Who will put Bensenville back together again?

The east side of Bensenville, a working class suburb, has been virtually destroyed for an expansion of O’Hare Airport that looks now like it will never happen.

So, will Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and his city pay to restore what was once the largest and most successful community of affordable housing in DuPage County? They should, but don’t count on it.

What Daley and his greedy cronies did to Bensenville, a community that had minded its own business for more than 100 years, borders on the criminal. Daley and airport planners knew that they did not need to destroy hundreds of Bensenville homes for years, until later phases of O’Hare expansion were scheduled. Yet, they launched an unprecedented political, economic and government attack that exceeded bounds of decency.

To review: Bensenville, with DuPage County, state and federal assistance, had successfully nurtured this neighborhood of hundreds of homes and businesses. It was modest neighborhood, yes, but it was a viable, clean and healthy neighborhood, exactly what affordable housing advocates (Daley counts himself among them) say that is needed in the job-rich northwest suburbs. But Bensenville sits southwest of O’Hare Airport, in the path of one of the unprecedented, unworkable and dangerous six parallel runways that Daley wanted to install. Daley wanted it at all costs.

The costs, of course, were paid by us taxpayers.

Standing in the way of Daley’s blind hunger to take control of east Bensenville, years before necessary, was long-time Bensenville President John Geils, and his Elk Grove Village ally, Mayor Craig Johnson. When all around them—once proud expansion opponents in neighboring suburbs in the Suburban O’Hare Commission—were being picked off one-by-one by Daley, the two stood firm, together.

Among the obstacles to Daley’s covetedness, was a serious legal one. To obtain the Bensenville properties, Chicago—as O’Hare’s owner—had to threaten condemnation. Trouble was, Bensenville was a separate municipality, in another county at that, and one municipality didn’t have the legal power to condemn property in another one. Long story short: Daley and his allies (in what Tribune columnist John Kass calls the state’s bi-partisan combine of greedy and corrupt politicians and special interests) simply passed a law, no problem. Now Chicago could cross borders and raid another town’s homes. And, by the way, any challenges to that authority would have to be heard in a Cook County court, where the Chicago Machine pretty much control who gets appointed to the bench.

Daley could have held off the acquisition, but in what only can be a fit of spite brought on by a small-town mayor challenging his power, he proceeded. One by one, Chicago picked off the homeowners and renters, many who had become resigned to their fate by the constant barrage of negativity in the media and elsewhere about the future of their neighborhood. Chicago’s intent was to create momentum, by buying and tearing down enough homes to create near-panic selling. In Chicago, that’s called blockbusting, and it is illegal when real estate agents use it to flip a racially changing neighborhood. But apparently it’s okay when Daley wants to use it for his “greater good.”

Bensenville has refused to issue demolition permits to Chicago to tear down the homes it owns and turn the area into something akin to a bombed-out city. Chicago has sued the village to permit the teardowns and the question is now in the courts.

That might have been the most egregious attack on Bensenville and Geils, but it certainly wasn’t the only one. Geils faced a multitude of personal attacks and once in a re-election campaign, he was ruled off the ballot for the most minor of technical errors. Still, he won by a write-in vote. In Springfield, the Legislature and others have targeted various Geils programs, such as combining the police and fire departments (among the handful of Illinois communities that have combined departments, only Bensenville was targeted). Daley’s strategy was to isolate Geils and Johnson, to make them appear to be small-town quacks that were standing in the way of progress. Much of the media and the public bought this slander.

Geils and Johnson now have a taste of justification. The communities hired some of the most knowledgeable and independent aviation experts in the nation, including a former acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, to analyze Daley’s expansion plans. Their criticisms of the plan now have been echoed by the airlines, which want out of future expansion plans, portions of what they called “ill-conceived.” United, in a letter to the FAA last summer, said, “Unfortunately, the city did not accept the more modest and financially prudent approach.”

Could that have been the approach that Geils and Johnson have long proposed: a “modest” O’Hare expansion that made more sense without the huge disruptions caused by Daley’s plan, along with a south suburban airport? That’s what anyone who’s interested in the welfare of the region would advocate. Daley won’t.

Time to support a better alternative to O’Hare Expansion

The airlines’ stinging rebuke (see below) to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s O’Hare expansion plans leaves an obvious question:

If O’Hare expansion isn’t the answer to the crowded skies over Chicago, what is?

The answer has been out there for decades: a new south suburban airport. And fortunately, the groundwork already has been laid. A commission of Chicago suburbs won agreement from two international public works developers to design, finance, build and operate the new airport—at virtually no public cost.

Sadly, Daley and his cronies have stymied those plans, so what could have already been is still a cornfield. It now will take a major shift in political, civic and business alliances to restart the project, if it is not too late. The economic downturn and the credit crunch may have cooled the developers’ interest—which had previously remained strong despite Daley’s assault on the project.

One of the first issues that needs to be settled is: Who would control the new airport? Interest for the new airport had stagnated while Daley was pushing O’Hare expansion, until a group of southern suburbs plus O’Hare neighbors Bensenville and Elk Grove Village got the project untracked. Under the bi-partisan leadership of Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. and the late Rep. Henry Hyde, the group formed a commission that was close to signing up the international developers, until Daley, seeing his cherished O’Hare jobs and contracts threatened by the competition, “put a brick on” the development.

In this, he rounded up a wide array of allies in the public and private sector, but in his most effective move, he created a competitor to the Jackson group. Will County, which had previously shown no interest in the airport, suddenly insisted that it, and not the Jackson group, had the exclusive authority to build the airport. Daley was able to work this magic because Democratic influence was growing in the previously solid Republican county, and whatever quid pro quos the powerful Democratic Chicago mayor could offer were eagerly sought and accepted there. Opposition to the Jackson plan was the price they willingly paid.

In an irrational and wasteful twist, the Illinois Legislature and the Illinois Department of Transportation, did the un-Solomon like thing and spilt the baby. Rejecting the developers who were on the doorstep and ready to begin, they gave the competing groups equal—as it were—standing to build and run the airport. Back to square one in the lengthy bureaucratic board game, the two now are seeking separate approvals from the FAA (which years ago had backed the project) and the state. So now the state has become so mired in “process” that the airport’s start is nowhere in sight—an outcome that suits Daley just fine, giving him time to make his O’Hare expansion a fait accompli.

One thing was wrong, however, with Daley’s scheme. The expansion plan was bound to fail of its own weight. He was blinded by his determination to hold on to O’Hare patronage and put too much faith in the yes-people who surrounded him, and assured him that the expansion was “doable.”

How now to re-energize the south suburban airport? The first gigantic hurdle is to get the major players who supported the expansion to admit that they were wrong. Daley might never do this, but the business, civic, media and labor community that so gladly fell in behind the mayor’s ego can perhaps turn the tide. They owe it to the body politic.

The Federal Aviation Administration, too, will have to reassert its expertise, instead of collapsing as it did before powerful political forces in the city, state and Washington that were aligned with Daley. The FAA years ago had said that the south suburban airport was the best solution, and nothing has changed to justify abandoning that position.

Now comes the hard part: Anything that happens will need state approval, and Illinois is so racked with mis- and mal-governance that it is hard to imagine rational decision-making ever happening. That state is $4 billion—almost $5 billion—in the red, and no solution is in sight. Perhaps the prospect of privately financed jobs and contracts—which will be so rare in the near future—would help them decide to back the new airport.

As for Daley, Jackson’s group had repeatedly said they would be glad to split the patronage with the mayor. It was a price they were willing to pay to move ahead with a solution that would be beneficial for the entire region. Sharing the spoils may look a bit more attractive to Daley now that the airlines have thrown a wrench into the O’Hare works. Then, again, sharing has never been one of Daley’s strong points

Airlines at last say no to further O’Hare expansion

In a stunning reversal and a slap at Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s grandiose dream to expand O’Hare International Airport, the major carriers have rejected costly city plans for additional runways and terminals the airport.

The significance of the reversal, disclosed today by Chicago Tribune reporters Jon Hilkevitch and Julie Johnson, would be difficult to understate. In rejecting further expansion, the airlines have reversed their long-held support of Daley’s expansion plans, and now have sided with long-time critics. Among them were a former acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration and other prominent airline industry experts hired by expansion opponents to analyze the plans.

Aside from vindication for the opponents, the apparent delay, if not death, of the expansion plans raises significant questions for the Chicago region, now to be honestly faced. Chief among them is the fate of the proposed south suburban airport, which has been moldering on the drawing boards, thanks in great part to Daley’s opposition.

Quashing low-fare competition at O’Hare

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Daily Observer

The upstart and lower-fare Virgin Airlines’ plans to initiate service at O’Hare Airport, and thus bring competition, more jobs and economic development to the Chicago area, appears jeopardized by the sweetheart deal between the Daley administration and the legacy airlines that control the airport.

