Lunar Eclipse Tonight!

A lunar eclipse will be visible in Chicago early this morning.

Gonzales Said to Have Resigned

Officials are reporting that embattled Attorney General Gonzales has resigned, the reports state that he has been temporarily replaced by Paul Clement.

Update: He's Outa there!

Was Al Gore in Chicago?

c Flying Debris

Maybe Al Gore stopped in this Walgreens on Fullerton this evening.

Batman to Film at CBOT this Weekend

c Flying Debris

When we walked onto the trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade yesterday we received notice that the film "Rory's First Kiss" will be filming outside of the exchange this weekend. Local movie folks tell me that "Rory's First Kiss" is the code name for the next Batman movie. During Batman Begins the Chicago Board of Trade building was used as the headquarters for Wayne Corp.

System Parking Chicago - $220+/Hour!

That's right the parking giant System Parking debited my credit card $662 when I parked in their Piper's Alley parking facility for three hours on Tuesday. The facility is adjacent to the Second City building which also contains a Lowe's Theater, a gym, a running shoe store, a Starbucks and the Adobe Grill.

The attendant on duty was useless and the manager was even worse. They both appear to be Nigerian so I'm not very comfortable about the chances of System Parking actually refunding my money. The manager hung-up on me three times Tuesday evening while I was attempting to explain to the man what had happened, a lovely bunch over at System Parking. When the charge was posted to my account early this morning I contacted American Express to dispute (with extreme prejudice) the charge posted by System Parking. They also charged me the correct fee of $16 for the three hours that I was parked in the Piper's Alley System Parking lot at North Ave. and Wells St. (230 W. North Ave.) in Chicago.


For $662 my Land Rover should have had sex.


Update: On Saturday I was informed by AMEX that System Parking has refunded my $662.

"What Is Wrong With Those People?"

I have long felt that one of the most important lessons that I learned in college involved a combination of the madness of crowds and the desire of many to find meaning from a person they feel is superior to them. As a junior at Spring Hill College, a Jesuit school in Mobile, Al., I attended a lecture put on by the school's Philosophy Club. This was right up my alley as I mostly enjoyed the philosophy requirements (2 years) and I was friends with many members of the Philosophy Club; well on this one occasion the Club had a Yale Philosophy professor speaking on a subject near and dear to his heart, "isms". That's right they had some Eli in to discuss linguistics under the banner of Philosophy. I cannot remember the name of the Yale prof but I do remember that he arrived wearing a cape, that's right a cape. Personally I believe that capes should be reserved for superheroes and Halloween but he sashayed on to campus wearing a cape.

The gist of this gentleman's lecture was that man invented particular words and added "ism" on to other words to describe experiences that were new to him and the Yale professor had one example that was just downright hysterical. He claimed that capitalism started just a few years before it was described by Karl Marx in Das Capital. As a student of Economics this was simply too much for me to listen to seriously, this poor man appeared to be deluded by the mindless and dull writings of that German nebish Karl Marx. I will state now that even as a twenty-year old I had absolutely no respect for those under the sway of Marx, be they Jesuit Priests pushing communism through some silly theory that they called "revolution theology" or the run of the mill commie drunk at the end of the bar. Ironically the pastor at Barak Obama's "church" is big on "revolution theology", something that he says that he got from the Sandanistas.

During the question/answer period I stood up and asked how this Yale professor could state that Marx was describing capitalism as something new when the type of trading that we understand as capitalism had been going on for multiple millennia. The professor's initial answer involved slavery, I interrupted him with a reminder that slavery was still part of the world when Marx was sitting in the basement of the British Museum and that in fact it was still occurring that very day. Well this line of questioning flummoxed the Eli and he went straight in to "attack the questioner" mode. Here was a Yale philosophy professor stating that he could not answer my question because I was too dumb to understand what he had said. I repeatedly told this gentleman that I understood him just fine but would he please answer my very simple question. After putting up with more abuse from this caped nut case I asked whether or not the Yale professor had the intellectual wherewithal to even answer the question. At that point the entire room went up for grabs and some of my classmates demanded that I be ejected from the hall for asking a question that went to the heart of the lecture. Sadly, many of the Spring Hill professors present were also part of the lynch mob.

