Chicago Daily Observer

Children’s Chorus excerpted from the motion picture adaptation of George Orwell’s “1984.”

Is Barack Obama the incarnation of Big Brother or does he fancy himself as a dictator or a divine right monarch? Perhaps he would prefer to be “President for Life” like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

I was frightened and disturbed by the familiarity of the children’s campaign video that is circulating on the Internet. The exploitation of children for political purposes is nothing new, but Obama supporters have taken it to a sickening new low. If any other candidate or his supporters had staged a similar event, Obama’s leftist friends would report those responsible to the Department of Children and Family Services.

Watching the preschool students in the ... Read More...

News Anchor, Russell Kinsaul: Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has asking Missouri law enforcement to target anyone who lies or runs a misleading television ad during the presidential campaign.

News 4’s John Mills is live at the County Election Board in Maplewood. He’s been learning more about which members of law enforcement are getting involved in this. John, tell us more about this.

John Mills, reporter: Russell, good evening. Prosecutors and sheriffs from across Missouri are joining something called the “Barack Obama Truth Squad.” Two high-profile prosecutors are part of the team. We met them this afternoon in the Central West this afternoon. They are Jennifer Joyce of the city (and) Bob McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney. They will be reminding voters that Barack Obama is a Christian, who wants to cut taxes for anyone making less than $250,000 a year. They also say they plan to respond ... Read More...

MORE THUGGISHNESS: Obama threatening the licenses of TV stations that run NRA ads.

Haven't we had about enough of this? Related item here. They told me that if George W. Bush were re-elected there would be brazen efforts to suppress free speech on political grounds -- and they were right!

UPDATE: Still more on the ad-silencing effort here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: "I fear that under the Obama administration, the lawyers sending these letters will be government employees."

Plus, from Jacob Sullum at Reason, Why Obama is Vulnerable On the Second Amendment.

MORE: Prosecutors and sheriffs threatening to prosecute Obama critics?

Thugs on parade. Will the U.S. Department of Justice investigate? Or are they compromised?

STILL MORE: This is the ad that's got the Obama campaign so upset. You can make up your own mind, but it doesn't seem especially unusual for a political ... Read More...

Boy, that didn’t take long.

In July, Mayor Daley promised to purchase and demolish Michael Reese Hospital for no more than $85 million.

He said he’d turn around and sell the property to a developer for at least $85 million, and the developer could build a 7,500-unit housing complex suitable for Olympic housing. All in all, Daley vowed, the deal wouldn’t cost taxpayers a cent.

Well, on Sunday, Fran Spielman broke the news in the Sun-Times that the cleanup of the property would cost $32 million, not $20 million, as originally estimated. So Daley will either have to spend more public money to get it ready for resale, negotiate a new deal with Medline Industries to get them to sell it for less, or find a developer willing to pay more than $85 million for the site. We haven’t even consummated the deal and it’s looking like a boondoggle.

In his acceptance speech last night, Obama outlined his goals, placing him squarely in the image of a generic Democrat, especially those anxious for more government safety nets. That would help him connect with his most troublesome demographic (according to Charlie Cook of the Cook Report): whites over fifty years old. Obama knows generic Democrats are outperforming him, so he has apparently decided to join them.

Obama built last night on the blocks that had been set out by the Democratic Party speakers earlier in the week: the soaring rhetoric of Ted Kennedy’s fight for universal health care, the sympathetic bio laid out by Michelle Obama of her husband: a hard working, smart, empathetic family man; a Hillary Clinton who told us if you liked her programs, you’ll like those of Barack Obama; a Bill Clinton, who stamped his endorsement not just on the Obama programs, but on Obama himself ... Read More...

Open Invitation to Our Readers

Thursday, September 4, 2008
7pm Film and Question & Answer Session
8:30pm Reception
Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art
220 East Chicago Ave
Chicago, IL 60611

Where are all the free-speech absolutists when you need them? Over the past month, left-wing partisans and Democratic lawyers have waged a brass-knuckled intimidation campaign against GOP donors, TV and radio stations, and even an investigative journalist — because they have all dared to question the radical cult of Barack Obama. A chill wind blows, but where the valiant protectors of political dissent are, nobody knows.

