Chicago Daily Observer

Today, I received seventeen pieces of mail which included an assortment of advertisements, bills, a bank statement, a letter from a law office and a union newsletter. Unfortunately, sixteen of the various items were addressed to other residents of my street and delivered to me in error despite the fact that each of the envelopes appeared to be addressed correctly.

I filed a complaint with the post office, but it seemed to be a thankless task undertaken solely for the purpose of exercise on my part. Quality customer service no longer seems to matter. Complaints about the Chicago post office seem to be routine. Like Mark Twain once said about the weather, everyone talks about it, but nothing is done about it.

I am dating myself by saying this, but, as a child, I can remember when the mail was delivered twice daily and the cost of a first class ... Read More...

Taxpayers face a tab of as much as $200 billion for a government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the formerly semi-autonomous mortgage finance clearinghouses. And Sen. Christopher Dodd, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, has the gall to ask in a Bloomberg Television interview: “I have a lot of questions about where was the administration over the last eight years.”

We’ll save you some the Senator some trouble.

During this period, Sen. Richard Shelby led a small group of legislators favoring reform, including fellow Republican Sens. John Sununu, Chuck Hagel and Elizabeth Dole. Meanwhile, Dodd—who along with Democratic Sens. John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were the top four recipients of Fannie and Freddie campaign contributions from 1988 to 2008—actively opposed such measures and further weakened existing regulation.

Sarah Palin sure has accomplished one grand task: she’s unwittingly unmasked a bunch of hateful, elitist, sexist fools for the liberal posers that they are. Our next contestant: Roger Ebert. Let’s take a look.

I want a vice president who is better, wiser, well-traveled, has met world leaders, who three months ago had an opinion on Iraq.

COMMENT: Yes, Sarah Palin is one of the few Americans who never had an opinion on Iraq! Even when her son joined the military she never formed an opinion! When she said America better have a clear exit strategy, she wasn’t voicing an opinion, she was just musing! Now, it’s true, she hasn’t been asked much for her opinion given that she is the governor of Alaska. Come to think of it, I don’t know what Rod Blagojevich’s opinion of Iraq is either. He must not have one.

Sarah Palin’s views make me fear that the Republican party has finally lost its mind.

As for sex, the hypocrisy of her outing her pregnant daughter in front of millions of people, hard on the heels of her concealing her own pregnancy (her faith in abstinence applying, apparently, only to non-Palins), is nicely balanced by her hypocrisy in gushing with loving support of her teenage daughter after using a line-item veto to cut funding for a transitional home for teenage mothers in Alaska.

Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party’s cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not ... Read More...