Category: Politics Page 27 of 36

Presidential caucuses have been Connie’s specialty in Iowa as she followed the elections of 2004, 2008, 2012 and wrote the 2 books “Obama’s Odyssey: The 2008 Race for the White House.” She also continues to follow politics by avidly reading everything she can get her hands on, including “Rolling Stone,” “Mother Jones,” “Newsmax,” “Time,” etc.

Hillary Clinton Campaigns for Bruce Braley in Davenport (IA) on Oct. 29, 2014

By Connie Wilson

On October 30, 2014

In Editorial, Local, Of Local (Quad Cities') Interest, Politics

Davenport, IA, Oct. 29, 2014 – I drove over to the Hillary Clinton appearance in support of Democrat Bruce Braley’s race for Tom Harkin’s soon-to-be-vacated Senate seat this evening at the Davenport (IA) River Center. I was surprised to see NO Braley signs along River Drive on my way to the venue, but a lot of Joni Ernst signs. At first, I thought, “It’s because this is a pricey neighborhood and primarily Republicans live here.” However, as I exited the building after the rally, I spoke with an African-American voter from a neighborhood far removed from those I had just driven by. She told me that they had seen no signs in their neighborhood, either, leading me to believe that the influx of outside money allowed the Republican challenger to literally blanket this county far removed from Ernst’s home base of Red Oak, Iowa—which is in the very southwest corner of the state, while Davenport is literally the opposite side of the state, on the Illinois border.
This Senate race is one of the most hotly-contested in the nation. The Democrats stand to potentially lose control of the Senate, something they want to avoid at all costs. This contest also pits two candidates against one another who are in stark contrast to each other.
Joni Ernst is an out-and-out Tea Party Conservative whose bus doesn’t even bear the word “Republican.” She is trying to become the first woman Iowa has ever elected to the Senate. That has earned her the support of some millennials and campus-age females, even though they are, in essence, voting against their own self-interest because of Ernst’s stances against access to contraception in any form. With Ernst’s avowed plan to promote a federal bill supporting “personhood,” young women of childbearing age would not have access to abortion or contraceptive services, even in the case of rape or incest, and such essential services as mammograms might not be provided. She was pleased to be publicly endorsed by Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor who was John McCain’s running mate in 2008.
Joni Ernst grew up in Montgomery County, Iowa in Red Oak, Iowa, and served as a Lt. Colonel in the Iowa National Guard and also served in Kuwait. She is a mother and grandmother, married to Gail, who is Career Army; she has served as Montgomery County Auditor. She has campaigned primarily as an anti-Washington D.C. candidate, but her controversial positions on trying to pass a federal “personhood” amendment that would deny women the right to abortion and contraception services, , even in cases of rape or incest, is noteworthy.
Ernst also failed to show up for the local newspaper’s (Quad City Times) round of editorial questions, which means she apparently has no need of endorsement by the Davenport-based newspaper, because she has far wealthier backers, the billionaire Koch Brothers. Clinton, in commenting on this, said, “Only one of the candidates answers your questions? She doesn’t show up for editorial board vetting? I’ve never seen anything like it!”
Braley, from Brooklyn, Iowa, has fought for such causes as veterans’ rights, environmental action, renewable energy, a raise in the minimum wage and equal pay for equal work. He first ran for Congress in 2006. He was re-elected in 2008, 2010 and 2012. His hard-luck story of a young boy whose father was injured in a grain elevator accident, (forcing his mother to go back to college and earn her teachers’ certificate so she could work to support the family) resonated with voters. (Braley’s mother still substitute teaches at age 85). He worked his way through college and attended law school at Iowa, ending up in Waterloo, where he and his wife still live. The Braleys have three grown children and live in Waterloo, Iowa, which is the northeast corner of the state and near where I grew up (20 miles away).
However, the single biggest issue in the Midwestern states that “Meet the Press’s” Chuck Todd is visiting by bus, (primarily Iowa, Wisconsin and Kansas) is Washington gridlock. Iowans are sick of the infighting in Congress and the Senate and want both parties to work together to move the country forward. Anyone running on that platform has an edge, and that gives Ernst the nod over Braley, even if her idea of a woman’s place is something out of “Little House on the Prairie.” The prevailing mood is: punish the Democrats without rewarding the Republicans, because Republicans aren’t trusted as agents of change.
In Iowa—the “first in the nation” caucus state—the polls show a dead heat between Ernst and Braley or a slight lead for the challenger (44% to 44% on Sunday and slight movement in the 3 days since). Out of 7 sitting Senators, only 2 incumbents have a favorable rating, according to the “Meet the Press” Sunday morning (Oct. 26) poll results. To a certain extent, I agree with Rob Ortman (R/Ohio) who said on “Meet the Press,” “This is a national election. People are looking for a change.” Being in office is not a “plus” this election season; it is a negative. Therefore, Democrats are fighting an uphill battle, as President Obama’s approval ratings are only 36% in Iowa and not above 40% in any of the contested states.

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Complicating the race is the infusion of outside cash. It is estimated that these mid-term elections might cost as much as $44 a vote, with Republicans outspending Democrats $5 for every $1. That is because outside billionaires (like the Koch brothers, who are worth $41.9 billion apiece) are pouring money in through PACs. Also, the Republicans have taken a page out of the Democratic playbook of 2008 and 2012, using early voting to their advantage.
Over $200,145,000 has been spent, to date, according to the Des Moines Register, which identified a list of contributors to each candidate as follows:
For Bruce Braley (D):
1) Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee
2) Bruce Braley
3) NextGen Climate Action
4) Sierra Club
5) League of Conservative Voters
6) Vote Veterans Action Fund
7) Environmental Defense Action Fund
8) International Association of Firefighters
9) American Wind Energy Association
10) Planned Parenthood Votes
11) Service Employees International Union COPE
12) AFSCME People
13) MoveOn.Org
For Joni Ernst, (R):
1) American Crossroads
2) National Republican Senatorial Committee
3) Joni Ernst
4) Freedom Partners Action Fund
5) Crossroad GPS
6) United States Chamber of Commerce
7) Priorities for Iowa
8) American Chemistry Council
9) B-PAC
10) National Republican Senate Committee
11) Conservative War Chest

Hillary Clinton’s appearance was full of references to her new granddaughter, Charlotte, and the birthdays that Braley and Clinton had either recently celebrated (hers, October 27th) and Braley’s the next day (October 30th). She commented on Joni Ernst’s failure to answer questions saying, “In Iowa people do not get away without answering questions—except for those that are far in the future.” This was most certainly a coy reference to her potential run for president in 2016. (Buttons touting “Hillary for President” were being sold outside the venue.)

It is 6 days until the election. My drive (along River Drive) that showed no signs for Braley concerned me. Another thing that concerned me was the general lack of a large crowd (only approximately 250 folks) and the fact that the crowd was primarily old. That is never a good sign. It signals that the mid-term election isn’t of much interest to the generation that swept Barack Obama to victory, and it is these voters, plus minority voters (what few exist in Iowa) that Braley needs to turn out in order to win.

Hillary made some brave pronouncements on behalf of Braley, one of which was, “He tries to find common ground, but he’s not afraid to stand his ground.” Said Hillary of Braley’s female opponent, “It’s not enough to be a woman; you have to be committed to expanding rights and opportunities for womanhood.” Clinton added, “It’s almost hard to believe these are some of the issues in this campaign…I think it’s amazing that we’re still debating this in the 21st century.” Another great Clinton quote: “Fear is the last resort of those who run out of ideas and out of hope,” in referencing the many negative ads that have been launched at Braley.

I feel concerned for Braley’s odds, given the mood of the country, which is anti-incumbent(s). Still, he seems the better choice in terms of his political policies. If a voter is in favor of saving the planet, equal pay for equal work, women’s rights, veterans’ rights and a middle-of-the-road approach, it would seem that he would be the better choice. As the woman introducing the pair said, “We can win this race. We can win this race. I’ve done this a lot of times and I can feel it.”

I do believe that woman was sincere, and I do believe Bruce Braley can (potentially) win this race.

Hillary Clinton & Bruce Braley at the River Center in Davenport (IA) on Oct. 29, 2014.

Hillary, onstage, listens to Braley's remarks.

A crowd of 300 to 400 mills about at the Bruce Braley rally in Davenport on October 29th.

Braley onstage at the River Center (10/29/2014).

Youngest Braley Democrat present, 5-month old Genevieve "Gigi" Metcalf.

91-year-old volunteer Bobbie Dodd, recognized from the stage by Hillary Clinton.

Spectators on the stage at Braley Rally.

Hillary Clinton in Davenport (IA) on Oct. 29, 2014.

