First, there's the Democratic global warming legislation rushing through Congress with a denouement expected soon. Second, the rush to pass the legislation is fueled by the upcoming United Nations meeting on global warming next month in Copenhagen. President Barack Obama and Democrats want to be able to go there with a goody basket of economy-busting measures that will show the world that America is with it.

Too bad, because the alleged "scientific" evidence of a coming man-made apocalypse...]]> Mon, 07 Sep 2009 22:00:00 -0700 While the hawker in chief chilled on Martha's Vineyard, we enjoyed a week of peace and quiet, but now President Barack Obama has accelerated back to full voice as he speaks to America's schoolchildren Tuesday and to a joint session of Congress Wednesday.

"I voted for Obama, and I presume you did," a new acquaintance said to me over the weekend. "But," he added, "he's not done anything."

Really? A $787 billion stimulus...]]> Wed, 13 May 2009 22:00:00 -0700 While President Barack Obama's newly proposed budget would finally allow Nevada to rid itself of a nuclear waste dump planned to be buried in tunnels deep under Yucca Mountain, it would leave Illinois with the shaft.

Obama's decision to zero out the Nevada nuclear waste repository is a betrayal of his Illinois constituents, forcing nuclear power plants here to continue to "temporarily" store more than 7,000 tons of dangerous, radioactive waste -- more than any other state -- in cooling ponds near rivers and...]]> Tue, 28 Apr 2009 22:00:00 -0700 While reading those controversial, recently declassified memos that provide the Bush administration's legal justification for "torturing" terrorist detainees, I wondered why they had left out one called "On the Rocks."

My high school Spanish teacher imposed that particular type of torture on miscreants who failed to accurately conjugate estar or who were languidly gazing out the classroom window, picturing the beauties over at St. Scholastica. Rare was the student who at least once a semester didn't spend at least five minutes kneeling on his knuckles (the "rocks").

Ha, you say, that doesn't sound so bad, and certainly not as bad as the horrors the evil...]]> Tue, 28 Apr 2009 22:00:00 -0700 As the future of the domestic auto industry becomes clearer Tuesday, it appears that an unprecedented government and organized labor partnership would end up running the companies, and if that doesn't give you pause, nothing will.

Under proposed and tentative agreements, the government (meaning us taxpayers) would own half of General Motors and an undetermined slice of a 10 percent stake in Chrysler. In addition, the United Auto Workers Union would own 55 percent of Chrysler and 39 percent of GM.

There's some poetic justice in the possibility that organized labor, which had so much to do with the failure of the domestic auto industry, could end up holding so much of the bag...]]> Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:00:00 -0800 Obama's schedule this week includes a White House fiscal policy summit Monday, a speech to Congress on Tuesday and the unveiling of his budget Thursday.

Potomac decipherers describe this as Obama's breakaway week, in which he completes the onerous task of dealing with the mess he inherited and begins his own far-reaching agenda. Of course, the inherited mess includes finishing work on this fiscal year's budget, which--ahem--the Democratic Congress failed to pass even though we're five months into the fiscal year. My question is: When does Obama have the time to go over the budget "line by line" like he promised?

Obviously, he doesn't, but we won't count that as a broken...]]> Tue, 17 Feb 2009 22:00:00 -0800 I once had a college sociology professor--Bud Bloomberg, a man as liberal as you could find--who fulminated against slapdash solutions to society's problems. First, define the problem, he lectured, and then craft the most efficient, direct and cost-effective solution, a solution that often turned out to be the simplest. The repeated failure to follow that framework in favor of a vague, hope-inspired panacea was why so many complex societal problems either weren't solved or made worse by heartfelt concoctions.

Hence, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, an unpalatable stew of every imaginable ingredient hatched by every imaginable chef, has come upon us, not targeted...]]> Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:00:00 -0800 It will prove to be about as effective at reigniting the economy as the TARP program has been, which is to say a criminal waste of taxpayers' money for generations to come. All those repeated, but ignored, warnings that the TARP billions would disappear down a financial black hole have come true.

A Wall Street Journal analysis (subscription required) reveals that the lending at the nation's largest banks actually declined after they received $148 billion to help unfreeze the credit market. Only three of the 13 largest banks increased lending after receiving billions of dollars. It turns out that a lot...]]> Tue, 30 Dec 2008 22:00:00 -0800 Although Burris was elected to those offices several times by comfortable majorities, he had failed in recent attempts at higher office, as governor (running unsuccessfully in a three-way primary against Blagojevich) and as mayor of Chicago. (Yes, in Illinois, mayor of Chicago is considered the highest of all offices, save the presidency.)

Burris had been fading into obscurity, running a consultancy that certified minority contractors and handled government bond issues, plums much more cherished and traditional for party loyalists here than the standard gold watch. Burris was no longer considered a player and had not been on the governor's list of possible appointees prior to his...]]> Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:00:00 -0800 True, the extent and audacity of Blagojevich's alleged illegalities are remarkable even for Illinois. No one has been caught trying to kill an $8 million state grant to the city's leading children's hospital because one of its executives didn't cough up a $50,000 campaign contribution. But it is impossible to convincingly assert that he has taken the art form to an entirely new level because unless U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald uncovers it, we can't claim to know how bad the corruption really is.

