The activist old media does not want to make this connection.

Barack Obama and Rod Blagojevich go way back. They emerged from the same cesspool that is Illinois/Chicago politics.

Obama and Rahm Emanuel helped run Blago’s first campaign for Governor of Illinois, which he has now thoroughly disgraced (if that is possible with the governorship of that state.)

Now that Blago has been convicted of trying to sell the “Obama Senate seat,” the media will work overtime to keep their beloved Dear Leader out of this. They might even try to make Obama a victim of sorts. Meanwhile, Obama played an integral role in making sure Blago got there in the first place. Obama was a “top advisor” to Blagojevich in the general election when he ran for governor in 2002.

I’ll give you $10 bucks for every time you hear the media mention that fact over the next couple days.

Emanuel says it was he and Obama who “were the top strategists of Blagojevich’s 2002 gubernatorial victory.” Thanks guys. Good job at putting Blago in office.

You can try to speculate about who was trying to cover for whom over the actual phone calls to sell the seat, but just suffice it to say, these guys are veterans of the armpit that is Chicago politics and they will protect each other whenever needed.

Bottom line here, the media work overtime to keep Obama out of the mess.

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You can always count on Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky to maintain the level of #newtone we’ve all come to know and love in politics.

After intervening on behalf of far-left protesters with possible links to various terrorist groups including Hamas, after calling bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound a “crime scene” thus suggesting that our Navy SEALS are criminals, Schakowsky completes a hat trick by calling for the exclusion of media critical to her. She also labels Bigs publisher Andrew Breitbart a “sleazebag.” From Founding Bloggers:

Says citizen journalist Andrew Marcus:

She probably feels this way because while covering the Schakowsky-Pollak congressional race last year on behalf of Big Government, Founding Bloggers and Adam Sharp of Sharp Elbows had the temerity to ask Representative Schakowsky some basic questions that she couldn’t/wouldn’t answer: 1) Where in the Constitution does Congress have the authority to force someone to buy a product or service? 2) What is the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and what is Democratic Socialism? Jan is a long-time supporter of the DSA, but for some reason she is shy about this association.

(more…)

Freshman Congressman Joe Walsh calls out the media for the absence of their questions on Obama’s budget.

Why am I not surprised.  Once again the Main Stream Media (MSM) exposes its lack of journalistic integrity in ignoring news that doesn’t fit its liberal narrative, when all but one of Chicago’s MSM snubbed a well publicized press conference with over 40 African-American religious and political leaders who gathered “… to decry the misrepresentation of King’s legacy and the noble civil rights cause” as being equivalent to the efforts by the Left and homosexual activists to legalize same-sex marriage.

The impetus for the gathering was the recent passage by the Illinois General Assembly in a veto session—the equivalent of a lame-duck—of the “Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act.”

Illinois Family Institute publicized the press conference to Chicago’s major media outlets NBC, ABC, Fox Chicago, WGN, Univision, WBBM, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Daily Herald, and the Southtown Star.  David E. Smith, IFI Executive Director, stated, “Sadly, the only major secular news outlet in Chicago that covered this important event was WBBM radio and television (CBS). While Univision and WGN News attended the press conference, apparently the producers decided it didn’t fit their messaging on the issue of so-called ‘gay rights.’”  To their credit IFI had their own camera rolling during the event, a portion of which you can view here:

Just think how widespread the coverage would have been had these African-Americans gathered to show their support for the bill.  I dare say it would have been wall to wall.

From WGEM, and the only thing funnier than their headline is the thought that WGEM likely receives a lot of ad money from the union in advertising.

It’s Christmas caroling with a message.

Wednesday night, locked out workers from Roquette America in Keokuk staged a very unique protest.

They took a break from the picket lines to go caroling outside the homes of top Roquette executives who live in Quincy.

[...]

They took a break from the picket lines to go caroling outside the homes of top Roquette executives who live in Quincy.

The union workers have been off the job for almost three months now.

Roquette locked them out on September 28th, and contract negotiations have pretty much stalled ever since.