“The Look of Silence” Documentary Is Powerful Testimony to Man’s Inhumanity to Man

By Connie Wilson

On October 22, 2014

In Movies, Politics, Reviews

The heinous massacre of anyone who had been affiliated with the Communist party in Indonesia is the subject of “The Look of Silence,” a documentary directed by Joshua Oppeheimer that was produced by such important documentary and filmmaker names as Errol Morris (“The Fog of War”), Werner Herzog and Andre Singer. It is a joint production from Denmark, Indonesia, Norway, Finland and the United Kingdom that tells a harrowing story every bit as horrible, in its details, as the Holocaust.
Indonesia’s transition to the “New Order” in the mid-1960s, ousted the country’s first president, Sukarno, after he had spent 22 years in power. One of the most tumultuous periods in the country’s modern history, it was the beginning of 31 years of Suharto’s presidency.
Described as the great puppet master, Sukarno drew power from balancing the opposing and increasingly antagonistic forces of the army and the Indonesian Communist Party, or PKI. By 1965, the PKI extensively penetrated all levels of government. The army lost power as the PKI gained it and this led to a coup.
On September 30, 1965, six of the military’s most senior officers were killed by the 30 September Movement, a group from within the army, and the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military. Within just a few hours, Major General Suharto mobilized forces under his command and took control of Jakarta.
Subsequently, over one million citizens who were on lists as being Communists were rounded up, hands bound behind their backs, and either killed immediately or imprisoned until they could be systematically exterminated, much like Auschwitz but in a much bloodier and more primitive fashion. It was a method no less systematic and inhumane testifying once again to man’s inhumanity to man. The PKI, which was officially blamed for the crisis, was destroyed.
The film follows a local optometrist, Adi, age 44, whose brother Ramli was murdered in the anti-Communist purge. His mother and father’s lives were totally shattered by the brutal slaying of their oldest child. As Adi’s mother says, it was only Adi’s birth two years later that saved her sanity.
One interview subject says, “We did this because America taught us to hate Communists.”
The politically weakened Sukarno was forced to transfer key political and military powers to General Suharto, who became head of the armed forces. In March 1967, the Indonesian parliament (MPRS) named General Suharto acting president. He was formally appointed president one year later.
Suharto’s pro-Western “New Order” stabilized the economy.
However, those whose mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and children were brutally murdered for no offense other than affiliation with the Communist party, the memories do not fade. They must live next door to those who murdered their beloved family members. We learn, as the film progresses, that Ramli, was gathered up, bound, and initially imprisoned. Trucks would take loads of 30 prisoners per truck each night and either hack them to death, throwing their remains into the Snake River, or, in some cases, the victims would be buried alive.
One survivor, Kemat, describes how he jumped from a truck with his hands bound behind his back and escaped through a warehouse. He reminisces, “Ramli was screaming for help saying, ‘They’re going to kill us.’”
“Were there any spectators watching the trucks taking people to be murdered?” asks Adi.
“No. Everyone was too frightened to watch,” says Kemat. “I thought, ‘I’m about to die. I’d better accept it. I’m going to be beheaded, my body and head thrown into the river. And then I ran.”
Adi, the protagonist, decided to search out each of those responsible for ordering the murders or implementing the murders of his brother and others (simply for being members of the Communist party). He used his vocation as a traveing optometrist as entrée.
As we learn, “In many cases, entire families were eradicated, and it happens to this day. Some Communists were starved to death in prison or released periodically to be killed by the local citizens.” The group responsible for the executions was Komando Aksi. Adi searches and finds Amir Hasang and Imang, leaders of the Death Squad in one city.
Not only are these perpetrators not ashamed of their actions, Inong, aged 72, who was the leader of the village Death Squad, appears onscreen as a bit of a loon, repeating that he would take two cups to the executions in order to drink human blood from the severed jugular veins.
“If we didn’t drink human blood,” says Imang, “we’d go crazy. Many went crazy. Drink your victims’ blood or go crazy.” He adds, “Human blood is salty and sweet.”
Imang also claims that he “only cut once.” pantomiming the use of a machete to cut a victim’s throat, but then adds, “Once I cut off a woman’s breast. It was just like a coconut inside.” He pantomimes how he would use a machete on a woman, and his wife giggles while he does so.
“But I thought you said you only cut once?” reminds Adi.
Imang becomes hostile. He says, “I don’t like deep questions. It’s over. Everything is safe now. The past is the past.” He also shows a book with sketches depicting how they killed their neighbors. There is absolutely no remorse or regret shown by anyone who, firsthand, either ordered the murders or committed them. The exception is one murderer’s daughter near the end of the film, who murmurs, “Sadistic” and semi-apologizes, saying, “Adi, we apologize. We feel the same way you do. We knew nothing about this.”
Aside from this one lone young woman, who appears to be about Adi’s age, nobody else—especially those who actually committed the crimes—shows any remorse or expresses regret. In fact, the head honcho at the time, Secretary General of Komando Aksi, expresses the opinion that he should be thanked for his actions and perhaps receive a free trip to the United States—perhaps to Disneyland—maybe a cruise.

It’s nearly impossible to believe how callous the killers are.

We also learn that children in school are indoctrinated with propaganda that teaches them things such as, “The Communists had to be killed because they were sleeping with each others’ wives.” The entire schoolteacher snippet is ludicrous in justifying the mass murder of 1,000,000 people.
Adi tells his small daughter and son that what they are being taught is all lies. One teacher actually says, “Some of the Communists want to be killed.” The teacher adds, “The Communists were cruel, so the government had to repress them. Their children could not work for the government or be in the Army.” [Actually, after the actions of Komando Aksi, there weren’t that many Communists left alive.]
There are extensive film clips of the Death Squad leaders explaining in great detail (and often with laughter) how they would systematically murder men, women and children. Their excuse, “I was only following orders.”
We learn that Adi’s brother, Ramil, who was then a young Communist male, was initially stabbed repeatedly in the shoulder and stomach (The Death Squad members laugh at the memory of his intestines spilling from his stomach.) He managed to crawl through the rice paddies back to his parents’ house, where he asked his mother to help him and make him a cup of tea. While she attempted to attend to his grievous wounds, the Death Squad Komando Aksi members—who received the names of their victims from the Army—returned to her house and promised to take her son to the hospital. She begged to go with him and offered two cows to barter for Ramli’s life; they refused.
Rather than taking Ramil to the hospital, he was taken back to the Snake River where he was stabbed repeatedly and then flung into the river, where he clung to foliage and begged for help. They fished Ramli out and cut off his penis. (The men demonstrated how this maneuver could be done from behind, with a push of the boot to the victim’s butt to push the corpse to the ground where the body would bleed out.) The victims’ bodies were then thrown into the Snake River. (Villagers would not eat any fish from the Snake River for two years, knowing that the fish had been feeding on human remains.)
Those in power made it appear that the people were rising up spontaneously to exterminate the Communists, in order to protect the image of the Army nationally and internationally. This was not true. The Komander Aksi members got lists of 500 to 600 victims’ names nightly from the Army and acted on that information.

When the Secretary General of Komander Aksi is seen onscreen, he seems completely unconcerned about his role in ordering the purge, saying, “That’s politics. Politics is the process of achieving your ideals.” This man continues to be head of the Legislature, since 1971 and says, to Adi, in a threatening manner, “Do the victims’ families want the killings to happen again? Sooner or later, it will happen again.” The message to Adi (who refuses to divulge his last name or city of origin): “Drop it!”
Throughout the film, the insistent messages are these:
1) The past is past. Forget about it. Don’t speak of it
2) I was only following orders.
3) Revenge for these murders will be taken by God after death.
One of the most revealing moments comes when Adi visits his Uncle (his distraught mother’s brother). He learns that his uncle was a guard and, in fact, in charge of guarding Ramil the night he was killed. Adi’s uncle is now 82 years old. The uncle protests, “I was just a guard. They came and took truckloads of 30 at a time. I was just told to guard the prisoners. I did not help! I did not take a machete and murder people!”
But, objects Adi, couldn’t his uncle have tried to defend his own nephew, Ramil?
“I did it to defend the state. Better just to follow orders,” says the elderly uncle.
When Adi later tells his mother that her own brother was complicit in the savage death of her son, Ramil, she is shocked at the sadistic news, saying, “I never knew this before.”
Some notable quotes from the film that illustrate Point One (above):
#1) “Because Joshua makes this film all the wounds are open. Forget the past. You want us to be open, but how can we be? I don’t want to remember. It’s covered up. Why open it up again? What are you trying to do? Just leave it? Let it go. Leave it to God.” (From various speakers)
The revenge motif (Point #3 above) is voiced this way, “It’s up to God to punish those who hurt our friends and family. It’s not up to us.”
This mini-Holocaust makes you instantly think of Auschwitz and the Nazi Death Camps, and those who made it obviously do not feel safe in Indonesia even now.
Nearly all the end credits (other than Joshua Oppenheimer) are listed as “Anonymous” because those who contributed video and reminiscences to this film still fear retribution. “The Look of Silence” is a joint production of Denmark, Indonesia, Norway, Finland and the United Kingdom and it’s an eye-opening film.

