Our encouraging thought for the day goes out to this season’s graduating classes: Cheer up. Those same qualities that brought scorn, shunning and outcast status in high school often bring the most success in adult life.
So says author Alexandra Robbins, writing in our sister newspaper the Los Angeles Times. As examples who were shunned by the Cool Table in the school cafeteria, she offers country star Taylor Swift, fashion icon Tim Gunn and Harry Potter creator J. K. Rowling. Take that, snobs.
"The most heartbreaking consequence of this treatment is that tens of thousands of students—imaginative, interesting, impressionable people—think that they have done or felt something wrong," writes Robbins, yet “being different is not a problem but a strength."

I was sorry to hear that “Chicago Code” is about to be axed, as Luis Arroyave reports. It’s not because the show offered such a true-to-life depiction of Chicago police and politics (It didn’t).
I enjoyed the program mainly because I am a fan of Jennifer Beals. I've been rooting for her ever since she was one of the students I met at a Goodman Theater high school workshop to which I lectured many moons ago. Even then she was a standout talent.
She’s had a great career from “Flashdance” to “The L Word.” But in my view, she deserves better scripts than “Chicago Code” provides. Compared to the real cops and pols I’ve covered for a few decades, the dialogue and situations sound like they were dreamed up by a Los Angelean. Fuh-gedda-bow-dit.

Who snitched on Osama bin Laden? A Saudi newspaper points to that intriguing possibility that the al-Qaida leader might have been set up by a rival faction led by –Guess who?-- his top deputy, Egyptian Ayman Al Zawahiri, according to the Daily Mail.
The plot allegedly began when Zawahiri’s faction persuaded bin Laden to move out of the hard-to-reach and well-protected tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border, the Saudi Al-Watan newspaper reported Thursday.  He moved to his more comfortable compound in Abbottabad, where U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6 "terminated" him last weekend, as the line in Apocalypse Now goes, "with extreme prejudice."

I was shocked but not very surprised by the Obama administration’s stepping on their own story about the shooting of Osama bin Laden.
I was not surprised because I know the Page Theory of Breaking News. It holds that the first casualty of any major breaking news event is the truth.
I came up with this theory when I served many decades ago as a drafted army public information specialist. (Hey, it was a safer job than helicopter door gunner.)

Stories filtered through military offices have a built-in contradiction. Aimed at a civilian culture that values information, they are produced by a military culture that values secrecy.
The result can be something of a mess, even a scandal. The death of Pat Tillman and the rescue of Jessica Lynch come immediately to mind. Both of those stories turned out to be quite the opposite of their initial reports. I was only shocked in this case that the skinback came so soon and with such awkwardness.

President Obama rebutted Donald Trump's birther goofiness right in Donald Trump's face -- at the White House Correspondents Association dinner on Saturday night.

But POTUS's jabs were gentle compared to those of Saturday Night Live's Seth Meyers, a Northwestern grad who effectively roasted Trump, the Prez and the press as ALMOST everyone laughed.

(Trump looked rather stony-faced and unamused as the crowd guffawed, although it was hard for me to tell beneath the glow of that large furry thing on top of his head.)

"Today I am very proud of myself,” said Donald Trump, leading me to wonder: How is today different from any other day?
True to form, the Donald reacted to Obama’s release of his long-form birth certificate with all the grace of a hungry badger.
"Today I am very proud of myself because I have accomplished something that nobody else has been able to accomplish."
Let Trump have his moment of glory like a schoolyard brat while grownups carry on with the serious work of government.
He should be grateful to Obama for lending an air of legitimacy to the calls for the long-form certificate, even though it is very thin air.
As I wrote in today’s column, he doesn’t appear to have followed the news much outside the business pages. But he can shoot to the top of the Republican presidential polls in this weird political season, simply by pandering to the Obamaphobes.

 

UPDATE: This! Just! In! AP reports that Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on Monday vetoed a bill to require President Barack Obama and other presidential candidates to prove their U.S. citizenship before their names can appear on the state's ballot.
Brewer said in her veto letter that she was troubled that the bill empowered Arizona's secretary of state to judge the qualifications of all candidates when they file to run for office.
"I do not support designating one person as the gatekeeper to the ballot for a candidate," said Brewer, “which could lead to arbitrary or politically motivated decisions.”
Brewer was secretary of state until she became governor in 2009.

10:20 pm EDT Monday
   +

Sarah Palin toying with birtherism? She's not alone.

For example, Arizonans are waiting for Governor Jan Brewer to sign an unnecessary law.
It would require presidential candidates to prove their citizenship before their names could be placed on the state’s ballot.
Guess what presidential candidate sponsors of this bill have in mind?

Yes, it faces legal challenges, but, as this Arizona Republic report explains, the bill’s Republican sponsors have a novel defense: It doesn’t call for anything that federal law does not already require.
Besides, as much as the bill calls for the “long-form” certificate, which birthers falsely claim Obama has

As polls show Americans split right down the middle on his Libyan war, President Obama had four big questions to answer with his televised address to the nation Monday: 
- Why are we riding to the rescue in Libya and not other tin-pot tyrannies like, say, Iran or Zimbabwe?
- What exactly are we trying to do there?
- How do we know when we have done what we’re trying to do?
- And, last but certainly not least, how soon can we leave?
With critics on his right, left and middle clamoring for answers, Obama focused less on details of what we’re trying to than on moral reasons for why we are trying to do it.

Reader Comment of the Day:

In response to my Sunday column:

Subject: “Chocolate City”
The song was not a hit. It reached 94 on billboard and 24 on black music charts.

But thanks for reminding the white community that the blacks have moved to the burbs and brought their criminal ways with them.

Just ask Evanston, Riverdale, etc., about the jump in crime.
JK

My Thought:

I maintain that the song was a hit and it soon became a classic.
Although apparently not in YOUR neighborhood.
Cheers,
CP

Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich once again shows himself to be the gift that keeps on giving for journalists on slow news days.
On Saturday he acknowledged shifting his position on the U.S. military intervention in Libya, then quickly tried to justify it. He said he was only responding to President Obama’s changing views.
“The fact is that on each day I was on television I was responding to where the president was that day,” the Republican former House Speaker Gingrich told a gathering of conservative Iowans, according to ABC News. “And so obviously there were contradictions.”
“It’s true,” he added, “I was trying to follow Obama.”
Say what? Does Gingrich actually pay attention to what he says before he denies saying it?