Journalism students outclass the pros

Here is an informative article on a promising and at-hand alternative to using embryonic stem cells to advance the science. The use of stem cells from umbilical cords holds the promise of more than 70 diseases, yet lacks sufficient funding.

If President Barack Obama is so interested in advancing science, maybe he should look to this noncontroversial alternative.

Congratulations and thanks are owed to Medill Reports, a news service available here, written and produced by graduate journalism students at Northwestern Univerity's Medill School.

CTA's pension fund fiasco

Here is an eye-opening, must-read story about the unnerving state of underfunded public pensions, including the Chicago Transit Authority's. A must read for people who aren't scared enough yet.

Now they're getting it

The Government Accountability Office will closely watch how Illinois spends its stimulus money, according to reports.

Seeing as how Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley won't tell the public where its stimulus money is going, maybe the GAO can start by smoking out the list.

"Experience tells us that the risk for fraud and abuse grows when billions of dollars are going out quickly, eligibility requirements are being established or changed and new programs are being created," said Gene L. Dodaro, acting U.S. comptroller generator.

Especially when one of the old requirements is that the money has to go to one of the mayor's friends.

And the Obama campaign propaganda machine said that it didn't matter that he was hatched in the cesspool of corrupt politics. Think aain.

Glib Gibbs

Asked if President Obama would accept Rush Limbaugh's invitation for a head-to-head debate, press secretary Robert Gibbs said something about shutting off his television and not having a radio. Clever.

As Obama sinks the nation into a deeper and deeper mess, he and his White House are increasingly less willing to engage in a substantive debate, instead attempting to make witicisms about "who is the Republican spokesman?" and engaging in personal attacks.

Obama, who hasn't missed a single opportunity to make himself public (before friendly crowds), will use the excuse that a president debate critics, which historically is true (except during re-election campaigns). But it sure would be nice if the White House responded with substantive arguments, for a change.

A $30-million Obama earmark for the CTA | Chicago Daily Observer

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Daily Observer

President Barack Obama, who has assured us that he’s the St. George in the crusade to slay the evil dragon Earmark, slipped a $30 million boon into the federal budget for the CTA’s Brown Line.

Which I guess proves that all earmarks are bad…unless they are our earmarks.

Obama, while he was still our junior senator connived with Illinois’ senior senator, Dick Durbin, to insert the $30 million give-away into the fiscal year 2009 omnibus budget just passed by House. Taxpayers for Common Sense, in its search for earmarks in the massive budget bill, discovered the $30 million lurking in federal transportation expenditures.

Read more in The Chicago Daily Observer

Mayor Daley's great big hush-hush

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

Mayor Richard Daley has given the lie to one of President Barack Obama's key promises: transparency.

While Obama promises that everything about his stimulus spending and, indeed, his entire administration will be open to inspection, Daley has steadfastly refused to reveal to the public or his City Council how he plans to spend Chicago's share of the $9 billion in stimulus cash programmed to come to Illinois.

That Daley would stiff several freedom of information requests from the media for a glimpse of his wish list is standard operating procedure in Chicago. But he's also ignoring 46 of the 50 aldermen on the City Council who asked all city departments and outside agencies controlled by Daley, such as the CTA and the Chicago Public Schools, to reveal their spending plans. That kind of high-handed autocracy might surprise observers in other cities, but in Chicago, any alderman putting his signature on a petition to implore Daley to even pretty-please do something is considered traitorous.

Daley's explanation? "Yes, we do, we have our list, we've been talking to people," he said. "We did not put that out publicly because once you start putting it out publicly, you know, the newspapers, the media is going to be ripping it apart."

So might the voters be ripping it apart, if this was a normal city. But this is Chicago, which re-enthrones Daley every four years, and whatever paltry gratuity His Lordship decides to bestow, Chicagoans gratefully receive. In a normal city, such wish lists would be transparent and the public would have a chance to comment, and if it chooses, to rip it apart. That's how a democracy is supposed to work, but not in Daley's Democratic realm.