Press to Bustos: Give Back the Money

By Connie Wilson

On October 2, 2014

In Editorial, Of Local (Quad Cities') Interest, Politics

The Chicago “Tribune” is hammering Cheri Bustos in editorials demanding that she give back 10% of her pay, as she supposedly promised in interviews with the “Tribune’s” editorial board.

Transcript:

John McCormack: “If you’re elected, are you going to say to whoever the HR department is, “Keep 10% of my pay?”

“I’m saying—” she began.

“It’s yes or no,” McCormick interrupted. “Are you going to voluntarily give up 10% of your salary?”

“Yes,” Bustos said. “And I would propose that there’s a vote to cut 10% of the pay for every member of Congress.”

End of remarks.

Despite the fact that the “Tribune” leans Republican and “seldom is heard an encouraging word” about any Democratic office-holder, from the President on down through the Mayor and/or local representatives, the “Tribune” first hammered her on Wednesday, September 24 with the headline “Promises, Promises,” on page 23, in an article written by Eric Zorn. (Schilling’s attack ads have also picked up the scent of blood in the water and capitalized on it, which makes what I am going to suggest much more plausible.)

Zorn has proven himself capable of pointing out inconsistencies in candidates of both parties and once wrote a rather scathing indictment of former Governor Small (a review of another’s book), so one shouldn’t dismiss his comments as partisan, out-of-hand. The second attack came on Friday, September 26th, just 2 days after the first editorial (which was larger with a large picture) in a small piece on p. 20, Section 1, entitled, “When You Say It, Mean It.”

I think we’ve all had the misfortune to say something we later regretted. (Joe Biden, anyone?) I know I did, when I said, “That makes me mad enough to spit” within earshot of a reporter for the Moline “Dispatch”, which I quickly told the reporter was “off the record.”( It was in reference to a school board meeting in the seventies in Silvis, when I was leading the charge for recognition of our teachers’ group as Co-Chairman of the Silvis Education Association). Although I told the reporter the remark was NOT for attribution and that it was off-the-record, and the reporter agreed, she printed it, anyway. (Too bad the reporter supposedly covering the recount vote during the 2005 election, Jenny Lee, when I had more votes than the incumbent, didn’t report those results at all!)

I was particularly impressed by Eric Zorn’s piece, because it was bigger, appearing on the Perspectives page under a large picture of Bustos, and he has shown at least some degree of objectivity in past articles. Plus, Zorn had what I consider to be a really good idea, which was phrased this way in his piece entitled “Promises, Promises:” “One thousand dollars ostentatiously donated from Bustos’ personal account to each of 35 worthy charities in the district would repay her ostensible debt, put Schilling on the spot to make a similarly generous gesture, and mark her as ‘someone who can be trusted,’ as she says, instead of someone who will say anything ot get elected.”

Zorn went on to say: “All falling trees make sounds, just as all promises, no matter how quiet, create obligations Politicians with skill know how to turn those obligations into opportunities.”

I wrote this as a Bustos supporter (full disclosure) and, given the fact that her husband recently received an unexpected career boost to acting Sheriff, (which probably comes with an increase in pay, I’m thinking), and because I feel confident that $35,000 would be obtainable for someone with her political connections, I would agree with Zorn. It’s what Spike Lee called (in his film of the same name), “Do the right thing.” I’m not suggesting that Bustos has done the “wrong” thing; I’m merely pointing out what Zorn has already done so eloquently.

View this as an opportunity, Cheri. I say this as the woman who ran the most active scholarship program in the country out of 900 Sylvan Learning Centers and received a Bi-State Literacy Award from then-sitting First Lady Barbara Bush as proof (a Republican leading lady, let it be noted). Did that cost me money? You bet! Was it more than $35,000? Probably, since it ran for close to 20 years and we never turned a poor kid away. Do some REAL good with the mean-spirited Schilling ad!

There are MANY worthy charities, locally, state-wide, and nationally, that would welcome $1,000 gifts, including my own old stomping ground (Sylvan). $35,000 would probably not derail the funding of your campaign, and I doubt if it would cramp your personal lifestyle, given your husband’s recent good fortune (at the expense of another Rock Island County officeholder biting the dust; by the way, whatever happened to Dick Leibovitz’s criminality? Just swept under the rug?)

I would suggest my own personal favorite non-profits, like the Midwest Writing Center, followed by various charitable and health organizations (Bi-State Literacy Council), followed by whatever health problem you care to support (diabetes, ALS, heart disease, breast cancer, etc.) There are homeless women’s shelters begging for funds, and I’d take a close look at them, as well. And just because Zorn says to make 35 different $1,000 contributions doesn’t mean you can’t divvy up the funds in some other manner.

All this simply means you should “carpe diem” and divvy up the funds in a timely fashion to prove your point. I do think you can be trusted. I do think that it would be a savvy political gesture, but I also think it would enhance your political prestige and reputation as the very first woman to serve as representative of our 17th district. I hope you and your political advisors consider Eric Zorn’s words carefully [and publicize your actions when you make good on the pledge].

Yes, the Republicans will decry your donation(s) as a “gesture” and as “politically motivated’ and as you being “shamed into it,” but the Republicans can’t really sit on too high a horse in the “shame” department these days, what with gridlock in Congress and all the partisan bickering the Sarah Palins of the world have brought us. You’re better than that, and your constituents should know it and see tangible proof of it.

Carpe diem. Seize the moment. If properly publicized (and you could even allow residents to vote on who gets the donation) it could seal the deal on this election for you. Godspeed! And remember: the election is just about a month off, so get cracking!

Worst Illinois Governor Ever? The Debate is On.

By Connie Wilson

On July 30, 2014

In Books, Local, Of Local (Quad Cities') Interest, Politics

The Award for Worst Illinois Governor Ever May Be a Tie
Jim Ridings’ 2009 Self-published Book Awards the Traveling Trophy to Another Scandalous Illinois Governor with a Quad Cities’ connection.

Fifty-nine year old Jim Ridings has self-published a new book (342 pp.) about a corrupt governor of Illinois, which includes statements like these:
“He is so unscrupulous that his lack of principle gives him the appearance of audacity.”
“Insufferable”
“Small-minded”
“Unprincipled”
“Maybe his bad record is a help to him — It is so bad, it is unbelievable. When the truth is told, people say it cannot be so, and that there must be a vicious reason behind the telling of it.” (Chicago Tribune editorial about this governor.)
“The great game of politics is played everywhere, but nowhere with greater zest than in the state of Illinois.” (“Time” magazine article about this governor).
First Governor of Illinois to be arrested while in office.
“Is the worst governor the state ever had. We believe he is the worst governor any state ever had. He has contaminated everything with which he has come in contact in politics.” (Editorial from the Chicago Tribune)
So, who are we talking about here?
The question is valid, because, at this point, the book begins to outline how the governor of Jim Ridings’ book “did wickedly, willfully, unlawfully and feloniously embezzle and fraudulently convert to his own use” more than a million dollars in state money when he was Illinois treasurer in 1904, prior to becoming Governor of Illinois, a post he held from 1921 to 1929.
When arrested, this Governor refused to surrender to authorities for nearly 3 weeks, claiming that the doctrine of separation of powers protected him from arrest. He threatened to use the National Guard to place Springfield under martial law to protect him.
Prosecutors said the accused Governor had deposited millions into a fictitious bank to defraud the state out of interest payments, and that he had operated a money-laundering scheme. The defense maintained that the governor didn’t really know what was being done in his name and was the victim of his mean-spirited political foes. This Governor considered the Chicago Tribune to be chief among his “political foes,” as a current website about the governor and his family says, “The Chicago Tribune championed a cause against the Governor which impressed upon him the importance of hometown newspaper(s).”
I know you have all been reading this and thinking that the scoundrel’s name was Rod Blagojevich.
In reality, Rod Blagojevich was the second Governor of Illinois to be arrested while in office. The first was Lennington Small, a Republican from Kankakee whose offspring went on to found the Small Newspaper Group, and the SNG website says, “He established the integrity of the business through personal example.”
Lennington Small, when brought to trial, was acquitted, but a juror and two Chicago mobsters were later indicted on charges that the jury had been bribed. Small, upon his acquittal and subsequent re-election bid, commuted the sentences of two other mobsters who had been jailed for refusing to cooperate with the grand jury investigating the circumstances of Lennington Small’s acquittal. It should be noted that Lennington Small lost a civil lawsuit and was forced to repay the state of Illinois $650,000. But he wasn’t impeached and—will wonders never cease—even won that second term in office.
Lennington Small died in 1936. His name was largely forgotten until his great grandson, Stephen Small, then 40, died after being buried alive in a botched kidnapping attempt in 1987.
The Small Newspaper Group began in 1913 with “The Daily Republican” in Kankakee (one of three newspapers in the town) and went on to acquire The Daily Times in Ottawa (1955); the LaPorte Herald-Argus (LaPorte, Indiana, 1964); the Daily Dispatch in Moline (1969); The Leader (Iowa Quad Cities) in 1978, (which has now ceased operations, although the SNG website does not note this); Star Publication weeklies in the south Chicago suburbs (1975-1995); SNG group prints 80,000 to 105,000 copies of “USA Today” in Kankakee (1983 to the present); “Family Weekly” magazine, which later became “USA Weekend”, was sold to CBS in 1980; Rochester “Post-Bulletin” (1977), the largest afternoon daily in the state of Minnesota; “Times-Press” in Streator, IL (1980; current Daily Dispatch publisher Roger Ruthhart came to Moline from Streator); Palisadian Post in California (1981); The Rock Island Argus from the Potter family, “one of the state’s oldest continuously published newspapers” in Rock Island, IL (1995), which also ceased operations in the recent past; and, in 1969, brothers Len and Burrell divided the family’s holdings in print and broadcast properties, with Len taking the newspapers and Burrell inheriting such properties as WKAN, in existence since 1947.
The SNG (Small Newspaper Group) website says of Governor Lennington Small, “The Governor is best-known for the 7,000 miles of hard roads he built in Illinois and for his support of the State Fair.”
Perhaps author Jim Ridings, who has written Len Small- Governors and Gangsters, a 342-page book about the “worst governor ever” would suggest other things for which Governor Small might be remembered, such as setting the bar so low that it took 90 years for someone (Rod Blagojevich) to lower it further.
SOURCES: SNG (Small Newspapers Group) official website; “The Worst Illinois Governor?” by Eric Zorn, Chicago Tribune, July 21, 2010; Jim Ridings’ self-published book “Len Small: Governors and Gangsters.”

