We are against law-breaking, but we accept that civil disobedience can be an effective weapon in liberty’s arsenal.

We’re also non-smokers and would avoid the Crow Bar spoken of here, but we’re more against interference with freedom, whether in the name of health or anything else …

… excepting always, as a British judge once said, ‘The freedom of your fist ends where my nose begins.’

From Mike Devine at examiner.com:

DeVine Law called for civil oil drilling disobedience even, B.O., or Before Obama.

Social conservatives and other defenders of the First Amendment issued the “Manhattan Declaration” this year, in Year One, A.O., or Annos Obamani, vowing to defy any federal mandates that would require religious or other institutions to aid and abet anti-life or anti-traditional marriage policies.

Now comes a “Chicago Declaration” of civil disobedience related to the right the Founders considered most essential to big “L” Liberty, i.e. private property rights:

CHICAGO — Smoking in bars has been banned here since Jan. 1, 2008, but Crow Bar, a cozy spot on the city’s far southeast side, is still a haven for people who want to light up.

Unless other customers object, owner Pat Carroll usually allows smoking. He keeps a “smoke jug” in view for $5 donations to offset fines.

“It’s good business to allow smoking. It’s a free country,” says Carroll, owner of Crow Bar for 28 years. It’s near the border with Indiana, which allows smoking in bars. He says his customers would patronize bars there if he forced them to smoke outside.

After all, if second hand smoke was really about health and not aesthetics, wouldn’t the smoking banners insist that waiters wear masks like coal miners? And if the global warming acolytes sought planet health and not political power, wouldn’t they be converting to agnosticism in the wake of a decade of global cooling?…

Hopefully the remnant of freedom-lovers in the Chicago home of Alinskyite thuggish liberalism will inspire a Dixie Declaration next year that will lead to a Declaration of Independence from ObamaDems that have moved to D.C., on Election Day next year.

Communists like Saul Alinksy and his disciple Barack Obama experiment with human lives. Communism is one of the atrocious religions that sacrifice children.

Heather Mac Donald writes about the fatherless children of Chicago’s black ‘communities’ that were ‘organized’ by Alinskyite ‘organizers’, notably Barack Obama.

This past September, a cell-phone video of Chicago students beating a fellow teen to death coursed over the airwaves and across the Internet. None of the news outlets that had admiringly reported on Obama’s community-organizing efforts mentioned that the beating involved students from the very South Side neighborhoods where the president had once worked. Obama’s connection to the area was suddenly lost in the mists of time.

Yet a critical blindness links Obama’s activities on the South Side during the 1980s and the murder of Derrion Albert in 2009. Throughout his four years working for “change” in Chicago’s Roseland and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods, Obama ignored the primary cause of their escalating dysfunction: the disappearance of the black two-parent family. Obama wasn’t the only activist to turn away from the problem of absent fathers, of course; decades of failed social policy, both before and after his time in Chicago, were just as blind. And that myopia continues today, guaranteeing that the current response to Chicago’s youth violence will prove as useless as Obama’s activities were 25 years ago.

One year out of college, Barack Obama took a job as a community organizer, hoping for an authentic black experience that would link him to the bygone era of civil rights protest. Few people know what a community organizer is—Obama didn’t when he decided to become one—yet the term seduces the liberal intelligentsia with its aura of class struggle and agitation against an unjust establishment. Saul Alinsky, the self-described radical who pioneered the idea in Chicago’s slaughterhouse district during the Depression, defined community organizing as creating “mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people.” Alinsky viewed poverty as a political condition: it stemmed from a lack of power, which society’s “haves” withhold from the “have-nots.” A community organizer would open the eyes of the disenfranchised to their aggrieved status, teaching them to demand redress from the illegitimate “power structure.”

Alinskyite empowerment suffered its worst scandal in 1960s Chicago. The architects of the federal War on Poverty created a taxpayer-funded version of a community-organizing entity, the so-called Community Action Agency, whose function was to agitate against big-city mayors for more welfare benefits and services for blacks. Washington poverty warriors, eager to demonstrate their radical bona fides, funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into Chicago’s most notorious gangs, who were supposed to run job-training and tutoring programs under the auspices of a signature Alinskyite agency, the Woodlawn Organization. Instead, the gangbangers maintained their criminal ways—raping and murdering while on the government payroll, and embezzling federal funds to boot.

