Tom Roeser

Your Memories of Tom

2011-05-31T20:49:00.003-05:00

Sun-Times: Political Voice, Social Activist Tom Roeser Dies at 82

Mr. Roeser is survived by his wife of more than 50 years, the former Lillian Prescott, four children and 13 grandchildren.

Visitation will be Friday, 4 to 9 p.m. at Nelson Funeral Home, 820 Talcott Road, Park Ridge. A funeral will be at 11 a.m. on Saturday at St. John Cantius Church, 825 N. Carpenter St. in Chicago followed by burial at Interment All Saints Cemetery, 700 N. River Road in Des Plaines.

Please your memories of Tom in comments below.

DANIELS’ WIFE CHERIE TO DECIDE IF HE RUNS. HUH? HE THINKS CONDI RICE WOULD BE GOOD RUNNING-MATE. HUH AGAIN!

2011-05-16T08:47:00.002-05:00

        Q. What’s this? A spouse decides whether one runs for president? Has this ever happened before?
       A.  No.   Of course not. I think it’s a joke and makes a laughingstock out of Daniels who on a number of fronts…budgetary expertise, excellent governor…is a well-qualified candidate. The proper way would be for the couple quietly to make that decision up or down and then either go for it or no. Throwing the ball to Cherie in public to make the decision for Mitch makes Mitch a sad joke of the GOP candidates—the weenie runt of the litter.
      As we all know, Cherie left him and their daughters for another man, divorcing Mitch and marrying an old flame because she despised Mitch’s chosen vocation of politics…and then did a reverse switch, divorcing him and returning to Mitch. Do they think this device…leave it to Cherie… will insulate her from another switcheroo when the press heat comes on? Looks a lot like it. But with her already demonstrated instability I’m not so sure. This stupid p. r. device should disqualify him from election if anything does.   This smacks of Dick Lugar, his topmost adviser.
       Q. And what’s this Condi Rice for vice president stuff?
       A.  Daniels made the suggestion carelessly over cocktails with some college kids after Cherie spoke to a Republican audience. Smart, huh?   Earlier he had been quoted as saying he did not feel qualified at this point to debate Obama on foreign policy. Smart, huh?    What a laugh after all the goof-ups Obama has made!   Now he evidently wants an architect of the George W. Bush foreign policy to be considered for veep! Thus from the outset the negatives of that policy will be used against him and the cameras will switch continually to Condi to defend it. Thus one woman decides whether Mitch will run—not Mitch—and another woman will be asked all the big foreign-defense policy questions—a vehemently pro-abort woman at that…..with Mitch presumably left to drive his motorcycle alone down the highways.
       The Bush tie-in has already been glaring….Laura calling up Cherie to steady her nerves….the big media serving a trumpet fanfare that here is the truly super-duper candidate…with smoothly the George W. and Poppy rolodexes clicking into place. That’ll mean we face a return to Wilsonianism…our mission being to lead those nations involved in the Arabian Spring to democracy—no how much blood and treasure it takes.
        And why Condi? Does he remotely think that Condi Rice is going to lead him to a treasure-trove of black votes when blacks already have a president?     God, I hope not. But “My Man Mitch,” as “W” calls him has made all by his own-self the most spectacular screw-ups any pre-announced presidential candidate has done…with a laudable pro-life record, he announced it would be off his table if he were to run—thus sacrificing an army of social conservative volunteers.
        He then angled back and signed the Planned Parenthood state funding ban which didn’t allay social conservatives but proved he was trying to be cute.   Anyhow, he vitiated much of the so-called “moderate” vote he had gained previously which had made him so exciting to big secular media. Then he booted his big decision...whether or not to run…to his wife. Finally denying himself a free hand postulating a foreign policy at odds with Obama’s…a great natural advantage…he hoists the white flag by suggesting the point-person in the Bush foreign policy be his veep.
         What we have here, friends, is a wimp who has proven he isn’t worthy of serious consideration for the presidency because all by himself he has blown it.
       .

ROMNEY TACKLED HEALTH CARE BACKASSWARD…CONVENING A FACT PANEL AND THEN TRY TO MAKE ITS RECOMMENDATIONS FIT HIS POLITICAL NEEDS.

2011-05-13T11:58:00.002-05:00

Many so-called “business approach” candidates…especially liberal Republican ones…fail to start first with the question—is this a job government ought to do? Mitt failed to ask this question first.
      Q. Please explain.
     A.  Relativists, ultra-pragmatists…and that approach made Mitt Romney a multi-millionaire in business…see a problem….insist there should be a solution and hire an army of experts to crunch numbers and come up with a popular liberal, governmental solution—because the trend lies that way—government leading the way.   Traditional conservative thinkers ponder a problem, determine if government or private sector is the route to the solution and postulate from there.    In 1994 when he ran for the Senate against Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts a heavily pro-abort state, Mitt Romney decided he would craft a strategy on abortion thusly—Under Roe v. Wade legal abortion is the law of the land.   I happen to oppose abortion but the law is the law and I respect a woman’s right to make that choice freely.
        He had calculated that a pro-abort answer was correct for his candidacy and then crafted a rationale that seemed to hint he was more amenable than Kennedy to pro-life views. A so-called businessman’s pragmatic “solution.”
        But ironically Kennedy won the argument by pointing out that if Romney felt personally abortion was wrong, a moral evil, he should forthrightly oppose it and seek to root it out.   It was the closest election Kennedy ever won…and at the beginning Romney was leading him….but the tables turned ever so slightly and Romney’s wobbliness on abortion helped Kennedy a fast-and-forever pro-abort.   Years later, when he planned a run for president, Romney said his views on abortion were “developing” and came out as a full-blown pro-lifer but was tied up trying to reconcile his earlier and present views and show that he had not….as suspicioned…changed his sails to square with the national GOP’s consensus on pro-life.
     Q. Now on RomneyCare…
     A. On RomneyCare, he made the same basic error—calculating via hunch that universal health care was the wave of the future. As Massachusetts governor, he hired an army of experts, drafted the legislation and added some juicy pro-Republican parts such as tort reform. But in the bill was the mandate that everyone in the state had to buy health insurance or pay a penalty which is the same as contained in ObamaCare. Because RomneyCare is a state bill it does not have the constitutional ones that ObamaCare has.
         But the thing is pesky enough. He signed the bill with great fanfare….Ted Kennedy was there applauding…but now the unpopularity of ObamaCare has taken much of the issue away from him.   So until yesterday he had two strategic choices. Both unappetizing.
     He could join the full-throated Republican candidates who urge repeal of ObamaCare by saying it had already been tried in the laboratory of state government….Massachusetts….and had been shown to be inefficacious. He could thus renounce his own child.   Here he would have to confess he had been wrong.
        Or—
      Q.   ..or--?
      A.   Or he could stick with RomneyCare and say it failed by failure of execution by his successors in the state. That’s the course he’s taken …and the rationale is not working.   It clearly points out…as The Wall Street Journal’s lead editorial said yesterday…the fault is in Romney’s flawed philosophy and ultra-pragmatic theory of government. Too damned pragmatic by half, Junior by a man who has always been called the smartest guy in the room.
     Q.   What’s likely to happen?
     A.   Although a brilliant salesman, he’s got a lemon with this one and I can’t fathom he can make it to the finals. His game-plan is to drown out all the others with kabillions and be the last guy standing by convention-time. I don’t think he can do it.

NOT CONTENT WITH SLANTING NEWS PRO-OBAMA, THE AP IS SKEWING POLL NUMBERS TO MAKE IT APPEAR HE’S WORKING UP A LANDSLIDE.

2011-05-12T07:27:00.000-05:00

Q. If so…if it made a simple sampling mistake, how bad is that for the wire service?

A. If it’s far off, it can say hello to the Literary Digest of 1936 (of which more later).

Yes indeed. Its poll yesterday showed Obama’s approval rating hitting 60% with 53% saying he should be reelected…which the formerly objective old-line service attributed to a terrific bounce from the Osama bin Laden killing—unrecorded let it be said by every other major polling agency. But what AP did was spike sharply upward the sample to favor the Democratsby a whopping 17%, something which doesn’t square with realistic demographic numbers. It was a hedge based on a hunch that Obama’s strength has zoomed and there has been a thus far unnoticed (but by it) massive dislocation of political allegiance to the Democratic party. But here the AP stands alone.

In almost 40 polls taken since the middle of 2009, Democrats and Republicans are seen to range in the 40s with the split…as in most Gallup samplings… at most 7 percentage points.

For example, in late April it showed the American public at 31% Republican,36% independent,32% Republican. The AP is betting somehow the party IDs have changed that drastically since Obama killed Osama. It alleges the country today isnearly one half Democratic and less than a third Republican. Wow—if so, the election’s over before it even began…on a par with the FDR halcyon days. Does it seem like that to you? As one who lived through FDR, it sure doesn’t to me.

Gallup has the two parties ID about even. Pew’s latest poll shows Dems ahead by 7.
Speaking of FDR in 1936 a prominent magazine devoted to public opinion, the Literary Digest foretold a massive Alf Landon victory over Roosevelt based on another hedge—that the election results in Maine, then held in September, would translate across the country due to the fact that the then truism “as Maine goes, so goes the nation” would be validated. It was true that for years Maine elections were a bellwether for the nation and the magazine just went along.

It took the Maine numbers…heavily Republican…and spiked them proportionately across the country. Its conclusion: FDR was a goner for reelection. In reality the November election was the heaviest, one-sided victory in history up to that point…for the Democrats and Landon carried only Maine and Vermont.

That was the end of the Literary Digest and the upshot for a fledgling polling company, Gallup. All right—it may be the AP’s hedge is better than anyone else’s…but if it isn’t, the one-time conservatively written and edited service (in contrast to the early flamboyant UPI) may lose all its credibility.

What bothers me….as one who in his youth strung for the AP from central Minnesota…was how conservative that organization was not just in fact gathering but in toned-down writing. The wire service that was always more colorful and made more inaccuracies was UP, United Press, later to amalgamate with Hearst’s International News Service as UPI. On a string assignment for the AP in 1955, I interviewed Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt in Minnesota, she being then the permanent representative to the UN….an appointment made by Harry Truman and which continued over in the Eisenhower administration. She was traveling in the state with Ambassador Eugenie Anderson…the first woman ambassador to Denmark. What I gleaned from Mrs.R was a blow-by-blow back-and-forth between she and the Russians on drafting the UN’s “Universal Declaration on Human Rights.” .

I wrote it up and got a call from AP New York and a guy who questioned me up and down about the authenticity since the wire-service’s old line diplomatic correspondent hadn’t been able to shake loose those facts. After questioning me for a half-hour with lengthy cross-examination, he sighed and said, “okay kid but if you’re wrong your ass is on the line.” I wasn’t wrong and my ass was promoted at my paper after that…the weekly salary hoisted to a massive $67.50 a week—from $45.00 which meant that I wouldn’t have to work nights as a barroom pianist at a shot-and-beer farmers’ tavern any more.

Since Obama’s election I must say I have never seen any news agency take a more dramatic turn to the Left than the AP. Slanting the news is one thing..making a goofy hedge as with its poll baseline numbers is another. Now it’s the AP ass which is on the line.

DALEY’S PIGGY-PIGGY 5 COP REQUEST MARKS HIM AS THE LOUT HE IS.

2011-05-11T12:33:00.000-05:00

Q. Are all these media serenades to Daley too much?

A. They are--with the notable exceptions of John Kass’ stirring column and Fran Spielman’s excellent dissections of what happened to his good appointments—Mary Rose Loney, named because she would be an honest O’Hare official, fired because she wouldn’t kow-tow to clout-connected suppliers which made her an honest O’Hare official….

…the team of Paul Vallas as school superintendent and Gery Chico as president of the school board because they would put educational quality on a priority basis over bowing to the teachers’ unions—fired (quietly, the way Daley prefers) because they wouldn’t bow to the teachers’ unions to the disadvantage of the children.

I won’t surprise you by saying I especially cherish the Kass column because it demonstrates how close Daley has been to the Outfit. But the payoff for me is how this fat little whelp after taking bows for beautifying the city with its own money does not feel its rewards enough that he has the no class to ask for five cops and two police cars to convey him around in private life. This because his life has been threatened. He has no shame; you’d think Maggie would restrain him but no she has her grubby hand outstretched too.

We authenticist Catholics have had to put up with this scoundrel who eschews 2000 years of theology embraced by the Church he falsely insists he belongs to…supporting abortion rights, gay marriage, selling his honor by courting the gay rights “community” by funding a building for its…er…use. He gets by with high-fiving his Irish ethnicity which is supposed to account for these moral transgressions.

Q. But if his life is really in danger, what should he do about it?

A. What he should do with his amassed next largesse…a high paying directorship from AON…is to pony up and retain a private guard service. Or rally his pals who have benefited from his association to put on fund-raiser in his honor that will meet the estimated $400,000 cost. And break down and buy a car he can drive himself. He reminds me of Nero, so obsessed with the trappings of power, playing fiddle by cutting ribbons on projects taxpayers shouldn’t have had to pay for…while the city burns. He’s really disgusting.

HISTORY FLASHBACK: HORATIO…ER… FDR AT THE BRIDGE WHICH IS WHERE IT ALL BEGAN.

2011-05-09T07:52:00.002-05:00

If you want to put your finger on when it all began, it was at the dedication of an Outer Drive Bridge, Oct. 5, 1937 with an unsufferably arrogant speech by “Dr. Roosevelt” who would put whole nations in quarantine.

The second in a series tracing how foreign-military policy interventionism became a staple of both parties—and how a quiet, studious thoughtful leader, Robert Taft emerged to lay down a legacy of constitutionalism that can well be applied by the next Republican president.

As the year 1938 dawned, five years after Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated with the hope of ending the Great Depression with massive public works and government intervention, there was little hope this could be done soon. The historian of the Depression Amity Shlaes writes in The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Depression [HarperCollins: 2007]that shockingly there was another downturn. By August there came the sharpest drop in industrial production ever recorded. Unemployment stood at 17.4%.

Two New Deal Octogenarians.

When New Deal guru Rexford Guy Tugwell, then 83 spoke at my 1975 political science class at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance on the 30^th anniversary of Roosevelt’s death, April 12, he told me, “at first we didn’t know what the hell to do; we were bewildered and confused. Our formulae seemed not to be working at all.”

Tugwell told me that to his great surprise that from 1933 to `38 there was “no real alternative to the New Deal” coming from congressional Republicans (there was but he was looking for liberal Republican ideas of the Fighting Bob LaFollette variety). In 1936 Kansas Gov. Alf Landon had lost spectacularly to FDR on a “dime store New Deal” program: a me-too, carbon-copy facsimile of Roosevelt’s program just trimmed a bit around the edges. But all changed as the jobless figure neared 20% in 1938. Gallup found that 66% of the American people thought FDR had turned the wheel too far to the Left.

“That just reinforced me and others with the need to give our redistribution and government planning programs some impetus before the country turned back to the reactionaries,” he said using the radical terms that got him canned as a U of Penn. professor of economics—and which ultimately forced his resignation from government after his farm resettlement plans gained him the appellation “Rex the Red.” Knowing him 36 years ago I can say his critics had him pegged rightly as a Communist in ideology although he was probably just an academic theorist and never got enmeshed in the subversion network since he was too much a dreamer and abstruse.

Tugwell thought he and others had time to spare to fight joblessness—but it was not to be. In the congressional midterms of 1938 a heavy voting majority resolved to turn New Dealers out in the midterms while keeping the Congress moderately Democratic. Tugwell…who later became FDR’s far left appointed governor of Puerto Rico… was one of two oldest-living relics of the FDR administration whom I interviewed in 1975. A strange kind of agriculturalist who was prevented by extreme hay fever from visiting the fields, he was retained by the administration to think of radical new means of stimulating farm prices (he came up with the Agricultural Adjustment Act that paid farmers for cutting production). When I asked him whether FDR veered to interventionism in the late `30s so defense arms buildup would gin up the employment and reelect him to a 3^rdterm, the old Ph.D dismissed it. “The war just caught up with us, that’s all.”

The other octogenarian I interviewed closely was a man nearer my own temperament—Tugwell’s old nemesis in the New Deal, a devoutly Catholic Dem, Jim Farley, 86, whom I questioned for a day and a half in his Manhattan office where he served as chairman of the Coca-Cola Export company. The post was a sinecure: Farley just made the office his home. Later we rode in his private limo to the exclusive New York city restaurant 21. He was eager to talk.

“Without a doubt,” he said when I asked him if FDR deduced that he could only solve our unemployment by putting us into a war. “And,” he said with a smile, “tell Rex I said this will you?”

Jim Farley was—and is in terms of modern political history—a legend of political management and strategy. He managed Roosevelt’s 1932 and 1936 campaigns, serving as Postmaster General and who mobilized heavy patronage to push FDR’s program through early Congresses, ultimately splitting with his old boss on the issue of a third term in 1940. The Hatch Act was passed by Congress to stop Farley midway in hiring armies of political workers.

Angling Toward War to Solve Joblessness.