Spelling Bees I Have Known and Loved—Or Not

By Connie Wilson

On March 23, 2014

In Editorial, Humor and Weird Wilson-isms, Local, Of Local (Quad Cities') Interest, Politics

Spelling Bees have always had a special significance for me going back to 1979, when, as I completed a decade in the public schools in Silvis, Illinois at the junior high school level, a “new gun in town” swept into our district and began barking orders like a drill sergeant about how all of the English department (all 3 of us) were going to be participating in the Big Deal Spelling Bee sponsored by our local newspaper, and about how SHE was going to be attending meetings to facilitate same (while the Principal of our Junior High School covered her classes) so she could be absent from the drudgery of teaching, blah, blah, blah.

The teacher—I’ll call her Jill St. John, (although that was not her real name)—did not even have a valid 4-year teaching certificate at the time, but was working to secure it. Why, then, was she being positioned as the Queen Bee of the Spelling Bee and bossing others around, which included calling several meetings at the crack of dawn at least one hour before school was even scheduled to start? [I am happy to report that I did not attend a single early-morning meeting; I’d rather be shot at dawn than have to go to such a meeting at 7 a.m. The very thought made me sick, so that’s what I was on those days.]

Why, she was married to the Superintendent of Schools of a very small nearby community, which I will call White Cliffs, for the purpose of this rehash of my deep-seated resentment of Spelling Bee Oh-So-Proper mentality. Ultimately, Jill and her husband left town under a very dark cloud that smacks of some of the abuses of the Catholic Church. But, during that school year, the Queen Bee was riding high and riding herd.

It seemed intrinsically unfair, to me, that a teacher who had just arrived on the scene (and wasn’t even fully certified) had suddenly been named Big Cheese, with all the rest of the English department (i.e., all 2 of us) supposed to kiss the Papal ring. I had even been named one of the “Ten Most Creative Teachers in America” in a TAB Scholastic Magazine contest shortly before this.

While I had (and have) nothing against spelling bees, up to that point, and would have enjoyed participating in one when a young girl, the pages and pages of directions for procedures on HOW we were to go about selecting our contestant of choice for the entire school were ludicrous, impractical and so time-consuming as to be virtually useless.

I was already supposed to be teaching Language Arts: Literature, Grammar, Composition and, (in a separate report card grade), Spelling in one 45-minute period. I barely had time to work in FOUR separate disciplines daily, giving 10 minutes per day to each. I was very “high” on writing/composition in my classes, and I also volunteered my time to run two different speech competitions (Modern Woodmen Oratorical Contest and Optimists Oratorical Competition) after school, as well as being the school newspaper supervisor, so running interminable “spell offs” in my classroom during the ordinary classroom day, in addition to the tasks described here, was not in the cards. When I saw the “recommendations” for HOW we were to come up with our contestants, I quickly realized that my best method would be to check the highest I.Q.’s in my study hall (which was held last hour of the day) and see if the two brightest students I had at that time of day would be willing to “spell” each other during the hour, which was an hour given over to doing one’s homework and otherwise taxing the patience of the study hall supervisor. Therefore, Chris Thompson and Fred Cernetisch became my duly selected contestants, and life went on as usual, with my students, at least, receiving a balanced diet of Literature, Composition, Grammar and Spelling. We had our “contestants” and all was right with the Language Arts World in my classroom, but things were rapidly going downhill in Jill St. John’s classroom right next door.

Mrs. St. John plunged into her new-found prominence with great gusto and began doing things exactly the way the myriad sheets of directions from our local newspaper described, which meant that she had no time to actually teach anything else. It also meant that there were upsets aplenty during her “Spell offs.”

The smartest and best and most motivated students did not, like cream, rise to the top of the Spelling Bee food chain in her numerous and never-ending elimination(s). As can happen in the real deal, chance and luck played a big part, and she did not care for the contestants who ended up as the “winners” of her never-ending spelling bee preliminaries. In fact, she disliked their odds of winning anything beyond a prison sentence so much (when compared to Chris and Fred’s odds, anyway) that she ran in a ringer—a boy who had been out with a broken leg but was among the smartest in the school, who hobbled onstage with his leg in a cast, never having taken part in any of her charade of “Spell Offs.” (That student is now a physician and almost certainly was among the highest I.Q.’s in the entire school).

The budding doctor, however, was a bit of a problem child. He didn’t really care that much for sitting through classes that did not challenge his superior abilities, and he had recently been disciplined at the school picnic for bringing a giant jam box and blasting hip hop music with obscene lyrics. (All in a day’s work for the school’s budding genius.)

This student—I’ll call him “Mike”—could not be counted on to apply himself with any diligence to the task of actually studying a bunch of dry spelling words. He wasn’t of the ethnic strains that “home school” their child and do NOTHING but study spelling words for months. (Now THERE’S a well-rounded child…if all you want him or her to be able to do is spell “antidisestablishmentarianism!”)

So, during the REAL spell-off in our school gym several things happened that were unexpected.

First, all of my teaching colleagues whom I had considered good friends and with whom I had stormed the barricades to achieve recognition for our teachers’ group over a three-year period, went to work setting up chairs and helping Jill St. John out, which I considered, then and now, a real slap in the face.

Second, during the actual Spell-off to determine who would be our junior high school’s contestant, the judges, under the leadership of Jill St. John, seemed oblivious to the fact that “Mike” had just misspelled a word and eliminated himself. I was upstairs in the overlooking band balcony and actually had to stand up and yell down at the assembled PTB, “What about ‘predestination’?” (or whatever the offending word was). The judges finally had to acknowledge that Mr. Future Surgeon had missed his word and the contestant from my homeroom (Chris) was the winner of the “Spell off.”

Third: the fact that the contestant from my homeroom won and hers did not so enraged Jill St. John that she totally lost it in the hallway after school. With plenty of students within earshot, she began swearing a blue streak at me (as it turned out, Jill St. John had the vocabulary of a sailor). And let’s not forget that she had gone back on her own many and numerous “directives.” After countless hours wasted having “spell offs” in her classroom, she had adopted my strategy and simply selected her smartest study hall student to compete, rather than abiding by the rather lengthy and capricious results she obtained while following the directions of the local newspaper.

“Next year,” she screamed, “this will be televised!”

I barely managed to keep from saying Big Whoop.

I maintained my calm (just barely) and asked her if she’d mind accompanying me to the office to repeat everything she had just said (screamed, actually) for our esteemed Principal, Mr. DoNothing.