The disaster failed to dim the romance of community organizing. But by the time Obama arrived in Chicago in 1984, an Alinskyite diagnosis of South Side poverty was doubly irrelevant. Blacks had more political power in Chicago than ever before, yet that power had no impact on the tidal wave of dysfunction that was sweeping through the largest black community in the United States. Chicago had just elected Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor; the heads of Chicago’s school system and public housing were black, as were most of their employees; black power broker Emil Jones, Jr. represented the South Side in the Illinois State Senate; Jesse Jackson would launch his 1984 presidential campaign from Chicago. …

Now children are being deserted by their mothers too.

The next stage in black family disintegration may be on the horizon. According to several Chicago observers, black mothers are starting to disappear, too. “Children are bouncing around,” says a police officer in Altgeld Gardens. “The mother says: ‘I’m done. You go stay with your father.’ The ladies are selling drugs with their new boyfriend, and the kids are left on their own.” Albert’s mother lived four hours away; he was moving among different extended family members in Chicago. Even if a mother is still in the home, she may be incapable of providing any emotional or moral support to her children. “Kids will tell you: ‘I’m sleeping on the floor, there’s nothing in the fridge, my mother doesn’t care about me going to school,’ ” says Rogers Jones, the courtly founder of Roseland Safety Net Works. “Kids are traumatized before they even get to school.” Some mothers are indifferent when the physical and emotional abuses that they suffered as children recur with their own children. “We’ve had mothers say: ‘I was raped as a child, so it’s no big deal if my daughter is raped,’ ” reports Jackson. …

There was a moment when it seemed that Obama recognized what these children really needed – not organizing, not empowerment, but a stable home with married parents.

Barack Obama started that work in a startling Father’s Day speech in Chicago while running for president. “If we are honest with ourselves,” he said in 2008, “we’ll admit that . . . too many fathers [are] missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. . . . We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.”

But after implicitly drawing the connection between family breakdown and youth violence—“How many times in the last year has this city lost a child at the hands of another child?”—Obama reverted to Alinskyite bromides about school spending, preschool programs, visiting nurses, global warming, sexism, racial division, and income inequality. And he has continued to swerve from the hard truth of black family breakdown since his 2008 speech.

Barack Obama’s autobiographical book Dreams from My Father is a quietly self-vaunting ‘tell-all’ mixture of narrative, nostalgia, apparent confession, disguised complaint and unfocussed accusation. As the self-portrait of a young man it is fondly self-indulgent, allowing a few small warts – or perhaps one should say acne spots – to show, just enough to deflect accusations of self-flattery. It emerges from the narrative, rather than it is said, that the young Obama resented being black. He implies that someone must be to blame for his having to feel like that. The self-pity is kept, however, as subdued as the self-flattery.

The story wears a candid expression on its face, so to speak, but gives itself away by inevitably raising questions which beg for answers not given. For instance, and significantly, Obama does not say who paid him to work as a ‘community organizer’, or why. A man, an ‘organizer’, named Marty Kaufman phones him out of the blue, meets him at a coffee shop and offers him the undefined job for a rather low wage. What this man’s interest in the work might be is not explained, other than that he’s been vaguely idealistic ever since the student protest movement of the 1960s. One is left to assume that this fellow ‘in a rumpled suit’, although he shows no signs of having disposable funds of his own, is some sort of selfless philanthropist nobly intent on alleviating difficult living conditions for the poor black tenants of a crumbling building in a seedy area of Chicago.

Now the truth is out. David Horowitz is providing the answer.

Since taking office Barack Obama, who promised during his campaign to create a moderate, inclusive administration, has engaged in actions that have created division and fear because they are meant to radically change America, not improve on what has always worked.  As a result, David Horowitz writes in Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, “Many Americans have gone from hopefulness, through unease, to a state of alarm as the President shows a radical side only partly visible during his campaign.”

Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model provides an understanding of the roots of the current administration’s effort to subject America to a wholesale transformation by looking at the work of one of the President’s heroes — radical Chicago “community organizer” Saul Alinsky.  The guru of Sixties radicals, Alinsky urged his followers to be flexible and opportunistic and say anything to get power, which they can then use to destroy the existing society and its economic system.  Alinsky died in 1972, but left behind an organization in Chicago dedicated to his malicious ideas.  This team hired Barack Obama in 1986 when he was 23 and taught him how to organize for radical transformation.

