Chicago Daily Observer

That was big of Sen./ Rev. James Meeks to dare someone to arrest the kids he’s leading out of the city’s public schools in an ill-conceived protest, when he’s the guy who should be pinched.

As for the students, truant officers ought to round them up and take them back to school where they belong. Of course, no one will do any of that because they don’t want to appear mean, racist or elitist. And that’s exactly the point of Meeks’ plan to haul Chicago students out of the first week of school to protest, at downtown offices and at Winnetka’s New Trier Township High School, the “inequities” of the state education funding formula.

If the powers that be in Illinois are so all-fired determined to prevent the electorate from calling a convention to reform the state’s constitution, then maybe the special interests should come up with a better way to flush the corrupt, wasteful and incompetent politics out of state government.

But they haven’t. Instead, business and labor, the self-righteous and greedy, along with some pure of heart folks are spending a ton of money to get you to vote “no” when you are asked in the November election whether you want to call a state Constitutional Convention.

David Plouffe, manager of Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, keeps sending me e-mails asking me to cough up money because the presumptive Democratic nominee’s fundraising is, supposedly, as pure as the driven snow. Somehow, my name got on Obama’s list of prospective suckers, and for months I’ve read this song and dance about how he has freed himself from the tentacles of special interests.

This is baloney.

What describes the nature of Illinois politics better than the hiring of Democrat strategist David Axelrod’s firm by an establishment Republican to squash any possibility of a state constitutional convention?

Voting to convene a convention to revise the Illinois Constitution—which is required by that very constitution to be on the ballot this November—is hardly a subject on everyone’s (or even anyone’s) lips, but you never know when the natives might act up and demand a change in the nation’s most dysfunctional state government. No telling what it might lead to, something like, oh, government that works.

The Democratic and Republican powers that have run this state (into the ground) can’t have anything like that, so a coalition is about to hire Axelrod’s ASK Public Strategies and the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton to jointly run a $2-million to $3-million media and advertising campaign. “We haven’t signed the contract, ... Read More...

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that gun ownership is an individual right turned Mayor Richard Daley into a fiery pillar, visible to the naked eye as far away as Rockford.

Daley declared the District of Columbia vs. Heller decision to be “frightening,” “outrageous” and a “return to the days of the Wild West.” You would have thought the court had ruled that free bazookas were to be handed out to gang members..

Before Barack Obama can get his presidential hands on the Iraq War, it might end, not in disaster as he figures, but in an American victory.

He, his fans and much of the media haven’t noticed in the heat of the presidential campaign, but the war is winding down, if not nearing its end. Fewer military and civilians killed or wounded; fewer insurgent attacks; more order and security, especially in such troubled areas as Basra and Sadr City; more reconciliation; improved quality of life, and—not the least—greater liberties.

More than his racist minister chums, his starkly liberal voting record, his pandering to the get-out-of-Iraq-right-now zealots, what really bothers me about Barack Obama is his association with politics as practiced in Chicago and Illinois.

This is not a crime, of course, but the fact that he is someone who got his start and was propelled to stardom after an internship in the incubator of perhaps the nation’s most corrupt state gives me, at least, pause. It seems that everywhere you turn here, especially if it is toward the federal courthouse, some politician or political insider is being found guilty of some or another form of corruption.

State Sen. Jeff Schoenberg (D-Evanston) suggests that a massive, costly, long-awaited and controversial statewide public-works program won’t be considered by the legislature until after the fall elections.

The idea that politicians can’t settle difficult issues before an election has become so widely accepted that it hardly raises an eyebrow anymore. That’s the way it is, we’re told. But is that the way it should be?

Before everyone drops into a deep swoon over the California Supreme Court’s decision “allowing” gay marriages, it might be worthwhile to read the entire 121-page decision to discover that it changes, well, practically nothing.

California already has extensive laws granting same-sex couples virtually the same rights as opposite-sex couples. The 4–3 majority recognized that fact but said the “substance” of the laws didn’t really matter. “The question we must address is whether . . . the failure to designate the official relationship of same-sex couples as marriage violates the California Constitution.”

When no one was looking, the “world food crisis” elbowed out “global climate change” as our planet’s Numero Uno calamity.

As if that weren’t bad enough, we now discover that the two are connected; with this attempt to fix the climate by shifting away from fossil fuels to more “eco-friendly” renewable fuels, we have ended up starving people in Africa and Asia.

Seems like we can hardly settle on one cataclysm before another one demands our attention.