We marched down to the office, me determined to have all the wrongs I had suffered for months set right, but the Principal (Mr. Do-Nothing, as opposed to Dr. DoLittle) did his usual straddling of the fence. He ushered me, solo, into his office, keeping the salty-tongued Jill in his outer office.

I remember asking him, “Just exactly who IS the Chairman of the English department? I’ve been here 10 years and have a Master’s degree plus 30 hours. Why is this woman bossing everyone around, calling early morning meetings, and swearing at me in the halls, to boot?”

Mr. Do-Nothing answered that we didn’t HAVE “Chairmen” of our departments, [which was a crock], and ushered me out a side door that exited outside, suggesting that I leave early for the day. I was pissed and likely to remain so, since I still am, 34 years later. He then ushered Jill St. John into his office where they, no doubt, commiserated on how difficult Mrs. Wilson was and how wonderful her behavior had been, because, after all, SHE was married to the Superintendent of White Cliff School District, [which he would soon leave under a very black cloud].

However, the “right” student won (and, later, went to work for me at Sylvan for 15 years) but, as luck would have it, her grandparents offered her a trip to Hawaii that was to take place at exactly the same time as the aforementioned Spelling Bee Finals, which were to be held at Augustana College during Easter break.

So, “Mike”—as runner-up—-with his cast now off his leg—is shown in the official school yearbook front and center with the TRUE winner (Chris) stuck somewhere in the back of the photo. I was never issued an apology by the woman who swore a blue streak at me in the halls, and, at the end of that school year, I took one entire year off from teaching to ponder a school district that valued my efforts so little and kissed ass so much.

Did I quit?

No, I did not. I returned after one year away (spent looking for work at a higher level) and taught 5 more years before quitting for good. to take a job writing for Performance Learning Systems, Inc.

But now you have the background of my disdain for Spelling Bees, with which I preface a review of “Bad Words” to follow. While I think Spelling Bees can be fun and useful, I don’t think that staying home and doing NOTHING but studying spelling words has much to recommend it as being the best possible educational course of action, and I still remember the injustice(s) of the first one held at my school in school year 1979-1980.

Fifty Years Ago Today (Feb. 25, 1964): Muhammad Ali Fought Sonny Liston

By Connie Wilson

On February 25, 2014

In Editorial, Local, Of Local (Quad Cities') Interest, Politics, Pop Culture, Sports, Television

Fifty years ago today (February 25, 1964), Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Clay) defeated Sonny Liston (aka, “the Big Bear”) to win the Heavyweight Championship of the World. It was “the Scowl” versus “the Mouth” in Miami.

Muhammad Ali and me: Iowa City, 1968:

When I read that today was the 50-year anniversary of the Clay/Liston fight (Ali was still known as Cassius Clay, what he called his “slave name,” until after the fight), I remembered the day Muhammad Ali visited Iowa City, Iowa and spoke at the Iowa Memorial Union. I was there. I was one of many students crowded into the room.

His anti-war message against the war in Vietnam was what drew me to his speech. At the time, it did not make Muhammad Ali popular, just as the student protests at Berkeley had made student protest leader Mario Savio much reviled in 1965, three years earlier, when I was a student on campus at the University of California at Berkeley. Today, there is a statue of the (now-deceased) Mario Savio on the campus grounds, and Muhammad Ali’s name is known and revered around the world. And, yes, perhaps reviled by some for being “mouthy” and proving he was as “good” and as “pretty” and as “fast” and as “great” as he always claimed to be. [It’s amazing the insights that time gives to events happening in the immediacy of the present.]

Like many young people of the sixties, I thought it was unfair that speaking out against the war might land the heavyweight champ in prison. (He was facing 5 years in jail and a $10,000 fine for refusing to serve in Vietnam). Ali was also denied the opportunity to do what he did best—box— and 4 of his prime athletic years were taken from him. He was stripped of his title and banned from fighting from age 25 until he was 29. (March of 1967 until October of 1970). Many sports experts have speculated about how that might have affected his legacy, since he did mount a comeback and fought well past his prime, winning the coveted heavyweight boxing crown three times.

Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Clay)

Ali’s standing up and speaking out on principle emboldened even Martin Luther King, Jr. to push more strenuously for human rights and racial justice and equality for African-American citizens. Ultimately, the Supreme Court overthrew the previous court decision that denied Ali conscientious objector status, and he was able to return to boxing in 1970, beating Jerry Quarry on October 26, 1970. But when I heard him speak, “live,” his future was very much up in the air. Soon after his return to the ring, Ali lost to Joe Frazier in what has been dubbed the Fight of the Century on March 8, 1971, in Madison Square Garden. I still remember my husband’s excitement when he came home from the closed circuit grainy televised match.

Time frame of Ali’s Iowa City Speech

Ali’s speech on campus happened between March of 1967 and March of 1968, although the University archives say it was 1969. I am fairly certain this is wrong. (I was married and living in the Quad Cities by March of 1968. Ali’s appearance in Iowa City had to have taken place during the first semester of 1967-1968 when I was still on campus and living at 229 Iowa Avenue. I remember being present. I am certain I didn’t drive BACK to campus from East Moline, so it was in the fall semester of school year 1967-1968). I always tried to take in speeches and concerts by any Big Name speaking on campus, which led me to hear Saul Bellow speak, and the Ramsey Lewis Trio play, and Booker T and the MGs perform “Green Onions” and Johnny Mathis (remember him?) sing in the Union. Many years later, I did drive back, to hear former President Bill Clinton speak and to hear Ben Folds (without the Ben Folds Five).

I remember Ali’s message, which was characteristic of the anti-war message he was delivering at a number of colleges across the nation during the time he was not allowed to fight in the ring, but was fighting in court to stay out of jail, be allowed to resume his career, and urging equality for citizens of color. His rhetoric, which sounded very anti-white, was scary to his elders, but the students of the sixties on campus at Iowa, anyway, embraced his message of liberty and justice for all, just as our forefathers had embraced such radical notions in 1776. It’s unclear whether Ali’s reception was as warm and fuzzy in the South, but I can tell you that it was a very closely packed, interested, respectful and enthusiastic crowd that listened to him speak at the Iowa Memorial Union that day. I remember the room was crowded with students who turned out en masse to see the fighter we saw on television “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”

Ali’s Legacy

Young Cassius Clay, later to be renamed Muhammad Ali.

His strong suit not being humility, Ali had self-described himself as “the Greatest.” He wasn’t far off in this early self-assessment of his own boxing prowess. Muhammad Ali was named one of the most recognizable sports figures of the past 100 years, with only Babe Ruth coming close to the universal recognition that Muhammad Ali earned. Ali was also crowned “Sportsman of the Century” by Sports Illustrated magazine and “Sports Personality of the Century” by the British Broadcasting Corporation. It’s safe to say that boxing will never see a fighter so good who was so controversial, entertaining and larger-than-life than Mohammed Ali/Cassius Clay, and whose stance on so many important issues of the day resonated in such important ways. He was a showman. The sport will not see his equal and, in fact, seems to have withered and died in favor of WWC and cage matches and other televised fare.
History changed forever when the 6’ 2” good-looking, outspoken fighter with the 80 inch reach bested the rough-and-tough gangster-related Sonny Liston [who would later be found dead from a possible heroin drug overdose on December 30, 1970.] The intimidating Liston was heavily favored to knock Cassius Clay’s block off. I remember thinking that Clay probably didn’t have a chance against a thug like Liston and hoping he wouldn’t get hurt too badly. Some even wondered if the brash youngster would even show up for the fight. Clay took pride in his good looks; the general feeling going into the fight was that Clay might have a hard time preserving his handsome good looks against the brutal beating Liston was about to administer.

The Fight

Liston was a 7 to 1 favorite. Clay had not really beaten any professional boxers of note, but, instead, had won a gold medal in the light heavyweight division in the 1960 Rome Olympics. In his 1975 autobiography, Ali claimed he threw the gold medal into the Ohio River after being refused service in a white diner in Louisville. Others dispute that version of events, saying he merely lost the medal. [Ali was issued a replacement medal 36 years after the fact, and it was presented to him during a basketball intermission at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, an Olympics where Muhammad Ali lit the Olympic torch. Talk about a national change of heart!].
Clay, prior to the fight that would launch his career as the only heavyweight to win 3 lineal World Heavyweight Championships (1964, 1974, 1978) on his way to becoming one of the most recognizable figures in the world, in a typical display of the psychological trash talk for which he became known, said that Liston “smelled like a bear” and that he was “going to donate him to a zoo” after defeating him In the ring. Prior to the fight, he recited this poem: “Clay comes out to meet Liston and Liston starts to retreat. If Liston goes back an inch farther, he’ll end up in a ringside seat…”

At the time, nobody thought the good-looking 22-year-old kid from Louisville, Kentucky, had a chance against the hardened ex-con, who learned to write his name while in a Missouri prison— a career criminal who had been arrested at least 19 times. Liston told Sports Illustrated, “I had nothing when I was a kid but a lot of brothers and sisters, a helpless mother, and a father who didn’t care about any of us. We grew up with few clothes, no shoes, little to eat. My father worked me hard and whupped me hard.”