My lesson was that even some people who are very good students (or very good teachers) and who are outwardly intellectual can be very ignorant when they look up to the person spewing nonsense and if the spewn nonsense fits their intellectual bias'. This was an important lesson for me as I started to trade as the the trading world is full of big mouthed charlatan bullies and figuring out the charlatans can mean the difference between driving a Porsche and taking the bus. Over the years I have repeatedly been reminded of that lecture when I see people using those tactics in the political arena, those reminders seemed nearly constant during the Clinton administration.

Flash forward many years to the late '90s, I was attending the wedding of a very dear cousin who had worked for Hilary Clinton and others in the Clinton administration. Well during dinner I sat with a group that included one of my sisters and her husband, a group of couples who had worked in the Clinton administration and a fascinating couple who had been involved in planning the protests in China's Tiananmen Square. The Chinese couple were as fascinating as their story was horrifying. They had been student organizers and they were able to escape the square when the Chinese authorities attacked the protesters in Tiananmen. Many of their cohorts were jailed and some of them were likely slain, many had family who were dragged into the claw of Chinese repression including this couple. They were lucky enough to escape to Japan where they met my cousin's future husband as he taught English. They later moved to Canada and eventually to Minneapolis where they were both medical doctors. Their story was fascinating and I pressed them for some insights that I would not have gotten while sitting thousands of miles away and watching those events unfold on CNN.

This conversation was just way too much for the liberals and Marxists at the table who objected to the couple's utterly realistic descriptions of the Chinese government. Most of the people at the table told the Chinese couple that they didn't understand China, it's people or it's government. My favorite comment came from a Dartmouth graduate who had worked in the Clinton administration who stated that a cab driver in Beijing told him that the foreign representations of the Tiananmen protests and the aftermath were all western propaganda. Well this being a wedding I was drinking beer and having a good old time giving it to my table mates for being boorish and somewhat abusive to our new Chinese friends and frankly for not being very smart.

After taking part in some dancing I returned to my table and encountered the Chinese couple who came across the table to sit next to me, at which point the woman asked me a pointed question that I should always remember, she asked "what is wrong with those people?" As I searched for an answer the woman went on to say that the people at the table were all well educated, well dressed and well spoken, so how could they be so bizarre? I told both of them that I did not have an adequate answer, that I had seen such behaviors for years but that I believed that they simply had bad educations. By bad educations I meant that they are not well rounded. This answer was inadequate to all three of us but for me the experience was just one more strange quirk that I had observed in some of my liberal friends that I did not understand.

Years later I started to read the blog of Dr. Pat Santy, of Dr. Sanity and NASA fame and evenings like my cousin's wedding started to make sense. Dr. Santy writes quite a bit on the subject of delusion and what must be mass delusion. Those people at my cousin's wedding fit the bill so perfectly that the evening finally made sense. Those liberal Democrats should probably be described as Marxists and the mere presence of those two Tiananmen Square leaders was just too much for those people to bear. They had to deny and talk over the the two who bore witness to that typical communist disgrace because to acknowledge that communists are capable of murdering innocent citizens who were peacefully marching for freedom may out those people as not being exactly as good as they believe themselves to be. The Chinese doctors probably never imagined that a free country like the United States would contain so many people who don't innately support people who agitate for democracy so the evening must have been an eye-opener for them. The two good doctors recognized the behavior as some sort of illness whereas I had long before internalized my thoughts on much of that type of behavior as being along the lines of "well, yeh, they do that."

Update: Many thanks to the wonderful Dr. Sanity for inclusion in her Carnival of Insanities again this week. Go Read Her Blog!

Michelle Obama - Off Her Rocker?

According to a report in this morning's Chicago Sun Times the wife of Presidential hopeful Barack Obama, Michelle Obama said the following to an Atlantic, Iowa crowd "if you can't run your own house, you can't run the White House." Somebody should clue Ms. Obama in that if her husband wins the Presidency that she will run nothing beyond the Office of the First Lady. She will not be running the White House.