Food riots have broken out around the world; grain-producing countries have banned exports to feed their own people; food prices in the U.S. and around the world have gone through the roof. The UN—its usual bold self—created a task force to study the matter.

My guess is that the American Catholic Church would see a resurgence beyond imagining if it welcomed women and the married into the priesthood. No one expected that Pope Benedict XVI on his recent visit to the United States would announce that he was overturning the centuries-long church tradition that closed the Catholic priesthood to women and married men. But some of the faithful can’t be blamed for hoping that the change will come in their lifetimes.

I hope that the pope has returned to the Vatican with some lasting impressions of the American Catholic Church: its tremendous vitality despite the disturbing loss of clergy over the last several decades, and the yearning of the laity for an even more invigorated church that an upsurge in the number of priests would bring to it.

Maybe we’re asking the wrong question when we debate whether the $100 million Chicago Children’s Museum should be built in Grant Park.

A better question is: Why is anyone spending $100 million on a children’s museum in the first place?

When the civic good hearts go about raising the $100 million in private money for the controversial museum in Grant Park, they should ask themselves: Isn’t there a better way to help the children? The answer is: Yes there is. Especially when Chicago’s children have a crying need for better schools. Think of what $100 million could do by duplicating the demonstrable successes of, say, Marva Collins Preparatory School on the South Side.

Wow, when was the last time the people of San Francisco—“the gentle people with flowers in their hair”—turned out to protest in such numbers the actions of a commie country?

I don’t keep track, but there they were last week, thousands fussing over how Red (as it used to be called) China is oppressing Tibet and adding to the miseries of Darfur. Even in Chicago there were protests.

Why didn’t someone tell us sooner that we could free ourselves from the clutches of Cook County?

Yes, it’s legally possible, but practically impossible, for suburban townships to secede from the county and its oppressive taxes, bloated payrolls, insider dealings and pathetic leadership. Still, it might be worth the effort. After all, if you can’t beat them, leave them.

Several Palatine government officials, pushed to the limit by the county’s recent sales tax increase, which may send shoppers scooting across the county line into adjacent Lake County, are discussing secession as something more than a stunt. Lost business and lost sales tax revenues are the price that the village and its businesses may pay for Cook County’s budgetary dereliction and other mischief.

You’ve got to hand it to Sen. Dick Durbin. When everyone is blasting the “earmarking” of federal funds for favored local projects, the Illinois Democrat defends the practice.

At least he’s honest about it, unlike so many others who say they oppose earmarks, while soaking them up like bread dabbed in gravy. Take our favorite son and presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, who says he’ll get rid of them—partially at least—yet he basks in the warm gratitude of Illinois interests that are the lucky recipients of the federal loot. Obama, on his campaign Web site, touts his promise to “slash earmarks to no greater than year 2001 levels.”

You’ve got to hand it to Gov. Rod Blagojevich. He sure knows how to keep everyone off balance, whether it’s proposing to drag the state deeper into the financial pit with unexpected and unaffordable new programs, purchasing Wrigley Field when there’s no need, or, now, signing on to raze the lecture hall where five Northern Illinois University students were fatally shot and replace it with a new classroom and memorial building, at a mere cost of $40 million.

Who knows what foolishness he’ll surprise us with next. Maybe he’ll dissolve the legislature, much as English monarchs of yore did when displeased with parliament.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich did it again last week. The roof is leaking, the electricity has been shut off, they’re coming to repossess the car, and he’s talking about adding a swimming pool and taking a Caribbean cruise.

Illinois is perhaps in the worst financial shape in memory and has the largest budget deficit of any U.S. state. But he’s proposing new programs and bigger giveaways. Blagojevich’s state of the state speech should have been delivered by Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman. What, me worry?

Wanna have some fun? Let’s speculate that none of the presidential candidates in either party wins enough primaries to wrap up the nomination before the conventions in August and September.

Those too young to remember the last time the conventions were wide open would be entertained, enlightened and appalled at the sight of party leaders and state delegations horse-trading behind closed doors to select their candidates. As scandalous as this might be for some, I don’t think it’s necessarily cataclysmic because the smoke-filled rooms have produced some good candidates and presidents.

For those who already are convinced that Gov. Rod Blagojevich is nuts, here’s something to add to the growing pile of evidence: He’s now insisting that legislation he once signed into law is unconstitutional. You can reasonably ask why he enacted the law in the first place, and the obvious answer is that the law no longer serves his cynical political purposes, so he pretends that the law, and the Illinois Constitution, doesn’t apply to him.