Unlike Tugwell Farley candidly acknowledged that Roosevelt decided to play the war card as early as 1937 when joblessness rose spotlighting the New Deal’s failure to get the country back to work—and he didn’t care for it one little bit. “I know the boss had decided to change the subject and get involved in international affairs,” Farley told me. “He was convinced that what would put men to work was a peacetime national defense effort pumped up by psychosis of fear. I was getting very uneasy with that.”

War clouds were on the horizon, begging to be exploited he said. In 1937 Germany and Italy intervened in the Spanish Civil War; Japan invaded China; two years earlier Italy invaded Ethiopia to harvest her African colonies. “The time was ripe for The Boss to capitalize on this as a change of subject,” Farley told me.

That year—on October 5- Roosevelt came to Chicago, an event I remember as a child of nine fortified by a Dad to whom politics was as savory as filet mignon. Roosevelt came here to dedicate the old Outer Drive Bridge running south from Navy Pier over the Chicago River, hailed as an historic linkup between two major park systems, Lincoln on the north and Grant on the south.

The president gave what was then seen as an engineering marvel a brief kiss-off, calling it a “civic betterment.” He chose Chicago because two publishers here—Robert R. McCormick and William Randolph Hearst—dominated the media. They charged what he wanted to do was change the subject, from joblessness to tailor himself as a potential wartime leader and thus gain employment from a so-called “national defense” effort.

The Tribune was by far the stronger paper. For days before the speech workers labored on a creation hidden under a tarp across the river facing the speaker’s rostrum. Workmen pulled away the tarp unveiling a massive billboard. It featured garish white letters on a dark blue background, reading: The Chicago Tribune: Completely Un-dominated. The paper had received a tip on what he would say in a speech that was one of the most influential speeches any president would make. (When he held his next news conference, Roosevelt said “Is Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune here?” When Trohan stood up, FDR said, “Thank you. I just wanted to see what a completely un-dominated newspaper reporter looks like”).

The Tribune predicted this speech would launch a drive to join Europe’s war. It was right. What FDR did in the speech was to suggest that a nebulous community of nations should “quarantine aggressive nations”—unspecified although it was clear he had in mind Germany, Japan and Italy. Yes—he meant “quarantine.” The word was immediately understood by all Americans. In the 1930s “quarantine” was applied as a precaution to families whose members were infected with polio—even measles, scarlet fever and whooping cough. A health department worker came to your door and actually affixed a sign attesting that you were to be incommunicado. Health Commissioner Herman Bundeson had a sign with red letters nailed to our door, too, since I had chicken pox.

Roosevelt could not have gotten away with that speech today. It was overbearing, brimming with I-know-better-what’s-good-for-you-than-you-do-yourself sophistry. His speech was a shot across the bow to signal that if we were not to be the world’s policeman, we would serve as its health officer, barring nations infected from associating with others.

“My Friends,” he began in his usual unctuous patronizing, radio announcer-resonant patrician tone which would be unacceptable for any politician to use today, flourishing what his friends called the “Endicott Peabody accent” named after the Brahmin Episcopal headmaster of Groton School for Boys which Roosevelt attended, the exclusive 5-year college preparatory school in Connecticut, “…It is because the people of the United States must, for the sake of their own future, give a thought to the rest of the world that I, as the responsible head of the nation, have chosen this great inland city and this gala occasion to speak to you on a subject of definite national importance.”

A few paragraphs down after he emphasized he sorely wanted to preserve international peace he issued one of the most arrogant precepts the head of a nation ever enunciated in peacetime:

“When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.”

Thus “Dr.” Roosevelt, the world physician in a massive show of effrontery, would decide what nation should be ruled out-of-bounds in the international community.

“I knew then,” Farley told me in 1975, “that we were moving out of the domestic into the global in the drive to change the subject for the American people which would ultimately lead us to war. I guessed then he was aiming for a third term—never anticipated by most presidents including the founders—and I figured I would do myself a big favor by not being around when he tried it. Not that I thought he couldn’t get it—but that he shouldn’t try.”

1938 and the Rise of Robert Taft.

Quarantine the Aggressors or not, in the congressional midterms of 1938, voters had had enough of FDR’s failure to solve unemployment—and though they didn’t defeat the Democratic congress, they rewarded the GOP with 80 new seats in the House, eight in the Senate and eleven governors. One of the Senate victors was 49-year-old Robert A. Taft of Ohio. Except for a famous surname as the oldest son of the 27^th president, no one expected this quiet, studious workaholic to be anything more than a nerdy backbencher. But Taft was one of the greatest senators in history—and his constitutionalism and courage has always stayed with me, leading me to suggest that he should be the model in foreign-defense policy for future Republican presidents. By which I mean not neo…not seeking to democratize the world as George W. Bush articulated in his Wilsonian first inaugural…nor like Ron Paul wishing to disband our foreign intelligence defenses, repeal the Patriot Act that protects us from domestic terrorism cut back our military to the size of the scrub armies at Lexington and Concord and curtail our navy to the status of privateering vessels under John Paul Jones.

From the outset, Bob Taft of Cincinnati seemed an anomaly. Totally unlike his gregarious jovial chief justice father, he seemed dry and antiseptic, seemingly unnourished by human juices. Yet he was anything but under-motivated.

Topping the academic lists —undergrad at Yale, law at Harvard—he came from a wealthy family (though by no means equal to either the Roosevelts or Kennedys), he sought twice to enlist in WWI, being rejected for poor eyesight, served as a young lawyer with the U.S. Food Administration run by Herbert Hoover under Wilson, was elected to the Ohio House, being elected Republican floor leader and later Speaker, went to the Ohio Senate where he rewrote the law for city, county and school finances which he jammed through by overriding a governor’s veto, and headed a joint tax reform legislative commission that repealed the old personal property tax.

He was defeated in the landslide Dem year of 1932 and decided he had enough of politics and started making a bundle at his prominent law firm. But the New Deal’s demagogic radicalism drove him nuts and he made the circuit in his state delivering studious speeches on the need to return to constitutionalism.

In 1938 a Democratic kingpin, Sen. Robert Bulkley was running for reelection and was seen as a sure thing. To everybody’s astonishment Taft decided to take him on. At first watching Taft on the stump and making a botch of handshaking was a painful embarrassment. His gregarious wife Martha told him so.

“For God’s sake, Bob, loosen up!” she said in Columbus. “Think of something civil to say to these nice people rather than boring them to death—or I tell you I’m going to take you home! Be more like your father or your brother Charlie [the mayor of Cincinnati]! I tell you—I’ve never seen anybody…anybody!...less suited for political life than you! You’re a wet blanket!”

But his cousin Dave Ingram who was running Taft’s campaign said “lay off, Martha! You can’t make Bob be what he isn’t! You’ll never change him! I tried that! If he loses he loses but let him be the dull old Bob Taft God meant him to be!”

Martha did. And lo and behold, the Bob Taft God meant him to be took hold and won election over Bulkley by 170,000 votes.
Next week how Martha Taft’s nerdy, wet blanket husband became the uncrowned leader of conservatives in the U.S. Senate and a model for what this country needs in its next Republican president.

DON’T WORRY—THE BIN LADEN PHOTOS WILL GET OUT, VIA THE BLACK MARKET…MITCH DANIELS MAKES HIS MOVE GUIDED BY DICK LUGAR.

2011-05-05T06:18:00.002-05:00

                             Look at the Birdie, Osama!
       Q. You mean the controversy over Obama’s decision not to release the photos of the dead Bin Laden is a waste of time?
       A.  Of course. The authentic photos of the mass murderer will be released in the time-honored American way through free enterprise. Somebody snitching them and after getting his palm greased sneaking them to Reuters. Indeed, we’re told this has already happened.
       Q. Did you favor Obama’s clamping down on their release?
      A. To show you how cynical I am, yes if it prevents a dust-up that infuriates the Muslim street.   But I know that we’ll get the pictures the old fashioned way so why worry?
                               Mitch Daniels the Stealth Candidate.
        Q. What do you mean by stealth?
       A. It’s a put-on by our RINO friends to slip in a quasi-liberal who will be the fall guy for Obama.   The slick job is being run surreptitiously by 79-year-old Dick Lugar which is appropriate.   I dealt with both Lugar and Daniels years ago when I was a lobbyist for Quaker and our meetings increased after we bought Stokely-Van Camp in Indiana which owned Gatorade. It made pork and beans which we dumped, selling it to ConAgra.
           The thing about Lugar that always intrigued me…dating from the time he was Indianapolis’ boy mayor at the age of 35 and hailed as Dick Nixon’s Favorite Mayor until now…has been that he has been a master of ideological disguise—floating as a conservative who has a maddening way of swallowing his words, rolling them around in his saturnine mouth and allowing them to be emitted in such garbled fashion that nobody really knows what the hell he’s talking about.   He has been the leading protagonist of the philosophy “when in doubt mumble.”
           So when I would try to hustle him for a vote and meet him off the Senate chamber he’d say: Well you must remember that glubniff…bochara…and when the vote comes up I necessarily will have to puffiff and for a time it might look like I’m not with you—but bluffough and balooka you’ll see that we’ll get it recommitted to the Committee where finally we’ll have a chance to plubinitff so you might be happy with it.
           Actually, dating from the days when he was a Rhodes Scholar Dick Lugar has always been with the liberals on all key items that matter…and next year the jig will be up for him. He’ll face a Tea Party that’s well on to him.   With respect to Daniels, I dealt with him when he was Lugar’s staffer, when he was with Eli Lilly…heading its North American operations…running a marketing campaign that saved its product Prozac from assault by the Church of Scientology. He started as an intern to Lugar in the Indianapolis mayor’s office and the two are almost indistinguishable in the way they muffle their words and intentions. Lugar is a kind of surrogate spiritual father to Daniels.
        Q. Daniels is an expert in federal budgeting—no?—basis his head of OMB under George W. Bush where he got the moniker “My man Mitch”?
      A.  He has all the demeanor and personality of a third-rung federal bureaucrat…probably a GS-16…with utterly no blazing conviction or passion. Utterly no view of how priorities should be reordered as Paul Ryan has demonstrated. No, Daniels is like his mentor Lugar.  You see the problem with federal spending is blomoff…duhommana…and clontatarff… George Will, the bow-tied columnist who likes to impress with his masterly erudition which when examined boils down to very little….famed for informing us that the first instinct for consumerism started with the Norman Conquest of 1066…thinks Daniels is ducky because he is so dull in contrast to Obama—which makes George think he’s what the country needs now: unflashy.      George introduced Daniels in a flowery speech at CPAC.
       Daniels is indebted to his mentor Lugar for leading him to eschew social issues so as to romance the country club…the country club never really understanding what Reagan meant when he said that the key to GOP national elections is a three-legged stool: fiscal integrity…emphasis on national defense…and social issues: pro-life etc. That has never been Lugar’s or Daniels’ way. They may support social issues privately in order to get their noses clean with conservatives but their heart and souls are with the pro-choice Establishment.
      Why is George Will so ga-ga over this balding, seedy-looking little Syrian extract who rides a motorcycle in order to seem one of the people?
        The trouble is that George is easily intimidated by numbers guys…as he was with David Stockman when he ran OMB. The trouble with Stockman…whom I knew very well since he was the top-staffer to John B. Anderson…was that David had no inner conviction. He could support John Connally for president as he did privately until Reagan offered him the job. There was a chasm of ideological difference between Connally and Reagan.   Stockman could never be true to anyone and at the end when he savaged Reagan by consorting with a leftist journalist he showed his true colors—that of a charlatan.
           Q.   But Mitch signed the Indiana bill depriving Planned Parenthood of state funding did he not?
           A.  A necessary expedient.
           Q.   Finally the columnist Sneed is quite taken with Joe Biden whom she labels a “devout Catholic” because he was fingering a compact rosary during the Navy Seal raid on the bin Laden compound.
          A.  You have to understand that every liberal who is a Catholic is to Sneed “devout.” Ask Joe why he voted straight pro-abortion in the Senate if he’s such a devout Catholic. That fact never entered Sneed’s fluffy little gossiper’s head.

WILL ARCHDIOCESE CAVE TO PFLEGER TO PLEASE TRIB EDITORIAL BOARD?

2011-05-04T09:07:00.001-05:00

       Q. What makes you say that?
       A.  Just because I know how the Archdiocese thinks. “Can’t we all get along?” The namby pamby Bruce Dold-orderedTribune editorial reflects a disjointed p.r. sense that means a lot to the wishy-washy of which that paper is the true exemplar. The Sun-Times would be thrilled. Jimmy Lago would be celebrated for putting it together.   Msgr. Ken Velo would do individual TV cameos.
       Ex-priest Bob McClory would blow kisses and say now the Church here is truly inclusive. Barbara Blaine whose face ordinarily looks contorted with grievance like a clenched fist would relax.   Hans Kung-influenced theologians would declare Pfleger’s soul has been spared from his threat to leave the Church. The parishioners of Sabina’s would be pacified and tend to accept their new pastor knowing that Pfleger is happy.     Nothing better than sublimating a split and papering over real conviction. Oh how Ms. Marin would be happy.   And Laura Washington and those experts on Catholic theology—Neil Steinberg and Richard Roeper.   The Cardinal would be celebrated as a true statesman of the Church.   Would that make him happy? Would it? Do kids like ice cream?
       Q. Not that you have a glimmer of what a possible settlement would be?
       A. I don’t. But suppose…just suppose… there comes an offer for Pfleger to head up a newly created archdiocesan office of Social Justice…so he could visit a number of parishes and do variants of his St. Sabina’s act with a hand mike where he bounced off the walls imitating Hillary Clinton. Wouldn’t that be ducky?
        Q. Changing the subject, what was the most revealing thing that has happened about the Osama bin Laden killing since the original announcement?
       A.  A statement that I guarantee you won’t appear in the Sun-Times or the Tribune or The New York Times  or any of the network news shows. The fact that Central Intelligence Director Leon Panetta has acknowledged that early waterboarding under Bush produced in part information that eventuated in bin Laden’s killing. Certainly this will not appear in any of Lynn Sweet’s breathless daily diaries that convey how fast her little liberal heart is beating at the prospect that Barack Obama may get some mileage out of this.   Has anybody wondered why Sweet doesn’t cover the Illinois congressional delegation despite the fact that she carries the title chief of the paper’s Washington bureau? Easy title since she’s the only one on the bureau. She is entirely given over to Obama and his wife. Moreover, she has now become not just incorrigible but utterly shameless—nothing more than a stenographer hewing to the party line.

Will Killing Osama Reelect Obama?...How Lisa Madigan Can—and Should—Enter the Vanekco Probe.

2011-05-03T07:33:00.002-05:00

      Q. Barbara Walters says she’d hate to be a Republican presidential candidate running against Obama in 2012 now that he had the CIA and Navy Seals kill Osama bin Laden.   Also Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC.
    A. You’ve identified the nation’s two overage liberal news Harpies there.   But it’s all in their dreams. The best research that can be found has determined that when Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003, George W. Bush got a brief 7-point spurt which died as domestic issues took to the fore. Bush won but by the time the 2004 election was held Saddam’s capture was a minor item.   And of course George H. W. Bush bringing the first Iraq War to a successful conclusion added 40 points to his popularity….so much so that a number of Democratic aspirants bowed out….leaving Bill Clinton, regarded as a second-tier southern governor, who capitalized on the dreary economy. The 40 points faded quickly. That’s likely to be the case in 2012 with Obama unless job totals start picking up.
     Having said that, however, the smooth professionalism that characterizes Bill Daley’s aplomb as chief of staff was readily evident. I thought Obama’s speech was brilliantly written and carried out --from top to bottom with the reverential signoff “God bless America.” All those sentiments had been missing in Obama’s communications before Daley.
       Q. You’ve been asking for a long time why the RJ Vanecko case has been stalled—but the other night on the radio you said it is not impossible for a wary States Attorney Anita Alverez to get help in probing the Daley nephew from Attorney General Lisa Madigan, R. J. Vanecko, for responsibility in slugging a Mt. Prospect kid a number of years ago where the kid fell backwards, hitting his head and dying in agony twelve days later…while Vanecko ran away, the cops delayed the probe and when they did hold a lineup Vanecko showed up with a shaved head ostensibly to confuse people who would identify him as the assailant. Lost records and mysterious jurisdictional transfers within the Police Department has led two major news organizations…the Sun-Times and NBC Channel 5…to see something fishy. Carol Marin went to States Attorney Anita Alverez and got her weakly to admit that there should be a third-party investigation.   A city inspector general has the job but that’s pretty unimpressive given the seriousness of the matter.   Marin suggested others do the job—such as Patrick Fitzgerald the U. S. Attorney but as Alverez is an old feminist buddy of Marin’s there hasn’t been much apparent progress.
       A.  Yes—but the one who should be all odds do it is Lisa Madigan the Illinois Attorney General. Alverez is swamped with conflict of interest. She was a high level functionary when the slugging was committed—and working as a top assistant to States Attorney Dick Devine. Devine is a former law partner of Rich Daley and the “lost” records happened on Devine’s watch. To make matters more uncomfortable for Alverez, Devine is the chairman of an advisory committee that recommends candidates for federal judgeships to the Obama administration and reportedly Alverez tops the list.
      All the while Poppa Madigan’s little dimpled darling Lisa is fooling around with easy stuff that gets her name in the paper and a mass following for a future run for governor. Between the two of them they’ve contrived a beautiful safe harbor for Lisa—with the media not vouchsafing to criticize her as she cavorts being one of the most popular AGs in the country with safe cases…romancing the gun-control lobby by crusading to print owners’ names…and saving Cairo’s homes from flooding by assailing mean old Missouri for choosing to save farmlands from flooding rather than blow the dams.   Lisa and Pop make sure she doesn’t get skee-geed with the Dem powers that be. All par for the course.
      Now, at least one expert on Illinois state government told me that under law it is not possible for Lisa to enter the case. Sounded funny to me since my earlier experience had been as an assistant to a Minnesota governor where the Attorney General, Walter Mondale, was particularly active.   So I asked a good friend, a top legal researcher here, to give the issue a look-see. Not exactly airtight. In People vs. Buffalo Confectionary Company 1980 and Skelton vs. Brown 2009 the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the AG does not have the authority to probe or prosecute on her own when the states attorney has jurisdiction, but can do so if so invited by the states attorney and the states attorney participates in the trial.
       It appears Alverez’s and Lisa’s good journalistic friends are not going the limit in this matter—hence liberal interests are blocking the way. Both liberal feminist icon pols have a problem…not irritating the Daleys who no matter whether they’re yesterday’s mashed potatoes or not can wreak vengeance to the third degree of kindred—Lisa because she and her Pop want her to cruise to the governorship without making waves in the party, and Anita because she wants someday to be a federal judge and Dick Devine who was States Attorney at the time doesn’t know for the life of him what happened to the records.
      Now expect a detailed answer to this by Madigan minions who will seemingly use every argument extant and some not so to justify that Lisa can’t move on this case even if she’s asked.   Want to hazard a guess where the answer will appear? Hah! That’s easy. Just think about it for a second.

