Tag: Blithe Spirit

O’Brien’s a tax-cutter, but Preckwinkle is Trib’s gal

Tell me, please, why did Chi Trib, which ran the ed-page graphic counting the days since the Stroger penny tax increase and until the Feb. 2 primary, endorse Preckwinkle the uncertain tax-cutter over the certain, enthusiastic, top-agenda tax-cutter O’Brien?

Has Trib been fooling us all this time?

O’Brien, polling behind Madame P. the alderwoman, who has run nothing bigger than a ward office in her whole life, has run an ad exposing her tax-raising history.  In her book it’s a “desperate attack” of the sort “some candidates make when they’re behind a lot.”

Not that O’B has it wrong.  She denies it not, namely her votes “to raise her salary in 1995, 1998, 2002 and 2006 (from $55,000 to $98,000, cumulatively) . . . to create a real estate transfer tax (1992), boost the sales tax on beer and wine (1993), raise the overall sales tax (2004) and raise the real-estate transfer tax (2008).”

Unable to deny it, she mounts a desperate counter-attack of the sort some candidates make when they are caught doing what voters most resent in the record of the despised and last-in-the-polls incumbent (Stroger).

Why wouldn’t Chi Trib have endorsed O’Brien, who has said from the start of his campaign that he would get rid of the penny increase right away, while Preckwinkle said not right away, she would have to think about it.

And oh, by the way, O’B for 18 years presided over a regional clean-water-supply operation budgeted tentatively for 2010 at nearly $1.7 billion, which I think — correct me if I’m wrong — is more than it takes to keep a ward office going, even in Chi.

Later: A new poll says this race is statistically in a four-way tie.  Huh?

Anti-abortionism at Ascension

My guess is 50 showed at Ascension’s pro-life talk tonight, by Ill. Right to Life exec director Bill Beckman.  He’s a true wonk and delivered a lot of solid stuff, but I bailed out after an hour-fifteen or so: Ask him the time and he tells you how to make a watch, a la Ronald Reagan, per his son a long time ago.

Some arresting stuff:

* Sen. Durbin “lies” when he keeps saying abortion is not mentioned in the now probably moribund health care legislation: doesn’t have to be named.  point is, it’s not excluded.  It wasn’t in Medicaid legislation in the mid-70s when the late Henry Hyde wrote his amendment that forbade federal funding of abortion for Medicaid recipients.  Deceitful of Durbin, says Beckman.  I agree.

* National inconsistency bordering on schizophrenia (my designation) lies in how inheritance and murder laws in many if not most states (I forget) that say the child in the womb has rights — kill a pregnant woman and you do double homicide.

* Early feminists (suffragists) were pro-life.  Only in the early ‘60s did feminism become identical with pro-abortionism.  I remember asking a feminist in a 1970s press conference if feminists were all pro-abortion, and the woman said yes, looking at me as if I were not quite with it.

* It was a lie foisted on us by pro-aborts that five to ten thou women a year were dying of illegal, botched abortions: 39 died that way in the U.S. in one year under consideration at the time.

* Nothing surprising here: pro-life Dems don’t get anywhere.  They can’t advance.  Remember Gov. Casey of PA, who couldn’t get a spot at the podium at the 1992 Dem convention?

On the other hand, five of six current Republican gubernatorial candidates for Illinois are pro-life, most of the senatorial hopefuls, all of the lt. gov. candidates.  As I say, we know which is the abortion party.

* Illinois is the only state w/o a parental-involvement law, requiring notification or consent for a minor’s abortion.  It got one in 1995, but the Ill. supremes wouldn’t write the rules for the “judicial bypass” it required — an escape clause whereby the abortion-seeker could plead her case for non-notification to a judge.

In 2006 the Illinois supremes wrote rules and sent AG Lisa Madigan (D.-Mike), who so badly presented the Illinois case to the federal judge that he said come back when you know what you have or don’t have.

Last year the Illinois supremes, all seven of them, wrote Lisa M. ordering her to go back and do it right.  She did, and for a few hours last year, the bill was in force.  Enter ACLU with some sleight of hand and the original injunction was restored.