Ali’s pattern of confidence and taunting his opponents before fights would continue in his career as he took on other fighters, like George Foreman. Ali was also confident and colorful before the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974. He told interviewer David Frost, “If you think the world was surprised when Nixon resigned, wait ’til I whup Foreman’s behind!” He told the press, “I’ve done something new for this fight. I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail; only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick; I’m so mean I make medicine sick.” Ali was wildly popular in Zaire, with crowds chanting “Ali, bomaye” (“Ali, kill him”) wherever he went.

The Boxer and the Beatles

When Liston was offered a chance to pose with a new British band touring the United States at the time (and causing a sensation) Liston refused to pose with “those sissies,” meaning John, Paul, George and Ringo, who were appearing on Ed Sullivan’s TV show on February 16th and February 23rd. Cassius Clay (who would change his religious affiliation and his name to Muhammad Ali after the fight) DID accept boxing promoter Harold Conrad’s offer to pose with the Beatles, bursting through the door of his 5th Street Gym in Miami Beach and shouting to the mop-topped group, “Come on, Beatles! Let’s go make some money!”

The Conscientious Objector Issue

Then came the difficult years. As an outspoken black man advocating black pride and opposition to the unpopular war in Vietnam, Muhammed Ali’s topics of choice were not popular. He spoke at the Memorial Union, attired in a suit. He had just been denied status as a conscientious objector and stripped of his heavyweight title (1967). He did not fight between March 22 of 1967 and October of 1970, years when he was 26 to 29 years old. That was the period of time when I heard him speak at the Iowa Memorial Union. Every state denied him a license to fight.

After his title defense against Zora Folley on March 22, Ali’s title was stripped following his refusal to be drafted into Army service (on April 28, 1967). His boxing license was immediately suspended by the state of New York and he was convicted on June 20, 1967 (by an all-white jury) and sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for draft evasion. While his case was on appeal, he was free on posted bond, traveling the country giving speeches like the one I attended, in which he made statements against the Vietnam War and urged that blacks be given racial equality in America. Ali’s conviction was overturned on appeal and, (as he was out on bond despite the threat of 5 years in jail), he served no jail time. He did, however, lose 4 crucial years of boxing eligibility during his athletic prime.

Among statements Muhammad Ali made, woven into his college addresses, were these:

“Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.” (He would add that no Vietnamese had ever called him the “n” word)…No, I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder, kill, and burn other people simply to continue the domination of white slave-masters over dark people the world over. This is the day and age when such evil injustice must come to an end…Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?..My enemy is the white people, not the Vietcong…You’re my opposer when I want freedom. You’re my opposer when I want justice. You’re my opposer when I want equality. You won’t even stand up for me in America because of my religious beliefs, and you want me to go somewhere and fight, when you won’t stand up for my religious beliefs at home?”

In 2014, fifty years later, when the film Twelve Years a Slave is a major Oscar contender for Best Picture at the March 2nd Academy Awards, these words ring as true as ever.

Boxing Talent

Ali probably had the fastest hand and foot speed ever for a big fighter. Jimmy Jacobs, who co-managed Mike Tyson, measured young Ali’s punching speed (using a synchronizer) versus Sugar Ray Robinson, a welter/middleweight often considered the best pound-for-pound fighter in history. Ali was 25% faster than Robinson, even though Ali was 45 to 50 pounds heavier. (Ali had once asked Sugar Ray to manage him, but the former champion declined.) “No matter what his opponents heard about him, they didn’t realize how fast he was until they got in the ring with him,” Jacobs said.
The effect of Ali’s punches was cumulative. “Ali would rub you out,” said Floyd Patterson, who fought Ali on November 22, 1965, right after his two fights with Liston. “He would hit you 14,000 times and he wouldn’t knock you out; he rubbed you out. It’s very hard to hit a moving target, and (Ali) moved all the time, with such grace: three minutes of every round for fifteen rounds. He never stopped. It was extraordinary.”

Of his later career, Arthur Mercante, (boxing announcer), said: “Ali knew all the tricks. He was the best fighter I ever saw in terms of clinching. Not only did he use it to rest, but he was big and strong and knew how to lean on opponents and push and shove and pull to tire them out. Ali was so smart. Most guys are just in there fighting, but Ali had a sense of everything that was happening, almost as though he was sitting at ringside analyzing the fight while he fought it.”

Taunting: the Louisville Lip

Speaking of how Ali stoked Liston’s anger and overconfidence before their first fight, a sports writer commented that “the most brilliant fight strategy in boxing history was devised by a teenager who had graduated 376 in a class of 391.” Ali knew that what he said outside the ring, taunting his opponents as “ignorant” (Frazier) or comparing them to an animal (Liston) did psychological damage to his opponents when they were in the ring. Ai got under their skin, and that was his intention. When Ali referred to Joe Frazier as “ignorant” on national TV, Frasier wrestled Ali to the ground while live television cameras broadcast the unexpected outburst. The animosity towards Ali, from Frasier, lasted until Frazier’s death on November 7, 2011.

Considering that I’m a small-town Iowa girl from a hometown of not quite 5,000 people, I’ve had the good fortune to be in several places when events were taking place that would turn out to be turning points in history—or, at least, important historic events that one might even call a milestone. Among them were events such as the beginning of the Free Speech movement on campus at Berkeley in 1965 and the student riots that year; Ted Kennedy’s last speech inside the DNC in Denver in 2008 nominating Barack Obama; in Grant Park in 2008 when Obama spoke to a cheering crowd on election night; at Invesco Field in Denver when Obama accepted the nomination for president from his party; at the very beginnings of the Tea Party movement inside Ron Paul’s Rally for America in Minneapolis in 2008; at a concert at the Savoy Hotel in Birmingham, England by a band (using a light show) which would go on to become Pink Floyd; in the 7th row of the Beatles concert at the Cow Palace near San Francisco in 1964; at a concert in Paris given by James Brown and the Famous Flames in 1965; at the Howard Dean Scream Heard ‘Round the World at the Val Air Ballroom in West Des Moines in 2004; at concerts by the Rolling Stones, Prince, Dave Matthews Band, John Cougar Mellencamp, U2, and a host of other memorable live acts, including Taylor Swift on May 8, 2010, at the IWireless Center (formerly the Mark of the Quad Cities) when my daughter worked for 13 Management, Ms. Swift’s organization.

And I was also at the Iowa Memorial Union in Iowa City, Iowa, when Muhammed Ali stood up and spoke out for his beliefs in 1968.