On August 11, I called the American Civil Liberties Union national headquarters in New York for comment about the Chicago gangland tactics of one of these groups — a nonprofit called “Accountable America” that is spearheaded by a former operative of the Obama-endorsing MoveOn outfit.

“Accountable America” is trolling campaign-finance databases and targeting conservative donors with “warning” letters in a thuggish attempt to depress Republican fundraising. (You’ll be interested to know that the official registered agent of Accountable America is Laurence Gold, a ... Read More...

If you think this is outrageous, wait until Obama becomes president..

His campaign tries to force a radio station to not air an Obama critic

Unhappy that Chicago’s WGN radio would ask writer Stanley Kurtz what he has found in documents linking Obama with one-time fugitive radical Bill Ayers, Obama’s henchmen organized a campaign to flood the station with angry calls.

Sure, it’s their right to protest Kurtz’ appearance on the highly respected and long-running “Extension 720 with Milt Rosenberg,” but it is clearly WGN‘s right to have as a guest anyone they wish. It says so right in the Bill of Rights.

Obama general counsel Bob Bauer today sent a second, sharper letter to the Justice Department, directly attacking the Dallas billionaire funding a harsh attack ad, Harold Simmons.

“We reiterate our request that the Department of Justice fulfill its commitment to take prompt action to investigate and to prosecute the American issues Project, and we further request that the Department of Justice investigate and prosecute Howard (sic) Simmons for a knowing and willful violation of the individual aggregate contribution limits,” he wrote.

He called the group’s activities “patently illegal.”

Bauer made the case that Simmons’ group fulfilling its a real nonprofit charter because it hasn’t spent any money on anything other than attacking Obama.

The American Issues Project released a statement responding to the letter.

“Having failed in its attempts to get our legal, factual and fully-supported ad off the air, Barack Obama’s campaign now wants to put our donors in ... Read More...

These are dangerous times we’re living in. Dangerous times for Americans who want to keep their inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Government is growing at an alarming rate and paying itself hefty salaries.

In Grover Norquist’s book, Leave Us Alone, he writes:

“In 2004, the average wage-and-benefit package for a private-sector worker was $51,876. The average federal worker earned $100,178 in wages and benefits. (For wages alone, private sector workers earned $42,635 and federal employees took home $66,589.) Total wages and benefits see federal workers taking in almost twice as much each year.” Besides the wage disparities, government leaders are telling us, the private citizens, what we can do, when we can do it, and what we have to give up.

If we sell our homes, we now have to pay our local government a sales tax on the sale. If we own a car, ... Read More...

14th congressional district Republican candidate Jim Oberweis delivered a blow to the intolerance of academia Tuesday night. It was on the Family PAC cruise when he handed DePaul University Conservative Coalition Vice President Nick Hahn a check for $1,000 to help defray the $2,500 cost of security required by university officials before co-founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps Chris Simcox was allowed to talk, according to Justine Perry.

Hahn’s group suffered what Peter Labarbera calls “the hecklers’ veto.”

The wealthy North Shore has become ground zero for a well-funded Realtors group that has launched campaigns to fight everything from the creation of historic districts to sprinkler requirements for new homes.

Using techniques normally associated with well-heeled political campaigns, the North Shore-Barrington Association of Realtors (NSBAR) has launched Web sites, sent out slick mailings, placed automated telephone calls, conducted opinion polls and used other tools to rally support for the group’s position on issues loosely grouped under the umbrella of homeowners’ rights.

Mary Mitchell wrote a puzzling column for the Sunday Sun-Times. Her subject was the appearance of the president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, at the UNITY conference of minority journalists in McCormick Place. Mitchell wondered what he was doing there, given that Wade was the first foreign head of state UNITY had ever invited to speak, since he’s “been accused of unfairly suppressing journalists by locking them up and threatening them.”