Which raises the question: When will someone, especially in the business community that is so dependent on air travel, finally get mad on the lunatic ways of O’Hare Airport.

Virgin Airlines, which provides international service from both coasts, has been planning a major expansion into America’s heartland, with O’Hare as its base. But it has been stymied because it has been unable to lease gates at the airport, even though more than enough are sitting idle. Virgin said it will have to decide in a few weeks whether to cancel its O’Hare plans and look for another alternative. Meaning, I assume, another Midwest city in which to locate its hub.

The reason Virgin can’t secure one of those empty gates? Because the gates are controlled by United and American airlines, which have a lock on some 80 percent of O’Hare’s business. And how can they get away with a duopoly at O’Hare when the airline industry is supposedly deregulated?

Read more in The Chicago Daily Observer

GM should file for bankruptcy

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

President-elect Barack Obama and Democrats are facing the first important test of their promise of change, and they are about to land heavily on the side of the status quo in the most embarrassing and contemptible way.

In their hyperventilated drive to "save" General Motors (read: the United Auto Workers union), they are deploying our wallets to save a failed business, when real "change" would be bankruptcy, from which would emerge a better and more competitive enterprise.

The $25 billion lifeline, to be sliced from the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program meant for the financial industry, rewards GM for decades of incompetence, greed and sterile thinking. We should scram as far as possible from GM's legacy, not resuscitate it. But if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President George W. Bush, with Obama's blessing, put GM on life support, they would be wallowing in exactly the kind of capitulation to special interests that just weeks ago Democrats condemned.

The UAW has spent $24.6 million in campaign contributions, virtually all to Democratic candidates, in the last 20 years, while GM has spent $10 million on lobbying in just 2008, according to the non-partisan OpenSecrets.org. A few weeks before the election, the UAW announced a $3 million ad campaign in support of Obama.

These millions don't include the uncounted piles of dough that the company and union have spent in the last few weeks to pressure Washington into a bailout.

Over the weekend, Pelosi assured us that GM and the UAW wouldn't get off scot-free, that the $25 billion would come with "strings" attached, such as requiring Detroit to embrace the technology of more fuel-efficient cars—never mind that a different $25 billion of our money already has been set aside in loans for that purpose. Pelosi said the additional $25 billion wouldn't be "new money" because it was coming from "existing" bailout funds. You mean that $700 billion, which suddenly showed up in the last month from who knows where, isn't new money? Stop it, Nancy.

Pelosi's other strings would include a vague company "restructuring" to assure its "long-term" viability. Yeah, sure, we can trust the auto industry and UAW, which made this mess in the first place (GM's car sales began sliding a long time before the current financial crisis arrived), to do what it should have done decades ago.

The best, and perhaps only, way to accomplish what needs to be done is for a bankruptcy judge and his appointed trustee to oversee a top-to-bottom reorganization of the high-bound, uncreative and sluggish company. (For example: How about breaking up GM, which has too many models and divisions, into separate companies, freeing themselves of the brain lock imposed by a lumbering bureaucracy and an unimaginative central management?)

What's needed is a start-over. And a bankruptcy judge has the power to force the company to go back to square one by, among other things, forcing a recasting of the ridiculously rich union contracts. Stockholders, bondholders and other creditors and suppliers will be hurt by a bankruptcy, so why should organized labor escape whole?

If there absolutely must be a government cash infusion, New York University business professor Edward Altman says it should only be made on the condition of GM declaring bankruptcy, to protect the public's interest. No one can predict that the economy won't suffer greatly if GM is ushered into bankruptcy, but anyone who insists that he knows that a nationwide depression will surely follow if we don't cough up $25 billion more for GM is a faker, even a liar.

Declaring bankruptcy doesn't mean that plant and dealership doors would be padlocked the next day and hundreds of thousands of workers would be instantly on the street—an impression that GM and UAW propagandists would like everyone to believe.

Bankruptcy requires an orderly process, prescribed by law, under which the company can be reorganized and emerge strong and resilient. Reorganization would allow the assembly lines to continue running while arranging reasonable warranties, maintenance and service for customers.

Sure, it will take creativity and skill to handle a meaningful transformation, but that will never happen if the Washington friends of GM and UAW plop $25 billion in their laps.

Your comments are welcomed here or at the Tribune Forum

Time to give race a respite

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

A young black woman looked up at my white face from where she was seated in the classroom and said, "Yeah, right."

I was teaching a class of students studying for their high school general equivalency diploma, and said they could be anything they wanted, that it took perseverance, courage, blah and blah. The young woman looked up and said, to the general amusement of the mostly black class, "Yeah, right; I'll be the state attorney general."

The state was Georgia, the city was Athens—deep in the heart of the old South—and the year was 1967. Boycotts, fire hoses, freedom marches and other events of the civil rights movement weren't history then; they were everyday news. The South was reeling from a national frontal attack on a century of legalized and institutionalized racism. The civil rights movement had started a decade before, but deep, abiding racism remained. The student was right; she had no chance of becoming the Georgia attorney general. Then.

Now, four decades later, that same state gave our first African-American president elect, Barack Obama, 47 percent of its popular vote, not enough to win its 15 electoral delegates, but unthinkable back then.

Much has changed in those four decades, and Americans can be justifiably proud of what they have accomplished. Obama has been elected to the highest and most powerful office—in the public or private sector—in America, if not the world.

This towering achievement begs us to honestly and humbly reconsider affirmative action.

Obama achieved this campaign victory on his own merits, without any racial set-asides or goals to "level the playing field" among the many ambitious, talented and resourceful white politicians who coveted the job. Obama's win is more than a powerful symbol; it is reality. A reality that the many affirmative action programs—too many to count at all levels of government, business and education—must now acknowledge. If there is anything that challenges the national unity that Obama seeks, you need to include the mandated, favored treatment of certain races and ethnic groups given in hiring, promotion, college admissions and contracts.

Affirmative action has strayed far from what President John F. Kennedy intended when in 1961 he issued an executive order requiring all federal contractors to "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during their employment, without regard to race, creed, color or national origin." It was a mandate to be energetically non-discriminatory.

President Lyndon B. Johnson expanded on Kennedy's "colorblind" approach when he said, "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and say, 'You are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair." Whatever you may think of the merits of the policy, it was indisputably a mandate to favor some over others.

Racial discrimination still can be found in America, but the appropriate follow-up question that eventually cannot be ignored is: For how long is discrimination against one race required to compensate for past levels of discrimination against another? Don't kid anyone: The many who have patiently stood in line while others have been escorted to the front, even though they may not have directly felt the sting of discrimination, is a source of deep animosity that stands in the way of the kind of racial reconciliation that Obama seeks. So are the battalions of affirmative action and race consciousness enforcers who have engineered a good living by spotting, exaggerating and "remediating" racial tensions where few or none exist.

This is not to say that Obama's election has ushered in an Eden unsullied by lingering, even persistent racism. And it might be a fool's quest to urge a rational and calm re-examination of the pros and cons of affirmative action as it now exists when a black president and a Democratic Congress have been swept into office.

But if not now, when? If we want a frank and honest discussion on race and whether affirmative action should be returned to its original race-neutral intent, isn't it appropriate to consider modifications to the programs to reflect current realities? And to weigh whether class, cultural and economic circumstances are holding back more African-Americans now than racial hatreds?

Is affirmative action to forever continue in its now constituted and overreaching form, which even Johnson would not recognize? How do we know when the kind of legalized racial imbalances imposed by some affirmative action programs are no longer required? If one of the signs that we should be moving in that direction isn't the election of an African-American president, then what is?

A tough time for comics with Obama as president? Yes, they can worry where to find the funny -- chicagotribune.com

The comics have concluded that it indeed will be a tough time for comics, concerned that with Obama they won't know where to find the funny.

Seems to me that they can start by finding something funny in a guy from Chicago getting elected president. But, really, the comics shouldn't worry about it; they've already turned themselves into a joke by their endless fawning over Obama.

Secret Order Lets U.S. Raid Al Qaeda in Many Countries - NYTimes.com

Will Barack Obama, when he becomes president, rescind
this order? Who leaked this story, and why? Whether it was to embarrass President Bush or to put Obama into a box, it was wrong to leak it.

Remember when Martin Luther King tried to march through white Chicago neighborhoods?

The argument back in the 1960s that he shouldn't march in support of open housing because he was "stirring up trouble," "inciting riots" and "endangering public safety." He marched anyway, as he should have, and for his efforts was hit in the head thrown by a racist in the crowd.