People who know the Obamas say that Michelle wears the pants in that family and that she is very power-hungry, and those are the supporters!

Dean Becomes a Hurricane - the Rovian Plot Continues!

This morning the National Hurricane Center announced that Tropical Storm Dean was upgraded to hurricane status. Check out the NOAA discussion. Hopefully this will be the last of Karl Rove's plots to be unleashed on the American public!

Tropical Storm Dean - A Rovian Plot?

Tropical Depresion #4 was named yesterday and it is now Tropical Storm Dean. This is unbelievable, George Bush gets rid of Karl Rove, the man liberals are now blaming for Hurricane Katrina, and now we have a storm named after Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean! This must be the last of the Rove dirty tricks, Lord help us! To make it even worse I have heard some people state that the storm is headed towards New Orleans! Only Rove could pull that one off.

Barack Obama Channels John Kerry

A paragraph from this AP article really sticks out as a John Kerry - Genghis Khan moment.

"Asked whether he would move U.S. troops out of Iraq to better fight terrorism elsewhere, he brought up Afghanistan and said, 'We've got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.'"

Thank you Senator Obama.

The Left and Their Secret Police Heroes

This Wall Street Journal op/ed piece by a retired high ranking intelligence officer in the Romanian Secret Police is a crusher for liberal Democrats. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former secret police chief, wrote about his psy-op efforts against the West and guess what? The left and prominent members of the Democratic Party are using the exact same tactics, and much like the disgraceful Democratic Party Platform of 1864 the current crop of would-be slave mongers are using the same rhetoric today. In 1864 the Democratic Party wanted to trade "peace' for slavery, today they want to trade "peace" for tyranny. The new Democratic motto is, "let them eat falafels".

Update: Wow, the Gateway Pundit has found a 3 1/2 year old National Review article in which the author of today's WSJ op/ed piece Pacepa asked where John Kerry got his rhetoric. Strangely the world's International Communists and John Kerry used the same rhetoric, including the reference to Genghis Khan; or do you say Jenjis?

The Gateway Guy also includes a video of Kerry and tipsy Teddy Kennedy in which Kerry is protesting the Vietnam war wearing, get this, his military uniform! Take that Kos Kidz!

Obama's Angel Rezko - More Trouble for Democrats

Alleged legal genious Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has had trouble with his political ties here in Illinois. That should not be a shock, Illinois is a Democratic cesspool of corruption. Well Obama's "angel" is at it again, it turns out that Tony Rezko once had a contract with the last Iraqi government to supply guards for power plants, his partner is a former Chicago cop with a checkered past; neither had any experience in that business. The contract was cancelled when the new Iraqi government was seated but those Democrats are trying to get the contract let to Rezko again. Rezko is of course the Obama supporter who used his ties to local Democrats to get government financing for then soon to fail real estate developments, some in or abutting Obama's former Illinois House district. The Chicago Sun Times has the story here. Also check out this story of how Rezco's company, Companion Security was involved in a possibly fake "burglary" of over $100,000 of $100 bills and three guns that showed up again threee days later, when the money was brought to a lawyer who said that the cash was gained "legally".

NSA Links - Tied to the DNC?

The leak investigation from the NSA leaks to the NY Times has ensnared a DOJ lawyer with old ties to the Democratic National Committee and a Soros funded outfit. The Soros outfit was removing evidence of the lawyer in question's connection to the group as AJ Strata of Strata-Sphere was looking at the sites. Mr. Strata has also warned of a possible looming constitutional crisis from this issue, he wrote that he had heard rumors of involvement by high ranking Democrats in this case of treason.

KOS Kidz Can't Handle the Truth

Okay, with those little kiddies it really should be spelled as "the trooph", but I digress. Anybody who has spent any time reading the anti-Semitic and ridiculous Daily Kos knows that they call themselves the "reality based community". They actually could reasonably be described as the LSD based community, but again, I digress. This morning a Kos Kidz panel attacked a member of the military (you know, the ones they, ahem, "support") after the gentleman brought a little bit of reality to their silly little convention. I blame Owsley Stanley.

