Posts Tagged ‘Obama’

Greg Abbot’s Constitutional Convention

Monday, January 18th, 2016

Texas Governor Greg Abbot has called for a Constitutional convention of states.

A convention is one of two ways that the U.S. Constitution can be amended, and it’s described in Article V. One way is that Congress can propose amendments approved by two-thirds of the members of both chambers. The other method allows two-thirds of the state legislatures to call for a convention to propose amendments. Republicans backing the idea are confident that because they control state government in a majority of states, their ideas would prevail.

Democrats are horrified. The Huffington Post first ran this post with a headline that he wanted Texas to secede! I guess they thought better of the scare tactic.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) on Friday proposed a series of amendments to the U.S. constitution that would permit states to override the Supreme Court and ignore federal laws.

One of the proposed measures would allow a two-thirds majority of the states to override federal regulations, while another sets the same threshold for overturning decisions by the Supreme Court. The governor also wants to change the Constitution to block Congress from “regulating activity that occurs wholly within one state,” and to require a supermajority of seven Supreme Court votes before a “democratically enacted law” can be overturned.

OK. That’s fair enough.

The plan lays out nine specific proposed amendments that would:

Prohibit congress from regulating activity that occurs wholly within one state.
Require Congress to balance its budget.
Prohibit administrative agencies from creating federal law.
Prohibit administrative agencies from pre-empting state law.
Allow a two-thirds majority of the states to override a U.S. Supreme Court decision.
Require a seven-justice super-majority vote for U.S. Supreme Court decisions that invalidate a democratically enacted law
Restore the balance of power between the federal and state governments by limiting the former to the powers expressly delegated to it in the Constitution.
Give state officials the power to sue in federal court when federal officials overstep their bounds.
Allow a two-thirds majority of the states to override a federal law or regulation.

Balancing the budget is probably pie-in-the-sky but the others sound reasonable to me.

Glenn Reynolds, who is a Constitutional Law professor thinks so, too.

This proposal has shocked some people. Writing in The Washington Post, Catherine Rampell — apparently unaware that the Constitution itself provides for amendments — is appalled, saying that Abbot wants to ”blow … up” the Constitution. According to Rampell’s analysis, if you love the Constitution, you can’t simultaneously want to change it.

This would come as a surprise to the framers, who actually ratified the Constitution and then, immediately, passed 10 amendments known as the Bill of Rights. They then followed up in short order with the 11th Amendment — protecting state sovereignty from federal courts — and the 12th Amendment, which corrected serious problems in the way presidential elections were conducted.

In fact, such a convention has been discussed for years but there have been fears that a state Constitutional convention could get out of hand.

opposition to a convention is more about locking in changes made through other means — Supreme Court decisions like Roe v. Wade and Baker v. Carr, or just longstanding bureaucratic practice that courts and the public have come to accept — rather than through a formal convention where the changes would have to be approved by the American people as a whole.

The real fear, I suspect, is that the proposals urged by Abbott, which would roll back much of the political class’s successful power-grab over the past century, would prove popular enough to pass. If that happened, the federal government would become both smaller and more accountable, two political-class nightmares.

In an era when Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump lead the two parties’ presidential campaigns, such fears seem a bit overwrought.

Reynolds’ conclusion is also apt.

Another nice feature of Abbott’s proposal — which is, as the Houston Chronicle notes, “well within … the mainstream of Republican governors” — is that it doesn’t depend on controlling the White House. The Constitution provides numerous checks and balances, and the Republicans are wise not to depend solely on the presidency.

I’m not yet ready to say that a convention to discuss constitutional amendments is a good idea. But to the extent it panics our current political class, which I believe to be probably the worst political class in our nation’s history, it’s looking like a better one.

Mark Levin, who I consider to be too strident, is also a Constitutional lawyer and wrote a book about a proposed convention in 2014.

Levin’s amendments include:

1. Term limits, including for justices.
2. Repealing Amendment 17 and returning the election of senators to state legislatures
3. A congressional supermajority to override Supreme Court decisions (overruling what could be a stacked court)
4. Spending limit based on GDP
5. Taxation capped at 15%
6. Limiting the commerce clause, and strengthening private property rights
7. Power of states to override a federal statute by a three-fifths vote.

There is some similarity to Abbot’s proposal.

Is the Ryan budget the final gasp of the government unions ?

