In December 2008, a few days after Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was arrested, I discovered this photograph in a newsletter published by the State of Illinois on November 12 celebrating the election of Barack Obama:

The photo was posted along with an article discussing the selection process for Obama’s replacement in the Senate. The caption to the photo read simply:

Governor Blagojevich confers with now President-elect Barack Obama

Within hours after we published the photo on Verum Serum, and after it was picked up by Hot Air and ultimately the Drudge Report (along with other blogs), the newsletter disappeared from the State of Illinois web site. Fortunately we were smart enough to save a copy.

The question of course is this: when did this meeting take place and what exactly were Blagojevich and the President-elect “conferring” about? (more…)

Unable to discuss facts in any logical, coherent way, or even engage in civil discourse, the modern left has two modes of argumentation: tu quoque and ad hominem. The former translates roughly as “and so are you,” while the latter means to attack the person instead of the point. In logic, both of these tactics are considered the lowest form of debate, but for the intellectually bankrupt and emotionally overwrought left, they’re the only tactics they have.

Exhibit A — a masterpiece of the genre — comes in the form of this pre-Father’s Day column from Colbert King of the Washington Post: “On Father’s Day, hypocrites are all in the family.” And away we go:

Family, marriage and the contribution of fathers come together as topics for reflection on Father’s Day. So I’d like to know why Barack Obama, a husband and a father in a family structure that encompasses bonds deemed essential to our society, is constantly and savagely attacked by conservative leaders whose personal circumstances undermine the family values they espouse?

Consider Obama: Raised by a single mother in a middle-class family where hard work and education were watchwords, Obama graduated from two of the top schools in the country, Columbia University and Harvard Law School. His legal scholarship was recognized when he became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He married and, equally important, has stayed married to Michelle Robinson, a Princeton graduate and Harvard Law alumna. He lives with his wife, two children and his mother-in-law. Obama: constitutional law professor, civil rights lawyer, state legislator, U.S. senator, 44th U.S. president, family man.

Let’s set aside for the moment the misrepresentation that the Community Organizer was ever a “constitutional law professor,” when he was more a gloried graduate teaching assistant than a real professor. Let’s also overlook his background as state senator “present,” and his very brief tenure in the U.S. Senate — a seat he won not in the general election against the hapless Alan Keyes but earlier, by taking out both his primary challenger and the real Republican candidate through the mysteriously obtained (hello, David Axelrod!) divorce records of his opponents.

Having set up an amazingly irrelevant straw man, even by the low standards of the left, King proceeds to demolish it: (more…)

Imagine if you could get full salary and benefits for a decent paying job and you didn’t have to work to get it. All you had to do was be accused of a crime.

What crime, you ask? How about molesting school kids? That’s what the teachers‘ unions in states like California and New York State are doing: coddling accused criminals — at your expense. And it’s probably going on elsewhere as well.

Believe it or not, New York is a lot tougher on them than California. From the New York Post:

At the beginning of his 32-year career as a math teacher in Queens, Francisco Olivares allegedly im pregnated and married a 16-year-old girl he had met when she was a 13-year-old student at his Corona junior high, IS 61, the Post learned.

He sexually molested two 12-year-old pupils a decade later and another student four years after that, the city Department of Education charged. But none of it kept Olivares, 60, from collecting his $94,154 salary.

He hasn’t set foot in a classroom in seven years since beating criminal and disciplinary charges. Chancellor Joel Klein keeps Olivares in a “rubber room,” a district office where teachers accused of misconduct sit all day with nothing to do. (more…)