Chicago Daily Observer

From an e-mail just sent out by the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute

When slightly positive is as bad as negative
EPI‘s take on the latest GDP numbers, released Wednesday morning by the Commerce Department, was that the miniscule 0.6% growth reported is not nearly enough to prevent rising unemployment. Economist L. Josh Bivens noted in an early response that “There’s nothing magical about staying above zero. In fact, annual growth of less than 2.5% is a recipe for rising unemployment. We’re already seeing this in three consecutive months of job loss, and considering the GDP numbers released this morning, we’ll surely see more in the coming months.”

Very clever attempt at changing the terms of political debate. There has been so much screaming about slipping into recession, and then reality intruded. So now the screaming must be about, well, not slipping into recession.

And for the ... Read More...

(Your wife) Michelle, who was born in 1964, says that most Americans’ lives have “gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl.” Since 1960, real per capita income has increased 143 percent, life expectancy has increased by seven years, infant mortality has declined 74 percent, deaths from heart disease have been halved, childhood leukemia has stopped being a death sentence, depression has become a treatable disease, air and water pollution have been drastically reduced, the number of women earning a bachelor’s degree has more than doubled, the rate of homeownership has increased 10.2 percent, the size of the average American home has doubled, the percentage of homes with air conditioning has risen from 12 to 77, the portion of Americans who own shares of stock has quintupled … Has your wife perhaps missed some pertinent developments in this country that she calls “just downright mean”?

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Northwestern withdrew an offer to U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, for an honorary degree this year, Al Cubbage, vice president for university relations, said Wednesday night.

At a Dallas church on Sunday, Wright, the former minister of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, said NU planned on presenting him with a doctorate in sacred theology. After controversial clips of Wright’s sermons were widely disseminated, NU withdrew the offer, according to an article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

“The president of the university called and told me he was withdrawing the degree because I was not patriotic,” Wright told the congregation of Friendship-West Baptist Church, the article said.

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“Against the Capitol, I met a lion, who glared upon me and went surly by, without annoying me…”Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare, Act I, scene iii
Nature abhors a vacuum and wild animals are proving highly adaptive to changing environments. Last year, a coyote paid a surprise visit to a sandwich shop in the Loop. More recently, the shooting of a cougar in the Roscoe Village neighborhood made headlines. It has been suggested that this was the first time that a cougar had been killed within the city limits in more than a century.

Snow plow drivers often operate their trucks late at night and during the
hours immediately before dawn. As such, they see many things that those of us
accustomed to working from nine to five miss. Many animals are nocturnal. My
informants have told me not to discount the presence of ... Read More...

“Why does Reverend Wright matter so much to you,” asks the caller to my WLS talk show. He thinks we in the media need to get over it.

Obama has thrown Jeremiah Wright off the Obama Bus and is now hoping that white people will get over it and black people will forgive him.

I find it amazing and frustrating that when I attacked Rev. Wright’s maligning of America I was called a racist, but when Barack Obama used some of the same language I had used he is compared on the Huffington Post to Jackie Robinson, an exceptional man standing tall against the hard wind of racism.

But this is not an issue of race. It is not an issue of partisan politics. It is not an issue of casual association – minster to congregant – or one of taking the Reverend out of context. Obama tried to ... Read More...

Today’s Tribune offered former governor Jim Thompson’s promise of a solution to one of most baffling mysteries of our time: How the state can buy and fix up Wrigley Field without spending any public money.

Thompson, now head of the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, claimed to have solved what the article termed this “seemingly intractable puzzle.”

Unfortunately, Thompson offered few specifics, nor did he give up much of anything to the Sun-Times. In essence, his message amounted to “Trust me, you’ll see, there are ways . . .”

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