And sure enough, during an interview Thursday with a group of journalists he “showed shocking disdain for journalists in his own country,” asserting that the “Senegalese press is infiltrated by politics. I am telling you if you do not give them information, they are going to invent it. They insult people. They accuse people when they don’t even have any proof.”

But what troubled Mitchell more—she found it “appalling”—is that Wade’s speech Friday was disrupted. Someone shouted, “I ... Read More...

“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state: the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”—United States Constitution, second amendment of the Bill of Rights

Subject only to the police power, the right of the individual citizen to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.—- Constitution of the State of Illinois, Article 1, Section 22

Illinois’ 1970 Constitution provides gun grabbing counties and city councils with an invaluable mechanism so as to create two strata of gun rights in Illinois. One strata that would pass muster south of I. 80 in the more crimson part of Illinois, and another that would enable the northern regions of Illinois to infringe upon the second amendment rights of the law-abiding citizenry in cities like Evanston, Wilmette, and Chicago. The clause that enables such constitutional mischief is that pesky “subject only to the ... Read More...

It’s not quite clear what Obama meant by this. If he meant that the military had taken over too many functions that normally should be handled by the State Department, then that echoes what Defense Secretary Robert Gates said this week. It seems to reference the costs associated with reopening consulates and doubling the Peace Corps, but that wouldn’t come close to matching what we spend at the Pentagon. The phrasing of it — a “civilian national security force” — sounds much more like a quasi-military organization operating within the US under the control of the federal government.

The media needs to ask Obama about it ... Read More...

There was a pro-Second Amendment rally at the Thompson Center on July 11, 2008, and bloggers know about it.

There were quite a few people, up to 500, by some counts, photos and some reporting on the events that occurred, by an independent website or two.

Some pundits questioned whether the Chicago Tribune would cover the rally.

But, to no one’s surprise, the Chicago Tribune skipped the story, regardless of the significance of the recent Supreme Court decision, with a search returning a warmed over story of professional activist Fr. Pfleger instead of the news. Perhaps the Tribune did not have room in the paper for the story, as they are running a series of windy PR pieces painting Sen. Obama is a centrist demanding individual responsiblity, despite all evidence in his voting record to the contrary.

Kudo’s to ABC-7 and Chicago ... Read More...

The ballyhoo over the Supreme Court’s recent decision that declared Washington DC’s handgun ban unconstitutional, and therefore implied the same for Chicago, didn’t last through the holiday. Unfortunately, neither did five poor souls who fell victim to gun violence in downtown Chicago during the long weekend.

“Why should our streets be open to someone carrying a gun?” Daley remarked after the Supreme Court handed down the ruling. “Do [people] have a right to carry a gun on the CTA?” Daley’s theatric rant blamed the rich and the powerful for protecting themselves but not the poor. “Those who are rich always feel safe … those who are in power always feel safe.”

Chicago’s grit is the stuff of legend. The city’s hard-scrabble history conjures images of wind-beaten dock hands; rugged immigrants working punishing factory jobs; and 500 acres of slaughterhouses and their hard-time killing floors.

At the same time, Chicago has always adopted a work-hard/play-hard mentality.

The city drank its way through Prohibition; its brothels became legendary, as author Karen Abbott detailed in a great new book, “Sin in the Second City”; and though Chicago today has a well-earned reputation for fine dining and cutting-edge cuisine, it is more known for sating its hunger with a greasy kielbasa, a thick steak, or an inch-deep slice from Gino’s East.

But Chicago seems to have lost a bit of its hard edge. The town that poet Carl Sandburg called “a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities” has itself gone soft, thanks to meddlesome politicians..

Those 27 words—the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—probably caused more violent argument and political polarization through the years than any sentence since the Emancipation Proclamation.

In essence the question was whether the founding parents were saying that anyone, anytime, had a right to own a gun or whether that right was restricted to the members of a militia—or National Guard as we would know it today.

