Chicago Daily Observer

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Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama tried to direct more than $3 million in taxpayer funds to a Chicago museum whose chairman is one of the Illinois senator’s largest campaign fundraisers.

Mr. Obama has twice since fiscal 2006 sought to have taxpayers foot the bill for a new theater projector and other equipment at the Adler Planetarium on the Lake Michigan waterfront. Neither of the requests, which totaled $3.3 million, was approved by Congress, the museum said.

The planetarium’s chairman, then and still, is Frank Clark, chief executive of ComEd, a unit of Chicago-based Exelon Energy. He has pledged to raise more than $200,000 for Mr. Obama’s run for the White House.

Roger Ebert, blessed with the wisdom that comes from sitting in a dark theatre looking at a movie screen for, what?, tens of thousands of hours over his lifetime, piles on Republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. Read it here if you can stand it.

After wandering around, in apparent confusion about what to describe as the worst of Palin’s faults (one of them being she’s just unbearably common) he appears to have settled on this: She’s been out of the country only once. And that, gasp, wasn’t at the Festival de Cannes. Lord, lord, how can a person like her know anything at all about the real world?

Well, maybe Ebert can explain why wisdom automatically comes from being a world traveler. Which would make jet setters—the company that Ebert prefers—the wisest, smartest people in the world. There’s a logical falacy, a missing middle term as it might be ... Read More...

The church does not endorse candidates for office,” said Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George in a letter read at all masses last Sunday.

Yes, it does.

Not directly but, yes, it does.

Though John F. Kennedy, our first and only Catholic president, promised in 1960 to not impose his faith on public policy, George has said directly that Kennedy was “wrong.”

On July 2, 2008, spot Oil Prices topped out at $144/Barrel, sparking doomsayers everywhere to gnash teeth and quit boating so much. Today, September 11, 2008, Oil Prices have crashed to $102/Barrel, a 29% drop, crushing speculators, refiners and the oil services sector at the bottom of the pile.

Exxon Mobile stock is at at 52 week low with a price drop around 25%. Halliburton is also getting slammed, down 36% for the year. Leading refiners, such as Tesoro are hit hardest, down nearly 75% from yearly highs. Pension funds, employee-owners, individual investors, and even the occasional oil company executive have seen their savings washed away, in some kind of windfall to the average consumer.

Isn’t it time that the most powerful economy on earth was able to support the oil companies? Don’t our leaders in Washington care about the retirees who are harmed when their ... Read More...

I’m starting this column with two quotes from Patrick J. Buchanan, he of the Republican-cum-Independent-cum-Nutty Isolationist slant, master of shouted punditry.
“Anatomy before ability” he shouted. “Plucked out of the feminist movement and elevated despite manifestly inferior recommendations!”

I beg his pardon??? Was he speaking of the newly-anointed Republican Vice Presidential nominee?

Actually, no. When he referred to Sarah Palin, moose-slayer and governor for two years of a state with approximately the population of Schaumburg, Buchanan last week said she was “obviously qualified” to run this country if it came to that.

His earlier judgement, 24 years ago, was of another woman chosen as the first female candidate for the vice presidency of a major party. That was Geraldine Ferraro, long-time congresswoman from New York, Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale’s choice for Vice President on his ticket in 1984.

Remember 1984? Some of us still do. At that time ... Read More...

From the New Yorker story on Obama. Here were Obama’s thoughts about the attacks of September 11, four days afterward:

“The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.”

“[P]overty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.” Strange, considering our attackers were wealthy and educated, connected and ecstatic. You know, if Obama is going to ... Read More...