Chicago Daily Observer

With oil topping $130 a barrel, pump prices over $4.00 a gallon a nd the media promoting—er, reporting on—the slowing economy, oil companies aren’t the only ones taking abuse from pundits, policymakers and politicians. Businesses all over America are really taking it on the chin.
This must stop. Vilifying business is a terrible trend in American cultural and political discourse. And while I have come to expect it from the Democrats, the Republicans aren’t immune either, including the putative presidential nominee.

I often ask my liberal friends to name one good social program that is not paid for by a business. The conversations are usually quite amusing. First, they often enthusiastically name a variety of programs such as social security, welfare and food stamps. Once it is pointed out that every single one of those programs is funded by tax dollars that are generated from business—either directly, or from ... Read More...

The Chicago Daily Observer welcomes the candidacy of Antoine Members, the Republican Candidate for US Congress in the 1st District.

Members, currently a Cook County Sheriff’s Deputy, favors School Choice, Simplified Taxes and Medical Savings Accounts.

Members will appear with Frank Avila Jr. on Political Shootout with Tom Roeser, Sunday Evening at 8PM on WLS-AM 890.

In their Michelle Obama piece, which is titled, “The War over Michelle,” Time’s Nancy Gibbs and Jay Newton-Small note that conservatives and some others “hear ‘whining’ from a woman preaching a ‘Gospel of Misery,’ about everything from her student loans to the high cost of piano lessons,” and other “deteriorating conditions.”

They point out: “They are probably right that most Americans have a happier impression of the past 40 years. But the skies have darkened in the past year … Those who hear Michelle in person often talk about feeling that they are seeing for the first time a political figure who understands what their lives are really about.”

I left a message with the public editor, Clark Hoyt, and sometime later his assistant, Michael McElroy, called back. “I know the number and so obviously it’s easy for me,” he said, in attempting to explain why the Times was too obtuse to put its main number where people would see it. (It’s 212–556-1234, by the way.) “I’m looking right now,” McElroy said as we talked. He rummaged around the Times site for a while and then gave up, allowing that he couldn’t find it. “That’s something I’ll tell Clark. That’s not a good thing.” Human contact “certainly has been pared down a lot,” McElroy conceded. “The biggest thing is more of a preference for e-mail. They try to make it where an editor’s not having to answer phone calls.”