USAMA’S DEATH SPURS US TO THANK GOD FOR OUR BRAVE CIA AND MILITARY.

2011-05-02T07:44:00.002-05:00

But for Future Reference: U. S. HAS BECOME FAR TOO MUCH THE WORLD’S CONSTABUARY.

It Really All Started with that Insufferable Egomaniac Teddy Roosevelt Whom Modern Media Glorify as “Great.”

As we digest the news of Usama bin Laden’s death and acknowledge that it is sweet retribution for all Americans…those who lost loved ones on 9/11 and the entire country which has invested billions in defense and anti-terrorism….let’s look ahead to a future where we can not be the combination constabulary and fire department for the world.

There is one important change in U. S. policy that is seldom discussed even in most conservative journalistic organs…and that is the necessity through election of a Republican president to move this country from being the world’s greatest busybody…sending troops to export democracy throughout the world—to returning to a foreign policy where our own self interest is paramount.

And I don’t mean back to Ron Paul the erratic uncle locked up in the attic who every four years escapes to demand cutting the defenses back to the days of Lexington and Concord volunteers and the Navy to rented privateers. I mean back to sensible standards: ala Robert A. Taft.

Overwhelmingly, Democratic liberals…the same ones who engage in hate America “peace movements”…are the ones who with support from the Kept Press, start agitating on grounds of “conscience” for U. S,. global intervention. They’re joined by Republican neo-conservatives—an admixture of all but official duo-citizenship intellectuals…Charlie the Kraut, Bill Kristol…touting a misguided variant of “American Exceptionalism” by which they mean an imperialistic America as the retributive arm of world “justice.”

Exceptional America is --but its founders did not mean us to be the world’s constabulary. There must be change guided by a Republican president—a change to the wise guidance of the West’s greatest legislator since Edmund Burke, a man ignored in recent years by historians, Sen. Bob Taft (R-Ohio). More of this unheralded great man who ought to become an exemplar for future Republican presidents later.

Still any change that must come must be subtle enough not to fracture a major coalition that is important for winning GOP_ elections. It means a gradual change can be accomplished by a president as courageous as a lion and as cannily resourceful as a fox.

Without embracing the near unilateral disarmament advocacy, abject libertarians (who like Paul believe we had 9/11 coming because of our pro-Israel stance—which equates him with the hate-America-spewing Left) also want to repeal the Patriot Act which protects us from domestic terrorists--the next Republican president should return us to the posture of watchful vigilance coupled with minding our own business, using as pretext to any foreign involvement this question: Does what is happening in the Middle East…revolutions, movement imbroglios, usurpations by tyrants… directly—and we meandirectly—threaten the peace and liberty of citizens of the United States?

Which means I I inveigh a pox on both houses: the neo-near dual loyalty people who are set to cry “charge!” on any suspected threat to Israel…and the embittered true isolationists who mistakenly…through anti-Semite hatred…view us being victimized by an inner cabal endebted to Israel. I reject both views equally.

How do we most usually drift to interventionism? It comes primarily from the Left.

Take a typical case. Fictional oil-rich Middle East Arab principality, Lower Slobovistan is a key supplier of our oil. We desperately need the oil since liberals put the kibosh on expanding our domestic drilling. Our economy will suffer with its deprivation. Thus we should avoid sticking our nose into a neighbor’s domestic disputes. But liberal bleeding hearts and editorial boards plead in the misguided cause of “anti-genocide” anguishing for imposition of U.S. sanctions.

Then liberal churches get into it including some of our own wimpy Catholic bishops (the kind who usually go easy on Catholic pro-abortion politicians here). First thing you know the USSB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) delegates some pimply-faced kid, an ex-DNC intern, fresh from Brown University to write a tract urging sanctions and more. Bored bishops, glancing at their wristwatches to see if they can catch the next flight back home, give the resolution an almost unanimous thumbs up. The New York Times, The Washington Post, the AP and those sitting around the rim of the desks writing copy for the TV networks’ Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos are inflamed. Savvy congressional media hounds—aka New York’s bird-dog whose nose twitches for scent of media opportunities, Chuck Schumer—nab the issue to get on the networks…and the rush for another global intervention is on.

Pleading the case of demonstrable history does no good. Since the days of its control by the Ottoman Empire, Lower Slobvastan has been roiling in Arab tyrants committing murder and pillage. It does not warrant our or UN sanctions, nor intervention, nor saturation preemptory round-the-clock bombings by the U. S. air force (by the snap of presidential fingers, not the official consent of Congress) and clump-clump-clump of our military boots on the ground on a messianic mission to install bucolic Jeffersonian democracy on a people who have yet to master the intricacies of installing home flush toilets.

Rejecting the oft-repeated cycle is not a repudiation of American Exceptionalism. It’s not Fortress America (which never existed) and erecting a moat around us; it is not to embrace what globalists have always mislabeled “isolationism.” But itdoes involve a fundamental reexamination of most recent scrapes we have waged including Libya and the often Machiavellian behind-the-scenes maneuvers of some of our most ambitious presidents to become “world leaders.”

A Republican president and two Democrats started imbibing “world leader” brew which led to our impasse: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and later TR’s fifth cousin Franklin. The cycle was broken by a number of restrained presidents including those whom the media defame—Warren Harding…no rube as media has mis-portrayed him…a poker player yes with an eye for the ladies, but in womanizing a gelding next to JFK and Bill Clinton.

He’s been defamed because of Teapot Dome which ranks 114^th down the list of later scandals including the Truman ones… who initiated the first arms limitation discussions…and Calvin Coolidge who led 15 nations to renounce war as an instrument of conflict-settling (didn’t work but a worthy goal).

Among those who practiced masterly restraint in military intervention was Dwight Eisenhower (a 5-star general: in fact no general-presidents Jackson barring a few ambitious stints as pre-presidential general…Grant, Hayes… were adventurers), eventually yielding to sending 700 military advisers to Vietnam—and this due to pressure exerted from his secretary of state, Wall Street lawyer John Foster Dulles.. and Ronald Reagan.

Then all to the good was the perversely brilliant Richard Nixon, a far smarter poker player in world affairs than is recognized through his brilliant smiting in twain of the Sino-Soviet alliance that really did threaten world peace. But to begin--.

The bad-guy presidential globalists start with good old Teddy Roosevelt.

A psychiatrist would have had a field day with TR: Born and grown to spindly adolescence as an asthmatic weakling, he built a chest-beating reputation for masculinity through boxing and cowboy antics out West sponsored by his wealthy family and largely contrived tales of derring do charges “up San Juan Hill” in the Spanish American war. Egotism dominated him so hugely he was called (behind his back) The Great I Am after Yahweh’s self-identification in the Bible.

It was Kettle Hill not San Juan and the exaggerated tales were written up by his sidekick, ex-presidential physician Leonard Wood (a chum of TR when both were Washington functionaries). Wood saw real political gain by hooking up with this pompous young aristocrat who knew nothing of war but wanted bully action in Cuba to burnish his political credentials.

Wood wanted a piece of political action too (and ultimately made a very close bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 1920). During the Spanish-American war, looking forward to someday becoming governor general of a defeated Cuba and governor general of our colony Philippines (which happened thanks to Teddy) Wood did the real heroics and flashed back to the U.S. media via telegraph key by a family-hired flack to dispel more authentic original notions of a spoiled eastern Harvard-trained political rich kid, educated by private tutors and who in adulthood wore gold aristocratic pince-nez.

It was Wood who by his own physical and military bravado which he freely attributed to Roosevelt via a crack p.r. hack aided by an adulatory press hungry for media handouts countered what TR’s otherwise favorable biographer Edmund Morris saw as haughtiness, unmatched egotism and as a native effeminacy. The hyped war stories got TR elected governor of New York and ultimately vice president with William McKinley. McKinley’s assassination in 1900 landed Roosevelt in the White House at the tender age of 42, the youngest man to hold the office.

The Great I Am’s manipulation for the Panama Canal showed his deviousness. Needing a short-cut passage between Atlantic and Pacific, he tried to buy a 48-mile strip of land from Colombia: a good thought. But his when his State Department botched the deal and Colombia wouldn’t ratify the treaty, TR got us to secretly finance a hoked up “revolution” that prompted Panama, then part of Colombia, to revolt on cue. Panama split away and sold the land to us. We benefited and the sleaziness prompted a frat-style drinking spree with Teddy and his buddies in the White House, chortling we stole the land fair and square!

Sadly for him, there was no opportunity to engage in war…although he did get a Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese war--but as soon as World War I erupted he was prodding his successor, Wilson, to get involved personally. In fact the before the draft was initiated he publicly asked President Woodrow Wilson for the right to organize a division—which he later hiked to two—which he would personally lead to France as its commander to fight the Kaiser ( which he intended to load up with U.S. press)—obviously a drum roll intended to return him to the White House for a third term (he was then only 59). Wilson wisely turned the old blusterer down.

But it was Democrat Wilson who immeasurably stretched our global adventurism on a world scale. A Princeton professorial history Ph.D snob who scrubbed his hands with antiseptic after handshaking the vulgar mobs, he couldn’t have been elected in 1912 but for TR’s split of the Republicans due to The Great I Am’s boredom with private life.

Wilson was reelected in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” The story of how we were deluded into war comes from the scholar Thomas Fleming in his definitive book Illusion of Victory: America in World War I [Perseus Books: 2003]. Historian Fleming is no relation incidentally to Dr. Tom Fleming, president of the Rockford Institute.

Obviously WWI which began in 1914 with the assassination of an Austrian arch-duke leading to a spat between Austria-Hungary and Serbia-Russia which pulled in Europe’s colonial powers was no threat to U.S. security at all. Safely reelected, at first Wilson was aloof from war but he was always partial to Britain. Indeed he had often enthused as a Princeton academic how its parliamentary system was superior to ours.

Now Britain was having a tough time financing its wartime role. Then when old J.P. Morgan in January 1915 said he could not spare Britain from eventual bankruptcy due to its war spending, Wilson became despondent—fearing that Britain’s finances would tank and pull us down with it (which Wall Street pooh-poohed). His pro-war propaganda office circulated unverifiable news stories of German brutality. Worse, he began smuggling weapons in passenger ships to Britain.

By hook or crook, mostly the latter, after his reelection he consulted with his cronies about how we could enter it without looking as though we barged in. His zeal was animated when Britain and French foreign offices communicated secretly that the war would eventually be won, that America need not send overseas troops and all that was needed was America’s financial aid to enable the Allies to put the finishing touches on a preordained victory. Meaning become a part victor of World War I on the cheap. Wilson bought in but soon discovered he would have to put skin in the game. A lot of skin—and American lives.

So be it. Finally, the topping on the cake was the prospect of Wilson sitting at the big postwar peace table carving up Europe and the German colonies. He already had a vision of a world organization of nations where he could play a decisive role. But first: how to get into WWI without looking like we barged in?

Then came a straightforward statement from Germany that shipping to Britain must be curtailed else violators…ships suspected of carrying armaments to Britain…would be attacked by German subs. The German statement was officious but earlier they had discovered that U.S. arms were being shipped in the cargoes of merchant ships bound for England.

Key example: The Cunard luxury passenger ship Lusitania transgressed waters ruled off-bounds by German subs and off the Irish coast on May 17, 1915 was sunk by a German sub after having ignored a warning to steam away. Of the 2,000 passengers on board, 1,198 died including 291 women and 94 children—with American dead numbering 128. The marvel was that after being struck by a two torpedoes it exploded and sank in less than 20 minutes…due to the fact that its hold was filled to the gills with armaments bound for Britain.

Immoral incidents like this…including a suspect telegram from the German ambassador to Mexico’s president “promising” to include him in on carving up the U.S. if Mexico joined in and attacked us, inflamed the country.

By duplicity…as TR did re Panama… Wilson got his declaration of war for which he composed the most dishonest pro-war slogan ever concocted: We’re engaging in one of Europe’s endless bloody cauldrons “to make the world safe for democracy.” Even in hell Machiavelli must have shuddered.

It wasn’t to be the first time bipartisan presidential subterfuge with media cooperation were enlisted to get us into global war. Stay tuned.

HACKETT SHINES AS ACE DEFENDER OF THE FAITH ON CHICAGO TONIGHT AND FOX PFLEGER DEBATES.

2011-04-29T07:08:00.001-05:00

Same Old Crooked WTTW 2 Against 1 Game but Hackett Wins. Fox 1 Against 1 Fairer: Hackett Wins There, Too!

          Q. Let’s take WTTW first.   That was the Chicago Tonight panel on the suspension of Fr. Michael Pfleger by the Cardinal…also the hurry-up beatification of JPII. You’re referring to Mrs. Mary Anne Hackett, president and CEO of Catholic Citizens of Illinois.
          A.  Yes. There as per usual we had the usually lopsided structure of two liberal Catholics…knowing and having interviewed both adversaries I would judge Barbara Blaine is more nominal than active… against one.
          Both belong to the Catholic Left. Robert McClory is a teacher, journalist and resigned priest who’s written a laudatory book about Pfleger.   McClory…a former assistant at St. Sabina’s pre-Pfleger who left the priesthood to marry… has in the course of thirty years aligned himself with the most leftward fringes of radical heretical theology: a Hans Kung-style supporter of “participatory democratization” of church structure to the extent that the holder of the papacy is only first among equals and oft-times hardly that. The rock of Peter becomes only one aspect of Church governance, sharing with bishops and…ahem….”theologians” who hold equal sway.
         McClory has long been an opponent of Humanae Vitae, an advocate of relaxed strictures on abortion, a devotee of an ultra loosened concept of mortal sin…under a slanted version of what normally is known as “Fundamental Option”-- where one can only commit it if he pronounces abject alienation from God—else a good Act of Contrition will clear it up…a supporter of women priests, a more “humanitarian” concept of gay rights. In essence his concept is diametrically adverse to the 2,000 plus years of authentic dogmatic theology.
       The second participant for the Left was Barbara Blaine of SNAP (Survival Network of Those Abused by Priests) who should not have participated in the Pfleger discussion since pedophilia and child abuse is not been involved in that melee—just the matter of priestly obedience and insubordination.
      She was obviously there to weigh in on later-discussed issue about JPII’s style of church governance…but she pitched in also on Pfleger where her clerical pedophilia views were not relevant. She was included because executive producer Mary Field feels that on every issue—politics, economics, urban policy, whatever—it is mandatory that there should be a thumb on every scale to tip discussions to the Left…believing that the marketing formulae of the station would be compromised by equal access to ideas.
        However it could be said that the panel moderator, Eddie Arruza that he made a conscientious effort to include Hackett’s views. Just a shame that the station feels so insecure it can’t run a one-on-one show…but that’s good old Mary Field and her so-called employer Danny Schmidt (salary: $450,000 flavored by taxpayer largesse which he is zealously eager to retain) for you.

Q. NEVERTHELESS MARY ANNE HACKETT DID WELL?

a. I call her the best lay expositor of the Catholic faith in any TV panel whom I have ever seen. I don't like to use the commonly applied word "apologist" because it can be so closely tied to the word "apology".

HER PERFORMANCE HERE ONCE AGAIN RATIFIES THE JUDGMENT I MADE WHEN WE FORMED “Catholic citizens of illinois” that we must get somebody to run this who in addition to being a superb manager is an extraordinarily good communicator. AT THAT TIME MARY ANNE WAS RUNNING ILLINOIS RIGHT TO LIFE—AND SOMEBODY MENTIONED TO ME, “you mean somebody like mary anne hackett!”