Sunday, December 20th, 2015

As usual. Richard Fernandez has a unique view of current events. He compares the present federal government to Boss Tweed’s Tamany Hall.

But in actuality the impetus for moderating political excess often comes from the elites themselves when mismanagement finally becomes so bad it threatens the survival of everyone.

Until things reach the point of failure mismanagement has the effect of leaving voters no alternative but content themselves with the opposition party. Republican voters may have been disappointed and outraged at the perceived sellout by a Paul Ryan-led Congress to the Obama administration. “It was another Republican “compromise” meaning Democrats got every item they asked for,” said the Drudge Report.

Paul Ryan has engineered a “compromise” with Democrats that gives them everything they wanted.

Today, he defended it on Meet The Press.

And in divided government you don’t get everything you want. So we fought for as much as we could get. We advanced our priorities and principles. Not every single one of them, but many of them. And then we’re going to pick up next year and pick up where we left off and keep going for more.

Is this true ? I doubt it.

(more…)

What else do we not know ?

Monday, December 7th, 2015

President-Obama-oval-office.sized-770x415xt

I was reading one of my favorite blogs this morning and saw this comment.

We just came from church service where we have San Bernardino police attending. We were told and I think it is important to share that the terrorists screamed “alahu akbar” several times while they were shooting; the FBI are preventing the police from going public with this information as well as the witnesses. BTW: My husband and I just got back from Washington, DC and were told by retired secret service that Obama has a Muslim prayer room in the White House. Not sure if this is well known. I had no idea.

The news media and the FBI, of all people, seem to be suppressing information.

Obama’s speech last night was weird. First, he was standing. Second, the only new information it contained was his statement.

That does not mean denying the fact that an extremist ideology has spread within some Muslim communities. This is a real problem that Muslims must confront, without excuse. Muslim leaders here and around the globe have to continue working with us to decisively and unequivocally reject the hateful ideology that groups like ISIL and al Qaeda promote; to speak out against not just acts of violence, but also those interpretations of Islam that are incompatible with the values of religious tolerance, mutual respect, and human dignity.

This sounds like he is finally recognizing that Islam has problems.

His proposed solutions are nonsense. One of them is delusional and no one will permit this to occur.

To begin with, Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun. What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semi-automatic weapon? This is a matter of national security.

The “No Fly List” is a list of people with no legal justification who are not permitted to fly on US airplanes. So far, we know that about half of them are there by mistake. We also know that 72 persons on that list work in the Department of Homeland Security. This is ridiculous. There is no incidence of a person on the no fly list who has committed a terrorist act or used a gun in a crime. The terrorists of San Bernardino were not on the list, or on any list of suspected persons.

Belmont Club, as usual, has a better explanation of what is going on.

(more…)

Is Obama Losing It ?

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2015

Barack Obama is the least accomplished person to be elected president in American History. His “accomplishments” in office include spending trillions of dollars on worthless energy boondoggles and introducing a health plan that is collapsing under its own contradictions. The plan was sold, sort of, to the American people with lies like, “If you like your health plan you can keep it” and others similar in misdirection.

His initiatives in foreign policy included a “Reset” with Russia, now long gone. He supported a Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt after removing support for a long term US ally in Mubarek. He has presided over a ridiculous nuclear proliferation plan with US enemy Iran that is already collapsing. He abandoned Iraq only to see the appearance and growth of ISIS, a worse manifestation of the Sunni revolt ended by George Bush with the Surge.

The list of Obama’s failures is long and distinguished. The question now is, is he losing his mind ?

Is it now time to invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment?

Has our president officially lost his ability to discharge the powers and duties of his office?

Anyone who listened to President Obama speak to reporters in Paris on Tuesday would reasonably conclude it is high time to start drawing up the papers to transmit to Congress for his removal.

If you are one of the millions and millions of literate Americans out there who have simply tuned this president out the past three or four years, that is certainly understandable. But if you tuned in to the long, rambling, empty press conference, you would have been truly alarmed.

Without the use of the teleprompter, his speech can be described only as “halting.” It was impossible to count the number of times he seized up, able to deaden the silence with only a drawn-out “uh,” “um” or “ahhh.”

I tried to find an embeddable video of that speech but there is not one available.

It took the doddering president 47 minutes and over 5,000 words to answer just six questions. And by “answer,” I simply mean he unspooled a torrent of disjointed words and broken sentences.