People wonder how Chicago can be so corrupt, and here's one reason. When Daley says "we've been talking to people" about the list, who do you suppose he means? Technicians who are using cost-benefit formulas to calculate where best to spend the money? Daley Cabinet members in all-night sessions debating where the money would most benefit Chicago? Spare us. The money gets carved up in the back room, by friends, benefactees and finaglers who intimately understand the opportunities arising from the arrival of the biggest pile of taxpayer cash, ever. Outside, we can smell the stink, but we won't know what's rotting until Daley, in his wisdom, decides to give us a peek.

But even if Daley's wish list was perfectly legit, it still ought to be disclosed because it presents legitimate issues for public discussion. Suppose Illinois is in line for $500 million for transportation projects. Should it go for Chicago pothole repairs or suburban intersection improvements? CTA track repairs or more rolling stock for Metra? New CTA buses or for the completion of the long-delayed Elgin-O'Hare Expressway? Should taxpayers look to the Obama administration to correct Daley's imperious, if not illegal, secrecy? After all, Obama has repeatedly promised "transparency" in government and a new way of doing business. Again, spare us. Obama's assistant for intergovernmental affairs is Valerie Jarrett, who herself rose through Daley's political apparatus to eventually head the CTA. Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and White House senior adviser David Axelrod (Obama's Karl Rove) also are Chicago products. For them to defy Daley's craving for distributing the loot as he sees fit is laughable.

Nor should we expect much from Obama himself, who will be engaging in blinding hypocrisy if he continues to allow Daley to get away with the in-your-face politics he practices in Chicago. Maybe Obama will cross me up and figure out a way to force Daley's list out into public view without humbling the mayor. My bet, though, is that Obama will keep his silence, because that will keep Daley happy. And the rest of the nation will continue its swoon, believing that "real change" has arrived.

Mr. Obama's recession

This is worth a read: Our Troubled Economy Is a Response to Barack Obama's Policies - WSJ.com

President Barack Obama's budget plan taxes wealthy to aid middle and lower classes

This story says:

WASHINGTON — From front to back and on nearly every page, President Barack Obama's new budget plan delivers a message that's seldom been heard in American politics for more than three decades: It's time for the rich to pay their fair share and lighten the load on the middle class. [Emphasis added]

Wait, a progressive income tax, which requires those in upper income brackets pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes, isn't a fair share? If not, then what is a fair share?

Barney, is there an answer in there?

MSNBC talk show host Chris Matthews asked the right question of Rep. Barney Frank:

MATTHEWS: Well, let me ask you about the numbers. Do you think there‘s enough money in the added income—the re-added income taxes of those above $250,000 a year—is there enough income up there to tax, enough taxable income to bring into the federal Treasury over time to pay for the cost of a real national health care system?

Here is Frank's non-answer, which you can see in context here:

FRANK: Well, thanks to the incompetence of the—where the financial system has worked the deregulation, there aren‘t as many rich people as there used to be and they‘re not as rich as they used to be. But over time, it will be there. But you do have to do more.

And one of the things that I most liked about the president‘s state of the nation speech—which I thought was a very good speech, very well delivered, even better than very good—he talked about ending the spending on cold war weapons. One of the great things of inconsistency that I think, Chris, of people who worry about spending—they brought us the Iraq war, the single biggest addition to the deficit, and unlike some other things, it‘s all money that we lose. We don‘t get any of it money back.

They have projected—you know, we are now—according to the Bush budget, we‘re going to spend billions of dollars to protect the Czech Republic from being attacked by Iran. Now, I‘m not a regular reader of the fatwas...

(LAUGHTER)

FRANK: Well, that‘s true. I don‘t regularly read all the fatwas that come out of Teheran, but I am not aware that they are about to declare war on the Czech Republic, and I don‘t see why I should spend billions of dollars to stop it.

Somehow, we got from asking a real question about how to finance TARP, stimulus, the 2009 and 2010 budgets and whatever comes next into fatwas. Too bad that Matthews inexcusably let Frank get away with it.

Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Republican Party

Once more it's not what is being said that's important for so many of my simpleminded colleagues, but who is saying it and how it is being said. What not engage in a debate over ideas rather than focusing, like this sorry article, on putting down the speaker and his adherents?

Northern Trust to Barney Frank: Kiss my ass.

