will no longer donate to the ECLA or to its synod. This loss of financial support is grave since as World magazine explains, the ELCA lost 76,000 members in 2008 and its budget shrank to $67 million from $81 million in 2005. A 2005 ECLA survey showed that only 22% of its members favored blessing gay unions or ordaining practicing homosexuals and 57% oppose the changes. Forecast: what you see happening in the Episcopal church will continue to be duplicated with the Lutherans. Traditional religions…including maybe my Catholic one if it can get rid of its lavender clergy—not all that many but some of which are quite prominent…will be the beneficiaries.

“They Declined Our Generous Offer…”

…so said Somalian militants after they beheaded four missionaries who refused to recant their conversions to Christianity on July 27. This again from World magazine, a publication of evangelical Christians which is really first-class and conveys facts no other magazine does. World is edited by Marvin Olasky, published by God’s World Publications 85 Tunnel Road, Suite 12, Asheville, NC 28805.

Podhoretz: Why Are Jews Liberal?

The veteran editor emeritus of Commentary, once published by the American Jewish Committee but which now is NOT for what reason I don’t know (still one of my favorite magazines) says in his latest book of the same title: “Liberalism has become the religion of American Jews”…ending it with the expressed “hope that the Jews of America will eventually break free of their political delusions.” So do I. Brilliant people—cultured, sophisticated, deep-feeling but as Ariel Sharon told me a decade and a half ago when he was here on a speaking tour, “in America…my God! They vote like Puerto Ricans!”