Part of the looniness of it all stemmed from the giant scam he and other world leaders are trying to put over on advanced countries, punishing them for their industriousness by redistributing billions and billions of dollars from hardworking American taxpayers and handing it over to tin-pot dictators in disheveled Third World countries.

“You go down to Miami, and when it’s flooding at high tide on a sunny day fish are swimming through the middle of the streets,” he said at one point. As if this were some kind of evidence that high tides or flooding are somehow caused by global warming.

Never mind that a) the argument makes no sense; and b) local media refuted the canard.

But President Obama’s fevers went well beyond global warming hysteria.

Asked about the “mass shooting” where a nut job shot three people at a Colorado abortion clinic, President Obama once again became exasperated with the American people.

“I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings: This just doesn’t happen in other countries.

He actually said this. In Paris. Not three weeks after gunmen mowed down 129 people enjoying freedom in the French capital.

What is going on ?

I think Al Gore went psychotic after losing the 2000 election. Before the election, I considered him approximately the equal of George Bush, who I was not that impressed with. I supported McCain in 2000. After the election, Gore got weird, not just in his fixation on climate “change” which predated the election and seemed a relatively harmless delusion shared by many. Until the revelations of the UEA emails and computer comments, I was just skeptical. Gore’s wife left him and he just got more and more strange.

Narcissistic personalities need feeding with some semblance of success. Looking at Donald Trump and his wild boasting shows one example but he has made billions in real estate and that must support his self love.

What is happening with Obama ? He came from nowhere and was given almost everything he accomplished with little effort on his own part. He did not even work to pass legislation that he is credited with.

Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio ­program.

I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:

“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.’”

“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”

“Barack Obama.”

Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.

None of this was his doing. It was handed to him.

Objections to his policies are met with accusations of racism by his supporters. I see very few examples of serious debate on his policy.

Now everything is collapsing. His “Climate” initiative is a fake and almost everyone knows it.

What next ? It is worrisome.

What is going on with Turkey?

Thursday, November 26th, 2015

istanbul

Turkish F 16s shot down a Russian SU 24, a bomber, after it entered Turkish airspace and did not respond to warnings.

A U.S. track of the Russian plane shot down by Turkey shows that the plane was inside Turkish airspace for 17 seconds, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports.

After 10 warnings without a response, a Turkish fighter jet shot the plane down Tuesday. U.S. officials said Wednesday that all of the warnings occurred before the plane entered Turkish airspace, Martin reports.

What remains unclear is whether the Russian plane was still in Turkish airspace when the F-16 fired, Martin reports. The explosion that brought the warplane down occurred when it was back in Syrian airspace, the U.S. officials said.

Why did Turkey do this ? One reason may be that the Russians were attacking Turkmen who are opposed to Assad.

Another is that Turkey is involved in oil trade with ISIS.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who canceled his planned trip to Turkey after the incident, described the shooting down of the Russian plane as a “planned provocation.”

He said the Turkish action came after Russian planes successfully targeted oil infrastructure used by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, alleging that Turkey benefited from the oil trade.

Lavrov also said that Turkish territory was used by “terrorists” to prepare attacks in other countries, but offered no details. He said that Russia “has no intention to go to war with Turkey,” but added that Moscow will re-consider its ties with Ankara.

Turkey has been trending to Islamism since Erdogan took over the government ten years ago.

President Erdogan also attended the summit, proceeding to speak at the event’s closing ceremony: “Muslim sailors reached the American continent 314 years before Columbus, in 1178. In his memoirs, Christopher Columbus mentions the existence of a mosque atop a hill on the coast of Cuba”. In this way, the Turkish President managed to cause a sensation, while ignoring the fact that mere notion of the ‘discovery of America’ is nothing but a linguistic ploy used to consecrate the European domination of the world from the 16th century onwards and to discount the achievements of the continent’s native populations.

Richard Fernandez has a theory about why this is happening.

Charles Krauthaummer argues that since the Turks could not have been spurred into action by such minor Russian intrusion into their airspace, their true motive must have been to signal Moscow to lay off one its proxies, the Turkmen. They were willing to violate the ‘no clash between principals’ rule to emphasize the point.

This I think sort of highlights that, the Turks are the most opposed to Assad of anybody on the ground. It wasn’t only that the Russian airplane went into Turkish air space. It’s that the bombing run was against Turkmen, who a minority in Syria, ethnically Turkish that the Turks have always felt they have to defend.

