It seems to have been agreed by every single media outlet that only one group has the right to challenge President-elect Barack Obama's promotion of "Pastor" Rick Warren, and that group is the constituency of politically organized homosexuals.
Harry Reid's back is against the wall. He thinks that if he doesn't oppose Rod Blagojevich's appointment of Roland Burris to fill Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat, the Republicans will make the Democrats wear Blago around their necks for the rest of their natural lives.
Whew. Now that 2008 is in the history books, $8.5 trillion in federal bailout money is in the pipeline, and bold leadership is set to take command, Americans can all breathe a little easier, right?
A new Rasmussen Reports poll -- the first to survey American public opinion specifically regarding the Israeli attack on Gaza -- strongly bolsters the severe disconnect between American public opinion on U.S. policy toward Israel and the consensus views expressed by America's political leadership.
While the future of Gov. Blagojevich levitates in a sort of "suspended animation," it is heartening to learn that he is reviewing the 2,600 clemency petitions that he has allowed to stack up on his desk. My organization, Cabrini Green Legal Aid, represents about 10 percent of those individuals still awaiting his decision for pardon and expungement. Hundreds have waited egregiously long periods of time, even up to five years. It is time for their "suspended animation" to come to an end and the governor alone has the power to make it so.
Heard enough about bailouts? Now comes the news that commercial real estate developers -- people who invest in office buildings, hotels, shopping centers and the like -- want to jump on the federal government's bailout bandwagon.
'Outliers" are not politicians who lie even more than other politicians. It is a term used by statisticians to describe some data that are far away from the average -- data on seven-foot women or freezing temperatures in Los Angeles, for example.
Ohio recently became the sixth state to ban Salvia divinorum, a psychedelic member of the mint family native to Mexico, where it has been used for centuries as an aid to healing and divination. The legislator who introduced the ban said he did so after hearing from constituents who blamed their 12-year-old son's death on the drug.
A Dec. 18 Sun-Times article, "Charter schools Obama praised ripped at board meeting" quoted Donald Feinstein, director of Chicago's Academy for Urban School Leadership, dismissing teacher concerns about Renaissance 2010 in testimony to the Chicago Board of Education.
For now, Barack Obama's response to the deteriorating situation in Gaza, where Israeli airstrikes appear to have killed almost 300, is to point out that he doesn't take office for more than three weeks.
As political dirty laundry goes, the case against Gov. Blagojevich is nothing compared with the scandal Chicagoans have been living with for decades -- the legacy of jailhouse torture during the tenure of former Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge. Chicago still has some serious housecleaning to do on that one.
As political dirty laundry goes, the case against Gov. Blagojevich is nothing compared with the scandal Chicagoans have been living with for decades -- the legacy of jailhouse torture during the tenure of former Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge. Chicago still has some serious housecleaning to do on that one.
It is theoretically possible to make an apparently bigoted remark that is also factually true and morally sound. Thus, when the Rev. Bailey Smith, one of the deputies of the late Jerry Falwell, claimed that "God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew," I was in complete agreement with him. This is because I do not believe that there is any supernatural supervisor who lends an ear to any prayer.
Caroline Kennedy is having a rough time convincing fellow New York-based Dems that she's good for them. If she really, really wants to be in the rough and tough of hard-scrabble politics -- and show us all what she is made of -- I wish she had decided to enter the political fray via election rather than appointment.
If we learned anything from the recent report on the contacts between President-elect Barack Obama and Gov. Blagojevich, it is that Obama considered the governor to be pure poison.
American presidents have been known to want a loyal follower close at hand to record their achievements for the ages. Lincoln had Nicolay and Hay. Grant had Twain. Franklin Roosevelt had Sherwood and Rosenman. Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan each had Edmund Morris. What about Barack Obama? Who will write his history?
You could be forgiven, reading a recent article in Britain's Sunday Times by Gemma Soames about "the new feminists," for thinking you'd woken up in 1994.
In October 1971, during the Vietnam War, I was in my 13th month of active duty as a Navy doctor, serving at the U.S. Naval Hospital at the Great Lakes Naval Base, north of Chicago.
When writing college letters of recommendation for my high school students, I often employ the somewhat pretentious phrase that the student displays a sophisticated appreciation for the role played by paradox and ambiguity in historical causation. The saga of former FBI official Mark Felt provides yet another example of history's ambivalence. And with his death and the acclaimed cinematic adaptation of Broadway's "Frost/Nixon" by Ron Howard, it seems that this holiday season will not escape references to the shadow that Richard Nixon continues to cast upon American politics.
I have a confession: I like Christmas music. The upbeat rhythms of a carol often bring a smile to my face. Hearing the soulful timbre of a song like "Silent Night" encourages contemplation. Yes, even a rabbi can appreciate Christmas music.
A couple of years ago, perceiving a giant, light-covered fir at the Capitol in Olympia, Wash., as a symbol of Christmas, the Jewish organization Chabad of Seattle sought to erect a menorah to commemorate Hanukkah. A local real estate agent, perceiving the menorah as a religious symbol, decided to sponsor a Nativity scene.
Random thoughts on the passing scene: Maybe the current bailout fever is Congress' way of getting into the spirit of the season -- saying in effect, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus." They will undoubtedly also be saying, "Yes, New Jersey, there is a Santa Claus. . . . Yes, Ohio, there is a Santa Claus . . ."