In this insightful new booklet, Horowitz discusses Alinsky’s work in the 60s — and his advice to radicals to seize any weapon to advance their cause.  This became the philosophy of Alinskyite organizations such as ACORN and to Alinsky disciple Van Jones, a self described “communist” who served as President Obama’s “Green Czar” until he was forced to resign when his extremist ideas became public.

After his analysis of Saul Alinsky, Horowitz points out what the grandfather of “social organizing” created “is not salvation but chaos.” Then he asks the crucial question: “And presidential disciples of Alinsky, what will they create?”

Read the devastatingly revealing bio of Valerie Jarrett – Obama’s closest adviser and the person who got Van Jones into the White House – by Ben Johnson at Front Page Magazine. It concludes:

An international, rootless wanderer abandoned by his father, and occasionally his mother, in search of authenticity, he [Obama] never felt at home until he found his roots, and himself, in the milieu of Hyde Park – a neighborhood big enough to encompass everyone from Marilyn Katz [see below] to Bill Ayers, from Tony Rezko’s vacant adjoining property to Louis Farrakhan’s wandering “security” force. And Valerie Jarrett. Is this what Jarrett reminds the Obamas of: the neighborhood that has been the president’s only true home and shaped or reinforced their values and identity? An elitist sanctuary of pampered radicals, racists, and terrorists, liberated of working class stiffs who bitterly cling to their guns and religion? Increasingly, it seems as though this is what “makes them who they are,” and is becoming the atmosphere Obama, with Jarrett’s help, is recreating in his administration.

Who is Marilyn Katz?

Who is this person to whom Jarrett is so indebted – and whom, we shall see, she calls a personal friend? Marilyn Katz provided “security” for Students for a Democratic Society at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Undercover Chicago policeman William Frapolly told prosecutors that during the Days of Rage, Katz showed protesters a new weapon to use against the police: “a cluster of nails that were sharpened at both ends, and they were fastened in the center.” Police later reported being hit by golf balls with nails through them, as well as excrement. Years later, Katz would insist her “guerrilla nails” were merely “a defensive weapon” to prevent “possible bad behavior by the police.”

The Democratic Hurray Chorus, otherwise known as the Mainstream Media, mined the depths of their malice to blacken the name of Governor and Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, an honest and honorable public servant if ever there was one, with lies, in the hope of destroying her. They did this because they feared her. The degree of their viciousness was the exact measure of their fear. She was a real threat to the election of their chosen One. 

Will they tell the damaging truth about certain iniquitous Democratic women in the public service and/or the public eye?  Probably not, is our guess.  

Fortunately Michelle Malkin has taken on the task: 

Mrs. Blago, the former Patti Mell, won the hearts of old-school thugs everywhere with her f-word-filled rants captured on FBI wiretaps, some of which were colorfully detailed in the criminal complaint against her hubby last week. It’s old news to folks in Chicago, but the woman who masquerades as a sweet gubernatorial spouse dedicated to children’s advocacy is a cutthroat wheeler-dealer in heels who schemed with the gov to fire pesky editorial writers and get herself placed on paid corporate boards in exchange for naming the president-elect’s pick to the Senate. First Lady by day, Dragon Lady by night.

Potty-mouthed Patti is the daughter of famed Democratic Chicago Alderman Richard Mell. Hardball ward politics runs in her blood. "Pay to play" is the family way. As a high-powered realtor, the Chicago Tribune reported, Mrs. B. raked in more than $700,000 in commissions on business deals after Hot Rod began raising money in 2000 for his first gubernatorial campaign. The feds have been investigating for years.

Close political observers are waiting for the other shoe to drop on Mrs. B. – or be used as leverage to force her hubby, to whom she has been fiercely loyal (to the point of alienating Daddy), to ‘fess up.

Corrupto-convict and Barack Obama fundraiser Tony Rezko was one of Mrs. B.’s biggest clients of the last decade. Behind him stood his housewife-in-hot-water, Rita, who whiled away some of her time as a patronage appointee to an obscure Cook County government board before getting entangled in the land swap couples’ deal between her husband and the Obamas – the one the president-elect called "boneheaded." On Tuesday, Rezko’s sentencing was postponed, suggesting he’ll be singing even more to the feds.

