Chi Trib on Saturday is its best day.  Today’s editorials, for instance, get right to the heart of their matters, offering data not blather and making a reader think.  The first is about the rude, crude dunces in our state senate arguing their need for a pay raise, or rather Sen. Rickey Hendon, who gets ugly talking to reporters.

The state house rejected the pay raise 94-8.  Hendon, chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, says they want one but won’t admit it, and in fact want to “pimp” the senators, i.e. get them to do the dirty work, presumably as a true-life pimp gets whores to do it.  On the other hand, a pimp is a sales rep, I thought, for women who need them to find higher-paying customers.  (Looking for help on this one.)

He also slammed his presumed colleague, Sen. Susan Garrett, who apparently is rich and has a big house.  “Have you seen her house? Go up there. Mind-boggling.”  Garrett, he said, is among “the filthy rich [who] are always the ones saying, hey, we don’t need the raise.” 

As opposed, for instance, to senate president Emil Jones, who earlier complained: “I need a pay raise! I need a pay raise!” and added jocularly to reporters this day, “I’ve got to get me some food stamps.”  The senate crown sits easily on that man’s head.

Garrett to reporters in self-defense:

This bill should not be reflective of what kind of money legislators have in the bank. . . . It should be reflective . . . of letting taxpayers know that we believe we deserve a raise or don’t deserve a raise. It should not be personal.

As for the pay-raise:

[S]ome of the legislators have missed the point, if they think they need the raise because, you know, they’re not making $150,000 a year. We’re here as public servants and we’re not here to assume we should be entitled to be receiving major increases every year when the rest of the state and other state employees are suffering.

The Trib concludes that the senate should reject the pay raise, adding that if the pay were performance-based, “they’d be sending the money back to the taxpayers.” 

Oddly, this conclusion is not posted.  Neither is the second editorial, “Rose Bowl secrets.”  So buy the paper.

Later: The conclusion has been posted, but the 2^nd editorial remains a hard-copy-only treasure.

Sun-Times man Steve Huntley weighs in on aldermen as advisors to the U.S. government rather than allocation of pothole repairs:

What to do about Iran must cause countless sleepless nights for countless generals, Pentagon strategists and political leaders in the White House and Congress. Now they’re going to get advice from the Chicago City Council.

Yes, and in Chicago style, the fix is in:

The Council’s Human Relations Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing today on a resolution “opposing any U.S. attack on Iran.” The full Council could vote on it on Wednesday. The results are a foregone conclusion. Today’s hearing features among its witnesses the anti-war figure Scott Ritter and John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago professor known for seeing “Israel lobby” machinations behind U.S. foreign policy.

And as this blog made much of two days ago, the eminent Stephen Kinzer, apparently late of the NY Times and currently teaching at apparently two universities in this area, will also testify, surely about U.S. failures in the Middle East — a specialty of his — and the trouble with jousting with Iran.

Huntley notes “the lone voice” opposing the resolution, that of Ald. James A. Balcer (11th), a war hero from Viet Nam war days on grounds of “sending a wrong signal about protecting the lives of the young men and women our nation sends in harm’s way” (Huntley’s words). 

Note the eight-alderman sponsorship of the bill, including Joseph A. Moore (49th) and Toni Preckwinkle (4th) and newcomers like Sandi Jackson (7th) and Robert W. Fioretti (2nd).  These are your Obama liberals, if I may introduce a phrase into discussion of Chicago ward politics — thinking man’s and woman’s liberals, you know, who think globally and act locally, you know, cherishing their illusions through the thick and thin of gaping potholes and murder in the streets.  God bless ‘em.

In the matter of what makes Hillary run (and not stop), this from Emily’s List founder Ellen Malcolm touches a nerve:

We might scoff at the identity politics run wild in this election cycle. But this personal identification [of low-income working women with Mrs. C.] and the sense that once again one of their own has been aced out by a young, glib, and underqualified male will be a bitter pill to swallow for many of Clinton’s staunchest supporters.

Young, glib, and underqualified, eh?  You don’t have to be a low-income working woman to find that nicely said.

I see Smooth Stephen Kinzer is letting his activism get the better of him and intends to testify, and not under subpoena, to Chicago’s aldermen as an instrument of Joe Moore’s foreign-policy leftism.  It’s official then, he’s no longer a reporter but a man whose biases — ahem, his conclusions based on extensive research — have got the better of him. 