Remember that Turkey and ISIS are both Sunni Muslim and the entire ISIS movement began as a Sunni reaction to the extreme provocation of the Sunnis by the Pro-Iran government of Iraq.

The challenge has been Russia’s focus on propping up Assad rather than focusing on ISIL. … Until that happens, it’s very difficult. It’s difficult because if their priority is attacking the moderate opposition that might be future members of an inclusive Syrian government, Russia is not going to get the support of us or a range of other members of the coalition.

Putin’s reaction to the incident on the occasion of his meeting with the King of Jordan describes the same strategic picture, albeit viewed from the other side of the lines.

Obama is basically an ally of Iran and that may be why he withdrew US forces that might have imposed discipline on the Iraqi government. In that sense, ISIS was created by Obama as the Sunnis had nowhere else to go. Turkey has little incentive to fight ISIS as they share Sunni religious affiliation and have no love for the Kurds and other anti-Assad forces. They certainly have little love for Shia Islam, of which Alawite is a form.

The differences between Russia and the West are also a a major factor in our dilemma.

(more…)

The Democrats seem to be choosing Islam as their theme.

Sunday, November 22nd, 2015

Hillary

The Meet the Press program on November 22 seemed to set a new theme for the Democrats. First, Hillary this week declared, “Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”

Then, Chuck Todd had a Muslim activist “American international human rights lawyer, Arsalan Iftikhar,” who bemoaned the Republicans “Islamophobia.”

Arsalan has also been an adjunct professor of religious studies at DePaul University and he is also a member of the Asian American Journalists Association –

He seems to be a professional Muslim. A few months ago, they had former basketball player Lew Alcindor, now named “Kareem Abdul Jabbar,” to make the same point about peaceful Muslims.

Abdul-Jabbar told host Chuck Todd that terrorists “do not represent the teachings of Islam” and that this misconception makes it “impossible for real Muslims to be understood.”

He continued by saying that he believes the majority of terrorists are a product of their environment, not their religion:

What is their environment ? What does the Koran say ? Another essay on Islam says something quite different.

The avoidance of analysis of Islam contrasts sharply with the excoriation accorded Christianity, Israel, and Western Civilization. The Catholic Church sex abuse crisis has received saturation coverage. Distinguished history professor Philip Jenkins, in a book published by Oxford University Press, claims that media coverage distorts the crisis and contributes to anti-Catholic bigotry. Israel’s very right to exist is questioned and, in high profile media, at times denied. Western Civilization is depicted as imperialist, racist, and Orientalist. This politically-correct selective outrage that lambastes the Judeo-Christian tradition and Western Civilization while emphasizing positive images of Muslims only serves further to inoculate Islam from critique.

(more…)

Where are we bound ?

Sunday, October 11th, 2015

I watched the Sunday Talk Shows this morning and nothing was reassuring. Then I read the column from Richard Fernandez.

It makes sense. I have believed for some time that we are headed for a revolution. Maybe not an old fashioned bloody revolution but something is coming.

The anniversary of the U.S. war against the Islamic State passed with little notice. It was August 7 of last year that President Obama authorized the first airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq, a campaign he expanded a month later to include targets in Syria. So far this month, the president has delivered remarks on the Voting Rights Act, his deal with Iran, the budget, clean energy, and Hurricane Katrina. ISIS? Not a peep.

Obama’s quiet because the war is not going well … One of our most gifted generals predicts the conflict will last “10 to 20 years.” And now comes news that the Pentagon is investigating whether intelligence assessments of ISIS have been manipulated for political reasons.

His column today suggests that the Ship of State is drifting. He quotes Niall Ferguson’s article in the Wall Street Journal.

I have spent much of the past seven years trying to work out what Barack Obama’s strategy for the United States truly is. For much of his presidency, as a distinguished general once remarked to me about the commander in chief’s strategy, “we had to infer it from speeches.”

At first, I assumed that the strategy was simply not to be like his predecessor—an approach that was not altogether unreasonable, given the errors of the Bush administration in Iraq and the resulting public disillusionment. I read Mr. Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech—with its Quran quotes and its promise of “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world”—as simply the manifesto of the Anti-Bush.

(more…)

Obama as the Godfather.

