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.

The Donald has ideas

 

A “regular people” party?

The most interesting thing Donald Trump has said recently isn’t his taunting of Hillary Clinton, it’s his comment to Bloomberg’s Joshua Green.

Mr. Green writes: “Many politicians, Trump told me, had privately confessed to being amazed that his policies, and his lacerating criticism of party leaders, had proved such potent electoral medicine.”

Mr. Trump seemed to “intuit,” Mr. Green writes, that standard Republican dogma on entitlements and immigration no longer holds sway with large swaths of the party electorate. Mr. Trump says he sees his supporters as part of “a movement.

”What, Mr. Green asked, would the party look like in five years? “Love the question,” Mr. Trump replied. “Five, 10 years from now—different party. You’re going to have a worker’s party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years.”

My impression on reading this was that Mr. Trump is seeing it as a party of regular people, as the Democratic Party was when I was a child and the Republican Party when I was a young woman.

This is the first thing I’ve seen that suggests Mr. Trump is ideologically conscious of what he’s doing. It’s not just ego and orange hair, he suggests, it’s politically intentional.

Knows what he’s doing, that is.

Source: Peggy Noonan, Clinton Embodies Washington’s Decadence – WSJ

Rahm has good idea of what do with a crisis, says Rauner doesn’t

Rahm is just mad because someone else believes in not letting a crisis go to waste.

The mayor said in a statement: “With a stroke of his pen, Bruce Rauner just told every Chicago taxpayer to take a hike.”

That said, about wasting a crisis, Rahm has a lot of nerve, getting indignant about this, he being a lover of the blue-state model, whose idea of a crisis is an opening for a new  fix-it program.

Tsk.

Source: Rahm says Rauner’s veto tells Chicago taxpayers to ‘take a hike’ | Chicago Sun-Times

State program throttled, senior citizen suffers. Illinois blues.

Thumbnail-sketch case study of standoff fallout:

The budget standoff hit home for Rachel Grainer when Illinois didn’t put up the money it promised seniors under its property tax-deferral program.

Fine. Of course, standoff doesn’t stand alone. It’s ridiculously inflated Democrat budget vs. Republican Gov. objecting to same. So I would like to see something futuristic that illustrates Illinois with budgets like this one.

Somewhere there’s a really smart columnist who can put future flesh and blood out there, online and on paper, to give us an idea of what the Republican governor finds objectionable. I ask you, is it too much to ask?

Source: BROWN: Oak Park woman faced tax hit on home over budget standoff | Chicago Sun-Times

Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters

Wash Post after Trump for using “gendered language”

What next, not using “person” when you mean “man” or “woman” or child?

The most offensive language, though, came from one of the warm-up speakers [for Trump at New Mexico rally].

David Chavez, a former state lawmaker, compared voting for Clinton because she’s a woman to drinking bleach because it looks like water. “I’ve heard people say: I don’t know who to choose: Trump or Hillary. Even Bill Clinton chose other women. So you should, too,” Chavez said.

(Jenna, our reporter in the room, says the crowd laughed and applauded…)

You can criticize someone, but very carefully. You can’t mock the mockable, ridicule the ridiculous, mind p’s and q’s. In short, you have to be careful what you say and how you say it. There are comfort zones out there with big signs saying Keep out!

Judge gives Justice a whupping

DOJ lawyers tried to pull wool over the judge’s eyes, when it’s justice that’s supposed to be blind, not the judge.

A federal judge in Texas has ordered hundreds of U.S. Department of Justice lawyers to undergo ethics training, accusing the agency of a “calculated plan of unethical conduct.”

The extraordinary order by U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen says Justice Department lawyers intentionally misled him in the course of a lawsuit filed by Texas and 25 other mostly conservative states challenging the Obama administration’s immigration policy.

He scolded, excoriated, them soundly.

Judge Hanen wrote, “Such conduct is certainly not worthy of any department whose name includes the word ‘Justice.’”

He went on, “In fact, it is hard to imagine a more serious, more calculated plan of unethical conduct. There were over 100,000 instances of conduct contrary to counsel’s representations.”

Who do they think they are, mob lawyers?