“NO,” I SAID, “I DON’T MEAN SOMEBODY LIKE MARY ANNE HACKETT—I MEAN mary anne hackett!” FORTUNATELY SHE TOOK ON THE RUNNING OF BOTH ORGANIZATIONS FOR A LONG TIME. UNDER HER LEADERSHIP CCI HAS GROWN IN SIZE AND INFLUENCE. BEFORE WE BEGAN, TV STATIONS AND RADIO 0UTLETS WERE ROUNDING UP ANDY GREELEY AND OTHERS TO EXPRESS A SO-CALLED “catholic position.” now we seem to have at least a beginning chance at defending the church and authentic doctrine

Q. what about the portion on whether jpii should be beatified this quickly?

A. Here mcclory fought the idea, serving up the dense soup of hans kung-flavored theology…OBVIOUSLY CALCULATED TO MIS-LEAD ARRUZA THAT THIS IS PART OF CHURCH DOGMA… charging that jp ii had tried to reverse the flow of church governance to pre-vatican ii. quite unconvincing FOR THOSE OF US WHO HAVE READ KUNG AND KNOW MCCLORY.

on clerical abuse where barbara blaine weighed in, i think there is no doubt that the church hierarchy here and in rome knew of the derelictions and swept them under the rug—i’ll CONCEDE That. MY GOD YEARS AGO WE HAD A BISHOP IN SOUTHERN ILLINOIS WHOSE DERELCTIONS WERE UNCOVERED BY MY PAPER,THE WANDERER, WHO NEVER DID GET CANNED…AND WHO WAS ON THE ALTAR WHEN HIS SUCCESSOR WAS INCARDINATED. AND THEN, OF COURSE, THERE’S WEAKLAND, EX-ARCHBISHOP OF MILWAUKEE WHO MISAPPROPRIATED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS TO PAY OFF HIS MALE LOVER…FOR which I WOULD IMAGINE SHOULD TODAY BE IN JAIL. NO COSMETICS CAN COVER THESE DERELICTIONS.

AND it goes far beyond jpii although i don’t think any objective study would show him SHARING BLAME—not for BLINKING AT the abuses but relying on untried psychology and pschiatric studies that argued deviances could be cured.

all sides…liberals as well as authenticists…have been slow to recognize that allowing the seminaries to be flooded with lavenders created the mess—reflective of the decadent liberalism that invaded the church…which, candidly, mc clory by his advocacy of relaxed codes had not inconsiderable to shape. I think of kicanas the ex-rector of Mundelein who told the media if he had to do it over he'd once again ordain Dan MacCormack...after which he was promoted to Auxiliary Bishop here...Bishop of Tucson...was elected No. 2 at the USCCB with George and very nearly succeeded him as President.

Frankly, i think JP II and his predecessors…and many bishops here including George… were asleep at the switch. But then with respect to the late Pope, beatification and canonization does not imply human impeccability—else we would not have gotten peter who denied Christ three times, would we? My personal preference however would have been to hold off the beatification. i keep asking: what’s the rush? NOBODY SEEMS TO HAVE RESPONDED ADEQUATELY TO THAT QUESTION.

Q. How did the Fox debate go?

A It was curtailed but it was one-on-one and fairer. there mary anne was faced with a theologically illiterate oracular black man who thought the whole Pfleger issue was a muffling by the Cardinal of PFLEGER’S RIGHT TO free speech.

q. Did you have a chance to see other news shows on the Pfleger issue last night?

q. In addition to Fox’s general news coverage at 9 pm. I caught NBC-tv channel 5 at 6 p.m. there was the same old Pfleger biographer mc clory on film…his face clotted with anguish at ‘the great loss of MICHAEL’…with no designation that MC CLORY is a resigned priest. there was utterly no reflection of the other side of the issue THAT FAVORED THE CARDINAL…the liberals of channel 5 made sure of that.

But the worst on channel 5 was Msgr. Ken Velo, Bernardin’s ex-driver and very close friend who was eulogist at his requiem mass…the Validictory you’ll remember that preceded the gay men’s chorus’ serenade of the BERNARDIN before he was dispatched to his final eternal destination.

Why Velo was included on channel 5’s coverage was a mystery since he is a vice president of De Paul and has had nothing to do with the issue administratively. But he spoke fondly of ‘Michael’ and followed the script that his loss would be grievous for the archdiocese. I haven’t been able to fathom Velo’s exact job for De Paul except to guess possibly it’s to bestow a kind of unofficial imprimatur for the lamentable pro-gay-advocacy trend that has been going on there including offering ‘queer studies 101’ to freshmen who at a tender age are most vulnerable in their lives.

CONSPIRACY TO KEEP BIRTH CERTIFICATE ISSUE STIFLED? YEAH—BETWEEN OBAMA AND THE KEPT PRESS…CONGRATULATIONS, EMINENCE—BETTER LATE THAN NEVER!

2011-04-28T07:15:00.001-05:00

     Q. Do we have Donald Trump to thank?
     A.  Yes. It took somebody like him who moved the birth certificate issue from bloggers to the mainstream media due to his visibility. What jarred the whole thing loose was Obama’s falling poll ratings….and specifically the astounding figure showing how many Americans really doubt he was born in this country at all.   But in the end, the thing that kept it going over two years was the White House’s cavalier inoculating the press with the snide comment that such speculation was nutso. That was Axelrod’s fault.   If they had done this when it surfaced, it wouldn’t have caused such a furor.   They could have defused it at once.
  Q. Does this give Trump a boost in Iowa?
     A.  It certainly adds to his being a celebrity. He’ll register up there in Iowa and the national polls but that’ll be of short duration. For now, he has every right to pat himself on the back—but so far as getting him the GOP nomination, no. He has his own gaudy past to account for and the erratic things he’s said.   But for now give the devil his due.
     Q. Big news day—now the Pleger thing where Cardinal George has suspended him and also his faculties.
     A.  The letter George sent Pfleger was excellent—a masterpiece. I say: Better late than never. I fully expect the Crying Towel liberals…including the Sun-Times editorial board, Carol Marin and Laura Washington…both nominal Catholics and whose grasp of theology is wafer-thin…will weep copiously:  This man has done wonderful things for the community!  Nuts. A priest is not supposed to be a community organizer. He was ordained to be an authorized mediator who offers a true sacrifice in acknowledgment of God’s supreme dominion over human beings and in expiation for their sins. His mediation is the opposite of the prophets.
      They communicated from God to the people. The priest mediates from the people to God. He reflects and in a very real sense represents Christ who is God and man, the first priest of the New Law who offered Himself once and for all on the cross—a victim of infinite value who continually renews that sacrifice on the altar through the ministry of the Church. All the faithful share in that priesthood by their baptismal nature…and are enabled to offer themselves in sacrifice with Christ through the Eucharistic ministry…offering the Mass as they internally unite themselves with the outward offering made by the ordained priest alone.
       Any community action the priest does is incidental but the above described is his principal role. It does not mean trotting out like a carnival barker in vestments during a Sunday sermon imitating Hillary Clinton…nor does it involve shouting over a megaphone to a legally constituted business owner acting within the law:  Come out of there or we’ll drag you out like the rat you are!...We’ll snuff you out!
      When I say it’s way overdue, I mean in past years the Archdiocese has allowed itself to be humiliated by this hot dog…made a fool of. The story of Pleger is that of an unruly showboat who went to a decadent “spirit of Vatican II” seminary and so entranced the teaching staff there that he was allowed to slip out, neglect his studies and cruise out to Chicago to do his “community organizing” (read: Left wing shannigans) work and get credit for it. He was ordained but is a veritable illiterate in theology. Thereupon he bamboozled the weak Archdiocese into doing his things at Sabina’s undisturbed.
       He shamelessly politicized his ministerial work and developed a nose for media exposure that fed his massive ego.   His subordination of his Church to his personal media-centric needs is shown by his frequently demonstrated willingness to shuck the Church and concentration of what he really wants to do with the rest of his life…be the Great White Hope of the Black Community…continue to be a power in The Squid by being able to mis-lead simple followers who like a good razzle-dazzle to enliven their Sunday mornings instead of spirituality.
        His departure will not affect the Church.   His congregants are less than 10 percent Catholic anyhow….conceivably troop up to the altar to receive the Sacrament unworthily…and are eager to follow him to either a theatre, an appropriated vacant church or storefront to swing, sway, clap and intersperse shouts of “Amen!” suited for a political rally rather than a divine liturgy which they and he pollute with their sacrilege.
       Expect the Sulking Sultan of Pout…Rev. Jesse Jackson…as much a charlatan as Pfleger…to “invite” this pinwheel of political self-indulgence to PUSH. They belong together.
      Meantime, congratulations Cardinal George.

NEO-CONS GRAVITATE TO MITCH DANIELS BECAUSE HE ESCHEWS SOCIAL ISSUES…SETTING STAGE FOR THIS QUESTION:

2011-04-27T06:57:00.002-05:00

   Does the GOP Go After Obama Without Evangelical Troops—Just the Country Club (Who’ll Likely Forget to Register and Vote, God Help Us)?
        Q. Who are the Neo-Cons Who Tout Daniels? And what issues are they forgetting?
        A.  Paradoxically a majority of philo-Semitic journalists and opinion-meisters most solicitous of political foot-soldiers to beat Obama so as to elect a Republican president who among other issues would be prone to defend the future of Israel…in which I am to be at least passively counted (Israel to my taste anyhow ranking well down the list of things I want a conservative president would support) …are stupidly blind to the source of such indispensable people-power. These are the evangelical Protestants (certainly not secular or semi-observant Jews nor conservative Catholics).
         Evangelicals believe implicitly that the future of their salvation and of the world’s is tied to the continuance of Israel…and when Israel was founded in 1949 and survived attempts of Arab nations to drive it into the sea…a religious determinism was inculcated in the evangelicals to see that the doughty little nation succeed.   Therefore it is not understandable to me such influential commentators such as Charles Krauthammer fails to understand the utter necessity of returning filial love of evangelicals who embrace pro-life, anti-gay rights etc. with at least a modicum of support for those issues.
       But no, Charlie the Kraut whose very determinative presence on TV demonstrates his first love…approaching a dual-fealty (U.S. and Israel) is geared to what he adjudges as our success in the Middle East gives no ground.   In fact he is for Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. Daniels is a remarkably successful governor who brought his state back from the fiscally dead. Moreover he is an expert on the U.S. budget having served as OMB director under Bush II.   In addition he has a sparkling pedigree as a pro-lifer.
         My problem with Krauthammer is this. Are you so wrapped up in your personal secular neuter morality—your obsessive worry that somehow Christians may force their opinions on the country …particularly in gay-rights on non-practicing Jews… that you can’t understand the implications of what Daniels has said? Specifically ignoring the fact that this abstruse little balding auditor lookalike of Syrian extraction…so dull a speaker you will have to watch the wall-paint dry… has given the finger to all discussion of social issues in a presidential campaign were he to be the Republican nominee?
          Do you apprehend, you otherwise brilliant but on this issue ineffably dumb Charlie Kraut, that this will deprive the GOP in 2012 of many thousands of evangelicals who otherwise pound the pavements, go door-to-door, run the phone-banks, stuff the envelopes, speak to Sunday congregations, write pamphlets, compose letters to the editors, call radio talk shows?
       Moreover do you not understand that a unilateral truce on defense of social issues by Daniels will not receive treatment in kind from Obama and the Democrats?    That they will certainly not stop saying that conservatives want to slaughter women, that they want to arrest women who procure abortions. That it will not stop the military gay-rights campaign marching under the banner of Human Rights to invade the precincts? To all of these things your precious Mitch Daniels will be mute?
        Finally do you understand…even remotely in your closed secular-dominated mind…that even if a president who could somehow be elected without reference to the social issues…would still have to deal with matters that involve them on virtually a day-by-day basis?     Example: There comes a vacancy on the Supreme Court which could either topple the one-vote majority—depending on what side of the bed Anthony Kennedy gets up on a crucial morning. A President Daniels—to keep his pledge—dismisses abortion and gay marriage as unworthy of consideration.
       I guess my question to you, Charlie Kraut, is this. Are gay and unrestricted abortion rights so dear to you that the 2012 chance to ditch Obama, set right the economy and continue to preserve Israel worth your fear that abortion will be severed and gay rights negated?
       I mean it. Which comes first for you, Charlie Kraut? Your eagerness to continue indubitably secular along with your pro-Israel buddies…or changing the direction of this country whereby you’d have to accept a bit of social conservatism?   You’re a brilliant guy, Charlie Kraut. I marvel at your foreign policy sophistication, your mastery of the health care issue stemming from your expertise as an MD and psychiatrist.    Why the hell can’t get grasp this and get it through your granite noggin that this election thing is not zero-sum?

         Q. Is it just Charlie Kraut?
        A.  No. But Norm Podhoretz’s got the message. He says just as when Moses came down from the mountain carrying the stone tablets and saw the Israelites dancing around the golden calf, led by his brother Aaron and God whispered in Moses’ earwhat a stiff-necked people most contemporary Jews have surrendered the Torah for the liberal secular state.   But The Weekly Standard people are largely with Charlie Kraut. Even Stephen Hayes who nods obediently to Charlie’s support for dumping Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Then there is the Cheshire Cat boss, Billy Kristol. He has a little more savvy than Charlie Kraut and says maybe a good pro-lifer running for veep with Daniels could balance things. Yeah, right, Billy. So far as I can tell Fred Barnes is okay—but damned quiet.  I can tell you—unless the Standard crowd puts defense of Israel on a par with social values in support of a candidate, which means dumping this Short Stuff Harley-Davidson riding Syrian, they’re going to in effect be the greatest allies Obama will have.
        Q. And is it just the Weekly Standard crowd?
        A.  No. There is the upper reaches of The Wall Street Journal.
       Q. Now that Haley Barbour is out and Ron Paul is in, what do you think of the Republican presidential list?
       A.  I’ve never thought all that much about Haley Barbour. If anyone was a deadringer for the TV cartoon of a fat Mississippi sheriff with a puffy red face, sweat dripping off his nose, leaning at the open car window of a black driver he stopped saying in that orotund grits and chintlings Yazoo voice `Pears to me you’re in a heap-a-trouble, boy I haven’t seen a better gift for Obama to face.   That and an ex-tobacco lobbyist who whenever he goes to D.C. hangs out at the old firm. He’s echoed Daniels on ditching all mention of social issues…which discounts his great reputation as a political strategist in my mind. He’s about to announce he will be chairman of Mitch’s expected presidential run which causes Charlie Kraut’s and Billy Kristol’s hearts to beat rapidly in three-quarter time.
      My prediction is that this crowd with the exception of Pawlenty…who just might catch fire I-hope-a-hope-a-hope…needs reinforcements.   And of course you know my hope—Christie and Ryan.
       Q. Why not Ryan for President?
       A.  A House member…particularly one this young however brilliant...can’t really do well running nationally: too inexperienced. No administrative experience. I can see Pawlenty and Ryan.   But the field has to be broadened.

WE GET QUESTIONS: See? The Vatican Can Too Do Things in a Hurry if It Wants—Beatify the Last Pope Before Sundown. Get the Trumpets on Cue, Guys, We’re Going to Have an Extravaganza!...And Chris Christie: Is He Pure Enough to Win for the GOP?

2011-04-26T08:46:00.002-05:00

********************************************

Q. In the first issue, you’re talking about the forthcoming beatification of John Paul II.

A. Yeah. I take nothing away from him and admire him hugely…met him once very briefly when he came to St. Louis…supported his efforts to return the Church to liturgical authenticism and theological tradition. Moreover his world leadership with Reagan, Thatcher and Walesa against Soviet Communism classify him as one of the great Popes. But why the rush? John Henry Cardinal Newman, a preeminent scholar of the Church, had to wait one hundred years from his death to be beatified.

Everything else in the Vatican…including the urgent need to either fire the editor of the so-called “official Vatican newspaper” L’Osservatore Romano or ditch the paper—which on occasion contradicts Catholic teaching and has the temerity to pick the top 10 rock-and-roll recordings of all time—becoming a vulgar near-scandal—goes at a snail’s pace. Try writing the office of Catholic education there about the flagrant doings of De Paul incardinating a course in homosexual appreciation…Queer Studies: 101…and complainants here are still waiting for an answer five years later while the bishop-boob who ran the show arrogantly avoided an even cursory reply and later got promoted for unique service to the Church. If JP II is a saint, he is so—and is canonized in heaven.

To my mind there are a few questions unanswered that have never been categorized by this fast-moving Vatican. One has to do with grievous administrative laxity on reaction to evident cases of child abuse and pedophilia. We’re told it’s because JPII’s experience in Communist Poland involved from attempts by Soviets to apply calumny against good Polish priests in order to make them less effective in Poland. Okay, maybe so but the West isn’t and never was Poland or the USSR. The same excuse doesn’t…and shouldn’t…be applied.

The second is the lamentable sloppiness involved in one of the most vital jobs a Pontiff has: the naming of bishops to carry on the evangelization. There is no doubt whatsoever that this tenure was a low-point in the appointing of bishops who let the Church down. I was told by a once very-high up functionary that dossiers of applicants for the bishopric were prepared with great care only to have JPII repeatedly and carelessly pick the first sheet off the stack. Right or wrong? You won’t get the truth from good old George Weigel who wrote the authorized biography…checked with the Curia.

