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 ... 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...

The Fed’s Next Move
Insight on whether there is anything else the Fed can do, with Brian Wesbury, First Trust Advisors; CNBC‘s Bill Seidman & Rick Santelli

Link to Video Offsite

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Nov 2008 85.60 -0.99

Dec 2008 85.60 -1.02

Jan 2009 85.90 -1.01

Feb 2009 86.10 -1.09

Mar 2009 87.11 -0.37

RBOB Gasoline

Nov 2008 1.9911 -0.0362

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Big Media want the presidential campaign to focus on “the issues” by which they mean the mesh of confusing statistics on the economy, tax cuts, energy and health care by which Obama…twisting and turning…endeavors to make himself invisible to hair-splitting evaluation. On the economy he is a master at changing direction to obfuscate the fact that he is a redistributionist. On foreign policy he is a veritable chameleon hiding the fact that in debate with Hillary Clinton he advocated negotiation with Iran with no preconditions. On energy he tongues-in-cheek a mention of drilling and says as an aside “yes, nuclear” but is the same-old, same-old. In issue debates, frankly, the truth isn’t in him. As he never has recognized absolutes of any kind, he is at a distinct advantage. He is a giant squid, inking the water with deception and the establishment media cheer him on-warning McCain that the worst ... Read More...

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained documents detailing earmarks submitted by Barack Obama on behalf of his family and political supporters during his time in the Illinois State Senate. The documents were obtained under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. Among the projects detailed in the documents uncovered by Judicial Watch:

Community of St. Sabina: In July, 2000, Obama helped secure a $100,000 grant for the Community of St. Sabina, a church headed by Father Michael Pfleger, a controversial and radical Catholic priest and Obama campaign contributor. Pfleger made news in March, 2008, for mocking then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ, formerly run by Obama’s personal pastor the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Read More...

As Cook County sheriff, I am responsible for running a 10,000-inmate jail, providing patrols to unincorporated areas and securing the courts.

But perhaps no part of our job is as difficult as the work done by our eviction units. On any given day, our deputies could be asked to throw a family out of their home, with all of their possessions left on a curb—sometimes pilfered through by those living nearby.

Where mortgage firms see pieces of paper, my deputies see people.

Yet no matter how difficult they are, evictions are part of our job.

What isn’t part of our job, however, is to carry out work on behalf of the multi-billion-dollar banks and mortgage industries.

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Five weeks ago, one of our regulars here at SAB took note of a Michelle Malkin piece on ACORN’s nefarious “voter registration” activities, here. Included was the fact that the Obama campaign had been forced to correct its filings with the FEC regarding payments made from “advance work” to “get-out-the-vote” work instead. ACORN, which claims to be non-partisan and a non-profit, was paid over $800,000 by the Obama campaign, through its front group, Citizens Services, Inc. for that so-called “advance work.” Obviously, the documentation supporting that “advance work” claim by Obama was fraudulent.

According to its website,

ACORN is a non-profit, non-partisan social justice organization with national headquarters in New York, New Orleans and Washington, D.C. To maintain independence, ACORN does not accept government funding and is not tax exempt.

A specific, month by month account of money paid by the Obama ... Read More...

So let’s sum up Obama’s Chicago connections. His chief financial supporter was Tony Rezko, now on his way to federal prison. His spiritual adviser and mentor was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, of “God damn America” fame. And the guy who got him his only administrative job and put him in charge of doling out $50 million is William Ayers, a terrorist who was a domestic Osama bin Laden in his youth.

Even apart from the details of the Obama/Ayers connection, two key points emerge:

a) Obama lied and misled the American people in his description of his relationship with Ayers as casual and arm’s-length; and

b) Obama was consciously guided by Ayers’s radical philosophy, rooted in the teachings of leftist Saul Alinksy, in his distribution of CAC grant funds.

Since Obama is asking us to let him direct education spending by the federal government and wants us to trust ... Read More...

To me, a terrorist is one who attempts to create malleable fear in a population through random acts of mayhem; someone who uses his own amoral unpredictability to magnify the power he is attempting to exert in an effort to create change.

Someone who bombs an abortion clinic or animal-research facility, say, in the middle of the night is not a terrorist, by this definition, because the purpose is not to prompt employees or clients to fear for their safety.

Someone who bombs an abortion clinic or animal-research facility in the middle of day is a terrorist, by this definition, because the purpose is to prompt fear not only among employees and clients of that clinic, but among employees and clients of other clinics.

Put another way, terrorists want to take innocent lives; violent guerrilla protesters (if that’s the best way to say it) don’t.

I see such a practical ... Read More...

Maintenance products distributor W.W. Grainger Inc. said Thursday its daily sales rose 7 percent in August, as sales from an acquisition offset lower demand for seasonal products.

Grainger said its sales were boosted by about 1 percentage point by its lab safety supply division’s acquisition of Highsmith Inc., but decreased by about 2 percentage points as a result of lower sales of seasonal products.

There were two fewer selling days in August 2008 compared with the year-ago period.

Grainger shares fell 89 cents to $87.50 in morning trading.

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Pending home sales rose 7.4 percent from July to August, an unexpected piece of positive news for the battered U.S. housing market.

The National Association of Realtors said Wednesday its seasonally adjusted index of pending sales for existing homes rose to 93.4 from an upwardly revised July reading of 87. The reading was the highest since June 2007.

The index, which sunk to a record low of 83 in March, stood at 85.8 in August 2007.

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