So, now we have another case of the right of free expression being restricted as a man is arrested for wearing a McCain shirt at an Obama victory rally. Where's the ACLU when you need it?

Hat tip to Blithe Spirit

I'll bet they did

Chicago Sun-Times religion columnist Cathleen Falsani reported that many members of the media cheered at Barack Obama's Grant Park victory celebration. I congratulate Falsani on her honesty, even though I'm sure her confirmation of media bias was unintended.

ABC News: Emanuel Was Director Of Freddie Mac During Scandal

And this is news to the national media? Obama's connection to Rahm Emanuel was well known, as was Emanuel's directorship of Freddie Mac. Why did ABC wait until after the election to make this a big deal?

It’s not Obama’s fault

An item from the I-wouldn’t-have-believed-it-if-I-hadn’t-seen-it-myself department:

How did the media report the 486-point crash of the Dow-Jones industrial average on Wednesday, the day after Barack Obama was elected president?

According to most media reports, the crash had little or nothing to do with a new president who is pushing redistributive wealth, higher taxation and other anti-business policies. On WMAQ-TV (an NBC station in Chicago on Channel 5) the words “Obama” or “election” weren’t mentioned in the brief item about the huge sell-off. It was as if the election hadn’t occurred, or that it was unthinkable that investors might have taken Obama’s election negatively.

The New York Times’ lead paragraph in its story reporting the huge Dow loss began: “Stocks erased all their gains from Tuesday’s rally—the biggest on a presidential Election Day in 24 years—as investors banked their profits and dealt with another round of bleak economic news.”

[Emphasis added] Not a mention of the election in the story until the end when it noted:

For those curious about the connection between stock markets and presidential elections, Wednesday’s declines fit in with historical precedent. Since 1888, on average, stocks fell 0.5 percent from Monday to Wednesday of a presidential election week when the Democrats took the White House, according to Jeremy J. Siegel, a professor at the Wharton School. (A Republican victory brought an average return of 0.7 percent.) This week, stocks fell about 1.5 percent over the same period.

Over the full four-year term, stocks have historically fared better under Democratic administrations.

“For those curious…” How condescending, as if the writer was stooping to explain it for those of us who are too stupid or audacious enough to think that Obama’s election might have at least a smidgen of something to do with the disastrous day. Notice that there is no attribution in the last sentence, which suggests that the business world prefers to have Democrats mucking up the free markets. If, indeed, stocks have performed better under Democrats, I anxiously await from the writer an explanation for the causal connection.

Of course, there was no mention in the story that, according to the Wall Street Journal story, Wednesday’s losses were the Dow’s “worst percentage decline ever on the day after a presidential election, surpassing the 4.5 percent drop on he day after Franklin Roosevelt’s first election in 1932.” No, mentioning that would have thrown dirt on Obama’s victory.

The Journal story rightly explored the other reasons for the massive decline (“renewed economic worries, coming on top of an unsustainable series of market gains,” as well as expectations for a bad jobless report on Friday), but it also gave attention to the possible Obama factor:

“Some commentators concluded that Wall Street was welcoming Barack Obama with a Bronx cheer. While polls had favored Mr. Obama for weeks, the reality of a new president and uncertainty about how, and how successfully, he will handle the financial troubles may have contributed to the losses, which left the Dow down 5.1 percent at 9130.27.”

I haven’t done a systematic survey of newspaper financial reports on Wednesday’s market drop, but I’m surprised at how quickly the media that I saw in my regular watching and reading so quickly discounted any relationship between the market and Obama’s election—except like the New York Times, which was quick to credit Obama for the previous days big increase, but dismissed any notion that Obama might have something to do with the loss.

It’s what we can expect for four more years.

(For one view from the business community about the impact of Obama’s policies, read the next post.)

Obama’s doing God’s work

These are excerpts from private correspondence between a Florida businessman and others. It is part of an exchange of e-mails discussing how to respond to Barack Obama’s election. Here is what a correspondent had e-mailed him earlier:

As one of my Republican friends said...she has to hope and believe that maybe this is a sign from God that Obama can help some of those people who really need help and see this as something that they really need right now. Maybe this is what our country needs right now. I don't know if I believe that. But it is the only way that I can think about this.

What follows is his levelheaded response. I was so struck by it that I asked him for permission to circulate it, which he granted. I have chosen to leave out the identities of the correspondents because I don’t want to subject them to the kind of uninvited responses I receive from the radical left.

I like the thought. However, I don’t see much desire to do God’s will coming from any politicians. What I see looks more like self will run riot. The desire to tax not to balance budgets, but to address fairness looks more like a desire to play God, than the humble desire to do His will.

I employ the middle class. I have the high privilege of being boss, steward, friend, creditor. How can Washington employ the masses? Can they redistribute enough to substitute for a job? Can the masses go to their congressmen and ask if they can have an advance to put a down payment on a car? Why isn’t anyone talking about jobs? Where did all the manufacturing jobs go? Why did no American firms even bid on the Dubai Ports deal? What effect does wetland impact fees have on jobs? What effect will cap and trade have on jobs? All we hear about is climate change, what is the other side of the balance sheet? What is the effect of our right-minded legislation? I see the effects. I don’t think they can see them from Washington.

I am hopeful that the American spirit, freedom, free enterprise, ingenuity, hard work will not be snuffed out in a tsunami of taxes and regulation that is sure to come. God Bless us all.

Here’s another, earlier view from the same businessman:

The current financial crisis should not be underestimated now that the market has stopped its precipitous slide. We employed 185 people at one time, we currently employ 80. Our company is one of the fortunate ones to have some work. Those 105 workers were not assimilated into the employment rolls of other construction companies. Many of them are still unemployed. I have never seen an environment that was so difficult to maneuver in. If the government has not taxed us into oblivion, they have regulated us into stagnation. I see it firsthand. It is not to be taken lightly. Now we have asked those who created the problem to fix the problem. Government has never been the solution. The worst fact of all is that we have succumbed to the illusion that they are.

Eloquent words from a man who makes his living by literally getting his hands dirty—something that you don’t get sitting at a keyboard hailing our “transformation” into wherever Obama wants to take us when he says, "We can get there."

Obama’s Cheney

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Daily Observer

In the time it took to grab a quick night’s sleep, Barack Obama trashed his dream of ushering in a new Era of Good Feelings by offering the White House chief of staff job to Rahm (the hatchet) Emanuel.

Emanuel is the abrasive, vindictive and partisan Democratic congressman from Chicago’s North Side whose willingness to crush the opposition is legendary. Several news organizations this morning are reporting that Obama has offered the top job in his administration to Emanuel, but he hasn’t yet decided to accept. If true, at this point only Emanuel can save Obama from Emanuel by turning down the job. Whether he will depends on which way his powerful ego steers him: To the second most powerful man in the White House, or eventually to his coveted job as Speaker of the House.

Even Jane Hamsher warns in the far left The Nation magazine that Emanuel’s appointment would be a “sharp slap in the face,” and a serious threat to an Obama administration’s ability....

Read more in The Chicago Daily Observer

Finally--maybe--an end to the economy bashing

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

Thank God it's over.

No, I don't mean the longest presidential campaign ever, although I'm glad it's done. Even though some commentator Tuesday night, as soon as the votes are counted, will be the first to kick off the next campaign by proclaiming that so-and-so now is "well-positioned" for a run in 2012.

Instead, I'm talking about how we no longer will have to be instructed that we are in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. That has been political hogwash, slopped on us by Barack Obama and the Democrats. If Obama wins Tuesday, the Great One no longer will need to scare us with that economic boogeyman and the positive news will start flowing. However, if John McCain wins (which we are assured he won't), look for Democrats and their media parrots to thwack his "failed economic policies" for our miseries, oh, woe is us, for another four years. Just as they blamed President George W. Bush's "failed economic policies," even though the same policies pulled us out of a bad recession that he didn't cause. Even though their president, Bill Clinton, was the first to push for the relaxation of mortgage loan requirements that led to the current wreck of a housing market. Truth is, we're not in the worst economic times since the Great Depression, when, at its peak, one out of four Americans was unemployed. Unemployment now, running about 6 percent, rose to more than 7 percent several times between the Depression and now, hit 9 percent in the mid-1970s and hovered a little less than 11 percent for some of the 1980s.

Yet, not letting facts stand in the way, Obama repeatedly deployed the Great Depression fabrication, which, in fact, added to our economic woes by eroding consumer confidence, stock market and housing values and credit availability. The collapse of the dot-com bubble and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks produced a recession that lasted 22 months (the Bush tax cuts helped pull us out of it). A recession in the early 1990s, brought on by a restrictive monetary policy, declining consumer sales, the insolvency of the government-backed fund guaranteeing savings-and-loan deposits and other factors still being argued, lasted 23 months. Those were nothing compared to the lengthy 1980s recession that featured 14 percent mortgage interest rates and lengthy gasoline lines. We had earlier recessions, even in the supposedly booming 1950s, but I guess those don't count either.