Third, while the aptly named Rembert Weakland OSB who took $240,000 of Milwaukee archdiocesan money to pay off a male lover to be silent, was consecrated by Paul VI why was no penalty leveled under JPII when his homosexuality and deviant theology became rampant? (In fact why was this viper who should have been stripped of his rank and sent to jail allowed to publish a book capitalizing on his homosexuality and glorifying himself in a statuesque portrayal where he basks with Mary and the
Child Jesus at his lavishly resigned cathedral…where he had also constructed a baroque throne for himself front and center while you have to search fruitlessly for the tabernacle…why was this self-same ogre allowed any role at all in the investiture of his successor? This is not to lay it all at JPII’s feet but years of inattention to the frolicking Weakland came on his watch.

Fourth, why were the seminaries here and overseas allowed to go to seed both in the laxity of their admissions and their teachings? The fact ignored by Ms. Maureen Dowd, Carol Marin and others is a simple truth not remotely covered by the supine press which dispenses deliberate misinterpretations of which they by their abject co-conspiratorial cooperation are guilty. The fact that thousands of young people were victimized by homosexuals…lavenders attracted to pre-pubescent males…who had been allowed into the priesthood by willing gay moles supposedly guarding the entry doors of the seminaries, being tribute to the lax propaganda done up by Dowd, Marin and others who justify homosexuality as a justifiable alternative lifestyle—following the liberal political lexicon the two subscribe to.

Whether politically correct appeasers like Dowd and Marin like to admit it or not—and they don’t since they are Leftist ideologues--the fact is that while not all…not even a majority…of homosexuals are child abusers, a preponderant majority of child abusers are homosexuals. USA Today has written an unchallenged piece revealing that of 1,200 pre-pubescent boy-men who have been abused by priests, 91% of the victims were male. Don’t get me going further on this.

Q. Ah but you have. Now we have another issue—of a far different type.

A. Shoot. I think I know what it is.

Q. A fair number of people question your support of a dream ticket of Gov. Chris Christie for president and Rep. Paul Ryan for vice president on the basis that Christie in the past supported a variant of gun control, Cap and Trade and appointed a Muslim lawyer to a state judgeship.

A. I haven’t seen the statements nor reviewed the qualifications of the Judge but let me point out a quirk in some conservatives…more than I would like to admit. Here we are facing $13 trillion in debt, have a radical leftist in the White House embarking on what could well torpedo the economy and wreck us as a nation…and we have the opportunity however remote (since Christie in particular has eschewed any thought of the presidency for 2012) that we can defeat the aposthesis of all evil…immoral (one who is so abortion he snuffed the life out of Born Alive bill allowing babies born of botched abortions to suffer unto their deaths without nourishment or comfort)…because at one point or other Christie had espoused a wrong statement on gun control and Cap and Trade. Now let me put the following in bold face.

Good God, people, have you lost your mind? Don’t you have the faintest inkling that not all political stands are absolutes—that one can change and is not forever to be disqualified because of issues that can be easily amended? Are you that obtuse that you feel if a guy has freckles he is forever sent to Hell with angels armed with fiery swords guarding our gates so they cannot return—as shown in the familiar Michelangelo painting of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.

Have you so closed your minds to the possibility of human redress that you have forgotten that Reagan as governor signed the most liberal abortion law in the nation—more liberal than the one Nelson Rockefeller signed in New York…and that Reagan abjured his action (to me and others)….was taken back by social conservatives and became one of the great exemplars of social tradition?

When…oh when… are you guys going to renounce that lamentable kid stuff where what you may do in one circumstance on an economic issue is equated on the same level as the salvation of the economic foundation of the country and the turning back of the abortion culture.

It’s time for you to grow up, smell the coffee…and for God’s sake try to adopt a political maturity….at least pretend you have it…for a time as climactic as ours.

BILL DALEY’S ADVICE TO OBAMA: GET REELECTED LIKE TRUMAN DID—AVOID THE ISSUES, JUST FOCUS ON GOP “EXTREMISM.”

2011-04-25T08:00:00.002-05:00

Can It Work? Not if Paul Ryan Gets on the Ticket for the Defense.

Some day after we’re all dead, revisionist historians will calculate that this 44^th president, Barack Obama, in addition to being the worst president from the standpoint of patriotism pro-U.S. motivation, was the most inept.

They will likely cite as Evidentiary One, his utter failure to craft a budget. The American people would have been informed about this incompetence long before this but the national media, accustomed to its role of running interference for him on his murky background, scant evidence of scholarship, mysteriously unavailable college records and dearth of classmates who knew him in Indonesia schools as well as Occidental, have covered up his ineptitude once again.

As this is one of the few places you’ll get the news straight about this so-called genius’ deficiencies, consider his two—yes, two—budget addresses.

Obama’s Two Phony Budgets.

The first one was delivered as the Constitution provides, last February. He forecast that it would reduce the $14 trillion deficit by a trillion. But the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office which examines such things as economic assumptions and baselines, said: Uh-uh, sorry Mr. President. It won’t reduce the deficit by a trillion over 10 years but using your assumptions we can tell you it will hike the deficit by $2.1 trillion.

Then Wisconsin’s Republican congressman Paul Ryan, a numbers whiz whom Obama earlier had praised, produced a counter-budget and submitted his numbers, economic assumptions and baselines to the CBO for scoring i.e. getting approval for using the right forecast. Ryan’s is a very tough budget but since worry about the deficits are high on the public mind right now, his roadmap convinces many that it’s the kind of tough, bitter medicine the nation gets to get back on a solid track.

The CBO gave Ryan’s masterwork a full frisk and said its assumptions are right on the mark: If followed as Ryan wrote it, his budget will reduce the deficit by $4.4 trillion over ten years. Ryan had set into place a master framework so we will be moving ahead to eradicating the entire deficit of $14.5 trillion within the following five years. Ergo: This 41-year-old kid working with a constricted House staff and directing the study himself showed up the entire Obama administration, its treasury secretary Tim Geithner (who was found to be in arrears on his own income taxes), budget director, Commerce Department and auxiliaries, getting a perfect score from the CBO which the Obama people couldn’t get.

Now as we all know, Barack Obama wants to get reelected in 2012 which is why he hired William Daley of Chicago as his chief-of-staff. Daley believes that the only way Obama will win is by demagoguery the way FDR did in 1936 by condemning the “economic royalists” and the strategy Harry Truman used in 1948 to condemn the rich no-good members of Big Business “special interests.” The fact that Bill Daley made $32 million in wages last year serving those special interests is apart from the case.

Well, Paul Ryan has been getting so much attention with his counterbudget, that Bill Daley, the Chicago boss’ son, decided that Obama should make another pass at a budget---but this time use it as a campaign document to fire up the listless troops in Obama’s base: the liberal papers like The New York Times from which every “mainstream” news oracle takes the lead—from Brian Williams of NBC to Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos of ABC, to wide-eyed Katie Couric and Bob Schieffer of CBS (Schieffer known particularly as an eager recipient of every liberal line).

So Daley and his crew drafted out a story line for the new budget. It came close to what Teddy Kennedy on June 21, 1987 said would happen if Bob Bork got confirmed for the Supreme Court. “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchlldren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.”

Similarly before a single budgetary statistic was collected, Bill Daley had his speech writers say that in his counter-budget, Paul Ryan would give us “a fundamentally different America…than what we have known throughout our history.” America would be a fundamentally different country than we have known. Autistic and disabled children would be turned out into the street and left to tend to themselves. Moreover just to drive a car in America would be precarious since collapsed bridges would go unrepaired: the country would be on the brink of stagnation.

When he re-read the rhetoric, Bill Daley figuratively rubbed his hands in satisfaction. Now to pump in figures that would cut the deficit and keep the massive superstructure of New Deal-originated social benefits augmented by LBJ’s Great Society plus the $1 trillion worth of ObamaCare.

When the figures were pumped in, crafty Bill Daley ordered that the economic assumptions should be based on 12 years—not 10 as all other presidents and Paul Ryan did—this to confound the CBO from making a line-by-line comparison. With the most shoddy work of guest-timating, Daley concluded that Obama’s new budget would cut the debt by $4 trillion (the same as Ryan had calculated only taking two years longer to accomplish). The figure could be accomplished by hiking taxes on the rich, which thrill the hearts of the Left which were becoming disenchanted with Obama. Then like dispatching a schoolboy, he sent Obama off to make the speech last week at D.C.’s George Washington University.

Now it just so happened that the statistical wizard of the Congress, Paul Ryan, wanted to catch Obama’s speech. When he showed up at the college auditorium, Ryan was ushered by White House minions down to the front row where he would sit right under Obama’s nose. Obama had two teleprompters rolling so that he could turn his head right and left and appear like he was talking conversationally. He spoke for 43 minutes, blasting Ryan as unfeeling, almost un-American.

He kept his eyes from making contact with Ryan. And when the speech was over, two things were clear. One, Obama wasn’t going to negotiate anything but two would use the speech not as an economic document but as a campaign broadside to get reelected.

The liberal media was titillated. Sweet little Katie Couric was overjoyed and The New York Times gushed that it was so-o-o-o good to have the old lefty Obama back in the ring again. So far so good for Obama and his guru Bill Daley.

Except then something bad happened. Standard & Poor, the nation’s leading credit rating agency, read the Obama speech and became so pessimistic about the evident failure to get consensus on the deficit that it warned there is a 1-in-3 chance that this country will lose its impeccable AAA credit rating on debt in the next two years.

And then something worse. Sitting in the front row, Paul Ryan wondered where Obama got his figures, his economic assumptions which enabled him to claim he would cut the deficit, slap higher taxes on the rich, and return the country to economic solvency—because the assumptions sure didn’t square with what Ryan had found. So the next day he called the White House to get the verification.

Guess what? The White House had no official verification—just a reiteration of the unsupported numbers on the bottom of its press release. Next Ryan called the Congressional Budget Office to see if this nonpartisan entity could defend the numbers Obama and Bill Daley conjured up. No, said the CBO: Obama used twelve years—a highly unusual projection instead of the 10 years everybody else including Ryan had used. Aha. No mystery why Bill Daley used twelve years—to cover his tracks and to keep the CBO from contradicting Obama as it had in the first go-round.

But Bill Daley’s twelve-year instead of 10 year ploy wasn’t working. Standard & Poor smelled something fishy and instead of putting the issue to be, the rating agency by capturing SuperBowl style publicity guaranteed that the signal issue of 2012 will be Obama and Daley’s hoaky budget of floating numbers vesus Paul Ryan’s legit budget projection.

The House GOP’s Phony CR.

But lest you believe the Dems have a monopoly on phony-ness, consider the Speaker Boehner Continuing Resolution aka CR that averted closing down the government. Remember the Tea Party’ers and a large number of freshmen conservative congressmen wanted Boehner to cut $100 billion off the 2011 spending list. He said he wouldn’t do it. All right, they said—how about $67 billion. He tried and couldn’t get agreement from the Dems.

But he announced he could cut $38 billion. Rush Limbaugh wasn’t buying that—saying the amount was too miniscule. But $38 billion…if they were real cuts… was something at least so most of the House GOP majority was willing to go along—until they looked at the numbers and found that the sacrosanct Mr. Boehner had in his own inimitable way played games with the numbers to arrive at $38 billion.

It turned out there were all kinds of fudging…$2 billion from unused highway construction funds that couldn’t be spent because some states couldn’t scratch up matching funds…a “savings” of $4.9 billion from a one-time unspent fund on housing that was due to expire anyhow…a $3.2 billion “cut” from the Children’s Health Insurance program unspent because some states weren’t able to qualify. A few billion of unspent funds left over from the 2010 census. In other words it’s like me telling my wife I just saved us $279,000 by my decision not to buy a new Lamborghini.

The hard outlay of savings…again totaled by the Congressional Budget Office…said what was really saved was a meager $352 million. Well the Tea Party and the new members threw a fit that hit the fan. Fifty nine mostly conservative GOP members decided to vote
no. Boehner had to appeal to Dem Whip Steny Hoyer to give him enough Dem votes to make up the difference. So 81 Dems joined 179 Republicans to save Boehner’s lying hide. But Hoyer’s nominal boss Nancy Pelosi said she still thought the cuts were too drastic and disavowed the CR and Hoyer.

That’s the tale of two factions—one led by a duplicitous Bill Daley pulling the strings for Barack Obama but getting sandbagged by Standard & Poor and the other by a fibbing John Boehner who got singed by the Tea Party and his own members. Couldn’t happen to more deserving two guys.

The conclusion this octogenarian makes is this: I’m old enough to remember the 1948 Truman-Dewey campaign where Truman was supposedly on the ropes until Dewey blew it. Dewey blew it because he was unwilling to defend the record of the Republican 80^th Congress….unwilling because he was a rival of Sen. Bob Taft who crafted a monumentally good record which Dewey neglected to defend.

Hear me out now: The defining record of this Congress is the Paul Ryan-designed counter-budget to Obama’s which saves Medicare and removes ObamaCare. For Republicans not to have Ryan on the ticket…my druthers would be as vice-president with Chris Christie as president…would be folly. Do you think Romney would defend the counter-budget—he as the godfather of Massachusetts’ RomneyCare? Or Mike Huckabee? ANSWER: In anybody’s hands but Ryan’s the Ryan budget would go largely undefended…and Obama under Bill Daley’s expert guidance would win the game.

Ryan at 41 and a House member is indispensable for the ticket. If he were to be paired with Christie, a tough former United States Attorney and a brilliant governor, I think the duo would be unbeatable.

Let me know what you think.

IF CHICAGO TONIGHT WERE STRAIGHT NOT LEFT-WING HERE’S THE FARE IT WOULD OFFER.

2011-04-22T08:08:00.002-05:00

         Q. What do you mean?
        A.  The format is so incurably left-wing it wreaks of political correctness and apologias. It is a case of the Left having taken over complete control of the program agenda…due to the feminist alliance of Mary Field, Carol Marin and Elizabeth Brackett…the trio telling hopelessly pliable anchor Phil Ponce what he will do.
        Q. As for instance?
       A.  Whenever the issue turns to same-sex marriage there is only one side presented—pro. They wind up Ponce like a robot…you can almost see the key sticking out of his back… and out he goes with that pasted on smile to mouth banalities while the hard aggressive salesmanship goes on.   Remember State Rep. Deb Mell who “married” her lover?   You’d think Marin was witnessing a theophany.
       Q.   So you’d convert the fare to the right.
      A.  Absolutely not. I’d have a debate—anything would be more robust than that old mushy liberal we-all-agree nya-nya-nya.
      Q. Such as…?
     A.  Two experts on the federal budget debating the Obama second-cut version as delivered at George Washington University the other night and an advocate of the Congressman Paul Ryan counter-budget. Mary Field knows from her rolodex who to get on the Left. The Heartland Institute should have a good representative on the Right. To keep it straight, they should get someone other than (a) Marin, (b) Brackett or (c) Ponce to moderate: they’re so hopelessly indoctrinated by the Left they don’t understand what it is to be fair.
       Q.   Who would it be?
      A.   Any ordinary station announcer who has the intellectual mien of the holder of a high school diploma.
      Q. What other issues would you like to see?
      A.  This should have been aired long ago. Pro and Con: Is the removal of Muammar Qaddafi in our long term interest? Also long ago: The growth of public employee unions and how legitimate or illegitimate they are—with emphasis on the Wisconsin imbroglio.
       Q. More!
      A.   Sen. Durbin announced recently that he would hold hearings on anti-Muslim bigotry. Two sides equally represented. Should the debt limit debate feature a deal to force consideration of a balanced budget amendment or a constitutional limit on federal spending with a supermajority required to raise taxes?   Pro-and-con.
      Q. Is something like this likely to happen?
     A. Decidedly not. But this is the stuff that could resurrect `TTW from its old Left-wing blues.

ONCE THOUGHT A FLAMBOYANT GOP CANDIDATE BUT UNELECTABLE, TRUMP NOW POSTURES HIMSELF AS THE NEXT PEROT.

2011-04-19T08:11:00.002-05:00

Which Means Obama’s Only Hope is Pinned to The Donald. But Even That Won’t Work.

Q. He says things bluntly which no one else says…such as steal Libya’s oil and enrich our coffers. Is that Trump’s appeal?

A. No—his appeal is that he has tremendous name ID from his network show “The Apprentice” which up to now anyhow swamps the polls.

Q. He’s the only potential candidate who refers to Obama’s missing hard-copy birth certificate from which there has never been an official response aside from saying it is meaningless.

A. A one trick pony—and even that trick is wearing out. You watch—his past and earlier remarks will catch up with him. He’s called for Universal Health Care, for example. He advocates America as becoming a true international outlaw nation—confiscating oil….theft in other words…from Middle Eastern countries where we have put down despots. You once thought Sarah Palin was a super-force to be reckoned with? Her avaricious quest for celebrity and her cynically packaging Bristol as a marketing commodity did her in. Trump’s will too. But give her credit, Palin has a somewhat unified philosophy of governance—contained in hard-to-listen-to high decibel screeches on the campaign trail.

