Author: Jim Bowman

Jim Bowman covered religion 1968-78 for the Chicago Daily News, since then has written books, articles, etc., mostly on corporate history but also on religion (Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968), and more recently on politics (Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters -- Lulu.com, Kindle). Longtime Oak Park, Illinois, resident, he lives now on Chicago's North Side, where four of his and Winnie's six children live close by.

These are jerks who do this

Thinking they are in the good old we-shall-overcome days.

From the campus left to Black Lives Matter to Occupy Wall Street to the union activists who took over the Wisconsin legislature in 2011, modern progressives are committed to protest politics: They’ll achieve their demands not democratically but by disrupting civic order and breaking norms and laws. Now these tactics have been imported to the U.S. Congress.

Pelosi et al.

Brexit happened

So?

Britain will regain its political freedom, its autonomous self-government, and its independence from an EU that is spinning out of control under the power of establishment elites, unelected and unaccountable socialist bureaucrats, and a judicial court that is increasingly making legal decisions that replace Britain’s powerful common law.

When you put it that way (and Lawrence Kudlow does), it’s sort of another Magna Carta, or at least in the spirit of same.

Works for me, especially the “establishment elites” part, in whom lies the spirit of something else entirely — experts deciding what’s best for the hoi polloi. Saying in effect, like it or lump it.

Britain Declares Independence – WSJ

Wise words in the aftermath:

If the EU wants to prevent other countries from catching the Brexit bug, our advice is to avoid the temptation to punish the U.K. with an arduous renegotiation of terms for its re-entry into the common market.

The perception of EU high-handedness is what alienates public opinion across the Continent.

Brexit ought to be the wake-up call the EU needs to return to serving as a common market that encourages growth and competition, and not—as it has become since the late 1980s—an innovation-killing superstate obsessed with regulatory harmonization, tax hikes, green-energy dogma and anticompetitive antitrust enforcement.

Yessir!

Source: Britain Declares Independence – WSJ

Illinois Blues: Pensioner’s “desperate look,” bond ratings, unemployment

At the Oak Park Library town hall, July 17, 2013 — from Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters, Chapter 3, “There Will Be No Cuts”:

A man asked why it had taken so long to do something about the pension issue when the Civic Federation of Chicago had raised the issue five years earlier.

Sen. Harmon played the therapist. He shared the questioner’s “frustration,” having seen the “desperate look” on the faces of people who fear losing pensions.

Nothing about why it had taken so long. Treating the do-nothing years as an act of God, himself as horrified observer. Not horrified, however, since even as he spoke, there was no crisis, he had said.

Another man complained that in response to Illinois’ lowest-in-nation bond rating and one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates, said citizens got nothing but “rhetoric.”

It was the first question about fiscal issues as such. The man stayed with his complaint, enlarging on it. Harmon listened up to a point, then called “next,” choosing not to engage him.

Rep. Lilly gloriously missed this and picked up with the persistent questioner, entering on extended commentary of her own, pacing back and forth, gesticulating, in general speaking as if to settle the question in an earnest, forceful, however cheery a manner.

The man threw in the towel, giving way to the next question, about a much-protested pawn shop on economically limping North Avenue and related matters.

Illinois Blues is available in paperback, epub and Amazon Kindle formats.

AG Lynch soft spot in heart for Muslims, so?

She downplays the Islamic in Islamic terrorism, or so it seems.

Top Justice Department officials, including Attorney General Loretta Lynch, have worked with an organization dedicated to interfering with law enforcement efforts to monitor activities at the most radical mosques.

Lynch and DOJ Civil Rights Division head Vanita Gupta have appeared at gala events for an organization called Muslim Advocates. The George Soros-funded charity has badgered the New York City Police Department away from monitoring the most radical mosques in the city.


Well this makes her Obama’s kind of attorney general, I must say. And of course, Soros’ too. What gives with him, anyhow? Did he attend a Muslim school too?