Chicago Daily Observer

Conservatism’s current intellectual chaos reverberated in the Republican ticket’s end-of-campaign crescendo of surreal warnings that big government—verily, “socialism”—would impend were Democrats elected. John McCain and Sarah Palin experienced this epiphany when Barack Obama told a Toledo plumber that he would “spread the wealth around.”

America can’t have that, exclaimed the Republican ticket while Republicans—whose prescription drug entitlement is the largest expansion of the welfare state since President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society gave birth to Medicare in 1965; and a majority of whom in Congress supported a lavish farm bill at a time of record profits for the less than 2 percent of the American people-cum-corporations who farm—and their administration were partially nationalizing the banking system, putting Detroit on the dole and looking around to see if some bit of what is smilingly called “the private sector” has been inadvertently left off the ever-expanding list of entities eligible for a bailout ... Read More...

Barack Obama has made his economic thinking excruciatingly clear, so it also is clear that his running mate should have been not Sen. Joe Biden, but Rumpelstiltskin.

He spun straw into gold, a skill an Obama administration will need in order to fulfill its fairy-tale promises.

Obama recently said he would “require that 10 percent of our energy comes from renewable sources by the end of my first term — more than double what we have now.” Note the verb “require” and the adjective “renewable.”

By 2012 he would “require” the economy’s huge energy sector to — here things become comic — supply half as much energy from renewable sources as already is being supplied by just one potentially renewable source. About 20 percent of America’s energy comes from nuclear energy produced using fuel rods, which, when spent, can be reprocessed into fresh fuel.

(Your wife) Michelle, who was born in 1964, says that most Americans’ lives have “gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl.” Since 1960, real per capita income has increased 143 percent, life expectancy has increased by seven years, infant mortality has declined 74 percent, deaths from heart disease have been halved, childhood leukemia has stopped being a death sentence, depression has become a treatable disease, air and water pollution have been drastically reduced, the number of women earning a bachelor’s degree has more than doubled, the rate of homeownership has increased 10.2 percent, the size of the average American home has doubled, the percentage of homes with air conditioning has risen from 12 to 77, the portion of Americans who own shares of stock has quintupled … Has your wife perhaps missed some pertinent developments in this country that she calls “just downright mean”?