In "Four Christmases," the hit holiday movie, Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn star as a happy young San Francisco couple, Kate and Brad, who navigate the merry minefield of four Christmas visits to their respective parents' homes in one single day.
There is something especially unsettling about visiting Las Vegas these days -- and it is not the town's lascivious culture. A voyage to Sin City in this moment of ecological and economic crisis is a journey to a giant concave mirror reflecting back the magnified -- and ugly -- truths about this epoch of cataclysmic consumption and hubristic hedonism.
Editor's note: In this posting on her blog, Tammy Lynn Michaels, wife of singer and lesbian activist Melissa Etheridge, defends the evangelist Rick Warren against accusations that he is a gay-bashing bigot. We have edited it for punctuation.
For more than two years, cozying up to Rick Warren has been one of Barack Obama's favorite ways of showing evangelical Christians that he might not be so scary, after all -- and for just as long, palling around with Obama every once in a while has been Warren's way of trying to show more secular-minded people that he's not so bad, either.
While the Blagojevich scandal so far has exonerated rather than implicated Barack Obama and his staff, the president-elect's camp has made some unnecessary mistakes in response. Inflated and distorted by hostile critics, those mistakes have risked creating public suspicion where there need be none.
Congress, go home and stay there. We don't need you. We have a president and a secretary of the Treasury. That's all we need. We don't need you, your hearings, your negotiations, or your votes.
No American president since Franklin Roosevelt will face as many immediate daunting challenges as Barack Obama, but a new report mandated by Congress, "World at Risk," presents a compelling argument that terrorism must be Job One.
Editor's note: It's not often that an East Coast newspaper tells folks in Illinois what to do. But in an editorial on Friday, the Washington Post, echoing the editorial position of the Chicago Sun-Times, had this to say:
I had never before been a special fan of that great comedian Phyllis Diller, but she utterly won my heart this week by sending me an envelope that, when opened, contained a torn-off square of brown-bag paper of the kind suitable for latrine duty in an ill-run correctional facility. Duly unfurled, it carried a handwritten salutation reading as follows:
In the United States, the education debate is framed as a zero-sum game. But a look at Finland, whose schools rank No. 1 in global surveys, shows that a national commitment to education can neutralize political debates on school reform.
Even Americans whose knowledge of the legislative process is limited to the "I'm Just a Bill" episode of "Schoolhouse Rock" know about the veto: If Congress approves legislation the president doesn't like, he can refuse to sign it, in which case the law can be enacted only by a two-thirds vote of each chamber. President Bush's plan to aid the auto industry relies on a more obscure maneuver: If Congress rejects a bill the president likes, he can act as if the vote went the other way.
Barack Obama's nomination of former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack for secretary of agriculture poses an interesting challenge to food policy progressives and environmentalists.
What passes for the holiday season began before dawn the day after Thanksgiving, when a worker at a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., was trampled to death by a mob of bargain hunters. Afterward, there were reports that some people, mesmerized by cheap consumer electronics and discounted toys, kept shopping even after announcements to clear the store.
Perhaps it all began in 1955 when Richard J. Daley ascended to the Chicago throne. Ald. Paddy Bauler (43rd) uttered those immortal words, "Chicago ain't ready for reform!"
I, among others, have posed the question of what the future of Catholic politics might look like -- if it has any future -- in light of the great splits between and among Catholic voters and leaders during the recent presidential campaign. There seem to be few good answers, and clearly much will depend on the outcome of the current debate with the Republican Party as to whether it will cool down its rhetoric on abortion and gay marriage and other hot-button issues to draw in more voters.
Questions are raised. Connections are drawn. Conspiracies are theorized. Guilt is imputed, implied, asserted and very widely associated. And more of the same feckless fingerpointing is exactly what Barack Obama should expect from the Republicans, the right-wing propaganda machine and their enablers in the mainstream media -- even after Gov. Blagojevich has met whatever fate he deserves.
The obvious is sometimes the most difficult thing to discern, and few things are more amusing than the efforts of our journals of record to keep "open" minds about the self-evident, and thus to create mysteries when the real task of reportage is to dispel them. An all-time achiever in this category is Fernanda Santos of the New York Times, who managed to write on Nov. 27 that the Chabad Jewish center in Bombay was "an unlikely target of the terrorist gunmen who unleashed a series of bloody coordinated attacks at locations in and around Mumbai's commercial center."
In the early morning hours of Dec. 10, federal immigration agents raided a BP refinery in Northwest Indiana and arrested 15 janitorial workers employed by United Building Maintenance, a Carol Stream company that BP has contracted for cleaning services.
Reality TV has nothing on the real-world, soap opera-like shenanigans of Illinois politics. Let's just call it "The Haves and the Have Nots." This show has all the stuff of good ratings: greed, hubris and power-grabbing. The star is our hopefully soon-to-be-canceled Gov. Blagojevich. The People of Illinois are mere extras.
In February, 1941, Prime Minister Winston Churchill stood in front of a British Broadcasting Corp. microphone. His listeners were the people of Britain, but his audience was President Franklin Roosevelt.
In 2007, Rep. David Price introduced a bill that would have applied American criminal law to all government contractors who commit felonies while working in areas where U.S. forces are operating.
On Dec. 3, the Sun-Times ran a story by Shamus Toomey outlining the latest development in the long-running, perhaps ages-old, conflict between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law.