Are you kidding me? A caravan of 80 people to sing insults and, according to eyewitnesses, shouting “F*CK YOU” at various houses right before Christmas? This isn’t “caroling,” this is intimidation. On private property. I’m told by locals that one of the houses they visited was down a private lane of an elderly couple whose granddaughter often stays with them (and luckily wasn’t the night the union struck) – the union trespassed.

As for the carols:

It went like this, “God bless ye very wealthy men,we’re here so you can see. The workers who helped make you rich are now out on the street. You locked the doors while profits soared, how greedy could you be? Oh tidings of capital gains, oh what a shame, all you care about it capital gains.”

Yes, those evil business owners who are trying to cut costs because a president who the unions supported and donated money to is forcing business to trim costs so they can afford his massive health control law and other regulations thrown on them. If the unions are unhappy with this then perhaps then need to look at the economic situation this president has created instead of blaming skittish business owners simply trying to stay afloat in a dismal economic period. The president for whom these unions worked has created an economic environment wherein there is less discretionary money to go around, thus less demand for goods and services, thus less revenue for small business, and so on and so forth. Union members should be “caroling” the source: their union bosses. Unions have become the very thing which they were formed to fight and many good men and women (my family is predominately union) are caught up as pawns in a game played by favored fat cat union bosses who send their workers out to engage in extortion and intimidation in exchange for work. (more…)

I’m being completely serious. From “How Mark Kirk Re-Segregates the Senate:”

For reasons that go back more than a century, all the way to the First Great Migration from the South, Illinois has led the nation in black political empowerment. We’ve elected more black statewide officials than anyone else. We produced the first black president. And it was a matter of pride among many Illinoisans that we kept the Senate integrated. In 2004, we picked such a great black senator that he went on to integrate the presidency.

This is no slur against Kirk. It’s not a slur against Illinois, either. It shouldn’t be our responsibility to provide a black senator. It’s a slur against the other 49 states, who refuse to elect a black politician to the U.S. Senate.

I’d like to introduce Mr. McClelland to Cedra Crenshaw. She was a black contender for Illinois state senate but the Chicago machine employed every dirty trick against her and even unsuccessfully ran her off the ballot.

Because she was a Republican.

Yet after 4 p.m. today, African-Americans will make up 0 percent of the nation’s most prestigious elective body. That’s disgraceful.

Yes, Mr. McClelland, it’s disgraceful how you ignore candidates of color when they don’t serve the plantation politics of progressivism. So when the Chicago machine was forcing out a mother-politician off the ballot because she threatened the progressive narrative that people of color can’t be conservative, that wasn’t, as McClelland so aptly writes, “segregation?”

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Wouldn’t you think it would be a big deal if a Republican president lost his senate seat to a Democrat only two short years after he was elected to the highest office in the land? I mean, don’t you think the media would think that a Republican president losing his own former office to the opposing party would be a story they wouldn’t be able to resist?

Yet with the election of Republican Mark Kirk, here we have a Republican taking the former senate seat of a Democrat president only two years in office (and only two years after a Democrat landslide at that) and the media has been practically nonchalant about the whole turnover of that seat to the opposition party.

Just think about this for a moment. Barack Obama resigned his senate seat in Illinois, the bluest of blue states, when he was elected president in a Democrat landslide that seemed to engulf the whole country. It was so tremendous a landslide that many pundits in the chattering classes at the time thought that it was the beginning of a permanent Democrat majority.

A scant two years later, that bluest of blue senate seats went to the Republicans who themselves won a landslide of epic proportions wholly reversing Obama’s great wave election.

I have been keeping an eye on this question since November 2 expecting some pundit or Old Media yakker to notice what a symbolic slap to Obama that losing his own senate seat to the opposition is. But so far, it’s all been very low key. And when the Old Media does bother to note the fact it is mentioned in a purely perfunctory manner.

It is telling that the Old Media has not made a bigger deal about this. After all, the Old Media wants to mitigate the GOP wave that swept the country and ignoring this major symbolic rebuke to Obama on a personal level is something they don’t want talked about.

Imagine how the media would be playing this news, though, if it were a Republican that lost his own senate seat to a Democrat. What if George W. Bush was a senator from Texas and his senate seat went to a Democrat in 2002, only two years after he was elected to the White House (or if a Democrat was elected to the Texas Governorship after Bush became President)?