Northern Trust seeks to repay bailout money

The golf tournament that Northern Trust sponsors has contributed more than$50 million to charity. How many people have been employed--servers, etc.--to host the tournament is no small matter...to the people who have the jobs.

Frank is engaging is class warfare, and the class he's warring against is the very people he claims to represent.

Let's hear it for Northern Trust.

Chicago gets FAA approval to spend $182 million on O'Hare expansion design

The FAA blows your money on a pie in the sky expansion of O'Hare. Aside from the questionable legality (the ticket tax was intended to be used for actual construction, not for plans), there is the sight of $182 million going down the drain for a project that the airlines say they don't even want. More proof that the FAA continues to be in the tank for Richard M. Daley

Details are here.

Dist. 214 To Host Special Meeting On O'Hare Ring Road

You mean that after years of hemming and hawing, O'Hare expansion enablers finally are going to tell everyone where the ring road around the airport will go?

Read it here.

Jindal comparisons to Kenneth the Page abound online

It didn't take long for blogdolts to begin making fun of Jindal. (Follow the links from here.)

As these the same people who would not tolerate anyone making fun of Obama's ears?

Obama's automotive history rewrite

Will President Barack Obama's assertion that America invented the automobile get the same kind and amount of attention as did the misspelling of potato(e)?

Don’t resign, Senator Burris

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Daily Observer

Hang in there, Roland.

Don’t quit. Finish out your term as the Democratic senator representing the cheesy state of Illinois.

It’s your best, and perhaps only, way to get even with your fellow Democrats who have turned on you with a vengeance, who have knifed you in the back after your lifetime of subservience to Democratic rule. You are the Rod Blagojevich gift to fellow Democrats that would keep on giving.

Truth is, senator, your former compadres want you out, without a second to lose, even more than Republicans, who have much to gain by your hanging on. Your Democratic pals didn’t want you in there in the first place....

Continue reading in the Chicago Daily Observer

Obama could be reaching too far too quickly

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

In just a month, President Barack Obama has saved the banking, financial services and housing industries, changed the way that Washington does business, bailed out the auto industry, settled the Republican hash and saved the economy with the largest spending bill ever passed. In record time.

This week he goes on to save health care, tame entitlements, balance the budget and map the way to energy independence. At least that's all that's scheduled. Maybe he'll throw in a bonus, like curing cancer.

No disrespect intended, but it makes me think of the late comic genius Andy Kaufman, standing next to a phonograph on bare stage and lip-syncing to the Mighty Mouse song.

Obama's schedule this week includes a White House fiscal policy summit Monday, a speech to Congress on Tuesday and the unveiling of his budget Thursday.

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

Obviously, he doesn't, but we won't count that as a broken campaign promise because, well, we'd get trashed by the White House for questioning the wisdom of this frenzy. Much as Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs racked Rick Santelli, the CNBC reporter in Chicago's futures pits, over the coals for audaciously saying what many Americans are: How fair is it when the irresponsible get rewarded by the government and the 90 percent of us who pay our mortgages on time don't? What kind of example does it set for a nation that has gone from an instant-gratification culture to one that demands instant and foolproof protection from all risk? You'll have to excuse the Chicago commodities and futures traders for raising the question, since they make their living by facing down pure risk. You would have thought the current White House would understand where the traders are coming from since the financial/investment sector was among Obama's biggest campaign contributors, according to OpenSecrets.org.

There is something about this manic rush to set straight everything in America that bespeaks an incredible conceit, the same kind of hubris that argues that government policy can stabilize the global climate. While I detect a certain pride in the Obama administration at having "accomplished" more in a single month than Franklin Roosevelt did in an entire term, there's also the possibility that Obama may have done more damage in the opening week of his administration than President George W. Bush allegedly did in two terms.

In this feverish rush to solve everything, wouldn't it be prudent to pause a moment to appreciate the fact that no one, even by the administration's acknowledgment, knows whether the economic upheaval we've set in motion, including a change in the basic relationship between the American citizen and his government, will work? Much of what Obama and the Democrats have done already is irreversible, giving some of us the feeling that we're speeding down a dark highway at midnight with no headlights on.