Was the BailOut A Good Thing? Matt Taibbi of “Rolling Stone” Weighs In

By Connie Wilson

On February 10, 2013

In Editorial, Politics

The excerpts below are from an article entitled “Secrets and Lies of the Bailout” by Matt Taibbi which appeared in the January 17, 2013, issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Taibbi has been a guest on Jon Stewart’s show and his investigative journalism is among the best in today’s business. Some of the points he makes deserve wider distribution, so here are a few quotes from the article that is subtitled: “The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy—it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come.”
Read on, Gentle Reader—if you dare! But buckle your seatbelts: it’s going to be a bumpy ride!
As Taibbi begins the article about the $700 billion in taxpayer money used to bail out Wall Street: “To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you’d think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we’ve been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul—right! Wrong!
It was all a lie—one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in—only temporarily, mind you—to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citi-Group to increase risk rather than reduce it.” As Taibbi puts it, “We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days, but we ended up with a family of hillbillies that moved in sleeping 9 to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.”
Taibbi says, “Money wasn’t the only thing the government gave Wall Street” and cites the omnipresent lying and quotes former bailout Inspector General Neil Barofsky as calling it “the ultimate bait-and-switch.” The lies, he says, were the most important part of the mechanism. “The only reason investors haven’t run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed.” Says Taibbi, “Investors may not actually believe the lie, but they are impressed by how totally committed the government has been, from the very beginning, to selling itl”
Under the sub-heading: “They lied to pass the bail-out,” Taibbi mentions that George W. Bush ludicrously warned that Saddam was planning to send drones to spray poison over New York City to sell the Iraq War resolution. And, of course, anyone who has seen the Sean Penn movie about the “outing” of CIA agent Valeria Plane will remember the infamous plutonium rods used by the Republican administration as proof that Iraq had nuclear capability (or soon would have). Cautioning that, “it wasn’t like (Henry) Paulson could just go out and unilaterally commit trillions of public dollars to rescue Goldman Sachs and Citigroup from their own stupidity and bad management (although the government ended up doing just that, later on.”
Says Taibbi, on page 36 of his article, “At one meeting to discuss the original bailout bill—at 11 a.m. on September 18th, 2008, —Paulson actually told members of Congress that $5.5 trillion in wealth would disappear by 2 p.m. that day unless members took immediate action.” He added that the world economy would collapse “within 24 hours.” Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, “We need $700 billion, and we need it in 3 days.” The plan stipulated that Paulson could spend the money any way he chose without review “by any court or law or any administrative agency.” So, carte blanche, essentially, to do as he wished with the money.
The provision that got the bill passed (Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008) was that the Treasury would buy up $700 billion of troubled mortgages from banks and modify them to help struggling homeowners. “That provision,” said Barofsky,” is what got the bill passed” on October 3, 2008. But, says Taibbi, “within days Section 109 was “unceremoniously ditched” and what was pitched as a bail-out of both banks and homeowners became a banks only operation.
Congress, feeling it had been lied to, put together a movement to cancel the remaining $350 billion of the TARP bailout. So, says Taibbi, “Bailout officials put together a proposal full of even bigger deceptions to get it passed a second time” beginning on January 12 and 15, 2009. Says Taibbi (and I’m skipping over portions of this long and detailed article), “A small slice of TARP was earmarked for foreclosure relief, but the resultant aid programs for homeowners turned out to be riddled with problems, for the perfectly logical reason that none of the bailout’s architects gave a shit about them.” Says Taibbi, “The promise of housing aid, in particular, turned out to be a paper tiger.”
As a person who attempted to use the TARP program to refinance a Chicago condo, I can attest to this. There are so many rules and regulations in place as to make the program virtually useless. After one full year (where I was assured it wasn’t MY credit that was the problem), I gave up and slunk away without a refinance in place and never heard from the eager Florida fellow again. Says Taibbi, “In fact, the amount of money that eventually got spent on homeowner aid now stands as a kind of grotesque joke compared to the Himalayan mountain range of cash that got moved onto the balance sheets of the big banks more or less instantly in the first months of the bailout.” For actual figures, at first, $50 billion was to help homeowners through HAMP; by 2010, the amount had shrunk to $30 billion and as of November, 2012, a mere $4 billion had been used for homeowner aid.
However, says Taibbi, “Obama’s HAMP program turns out to be one of the few bail-out promises that was even partially fulfilled. Virtually every other promise (Larry) Summers made in his letters turned out to be total bullshit.” (Larry Summers, you may remember, was the Harvard President who made some unfortunate remarks about women not being as able in math and the sciences as men that cost him his job; he subsequently became an economic advisor to Obama.) There was no monitoring attached to any aspect of the bailout and there never would be, says Taibbi:
“But even before Summers promised Congress that banks would be required to increase lending as a condition for receiving bailout funds, officials had already decided not to even ask the banks to use the money to increase lending. IN fact, they’d decided not to even ask banks to monitor what they did with the bailout money. Barofsky, the TARP inspector, asked Treasury to include a requirement forcing recipients to explain what they did with the taxpayer money. He was stunned when TARP administrator Kashkari rejected his proposal, telling him lenders would walk away from the program if they had to deal with too many conditions. ‘The banks won’t participate,’ Kashkari said.”
The first 9 bailout recipients were picked because of their size, not because of their economic “health” as was represented. Taibbi suggests that they have become, like AIG, “too big to fail.” The banks in question include all the Big Boys, even though Citi-Bank was deemed “likely to fail” at one point, and many could not pass the CAMELS test of solvency, which refers to Capital, Assets, Management, Earnings, Liquidity and Sensitivity to risk.
A telling paragraph:
“A month or so after the bailout team called the top 9 banks ‘healthy,’ it became clear that the biggest recipient, Citigroup, had actually flat-lined on the ER table. Only weeks after Paulson and Co. gave the firm $25 billion in TARP funds, Citi—which was in the midst of posting a quarterly loss of more than $17 billion—came back begging for more. In November, 2009, Citi received another $20 billion in cash and more than $300 billion in guarantees.”
Stress tests of the banks were then announced, and this telling passage results:
“Now, instead of using the bailouts as a clear-the-air moment, the government decided to double down on such fraud, awarding healthy ratings to these failing banks and even twisting its numerical audits and assessments to fit the cooked-up narrative. A major component of the original TARP bailout was a promise to ensure ‘full and regular stress tests’ of the bailout recipients. When Geithner announced his stress test plan in February, 2009, a reporter instantly blasted him with an obvious and damning question: Doesn’t the fact that you have to conduct these tests prove that bank regulators—who should know who is solvent and who isn’t—actually have no idea of who is solvent and who isn’t?”
From this point on, Taibbi outlines “meaningless parodies of oversight,” even citing a “SNL” skit. Bank of America (my bank) had a $50 billion dollar hole cut to $15 billion. Citigroup got its number slashed from $35 billion to $5.5 billion. Regulating the banks that took the bailout money, in other words, is a joke.
Quote:
“Through behavior like this, the government has turned the entire financial system into a kind of vast confidence game—a Ponzi-like scam in which the value of just about everything in the system is inflated because of the widespread belief that the government will now step in to prevent losses. Clearly, a government that’s already in debt over its eyes for the next million years does not have enough capital on hand to rescue every Citigroup or Regions Bank in the land should they all go bust tomorrow.”
Lies About Bonuses
“That executive bonuses on Wall Street were a political hot potato was obvious from the start. That’s why Summers, in saving the bailout from the ire of Congress, vowed to “limit executive compensation’ and devote public money to prevent another financial crisis And it’s true. TARP did bar recipients from a whole range of exorbitant pay practices, which is one reason the biggest banks, like Goldman Sachs, worked so quickly to repay their TARP loans. But there were all sorts of ways to get around the restrictions.”
Taibbi goes on to say that, “In one of the worst episodes, the notorious lenders Fannie Mae and Feddie Mac paid out more than $200 million in bonuses between 2008 and 2010, even though the firms (a) lost more than $100 billion in 2008 alone, and (b) required nearly $400 billion in federal assistance during the bailout period. One of the ways around the TARP bonus restrictions was to give executives long-term stock options. ‘An independent research firm asked to analyze the stock options for the New York Times found that the top 5 executives of each of the 18 biggest bailout recipients, received a total of $142 million in stocks and options.”…The value of these options has soared to $457 million, an average of $4 million per executive.
Lies About the Bailout Being Temporary
“What’s more, some parts of the bailout were designed to extend far into the future Companies like AIG, GM and Citigroup, for instance, were given tens of billions of deferred tax assets, allowing them to carry losses from 2008 forward to offset future profits and keep future tax bills down…Citigroup, all by itself, boasts more than $50 billion in deferred tax credits—which is how the firm managed to pay less in taxes in 2011 (it actually received a $144 million credit) than it paid in compensation that year to its since-ousted dingbat CEO, Vikram Pandit, who pocketed $14.9 million The bailout, in short, enabled the very banks and financial institutions that cratered the global economy to write off the losses from their toxic deals for years to come—further depriving the government of much-needed tax revenues it could have used to help homeowners and small businesses who were screwed over by the banks in the first place.”
“There is also the matter of the $7.7 trillion in secret emergency lending that the Fed okayed to Wall Street—loans that were only revealed to the public after Congress forced a one-time audit of the Federal Reserve. The result of this ‘secret audit’ did not come out until November, 2011, when Bloomberg Markets—which went to court to win the right to publish the data—revealed how the country’s biggest firms secretly received trillions in near-free money throughout the crisis.”
“By the end of 2008, Goldman Sachs had snarfed up $34 billion in loans and was paying an interest rate as low as just 0.01% for the cash infusion. Barofsky in his book Bailout: Paulson told him that Goldman was just ‘days from collapse” before the government’s gigantic infusion. Bernanke later admitted that “Goldman would have been the next to fall.”
Bank Executive Use Unfair Insider Trading Advantage
“Meanwhile, while officials were taking trillions in secret loans from the Feds, top officials were using their positions of influence and insider knowledge to buy up stock in their companies:
“Steven Friedman, a Goldman director who was chairman of the New York Fed, bought more than $4 million in Goldman stock in 5 weeks between Dec., 2008 and Jan., 2009. Vikram Pandit, Citigroup CEO, bought nearly $7 million in Citigroup stock, just as his bank was taking $99.5 billion in Fed loans. Jamie Dimon bought more than $11 million in Chase stock in early 2009, at a time when his firm was receiving as much as $60 billion in secret Fed loans.” (p. 40) In fact, at the end of 2011, the SEC sent letters to executives of: Citibank, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Chase and Bank of America asking them why they were not revealing their large purchases of stock at a time when their banks were receiving such large public bailouts. All 5 replied, absurdly, that this was “not material.”
Taibbi paragraph, p. 42:
“The implications here go far beyond the question of whether Dimon and Co. committed insider trading by buying and selling stock while they had access to material nonpublic information about the bailouts. The broader and more pressing concern is the clear implication that by failing to act, federal regulators have tacitly approved the nondisclosure. Instead of trusting the markets to do the right thing when provided with accurate information, the government has instead channeled Jack Nicholson and decided that the public ‘just can’t handle the truth.’”
“Bailout officials have spent years building the government’s great Implicit Guarantee to the biggest companies on Wall Street: we will be there for you always, no matter how much you screw up.”
Also, says Taibbi, “The big banks have grown even bigger and more unmanageable, making the economy far more concentrated and dangerous than it was before. America’s 6 largest banks: Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citi-Group, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, now have a combined 14,420 subsidiaries, making them so big as to be effectively beyond regulation.” Says Taibbi, “A recent study by the Kansas City Fed found that it would take 70,000 bank examiners to inspect such trillion-dollar banks with the same level of attention normally given to a community bank. (And, daughter of a community bank President, I remember how daunting the Bank Examiners’ visit always was.)
“The complexity is so overwhelming that no regulator can follow it well enough to regulate the way we need to,” says Senator Brown, who is drafting a bill to break up the megabanks (but also announced he is not running again since this article appeared in January, 2013).
Therefore, says Taibbi, “banks have made a dramatic move into riskier and more speculative investments, including everything from high-risk corporate bonds to mortgage-backed securities to payday loans, the sleaziest and most disreputable end of the financial system.”..The bailouts have brought us right back to where we started. Says World Bank Consultant Klaus Schaeck, “Government intervention has definitely resulted in increased risk.”
The closing paragraphs (3) of the article say this:
“And while the economy still mostly sucks overall, there’s never been a better time to be a Too Big to Fail bank. Wells Fargo reported a 3rd quarter profit of $5 billion last year. J.P. Morgan: $5.3 billion—roughly double what both banks earned in the 3rd quarter of 2006, at the height of the mortgage bubble. As the driver of their success, both banks cite strong performance in, you guessed it, the mortgage market.
So, what, exactly, did the bailout accomplish?
It built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failer, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt banks the official policy of the U.S. government. And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another financial crisis, meaning we’re essentially wedded to that policy for the rest of eternity—or at least until the markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute now.
Other than that, the bailout was a smashing success,” says Taibbi.

