This octogenarian’s blog has missed several days—and the reason is contained in the first words of Johnny Cash’s song “I Walk the Line.” If I were tailoring it to my health experience the last several days, it would run: “I keep a close watch on this heart of mine/ Along with kidney function all the time…”

The diagnosis found sounds deadly—heart failure, worsening kidney health–but it need not be. The knack of this game is to learn to recognize the symptoms before they get too bad. …

If you read Capitol Fax and its blog which I urge you all to do because as said here many times, it is indispensable for anyone interested in Illinois politics which it covers like a blanket, you have to realize you must pay your dues.

Dues come in four parts.
First understand that it is a wholly owned compliant lip-synch subsidiary of the Democratic Left and a handmaiden to the unions—particularly public ones. Private companies are avaricious…profits, especially …

So now we know how this presidential pillar of uncertain, quivering Obama Jello reacts (I wouldn’t dignify it by calling it thinking). He was definitely against entering Libya on any pretext until three women pressured him—the most notable being the orange-haired ex-journalist, 40-year-old Irish born Leftist Samantha Power director of multilateral affairs at the National Security Council (the wife of economist Cass Sunstein of the U of C)…about whom that legendary arbiter of Washington power NPR’s feminist Nina Totenberg said trilled about the women changing the presidential intention: she’s …

What did F. Scott Fitzgerald mean in The Great Gatsby where he has the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway tell the mysterious stranger Jay Gatsby (who changed his surname to Anglo from the Jewish Gatz): “The rich are not like us. They don’t care who they hurt! They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth more than the whole damn bunch put together!”

He meant that encrusted arrogance runs roughshod. That arrogance of course pertains to the Daleys who have lived like a royal family here since the Old Man …

Q: Will the Libyan War turn Obama’s chances in 2012 to toast?
A. I think it could, yes, very possibly. When I saw the demonstrators coming down Wacker the other day….mostly white liberals, some pretty old..I calculated how fleeting the liberal consciousness is. News that similar groups were marching in Washington D.C., New York and San Francisco clinched it for me. It tells me that if this “humanitarian” approach can still draw such opposition at the outset…before there are any flubs.. it’s not good for Obama.

Q. But …

When this octogenarian was a kid, most of us thought of journalism in heroic terms…the old Call Northside 777 genre of 1948… where Jimmy Stewart’s dogged research frees longtime felon Richard Conte after almost twenty years an unjustly convicted man.

But since that time liberals have seized upon the craft for redemption and belief in the innate goodness of man separate from the degeneration of the human condition since the fall from Eden…so much so that the pendulum has swung from interest in convict getting the full measure of what evidence …

Ninety-two years ago, in 1919, Republicans were within a year of a presidential contest to replace a partly-paralyzed, stroke-ravaged Woodrow Wilson…and the list of GOP contestants ranged from dull and competent to charismatic, progressive, terse, non-committal and highly oracular.

The top ones were Illinois Governor Frank Lowden who could be compared to Mitt Romney of today—meticulous, competent, good administrator, lots of financial resources. He married a lot of money—the daughter of George Pullman. That dough enabled him to draft a great number of civic leaders to implement an …

Q. Your impression of the political reaction to the Wisconsin public union imbroglio?
A. The big MSM news services are misplaying the effect of the story. They say that since Wisconsin was the political seedbed of political reform, the riots at the state capitol will detonate a voter backlash against the GOP: That’s what Yahoo, the liberal Internet service says and to some degree the whimpering AP: agrees. Wrong. The play of history presumes public reaction will go to the right—and with a vengeance. …

The first thing Rahm Emanuel should do once installed in his mayoral sancta sanctorum on the 5th floor of city hall is to scoot everybody out, lock all the doors and once alone put on a tallis…aka a Jewish prayer shawl, the ancestor of our Catholic pallium…to give fervent thanks to Yahweh—the name of God that Jews don’t pronounce–who led his ancestors out of Egypt… to inspire the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. to spare Chicago and Emanuel by raising the prospect of Carol Moseley Braun for mayor.

As an …

Q. What was your reaction to yesterday’s news that Northwestern University put on a live sex demonstration for 100 students featuring an engaged couple which involved a motorized sex toy to stimulate female orgasm…orchestrated by Kenneth Melvoin-Berg, co-owner of Weird Chicago Tours?
A. I was tickled. Double entendre intended.

Q. In the name of God why?
A. It was a magnificent demonstration of the vapidity of contemporary Higher Education [sic] which has so debased learning which began solemnly with
(a) the love of wisdom and beauty learned from …