Chicago Daily Observer

Throughout the Spring and into the Summer, the Obama campaign was assuring us of the inevitability of his nomination within the next twenty-four hours.

The Obama team urged us to do the math and insisted that further resistance was futile. In the weeks that followed, however, Hillary Clinton continued to rack up primary victories in state after state. With the finish line clearly in sight, Obama stumbled and struggled.

As events turned out, the nomination contest continued almost to the start of the Democratic National Convention. Relying upon arcane party rules and a brokered deal to deny full voting rights to disputed delegates from Florida and Michigan, two states that dared to advance their primaries in defiance of the well established tradition of the party promoting the primacy of Iowa and New Hampshire, unless Obama was awarded delegates from the two states that had been carried by Clinton (full disclosure: ... Read More...

The Associated Press has taken to quoting hecklers at McCain rallies;

McCain’s remarks about Obama were interrupted with shouts of “socialist,” “terrorist” and “liar.” At another time, a man in the bleaches [sic] shouted “No more ACORN,” referring to a group that registers poor voters.

Poor poor voters! This guy must really have it in for them!

Actually, as it turns out, poor voters aren’t the only ones Acorn—an acronym for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now—registers. The group has been in the news in several key states the past few days:

• Nevada. “State authorities on Tuesday raided an organization that registers low-income people to vote”that would be Acorn“alleging that its canvassers falsified forms with bogus names, fake addresses or famous personalities,” the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports. “The secretary of state’s office launched an investigation after noticing that names did not match addresses and that most members ... Read More...

Convicted felon Tony Rezko. Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is hard to think of any presidential candidate before Barack Obama sporting associations with three more execrable characters. Yet let the McCain campaign raise the issue, and the mainstream media begin fulminating about dirty campaigning tinged with racism and McCarthyite guilt by association.

But associations are important. They provide a significant insight into character. They are particularly relevant in relation to a potential president as new, unknown, opaque and self-contained as Obama. With the economy overshadowing everything, it may be too late politically to be raising this issue. But that does not make it, as conventional wisdom holds, in any way illegitimate.

McCain has only himself to blame for the bad timing. He should months ago have begun challenging Obama’s associations, before the economic meltdown allowed the Obama campaign (and the mainstream media, which is ... Read More...

Cubs lose. White Sox lose. Elections are depressing. Stock market tanks. Economy shrivels. The Bears? Who knows? The Bulls? Who cares?

We need some positive news, and so I offer:

The Blackhawks.

Correct, the Chicago professional hockey team that has been in hibernation for the past.. well, can anyone remember off the top of his head when it last won the Stanley Cup? (The answer is 1961; I had to Google it.)

The same Blackhawks whose owners treated the team’s fans worse than any team in professional sports. The owners that blacked out local telecasts of the Blackhawks because if fans wanted to see the team, let ‘em buy a ticket, a policy that emptied thousands of seats. The team that once was the jewel of Chicago sportsdom, but slide in stature behind the minor league Wolves hockey team playing in Rosemont.

Two generations of Wirtz family ownership established itself ... Read More...

The Chicago Sun-Times reports on Chicago opening 15 new high schools.Let's quote a CBS TV Chicago report on Chicago's amazing declining school age population from January of 2008:

Half-empty schools are ‘unacceptable’ because they don't serve their students or the communities they're supposed to anchor, Mayor Richard M. Daley said Thursday, setting the stage for the biggest wave of school closings in decades. Officials contend 147 of 417 neighborhood elementary schools are from half to more than two-thirds empty because enrollment has declined by 41,000 students in the last seven years. A tentative CPS plan calls for up to 50 under-used schools to close, consolidate with other schools or phase out over the next five years.

So, if you lost 41,000 school aged kids would you be building 15 new schools? Unless you were from Barack Obama's corrupt town. Read More...