Download Full Content – Printable Pickings
Volokh post points out Spitzer irony.
… So Elliot Spitzer, aggressive former white collar crime prosecutor, was brought down because he couldn’t outsmart banks looking for evidence of white collar crimes.
Spitzer posts from a lot of our favorites.
Bad news for the GOP in Illinois. John Fund has the details.
Karen Hanretty, the spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, had a terse response to the startling loss of former Speaker Dennis Hastert’s seat in a special election in Illinois on Saturday.
“The one thing 2008 has shown is that one election in one state does not prove a trend,” she noted. Fair enough. Indeed in June, 2006, Republicans retained a California seat in a high-profile special election, but that had no predictive value given that Democrats stomped their way to control of Congress a few months later.
But special elections in highly visible seats do have a psychological effect on parties. Not only can they boost or depress morale, but they can affect how political contributions flow in the months leading up to the general election.
That should worry Republicans because history does show that some special elections have captured a growing mood against the party that controls the White House. …
Mark Steyn Corner post.
Todd Spivak, Houston Press reporter reports his coverage of Obama back in the day. This is long, but will provide a good flavor for Obama and Chicago politics.
It’s not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone screaming at me. He liked the story I wrote about him a couple weeks ago, but not this garbage.
Months earlier, a reporter friend told me she overheard Obama call me an asshole at a political fund-raiser. Now here he is blasting me from hundreds of miles away for a story that just went online but hasn’t yet hit local newsstands.
It’s the first time I ever heard him yell, and I’m trembling as I set down the phone. I sit frozen at my desk for several minutes, stunned.
This is before Obama Girl, before the secret service detail, before he becomes a best-selling author. His book Dreams From My Father has been out of print for years.
I often see Obama smoking cigarettes on brisk Chicago mornings in front of his condominium high-rise along Lake Michigan, or getting his hair buzzed at the corner barbershop on 53rd and Harper in his Hyde Park neighborhood.
This is before he becomes a U.S. senator, before Oprah starts stumping for him, before he positions himself to become the country’s first black president.
He is just a rank-and-file state senator in Illinois and I work for a string of small, scrappy newspapers there.
The other day, while stuck in traffic on Houston’s Southwest Freeway, I was flipping through right-wing rants on AM radio. Dennis Praeger was railing against Michelle Obama for her clumsy comment on being proud of her country for the first time.
Praeger went on to call her husband a blank slate. There’s no record to look at, he complained, unless you lived in Barack Obama’s old state Senate district.
Well, I lived and worked in that district for three years — nearly half Obama’s tenure in the Illinois Legislature. D-13, the district was called, and it spanned a large swath of the city’s poor, black, crime-Âridden South Side.
It was 2000 and I was a young, hungry reporter at the Hyde Park Herald and Lakefront Outlook community newspapers earning $19,000 a year covering politics and crime.
I talked with Obama on a regular basis — a couple times a month, at least. I’d ask him about his campaign-finance reports, legislation he was sponsoring and various local issues. He wrote an occasional column published in our papers. It ran with a headshot that made him look about 14 years old. …
Canada’s National Post has a great op-ed on globalony.
Just how pervasive the bias at most news outlets is in favour of climate alarmism — and how little interest most outlets have in reporting any research that diverges from the alarmist orthodoxy — can be seen in a Washington Post story on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), announced last week in New York.
The NIPCC is a counter to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The group was unveiled this week in Manhattan at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, along with its scientific report claiming that natural factors — the sun, El Ninos and La Ninas, volcanoes, etc, — not human sources are behind global warming.
The Washington Post’s first instincts (not just on its opinion pages, but in its news coverage, too) were cleverly to sew doubt of the group’s credibility by pointing out to readers that many of the participants had ties to conservative politicians, such as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and that the conference sponsor — the Heartland Institute — received money from oil companies and health care corporations.
That’s standard fare, and partly fair, so that’s not what I am talking about.
The insidiousness I am referring to is the unfavourable way the Post compared the NIPCC report to the IPCC’s famous report of last year.
After reminding readers that the IPCC and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for their work on climate change, the paper then, sneeringly, added: “While the IPCC enlisted several hundred scientists from more than 100 countries to work over five years to produce its series of reports, the NIPCC document is the work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists.”
First of all, the IPCC and Mr. Gore won the Peace Prize, not a science prize, which only proves they are good at politics. They didn’t win the Physics Prize, for instance. …