Chicago Daily Observer

Today’s Philadelphia Speech, as it may become known, is a milepost in American race relations, approaching the significance of the “I have a dream speech” delivered in 1963 by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Just about everything Obama said in the speech was exactly right.

The carefully crafted speech is a landmark because it is was built around the premise that America can change.

“The profound mistake of Reverend [Jeremiah] Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society,” Obama said. “It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old—is still irrevocably bound to ... Read More...

Just before Christmas in 2005 an FBI informant, posing as an al-Qaeda member, met with Narseal Batiste and discussed plans to build an Islamic army. Batiste, a former FedEx truck driver, wanted to wage a jihad “just as good or greater than 9/11.” His targets: the FBI building in Miami and Chicago’s Sears Tower. The most iconic symbol of Chicago’s ingenuity, innovation, and prosperity is a fitting sign of human progress––one that seemed to beg an attack from the jihadists. Just as the World Trade Centers stood at the center of American economic power, the Sears Tower is filled with some of the best Midwestern marketers of global capitalism.

Had the Tower on 233 South Wacker Drive been demolished by these American jihadists, it would have hearkened back to Chicago’s perseverance in October of 1871. The ... Read More...

Loretta Napoleoni, writing in the Chicago Tribune would have us believe that ”love, hate, power and greed” are causing bad investments in the housing market, which is a bit surprising to those of us who bought homes just wanting a roof over our heads.

She then goes on to connect “Prime Minister John Majors (sic), former president George Bush and the Arab super-rich, among whom are members of the bin Laden family” as founders of Carlyle Group, and Carlyle Capital.

In Loretta’s melodrama, Carlyle Capital has gone bankrupt, showing those bad old world leaders and Arabs a thing or two about what happens when you dare to make an investment.

Of course, Loretta forgets to mention that Carlyle Group is doing just fine, while the bankrupt entity, Carlyle Capital, was only 15% owned by the Group. The Carlyle Group is organized much like a McDonald’s with a “ringed ... Read More...

Barack Obama desperately needs to distance himself from his spiritual mentor and pastor of two decades, Jeremiah Wright, Jr. But the man who wants America to believe his promise of unspecified change adopts the carefully-parsed language of a Harvard-trained lawyer. There is a fundamental discordance in spirit between a canny, evasive lawyer inserting loopholes, and the smiling vision of unity and change you can believe in.

Here is the key paragraph of Obama’s statement, bizarrely first published on the Huffington Post, a website that once featured Senator Joseph Lieberman in minstrel blackface. There are multiple evasions buried in each line, analyzed below:

Blacks should not sing “God Bless America” but “God damn America.”

So thundered Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a video that was offered for sale by Trinity United Church of Christ about the government’s treatment of black Americans:

“The government gives them drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing `God Bless America’ No,no,no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme!”

In addition to cursing America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after September 11, 2001 that the U. S. had brought on al Qaeda’s attacks because of its own terrorism. “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki and we nuked far more than ... Read More...

The likelihood that Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will open its second store within Chicago city limits just got smaller.

The city of Chicago declined a request to allow the world’s largest retailer to build a store at the 50-acre Chatham Market on the South Side, a former steel plant site that the discount chain has been eyeing for at least four years.

Arnold Randall, commissioner for Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development, notified the project’s developer, Archon Group LP, a unit of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., on Friday that he would not let the project move forward