Sadly, many of my media colleagues have been struck by amnesia as they failed to report how we have gone through harder times, mindlessly repeating the Obama assertion as if it were a given. Keep it up long enough, and it will be a given, which is why I'm kind of hoping that Obama is elected so that it just might staunch the unremitting flow of predicted bad news.

Ever since Bush took office, we've had a ceaseless barrage of "we're-in-for-it-nows" from Democrats and liberal media. They have relentlessly repeated the r-word, even in good times, and soon enough, like a self-fulfilling prophecy and to Democratic good cheer, we got an economic slowdown. If you keep saying we're in a recession long enough, sooner or later, because of the economy's cyclical nature, you can claim that you're right, hurray, even though we still have not officially entered one.

Since I'm rash enough to challenge Obama's economic inventions, I'll go even further and suggest that the "recession" might well be over even before it started, or soon thereafter. The most recent gross domestic product numbers didn't tank as badly as the oracles predicted. Skyrocketing crude oil prices ("It's Bush's fault"), once considered the prime cause of our miseries, have plummeted. Funny how energy prices, when they are high, "ricochet like a deadly bullet through the economy," but when they nose-dive, it doesn't matter. Now, we're told, housing is really the problem. Except for the fact that housing sales, according to the data, have turned positive in the last month. But that, I gather, doesn't matter either because now it's tight credit that matters. Even though the credit markets have begun to loosen.

Not until Obama steps into the Oval Office will any of this be taken as a positive sign, and then guess who will get the credit for bringing us our newly discovered prosperity?

More Fireworks for Grant Park?

Talk about bad judgment, Barack Obama’s decision to hold a late-night victory rally in Grant Park is the exemplar. If this is the kind of horse sense we expect to see from Obama as president, then we’re in for a rough ride.

The Grant Park plans were cast as Obama’s brain, David Axelrod, was smacking around John McCain’s supposedly awful judgment for heading to Washington to debate the $700-billion financial bailout plan. As if it were a sign of awful judgment for a senator and presidential candidate to be involved in one of the most important public policy decisions of the decade. Naturally, the airheads and the media ate it up, taking Obama’s distant posing as a sign of great leadership.

But I stray from the subject at hand, which is Obama’s smug and/or stupid decision to celebrate his victory late at night in the heart of the nation’s murder capital.

Read more in the Chicago Daily Observer

The worm turns?

If the New York Times runs a piece confessing that the media, indeed, may have "baked the cake" against McCain, then it must be so.

Obama Cites Questionable Study on McCain Ads

By Dennis Byrne
Human Events

Barack Obama’s astounding assertion that “100 percent” of John McCain’s campaign ads are “negative” is based on a study that is disingenuous, if not fraudulent.

It is exactly the kind of study that surfaces from academia that the media blindly report without questioning the methodology, the data or the conclusions -- especially if it conforms to the media’s biases.

Obama made the charge against McCain in the Oct.15 presidential debate, saying a look at the record shows that “100 percent, John, of your ads -- 100 percent of them -- have been negative.” McCain replied with something that sounded like, “It’s not true,” prompting Obama to come back with: “It absolutely is true.”

Obama apparently was referring to a study by the Wisconsin Advertising Project, affiliated with the University of Wisconsin’s political science department, reporting that “all” McCain campaign ads were negative for the week of Sept. 28, to Oct. 4 -- a timeframe that Obama neglected to mention.

Beyond that glaring factual omission by Obama, there remains the questionable methodology,,,

Read more in Human Events

Proving once again that...

you can say anything you damn well please and get away with it. This is in reference to Barack Obama's upcoming closing argument speech
in which he, according to the Wall Street Journal, will lay claim

to the political middle, claiming, as numerous presidential candidates in the past have done, that he can end gridlock in Washington and its dependence on partisan politics and special interests. [emphasis added]

The middle? The most liberal presidential candidate ever?

Had enough yet? Vote for change

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

Folks who are sincerely interested in "real change" should vote in next Tuesday's election for an Illinois constitutional convention.

Former Gen. Colin Powell said the election of Barack Obama would be "transformational," and if supporters of the Democratic candidate want the same kind of sea change on the state level, they can mark yes on the ballot question: Shall a convention be called to change the state constitution?

Without it, the state will continue marching toward insolvency and remain mired in corruption and incompetence. Sure, a revision of the state's 37-year-old constitution doesn't guarantee our rescue from the clutches of the bumbling, stubborn and shady politicians and interests that now run the state. But without the kind of improvements the convention and voters can force upon the state's power structure, you can wager that nothing will change.

The organized opponents of a constitutional convention—representing many of the same business, labor and political interests that have steered us to the brink—insist that constitutional change isn't what we need. The way to change government is to elect new people, they say. Sure, that has worked so well.

Then, after telling us that the way to reform government is to elect better people, the anti-con-con forces warn us a convention would be dangerous because voters would elect the same kind of convention delegates that they already elect to run state government. This argument is at war with itself. If we can't elect true reformers to a con-con, then how are we going to elect true reformers to man the helm of state government?

The anti-con-con forces could have made a better case for themselves if they had said: To reform government, we need to elect better people, and we're creating a coalition of the reform-minded to do just that. Our coalition will cross party lines and back a consensus slate of candidates for the 2010 election, in which the governor and all leading state officers are elected. That they haven't shown any interest in that demonstrates that in opposing a convention they are mainly interested in tamping down reform efforts.

Certainly, some opposition is reasonable and well-intentioned, based on fears, for example, that the convention would draft a worse constitution or fall into the hands of single-issue delegates, such as those who want to write into it protections against global warming or for traditional marriage.

One such thoughtful opponent is Ann M. Lousin, a John Marshall Law School professor, an experienced hand from the 1970 Con-Con and a scholar in the field. In a 52-page paper, "Will Illinois Hold a Constitutional Convention?," she outlines some major issues and how they might be addressed without calling a convention.

Whether they are confronted at a convention or some other way, Lousin lays out a worthy agenda for consideration that is a rebuke to those who say there's nothing for a convention to do: replacing judicial elections with "merit" selection; funding public pensions; financing public elementary and secondary education; and instituting a system of recalling state and local elected officials.

Other issues ripe for consideration are:

Returning to the "cumulative voting" system of electing state representatives, to help depolarize the current system; improving the system of redrawing legislative districts, to eliminate "redistricting by lottery"; imposing term limits; combining overlapping offices, such as state treasurer and controller; eliminating some offices altogether, such as lieutenant governor; revising home-rule powers and eliminating the multitude of special districts; reforming the state income tax; removing the corporate tax that was designed years ago to replace the personal property tax; requiring a legislative supermajority to raise taxes; broadening citizen initiative and referendum rights to bypass a gridlocked legislature; restricting the power of government to condemn private property for private development; and rethinking tax-increment financing districts.

Other issues abound, all sounding technical, uninteresting and only indirectly connected to solving Illinois' current problems. So, boredom and apathy are on the side of anti-con-con forces. Those forces also have the advantage of money, institutional power and a focused agenda. Pro-con-con forces are fragmented, ill-funded and devoid of comparable organizational resources. As outsiders always are.

But if you are fed up with the Blagojeviches, Madigans, Joneses and all the others who know how to play the system, I'd suggest you vote yes on con-con, to yank the system out from under them.

Chicago Goes To Washington

Oh, boy, it has started already, a week before they even start counting the ballots.

David Axelrod, Mayor Daley's pal and Chicago Machine political consultant, is reportedly interested in serving in a position in the Obama administration.

Rahm Emanuel, the sharp tongued North Side congressman, rich La Salle St. guy and member of the Clinton administration, reportedly could end up as Obama's chief of staff. As the congressman from the north side district, Emanuel succeeds such bright lights as Dan Rostenkowski, Frank Annunzio and Rod Blagojevich, which says it all.

These are the first, I presume, of a flood of Chicago pols that Obama would bring to Washington. And they thought Texans in the White House under George W. Bush were bad, wait until everyone gets a load of what Chicago offers.

More reporting incompetence at the New York Times

Here's why the public has such a low opinion of the media. While the real estate market was tanking, it was big news. Now, when there's a glimmer of hope--well, it's still bad news.

Notice in the lead paragraph, the writer reports the turn-around in sales, but immediately dismisses it with an unattributed, subjective and perhaps inaccurate comment (i.e., the credit crisis has intensified since those home sales occurred).