Michelle Obama was apparently friendly with the sordid sorority, according to Chicago Magazine. Writer James Merriner reported on a fashion show/political back-scratching gala chaired by Mrs. Rezko and co-chaired by Mrs. Blago two days before the November 2006 elections:

"Michelle Obama, wife of the Democratic U.S. senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama, was a special guest that day (even though the news had just broken about Rezko’s participation in a funky real-estate transaction involving the Obamas’ Hyde Park home). The fashion show attracted little if any media coverage, which may have been exactly as its organizers and sponsors had hoped. Just three weeks earlier, Tony Rezko had been indicted on charges of extorting kickbacks from businesses seeking contracts from the Blagojevich administration."

Then there’s Anita Mahajan, wife of Chicago Mutual Bank owner Amrish Mahajan. Hubby is the Obama supporter and Blago fundraiser who handled that boneheaded Obama land deal and loaned cash to Rezko. Mrs. Mahajan hired Mrs. Blago to sell properties for her. In 2007, Mrs. Mahajan was indicted on fraud charges related to a contract from the state Department of Children and Family Services – awarded to her by the Blagojevich administration. Prosecutors say she bilked taxpayers out of $2.1 million. For the children, of course.

 

 Jonah Goldberg writes:

There are so many things to love about the Rod Blagojevich scandal it’s hard to know where to begin.

Wait. That’s not right. There are so many bleeping things to love about this bleeping-bleep Blagojevich scandal it’s hard to know where to begin.

For starters, the folks at the Chicago Tribune are Christmas Pony Happy because Blago tried to strong-arm Trib ownership to fire members of the editorial board. Instead, Trib editors will get to have a big tailgate party outside Blago’s cell window.

Newspaper people love that sort of thing.

For the more historically minded, it’s a time for nostalgia. The past comes alive as Chicago’s grand tradition of corruption is sustained for another generation. As the Chicago Tribune once wrote, "corruption has been as much a part of the landscape as corn, soybeans and skyscrapers." According to the Chicago Sun-Times, as of 2006, when Blago’s predecessor, George Ryan, was sent to prison for racketeering, 79 elected officials had been convicted of corruption in the past 30 years. Among the perps: 27 aldermen, 19 judges, 15 state legislators, three governors, two congressmen, one mayor, two turtledoves and a partridge in a stolen pear tree. Especially in this holiday season, it’s so very important to keep traditions alive for the kids. In a sense, Blago did it for the children.

For partisans, there’s the schadenfreude that comes with watching the Democrats – self-proclaimed anti-corruption zealots in recent years – explain why Blagojevich shouldn’t be lumped in with Congressmen Charlie Rangel (cut himself sweetheart deals), William Jefferson ($90,000 in his freezer) and Tim Mahoney (tried to bribe an aide he was sleeping with not to sue him; and you thought romance was dead) as part of a new Democratic "culture of corruption" storyline.

There’s the enormous I-should-have-had-a-V8! moment as the mainstream press collectively thwacks itself in the forehead, realizing it blew it again. The New York Times – which, according to Wall Street analysts, is weeks from holding editorial board meetings in a refrigerator box – created the journalistic equivalent of CSI-Wasilla to study every follicle and fiber in Sarah Palin’s background, all the while treating Obama’s Chicago like one of those fairy-tale lands depicted in posters that adorn little girls’ bedroom walls. See there, Suzie? That’s a Pegasus. That’s a pink unicorn. And that’s a beautiful sunflower giving birth to a fully grown Barack Obama, the greatest president ever and the only man in history to be able to pick up manure from the clean end.

Obviously the list doesn’t end there… 

Read the rest. It’s all delicious. 

From Little Green Footballs: 

Barack Obama has denied ever discussing his Senate seat replacement with Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.

But that apparently was not true. 

 A November 8th article at the KHQA website reports:

QUINCY, IL — Now that Barack Obama will be moving to the White House, his seat in the U.S. Senate representing Illinois will have to be filled.

Obama met with Governor Rod Blagojevich earlier this week to discuss it.

UPDATE at 12/10/08 11:17:50 am:

Another KHQA article on the meeting, from November 5th: Who will fill Obama’s senate seat?

CHICAGO, ILL. — Now that Barack Obama will be moving to the White House, his seat in the U.S. Senate representing Illinois will have to be filled.

That’s one of Obama’s first priorities today.

He’s meeting with Governor Rod Blagojevich this afternoon in Chicago to discuss it.

UPDATE at 12/10/08 11:48:08 am:

And at the Illinois Government News Network, an announcement that the meeting took place and the Senate seat was discussed, with the headline:

Governor Blagojevich Congratulates President-elect Obama and Discusses U.S. Senate Seat

UPDATE at 12/10/08 12:21:23 pm:

Curiouser and curiouser. KHQA has taken down both of their articles about the meeting.

