Not all Republicans have lined up in opposition to the federal government buying Thomson state prison and using it as a federal maximum security prison with a separate wing for Taliban and Al Qaida terrorists currently housed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. President Obama has pledged to close the U.S. prison in Cuba by the end of the year.

State Rep. Jim Sacia, R-Pecatonica, represents the Thomson area. The career FBI agent, now retired, strongly supports the plan, and in unusually blunt language.

“If we pass up this opportunity I think we’re buffoons. We have a state of the art facility designed as maximum security prison that is the second largest expenditure for a building in the history of th state of Illinois. It has been sitting mostly vacant for eight years,” Sacia said.

“We have an opportunity to bring 2,000 to 3,000 good jobs to Illinois, and the prison would be doing exactly what intended to do. If President Obama, is going to do this, we are literally idiots if we don’t pursue this opportunity.”

The government plans to use most of the 1,600 bed prison for regular federal inmates, around 100 would be the Taliban and Al Qaida terrorists. They would be housed in two to three wings of the prison, and that part would be operated by the Department of Defense, not the Bureau of Prisons.

Sacia said he respects U.S. Rep. Don Manzullo, R-Egan, who is strongly against the government’s plan.

“He and I  had lengthy conversations Monday and Sunday, and I see this significantly different form the congressman, We already have 340 (convicted terrorists) in U.S. prisons; there are 40 at Marion, 40 at Terre Haute, Indiana, and there is another prison in Illinois that has approximately 40.

“I listened to (U.S. Rep.) Mark Kirk say this will be threat to Chicago. For (God’s) sake, this is 150 miles away. A terror target? What a joke. I almost have to laugh at that. Why would it be any different from any maximum security prison in this country?”

Sacia noted that in Savanna, which is close to Thomson, “up until 15 years ago we had more nuclear weapons stored than anywhere in the world, and nobody blew us off the map.”

“Here we have an opportunity to bring significant economic development to northwest Illinois. Usually we hear 5 jobs here, 10 jobs here., and we have an opportunity for 2,000 to 3000 good paying fed jobs and we have people trying to kill it,” Sacia said.

“I take strong issue with Congressman Manzullo,” said Sacia, who spent three hours Monday talking with federal authorities in Thomson to investigate the prison site. “The Gitmo prisoners will be housed totally separte from other inmates. We have a lot better terrorist targets than (Thomson.)”
“All this coffee shop conversation that these people are going to be released in Thomson, Illinois and be treated in our hospitals is a lot of hooey. These are war prisoners, detainees.”

The prison, built at a cost of over $140 million in 2001, is only used for 100 to 200 minimum security prisoners now.

As to the issue of threats to security, Sacia noted that in World War II, “we had 400,000 POWS in the U.S. including hard car Nazis, SS members, and we dealt with them.” Rockford had its share of those Nazis, too, housed in the prison camp at Camp Grant. POWs were taken daily on trucks to work on area farms and in local industries.

(Bachman is U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minnesota, and Levin is neocon radio host Mark Levin.)

Manzullo’s speech was brief, but he use the word “revolution” and invoked Ronald Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Madame Speaker, tear up this bill.”

At the same event, Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Michigan, read what he called the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, a 1787 document. Problem is, he was reading from the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, a July 4, 1776 document.

No word on what Manzullo thought of the giant banner in the crowd that pictured dead bodies at the Dachau concentration camp and labeled the picture “National Socialist Health Care, Dachau, 1945.”

Click here to watch Manzullo.

In the snipped of the meeting Hynes’ ad uses, we are talking about Quinn’s proposed 50 percent income tax increase, when board member Bob Trojan, a Rockford manufacturer, notes that the governor’s plan would raise taxes on an individual making more than $14,000.

Quinn interrupts Trojan and says, “But isn’t that part of what we have to do to get our state back on its feet?”

Hynes’ ad goes on to castigate Quinn for proposing to raise taxes on middle class folks. Hynes, the ad concludes, will “ask the wealthy to pay their fair share.” See the ad by CLICKING HERE.

When we saw the ad, we wondered if Quinn’s quote had been taken out of context. I reviewed the video of our editorial board meeting, as did Editorial Page Editor Wally Haas. We both concluded that the quote was not taken out of context. Indeed, as questioner Trojan pressed on, Quinn defended his plan. Watch the editorial board meeting here.

This was more a grudge match between moderate and conservative Republicans for the soul of the party; Owens was the beneficiary by default.

