A Chicago Blog

I haven’t found a link to this yet, but MSNBC was covering on Morning Joe this morning. Hillary is finally taking Obama head on. Her new line of attack? Paraphrase: “I have a lifetime of experience to bring to the White House, Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience to bring to the White House, Obama gave a speech in 2002.” This sounds caddy, but I’ll bet it has an impact on the election.

Update: I found it.

This is an interesting piece of public theatre. 207 people freezing-in-place simultaneously in Grand-Central station. I’m not sure if there was a “purpose” behind it, but I hope there wasn’t.

I don’t know why I find this fascinating.

Dennis Leary used to joke “only in America would there be a guy who cocaine wasn’t good enough for.” I was reminded of that quote this morning when I read that the “Honorable” Todd Stroger rejected a sales tax increase because it wasn’t enough. A 200% increase in the sales tax, it seems, just isn’t enough for the Stroge. He wants a 266% increse which would take the tax all the way up to 2%.

The number one rule in politics? Campaigns matter. You can be the perfect candidate. You can have all the money in the world. But if you can’t run a solid campaign you’ll lose every time. Oberweis is working on losing a record number of campaigns in Illinois because of crap like this. Just about every campaign he has run has involved SERIOUS blunders. While getting his commercials pulled from the air is not a campaign killer, it’s only March and there are still eight months left.

Obama is dancing on Ellen again today and you know it has to drive Hillary batty. Not to defend her, but she has to answer real questions about policy, about the positions she’s taken, and about her history in politics. Obama? He dances.

Ladies and gentlemen say hello to the future of American politics.

Blue Collar Muse offers one of the more reasonable arguments for stricter immigration enforcement: crime prevention. The argument is that illegal immigrants sometimes commit crimes. Thus, if we deported illegals or barred them from coming here in the first place, we would prevent those crimes. I am sympathetic, especially when it comes to terror-related crime.

However, there are still some problems with this reasoning. For every crime committed by illegals, there are undoubtedly also good deeds. Do we throw out the baby with the bathwater when we crack down on illegal immigration? Can we say for sure that the overall net effect would be negative? I think not. To be fair to BCM, he is talking specifically in the context of sanctuary cities, where illegals with criminal records are still not deported. This is inexcusable, for sure, but we have to make a clear distinction between dealing with sanctuary cities and our nation’s policy as a whole.

Jesse Walker thinks last night’s Oscars were the most watchable in years, partly because there wasn’t much of the traditional “witty banter” provided by the writers. Maybe he’s right, but frankly I was bored. That’s probably because I hadn’t but one or two of the nominated movies. There was a time when would’ve seen most all of them. But no more, either their movie selection is becoming more and more irrelevant, or I am.

UPDATE: Apparently, I misread Jesse Walker. He thought the Oscars were as boring as I did. Apologies.

Helenann over at DailyKos is trying to brag about how much Obama has accomplished as a Senator. Among his accomplishments he lists 570 bills introduced or co-sponsored in in the three years he’s been in Washington. It baffles me that this would be considered an accomplishment. In fact, it baffles me that it’s even considered humanly possible, that one man could sponsor 570 different pieces of legislation. How absurd out government has become. Instead we consider it commonplace. Think about it, EVEN if they worked all year long, Monday through Friday, it would still work out to one bill every day and a half. If we actually look just at the time spent in DC, Obama was probably churning through legislation (or signing on to it) at a pace of two or three bills a DAY. Ridiculous. The whole lot of them.