 Obama is ‘saddened’ to hear that  Governor Blagojevich of Illinois has been arrested on corruption charges, for (inter alia) trying to sell Obama’s vacated seat in the US Senate. He knew nothing about it. If he had, he would have been shocked, shocked. 

Most media reports carry a denial, variously worded, that Obama can in any way be connected to Blagojevich’s alleged corruption. 

However, ABC News reports:

On the Chicago TV show "Public Affairs with Jeff Berkowitz" on June 27, 2002, state Sen. Obama said, "Right now, my main focus is to make sure that  we elect Rod Blagojevich as Governor, we…"

"You working hard for Rod?" interrupted Berkowitz.

"You betcha," said Obama.

"Hot Rod?" asked the host.

"That’s exactly right," Obama said.

In 2004, then-Gov. Blagojevich enthusiastically endorsed Obama for the Senate seat after he won the nomination [without paying a bean to Blagojevich?], and Obama endorsed Blagojevich for his 2006 re-election race in early 2005.

In the summer of 2006, the then-U.S. Sen. Obama backed Blagojevich even though there were serious questions at the time about Blagojevich’s hiring practices. 

 Atlas Shrugged notes:

Rezko is singing about the Giannoulias family and its longtime “business dealings” in Chicago, which would interest someone like Fitzgerald and the Justice Department, who have had a long ambition to crack Soprano-style business dealings in Chicago (the city known for Al Capone hasn’t changed much, really). The next plate to drop in this will be Fitzgerald then leaning on the Giannoulias family to give up someone bigger than them, who Fitzgerald once discussed in terms of hoping “he has the morals to do the right thing”, to paraphrase. We now believe that person Fitz was talking about is Barack Obama.

The Giannoulias family was involved with Obama as far back as his first state senate campaign in 1996. It has been long rumored here in Chicago that Obama obtained a sweetheart deal on his first town home here in Chicago — which he could not have afforded otherwise — and guess who the financing came from for that house? We’ve been told it was Broadway Bank, the Giannoulias bank. Now, this sets up a scenario where the Giannoulias family helps Obama with his campaign finances and gets him deeper in their pocket with his sweetheart mortgage deal (for the first home he owned that he could not afford) – all in exchange for quid pro quo to be determined later.

One favor political Chicago claims Obama did for the Giannoulias family was in 2006 when, out of the blue, 29 year old Alexi Giannoulias, with no experience, and without ever having voted before, decides to run for State Treasurer of Illinois. Also out of the blue, Barack Obama endorses Alexi Giannoulias for State Treasurer. This was a SHOCK to everyone in Chicago — and Giannoulias would have never become State Treasurer without Obama’s help. In political circles here, it has always been believed that this endorsement was bought years ago with that sweetheart mortgage deal Broadway Bank arranged for Obama to buy his town house.

So, the Tony Rezko sweetheart deal was not the first magic home loan Obama ever received to buy a house he could not afford.

 

 Now that a Chicago politician has been elected to the presidency of the United States, and only now, the sewer that is Chicago politics is being investigated. 

The Chicago Sun-Times carries the story.

Was the President-elect involved in the corrupt  politics of Illinois?  He was not just casually acquainted with Tony Rezko. He had dealings with him which smell pretty bad. See this report in the Washington Times. Tony Rezko is in prison, where he belongs. Obama is heading for the White House.

From the Washington Post:

Rezko was a key supporter and donor throughout Mr. Obama’s political career, with the Illinois Democrat estimating that Rezko raised $250,000 for his various political campaigns, though not for his presidential bid. The two were friends [!] who talked frequently about politics and occasionally dined out together with their wives.

Rezko was convicted this summer on federal charges of using his clout with state government to squeeze kickbacks out of firms wanting to do business with the state. The charges did not involve Mr. Obama. [???] Rezko is now cooperating with federal prosecutors in a continuing probe of corruption in Illinois government.

Mr. Obama consulted Rezko, a real estate developer, before buying his home in 2005. [See the whole report to judge if this adequately sums up what happened.] 

As a state senator, Mr. Obama wrote letters endorsing government support of a Rezko housing project for senior citizens.

Obama aides say he was simply supporting a project that would help residents of his district, not doing a favor for a friend.[???]