All across the country tongues would be wagging in the Old Media and the drumbeat theme would be that Bush losing his seat to the opposition would mean a repudiation of him in the most personal of ways. Why what would the Old Media be saying if a president couldn’t even assure his party that his own old elected position of only two years past could be held for his own party?

Yet, the fact that Obama could not insure that his own senate seat would stay with his own party and on top of that he couldn’t insure that in the blue state of Illinois has gone practically ignored by the Old Media.

It is a puzzlement, isn’t it?

Illinois Democratic State Senator Ricky Hendon said that Republican Gubernatorial candidate Bill Brady wanted to kill homosexuals and that women should have no rights.  Hendon also called Brady idiotic, racist, sexist, and homophobic.  But, if you watched the Fox channel in Chicago for your local news, you’d never know it.

In a classic case of offering the bare minimum, token coverage of a major story, WFLD pretended to cover the uproar over the speech without really covering it.  Here is their report with a very small portion (the tamest, in fact) of Hendon’s remarks:

Now read Hendon’s actual remarks:

I’ve never served with such an idiotic, racist, sexist, homophobic person in my life. If you think that the minimum wage needs to be three dollars an hour, vote for Bill Brady. If you think that women have no rights whatsoever, except to have his children, vote for Bill Brady. If you think gay and lesbian people need to be locked up and shot in the head, vote for Bill Brady.

Not only does the media pass over his most offensive charges, but then they go out and find Gov. Pat Quinn’s running mate to support the spirit of Hendon’s outrageous remarks, if not the actual words.  Even Quinn has refused to apologize for the remarks made while he was standing right next to Hendon.  Quinn has also said that they should not “mask in any way the positions that Bill Brady has taken.” (more…)

Northwest Herald editor Dan McCaleb weighs in on the controversy over reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at a recent Melissa Bean event. How dare the great unwashed wish to rise in praise of old glory, one they’re intent on recapturing and waving proudly in the modern day.

He, like Tate-Bradish, just recognizes that incivility masked as patriotism is, in fact, not patriotic at all.

Never was. Never will be.

McCaleb’s tongue clucking and putting on airs is bad enough. That it’s laced with such ignorance and condescension smack in the middle of a rejuvenated and rejuvenating Tea Party era in American politics only makes it worse. One might imagine this milquetoast of the American spirit standing on the docks in Boston circa 1773 with his hands up, yelling, careful boys, ya doesn’t wants to get your feets wet, mates!

McCaleb displays his ignorance in multiple ways.  He would have you believe that large numbers of American citizens riled up about and engaged in politics, many of them for the very first time, represent a decline into “pettiness,” to use his word. Bollocks!

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The QC Examiner notices some pro-Phil Hare shenanigans going down at the Illinois, quad cities’ completely objective, non-partisan, and totally neutral Phil Hare Argus, a.k.a. the Quad Cities Online.

Hare, if you remember, is the Illinois Democrat congressional candidate who:

a) thinks the deficit is a myth

b) doesn’t care about the Constitution

QC Examiner writes:

the Hare-Dispatch jumps into the fray with multiple pro-Hare, anti-Schilling “reporting”.

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The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne has just given us a new line of attack on the Tea Party: now the movement is just a giant scam out to hoodwink the American public.

Is the tea party one of the most successful scams in American political history?… the tea party constitutes a sliver of opinion on the extreme end of politics receiving attention out of all proportion with its numbers. …The tea party may be pulling a fast one on the country and the media.

The only one trying to pull a fast one here is Dionne—who’s playing fast and loose with the facts. More about that shortly.  But first, a question: “What makes a liberal deny reality?” There can be only two answers.

Either the liberal is so blinded by ideology that he simply cannot see the truth, or the liberal’s unwillingness to recognize painful reality compels him to try to minimize it. Paul Krugman falls into the first category.  A Keynesian crackhead from his salad days, Krugman believes the first stimulus was too small.