Gun-control advocates—mostly liberal Democrats and card-carrying members of the American Civil Liberties Union like me—took the latter interpretation as gospel, while a substantial majority of Americans, strongly encouraged by the National Rifle Association, took the other side, tossing out the initial qualifying phrase.

In June the U.S. Supreme Court finally made a definitive ruling, ... Read More...

Our favorite non-religious holiday is Independence Day, celebrating the Declaration of Independence, which declared freedom from the Kingdom of Great Britain.

In 1776, America was an agricultural economy, with levels of productivity that lagged significantly behind most of Western Europe. Since then, on a very consistent basis, these United States have increased living standards and wealth. Today, US GDP is more than double the next largest country (Japan), and no country is as powerful – economically or militarily.

This nation is blessed with abundant natural resources, ports and an agreeable climate. But, the number one attribute of economic success is freedom, which allows people to find and exploit their own God-given talents. This freedom creates a sense of adventurism and entrepreneurship that many other societies strive to emulate. It also breeds optimism, which has been consistently reinforced by more than two centuries of success.

Despite this history, Pouting Pundits ... Read More...

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that gun ownership is an individual right turned Mayor Richard Daley into a fiery pillar, visible to the naked eye as far away as Rockford.

Daley declared the District of Columbia vs. Heller decision to be “frightening,” “outrageous” and a “return to the days of the Wild West.” You would have thought the court had ruled that free bazookas were to be handed out to gang members..

Joined by leaders from the immigrant community, Aldermen George Cardenas of the 12th Ward and Manny Flores of the 1st Ward today introduced a resolution for the Chicago City Council that condemns the increasingly venomous tone of the national immigration debate and reaffirms the City’s support for sensible solution for the immigration issue.

“Throughout our history, Chicago has welcomed immigrants from around the world, including my own family,” said Alderman Cardenas at a City Hall press conference announcing the resolution. “Our city was built by immigrants, and has respected the contributions that immigrants have made and will continue to make. Unfortunately, the overall climate surrounding the immigration issue has turned more and more ugly, fed in particular by cable news. It’s time that our city took a stand against the hateful rhetoric.”

Court Affirms Right to Own Guns
The Supreme Court struck down a District of Columbia handgun ban and affirmed Americans’ rights to own firearms in the court’s first definitive pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history

On Tuesday Cardenas and aldermen Manny Flores and Toni Preckwinkle were flanked by activists from the Illinois Coalition for Immigration and Refugee Rights when they announced a City Council resolution condemning what Flores called the “race-baiting” portrayal of immigrants by right-wing TV news personalities.

Like all resolutions, this one is nonbinding—it functions as an official statement of outrage but doesn’t actually do anything about the issue.

Fair enough—legislative bodies at every level of government pass resolutions mostly so they can tell their backers they did. And in this case, no one in the room was willing to argue that Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck don’t misrepresent immigrants. Cardenas and his colleagues even appeared to have answers for skeptical reporters.

Two dormant properties in the heart of downtown Wheaton may soon become contributors to the city’s economy.

City officials expect to have ownership of the two parcels at 107–109 N. Main Street and 111–113 N. Main Street no later than early July.

The properties are the fruits of a long battle between the city and businessman Bob Sandberg. In return, Sandberg will receive about $650,000, which is held in escrow by DuPage County.

The land grab likely marks the final parcels the city will gain by condemnation. The court cases go back so long they were litigated under old standards for government takeover of private land.

Before everyone drops into a deep swoon over the California Supreme Court’s decision “allowing” gay marriages, it might be worthwhile to read the entire 121-page decision to discover that it changes, well, practically nothing.

California already has extensive laws granting same-sex couples virtually the same rights as opposite-sex couples. The 4–3 majority recognized that fact but said the “substance” of the laws didn’t really matter. “The question we must address is whether . . . the failure to designate the official relationship of same-sex couples as marriage violates the California Constitution.”

A suburban Chicago delegate backing Sen. Barack Obama is now expected to keep her spot at this summer’s Democratic National Convention, reversing an outcome the Illinois Democrat’s campaign had reported a day earlier.