Again and again, we hear that our only choice is not just to do something, but to do this something—a truly false dichotomy. But the question remains: What if we're wrong? What if we've spawned a monster—the kind of stagflation that gripped us in the early 1980s? What if the unprecedented debt we are creating is so huge that our children will have to spend so much of their wealth servicing it that they'll be denied the indulgences that this generation takes as its right. Or worse, what if the debt servicing consumes so much of the nation's wealth that future generations will be unable to afford the safety nets and government social spending that the left

GM's Plan: Subsidize Our 48-Year-Old Retirees

Lots of taxpayers would like to get the deal UAW workers still get: Paul Ingrassia in the Wall Street Journal

Obama Road Show Panned in Peoria

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Daily Observer

In a remarkably inept and embarrassing political stumble, President Barack Obama’s trek to the Caterpillar plant in East Peoria to pitch his stimulus package re-focused the spotlight on the Democratic death-grip on the Colombia free-trade pact.

Passage of the measure would mean for Caterpillar hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new or saved jobs, without costing the taxpayers any money—unlike the wildly extravagant $1.2 trillion (with interest) stimulus package. Yet, Obama opposes the pact and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stubbornly has refused to allow the agreement to come to the floor for a vote.

Caterpillar, the heavy equipment manufacturer, is one of the nation’s main exporters to Colombia and would be a chief beneficiary of free trade with the South American nation....

Read more in the Chicago Daily Observer

Slow drip of financial ruin

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

It's the death of reason.

Well, maybe not its death, but passage of the $787 billion stimulus package has sent reason to the intensive-care unit, possibly to draw its last breath. How ironic that at the very moment we were celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, who with Newton, Galileo and other rational minds, freed Western thinking from the manacles of faith, miracles and doctrine, Congress and President Barack Obama launched history's most expensive government giveaway, based entirely on panic, divination and ignorance.

The emotions of fear and loathing are what spawned this monstrosity; reason and logic had nothing to do with it. It's no better than sorcery. Democrats sold this package purely on gut feeling, sentiment and intuition.

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

Hence, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, an unpalatable stew of every imaginable ingredient hatched by every imaginable chef, has come upon us, not targeted to any particular taste or need, but guaranteed to give every American the heaves and heartburn for generations to come. No more reason went into this gelatinous slop than the ridiculous and dishonest assertion that it was either "this or nothing." It's the ultimate whine of the naive do-something crowd that surfaces with every trouble, natural or man-made.

Senator after Democratic senator stood to disgorge this dishonest rhetoric during floor debate, repeatedly proclaiming the lie that Republican opponents had nothing of their own to offer. But you didn't have to search far to find examples of GOP solutions, such as the one on House Minority Leader John Boehner's Web site. You don't have to agree with his more moderate and targeted package of immediate tax relief for working families, more help for the small business sector (the nation's biggest job producer), no tax increases to pay for spending, jobless assistance and home price stabilization.

However, simple honesty should compel the Reids and Pelosis to refrain from saying the opposition has no plan. Democrats, of course, were able to get away with this slander because few in the media challenged it or bothered to report it. The media also have failed to challenge the economic methodologies that are the basis for claims that the stimulus will produce millions of jobs.

Reason is the facility of the mind used to intelligently form judgments, make decisions and solve problems. Emotions are feelings, desires, fears, hates and passionate drives—all of which are the tools that Obama deployed to sell the stimulus package to a gullible public. Endeavor to go through all 1,100 pages of this stuffed piggy and you'll find little rational connection between the nation's problems and its solutions—other than if we throw enough money out there, some of it will stick to the wall.

The lightning-like passage of this colossal spending package (amounting to more than the Iraq war) took just three weeks. Congress is supposed to be a deliberative body, making decisions judiciously, openly and unhurriedly. This was steamrolled.

Worse than the insult to the democratic process, however, is the substance of this lunacy. Our national debt will nudge close to 100 percent of gross domestic product, something that hasn't happened since World War II when the threat to our country was external, mortal and real, and not of our own making. Then, we had to sell war bonds to our own citizens, the only way we could finance the war. Now, with the possible drying up of foreign purchases of American debt, perhaps we'll have to revert to celebrity-studded beg-a-thons of the 1940s to buy our own debt. School kids could again pinch pennies and nickels for the cause. They'll love us for it.