Blagojevich, if convicted, would be the second Illinois governor in a row to go to federal prison. And he would be the fourth of the last eight Illinois governors to be...]]> Fri, 28 Nov 2008 22:00:00 -0800 That's just in one day. Who knows what Wednesday will bring?

Consider: President George W. Bush has been passionately faulted for "breaking the bank" by conducting the Iraq War. But the non-partisan Congressional Research Service figures that the total cost of the Iraq War and the rest of the global war on terror, including the war in Afghanistan since Sept. 11, 2001 is $864 billion. Now, we can whistle past that in a single day, and few seem to worry. There are no metaphors for this because there is nothing comparable to the rapidity of our plunge into national hock.

I didn't make up that $7 trillion number; it comes from the Associated Press and includes funds to guarantee...]]> Fri, 24 Oct 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Could this be a turnaround? Let's look at another NAR measure: its "pending sales of existing homes" index most forward-looking barometer of residential sales because it records a sale when a contract is signed, rather than at closing, which can be months later. In August, the latest month available, it rose 7.4 percent over July. More significantly, that's 8.8 percent higher over August 2007. These are the kinds of numbers that should be on the front page over every newspaper in the country--but they weren't.

The second reason for my optimism is personal experience: My wife, Barbara, sells residential real estate in Chicago's northern suburbs, and she is having the best second...]]> Tue, 21 Oct 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Those of us with below-average sensibilities can only ponder how Obama has managed to establish a cult of personality the way no other presidential candidate has, except perhaps John F. Kennedy. Yes, Obama says what many Americans want to hear and how they want to hear it. But something is creepy about how Americans are running to embrace what is essentially a method. As ethereal as Obama's aura might be, nothing in the Republican quiver can fight it. Past or present affiliations--be they with violent radicals, racist ministers, convicted fixers and the corrupt Chicago political machine--can't fight the aura.

Obama's aura overcomes his inexperience, his most liberal voting record...]]> Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Mon, 29 Sep 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Mon, 29 Sep 2008 22:00:00 -0700 We who hesitate are lost. On top of that, the public was asked to pick its poison immediately, without congressional hearings, extensive public debate or any other accouterments of a democratic republic. The public was required to accept the edict. No look before you leap.

That an upstart public would flood Congress and the administration with unscripted, immediate and overwhelmingly negative reaction was, itself, considered a disaster of unprecedented proportions. You could read in the faces of the Wall Street types on CNBC and elsewhere their astonishment that anyone would dare defy their wisdom. Jim Cramer, the popular stock guru, expressed it best when he stated that the folks...]]> Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:00:00 -0700 State Sen. Emil Jones (D-Chicago) is the Chicago machine politician who might have been most instrumental in jump-starting Obama's political career. Now, as Illinois Senate president, Jones is the one sitting on the reform legislation, refusing to call it for an expected favorable vote before it officially dies of neglect.

Jones is the pal of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, no friend of reform, who used his amendatory veto power to change the legislation after it passed both houses so that Jones would get another chance to kill it.

If all that's confusing, welcome to Illinois politics, where intricacy is the best camouflage for chicanery. Suffice to say, neither Blagojevich nor Jones...]]> Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Jill Stanek, a former nurse at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, described in 2001 during congressional testimony how it happens: In a "live-birth abortion," doctors "do not attempt to kill the baby in the uterus. The goal is simply to prematurely deliver a baby who dies during the birth process or soon afterward." Medication stimulates the cervix to open, allowing the baby to emerge, sometimes alive. "It is not uncommon for a live aborted baby to linger for an hour or two or even longer. At Christ Hospital, one . . . lived for almost an entire eight-hour shift." Some actually are born healthy because they are aborted to preserve the "health" of the mother, or because the pregnancy was due to...]]> Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:00:00 -0700 His stunt is to bus as many Chicago public school students as possible on the first day of school to New Trier High School, which serves Chicago's wealthy North Shore suburbs. There, he'll try to enroll them, which Meeks knows won't happen because New Trier, like every other school in the state, serves students and taxpayers in its own district. But Meeks will get what he wants: TV cameras capturing the image of a New Trier official turning away black students, evoking memories of old time Southern segregationists, like George Wallace or Orville Faubus, standing in the school house door. Meeks promotes this despicable image by saying: "I want to keep kids out of the 'colored' schools. I...]]> Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Although I have never worked for the Times, I hope that I'm still entitled to some thoughts about its conduct. My labors at three Chicago papers have included membership on an editorial board (Chicago Sun-Times), op-ed columnist (Sun-Times) and op-ed contributing columnist (Chicago Tribune), and sometimes included the selection of op-eds, letters-to-the-editor and forum pieces. At the iconic Chicago Daily News, I filled in on the editorial page under the wise tutelage of Pulitzer Prize-winning Lois Wille, who also later directed the editorial pages of the Sun-Times and Tribune.

So, let's take a look:

Shipley, the op-ed editor, in his response to McCain's submission said:...]]> Sun, 06 Jul 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Sun, 29 Jun 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Sun, 18 May 2008 22:00:00 -0700