Chicago Daily Observer

News that overage racial warrior Jesse Jackson promised that an Obama administration would end slavish U.S. concern for Israel should not be taken as a serious rupture in U.S. Jewish allegiance to the Democratic party. Religion only pertains to the miniscule religiously observant Jewish population. For the most part, prosperity has lessened ties to the old faith. Secular Jews use their identification for social and political purposes…professing to take umbrage at what they call transgression of Jefferson’s “wall of separation”-especially with respect to Christmas observations on public property: but for the most part this is all show. But they have long since passed into observance of a civil religion…something like Rotary Club blandness…with most of them happily trooping to the polls to vote for Obama and all other Democrats.

Old man Jackson…chafing that his influence is declining beyond the earshot of his stentorian rhetoric… spoke at the first World Policy ... Read More...

I wish George Carlin had been able to hang onto life at least through last week.

Just think about the dual sociopathologies he would have observed in (a) all the attention paid to the symbolic fate of Barack Obama’s testes and (b) the goofy journalistic soul searching that went on in reporting exactly what Rev. Jesse Jackson said he would like to do to them.

OK—we know only the most liberated of publications and cable outlets will permit use of Carlin’s seven unsayable (unprintable?) words.

Sophisticated periodicals ranging from the Chicago Reader to the New Yorker will print the four-letter word for coitus at the drop of a hat—or pair of pants. Most others use asterisks or dashes for the middle two or final three letters. Some will refer to the “F-word,” while hipper places call it the “F-bomb.”

But how about the series of words that are perfectly acceptable ... Read More...

NOTE: Today we welcome a new columnist to our Observer fold—Carol Felsenthal, author of the best-seller “Clinton in Exile” available at your local booksellers. Carol is a resident of Old Town and a blogging contributor to The Huffington Post.com. She is a contributing editor of “Chicago” magazine and has written book and magazine profiles of such people as Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Daley, Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Katharine Graham. Her Katharine Graham piece is being adapted to cable TV by HBO. She has been a guest on my WLS-AM program and frequently appears on “Beyond the Beltway with Bruce DuMont.” We welcome her to our growing list of columnists. –Tom Roeser.

How must Jesse Jackson have felt last January when political pundits and Barack Obama aides erupted in outrage after Bill Clinton dismissed Obama’s big win in the South Carolina primary as nothing more than Jackson’s wins there in ... Read More...

No one, white or black, has been cut more slack by the supine mainstream white-dominated media than the Rev. Jesse Jackson. They’ve caved in as big business has because Jackson is a “people pleaser,” manipulating handclapping enthusiasts who storm his meetings for rhetorical excitement-and media fear if they put him down they will be labeled racist. In Chicago, the “Sun-Times” unforgivably gives this demagogue a full spread column every week to propagandize DNC boilerplate. And the results of this wholesale caving-in richly show: an arrogant, puffed up, swaggering phony “minister” (his “ordination” casual with some additional honorific degrees conferred during congregational rallies)… who has mastered the art of the con….extorting concessions from major companies he has blackmailed including the hiring of two sons with no experience who have a wealthy beer franchise… who falsified his closeness to Martin Luther King (in reality King’s definitive biographer, Taylor Branch, wrote King ... Read More...