Chicago Daily Observer

Sirs,

Contrary to the impression left by your story on agriculture and trade (“Food Crisis Forces New Look at Farming,” June 10), higher commodity prices do not result in a repeal of the principle of comparative advantage. Trade benefits people and trade distorting subsidies do not. This simple truth seems to have escaped both the “experts” interviewed in the story and those doing the interviews as the story quotes multiple experts complaining that countries like Haiti are no longer self-sufficient in various commodities. But food is no different than any other good. In no case is autarky a welfare-enhancing public policy, as the disastrous example of Albania under communist rule ought to have demonstrated once and for all. Public policies built around subsidizing inefficient producers in agriculture will raise, not lower, the price of food in poor countries and divert scarce resources from other, more productive investments. The problem for ... Read More...

Pepperdine Prof. Douglas Kmiec has now officially become America’s Number-One Catholic apologist for supporting abortion rights:

”...it is abundantly clear from our conversation that Obama shares a common aspiration to reduce the incidence of abortion.

How? Obama is committed to encouraging “responsible sexual behavior,” discouraging unwanted pregnancies, promoting adoption as a more viable, affordable and appealing option than it presently is, and putting off limits in a manner consistent with the law as the justices see it, late-term abortion. Obama will not exclude abortion from medical coverage to fulfill a health exception ‘rigorously defined.’”

Obama is blatantly lying to Kmiec, but it’s OK, because Kmiec knows it.

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.

Ayham Alsammarae, Iraq’s slimy ex-Minister of Electricity under the Bremer and Allawi administrations, who had escaped from an Iraqi prison by hiring an American security company to break him out back in December 2006, has resurfaced in the Jordanian capital Amman where he gave a press conference today saying, among other things, that he hoped that the insurgency in Iraq “would continue [against U.S. occupation] and avenges the Iraqi people.”

Alsammarae, an Iraqi-American Chicagoan, added during remarks carried by Radio Sawa (Arabic link) that he had contributed the maximum allowable of $2,300 to Barack Obama’s campaign. But there’s another Obama link to Alsammarae: while serving as electricity minister Alsammarae had been involved in brokering deals in the Iraqi electricity sector for Antoin Rezko, Obama’s long-term friend and patron. Rezko is the Syrian-American hustler who was convicted of fraud in an Illinois court on the day that Obama secured the Democratic ... Read More...

“The Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby.”

Mayor Jean Drapeau of Montreal, Quebec Province, Canada (1970)

Barack Obama modestly announced that he was looking forward to Chicago’s
hosting the 2016 Olympics which would coincide with the final year of his second
presidential term. Obama also waxed melodically about how the new stadium
near Washington Park would be only a short distance from his palatial home
(alternatively known as “The House that Rezko Bought” to discerning sports
fans). Senator Obama was merely paying homage to his patron, Mayor Richard M.
Daley, by touting the Olympics.

Apparently, none of the besotted followers of Obama have stopped to
contemplate the oxymoronic character of seeking to nominate and elect a reform
politician who was nonetheless a product of the Chicago ... Read More...

Margaret Ramirez and Rex Hupke at the Tribune have weighed in on the working of the Catholic Church, claiming Fr. Pfleger’s:

“latest transgression: talking about the wrong thing, in the wrong place, with a preaching style—honed in the back pews of black churches—that some Catholics found unsettling.”

Never mind shouting racist rants, appearing as a crazed vaudevillian in public and defying the Cardinal, Hupke and Ramirez tell us that the real problem was that Fr. Pfleger was a very mild “unsettling”.