Archive for May, 2008
May 30th, 2008
Well, you’ve all heard about the latest “pastor eruption” from Trinity United Church o’ Christ, Barack Obama’s church home for the last 20 years.
This outburst was from the famous or notorious Father Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina’s, a Catholic church on Chicago’s South Side. In a guest sermon he gave Sunday at Trinity, the radical priest delivered a racist rant against Hillary Clinton, saying she expected the Democratic nomination because of “white privilege,” a concept that white, liberal guilt-mongers have been pedaling for a couple of decades now.
Sound bytes of this “sermon,” along the congregation’s enthusiastic agreement, were instantly “Hannitized” and spread like wild fire through the talkosphere and blogosphere. Then the fire spread to the fossil media.
Hillary doesn’t have to sabotage Barack’s campaign. His church does it for her!
I think it’s time for Mayor Daley to intervene: Send a legion of city code inspectors to Trinity.
May 27th, 2008
Remember the comments of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who said in 2001 that we had become a wicked land, causing God to lift His safety net over America and allow the terrorist attacks of 9-11 to occur? Most of us dismissed such comments as ridiculous fear-mongering (and probably linked to a plea for money.)
Now there’s a New Age version of the same thing, only , as you might expect, it’s bad karma that’s punishing China. No less an authority than Sharon Stone (she of the famous leg-crossing scene) said it.
Asked by a Hong Kong TV crew if she’d heard of the earthquakes in China, our Sharon said of course, she had. She added,
“I’m not happy at how the Chinese are treating the Tibetans, because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else… They’re not being nice to the Dhali Lama, who is a good friend of mine. And then all this earthquake stuff happened, and I thought, is that karma, that when you’re not being nice, bad things happen to you?”
May 27th, 2008
Here’s what I want to know: Is Danica going to be the lede on every Indycars racing story, regardless of whether she wins????
May 27th, 2008
So, Barack Obama wants to open up American– Cuban relations, maybe end the 40 year old trade embargo. Horror of horrors, wail assorted Bushies, McCainiacs and The Maha-Rushie. We can’t be talking to people who rule with iron fists, say they.
But it was Mr. Bush, or as Garrison Keillor refers to him, “the Current Occupant” of the White House, who went, begging for oil to the Saudis, who run a cruel, dictatorial regime that, aside from having no elections, doesn’t even let women DRIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Last time I was in Walmart, just about eveything in the store was made in China, which similarly cracks down on all dissent, won’t even allow those passive Falun Gong exercisers to practice their relaxation exercises in the park, and stifles dissent in Tibet. Not a word from Bush about the Chinese crackdown in Tibet. Probably he wanted to be nice to them because he’s borrowing big bucks from the Bank of China to mail to us in “rebate” checks.
But oh how tough George & Co. are on those dastardly Castro Bros. Give me a break.
The trade embargo is simply daft. Our farmers would like to sell them products. Our contractors would like to build roads and buildings. Our citizens would like to vacation on the best beaches in the Caribbean. Several years ago, Illinois sent a trade delegation to Cuba with some of the top corporate and ag leaders in the state. We wanted to trade. But the feds said no dice.
Lift the embargo. Recognize Cuba. Let people visit. That’ll do more to change Cuba for the better than any speeches from the likes of President Dopey.
May 25th, 2008
The Young at Heart festival was great, as usual, and the weather held up. I missed my favorite part, though, which is Mayor Darryl Lindberg’s party at the Penguin Golf Academy to watch the great fireworks show. It wasn’t on purpose, though. I had to attend my neice’s graduation ceremony from Bartlett High School, which started at 8 p.m. in the Sears Centre. That school district, U-46, had five high school graduations in the big barn in one day, starting at 8 a.m. As luck would have it, Bartlett’s was last.
I wish, however, that the organizers of the Wing Ding celebration of rock ‘n’ debauchery could move their show to another date that didn’t conflict with Young at Heart.
May 23rd, 2008
The futility of it all! That sums up the collective feeling at Giovanni’s Friday after former U.S. House Speaker Denny Hastert made an impassioned plea for Illinois lawmakers to pass a $31 billion capital bill before they adjourn May 31.
If they don’t, he said, the state risks losing $9.3 billion in federal transportation funds.
But Illinois probably won’t pass a capital bill for one reason: No one trusts Gov. Rod Blagojevich. His word is no good in Springpatch. Lawmakers haven’t been able to pass a to pass a capital bill since he took office in 2003.
Leasing the lottery, even 80 percent of it, is a non-starter to many lawmakers. Selling off state assets is like selling your house, room by room, to pay the mortgage on it. Pretty soon you’re living in a pup tent in the back yard, and your mortgage still isn’t paid.
As for gambling expansion, that’s been tried numerous times in Springfield, and they’ve never been able to do it because nobody can agree on how much more gambling there should be, or whether there should be more gambling at all.
State Sen. Dave Syverson, R-Rockford, had it right when he said the responsible approach would be to increase the state’s 3 percent income tax by three/quarters of a percent.