Wednesday, October 7th, 2015

Richard Fernandez has an interesting take on Obama’s present foreign policy iteration. He sees himself as The Godfather negotiating among his capos and arranging the territories that each are allowed to possess.

The White House is also exploring what could be a diplomatic blockbuster: possible new limits and controls on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Such an accord might eventually open a path toward a Pakistani version of the civil nuclear deal that was done with India in 2005….

Pakistan prizes its nuclear program, so negotiations would be slow and difficult, and it’s not clear that Islamabad would be willing to accept the limitations that would be required. But the issue is being discussed quietly in the run-up to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s visit to Washington Oct. 22. Any progress would break a stalemate that has existed since the U.S. detected Pakistan’s nuclear program in the mid-1980s, and especially after Pakistan exploded its first weapon in 1998.

This is behind our negotiations with the Taliban, which seems just as intent on upsetting Obama’s applecart as they ever were. No matter. Obama will keep negotiating. As Woody Allan once said of stockbrokers, “They invest your money and keep investing it until it is all gone.”

David Ignatius seems to approve of this approach.

The U.S. recognized more than four years ago that the best way out of the Afghanistan conflict would be a diplomatic settlement that involved the Taliban and its sometime sponsors in Pakistan. State Department officials have been conducting secret peace talks, on and off, since 2011. That effort hasn’t borne fruit yet, as the Taliban’s recent offensive in Kunduz shows.

But the pace of negotiations has quickened this year, thanks to an unlikely U.S. diplomatic partnership with China. A senior administration official said Monday that “we’re hopeful that there will be a willingness on the part of the Taliban to resume negotiations,” despite the intense fighting in Kunduz and elsewhere. Beijing’s involvement is a “new dynamic” and shows an instance where “U.S. interests overlap with those of China.”

Yes, China will pull our chestnuts out of this particular fire. We can trust the Chinese. After all, we trusted them with the OPM database management.

It’s not just that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) failed to certify nearly a quarter of its IT systems as secure.

The real news is that outsourcing government IT tasks led to Chinese contract workers, and at least one person working in China, having root access to OPM systems.

Having root access, of course, means having access to any data you want in the system – regardless of any security application that may protect the data against “unauthorized” users.

Yes, we can trust the Chinese.

Meanwhile, Obama was lecturing Putin on his responsibilities.

Russia’s leadership is challenging truths that only a few weeks ago seemed self-evident, that in the 21st century, the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force, that international law matters, that people and nations can make their own decisions about their future. …

And that’s why Russia’s violation of international law, its assault on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, must be met with condemnation, not because we’re trying to keep Russia down, but because the principles that have meant so much to Europe and the world must be lifted up….

Understand as well this is not another Cold War that we’re entering into. After all, unlike the Soviet Union, Russia leads no bloc of nations, no global ideology. … I believe that for both Ukraine and Russia, a stable peace will come through de-escalation, a direct dialogue between Russia and the government of Ukraine and the international community, monitors who can ensure that the rights of all Ukrainians are protected, a process of constitutional reform within Ukraine and free and fair elections this spring.

Yes, this is no Cold War. “The 1980s are now asking for their foreign policy back.”

Yes, very insightful. This is what passes for foreign policy in Obama’s last term.

David Petraeus testified last month to the Senate Armed Services Committee on U.S. policy in the Middle East. Regarding Syria, the former general and CIA director urged a credible threat to destroy Bashar Assad’s air force if it continues to bomb its own people. He also recommended “the establishment of enclaves in Syria protected by coalition air power, where a moderate Sunni force could be supported and where additional forces could be trained, internally displaced persons could find refuge, and the Syrian opposition could organize.”

But Barack Obama does not agree. At his Friday press conference, the president described such views as “mumbo-jumbo,” “half-baked ideas,” “as-if” solutions, a willful effort to “downplay the challenges involved in the situation.” He says the critics have no answers to the questions of “what exactly would you do and how would you fund it and how would you sustain it.”

America’s greatest living general might as well have been testifying to his shower drain for all the difference his views are going to make in this administration.

The “smartest man in the room” is in charge. What could go wrong ?

The Washington Free Beacon thinks it is no coincidence that “Obama’s top advisers on ISIS, Russia, and Cyber-Security have all resigned over the past two weeks”.