“Ms. Ramirez-Sliwinski is an elected delegate and we respect her decision to represent the campaign at the convention,” Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said in a statement.

On Tuesday, LaBolt had said the trustee in suburban Carpentersville had decided to step down after she used the word “monkeys” to describe two African American children.

“It is clear that the incident was a misunderstanding,” LaBolt said.

Barack Obama did not hunt or fish as a child. He lives in a big city. And as an Illinois state legislator and a U.S. senator, he consistently backed gun control legislation.

But he is nevertheless making a play for pro-gun voters in rural Pennsylvania.

By highlighting his background in constitutional law and downplaying his voting record, Obama is engaging in a quiet but targeted drive to win over an important constituency that on the surface might seem hostile to his views.

His autobiography was entitled, “In the Arena” and that is most certainly where Charlton Heston lived his life.

When fundamental principles of individual rights and human liberty were at stake, Heston wheeled his chariot into the arena to do intellectual battle. He was the rare iconic figure who did not let his status inhibit him from consistently acting in furtherance of what he knew to be just.

News accounts about his passing have detailed his record on civil rights and gun rights but it is on free speech rights that I am able to give eyewitness testimony.

Carol Marin brought on top notch group of innovators to WTTW‘s Chicago Tonight to resolve the gun violence issue.

Dexter R. Voisin, a Ph.D from the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration told us that more spending on education is the answer. Voisin noted that spending per student in Kenilworth is higher than spending per student in Chicago, and surmised that this spending keeps the gun violence down in Kenilworth.

Fr. Michael Pfleger called for tighter gun laws and more government regulation to stop the violence. Carol Marin repeatedly asked “But when is the violence going to stop” in rhetorical display of courage unmatched since the Founding Fathers.

But, none of the panelists noticed the actual trends in violence in Chicago. Murder hit a 40 year low in Chicago in 2007. The number of students murdered is down 25% from the last school year to the present ... Read More...

Only Hours after bringing Chicago Public School Homicides to its knees with a dramatic and well-publicized March around Thompson Center, shots were fired near Morgan Park High School in my neighborhood.

With his usual aplomb, Daley went Old Testament on the City Tax-payers. Daley and Arne Duncan, both proud products of private education, promised to bust a cap- Property Tax Cap – the one that was raised last Fall, if Gov. Blago does not come up with the trump for Arne’s National Laugh, in the ear of Chicago Tax Payers.

That’s me. I take the weather personally.

Public Schools are tragedy and Chicago Public Schools are Blood Tragedy ( Marlowe, Jonson, Ford)- the shockingly violent sister of the genre. CPS kids die from homicide. People kill those kids. The guns do not go off by themselves. People kill other people because they feel comfortable doing so – we live ... Read More...

One might call it Shakespearian if there were a shred of nobleness in the story of Eliot Spitzer’s fall. There is none. Governor Spitzer, who made his career by specializing in not just the prosecution, but the ruin, of other men, is himself almost certainly ruined.

Mr. Spitzer’s brief statement yesterday about a “private matter” surely involves what are widely reported to be his activities with an expensive prostitution ring discovered by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. Those who believe Eliot Spitzer is getting his just desserts may be entitled to that view, but it misses the greater lesson for our politics.

No question about it, The Sam Adams Alliance does some great work in Chicago, and nationwide in promoting individual liberty. So it was pleasant to see the Feb 8, Tribune give Sam Adams a mention for defending the right to cook pork outdoors.

Yet, yesterday morning, Sam Adams was painted out of the story, to be replaced by a generic ”Chicago non-profit Libertarian organization” as one of the supporters of cooking out.

The Daily Herald twists the story in a different direction, entirely leaving out the ACLU and the Sam Adams Alliance, lending only Filipino “newspaper and television representatives” as interested in the case, chucking out the civil liberties angle, and picking up on the outdoor-cooking-gasp-Catholic-immigrants in the suburbs angle.

We hope to receive a full report from the Sam Adams Alliance on the delicate balance between commercial enterprise and private property rights as applied ... Read More...