Dionne falls into the second. He can’t accept the inescapable truth that the Tea Party is here to stay. And so, Dionne does what most ideologically strait-jacketed liberals do: he minimizes. By the way, throughout his article, note how Dionne intentionally spells the movement in lower case (“tea party”), literally diminishing the group by not granting it upper case status. In comparison,“Republican” and “Democrat” get full capital letter respect in Dionne’s piece. Anyway, here’s E.J.’s  “proof” that the Tea Party is fringe. (more…)

“My bosses aren’t interested in tackling the story.”  That’s what a top investigative reporter at a major Chicago newspaper said when I asked why the story of Annabel Melongo – former Save A Life Foundation employee turned whistleblower – wasn’t being covered. “We’d have to spend a lot of time to get it right.” The reporter explained how, with a limited staff of investigative reporters tasked to write one “investigative story” each week, there aren’t enough resources to focus on the Melongo case.

And besides, it’d be “covering ground on someone else’s story.” In other words, bloggers have already told the what of Melongo’s incarceration in the Cook County Jail – a nasty place – under a $300,000 bond for “eavesdropping.” The reporter was right about that. But ferreting out the why of her imprisonment as she awaits trial is a different task.

If the Chicago print reporters were interested, they’d follow the money. If resources are so tight, here’s an economical way to do it:

First, add up all the government grants listed by the Chicago suburb-based Save A Life Foundation (SALF) in their Form 990s. That’s the yearly paperwork that 501(c)(3) nonprofits submit to the Illinois Attorney General (AG) and to the IRS. A simple email FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to the AG for SALF’s 990’s from its birth in 1993 until it folded last year takes a minute, and the information is free. Their reported government grants total $7,850,777.

Next, add up the dollar amounts of state and federal grants obtained via FOIA requests and email exchanges with agency officials. That number is considerably more than $7,850,777.

So what’s up with the discrepancy? (more…)

Well we’ve got a case of another journalist that turned into a political operative that now wants to go back to being a journalist. And would you be surprised that the journo/politico/journo redux is a Democrat? I would hope you wouldn’t because the right leaning journo to politico hardly ever happens (though it has been known to).

It doesn’t just happen on a national level as it has with all the journos who joined Obama in D.C., either. This time it’s one Bob Reed former Chicago reporter and editor of Crain’s Chicago Business turned mouthpiece for Illinois Democratic Governor Pat Quinn. Reed quit the journalism trade to head up Pat Quinn’s communications office when he was Lt. Gov. and stayed with him when he became Illinois’ accidental governor upon the ejection of Rod Blagojevich from his lofty, bribe-riddled heights. Now Reed wants to go back to being a journalist and has resigned from Quinn’s staff to pursue new opportunities.

Interestingly, Reed termed his employ in the guv’s office as just another journalistic “assignment.” (more…)

It’s long been clear modern Democrats and their ops are quick to anger, and far too comfortable with resorting to physical violence. The other day it was Congressman Bob Etheridge (D, N.C.), going nuclear on a couple of college kids, and now this:

That would be representatives of the Democrat candidate for Senate in Illinois, Alexi Giannoulias, the Obama pal whose family-owned Broadway Bank was recently seized by federal regulators. (more…)

The Chicago media covers Illinois political corruption like crime reporters. They show up at the scene, gather for the perp walk, snap a photo, and cover the trial.  In short, they wait for the story to happen and then accept official explanations with minimum scrutiny.  Consequently, when the Machine gets caught, it’s generally not the media that breaks the story. And it’s been that way in Chicago for a very long time.

Here’s one example of a story gone missing: the strange saga of an FBI mole who interacted with several Chicagoland players, including Barack Obama, associated with the rise-and-fall of Antoin “Tony” Rezko and former Illinois Governor Milorad R. “Rod” Blagojevich.

It starts in the late 1990’s in New York where Bernard Barton, Jr. made “wrong decisions” while running his billboard leasing company. One wrong decision was selling space on billboards he neither owned nor controlled.

According to an FBI affidavit, those “wrong decisions” included Thomas’ drawing more than $350,000 from his customers’ credit cards while he was running a billboard leasing business in Manhattan in the late 1990s. He also charged more than $140,000 to an American Express business account he obtained using his father’s Social Security number.