Trump has no such discipline. He engages in bloviating examples of bravado….declaring for example that his net worth is bigger than Mitt Romney’s…mine is bigger than yours! The only salutary thing Trump could have contributed to 2012 would be to say in blunt terms what other more malleable candidates would or could not and retire to the wings after the nominating convention. He intends to run as an independent. He’ll be far less compelling than Perot. And he’s on the way to becoming the Class Clown. Wait til people find out George Soros bailed him out of a jam in 2008.

Q. You referred to Palin’s screeching on the campaign stump.

A. Did you catch that clip of her last night from Iowa? Bachmann’s is almost as bad. The female speaking voice is listenable only when it is well-modulated, in a conversational tone. As good as Laura Ingraham is substituting for O’Reilly she is cursed with a grating conversational voice. The models for voices and female TV presentation are all on Fox-- Martha McCallum, Shannon Bream…and the best of all, Harris Faulkner, a three-time Emmy winner, the winningest presenter of all who was the first African American winner of the Miss Minnesota title a few years ago.

As a matter of fact, since Reagan, all speeches by men and women come across as more effective when delivered calmly. Last night on Channel 11 there was a clip of Franklin Roosevelt speaking at the dedication of the Outer Drive Bridge in 1938—the famous “Quarantine the Aggressors” speech. He shouted it…his head tossed back in patrician style… which was startling given the changes that have occurred in elocution. Watching it from today’s vantage point, it was bluster and highly ineffective—not what it registered then.

        In essence Roosevelt was doing a William Jennings Bryan. The historic style for politicians which lasted from the mid-19^th century to Roosevelt, was that of Bryan circa 1893 when he electrified my Irish marble-layer artisan grandfather with the “Cross of Gold” speech at the old Chicago Coliseum.   Intriguingly enough the last pol who tried it didn’t do too badly—JFK at his inaugural where he shouted “let us serve this notice to nations whether they wish us good or ill, that we will pay any price, bear any burden…” etc.
       Highly adaptable, Franklin Roosevelt was never excelled when he delivered his Fireside Chats where he spoke as a comforting father to children over the microphone from the Blue Room. It was that style which Reagan, an old FDR Democrat, took and adopted as his—whether he was speaking in a convention hall or elsewhere. Even when on the speaker’s stage he was angry, he raised his voice only slightly as “Mr.Green, I paid for this microphone!”
           Q. Back to The Donald. Is he poised to take over the Tea Party?
          A. Not on your life.   He has no ruling philosophy whereas the Tea Party has. Trump makes it up as he goes along.   That’s not Tea Party.

YOU’RE NEVER TOO OLD TO GET TAKEN. EVEN AT 82.

2011-04-15T07:51:00.002-05:00

    Q. By which you mean?
    A.  I always thought that at 82 I couldn’t be fooled. Hah! The Boehner CR which the Speaker and his staff hailed as a great victory…supposedly cutting $38 billion from the rest of fiscal year 2011 budget was filled with fiscal gimmickery—as if I told my wife I “saved” $100,000 by not buying a new Mercedes. They “cut” $2.5 billion from highway funds that can’t be spent anyhow because of restrictions by other legislation prevent them from being spent.”   More: “cuts” from unspent monies left over from the 2010 census.   A total of $3.9 billion from the Children’s Health Insurance program that for technical reasons (the inability of most states to qualify) wouldn’t be spent anyhow.
         The spending bill produces less than 1% of the $38 billion promised by Boehner this year. Part of the misconception is something I should have known, having worked in the House as a staffer but which I forgot: It’s the House’s arcane and confusing way of mixing authorizations and appropriations. The lack of immediate budget-cutting punch is derived because the budget year is more than half over and cuts in new spending authority are slow to be reflected in deficit figures which may take a year or more to show up. Also $8 billion of cuts in domestic programs are zeroed out by automatic increases in defense spending. But Boehner knew this certainly and is guilty of rank misrepresentation.
     Q. If you were in the House and had known the full truth what would you have done?
    A.  Opposed the CR and supported closing down the joint. Breaking off negotiations and really going for the shutdown. I don’t believe for a minute that a shutdown would hurt the Republicans singly—since even with Newt Gingrich’s great strategic lapses it didn’t interfere with Republicans retaining control of the Congress.
      Q. Does this mean you owe Rush Limbaugh an apology?
      A.  Apologize my--!
     Q. Don’t say it!
    A. He’s of great value to the conservative movement because of his huge listenership. Like the proverbial stopped clock which is right twice a day. You say “no” enough when others say “yes” you’re bound to be right sometime.  Apologize to somebody whose sole political experience is just running his mouth and puffing a cigar sitting behind an artificially painted “golden” microphone who viscerally reacts to pump up the audience and who has never, ever been involved in negotiations himself? You know he’d argue pulling the plug if the cuts were real and hit $90 billion—just ten short of the Tea Party goal. He’d do this for audience appeal because he’s a marketing genius. The people I apologize to are the Tea Party’ers. I should have listened to their objections at the outset.
     Q. What’s Boehner’s future?
    A.   I for one will never trust him again.   He’s followed the age-old political rubric of overstating his case. The Tea Party’ers should burn his hide.   One more and he will lose control of his caucus.   As it is 59 Republicans voted against it—and I’d have been one of them.   The thing I don’t like is that Boehner had to go supplicating Steny Hoyer, the Democrats’ minority whip to carry the day 260 to 167…and God knows how much he’s indebted to them. I really think this is a case of fraudulent misrepresentation. It’s as serious as old Charlie Halleck’s drinking for which they dumped him for Jerry Ford.   The House Republican caucus ought to convene and give Boehner a reprimand. They really ought to scout around for a possible successor.

WHITE HOUSE FAUX PUBLICIST LYNN SWEET PLUS TRIB’S JIMMY THE LIMP-WIMP “ANALYZE” OBAMA’S SPEECH ON “CHICAGO TONIGHT” AS MARIN DIRECTS THE CHORUS.

2011-04-14T06:51:00.002-05:00

        That’s Chicago Journalism Folks. All the Honesty of Pravda.
       It is so much fun to see how Chicago Tonight “analyzed” the Obama deficit speech last night with Carol Marin as moderator plus Lynn Sweet of the Sun-Times and Jim Warren, formerly of the Tribune and now of the Chicago News Cooperative, funded partly by WTTW which runs pallid pastel features in The New York Times.   Of course given that WTTW is up to its neck in the bag to Obama and the Democrats…the Sun-Times a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Squid and the reputation of The New York Times it was no analysis at all but three committed lefties masquerading in journalistic garb gabbing about the exciting days to come in the 2012 campaign.
      Rather than do it as the late John Callaway would have—journalistically--with two experts debate the pros and cons of contrasting the Obama second-take version and the Paul Ryan initiative …WTTW’s ultra-liberal co-conspirators Mary Field and Carol Marin decided to feature only one side—Obama’s—with ecstatic, glistening-eyed liberal Sweet gussied up in finery to breathlessly cover the big social gala known as the Obama fund-raiser toeing the party line that Obama wasn’t going to raise a billion dollars, and the Cooperative’s limp-wimp Jimmy Warren telling us what his buddy David Axelrod had already told everybody who attended the City Club luncheon the other day.

All this while `TTW president Dan Schmidt was worrying he might lose his $450,000 job fortified with taxpayer money—which he has been busily lobbying for using `TTW resources funded partially by taxpayer money.

Not a word was said on the panel as to the probable cause why Vice President Joe Biden, sitting in the audience, was shown on TV sound asleep. Can’t blame him. He’d seen the movie before.

It was in fact the second go-round on the budget for his boss who flubbed his first with a gauzy pastiche of non-specifics. It was so in-substantive in content after Ryan’s presentation that the Commander-in-Chief had to hurry back to the rostrum. It didn’t occur to Marin to toss tough questions at Sweet on why Obama didn’t get to his own supposed alternative until the second half of the speech, after he covered his soak the rich demagoguery.

Nothing prompted Marin to ask the two to contrast the two proposals—Obama’s which involves tax-hikes and Ryan’s which doesn’t. Not a word was said about Obama’s tossing out numbers with no credibility behind them, that the issue was not what Obama alleged (for the 2012 campaign)—extension of the Bush tax cuts—and that Obama’s speech was 98% an attack on Ryan’s proposal.

Excitedly propagandizing for Obama as Sweet is used to doing in her paper, she was asked this super-tough hardball question by Marin: Does it matter whether or not the Obama campaign is run from Washington or not?

It gave Sweet the chance to gush the notion that Obama wants to sever from the Beltway and add an answer suited to the inside-Dem campaign logistician she is…pointing out it’s better to dispatch party luminaries to Iowa from here than from Washington.

Oh yes, indeedy, said the deferential Warren. In fact Axelrod told us [at the City Club] that he regards working in Washington as something like being encased in a submarine!

The dazzled Marin…ingrained with three decades of liberal talk with no conservative alternatives… took careful note of this response—all the while the differences between the two fiscal plans remained untouched.

Then the heavily rouged Sweet…having dolled herself up for the fund-raising gala…told us all how there can be absolutely no difference of opinion between Axelrod and his successor, David Plouffe. After all, they have worked together for years as partners in David’s firm. At the fund-raiser, she confided, Plouffe will introduce Mayor-Elect Emanuel and Emanuel will introduce the president.

God—that’s exciting as hell to know!

Jimmy the Limp Wimp made occasional mention of a tough time Obama may have in states which he carried in 2008…the only time he discussed the campaign in realistic terms… about which Sweet had nothing to say…and which Marin didn’t care enough to follow up.

Then it ended mercifully and the camera returned to the real heavyweight of the show, Phil Ponce.

OH, SO THE GREAT GOD RUSH ISN’T SATISIFED?

2011-04-13T07:49:00.000-05:00

        Q. No, Limbaugh is displeased; thinks Boehner blew it.
       A.  Rush is a great asset to conservatives but when he gets on a all-or-nothing crusade like this someone ought to remind him he has the nature of a big fat blowhard who’s only experience with negotiating has been to take calls from his agent to hear what multi-million-dollar fresh contract has been arranged. Honestly, this guy who is set up as the oracle for all conservative thought has never…ever…had to sit across a conference table with anybody.
         Q. You have?
         A.  You betcha…in two states and D.C.: In Minnesota as a prime negotiator for a Republican governor facing a two-House Democratic legislature. In Illinois as a negotiator with Jesse Jackson staving off a boycott against Quaker Oats…in D.C. as an assistant Commerce secretary dealing for my program with a two-House Democratic majority in 1969…as number three in the Peace Corps—running it when the director and deputy were out of the country—and negotiating its appropriations with a two-House Democratic majority in 1970-71.   I think Limbaugh’s valuable but seeing him sitting there pontificating like a fat Buddha in his studio, engulfed in cigar smoke rattling his cheeks about things he never had experience with is sickening.
         Q. What about the august Judge Andrew Napolitano on Fox?
        A.  The “for Freedom!” guy?   One of those crazed libertarians ala Ron Paul who wants to suborn the CIA and defeat the Patriot Act all the while terrorists are conspiring—defended by our freedoms—to do away with all of us?     Napolitano is another egomaniac who hopes to benefit from Glenn Beck’s departure.
         Q. What about Beck?
        A.   You know—for the first several years he’s been on I rather liked him because in this historically illiterate age he taught history the way I learned it….the devastation liberals have made of this country.   I must say I haven’t caught him recently when he started losing his audience—although his ratings are still something Chris Matthews would covet. Did George Soros, a Jew, make a deal as a kid with those who perpetrated the Holocaust in Hungary to save his hide?   Search me. But I know Soros is a bad customer.
        Q.   Changing the subject…
        A.  Yes.
        Q. It wounds Fr. Pfleger to say this but if the Archdiocese kicks him out of St.Sabina’s he’ll leave the Church.

A. Those cookie pushers are living miracles…born without brains, backbone or guts. All they can do is parse-parse-parse because they’ve been told they’re the smartest guys in the room. God save the church from these accommodationists. as bob novak said “The church is really divine since it has endured for 2000 years with a coterie of jerk bishops like today’s running it.”

HELD FOR QUESTIONING: Obama’s Reactive Approach Makes Paul Ryan Intellectual Leader in the Congress in Budget Debate.