If the writer had been paying attention on Friday and earlier, most of the reports and analysis suggested that credit was loosening up. But whether it is or not, the first paragraph is not the place for such an unattributed statement. When I was in journalism school, the professor would have climbed all over me for shoving it into the lead. Or using it at all if I didn't have it attributed to someone.

Judge tosses lawsuit challenging Obama citizenship

This lawsuit has been hot on the Internet, and now we have a conclusion, in which the judge said "any" or "all" voters lack standing to bring this lawsuit because "...any harm from an allegedly ineligible [presidential] candidate was too vague and its effects too attenuated...."

I am puzzled. If a voter (or a citizen) doesn't have standing in such a case, then who does? If the damage done by a violation of the Constitution, in this or any other case, is "too vague" for a citizen to bring a case, then what is the legal remedy to this alleged constitutional violation?

I'm not anxious to see such a case move forward and send our electoral process into a tail-spin, but, like I say, I am puzzled. Perhaps a constitutional lawyer (not Obama) out there can enlighten me.

Here is the story about the suit's dismissal:

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit challenging Barack Obama's qualifications to be president.

U.S. District Judge R. Barclay Surrick on Friday night rejected the suit by attorney Philip J. Berg, who alleged that Obama was not a U.S. citizen and therefore ineligible for the presidency. Berg claimed that Obama is either a citizen of his father's native Kenya or became a citizen of Indonesia after he moved there as a boy.

Obama was born in Hawaii to an American mother and a Kenyan father. His parents divorced and his mother married an Indonesian man.

Internet-fueled conspiracy theories question whether Obama is a "natural-born citizen" as required by the Constitution for a presidential candidate and whether he lost his citizenship while living abroad.

Surrick ruled that Berg lacked standing to bring the case, saying any harm from an allegedly ineligible candidate was "too vague and its effects too attenuated to confer standing on any and all voters."

An Upturn in the Housing Market?

Is it possible that the housing market has turned?

Blamed for just about everything bad that has happened recently to the economy, housing sales, I dare say, are showing signs of picking up. At the risk of being considered a lunatic, I say this for reasons of systematically gathered data, personal experience and common sense.

Read more in RealClearPolitics.com

Existing home sales jump sharply

How well to you think the media will respond to this? Is Wall Street listening?

Seeing as how everything bad that has happened to the economy has been blamed on housing, this news should be shouted from the rooftop. My guess? It won't.

Racism among Obama's supporters.

Sun-Times columnist Laura Washington demands ("President Obama will have debts to pay") that if Barack Obama is elected, he must carry out a "black agenda." Said she:

...[H]e will step into the Oval Office courtesy of overwhelming turnouts dug out of the red hills of Georgia and the gritty concrete of Newark.

There will be a debt to pay.

Amazing. We have been constantly reminded that the Obama campaign has been devoid of "race." The PBS Newshour tonight spent an entire segment analyzing just how large a factor white racism has played in the election. (The panel seemed to conclude that it was a "second tier" factor.) Overlooked was a discussion about how important black racism has played in the election. Judging by Washington's demand, it has played a big factor in the minds of some of his supporters.

Obama campaign selling Chicago election night coverage packages to news outlets

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. The Obama campaign is demanding that the media pay for where they sit to cover him on election night. Those not willing to cough up are literally left out in the cold.

Lynn Sweet at the Chicago Sun-Times calls it "an outrageous pay to play plan that caters to national elite outlets with deep pockets." I hope she covers the story election night to tell us which elite outlets cave in to this unusual, if not outrageous, demand.

ACORN ain't ready for vote fraud

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Daily Observer

Haven’t those dummies from ACORN ever heard of roundtabling?

The liberal activist group was easily caught by election officials in Lake County (Ind.) for turning in more than 2,000 voter registration forms, out of more than 5,000, that were called bogus. The give-away to the brazen fakery was the fact that so many of the signatures were identical. Application after application in the same handwriting.

How stupid can anyone be?

Didn’t they know about roundtabling, a time-honored Chicago machine practice at which a bunch of people sitting at tables pass around voter registration cards, nominating petitions or other forms of public documents so at least their bogus signatures didn’t all look the same on the same document?

Read more at the Chicago Daily Observer

The aura of Mr. Smooth

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

Aura: (n.) A general impression produced by a predominant quality or characteristic: air, ambience, atmosphere, feel, feeling, mood, tone.

A single word explains why Barack Obama might be president. Aura perfectly describes the Democratic candidate. An aura, the dictionary says, is the distinctive, but intangible air that surrounds a person. It derives from the ancient Greek, meaning breath or gentle breeze. I particularly like the third definition, which says an aura is "the supposed emanation surrounding the body of a living creature, viewed by mystics, spiritualists and some practitioners of complementary medicine as the essence of the individual and allegedly discernible by people with special sensibilities."

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 and his outright deceptions (e.g. reneging on his pledge to take public campaign financing, and thereby limiting his campaign advertising).

We could have 10 more presidential debates over the differences between Obama and John McCain on foreign policy, Immigration, the economy, government ethics and so on, but it wouldn't matter. Intricate policy differences between the two don't matter, because only aura counts. Because of his aura, Obama can engage in a presidential debate, and his aloofness and one-note message of "change" will be misinterpreted by burbling commentators as thoughtful, calm and intelligent discourse. His aura explains why his handlers can get away with slamming McCain for his allegedly negative campaigning, even at times when he is simply disagreeing with Obama's policies.

We are about to elect a president because of how he makes us feel, not how he makes us think.

That says a bundle about an undemanding electorate. Yes, Obama has policies, and he enunciates them eloquently, and a lot of people support them; but notice is mostly taken of his delivery, not of his substance. Voters, never, ever have elected a president with policies this far to the left; rare, indeed, is the senator or congressman who is further left. (Note to conservatives: Stop calling Obama a socialist. It doesn't do your cause any good, and besides, he isn't, in the strict Marxist definition of the state owning the means of production. Obama is just a Hyde Park liberal, a sui generis kind of extreme leftist who uses words like "sui generis." Talk, instead, about how McCain is mainstream. Although, I also doubt that McCain's more centrist positions can stand up to aura either.)

Having aura is fine, but electing a president based on whether he or she possesses it shows curious understanding of how democracy is supposed to work.

Yes, tens of millions of Americans will feel wonderful when Obama is elected and maybe the stock market, the housing market and the rest of the economy will boom from that good feeling. I hope so, because that's just about what has been guaranteed by a vote for Obama, and I can't wait.

But there's this. After the aura has burned away—like the early-morning summer mist disappears before a rising sun—the president needs to make tough, on-the-run and wise decisions. It is then when a president's basic inclinations surface, about whether to involve the government more in your life, take more of your money or, in the face of our enemies, speak softy and carry a little stick. And then, the pathological definition of aura comes into play: a sensation, as of a cold breeze or a bright light, that precedes the onset of certain disorders, such as an epileptic seizure or an attack of migraine.

Or, more precisely, an attack of a real, actual problem that requires something more than Mr. Smooth.

A new look at Democratic class warfare

The Rich Support McCain, the Super-Rich Support Obama

It's the work of the political handlers, not of intelligent life

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

John McCain's political advisers must have been astonished by the number of journalists asleep at the switch when the Republican presidential candidate dropped his bombshell during last week's presidential debate with Democrat Barack Obama.

Under McCain's American Homeownership Resurgence Plan, the government would buy mortgages directly from homeowners who were falling behind in their payments and replace them with, as his Web site says, "manageable, fixed-rate mortgages that will keep families in their homes." It would only cost another $300 billion or so, his handlers later explained. Where do I sign up?

In post-debate media confabulations, few commentators appeared to pick up on how a Republican was proposing the kind of huge, expensive and intrusive government program that would make GOP eyeballs spin if a Democrat had come up with the same buy-me-some-votes idea. In my channel surfing, only a Fortune magazine editor on one of the debate postmortems was aghast, noting that the Republican "small government" tradition had just capsized and sunk.

Abandoning long-held beliefs is what happens in an economic panic. I can imagine it now, how McCain's political advisers were desperate to come up with something, anything, that would make their candidate look like he had the definitive economic plan, something more than dishing out up to $700 billion to rescue banks, Wall Street and derivatives magicians.

The theory was probably something like: "Let's look like we're bypassing all those crooks by giving the money directly to homeowners. What could be more Main Street than that?"

What better way to trump Obama's lead with airheads who figure that "change" is the all-purpose elixir for every ill. It would "position" McCain as the advocate for the regular guy and force Obama into the unfamiliar position of being for the "fat cats" on Wall Street.

