Multiple sources this morning are covering the initial success of Indiana’s school choice program, which supplements low and middle income parents so they can send their kids to private schools. More than 3,200 kids have enrolled in private schools under the program already, and that number is expected to keep increasing.

Opponents of the plan are likewise showing their true anti-religious agenda, with the Indiana teachers’ union vice-president emphasizing not the phony claim that school choice doesn’t work, but her real beef with the program: that too many of the private schools parents are choosing are Catholic.

From USA Today

Indiana’s program, which is still accepting applications, also topped first-year enrollment in a similar program in Milwaukee, which introduced a large-scale voucher system in 1991. Milwaukee’s program began with just 337 students its first year before growing to more than 19,000 last year, according to the Milwaukee School Choice Program website.

Indiana has a cap of 7,500 vouchers this year and no more than 15,000 next year. The cap will be lifted in 2013 and there will be no limit on the number of students who can obtain vouchers, according to the Indiana Department of Education.

While vandals struck Archbishop Messmer School in Milwaukee

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.

Mitt Romney

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.

**

Tom Roeser is the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Chicago Daily Observer

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Some day after we’re all dead, revisionist historians will calculate that this 44th 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 80th 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.

**

Tom Roeser is the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Chicago Daily Observer

image Jack Benny with Harry Truman on accompanying piano

image Jason Plummer with CNBC’s Rick Santelli

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The deputy police chief, who sat on the pension board, received a similar deal. As it did for Baldermann, the town added Dennis Kapelinski’s unused vacation time to his final salary — in exchange for opting out of insurance coverage — and gave him a 20 percent raise just before he retired, documents show.

Baldermann, who also is New Lenox’s mayor, saw his police pay — including 100 days of unused vacation time — jump from about $127,000 to $199,000 while Kapelinski’s salary went from $105,000 to $188,000, according to village documents. Their pension benefits are calculated using final salaries.

Read more at the Tribune

Obama also said “he had no interest in dictating the result of the selection process and he would not do so, either directly or indirectly through staff or others,” the report said, adding that Whitaker relayed that information to Peters.

And here is what actually happened in negotiating the Obama/Blagojevich purchase/sale of the Illinois Senate seat, (via the Backyard Conservative):

The picture could have been taken before, but the questions about a meeting between Obama and Blago remain. Big Journalism. That question is connected to another big one–the direct contradiction by SEIU Illinois leader Tom Balanoff of the President’s contention that he had no contact or communication with the Blago people on the Senate seat. Apparently in Obama’s mind communicating through Balanoff was not communicating.

Will the media ask them? The subject came up at the White House press briefing. (Was that Ann Compton of ABC Radio, who hails from suburban Chicago New Trier) Time, the Politico and Morning Joe have noticed.

The Obama Greg Craig whitewash report has been questionablefrom the get-go, and looks very questionable now:

Transition aides said it wasn’t until after Nov. 12 that Emanuel, a North Side congressman with close ties to Blagojevich, and Obama talked about a preferred list of Senate candidates, and the president-elect authorized Emanuel to relay it to the Illinois governor’s office.

Balanoff says the president called him on the day before the election, Nov. 3rd to say Jarrett was his choice and convey it to Blago. And are we really to believe that the president wouldn’t have discussed this with Rahmbo at that time? And that Rahmbo would have called Blago without the president’s knowledge to recommend Jarrett between Nov. 6-9th? In addition to that, Jarrett withdrew on Nov. 9th. What prompted that? And what about this:

The report also said that between Nov. 6 and Nov. 8, Louanner Peters, a Blagojevich deputy governor, tried to contact close Obama friend and former state public health director Eric Whitaker about the Senate vacancy.In that conversation, the report said, Peters said the governor’s office wanted to know who spoke for the president-elect regarding the Senate vacancy. Whitaker contacted Obama, and the president-elect said no one was authorized to speak for him on that issue, the report said.

Balanoff’s evidence is key, and contradicts the president. He’s under oath.

Will the president eventually have to testify?

And it’s not just Balanoff. Blago’s chief of staff John Harris opens the door to raising questions about what Obama knew and when did he know it. Did he meet or phone Blago directly, and did hecover that up through the Craig report. Did he lie to the FBI?

That’s what got Nixon impeached, the cover-up, not the Watergate break-in itself. I’ve always wondered whether U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald pulled the plug on the investigation before the White House could get really embroiled in this–and did he give them a heads up that Blago was on tape–recall Jarrett’s abrupt withdrawal from consideration for the Senate seat. (See this.)

So far the judge in the Blago trial has brushed back attempts by the defense to bring Obama into the trial–but once Blago gets on the stand himself–all bets are off.

6. Obama had a secret phone call with Blagojevich
Redacted portion: President-elect Obama also spoke to Governor Blagojevich on December 1, 2008 in Philadelphia. On Harris Cell Phone Call # 139, John Harris and Governor’s legal counsel discuss a conversation Blagojevich had with President-elect Obama. The government claims a conspiracy existed from October 22, 2008 continuing through December 9, 2008.6 That conversation is relevant to the defense of the government’s theory of an ongoing conspiracy. Only Rod Blagojevich and President Obama can testify to the contents of that conversation. The defense is allowed to present evidence that corroborates the defendant’s testimony.

The spouse of Rep. Michael Zalewski (D-Chicago) nearly doubled her state salary when Quinn named her to a $117,043-a-year spot on the Illinois Pollution Control Board.

Read more at the Sun-Times