Chicago Daily Observer

Rubes. Rednecks. Low-information voters. Beer-track voters. NASCAR man. Bubba. Retro America. These terms have all been used by well-known progressive writers and thinkers to describe white working-class Americans. This familiar litany of contempt provides the context for the firestorm that erupted Friday, when Sen. Barack Obama’s remarks to a closed-door group of rich donors in San Francisco were made public by a blogger for the Huffington Post.

Referring to “these small towns in Pennsylvania,” Obama told his wealthy audience that the views of these voters on a variety of subjects should be understood as responses to decades of economic distress. “It’s not surprising,” he said, “then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” When both Hillary Clinton and John McCain accused him of condescension toward nonelite ... Read More...

Cook County Board President Todd Stroger has two weeks to name directors to a new, independent board to oversee the county’s vast Bureau of Health Services, which critics contend is a patronage-laden fiefdom controlled by 8th Ward Democrats….....Here’s the list:

*Dr. David Ansell, vice president and chief medical officer at Rush University Medical Center

*Fernando Grillo, former secretary of the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation

*Warren Batts, retired Premark International CEO

*Dr. Carl Bell, president and CEO of Community Mental Health Council & Foundation Inc.

*Norman Bobins, chairman emeritus of LaSalle Bank Corp.

*Daniel Cantrell, who is on the staff of U.S. Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.)

*David Carvalho, deputy director of the Illinois Dept. of Public Health

*Margaret Davis, executive director of the Healthcare Consortium of Illinois

*Dr. Joseph Flaherty, dean of the College of Medicine at University of Illinois-Chicago

*Quin Golden, former chief of staff ... Read More...

On the same day Gov. Rod Blagojevich issued a massive executive order to combine more state agency functions, a Cook County judge ordered that Blagojevich’s administration has to stop expanding a state health program to middle-income adults. But that’s not going to stop Blagojevich from trying. In the meantime, residents who already started receiving state-sponsored health care under the governor’s expansions are left in limbo over whether they’ll continue to receive those benefits. We’ll have more on the governor’s move to consolidate state agency functions tomorrow. It’s a mess.

Robert Sorich and three other former Daley administration workers were convicted of fraud or perjury charges in 2006 after a federal investigation into illegal patronage hiring at City Hall. Today their appeals were denied [PDF] by a federal appellate court that reiterated how for years they helped politics trump policy:

“Sorich was the mayor’s so-called ‘patronage chief,’ and held the title Assistant to the Director of IGA. Defendant Timothy McCarthy was Sorich’s deputy from 2001 to 2005 and often stepped into his shoes. Campaign coordinators would pass Sorich lists of campaign workers and volunteers, whose names he would then send to the heads of various city departments—Aviation, Streets and Sanitation, Sewers, Water, etc.—for jobs. Defendants Patrick Slattery and John Sullivan held high positions in the Department of Streets and Sanitation.