This district, closer to Montreal, Quebec than to New York City, has been reliably Republican since there were Republicans, which was just before the Civil War. (1861-65)

When the Republican congressman John McHugh resigned to become secretary of the Army, party leaders in the district selected Dede Scozzafava, a state legislator, to be the Republican candidate in the special election to fill the remainder of McHugh’s term.

But Scozzafava was too liberal for many national Republican chiefs and opinion leaders to stomach. From Sarah Palin to Tim Pawlenty to Dick Armey, the rightist  pundits and poo-bahs weighed in with support for Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman. Over the weekend, Scozzafava dropped out and threw her support to Democrat Owens.

Hoffman, who does not live in the 23rd district,  came close to winning but couldn’t do the job because Scozzafava, whose name remained on the ballot, took about 6 percent of the vote. Other Scozzafava fans certainly followed her lead and voted for Owens to punish the GOP for essentially kicking her out of the party.

This fight isn’t over, just taking a break. In 2010 I think Hoffman will be back, with full GOP backing, trying to defeat Owens, who will no doubt have strong funding from the Democratic Party. Certainly this will be a race to watch. Conservative Republicans are boasting that they banished a liberal from their ranks in NY23, and promise to run primary candidates against other GOP’ers who don’t pass the conservative test.

Someone who is skeptical of this purge of moderates and liberals is Newt Gingrich, who supported Scozzafava because she was the pick of the local GOP in NY23.

Gingrich knows something about winning: He led the House Republicans to a 52-seat pick up in 1994 and returned the party to majority status after 40 years in the wilderness. He knows that to win nationally, the Republican Party has to be attractive to enough voters to attain 50 percent plus one in most elections. If every candidate is required to run the Rush Limbaugh-Glenn Beck-Sarah Palin gauntlet, the GOP will become  a mighty small party in the future.

That’s a shame, because the country really needs a robust, market-based alternative to the Democrats’ programs.  If the Democrats do not have to fear losing control of Congress because Republicans have become too extreme, the donkey party will do whatever it wants, which means enacting a plethora of job-crushing new taxes, regulation and other nanny-state laws that stifle creativity and curtail liberty.

Frankly, I’m horrified at the Democrats’ idea of health care reform. And their cap and trade energy bill is even worse.

Both bills will punish the middle class as well as the small and medium sized businesses that employ them. New taxes, reductions in Medicare and mind-numbing bureaucracy are not my idea of reform. Millions of jobs are at stake. And their health care bill does not come close to covering everybody.

At this point, “No” is the appropriate answer to Democratic bills on health care and energy. I think that’s what voters in Virginia and New Jersey were saying. (Results from NY 23 congressional race have not come in yet.)

That  is not how former President George H. W. Bush (”41″) sees it. Indeed, he commits what the “right” sees as the ultimate sin, giving credit for the wall’s demise to former U.S.S.R Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev himself.

I’m not making this up — I saw and heard Bush say it on Greta Monday night on Fox.

Greta was in Berlin to cover ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary of the wall’s tumble, as was Bush 41. She interviewed him. Greta kept trying to get Bush to take credit for the Berlin Wall coming down, and he repeatedly refused to accept it, giving the lion’s share of credit to Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost, the attempt to forge a kinder, gentler, form of communism in the East Bloc and Soviet Union.

What happened instead was that as soon as people tasted a little freedom, they wanted more, and within two years the East Bloc nations had shaken off communism, most peacefully, one (Romania) brutally.

Finally, on Christmas Day 1991, the mighty Soviet Union itself went out of business, to be replaced the next day by the Russian Federation, a whole slew of “independistans” and three, free Baltic states.

Bush also noted to Greta that the U.S.’s controversial decision to install Pershing missles in Europe in 1982 also hastened communism’s demise, because it signaled to Moscow that the western allies were not going to back down from strong opposition to the Soviets and their client states.

Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize, which Bush 41 also mentioned.

That’s nice. Now, whatever happened to the synchronized lights on East State Street? Remember, it wasn’t that long ago when the city of Rockford ballyhooed the smooth traffic flow. They calimed you could go from the tollway to Fairview without stopping and back again if you liked.

I tried it, and it worked, mostly. But that was years ago. The system no longer works, if indeed it still is supposed to. I gather there have been more stoplights put in.

If any city traffic bureaucrats are reading this, perhaps they can enlighten us about whatever happened to the East State Street traffic light synchronization system.

See the video here

And if you have a free weekend and nothing to do, here’s a link so you can read it yourself:

http://kingston.house.gov/Components/Redirect/r.aspx?ID=32748-1147446