The Community Word

Listen to talk radio these days, and one gets the impression that the Republican Party is the party of the working class. It is the Democratic Party that caters to the whims of the rich, liberal elites, they say.

Listen to it long enough, and you might begin to believe it.

But if you saw the spectacle in Peoria last month when President Bush stopped by to visit, all such notions vanish.

In case you missed the fawning coverage, President Bush blew into Peoria for a few hours to attend a fund raiser for Congressional candidate Aaron Schock. For a mere $500, attendees dined on fillet mignon shish-ka-bobs, rice and cheesecake. For $5,000, they could have their picture taken with the president. And the event was completely closed to the press.
But that wasn’t the only party happening on July 25.

In case you missed what little coverage there was, Congressional candidate Colleen Callahan held a fish fry at Kickapoo Sportsman’s Club. The price of admission was $15, and you had to buy a drink ticket at the front door. You had to stand in line to get served, but some nice ladies served up fried catfish, homemade potato salad, chips and salad onto plastic dishes. Dessert wasn’t included in the meal, but a group Kickapoo ladies cooked up plenty of cakes and pies, which were sold for about a buck a piece. Honestly, it looked like a church bake sale in there. They held a few 50-50 drawings, but I doubt they raised as much cash as one single meal ticket at the Schock event. Colleen didn’t charge anyone for the photos she took with anyone who asked. And attendees were forced to mingle with any reporter or blogger who showed up.

In other words, it was a lot more fun than that stuffed-shirt event Schock threw together.
I didn’t see one single person wearing a suit and tie. I did see a lot of union logos. I saw a few seed hats, too.

Someone notify Sean Hannity. Here in Peoria, the GOP is still the party of the affluent and the Democrats are still the party of the working class.

I’m not going to try to tell you that working with your hands is more moral than working in a suit and tie. And having a lot of money doesn’t make one evil.

But what I am telling you is that no one who has to do hard, physical work is going to hand over $5,000 for a photograph with anyone. And I guarantee you that most of the people who paid that money are folks who want to have their Congressman’s ear at some time in the future. If Aaron Schock is so far ahead in cash and in the polls as he wants us to believe, why is he so intent on raising as much cash as possible?

What did the people who paid $15 to eat catfish and potato salad get? A chance to help send someone to Washington who thinks it’s time to let Iraqis defend Iraq, and who’s a bit more mature and experienced, and who doesn’t need $500 from you to get her attention.

I believe it’s called

‘identity theft’

Columnist Phil Liciano got all nostalgic on the occasion of his 20th anniversary at the Peoria Journal Star. And he makes this surprising revelation about how he got the job:

“Looking for work, I called the managing editor. She mistook me for some guy named Paul Lucchese, whom she had been meaning to schedule for an interview.

“‘Oh, um, yeah, that’s me,’ I said. I showed up days later and got hired. I don’t know what happened to Paul Lucchese, but I hope he holds no hard feelings. As we Italians say, ‘Nothing personal - just business.’”

Three thoughts:

1. This column makes former M.E. Marge Fanning look like a dolt.

2. There’s a phrase for this: Identity theft. Luciano can laugh about it now, but he basically screwed some guy out of a job.

3. There are newspapers that take their ethics very, very seriously. At these places, admitting you lied to get your job means you get shown the door, twenty-year veteran or not. It’s easy to understand why. Look at the major newspaper scandals of the past few years. Almost all of them involved people who misrepresented themselves to get hired.

Serial plagiarist Jayson Blair misrepresented himself as having completed a degree to get hired on at the New York Times. Janet Cooke, whose faked article “Jimmy’s World” earned a Pulitzer Prize for the Washington Post, lied about having a degree.

But hey, all Luciano did was let someone think he was this other guy to score an interview he might not have gotten otherwise. And besides, it was 20 years ago! What does it matter?

Well, it might matter to Alicia Butler. She’s the woman who lost her seat on the Peoria School District 150 of Education after the Peoria Journal Star ran a bunch of articles about how she didn’t have the academic degree she had claimed in campaign literature. They wrote a lot of articles, and and Luciano was one of the reporters who piled it on. He didn’t have any sympathy for Butler’s misrepresentations, as I recall.

But hey, there’s a difference. Butler was on the school board, where she could shape young people’s minds. And as a member of the school board, she has to be a role model. It’s not like Luciano has any such influence on young minds, except if you count the fact that he teaches journalism at Bradley University, a course which presumably has a section on ethics.

But there’s also the possibility Luciano is either exaggerated the story about his hiring, or that he’s making it up completely. This would make him a bit of a fabulist, like disgraced New Republic writer Stephen Glass, who lied in his stories, just not about his resume.

You can own part of the Journal Star for less than the cost of one copy of the newspaper

At the time I’m writing this column, GateHouse Media stock is selling for 84 cents a share. That price is two cents more than its all time low, which was reached on that same day. GateHouse, the chain of newspapers that includes the Peoria Journal Star, is in deep trouble. Its stock once sold for more than $20 a share. But it was consistently selling for less than $1 a share for the last half of July. Floor trading of GateHouse stock was placed under an “operational trading halt,” and won’t be allowed to return until it trades above $1.10 a share for an entire trading day. It hasn’t.

Analyst Douglas A. McIntyre says that GateHouse lost $29 million during the last quarter, while revenue was $170 million, while debt service was $24.4 million. GateHouse will have to stop paying what was a huge dividend, which he said is the only reason to own GateHouse stock in the first place. He predicted that GateHouse either will be broken up before the end of the year or will enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Does this mean that GateHouse will be sold off? Not necessarily. There’s always the possibility a court could order GateHouse’s assets to be simply liquidated. The Journal Star bought a hugely expensive printing press before Copley Press sold the JS to GateHouse. That might make it even less likely some media organization would buy the Journal Star. And let’s not forget GateHouse also owns the Peoria Times-Observer and other smaller weeklies serving Morton, East Peoria, Chillicothe and Washington. GateHouse also owns newspapers in Galesburg, Lincoln and Pekin.