To mitigate jail time, Barton volunteered to help New York federal prosecutors make a case against organized crime families that were trying to penetrate the billboard business. His offer worked. His sentencing has been delayed… for seven years now. (more…)

Reporting on politics, “The Chicago Way.”

The Illinois Senate race is shaping up to be a high-profile and influential campaign that will have national implications.  Not only because Illinois is the most populated state in the mid-west, but also because the seat up for grabs is President Obama’s former seat.  If Republican candidate Rep. Mark Kirk, were to win the seat it would be seen as an enormous PR loss for the White House.

The Democratic nominee, Alexi Giannoulias has been under fire because of the failiure of Broadway Bank and his direct connection to it.  Believe it or not, there are suspicions of corruption, incompetence  and graft with regard to a Democrat in Chicago.  Go figure! (more…)

Sitting through a Rachel Maddow commentary is difficult enough in the best of circumstances. Listening to her tortured logic (employing the word loosely) as she tried to expose the “perfidy” of lobbyist Rick Berman and Big Government editor-in-chief Michael Flynn was enough to make one’s ears bleed. Either unable or unwilling to discuss the merit of Berman’s and Flynn’s positions with regard to any particulars, Maddow relied upon a classic liberal theme song to make her point: whatever government or so-called public interests groups want to do is both altruistic and good and whatever conservatives and corporations want to do is selfish and evil.

No doubt this background music, which permeated her latest sneering rant, resonated like a symphony when heard by MSNBC’s enraptured audience of a couple dozen or so of the leftist faithful. For the rest of America, growing ever more disenchanted with the munificence of big government, it was just more liberal static.

But, once again, we must ponder the ultimately-unanswerable question: What’s the most annoying thing about Rachel Maddow?  Is it the condescendingly arrogant way in which she delivers her message, or is it the appalling ignorance that forms the foundation of her message? In this particular case, I lean toward the latter. (more…)

If you want to know what “progressive” policies will do to America in the long run, look no farther than the president’s home state. According to the MSM narrative, the economic disaster in Illinois is Rod Blagojevich’s fault. That’s true to some extent, but there’s much more to the story than the incompetence of one man. Despite the recession, there is no good reason that Illinois should be bleeding jobs and that its state budget should be on life support.

The Prairie State – my state – sits atop the transportation crossroads of America, has a rich, diversified economic base and a multi-talented workforce. Less than a decade ago, the state had money in the bank, unemployment was low and the outlook was bright. Illinois even managed to shrug off the mini-recession that followed 9-11 with barely a pause. Then, in 2003, Democrats took over complete control of state government, brimming with progressive policies that – cross their hearts and hope to die – wouldn’t hurt the state’s budget or damage its economy one little bit. Happy days, the bedazzled citizens of Illinois were told, were here again.

Seven years later, the Illinois’ economy is lies in smoldering ruins thanks to the progressive policies foisted upon its citizens by a cabal of Democrats that included then-state senator Barack H. Obama. Illinois ranks forty eighth in the nation in job loss, with over 200,000 jobs lost in 2009 alone and unemployment over eleven per cent. Our leading exports used to be corn and soybeans. Today, our number one export is college graduates, because young adults can’t find jobs in the state that gave them their education. In 2000, Illinois debt basically matched revenues. Now, the state’s total debt totals over $100 billion, almost four times annual revenue. (more…)

The irony would be amusing, were the stakes not so serious. The very day that the United States Congress passed sweeping legislation that will undermine the economy, increase debt and send tax rates soaring, a leading liberal media outlet criticized the elected officials who have been in charge of the president’s home state for repeatedly passing legislation that has: undermined Illinois’ economy, increased Illinois’ debt and sent Illinois tax rates soaring, thus poisoning the business environment and employment prospects in the state. It appears that government’s mission isn’t to tax and spend. Who knew?

It will be hard to believe, but when Illinois Democrats passed all of the legislation that got Illinois into this cesspool of a fiscal crisis, both they and the MSM assured voters that the there was nothing to worry about. These great new programs, they said, will actually make the state more prosperous and, if you disagreed with that proposition, then you were obviously a crabby conservative trying make political hay at the expense of what was obviously the best thing for the people of the state of Illinois. Sound familiar? (more…)