Nice, but the problem was that the media barely noticed. Maybe they would have paid more attention if Obama had come up with the plan. Obama last week offered a plan (I suppose in response to McCain's), as The Wall Street Journal put it, "to temporarily provide low-interest loans to struggling businesses by using existing structures already in place through the Small Business Administration," whatever that means. Obama also supports allowing elders to delay withdrawals from their 401(k) retirement plans beyond age 701/2. Democrats also are talking about passing a new economic stimulus package in the lame duck Congress after the election because, I guess, the last package worked so well.

Even McCain's handlers admit the $300 billion for his rescue plan is a lot of money so maybe it could be taken out of the $700 billion bailout already passed. Or maybe the earlier bailout of Bear Stearns. Or the Hope for Homeowners Act. Bet you already forgot about that one, even though it was enacted only eight weeks ago. (It gives distressed homeowners a chance to cancel their mortgage and replace it with a 30-year, fixed-rate loan up to 90 percent of the current fair market value, all insured by the Federal Housing Administration for up to $300 billion over the next three years. And doesn't that sound familiar?)

The number of these schemes is getting downright creepy. There are so many that guessing that some of them will be unnecessary, conflicting or just downright damaging to the economy is irresistible.

The debates and campaigns have reduced themselves to the mere memorization of talking points concocted by handlers, which is why the last debate was such a yawn.

Listen handlers, we've got your talking points memorized. If we want any more thoughts out of you, we'll squeeze your heads and see what comes out your ears. It's probably too late to fire all the handlers and let the candidates be whoever they are. Although, it might be just the kind of stimulus the public needs to pull us out of our despondency.

Sheesh, why not call in the FBI too?

Video shows coach shoving 11-year-old football player; parents want to file assault charge; underwear in knots.

America's big economic flimflam

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

The $700 billion financial bailout may be the biggest flimflam ever pulled on the American public. It has all the earmarks of a good con: Bankers and assorted Wall Street grifters will make off with hundreds of billions of dollars, abetted by Washington politicians, while we get stuck with the tab.

We can thank Wells Fargo & Co, a big Western bank, for exposing this swindle for what it was by agreeing to buy Wachovia Corp., a troubled Eastern bank, thereby rescuing it from a government-arranged shotgun marriage with Citigroup Inc.

We need to step back for a moment to appreciate Wells Fargo's good deed. Start at the beginning: Deflation in home prices caused the value of mortgages (and their derivatives) held by banks (and other investors) to likewise lose value. Not knowing their "real" value, these banks and other lenders aren't willing to risk lending money to anyone—consumers, businesses or other banks. Thus, the credit market has "locked up."

We're told the only way out is for the government to cough up $700 billion, which supposedly will allow banks and the others to somehow put a value on their diminished assets and, thus, get back to the business of lending. Wells Fargo discredited that scenario. It did exactly what Washington said couldn't be done: It put a value on a failing bank, Wachovia: $15.1 billion.

In effect, Wells Fargo bet its money on the value of Wachovia's portfolio of toxic mortgages, something Wall Street said couldn't happen until the bailout deal was struck. Actually, the Wells Fargo deal was done before the bailout and it came without government involvement or taxpayers' money, unlike the proposed Citigroup deal.

This needs emphasis: The government, through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., planned to put taxpayers into the middle of a risky and costly deal that the private sector—Wells Fargo—was willing to undertake on its own. Does this mean that government should have done nothing to help resolve the credit crunch? No, it only means that the government's panic-driven bailout might not have been the best way to do things, as 100 of the nation's top economists warned.

Only time will tell if, as the economists asserted, the bailout is unfair, too ambiguous and a drag on capital markets for decades to come. One thing we do know, however, is that before the bailout was enacted on Friday, the Dow Jones industrial average was up more than 300 points, supposedly in anticipation of its enactment, but after the House sealed the deal, the index fell 157 points, a swing of more than 400 points. Oops. Wall Street sages suddenly opined that the "market" considered the $700 billion bailout to be no big deal after all, because the life preserver may be arriving too late.

This is curious, because there's plenty of cash to lend; the nation's money supply hasn't shrunk, it has expanded. Already, we're seeing stirrings in the private sector—no thanks to the bailout—that say now is a good time to gobble up bargains. Witness tycoon Warren Buffett's big investments in GE and Goldman Sachs. And we never know when the logjam of pent-up demand for housing will break.

Here's the supreme irony of the bailout: Easy credit, low interest rates and Wall Street legerdemain launched us into this mess. The cure, we're told, is more of the same: easy credit, made possible by the accounting hocus pocus of the bailout, for the truly unworthy. Plus another $110 billion in earmarks for lawmakers, exactly what everyone says is bad. And the source of all this dough? Borrowed from, among others, foreign purchasers of Treasury notes, and paid back by us. And if we can't borrow enough, we'll just print more money. The cure for bad credit is, well, more bad credit. Flimflam hardly describes it.

The Bailout: Recommended Reading

Here's a good primer, clearly written, on the financial bailout. It also is notable for its honesty, in that the author freely admits that he can't predict the future, as so many have.

Ebert, again

Roger Ebert is honked, personally insulted it appears, because McCain didn't look at Obama during the debate. Gee, Roger, if I thought that where McCain looked was important enough to devote an entire column to, I would have counted number of times that Obama said, "Uh."

And the public wins!

Not so fast on that bailout package

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

The American public on Monday stuck it to the "knowledgeable and sophisticated" elites who warned that without the $700 billion federal financial bailout plan all hell would break loose.

The House vote, 228-205, was a rejection, for better or worse, by "regular Americans" of the Hobson's choice presented to them by the upper echelons of government, politics, Wall Street, media and others.

Either:

Write a blank check for $700 billion, $350 billion or whatever, in the most drastic U.S. government intrusion into the private sector perhaps ever, or at least since the Great Depression, with unknown consequences; or, live through another Great Depression, with unemployment of "20 percent," loss of homes and other horrors.

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 who opposed the deal are "not knowledgeable or sophisticated." As if everyone who disagreed with him is stupid.

Rant and rave all they want about how the 95 Democrats and 133 Republicans who voted against the package were cowardly hacks genuflecting to the populist rabble, the truth is their vote was courageous. They are the ones taking the risk in a belief that a more sensible, middle-ground position can be worked out; they are putting their chips on the belief that the nation won't go belly up by stopping for a moment to have more debate.

They aren't the ones who dumped a 110-page bill on top of everyone the night before the vote. After the vote, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the rest of her gang accused the Republicans of being ideologues who couldn't depart from harebrained, free-market notions, while seeming to forget that 95 members of her own caucus would be guilty of the same sin. This is the same Nancy Pelosi who after the vote bizarrely blamed Republicans for a failure of bipartisanship, when, during the debate leading up to the vote, she let loose with a nasty partisan attack totally inappropriate for the quality of the debate. You had to see it to believe it: There was rational debate on the House floor, indeed in a spirit of bipartisanship, and then she comes along blaming President George W. Bush for everything.

It sure put a damper on the debate. But if turned off Republicans were mad enough to switch votes from aye to a nay just for that reason, Rep. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who managed the legislation, was right: Putting personal affront ahead of the national good is ridiculous.

Easy for me to take shots from the sidelines; as much as I dislike the legislation, I might have voted for it, because I'd be scared stiff about the consequences of no bailout. But in the few short days of debate, I also know that other possible routes are available for addressing the "seizing up" of the credit markets. Among them are accounting-rules changes that would allow banks to keep good mortgages on their books at their face value, instead of deeply writing off their value, thereby strangling the ability of banks to make loans.

How about the involvement of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which in the past week managed to salvage the assets of two major financial institutions without endangering a dollar of taxpayers' money?

So, rack up another congressional failure in what seems to me to be the most unproductive legislative session in my memory. Here's a Congress whose public approval ratings are lower even than Bush's. The markets, of course, will spin wildly out of sight, offended by this public uprising. But things will settle down, Congress will work it out. Take the word of someone who don't know nothing.

Read more comments on this column at RealClearPolitics

Blame the Democrats

Here is a video of Democrats condemning Republican efforts to impose more stringent regulations on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

3 to 4.3 Billion Barrels of Technically Recoverable Oil Assessed in North Dakota and Montana’s Bakken Formation

That's 25 times more than what the U.S. Geological Service previously estimated. (The details are here)

Yeah, but what will threatened rattlesnakes say?

Court blocks guv’s health care expansion

(AP) — An Illinois appellate court on Friday blocked Gov. Rod Blagojevich's attempt to expand a state-funded health care program, noting that administration officials don't know who they've signed up or even where the money is that they've collected in insurance premiums. [Emphasis added]

Read the latest full story about the governor's screwball plan.

Mary Mitchell’s Ophidian World

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Daily Observer

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell, forever on guard against the white racism she’s expecting to spring troll-like from its ubiquitous hiding places, has managed again to twist a few facts to suit her nasty bigotry.