Beckman estimates 5,000 abortions a year on non-Illinoisans drawn by its lack of a parental law — too much business for relevant docs et al. to go easily into the dark night, as they see it, of pro-life-ism.

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All or nothing

“It is very important that progressives help defeat Coakley,” says Gregory Martin at Firedog Lake. “Please read my explanation.”

It’s about enabling the betrayers of the leftist dream, helping the “Democratic Corporate Suck Up wing of the party” grow in power. 

To do so

will, in fact, ensure that there will be NO progressive agenda. It was not the Republicans who failed us of late. It was the Democrats. We will never succeed as long as the Dem’s [sic] can talk liberal and vote corporate.

He’s right.  They have nothing to lose but their chains.  No, they also have elections.

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Clinton makes a point in Massachusetts

Bill Clinton campaigning for the endangered Dem candidate, commenting on Tea Party members from Rhode Island and New York campaigning for Scott Brown:

“I thought Massachusetts knew more about American history than anybody else, and understood the Boston Tea Party was a revolt against abuse of power, not against government itself.”

Good point, if you concede that they are not anarchists, as he would have it, but rebels against abuse of power.

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Ditka, Bears, banks, “reform”

Ditka and the Bears: Changing coaches is a start, but we have little to hope for until there’s a change of owners, dropping those who fired D. in 1993.

“I was fired out of jealousy, plain and simple,” Ditka said for the Beyond the Glory special. “I had become the Bears. The greatest moment of my life is when George Halas hired me. The lowest moment of my life was when a guy that shouldn’t have been there fired me.”

But he’s still there, at his mother’s side.

2) Obama vs. banks: New tax purely political, as Geithner made clear on CNBC yesterday on the Kudlow Report, John Harwood asking, “You know Wall Street . . . . Is there something morally corrupt about Wall Street institutions and the people in them?”

Geithner:

I believe personally [dodge word: how else would he believe?] that what you’re seeing happen across the financial system, what you saw happen that caused the crisis, even what you see now happening, is just causing a huger damage to basic trust and confidence of Americans in the fairness of our system.

Fairness an Obama word: he used it in the ‘08 campaign to justify tax rate increases that result in reduced tax revenues.

Geithner continuing:

It’s just very hard for people to understand with unemployment at 10 percent, you know [yes, we do know, now that you mention it], with millions of Americans–this is the United States of America [yes, we know that too]–with millions of Americans on food stamps, worst recession in almost a generation, that you could see compensation practice produce such huge returns to people who were at the center of this mess. It is unexplicable [sic]. People cannot understand why it is fair. And…

Harwood: “But you understand because you know this culture. Why is it happening?”

I don’t–I don’t–I don’t understand it, really. I really don’t understand it. [Hand-wringing off camera]  . . . but what it underscores is why it is so important to make sure that we put in place tougher rules, the kind of reforms that’ll make sure that we can wake up in the morning and tell the American people that we have done what is necessary to protect them from the risk of this happening again.

A political goal.

Harwood: “Is it pure greed?”

Geithner:

John, it’s a complicated thing. I don’t–I don’t know how to explain it. I can’t explain it, I don’t understand it, [distraught] and I think it’s very important for those people running these firms, for their boards of directors, for their shareholders, to work very hard to try to earn back some basic sense of trust and confidence of the American people.

Like the trust and confidence in Congress? He’s worried about that too?  What about the sheer economics of it all?  Is he the treasury secretary, or a highly placed morale officer?

He continued:

I think it’s very important to do that. [Of course you do.]  And I think, as part of that, they need to not just make sure they’re making loans [with less available capital, of course] again to businesses and communities, helping solve the housing crisis [ditto], but . . . are working to support a package of strong reforms in the financial system that’ll be better for the country as a whole.

Vague, indecipherable, enough to drive a sane man nuts.

 

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The “Kennedy seat” looking Brown

In the Mass. race, Brown v. Coakley, keep your eye on the big guy:

“If the White House thinks she can win, Obama will be there,” the Democrat says. “If they don’t think she can win, he won’t be there.” 

Word is, they don’t think so and he won’t be there. 

=============

Later: Word is wrong, according to The Hill:

President Obama will travel to Massachusetts on Sunday to campaign for Martha Coakley, according to sources.

Going for broke.

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