Here’s one of one of his talking points, as appearing on the (left-wing) UK Guardian website, where it’s not clear for what publication he wrote it:

By naming his favourite military officer, General David Petraeus, to head the US Central Command, President Bush evidently hopes to terrify Iran. Americans and people in the rest of the world, however, have at least as much reason to be terrified as anyone in Tehran.

Kinzer is or was the NY Times man in Chicago but hasn’t written about political corruption.  You can get your hands dirty that way.  Rather, he’s playing ball with Chi Dems dying to see one of their own in the White House, arguing for one of his more notorious policy positions, of the “Can’t we sit down and talk?” variety. 

That would be the Big O., featured in the John Kass column today as “magically unstained” by the “Chicago way” of doing things.  Kinzer is a longstanding believer in the U.S. as mideast bungler, but he might pay heed to his being used by the left.

He will make aldermanic eyes glaze over, I expect.  See K’s ideas on the Iranian matter also in today’s Chi Trib (Left-wing) Perspective section, where he is i’d’d as a journalism and political science teacher at Northwestern U. 

(But in Oak Park we hear of him as teaching at Dominican U., River Forest.  He’s left the Times?  His most recent byline is Feb. 11; so either he has a very easygoing gig or is no longer at the Times.)

In any case, wine and cheese will not be served to the aldermen, those doughty protectors of their right to make money hand over ringed pinky, as Royko used to speak of.  But they will like whatever helps their man Obama.

 

 

“We may now understand why Barack does not wear a flag lapel pin. He’s afraid that Bill Ayers will stomp on him,” says Larry C. Johnson at Huffington Post, next to pic of Ayers and flag from Chi Mag, as below.

The context is that Hillary has to convince superdelegates that Obama’s unrepentant-terrorist friend and supporter Ayers will be a millstone around his neck in the general election.

I am a pessimist. Even though Hillary is the one who wins the big states that will count in the fall, the “supers” appear to be moving toward Obama. Even though Hillary has more popular votes and polls much better among the Reagan democrats, the supers appear to be moving toward Obama.

Hillary’s only hope is that the super delegates will come to their senses and realize that Barack Obama’s relationships with the corrupt Tony Rezko, the racist-wife stealing Jeremiah Wright, and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers will provide the Republicans with ammunition they have never had at hand to use against the Democrats’ candidate. This is particularly true of that flag stomper, Bill Ayers.

“[I]t will be the relationship with Bill Ayers that will empower the Republicans to destroy the candidacy of Barack Obama.”

Fact is, Obama lied about their relationship.  (And a campaign died?)  Why?

What is he hiding? As I have pointed out before, 1995 was a critical year in the Obama/Ayers relationship. It was in 1995 that Barack was tabbed by Ayers to be the Chairman of the Annenberg Challenge (a failed $50 million project). That same year, Barack sat at a kitchen table with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Bill’s wife, and plotted the ouster of Alice Palmer, who [sic] Obama took down in order to secure his place in the Illinois state senate.

What the supers must do:

If the Super Delegates do not insist on a full and complete disclosure from Barack Obama about his ties to Bill Ayers, the Republicans will force the issue in the fall. It is one thing to have a name that sounds like the terrorist who attacked us on 9-11. But it is an entirely different matter to be close friends with an unrepentant terrorist who bombed U.S. Government buildings.

With friends like Johnson, the Dems could win.

Can you imagine a self-respecting newspaper going with this item, which I know I am going to pass over in silence:

Delmer Reed has told friends he believed it was no coincidence that his former wife, Ramah, divorced him and married [Rev.] Mr [Jeremiah] Wright shortly after the Chicago pastor gave him advice on their troubled marriage in the early 1980s.

Roosevelt Thomas, a lawyer who handled the Reeds’ divorce in 1983, confirmed to the New York Post that Mr Reed long believed Rev Wright moved in on his wife after counselling them.

Even Bill O’Reilly is drawing the line:

Bill O’Reilly told Kinky Freidman and Juan Williams that he’s tired of the Wright story. This sudden Wright fatigue didn’t stop him from mentioning the New York Post story about Wright stealing the wife of a church member. He even held up the front page so viewers could catch the headline and photo.