But Blagojevich maintains he won’t support income tax or sales tax increases. And Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan doesn’t seem inclined to support anything the governor wants to do. They’e at loggerheads.
So, I don’t think we’ll see a capital bill anytime soon.
May 17th, 2008
For years I’ve said that countries that don’t manufacture inevitably become colonies of those who do. That’s why our British overlords didn’t want the 13 colonies manufacturing products. We were to provide the raw materials, and Englishmen toiling in factories in the Midlands would make them into products to sell back to us,
That’s the main reason we rebelled. We knew America would never amount to anything if we couldn’t control our own industrial destiny.
Now, we’re blithely ignoring that truism in a rush to move factories off shore in a race for low-clost labor. Soon, those offshore factories will be dictating our economic reality, if they aren’t already.
I’ve been appalled that what we call wealth creation is really just moving old wealth around. Once, Rockford’s movers and shakers were bold men who put their brains to work inventing things that people wanted, then built the factories to make those things, and sold them all over the world. Rockford added value to raw material. That’s wealth creation.
Today, our movers and shakers are real-estate developers. These men and women move existing wealth around, but they create no new wealth.
I bring this up now because I’m impressed by an op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post.
Political analyst Kevin Phillips writes in a piece titled “The old titans are collapsed, is America next?” that we may be going the way of other world powers that began to believe that their powerful financial sectors were wealth creators, rather than the product of wealth creation.
As Phillips puts it:
“The most chilling parallel with the failures of the old powers is the United States’ unhealthy reliance on the financial sector as the engine of its growth. In the 18th century, the Dutch thought they could replace their declining industry and physical commerce with grand money-lending schemes to foreign nations and princes. But a series of crashes and bankruptcies in the 1760s and 1770s crippled Holland’s economy. In the early 1900s, one apprehensive minister argued that Britain could not thrive as a “hoarder of invested securities” because “banking is not the creator of our prosperity but the creation of it.” By the late 1940s, the debt loads of two world wars proved the point, and British global economic leadership became history. ”
If Phillips is correct, we are in for a long, bumpy ride.
May 16th, 2008
Sometimes my blog entries mysteriuosly disappear, so here’s one I did a few days ago that is now gone. I’ll try and reconstruct it because I want your input on the topic.
The Rockford City Council is taking up the idea of changing the way the city hires (and presumably fires) the police and fire chiefs. The Forest City is alone among Illinois’ major cities in picking the chiefs through an arcane “Board of Fire & Police Commissioners,” a three member panel appointed by the mayor with the approval of the aldermen. It’s been that way for as long as I remember, and I don’t know why it was set up in the first place.
Once they’re in place, the panel can’t fire the chiefs except for cause. No fire chief or police chief has ever been fired, to the best of my knowledge, and I remember back as far as Thomas Boustead (sp?) being police chief and Wayne Swanson being fire chief. All chiefs have come from within the departments.
In other cities in Illinois, from Chicago on down the line, the mayor hires the chiefs with City Council approval. This makes the chiefs directly accountable to elected officials.
I think it makes a lot of sense to make this change. The Board of Fire & Police Commissioners would still have a key role in other matters, but the naming of the top public safety officers in the two most important city departments should be done by the mayor, who is elected by the whole city, and the 14 aldermen elected from their respective wards.
What do you think?
May 16th, 2008
On the day when the price of oil hit a record $127 a barrel, President George W. Bush went to Saudi Arabia for the second time this year to beg King Abdullah to ratchet up oil production in that terrorist-producing absolute dictatorship.
And for the second time this year, the King said, “No.”
I admit it: I voted for W, twice. But I can’t wait for high noon on Jan. 20, 2009, when he’s finally gone.
Of course, if John McCain takes over, Bush won’t really be gone at all. He’ll just perform the third Bush term.
May 15th, 2008
The posting I did about who might run for mayor of Rockford got me to thinking. Yes, I got some sarcastic comments, which is fine. I enjoy coming up with halfway funny responses.
But what if we go in another direction? What if we use this post as a forum to come up with serious solutions to what we see as Rockford’s and the region’s problems?
See, I’ve lived here all my life, and for all my adult years I’ve heard complaints about this, complaints about that, conspiracy theories galore about what “they” are doing at City Hall or the courthouse or the School board to shaft the taxpayers.
These are mostly fact-free observations and urban falsehoods like, “We voted against the MetroCentre and they built it anyway.” The facts are: Voters rejected a property tax increase to build a civic center in the mid–1960s. In the 1970s, the legislture passed a bill to fund civic centers with taxes from racetrack winnings. So, the MetroCentre was built with racetrack tax money, not our property taxes.
I could go on. And on. And on, exploding myth after myth. But I’ve done it so many times, frankly, I’m bored trying to explain things to people who have no intention of listening to me.
All I’ve heard for 40 years on local talk radio is an endless series of paranoid rants. I often think that if someone thinking about moving to Rockford listened to the people who were born here, he’d turn his car around and get out of town at 80 mph.
So, let’s hear it, Rockfordians. Let’s turn the page. Give me some positive ideas for the future, with as many details as you can provide about how the job should get done.
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