Hat Tip: Little Green Footballs

A Fascist in Democratic Clothing is Still a Fascist

Last night the US House Democrats lost a vote concerning agricultural subsidies that could be paid to illegal immigrants. After they lost the vote they illegally re-voted and gavelled the illegal result as a victory. As of this morning they have expunged the entire episode from the record. They did all of this in order to insure that illegal aliens could receive federal agricultural subsidies. No wonder all of their weak presidential candidates are currently winging their way to Chicago to speak before a group of Democratic bigots and anti-Semites at the Daily Kos' annual Yearly Kos convention. The Democrats have been screaming and whining that with George Bush as President the nation would succumb to fascism, they just didn't tell us that they are the fascists. It is truly Pathetic but their tyrannical heroes would be proud, hello Uncle Joe Stalin!

Hat Tip: Drudge

Action Jackson Jr. - the Thug

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL) is once again showing his intellectual oats. When confronted on his nonsense he inarticulately threatened Rep. Lee Terry (R-Ne) physically. Last night Jackson stated on the floor of the House that "Republicans can't be trusted"; coming from a Chicago Democrat that is simply way too rich. I am a life-long Chicagoan and will state categorically that the local Democratic politicians can not be trusted and that they are not the least bit honest. Unfortunately many of the rank and file Democrats are exactly the same way.

For years my fellow Chicagoans of the Democratic persuasion bragged that they had helped to steal the 1960 Presidential election for John F Kennedy, they stopped at about 4:00 AM the day after the 2000 election as it would appear a bit unseemly to be bragging about stealing elections at a time that the Democrats were attempting to steal an election. The Democrats control this city and the state of Illinois and the place is a disgrace. The IOUs that are piling up in this state are massive and I don't care what anybody says the Chicago area is still booming. so why all of the local and state governments here are going broke is somewhat of a, mystery.

This type of physical intimidation is just part and parcel of the Democratic Party, think Teamsters. The fantastic Tribune columnist John Kass calls congressman Jackson's father Jesse Sr. "the King of Beers" because Jesse Sr. had threatened Anheuser-Busch with a nation-wide boycott, until low and behold, Anheuser awarded two of the Jackson children an Anheuser-Busch distributorship on the North Side of Chicago; think the Loop, the Near North Side, Rush St., Lincoln Park, Wrigleyville and Wrigley Field. A Hispanic woman owned the distributorship before she was run out by Anheuser and there was never a call for a boycott against Anheuser. It also notable that when Jesse Sr. ran for President it came out that one of the Jackson children had loaned about $20,000 to a cocaine dealer in California and the Jackson's claimed that the son was simply "lending" the money to the cocaine dealer in order to help the cocaine dealer buy a used Alfa Romeo automobile. As any well read American could tell you, if there is anything that cocaine dealers are short of it is not US currency! They and their honest and trustable Democratic cohorts expected us to believe that big-time California cocaine dealers have no need to launder currency because they don't have any. Most cocaine dealers take credit cards I guess. So yeh one of the Jackson children had some sort of financial arrangement with a California cocaine dealer when he worked on the floor of one of Chicago's exchanges; I was on a trading floor back then and I can tell you that there was a lot of cocaine use among certain rich young traders and it was rumored at the time that one of the Jackson children was dealing. I have no personal knowledge of those rumors and have no idea whether or not they were true; the Alfa thing has always made me wonder.

As far as threatening people they don't like I have a wonderful story from an old family friend. My friend was returning to Chicago O'Hare and sitting in first class when a stewardess asked him to move to coach for a VIP. My friend was ill and not anxious to move, in fact he got the first class ticket due to his illness. The gentleman in question asked who the VIP was and was told that it was Jesse Jackson Sr.; his response was that he would never move for Mr. Jackson because Jackson is dirty. This comment was overheard by a Jackson body guard who repeatedly demanded that my friend go to Mr. Jackson and apologize (Jackson was out of earshot), which my friend refused to do. The bodyguard then threatened my friend for his refusal and said that he would see my friend on the ground. Well luckily for my friend the flight attendants noticed the threats and notified the O'Hare tower who then notified the Chicago Police who were waiting at the gate. On his way off of the plane my friend was further threatened by the contingent of Jackson bodyguards who were promptly lead away (but not arrested) by the Chicago Police. That is how the Jackson family operates. That is how fascists and gangbangers operate, the Democratic Party should be ashamed of having those thugs as such a prominent symbol of their party.