In her latest exercise in tedium, she cited an AP-Yahoo News poll that concludes that Barack Obama’s race could cost him “six percentage points—enough for him to lose in a closely contested race.”

I’m not sure what poll Mitchell is reading, since when I look at the one* she seems to be citing, I see different results.

Read more in the Chicago Daily Observer

Tollway chief follows the game plan

The executive director of the Illinois Tollway has resigned to take a job with--oh no, not again--a big tollway contractor.

No one here, of course, should be surprised, because that's how things are done in Chicago: Hand out some huge government contracts and find yourself in demand later for a high-paying job.

The executive director, Brian McPartlin, who came to head the tollway under the auspices of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, is joining Chicago-based McDonough Associates, an engineering and architectural firm, as vice president. There he will work for James McDonough who rose to the head of the firm after serving--no surprise here either--as chairman of the CTA. Then, the firm was known as Murphy Engineering, which was--guess what?--a big, politically connected contractor.

That was more than 30 years ago. Some things never change.

Campbell Brown: Free Sarah Palin: The Swamp

CNN anchor Campbell Brown got it right: The McCain campaign should unleash Sarah Palin. See her comments here. Even Rush Limbaugh says the campaign should let Palin be Palin. Fie on those political consultants that are making her look like a coward.

Hold on: Maybe the economy can wait

Never has the United States had to make such a momentous decision so quickly, except on more memorable dates such as December 7, 1941 or September 11, 2001. Is this really that urgent?

Our betters tell us that the “financial meltdown” leaves us only two choices: Either put this nation in hock in unspeakable amounts to who-knows-whom for how long. Or bring on another Depression. And we must pick our poison right now -- no looking for reasonable alternatives. All the key players agree that we’ve got no time to spare; all us bit players can’t fully understand why.

Read more in Human Events

Who's right on home prices?

What if Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is wrong about home prices, and the market is right?

Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools - WSJ.com

This is worth reading if you still think that Obama wasn't being deceptive when he said that Bill Ayers was just some guy he knew in the neighborhood.

Sen. Dick Durbin: No agent of change

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

When the public's loathing of Congress is soaring, why is the re-election of Sen. Dick Durbin, an architect of that body's many disorders, thought to be a cinch?

How low is Congress' job approval rating? While President George W. Bush's is a dismal 32 percent, according to RealClearPoli- tics.com, Congress' is an even more wretched 21 percent. As the Senate majority whip and second in command, Durbin can't escape blame.

One can find many reasons why Durbin shouldn't be re-elected and his Republican rival Steve Sauerberg deserves a closer look: Durbin's grinding partisanship, among the worst in the Senate, according to washingtonpost.com; the millions he has raised from clout-heavy, legal, securities, investment and real estate interests, according to OpenSecrets.org; his craven about-face on abortion; his unabashed love of earmarks. True, some voters might support Durbin for those reasons. But when measured by the Democratic mantra—the willingness or ability to change things—Durbin flunks.

Consider the fate of Durbin's own legislation, the awkwardly named Increasing Transparency and Accountability in Oil Prices Act. He introduced it in June as a response to the "excessive speculation" by oil traders supposedly responsible for driving spot crude oil prices more than $140 a barrel. The bill would strengthen the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to help nail those nasty traders by, for example, closing the "London loophole" that allows traders to "avoid speculation limits and reporting requirements by routing transactions through off-shore markets." Naturally, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama assigned the bill to a high place on his agenda for change.

Well, at least it made for a good news release; the bill is still sitting in a Senate committee because Durbin and the rest of the party's leadership couldn't get the votes to bring the legislation to the floor for debate. Yes, blame Republicans for opposing full debate. But there's also this: Republicans and Democrats agreed to the two-thirds majority requirement, and those are the rules of the game that the leadership of either party must work with if they want to change anything. Also, Republicans would have agreed to a full debate if the legislation also contained provisions for increased access to domestic oil, but the Democrats wouldn't allow it. So much for bipartisanship to get change.

Wait, it gets better: The premier trader of oil futures (where presumably most of the "excessive speculation" occurs) is the New York Mercantile Exchange. That exchange recently was acquired by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which also recently took over the Chicago Board of Trade. The combined CME Group now controls a mind-bending 98 percent of the U.S. futures market.

That makes the CME one of the most important cogs in the city's and state's economy, and no Illinois politician in his right mind from either party, including Durbin, would want to take it on.

But Durbin would, some might argue, because he courageously puts the public good ahead of parochial, special interests. OK, but perhaps not.

Here's why: The Justice and the Treasury Departments said they might look into whether the CME/NYMEX merger would impose "unnecessary restraints on competition [that] threaten the ability of the U.S. financial markets to adapt to changing dynamics, including the increasingly global nature of those markets." Sounds familiar doesn't it, as the recent market crisis has strengthened the argument, especially among Democrats, that the markets need more regulation.

But on Feb. 7, Durbin and Rep. Rahm Emanuel, another denizen of the Chicago political machine, wrote to the departments, expressing "our strong objections" to the look-see. Just the suggestion of a probe, they complained, cost CME shareholders big, causing their stock to fall 17 percent in a single day. Besides, they said, Congress has done everything necessary to make sure that the CFTC does its job. The CFTC, they said, already was engaged in "vigorous oversight."

In other words, Durbin was for the CFTC before he was against it. And it took him only four months to reverse himself. So, which Durbin to believe, the change agent or the status quo agent? The simple-minded, populist basher of complex financial markets? Or the voice of CME shareholders? In truth, Durbin and Emanuel are the quintessential agents of the status quo that Obama condemns. One can wonder if they're even committed to change.

If the fairy godmother showed up tomorrow and granted Obama a wish, and Obama were true to his promise of change, Durbin and Emanuel would immediately disappear like Cinderella's carriage and turn into a pumpkin.

Or maybe that's not Obama's wish at all.

Greeley predicts a wave of book burnings

Andrew Greeley goes off the deep end, imagining that the election of Sarah Palin will usher in Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's science fiction novel about rampant book burning. What set him off, we must assume, is the nomination of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as the Republican candidate for vice president. Greeley's dark vision of what is to become of America appears to be based on the report that Palin, as mayor of a small Alaskan town, once asked the librarian what she would do if someone asked her to remove a book from the library.

I suppose the request can be interpreted in different ways: Was Palin fishing around to have a book removed? Or was she asking for the library's policy, much as she might ask the town's police chief what his policy was on residents giving gifts to police officers. Or the public works director if he thinks the town's water rates should be raised.

I don't know. But I do know that the Chicago-based American Library Association (the librarian whom Palin approached was head of the state's branch of the ALA) gets hyper every time anyone questions the wisdom of a particular book being available to impressionable, young minds. For years, the ALA counted each instance as an example of a "banned book," until it was pointed out that an inquiry is not a request which is not an actual banned book. Only afterwards did the ALA change the name of "Banned Book Week," to "Challenged Book Week."

Such inquiries are not unreasonable when you consider that the ALA's official policy holds that children should have access to anything they want or need. That continues to be the official policy, although it is not stated so directly after I wrote about the policy's absurdity years ago.

My own local library used to have on its shelf a children's sex education book called "Show Me." Indeed it did. The book was page after page of naked, curious children, a pedophile's delight. It eventually was taken off the public shelves and went into a collection that a patron could access only upon request. Now it's no longer in the card catalog. Was its removal censorship, or simply a display of good judgment by the librarian?

Librarians constantly are making judgments about what books to include in a libary's collection. Some of those decisions are based on "guidelines" or recommendations some made by the ALA. I suppose you can call those judgments objective, but some obviously are as subjective as what a reporter decides to include or exclude from a news story. You cannot properly label such decisions "censorship." It is merely the exercise of wisdom.

Greeley had an opportunity to bring some cool-headed reason to this discussion, but he demurred. Too bad.

Chicago needs more airport capacity: FAA chief

The head of the Federal Aviation Administration says Chicago will either need to build a new airport or vastly expand one of its existing airports to keep pace with demand in the future, the Associated Press reported.

That is is addition to the $15-billion expansion of O'Hare Airport, and contradicts Mayor Richard M. Daley's repeated assertions that O'Hare expansion is all that is needed. If not for Daley's opposition, the new airport--the Abraham Lincoln Airport in the south suburbs--already would be up and running.

Obama sidesteps reform in Illinois

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

For those of you who still cling to the fantasy that Barack Obama is "about change," you should note how he, or his minions, want nothing to do with reforming politics in Illinois, perhaps the most corrupt state in the Union.