2011-04-12T07:22:00.002-05:00

         Dramatic Shift in Budget Debate from White House to U.S.House.
      Q. Has the budget process has changed dramatically since you first went to work as a staffer in the U. S. House in 1958?
     A.  Absolutely. When I went there then, at the tag-end of the Eisenhower administration, the course of action had been always in the president’s hands—and had been so since the days of Franklin Roosevelt: Meaning that the ball started rolling with the president: in his State of the Union where he outlined his vision and the budget address where he unfolded his schema on how to pay for it…tax revisions—either escalated up or laden with certain incentives.
       The debate would start there—with the president going first; often the presidential budget was just the starting point for debate: but let’s be clear—it was the starting point.  That system was in place ever since the nation’s first budget chief, Charles Gates Dawes of Evanston (later to become vice president under Coolidge) initiated it under Warren Harding. And it has continued through the administrations of Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, GW Bush…until now.   The Congress waited eagerly to get their hands on it—to either tear it apart or add to it….but whatever: the presidential budget was always the starting point. Until now.
   Q.   What’s the change that occurred?
   A.   First,  the last State of the Union speech, the last one delivered by Obama was a laugh: a pastiche of hoary old slogans including the title Winning the Future which was a steal of Newt Gingrich’s early books.   Second, the outrageously expensive and regimented ObamaCare bill which Nancy Pelosi described as something once we all—including she—understand, we will like…and the awful force-feeding of the medicine with Rahm auctioning off goodies to Louisiana (the Purchase) and Nebraska (the Cornhusker rape) to get it passed without a concern for the ever-growing deficit or looming national debt ended the historic pretext of the presidential budget and programs being introduced first and Congress then taking a whack at them. It led to the election of a Republican House, the chamber where appropriations begin and a strong reinforcement of Republicans in the Senate.
       Third, the 2010 Republican congressional victory led to the ascension of the first intellectual leader the GOP has had on substantial issues since Robert Taft [1889-1953]—41-year-old Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of House Budget.
      Q. How did Taft dominate Democratic and Republican congresses?
      A.   By un-showy intellectual prowess. Everyone came to defer to him since he knew the most. He had a mind that scooped up facts like a vacuum cleaner.
      I came to Washington five years after his untimely death in 1953 but his intellectual influence was still strong. Wherever he served in the Senate....member of Finance….chairman of the Labor committee…co-chairman of the Joint Economic committee….Senate majority leader…his reasonable yet firm intellectual dominance was impeccable: his view of fiscal solvency as Finance and the Joint Economic committee which enabled him to put together a successful coalition with Virginia Sen. Harry Byrd…his crafting of the first revisionist labor reform legislation since passage of the early New Deal Wagner Act—Taft Hartley…his farsighted support of realistic anti-Communist yet not interventionist foreign-defense policy. Sen. Paul Douglas (D-IL) who didn’t agree with him on most issues except thrift (having said “being a liberal doesn’t mean one is a wastrel”) nevertheless grudgingly averred that he was “the uncrowned intellectual leader of the Senate.”
       Q. And you say the budgetary procedure has moved with the initiative going to Ryan rather than the president?
        A. Yes. The first initiative to supposedly “control” spending and the deficits coming from Obama was so weak…remember the long since abandoned “spending freeze” no one ever believed?...that since nature abhors a vacuum, the momentum moved to Ryan. Last week he fearlessly outlined a counter-budget which was so courageous that Obama was forced to do what no other president has done—announce via his top political adviser not his budget guy or economic guru, the successor to David Axelrod, David Plouffe, his 2008 campaign manager, that he would make a second try at a budget/economic speech: tacit recognition that he was outpointed by this young congressman.
       Q. But Paul Ryan’s blueprint has been described as draconian.
       A.   It has but since the American people have come to recognize that our deficit and debt position is so draconian, realism….grasping the third rail that other politicians fear to touch..is needed.
      Q.   What are the essentials of the Ryan blueprint?
       A.  It starts with bold thrusts. It reduces spending by $6.2 trillion over the next decade and cuts the deficit by $4.4 trillion. A big part rests with the assumption that ObamaCare will be repealed which means that over the next decade this will cut $1.4 trillion in savings alone. It cuts the top income tax rate from 35% to 25%. He will cut $389 billion from Medicare over the next decade; at the same time he puts $735 billion less toward Medicaid.   Discretionary spending on domestic programs is reduced by $923 billion. He makes two exceptions—national defense spending and Social Security which would be unchanged from the Obama budget.
   His plan shows that $1.1 trillion less than the next five years under the Obama budget and would add $3 trillion less to the debt than the Obama budget over the next decade. It would bring down the debt to $13.9 trillion by 2016 instead of $15 trillion under Obama and $13 trillion by 2016 compared to Obama’s $16 trillion and $19 trillion by 2021 under the president’s plan. Ryan would have $40 trillion in spending over the next 10 years compared to $34.9 trillion in revenues. Obama would spend $46 trillion in the coming decade while bringing in $38.8 trillion in revenues.
      The gradual nature of the Ryan plan can be seen this way: Ryan would still result in government spending $5.1 trillion more than it brings in in the next decade but this is less than the $7.2 trillion in deficit spending Obama has proposed.
       Ryan’s plan is gradual but radical since he maintains the impasse demands radical action. Under Ryan, the federal government will spend $5.8 trillion less over the next decade than it would under current law. Over a reasonable amount of time his blueprint would begin to reduce the size of the deficit relative to the economy and over the coming decades would not only balance the budget but would actually begin to pay off the principal of the debt. He would do this by cutting discretionary spending, reform the tax code to broaden the base and lower rates, block-grant some federal welfare programs including Medicaid to the states, repeal ObamaCare (already described), privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, cut back farm subsidies and corporate welfare and—most important—reform Medicare for those now younger than 55 from an open-end entitlement to a system of premium supports to subsidize the purchase of private insurance.
         One can argue with the details of the Ryan plan but this much is true: He…not the president…has set the standard of a debate which has at the end of the tunnel the prospect for a gradual return to solvency. Which means that the initiative has swung from the White House to the Republican House.  This follows the widely heralded Republican victory under Speaker Boehner in negotiations with Obama and the Democratic Senate.
       Q. What are the reactions of key Obama allies to the Boehner-Obama-Reid deal that sent Obama scurrying to the Lincoln Memorial yesterday…sprinting up the steps to show his youth… to politick with tourists, trying to move into the limelight for some of the glory ala 2012?
       A.   Understand when the negotiations began I was one who said something I still believe that if Boehner hit a sticky wicket it would be advisable to shut the government down. But in the negotiations Boehner came out the winner so dramatically that it wasn’t necessary no matter what some Tea Party purists believe. Friday’s deal cuts spending more than in any other single year on record--$78 billion more than Obama initially proposed. While domestic discretionary spending grew by 6% in 2008 (under George W. Bush) and 14% in 2009, this year it will fall by 4%.   For a party that controls only one House of Congress that’s a signal victory—and Boehner was right to accept it as well as the other goodies from a conservative point of view rather than moving to pull the plug. You only pull the plug as a last resort—not at this time.
          Q. But Boehner sold out the pro-lifers on Planned Parenthood, didn’t he?
         A.   Quit this “sold out” stuff will you? That’s Captain
Queeg rolling-the-steel-ball-bearings talk.   The District of Columbia which has the most excessive pro-abort record propelled by public funding has to drop it—returning to the days pre-2009 when the ban was lifted. As far as not removing all public funding for abortion, I don’t yield to anyone my near 40 years of activism on pro-life and in opposition to federal subsidies for Planned Parenthood but for the first time the Democratic Senate….sharply reduced in numbers…will have to vote on a rider that supports their contention which is greatly politically more desirable than feeding our enemies the notion that to end monies for PP we’d close the government down.
         That would be politically disastrous for the future and be a tragic setback for pro-life. This way we have the best of all possible worlds—a remarkable fork in the road from 70 years of liberalism plus in a country which is undergoing serious reappraisal of abortion, a vote by Senate Democrats that will be disadvantageous to them.   As a matter of fact, if Boehner had rejected this deal he’d be repudiating his leadership. Plus the District of Columbia with the worst schools and in the grip of the teachers’ union gets a return to vouchers.Magnificent deal. Not perfect but one which can be defended on human attainability under Natural Law.   Get over this if we don’t get everything we want, we pull the plug, take our marbles and go home—to live in ignominy because of our legendary hard-headedness.
        Q.   What is the reaction of the Obama press to what you call the Boehner victory and the Paul Ryan seizure of the political initiative?
       A.   When I unfolded The New York Times yesterday over the breakfast table the main editorial said: “The cuts to keep government running are far too large and the next battle could be worse.” The editorial said this:  “The Republicans set the terms of the debate at every point and learned they can push the fumbling and fearful Democrats far to the right[sic]. ..[T]he Republicans did far better than they could possibly have imagined when the process began, winning $38.5 billion in cuts, more than even the House [GOP] leadership had proposed.   That’s on top of the $40 billion in additional spending President Obama had originally proposed for this fiscal year which was dropped. About $13 billion will be cut from the Departments of Labor, Education and Health and Human Services…Democrats also agreed to the ideological demand of House conservatives that the District of Columbia be banned from spending any money for abortions, a cruel blow to the poor and largely African American women who need these services [sic]. “
     Q. Wow—that’s the New York Times?
     A.  The paper that sets the agenda for liberalism in this country and which is scrutinized by the networks for what tone to take in their coverage.  Then while I was munching my Quaker oatmeal squares, I turned to Paul Krugman’s column…the Nobel Prize-winner who is easily the most leftwing economist in the country, one of Obama’s great apologists and fervent supporter of ObamaCare. This is what he said yesterday morning in his column entitled The President is Missing.
       “What have they done with President Obama? What happened to the inspirational figure his supporters thought they elected? Who is this bland, timid guy who doesn’t seem to stand for anything in particular?...Maybe that terrible deal in which the Republicans ended up getting more than their opening bid was the best he could achieve—although it looks from here as if the president’s idea of how to bargain is to start by negotiating with himself, making preemptive concessions, then pursue a second round of negotiations with the GOP leading to further concessions….But let’s give the president the benefit of the doubt and suppose the $38 billion in spending cuts—and a much larger cut relative to his own budget proposals—was the best deal available.  Even so, did Mr.Obama have to celebrate his defeat? Did he have to praise Congress for enacting `the largest annual spending cut in our history…?”

SUN-TIMES BLACKS OUT UNION THUG OUTRAGES IN WISCONSIN.

2011-04-11T07:01:00.002-05:00

Like the old Pravda It Spikes the Inconvenient Truth. Its Columnists with One Exception Run the Lefty Gamut from A to B.

The outrage of the country would engulf public unions if the story were allowed to fully get out. And I meanfully.

But the nation’s slowly dying but still effective “mainstream media” have succeeded partially in clamping shut the faucets begging to let flow the surge of truth about public unions’ organized campaign of extortion against Wisconsin business which rivals anything the Capone thugs did in their “protection” racket against restaurants and dry cleaners in this town ninety years ago. That the unions have done these things is still waiting to be told to Sun-Times readers by management which prefers its consumers not be bothered by the truth.

The left-leaning Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel played it Pravda- mum until forced by embarrassment to give it at least minimal coverage, that cowardly journalistic distinction does not belong to it alone…but is shared by two-paper Chicago--served by the Sun-Times, a wholly-owned intellectual captive of Democratic party liberalism filled with lefty columnists who lip-synch spurious “workers’ rights”…and the Tribune, a goulash of social liberals, toadies of a galaxy of billionaire Sam Zell’s dissolute media hires. Until exposed a few months ago, the Zell buddies had turned the paper into a near frat house bordello. The paper’s public face was that of Zell, a red-bearded motorcycle-riding eccentric with a face an uncanny duplicate of the pitchfork-bearing symbol of Lucifer Matches.

Of the two, only the Tribune finally allowed the truth to ooze out in driblets and so obscured, watered down, that is hardly memorable. The Sun-Times has steadfastly kept any news of union retaliation against business in Wisconsin out of its pristinely pro-Dem pages.

What circumvented the mainstreams has been the godsend of AM talk radio of which no broadcaster has been more compelling than Rush Limbaugh, plus a remarkably effective news aggregation run by Rupert Murdoch, includingThe Wall Street Journal.. Always superb as an economic resource, it has become a full-blown gutsy advocate…with America’s No. 1 newspaper circulation…that offsets its rival, The New York Times.

Still, despite the strength of Murdoch media holdings…The New York Post…Fox News Network and a string of talk radio outlets…it has begun—but not yet accomplished—the wresting away of the age-old dominance of dinosaur liberalism: the two principal liberal newspapers, The New York Times, Washington Post and onetime “major” news magazines, Time and the flat busted Newsweek which recently was bought by a liberal billionaire Sydney Harmon husband of Dem Congresswoman Jane Harmon [Calif.] for $1 for which he was overcharged.

Earlier thanks to the Murdoch press, the story was revealed about how the public unions threatened to punish-by-boycott Wisconsin industries that supported the Walker budget. Now the unions are threatening those which resolutelystay neutral.

The Wall Street Journal obtained a letter sent March 26 to Union Grove, Wisconsin (Racine county) business owners and managers by Council 24 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees…the most powerful wing of the AFL-CIO… which had turned down AFSCME’s plea to go public in opposition to passage of Gov. Scott Walker’s budget. Read this extract and see if it doesn’t evoke the days of Capone and the extortion racket:

“DEAR UNION GROVE AREA BUSINESS OWNER/MANAGER: It is unfortunate that you have chosen ‘not’ to support public workers rights in Wisconsin. In recent past weeks you have been offered a sign[s] by a public employee[s] who works in one of the state facilities in the Union Grove area. These signs simply said `This Business Supports Workers Rights,’ a simple, subtle and we feel non-controversial statement given the facts at this time.”

The letter outlines twisted critiques of the budget and concludes with this chilling Mafia-style threat masked in subtlety:

“With that we’d ask that you reconsider taking a sign and stance to support public employees in this community. Failure to do so will leave us no choice but to do [sic] a public boycott of your business. And, sorry, neutral means ‘no’ to those who work for the largest employer in the area and are union members.” The letter was signed by one Jim Parrett, field representative for AFSCME who didn’t return the paper’s repeated calls.

Comments the Wall Street Journal: “So even businesses that stay neutral in the political battle are considered the enemy and will be punished. Charming stuff and especially coming from a union that claims (wrongly) to be losing its constitutional rights. Free speech for others apparently isn’t all that important.” It reports that at least two Wisconsin businesses have been boycott-slugged, M&I Bank and Kwik Trip because either they or their business executives supported Gov.
Scott Walker’s budget initiatives or refused to publicly oppose them.”

It is the only paper of national significance which has called the turn on public union political hacks. Remember this is being written by a union member [American Federation of Television and Radio Artists AFL-CIO]): 1,400 dues paying members in Indiana along from what used to be 1,600 a few years ago. Nationally state public employees used to stand at 35,000; now they number 28,700 with a falloff of dues.

And it concluded editorially: “This kind of union thuggery is all too common and is in keeping with the larger political goal of preventing union members from exercising their own rights of free association. The Walker reform that union leaders hate the most require unions to be recertified annually by a majority of their members and let those members opt out of paying dues…This is the prospect that has Wisconsin labor leaders so furious these days—furious enough that they’ll even threaten the livelihoods of local business leaders who won’t join them at the barricades. This is the nasty modern reality of government union power.”

Misnamed “mainstream” liberal media may be fading…Katie Couric who became the first woman network news anchor with a job launching from NBC “Today” to CBS “Evening News” rivaling Jennifer Anniston’s latest film…has lost her bid after three years to resuscitate CBS from 3^rd place. All that hype and a $15 million annual salary to-boot and the needle is still stuck at No. 3.

Undeniably there are many reasons but the one seldom cited is the proclivity of journalistic liberalism: the knack of hyping stories to enable the lefty cause while blacking out the unfavorable topics.

But the one steady lodestar of liberalism remains—The New York Times. In fact despite all the changes in consumer news-reading habits, this one paper continues to set the agenda for a massive number of commentators spanning the wire services to a local hayseed weekly editor in East Whistlestop, Nebraska who, short on time hopes to sound Manhattan-erudite.

The Wall Street Journal is far different from its rival The New York Times. In its news coverage it is hard to tell where it stands; it is easy to discern the Times editorial view in its supposed news lineage. That is the hallmark of “advocacy journalism”—which sprang from lefty journalism classes at Ivy League universities. Ironically, advocacy journalism got The Times into such trouble that it pushed entry into a war unwittingly (as to be revealed later on).

The Times’ view of things has been gospel for network news, other big city newspapers (like Chicago’s) and a scattering of urban-suburban publications…this despite that most of the 75 dailies which have folded during the last five years have generally followed the left-leaning Times editorial slant although to be sure round-the-clock internet coverage of the news and the diversifying of news outlets have played havoc.

The Times, known as the nation’s Gray Lady for its once lackluster format, was veering to bankruptcy as late as last year when it nailed a beneficent sugar daddy—a Mexican multi-billionaire who has just edged out Bill Gates as the richest man in the world. He is Carlos Slim Helo (most generally referred to as Carlos Slim), 71, of Lebanese Christian heritage but decidedly leftist orientation, who by the most conservative account is worth $60 billion.

His big ventures should have shocked the pristine Times’ sense of liberalism—but hasn’t: ownership of the Mexican phone monopoly allowing it to charge the highest rates in the world, courtesy of having been a crony of Mexico’s unsavory ex-president Carlos Salinas…plus his ownership of cell phone companies that dominate 70 percent of Latin America which have found interesting ways to discourage competition…Imbursa Banks, Carso Construction; Prodigy Internet (Mexico’s top provider)…profits of which depend on heavy exertion of business-government muscle. In this country his holdings include double digit chunks of Sears and Saks Fifth Avenue.

But if you’re going down the drain to all-but-certain bankruptcy as was the Gray Lady, one can’t be choosy: the deal they struck was a $250 million loan from Slim who already owns 6.9 percent of the company which would enable the paper to refinance its existing debt and help free its borrowing capacity, granting Slim six-year notes with warrants convertible into common shares—notes carrying a 14 percent interest rate with 11 percent paid in cash and 3 percent in additional bonds.

Slim agreed to receive no representation on the Times’ board but will be among the largest single shareholders of the company—owning up to 17 percent of the common shares outstanding. The deal is seen by consumer rights groups as hostile to common stockholders since under the deal Slim gets an initial 14 percent plus a warrant convertible into stock as a sweetener—unfair to the common stockholders meaning that free cash flow that would have paid them dividends will be used to pay what many experts see as usurious interest rates to Slim.

The Slim Daddy Warbucks factor has given the paper breathing room but even in its salad days, beyond purveying elegant prose styles have produced serious embarrassments. One was intriguing from the standpoint of its hostility to George W. Bush’s foreign-defense policy. Editors gave Judith Miller the highly coveted national security beat. No reason not to, given her status: winner of the 2002 Pulitzer for coverage of the Middle East. Miller’s scoops were gained from heavy social networking—too much so said critics.

Yet despite the paper’s passionate opposition to involvement in Iraq, Miller’s coverage ran just the opposite: that Saddam Hussein indeed had WMDs Although her sources were anonymous her star status as journalist overrode all other reservations.

The book Gray Lady Down by ex-Timesman William McGowan [Encounter: 2010] tells much of the story. Miller’s reporting ignited a fierce battle in the newsroom and on the editorial board. Her in-house critics spread stories about her: she had become far too cozy with sources, especially male ones. But, her defenders averred, this was sexist, against the canons of feminism; she was not exactly a looker like Sophia Loren but a plain, late 50ish matron, married to a 76-year-old guy, a true composite Times creature, born to a Jewish father and Irish Catholic mother; master’s degree from Barnard; academic honors for a Middle East term paper; former NPR correspondent with a leftward bias.

Things were coming down against her when she produced a seeming blockbuster which could only come from someone with highly sensitive intelligence clearance—that we had intercepted thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes in Iraq which could only have one purpose—as casings for rotors used for enriching weapons-grade uranium that could have one purpose: production of an atomic bomb.

This produced the anomaly of diversity, certainly the first in modern times for the paper: while the editorials and columnists warned against Iraq involvement, its celebrity national security correspondent was reporting authoritatively, though using anonymous sources, that a decade after Saddam Hussein claimed to have abandoned a quest for nuclear weapons, he had resumed it—“embarking on a worldwide hunt” for nuclear materials. As Timesmen gritted their teeth, the Bush people—including the man they hated more than anyone else, Dick Cheney—were citing their paper in a drive to go to war. When copy desk liberals complained, Gerald Boyd, the Times managing editor snapped: “Listen, you guys shut up. She has a Pulitzer and your job is not to second guess her but get her stuff in this paper.”

Thus ironically, the Gray Lady, unblushing editorial page extoller of international restraint became through Miller on her front pages damn near an enlistee in the war herself. We now know that George W. invaded using The Times’Judy Miller stories as part of the pretext but found no WMD. We now know that Miller’s key source was a charlatan named Ahmad Chalabi, an Baghdad-born ex-banker who got a MIT Ph.D in mathematics and who formed a committee here to encourage the removal of Saddam Hussein. Chalabi cherished the idea he would return to Iraq and be elected its president.

More “we knows.” We know that Chalabi was close to Scooter Libby, Cheney’s top staffer, that he introduced Libby and Miller to “Curveball” an Iraqi expatriate with the phenomenal ability to present supposedly Inside Saddam’s Iraq stories. We know that Chicago prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald convicted Libby under his mandate to discover who leaked Valerie Plame’s CIA connections to Bob Novak, even though Novak had privately passed the word that the leaker was Richard Armitage, the undersecretary of state.

Continuing: we know that Judith Miller refused to divulge her main source about Iraq’s war buildup for which a federal judge found her in contempt and sent her to jail for a term of 18 months. And that finally Miller acknowledged her source was Scooter Libby.

Thus the irony: The New York Times is back flush with an infusion of a billionaire’s loan whose lack of ethics the paper would condemn in others…the same far-left Times was led ingeniously to be a handmaiden to the Bush administration getting us into a war it itself opposed through the cozyness of one of its star journalists with an Iraqi hustler, his friend named CurveBall and also Cheney’s top guy.