Update: I just remembered another vote stealing instance for the Democratic Party and it involved Jesse Jackson Sr. I will never forget watching the Democratic National Convention in Miami during the summer of 1972 in our den with my Democratic parents. We watched my parent's primary votes stolen on national television. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party was still mad at old man (Mayor) Daley and decided to punish him by refusing to seat the Illinois delegation. Instead they sat a delegation presented by Jesse Jackson Sr. and Operation PUSH. Operation PUSH had run their own polls in black areas around the state and that was the delegation that was sat by the Democratic Party. We lived in a white community so my parents had no way to vote in or even register for Jesse's, ahem, "election". My parents votes, votes taken in a legal state sanctioned and overseen election were ignored and thrown away by the Democratic Party 35 years ago, the same summer that many of us first witnessed the thugs of Islam when they turned up at the Munich Olympics.

Dems Want to Jail Political Opponents

In this morning's Chicago Tribune, a paper once described by the late Chicagoan John Belushi as "that fascist newspaper from Chicago", was another of the Tribs typical propaganda pieces. This time they are not shilling for CAIR but for the Democratic Party. They have a ridiculous article by Northwestern Law professor James Pfander and former Democratic congressman and former DC Court of Appeals judge Abner Mikva that suggests that the US House and the US Senate should construct a jail to imprison people from other branches who don't dance to their bizarre tunes. Abner Mikva was once White House Counsel during the Clinton administration when he gave that administration the advice that they could not legally implement their illegal fund raising schemes; ironically Mikva lasted a few months and left for "personal and family reasons" at about the time that the Clinton people implemented their illegal fund raising schemes, you know, the ones in which Al Gore claimed that there was "no controlling legal authority". Mr. Mikva was not exorcised over the blatant illegal political fund raising by the Democratic Clinton administration. It is worth noting that when the Clinton administration was in hot water with congress that Judge Mikva had no such suggestions. Mr. Mikva also argued that President Clinton should not be punished for lying to a Federal Court. Thanks Ab.

It is worth noting that these two "experts" on the Federal Court system are not willing to admit that the President of the United States has unlimited powers to appoint and relieve Federal prosecutors at ANY time for ANY REASON. What is going on up at Northwestern? Is it the water? Because they are two hyper-partisan lawyers these two men have dishonestly framed their argument as being about "executive privilege", a serious component of our system. They are also saying that congress should be able to throw people in jail for invoking a well established right to counsel that is held by the executive branch. They believe that all Republican Presidential counsel should be open to congressional and public scrutiny. Thanks Ab.

Mikva, a former congressman may be trying to give congress powers that he dreamed of having while he was in office. The balance of powers between the branches of the US government is a very important component of our system and to willy-nilly give hyper-partisans the power to jail their political opponents is disgracefully fascistic. It is interesting that arguments over the balance of power are as old as our nation and that these two are basing their arguments on the fact that the congress had a jail during the "19th century" and regularly used that jail to imprison those they disagreed with. Mr. Mikva and Mr. Pfander may not be aware of this but our nation and our government have changed quite a bit since those halycon days; for instance those two men could have owned slaves back in the 19th century, in fact as recently as the 1864 election the Democratic platform advocated slavery for the Southern states. Thanks Ab.

It is interesting how they develop their propaganda but it is important to realize that these two are advocating that the hyper-partisans of the House be given the power to jail those governmental officials with whom they disagree, a position that at least one of them did not take when the power in Congress was held by Republicans. Those two men are pathetic.

It is worth noting that as a pre-teen I passed out brochures for Mr. Mikva's numerous congressional campaigns and that I have met the man. My late father also knew "Ab" Mikva, my father also taught at his alma mater Northwestern Law and that one of my uncles is currntly on the faculty of Northwestern Law.