Last week, President Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan announced that he was leaving at the end of the year. Far less attention has been paid to the string of other high-profile resignations that have rocked the administration since September 22, when Bloomberg reported that John Allen, the retired general Obama hand-picked to lead the U.S. war effort against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, was stepping down.

One week later, on September 29, POLITICO reported that Evelyn Farkas, the top Pentagon official responsible for overseeing U.S. relations with Russia and Ukraine, was leaving her post after five years. According to the site, the administration is expected to “have a hard time finding a replacement,” as Farkas’s resignation comes at a time of considerable division within the Obama administration over how to respond to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Syria.

The resignation of Ari Schwartz, the administration’s top adviser on cyber-security, was barely acknowledged. Schwartz stepped down on October 1, having served in the position since March of last year. His tenure coincided with a series of damaging cyber attacks believed to have been carried out by the Russian and Chinese governments, including the large-scale theft of sensitive employee information from the Office of Personnel Management.

He had yet to learn that the men who could rearrange the world over snifters of brandy could also beat each other to death with baseball bats. It will be interesting to learn from future histories (if any are written) exactly when Putin and other American enemies first realized that he was faking it. But when the moment of discovery came, Obama soon realized that running with wolves came at the price of terrible danger.

He doesn’t know it and probably never will.

Is Obama our punishment ?

Saturday, October 3rd, 2015

Obama was an unusual candidate for president in 2008. I had serious questions in 2008.

One criticism of Obama is that his portfolio is mighty thin. He has no record. Well, he actually does and and here it is. Pretty interesting.

It’s a lengthy record filled with core liberal issues. But what’s interesting, and almost never discussed, is that he built his entire legislative record in Illinois in a single year.

Why was that ? In 2002, the Democrats took over the Illinois legislature, not because of Bush as the reporter says, but because the Republican governor got caught selling drivers’ licenses to truckers with bad driving records. A disastrous truck accident splashed the whole story across the newspapers and the Democrats took over in the next election.

The white, race-baiting, hard-right Republican Illinois Senate Majority Leader James “Pate” Philip was replaced by Emil Jones Jr., a gravel-voiced, dark-skinned African-American known for chain-smoking cigarettes on the Senate floor.

Jones had served in the Illinois Legislature for three decades. He represented a district on the Chicago South Side not far from Obama’s. He became Obama’s ­kingmaker.

Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio ­program.

I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:

“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.’”

“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”

“Barack Obama.”

Obama ended up in the US Senate because the GOP Senator, Peter Fitzgerald, did not run for re-election. Why ?

While State Senator he was a member of a group of conservative state senators elected in 1992 who often challenged the leadership of the Illinois Republican Party and were dubbed the “Fab Five”, the group also included, Steve Rauschenberger, Dave Syverson, Patrick O’Malley and Chris Lauzen.

After a hard-fought primary victory against Illinois Comptroller Loleta Didrickson, in which the latter had the support of most national and state-level Republican leaders, Fitzgerald defeated first-term Democratic incumbent U.S. Senator Carol Moseley Braun in 1998, and served for one term in the U.S. Senate. He was the first Republican in Illinois to win a U.S. Senate race in 20 years, and the only Republican challenger in the country to defeat an incumbent Democratic senator in the 1998 election cycle. Although Moseley Braun was dogged by negative publicity of corruption charges, Fitzgerald defeated her by only 2.9%.

Fitzgerald is a staunch conservative on such issues as opposition to abortion (except to save the life of the mother), gun control, gay marriage and taxes, but on some issues, particularly environmental issues — he opposed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge throughout his tenure in the US Senate — he broke with conservative colleagues. He was one of only a handful of GOP Senators to support the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation.

He was a “maverick” and was not supported by “the Illinois Combine,” a term coined by columnist John Kass to describe the bipartisan corruption in Illinois politics that has brought the state to bankruptcy.

I called former U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, the Republican maverick from Illinois who tried to fight political corruption and paid for it. For this sin, he was driven out of Illinois politics by political bosses, by their spinners and media mouthpieces, who ridiculed him mercilessly.

Senator, what do you call that connection that Stuart Levine describes from the witness stand, you know that arrangement across party lines, with politically powerful men leveraging government to make money — what do you call it?

“What do you call that Illinois political class that’s not committed to any party, they simply want to make money off the taxpayers?” Fitzgerald said. “You know what to call them.”

What?

