Chicago Daily Observer

Barack Obama’s ACORN is part of the problem. Involved in voter registration fraud, embezzlement, ACORN also bears some responsibility for the housing crash. Townhall:

ACORN’s “victories” often have harmed rather than helped their intended beneficiaries. ACORN-sponsored community groups, for instance, regularly have invoked the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 in their attempts to block bank acquisitions and mergers with flimsy charges of mortgage lending “discrimination.”

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We want to add our congratulations to the US Olympic Men’s, 4×100 Freestyle Relay Team. A new world-record, and an amazing anchor leg comeback over the favored French team, was simply amazing. How ’bout them apples?
The technology behind the new Speedo swimsuit worn by most swimming medalists in Beijing is a reminder of the fact that the globe is still in the midst of a technological boom. But, unlike the 1990s, this productivity growth is not holding back inflation. Neither is weak economic growth – experienced in the US since last fall when the subprime crisis first unfolded.

In fact, the value of the gold in a gold medal is up 115% since 2004, while silver prices are up 130%. Much of this increase in commodity prices has occurred in the past year, pushing the 12-month changes in consumer prices to 5% and producer prices up to 9.2%.

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Sen. Obama in the Washington Post lectures: "I think oil companies are amoral. They want to make as much money as they can for their shareholders, which is what corporations do," he says. "The difference is the nature of the kind of outsized profits they make that may have no relationship to their investments or their production. The fact, for example, [that] the shortage of refinery capacity could actually increase their profits so the less they invest the more they make indicates that you are not dealing with someone making widgets out there."

If making profits is amoral, then would the great loss makers of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Countrywide be highly moral businesses?

The concept of the Demand Curve seems to have eluded Sen. Obama in his theocratic views on the morality of making profits.

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Here is a published interview with CBS 2 Political Editor Mike Flannery about Barack Obama contained in “Chicago Life” magazine political issue which was distributed with “The New York Times” yesterday (I stopped when he got to non-germane issues i.e. the legislature, Blagojevich, the admittedly weak state of the GOP).

In it you find a serious rupture of a newsman’s neutrality with a politician he covers. Notice the exhilaration that Obama was driving his own car, American-made and SMARTLY, too. Notice there are no leaks from inside the Obama campaign but there is no recognition of reported newsmen’s dissatisfaction with how they’re kept from the candidate. Nary a mention of that. Notice he predicts Obama will be president in 2006 and importunes him to invite him to the White House Christmas party, give him a sample Christmas tree ornament and allow a picture to be taken with ... Read More...

“John McCain is a known quantity… You don’t look at John and say, ‘Who the heck is he?’ he’s a veteran, he’s a guy who got pretty banged up in Vietnam. He can deal with crisis. There’s some uncertainty about Senator Obama.”

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Read the newest trash-Obama book, check Tribune columnist John Kass, hear some of my Hyde Park buddies and you get a picture of Barack Obama as a traitorous cog in this incarnation of the Daley machine.

Others still revere him as a pure and cleansing light, lasering through the old politics, beaming us up to Democratic Nirvana.

Both portraits are pure bulljive, depending on which surface of this complex, multifaceted politician glints in your eye. There is something of the “Being There” quality to Obama: He is so new and exotic and appealing that everyone has a personal interpretation of who and what he really is—a blank slate we inscribe with our own dreams.

This is largely because Obama never fully plants himself in anyone’s garden. The columnist David Brooks had an interesting riff on this, pointing out, for example, that while he was on the University of Chicago Law ... Read More...

Last February, Northern Illinois University won state permission to build an expensive and advanced proton-therapy cancer-treatment center in the suburb of West Chicago. It would be the first such facility in Illinois, joining five other centers in the nation.

But it won’t be the last: Proton therapy has a bright future. Doctors say it’s often superior to X-ray treatment: Its energy can be more finely focused on a cancerous tumor, sparing surrounding tissue to a significant degree. So far, it’s been used most often on children and patients with brain tumors.The promise of proton therapy explains why several more centers are in planning or construction stages nationwide—including one proposed by Central DuPage Hospital for Warrenville, about six miles from the NIU facility.

And that’s too close, according to the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. In April, the board issued a preliminary rejection of Central DuPage’s plan to build.

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A state senator called for two executives of the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board to be fired because they were leaders during a time of corruption on the board.

Edward Hospital in Naperville and Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield have projects awaiting board action this week.

State Sen. Bill Brady, R-Bloomington, held a news conference in Chicago on Thursday to publicly urge Gov. Rod Blagojevich and Illinois Department of Public Health Director Damon Arnold to replace Jeffrey Mark, executive secretary of the planning board, and David Carvalho, the health department’s ex-officio representative on the planning board and the Task Force on Health Planning Reform. Brady is one of eight lawmakers on the 19-member Task Force on Health Planning Reform.

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On July 29 a circuit court judge ordered the Uptown Theatre onto the auction block, and the sale had one immediately obvious benefit—it eliminated the tangle of owners, partial owners, mortgages, and liens surrounding the property and made it clear who’s actually responsible for the place. Chicago-based Jam Productions won with a bid of $3.2 million—and surprisingly, the only other bid accepted was from the holder of the first mortgage, not from one of Jam’s competitors. [Update: The sale won’t be official until approved by a judge, but most observers feel that’s a mere formality.]

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