A scenario which would be turned down for a novel, huh?

ASK ME YOUR QUESTIONS AND I’LL TELL YOU NO LIES.

2011-04-08T06:49:00.001-05:00

         Q. Among these events…Obama backing down on civil trials for 9/11 alleged plotters and going instead with plans for military trials at Gitmo…his extolling job growth in a speech at a windmill factory owned by Spaniards…his planning a weekend getaway while the government faces a shutdown—which of these tell you most compellingly that he will lose in 2012?
        A.   All of them show ineptitude but none forecasts the desperation reflected in his request to the Rev. Al Sharpton to keynote Sharpton’s National Action Network which he did Thursday. That’s as if a Republican presidential wannabe would speak at the Klan. If you’re the first black president in U. S. history but you still feel you don’t have sufficient support with your black base to the extent you have to pander to the racial arsonist who perpetrated the Tawana Brawley hoax, a leading anti-Semite associated with bitter demonstrations in New York, that tells you all you need to know.
        The fact that the conspiratorially fawning media has collaborated in this farce leading to the most incompetent of administrations headed by a real dumbbell…loaded with honorifics but so far as we can tell since we are denied access to his school papers or grades, educated far beyond his intelligence…who substitutes drawing room grace for ability—and is by being rendered immune to proper media investigation a walking hoax who personifies media’s complicity.
         Three major network Obama shills are getting out now—Katie Couric of CBS…Matt Lauer of NBC…and Meredith Vieira of NBC—the latter having disgraced herself at the inauguration by announcing on air that she was close to sexual orgasm with excitement. But there are many lesser lights—including Mike Flannery formerly of Chicago CBS now with Chicago Fox who wrote a disgustingly sophomoric plea in mid-campaign that Obama send Flannery an ornament from the White House Christmas tree…this before the election—and written for a shamelessly liberal advertisement supplement in The New York Times sent to Chicago subscribers. Any competent editor would have removed Flannery from the political beat for this outrage—but no.
        Q. Your views on the Caterpillar letter to Gov. Quinn and what it means.   There seems to have been a blurring over the import.
        A.  The blurring comes from the pro-tax-hike group typified by Capitol Fax…which gives superhuman coverage to state government much of which is exemplary and unduplicatable…but which has taken the back-down by the CEO as support for Quinn’s out-of-control government.   No CEO likes to be in the limelight threatening to leave, but the letter said plainly that it was disturbed at Illinois’ spend-and-spend, tax-and-tax. The fact that the CEO seemed to endorse the tax hike can be laid to the mushy quality of Big Business expostulation in the media. The letter said everything but of course Capitol Fax, a megaphone for the unions—particularly public unions—draws its own conclusions consonant with its megaphone.

Thoughts While Shaving: Trump No. 3? Good! The More the Merrier…Don’t Blink, GOP--Shut the Damn Thing Down.

2011-04-07T07:42:00.002-05:00

                            The Donald’s Fine With Me.
     The worst thing that can happen to the GOP is to narrow the field, choose between a safe handful of presidential wobblers and bore the hell out of the electorate.   Playing it safe ala Mitch Daniels and scratch discussion of social issues because they can turn off the country-clubs.
    The best thing is to broaden the field and expand the choices. Plain-speaking and pulling no punches boosted Donald Trump in just a few scant weeks in a WSJ-NBC poll to tie Mike Huckabee for second behind Mitt Romney and top Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich in key races. My favorite, Tim Pawlenty, is still hanging on with 6% (showing his battle for name identification and differentiation is not catching on) and the eminence grise of Republican professionals, Haley Barbour, is lower than that.
        I think this wide-open thing is good for my party. The worst thing would be to field a neuter, emasculated candidate who has already conceded issues that send armies of volunteers into the field—pro-life, anti-same-sex marriage: Mitch Daniels. He has won over the country clubs because inherently they are social liberals anyhow.
         Do I think The Donald will get the nomination? Not at this point-- but I think it’ll be fun to watch him try….and if he gets it, he’ll have my support although I wish he’d quit combing over what I suspect is a bald spot. I love his political incorrectness….his saying “thank you, honey” to a comely girl interviewer. Frankly this guy Obama is so inept…so professorial…so detached…so unutterably dumb (scheduling an event at a windmill factory owned by an outfit in Spain), I think a Chinaman can beat him (I put in this old-fashioned ethnic reference to drive the sanctimonious Unbeliever and patron secular saint of correctness Eric Zorn nuts). Can you imagine our first black president having to go hat-in-hand…asking to address Al Sharpton’s convention to shore up his black base?
         I still think the field will broaden further and that a Draft Chris Christie movement will take hold. Paul Ryan did such a good job on his budget plan I’d like his followers to launch a Draft Ryan. I want Kasich of Ohio to enter…I want people to advance the name of Scott Walker. Their bombast will foment Little Shrimpy—Daniels—to dose up on conservative Viagra to gain testicular strength. I want Texas Gov. Rick Perry and his 10^th amendment drive to get in. I understand old Ron Paul will enter: great—although he’s a decided acquired taste. I understand a documentary on his life is going to be produced by 18^th Century Fox.
                           Charles the Kraut Advocates Blinking.
       The residual Democrat in Charles Krauthammer…the Charlie Kraut who was Mondale’s speech-writer… always comes out at crunch time like this. He wants Speaker Boehner to kick the can down the road on shut-down. Listen, the worst thing that can happen is for the waverers in the GOP to lose the Tea Party’ers.   Polls show the two parties will share equal blame….whereas I think the preponderance will go to the Dems because of Obama’s spinelessness.

RICH DALEY IN RETROSPECT: IS THIS WORTH $25,000? KNOCK-KNOCK, ANYBODY HOME? WHO’S DERE?

2011-04-06T11:01:00.002-05:00

The Squid, my name for the writhing, living, breathing Democratic party organism here which has tentacles into all facets of life…big business, organized labor, liberal media and our Roman Catholic chancery, also equipped with an ink sac used to cloud the media waters so as to hide its intentions… has been worried—but is no longer.

Until recently it suffered from nervous upchuckitis because the city’s Irish Catholic Democratic royal family was threatened with possible prosecution for an indelicacy of seven years ago that everybody thought was tucked away.

The indelicacy is a death suffered when a 21-year-old, five-foot-four-inch 145-lb kid from the suburbs, David Koschman, struck the city pavement after being slugged in the early morning hours in what the cops called a drunken altercation one Spring night in 2004 near Rush Street, the nightclub district, purportedly by Rich Daley’s apparently uncontrollable thug-sized nephew, R. J. Vanecko who has been featured in brawls before.

Koschman brushed by the Daley party including Vanecko; words were exchanged and Koschman was slugged. After the slugging all three from the Daley party including Vanecko ran away. The medical examiner...not clued in on the royal family’s bloodline in this case…called it a homicide. That’s when what looks very much like a coverup began.

In Chicago when this happens to a mayor’s family, the fix goes in via the cops and the prosecuting attorney’s office.

As young Koschman lay dying in his hospital bed, a city detective called the room and told his mother that her son had been involved in an altercation—which she already knew. The detective promised to get back to the mother soon. Never happened. The cops never began an investigation for until Koschman died, 12 days later.

By that time Vanecko showed up for a lineup with a completely changed appearance, having shaved his head. Then the investigation was moved to another location where…surprise!...the records of the encounter disappeared. Finally, the Cook county States’ Attorney, Richard Devine close to the Daleys…and who was Daley’s top assistant when the mayor served as States Attorney… decided not to prosecute.

The story received a brief notoriety after it happened but then seemed to fall off the edge of the earth for years untilThe Sun-Times and NBC-Chicago employed sophisticated Freedom of Information Act devices to reincarnate the story. The more the paper and TV station dug the more intrigued it got about the missing records. They unearthed a wealth of new information showing that the cops—from beat cops to homicide detectives to area police commanders to assistant states attorneys—considered it a very hot potato and wanted nothing to do with it in order to protect Daley.

Daley’s retirement assured the media that since he would not be around, he would not be in a position to punish news organizations (not so with some viable Squid operatives) which we will get to later.

Disappearing and “lost” police records—especially after a decision was made not to prosecute—is rarity even in politically barnacled Chicago. Richard Kling, a law professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law said in the FOI probe: “They declined charges but they can’t find the file? I’ve been doing this for 39 years, literally thousands of cases. I’ve never seen a felony review file missing. Ever. Never heard of one. There’s certainly some red flags. Like not investigating the case earlier, a missing felony review file, transferring the case from one area to another and not having lineups until a month later.”

The reason The Squid was upset is that in office or retirement Daley has a very volatile temper coupled with an elephant’s memory and his disposition would be to interfere with the upward mobility of anyone who aids and abets the Koschman matter which leads to the prosecution of a family member.

That would mean the current states attorney, Anita Alverez, who was number 3 under Devine, a major prosecutor in his office at the time and should be expected to know something about the case. Since then with Devine’s retirement, Averez won a primary over four other Dems and the general election, becoming the first woman…and first Hispanic..States Attorney—viewed as a one of the rising Hispanic stars in the county.

When badgered by the press to reopen the case, Alverez first went into hiding…speaking through aides. She released only certain information and then not under her own name—such as one paper titled “Statement of the Cook County States Attorney’s Office [sic] Regarding the Death Investigation of David Koschman” and another that bore no title or reference to Alverez.

This presented a bit of a problem for Carol Marin who…to give her credit worked on the story at both the Sun-Times and NBC Chicago. The a 60ish russet haired feminist and legendary liberal had cheered the election of Alverez as a victory for feminism—but now her hero (heroine you understand being a sexist term) who quite likely knew full well the facts behind the Koschman case was stonewalling. Regretfully Marin wrote a column that evinced her displeasure with the stalling. However the paper conceived of a solution to get the States Attorney’s office out of the jam…and the last two incumbents, Devine (Daley’s onetime top aide) and Alverez who has been savoring eventual appointment as a federal judge with recommendations to the Obama Justice department from a panel Devine heads.

After one nasty column, Marin laid off Alverez. But ingeniously ideas which surfaced in a Sun-Times editorial that seemed a natural to rescue Alverez, would be to kick the can down the road. Meaning to have another of Marin’s choice women heroes--Illinois Attorney General, Lisa Madigan--name a special prosecutor and take the issue off Alverez’s plate. Everybody agrees that the statute of limitations such as involuntary manslaughter has expired—and while murder has no statute of limitations, it is difficult at this time with “lost” police records to make that case stick.

The editorial suggested coyly that maybe Alverez herself would ask the AG to intervene and maybe empanel a grand jury. That idea has just seemed to lay there. Anyone conversant with Lisa Madigan, knows she’s a reformers for the grandstands and doesn’t want to go poking her nose into questions such as why Richie Daley’s nephew wasn’t given the same prosecutorial treatment as would be expected for anyone else.

The second option laid out in the exceedingly helpful-to-Alverez editorial published in Chicago’s heavily Democratic newspaper was to ask that Patrick Fitzgerald take it—the U. S. Attorney who has been pulled into investigative tasks before, and who flirted with liberals in the Valerie Plame case by conducting a probe purportedly to find out who leaked Plame’s CIA operative status while all the time Fitzgerald knew the identity of the leaker (Bush deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage) but plunging ahead to indict the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby for supposedly withholding information about other things outside the purview of the Fitzgerald investigation.

The Squid suffered gas pains anew when the hyper-cautious Alverez met with her old friend Marin and while she denied anything untoward happened with the cops and her office tepidly endorsed the idea of an independent probe in the matter in order to “clear the air.” She referred it to Daley’s inspector general but that only certifies the fix is really in.

To sweeten it up she asked Pat Quinn’s new state police head to reenter the case.

For a second The Squid thought it would vomit. But Old Watery Eyes’ who has a practiced aura of sanctimony so he can carry it off without doubling in laughter (easy since he has no humor) saw that his new appointee turned down the opportunity. No thanks.

The Squid took a Tums and forgot about it.

Earlier, , Dick Devine sitting in his private law firm’s corner office couldn’t explain the missing police records.

Once again into the breach they went—all striving to help Rich.

Just as in the case of the Boston charm boy, JFK an army of people have dedicated their lives to making Rich Daley’s life easier. They got him through a JD at DePaul, historically the law school of The Squid but he had trouble passing the bar exam—took it and flunked it three times, the fourth being the charm after some massive help was engineered to get him through it. The magic name Daley got him elected to the Illinois Constitutional Convention and then to the state senate from the ancestral home of his family in Bridgeport.

Following which he won the post of Cook county states attorney a campaign his much-smarter kid brother Blll ran. Bill made sure after Rich’s election that he was surrounded by excellent lawyers, topped by Devine. The one problem they faced was Daley’s butchered English syntax.

Bill ingeniously compared Rich’s ineloquence with that of their father, Richard J. —but there was no comparison.

I met with Old Man Daley when I took a job as assistant Commerce Secretary in 1969 and his questions were succinct and direct and if not always flawlessly grammatical, they got the point across and he was extraordinarily good on follow-up. “Listen,” he said. “Whatever you can do for Chicago, when you find out what it is—either the Commerce EDA [Economic Development Authority} or when you get your own funding for small business—call me. Here’s my personal number [handing me a card on which he had written his confidential office number]. I’ve talked to Don Rumsfeld at OEO [Office of Economic Opportunity] and” he rattled off a list of other Republican Nixon appointees.

Rich Daley, I’ve always found, was much more indirect. So indirect as to be indecipherable. But a true cipher can’t be indecipherable: this won’t compute.

Early on, Brother Bill had propagated the view—I now think I fell for a skillful myth—that Rich spoke purposely in language fitted for a teamster as a device to make him more a man of the people. For a long time I bought it—but having known Bill, as a fellow lobbyist, much longer than I did Rich, I always wondered why, if true, Rich had to garble not just the language but ideas—while Bill, coming from the same family and background, has no trouble at all conversing on multi-levels.

I brought it up in friendly fashion to Bill when we bumped into each other checking out at a Madison hotel desk…the home away from home… in Washington.

“You guys were raised together and are very close,” I said, standing behind him as he signed his credit card. “I’m intrigued that we see only one type of guy in him at news conferences but--.”

“Well yes—but I can tell you the real Rich is more cerebral than you can imagine,” he said. “Take it from me. It’s a great political device that helped our Dad and helps him.

“So say you were to run for governor, what would you sound like?”

Bill Daley who always cherished a run for governor of Illinois said, “Just like I am now.”

“But if you were to run for president of the Cook county board?”

“That,” said Bill Daley, “is different. I’d have to make a lot of neighborhood appearances and it’d be like this—“ and he lapsed into dat-dem-dese Bridgeport lexicon. A perfect imitation of Rich with flawless intonation.

We laughed heartily.

For years Bill Daley convinced me Rich’s feigned obtuseness was a put-on to avoid heavy examination in news conferences where he would have to delineate ideas. That ended in 2000.

In midsummer of that presidential election year we met at the City Club of Chicago where I am chairman. He was to deliver a “state of the city” address.

     “Roeser,” he said as he passed me the luncheon rolls,”who’s gonna be d’ next president?”
     “Bush.”
    “Naw—gimme a break!”
      “Who do you think, Mayor?”
    “Who?   Gore of course!”
     “You’re on,” I said. “Loser buys lunch!”
      “Hey—best deal I got today!”

After the long recount and Supreme Court ruling when it was determined that Bush won the electoral while losing the popular vote, I waited to hear from him.

Not a peep.

So I called. His black female press secretary checked and said he didn’t recall making a bet. But there were all kinds of people who overheard. She called back and said, “He’ll host breakfast in his office—just you, him and me.”

When I got there on the fifth floor of City Hall, his office was transformed by a banquet table. We talked about a number of things—principally what he saw as Democratic size-ups in the next two years. When he brought up Democratic advances made in the Chicago suburbs which had hitherto been GOP country, I asked him this:

“You say women in the suburbs are voting Democrat because of abortion. Does that bother you in any way because of the serious moral nature of this procedure held by the Church you and I belong to?”

“Huh?”
I repeated it.

“Lissen dey [the women] are goin’ to vote as dere goin’ to vote. What’s the difference? Dey had been votin’ wit’ the Republicans and now dere wit’ us. Whazza difference.`Merican way.”

He masked it with a huge gaffaw and a shrug of shoulders.

I looked into the eyes of his press secretary and for a split-second thought I saw keen disappointment with the answer.

If I had asked the same question of Bill—and indeed I have earlier—I’d get at least an effort at parsing ideas.

Not here. I left him thinking: Bill’s been conning me. This guy’s no put-on. He’s really dumb.

      Dumb with a lot of smart friends.
           He’ll find out how many friends he has when he embarks on that famous lecture tour cross-country at $25,000 to $50,000 a pop.
          I asked one of his early business allies: Will the tour work for him?
          He said: Are you kidding? Anybody who pays that much to hear him ought to have his head examined.   He was one who stood at rapt attention during their meetings on the 5^th floor.

But in other cities where his manufactured luster still shines, there’ll be some suckers.

        They’ll pay it once.
           And never again especially after getting a tough question he walks over to the guy, raps his knuckles on his forehead and says:
           “Knock knock! Anybody home? Who’s dere?”