“The Illinois Combine,” Fitzgerald said. “The bipartisan Illinois political combine. And all these guys being mentioned, they’re part of it.”

(more…)

We approach the final act

Friday, September 25th, 2015

As usual, Belmont Club has the clearest view of what is coming. It will not be pleasant. I have just returned from Europe from what will probably be my last trip. We were going to go to Greece but cancelled due to the financial unrest and the “migrant” crisis. Instead, we went to Britain and to Belgium where we did some history. We also saw a small portion of the migrant invasion.

The Washington Post, a reliable indicator of leftist thinking in Washington, reports that the Syrian Crisis has “forced” Obama to meet with Putin in New York.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that the meeting came at Putin’s request and that at the top of the agenda for Obama will be Ukraine, where, he said, Russian separatist troops remain in “clear violation of the territorial integrity of that sovereign nation.” …

Earnest said that when the two leaders talk about Syria, Obama would encourage Russia to join coalition efforts to combat the Islamic State but warn that “doubling down on the Assad regime is a losing bet.” He added that “a face-to-face sit-down seems appropriate at this juncture.”

There is, of course, no reason to believe that this statement is true. Earnest is well known to lie for his master.

Willing or not, Obama’s been dragged to New York to meet a man he would rather not. The Russians and Syrians for their part, are pushing the story that Obama has already pre-surrendered to Putin and is merely looking for a way to put the best face on it. AFP reports: “Russia and the United States have reached a “tacit agreement” on ending Syria’s bloody crisis, a senior adviser to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has said.”

Allegations that it’s all over bar the shouting were half-heartedly denied in the Washington Post story which said, “the administration says it has no interest in Putin’s still-vague proposal for Syria — that the West drop its insistence that Assad must go and that all parties join together to defeat the Islamic State. But administration officials still believe there are grounds for U.S.-Russian cooperation there, if Putin is willing.”

Long ago, when the USA was still run by realists, this would be called “surrender.”

The Russians are working behind a fait acompli and that is a strong card. Moreover, Moscow is amping up the pressure by sending a fleet for “drills” into the Eastern Mediterranean. The message is: we’re here to stay and you’re not man enough to push us out. Sources told Bloomberg that Putin will go it alone if Obama balks. “President Vladimir Putin, determined to strengthen Russia’s only military outpost in the Middle East, is preparing to launch unilateral airstrikes against Islamic State from inside Syria if the U.S. rejects his proposal to join forces, two people familiar with the matter said.”

The Europeans, beset by the Islamic invasion (where is Charles Martel when you need him ?) are of no use.

In a statement that surprised many, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said early Thursday that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should be part of negotiations with the West.

“We have to speak with many actors, this includes Assad, but others as well,” Merkel was quoted as saying at a news conference following an E.U. summit in Brussels. Many German commentators and journalists described the statement as groundbreaking. “Approaching Assad would be an about-face in the way the West is dealing with Syria,” Der Spiegel concluded in its online edition….

Merkel’s willingness to bring Assad and Iran to the negotiating table will be met with skepticism in other Western countries, primarily in the United States and France. Last weekend, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said that the United States was “prepared to negotiate” but that “Assad has to go.”

These developments must certainly create unease in the Leader of the Free World, who looking behind him at his expected support, has found them all dwindling away.

This farce began with the overthrow of Libyan dictator Gaddafi and the threat to cross a “red line” if Assad used chemical weapons on his own people. Here we are after years of Obama, Hillary and Kerry running our foreign policies. What did you expect ?

The Russian moves appear to be part of an deliberate plan prepared long in advance to bring the Western Alliance into an ambush zone. The most disturbing aspect of it is that president Obama didn’t even see it coming. Not even close. He walked into it, got up, asked for the number the truck and walked into it again. When he comes to himself he’ll be ready to ask a boy about a clock. Maybe that way he’ll get the time of day.

Charles Krauthamer notes that Putin always seems to be one step ahead of the Obama. Yet despite the apparant truth of that assertion, it is hard to actually test the proposition. Obama’s position on Syria has been so vague that he can plausibly convince his followers that, whatever the result, it was what he intended to begin with. It’s pitiful to watch.

Obama has truly achieved a fundamental transformation in America.

Growing old is not a pleasure when one considers the pain of arthritis and the loss of pleasures like golf and sailing but there is the positive aspect of not having to live long with the consequences of Obama’s regime.