For documentation purposes, it started here, wouldn’t you know?  With this:

May 4, 2008 — The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama‘s loose cannon of a spiritual adviser, stole the wife of a parishioner – after the man sought Wright’s help in saving his troubled marriage, the former husband told friends.

Delmer Reed, 59, confided to pals that he believed the minister moved in on his wife while Wright was counseling the couple at his Chicago church in the early 1980s, The Post has learned.

“That’s exactly how he said it,” Reed’s divorce lawyer, Roosevelt Thomas, told The Post.

Chicago youth worker Harold Davis backs Reed up.

“Jeremiah knew all the weaknesses of the couple, and he started focusing on the wife, her vulnerabilities, and started doing things she wanted Delmer to do – spending time with her, taking her to the movies, that sort of thing,” said Davis, who heads the Chicago branch of football great Jim Brown’s Amer-I-can youth program.

“Everybody knew Jeremiah took the man’s wife,” said Davis. “It was common knowledge.”

The Wrights deny he ever counselled the woman.  

But a member who chastised Wright for his behavior was denounced from the pulpit:

Activist Derrick Mosley, a self-styled minister who has clashed with Wright, said there’s an “unwritten rule” that pastors don’t counsel married couples separately – as Wright did with Ramah Reed, he said.

In 2003, Mosley said, “I called him on the carpet about the indecorous manner in which he’d obtained his wife.”

In response, said Mosley, “he ranted and raved from the pulpit. He got up and announced, ‘If Derrick Mosley is in the building, I want you all to arrest him.’ “

Wow.  Was Obama there for that sermon?

If it happened.  Let us not trust Mosley too far:

CHICAGO — The Rev. Derrick Mosley, known throughout the Chicago area as a self-proclaimed community advocate, was arrested and charged with wire fraud and extortion Monday in an alleged plot to blackmail the wife of a professional athlete.

NBC5 Image

Mosley is accused of trying to obtain $20,000 from a business manager representing the athlete’s wife, claiming he had a videotape depicting her in a sexual encounter with a musician and another woman, NBC5’s Darren Kramer reported. Sources confirmed the musician on the alleged sex tape was R & B star R. Kelly.

According to NBC5’s sources, the tape pre-dates the woman’s marriage to the unidentified athlete. R. Kelly’s manager said Mosley tried to extort money from him in a separate incident. The R & B artist’s manager filed for a restraining order against Mosley in 2003, NBC5’s Marion Brooks reported.

A tangled web, I’d say

Reporters swoon at Obama:

John Harris, editor of Politico.com, has said he was forced to put certain reporters sent to cover Mr. Obama through a rehab program after they returned to the office. Back in January, NBC News anchor Brian Williams noted that Lee Cowan, the reporter NBC had sent to cover Mr. Obama, had told him that “it is hard to stay objective covering this guy.”

Somehow, however:

Some media reevaluations of Mr. Obama are now taking place, fueled in part by revelations such as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that are hard to ignore. But the simple truth is that Mr. Obama has had a free media ride for so long that he effectively wrapped up the Democratic nomination before any of his political weaknesses were generally known.

John Fund delivering this, for the excellent Wall St. Journal Political Diary.

A little (not much) bold thinking to demonstrate that Obama has been delivering nonsense to gullible Dimmycrats:

In the form of a few penetrating questions:

1, On what unifying principle will he bring us together, as he has been saying from the start, besides general weariness at political squabbling?

2. How long will avoidance of squabbling last when interests are concerned, and they always are?  He means to achieve what’s wanted by some but not by others and in the process bring us together?  Bull.

3. Meanwhile, leaving that question unanswered, what are his inclinations?  What side will he argue spontaneously, as it were, of the hot questions, as in pacifism (rampant among Dimmycrats, to be sure) over security?  Gun rights vs. gun banning (hot potato that Dems leave alone)?  Freedom (of speech and market, to name two) vs. government control?

— He’s a blank slate in many respects, seeking to repair with his brash self-confidence his woeful lack of experience.  But those pesky inclinations are already surfacing —

more more more

John Fund quoting a Dem superdelegate skeptical about a joint Obama-Clinton ticket and the baleful Clinton Effect:

“If Hillary were the vice president you would have Bill rattling around the West Wing and Obama would need a food taster for four years. No way.”

And not checking for excessive calories either.