"Throughout his political career, Barack Obama has fought for open and honest government," proclaims his campaign Web site. Apparently, no longer. When the Democratic presidential candidate—now his party's industrial-strength voice for our deliverance from political corruption everywhere—was asked by a reformer if he would help get his political mentor back home to get off the dime and move the most minimal of state ethics legislation toward passage, the Obama campaign sent word back that amounted to a "no."

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 is working for reform.

So, along comes Cindi Canary, director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, thinking that now might be a good time for Obama to parlay his friendship with Jones to do a good deed: Won't you intervene with Jones and try to get him to call the Senate back into session to get this law passed? "[T]his is a place [Obama] could come in and quickly clean up some of the damage and serve his state," she told the Chicago Sun-Times. After all, her group and Obama worked together during those halcyon days when he actually supported reform in Illinois, so maybe he'll be receptive to a plea to intervene on behalf of Illinois folks who have been getting gouged for years by the likes of Jones. "A 30-second phone call to the Illinois Senate president could yield huge dividends to this state," she said.

In response, Obama's campaign issued an oozy statement reaffirming Obama's alleged commitment to reform, while getting no more specific than urging everyone to get together and love one another right now. What Canary was asking Obama for wasn't all that much. Maybe a 30-second phone call to back up his usual pap of, "Look, ah, I've, ah, always been for, ah, reform." For most people, the reform that we're talking about is so basic that they might ask, "You mean it's not illegal already?"

The legislation would make illegal the widespread abuse called pay-to-play politics, by which companies doing business with the state contribute to the state official in charge of ladling out contracts. The new law wouldn't let you do it if you have more than $50,000 in state contracts, which, even at that, leaves open a nice loophole. In Illinois, this is a huge leap forward from how things are done. Blagojevich, who has reaped bundles of cash from state contractors, could be one of the pols most jolted by the prohibition. That explains why he rewrote the legislation in a way that would make it ineffective and why the House overwhelmingly rejected his changes.

Jones now is the only one standing in the way of the reform, with Obama abetting.

Here's another example of how Obama has revealed himself to be a creature of the Chicago machine. Who can forget his silence when he could have affirmed his reformer credentials by endorsing Democrat Forrest Claypool over machine creature Todd Stroger as Cook County Board president? When things got too hot, Obama severed his ties from his racially inflammatory pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. That's not too hard; you can always find another pastor.

But betraying your political godfather(s) in Chicago and Illinois is an entirely different matter. Especially if you lose the presidential election and return to being just another senator from Illinois. Cutting his ties with the corrupt Chicago machine is one bridge you will not see Obama burn. Not now, not ever.

Agent of change, my foot.

For reader response, check out the Chicago Tribune discussion

Also posted on RealClearPolitics.com, where there are more reader comments.

The Aussies understand us better than, well, us.

Command of foreign policy exposes Palin's critics | The Australian

Sarah Palin is not a woman

This astonishing assertion comes from Wendy Doniger the (let me see if I have this right): Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School

Here is what she said on newsweek.washingtonpost.com:

Her [greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party's cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women. [Emphasis added.)

This, and the rest of Doniger's teeth-exposed essay, is why Palin's candidacy is so much fun; it sends the haut intelligentsia off the cliff, without their having the slightest clue that they're in midair.

Is Charlie Gibson able to define the "Bush Doctrine"

Can you?

In a perpetual search of a "gotcha" question to lob at Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, ABC anchor Charlie Gibson revealed he didn't know what the expression meant, or if he did, he wasn't willing to say.

Truth is, according to Charles Krauthammer who coined the "Bush Doctrine" expression, there are a number of different meanings. Gibson should have told Palin when she asked him to clarify the question which of the meanings he was referencing. There was the old doctrine in which Bush warned that Iran and North Korea were part of an "axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world." And that he would not permit it. It also meant that nations that harbor terrorists would be treated as terrorists themselves. There's the definition in the Sept. 20, 2002 National Security document that shifted the nation's policy of containment and deterence of an enemy to preemption. And so forth.

Instead, of acknowledging these differences, Gibson looked down his glasses at Palin as if he had nailed her. And then stumbled around trying to formulate a definition.

All he did was reveal his own ignorance or unfairness.

Here is the excerpt from the interview:

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?
PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?
GIBSON: The Bush -- well, what do you -- what do you interpret it to be? PALIN: His world view.
GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war. PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that's the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.
GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?
PALIN: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.

So when do you think that Biden will withdraw as the vice presidential candidate in favor of Hillary Clinton?

Joe Biden said it himself that "Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America."

Considering his never-ending flow of such gaffs (e.g. asking a paraplegic state official to stand up to be recognized at a campaign rally), who knows when David Axelrod and other trolls in the Obama campaign hierachy will ask Biden to step down for the "good of the party...oops, I mean, the nation."

(This maneuver would be called an "Eagleton," after Thomas Eagleton, who was dumped as Democratic president candidate George McGovern's running mate when it was disclosed that he had received treatment, including electric shock therapy, for mental illness. This was something that you might have expected "insensitive" Republicans to do, but those were different times.)

Anyway, as it becomes increasingly apparent that Barack Obama made e a strategic mistake in not picking Hillary Clinton as a running mate, it could be only a matter of time before the ax falls on Biden. If the Democrats are foolish enough to think that they can way with it, which they can't.

What we've all been waiting for: Roger Ebert's review of Sarah Palin

Roger Ebert, blessed with the wisdom that comes from sitting in a dark theatre looking at a movie screen for, what?, tens of thousands of hours over his lifetime, piles on Republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. Read it here if you can stand it.

After wandering around, in apparent confusion about what to describe as the worst of Palin's faults (one of them being she's just unbearably common) he appears to have settled on this: She's been out of the country only once. And that, gasp, wasn't at the Festival de Cannes. Lord, lord, how can a person like her know anything at all about the real world?

Well, maybe Ebert can explain why wisdom automatically comes from being a world traveler. Which would make jet setters--the company that Ebert prefers--the wisest, smartest people in the world. There's a logical falacy, a missing middle term as it might be called, in Ebert's reasoning:

A. Some world travelers are wise.
B. Palin is not a world traveler
C. Therefore Palin is not wise.

Even freshmen logic students would recognize this fallacy. That Ebert doesn't suggests that his world travels haven't done him much good in the smarts department.

This is astonishing

Climate change now is a "lawful excuse" for radicals to cause property damage, according to a British court. This is a press release from Greenpeace hailing the decision:

British Court Acquits Greenpeace Activists; Says Property Damage from Global Warming Justifies Attempt to Shut Down Coal Plant
Verdict marks a 'tipping point' for climate change movement

In a victory for Greenpeace and efforts to stop global warming, a British court today acquitted six Greenpeace volunteers of attempting to shut down a coal-fired power plant in Kent, England on the grounds that they had a “lawful excuse.” The court said that the coal plant was causing so much property damage around the world from global warming that it exceeded the property damage done through shutting operations of the plant.

The acquittal is the first case where preventing property damage from climate change has been used as part of a 'lawful excuse' defense in court. The defense has previously been successfully deployed by defendants accused of damaging a military jet bound for Indonesia to be used in the war against East Timor before independence.

The Maidstone Crown Court heard testimony from NASA climate expert James Hansen, an Inuit leader from Greenland and the British Conservative Party’s environment adviser. The jury was told that the Kingsnorth Power Plant emits 20,000 tons of CO2 every day - the same amount as the 30 least polluting countries in the world combined – and that the British government had advanced plans to build a new coal-fired power station next to the existing site on the Hoo Peninsula in Kent .

The 'not guilty' verdict means the jury believed that shutting down the coal plant was justified in the context of the damage to property caused by CO2 emissions from Kingsnorth.

Lipstick on a donkey

The first "change" I would love to see in this election is everyone retiring their demands for apologies. Much to my disappointment, John McCain's campaign has now launched its own demands for an apology, something usually eminating from thin-skinned Democrats. We've got to apologize for this and for that, and it's getting so that the person who can coral the most is declared the winner. But, so what if Barack Obama referred to the McCain campaign as "lipstick on a pig?" Who cares? It was a banal comment, anyway.

Speaking of banal, Obama now is really, really mad at Republicans for allegedly trying to "swift boat" his campaign, a reference to the truth squad of Navy veterans who surfaced in the last election to challenge John Kerry's self-proclaimed heroism in the Vietnam War. If that's what Republicans are doing to Obama, I'm for it, because Kerry needed to have his fake claims smacked down. And it wouldn't hurt to have some of Obama's challenged too.

See: Obama accuses Republicans of 'swift boat politics' - CNN.com

On aborting "defective" children

You're protected by law against discrimination by employers and insurance companies for illnesses and defects that genetic testing might turn up.

But how about protecting people whose genetic diseases are turned up by testing before they are born?

Read more in the Chicago Daily Observer