Thought for the Day

By Connie Wilson

On January 4, 2013

In Editorial, Humor and Weird Wilson-isms, Politics

Me, pondering thoughts like these while listening to Ron Paul at the Rally for the Republic in Minneapolis’ Target Center, with Barry Goldwater Jr., Jessie Ventura and Tucker Carlson all onstage at once. After that, the German Libertarians libertarianism and legalizing hemp to me. In German. So, I’m thinking this little aphorism about life can be illustrated with just about anything, and this is it.

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, he wordlessly picked up a very large and empty mayonnais…e jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles roll
ed into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full.. The students responded with a unanimous ‘yes.’

The professor then produced two Beers from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar effectively filling the empty space between the sand.The students laughed..

‘Now,’ said the professor as the laughter subsided, ‘I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things—-your family, your children, your health, your friends and your favorite passions—-and if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house and your car.. The sand is everything else—-the small stuff.

‘If you put the sand into the jar first,’ he continued, ‘there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life.

If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff you will never have room for the things that are important to you.

Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness.

Spend time with your children. Spend time with your parents. Visit with grandparents. Take your spouse out to dinner. Play another 18. There will always be time to clean the house and mow the lawn.

Take care of the golf balls first—-the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the Beer represented. The professor smiled and said, ‘I’m glad you asked.’ The Beer just shows you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of Beers with a friend.

Reasons Why Obama Won & Mitt Lost: Two Liberals Discuss, Post-Election

By Connie Wilson

On November 13, 2012

In Editorial, Interviews, News, Politics, Pop Culture

1) The technical wizardry and knowledge of the young Obama workers far outstripped the more pedestrian team working for Romney, just as it overpowered the Clinton candidacy in 2008. (Look for Obama to “help” Hillary to run, should she gear up, in 2016, and that will be all it will take, even if we don’t “like” Hillary as well. She has proven herself competent and that Ryan runt will be all over the next nomination for the Republicans as will Christie and Rubio.)

Rubio has the charisma factor. Ryan, for me, does not.He failed to carry his home state and his own home town (Janesville, WI). Nor did Ryan “work” for the millions of baby-boomers who feared what he would do to what have been dubbed “entitlement programs.” Hillary’s choice of a VP will be crucial in 2016. It will have to be a man with singular experience in government and someone relatively young, in order to corral the youth vote. (If not Hillary, who?)

2) Sandy, the storm: Was there ever a luckier event in terms of politics, for showing across-the-aisle bi-partisan working together-ness? When the Republican Governor comes out and embraces the Democratic President, how sweet is that? Mitch McConnell, on the other hand, personifies the dug-in prejudices that have mired us in stasis for half of Obama’s first term. I look for him to find a way around this aggravation, as much as he can.

3) Obama is a once-in-a-generation figure. He has “it,” that indefinable charismatic cool. He is calm under pressure, smart, and he was voted as being more “in touch” by 53% of the nation (as opposed to 43% for Romney).

Dear Connie (from friend Pam), in response:

1) I do think that barring anything really unusual happening, Hilary has an excellent change to become president in 2016. I don’t think the Republicans will run anyone who can match her. They have good candidates, Chris Christie for one. However, I think he is too independent and moderate for the Republican hierarchy (Think of his recent praise for President Obama after super storm Sandy. What real conservative would have said one kind word about our president?)

I don’t think Paul Ryan has broad enough appeal to win a national election. His budget was a give-away to the rich and a complete take- away for the poor. There are more poor people in this country than there are rich people— WAY more. Will the Republicans really run a Hispanic candidate? An Indian? Maybe, but how would that play in the Deep South and the border states? (What would Rush say? Or do, he’d probably have a melt-down not unlike his poor treatment of the young woman who attempted to testify before Congress about a woman’s right to choose.

2) I agree that the choice of VP for Hillary is critical. It has to be someone with a lot going for him (definitely a man). However, he can’t overshadow Hillary. If he does, that would make her look weak. She certainly is not weak, but remember how the press pounced on her tearing up during the primary campaign in 2008? That hurt her a lot, I thought. (*Note: I thought it humanized her, but this is a good friend and fellow political junkie’s opinion)

People, especially men, are always ready to think a woman is weak or too emotional. Actually, I think she should find someone who is moderate and acceptable to many moderate Republicans. It’s too bad Huntsman is a Republican; I thought he was very credible. I think Huntsman would have been a far better candidate for the Republicans than Romney. (*On the Sunday morning news talk shows, Joe Scarborough, et. al., described Romney as “a flawed candidate.”)

3) President Obama definitely has the “it” factor. The future is hard to predict but if he has any luck at all, I think he will go down as one of our most important, transformational and influential presidents. It’s not just because he is African-American; he’s smart and he sticks to his principles. True, he gave in on the Bush tax cuts once, but not until he was backed into a nearly impossible corner. Obama’s health care bill is not perfect; the Republicans are responsible for watering it down and making it less effective than it could have been. Still, as Biden said at the time, “This is a big f***** deal.”

4)I am hoping that Mitch McConnell is beaten in a primary fight; I’m hoping that instead his district is represented by an Aiken or a Murdock. It would be fitting. What an &***&& McConnell is!
________________

(Me again, the Associated Content Content Producer of the Year 2008 for Politics, if you wondered where this woman gets off, I’ve followed the primaries, in particular, closely since 2004 and also reported from inside the DNC, RNC, Ron Paul Rally for the Republic, Belmont Town Hall Meeting, and Rudy’s race in Florida (which was more of a stroll, really,) in 2008:

5) Where was I? Oh, yes, the relatability factor: Who could EVER think that a rich millionaire was more like “us?” There was a HILARIOUS clip from Letterman that showed Mitt commenting and it was devastatingly funny and devastatingly on target. There was also a very funny skit on Jimmy Fallon where Obama says to Mitt (Fallon) something like, “At least you created one job, Mitt…for me.”

6) Let us also not forget that Mitt never did release all of his tax returns, despite his own FATHER saying you had to release at least 10 to 12 years of same. This is a man who doesn’t even support his country to the extent that his vast wealth would allow him to do, through taxation. Yet he wanted us to elect him President of that country. He gave a good concession speech, but claimed he had not even written one, prior to election night.

I do hope this stunning defeat for Karl Rove puts him out of politics forever. He was 1 for 10. Sheldon Adelman lost $60 mill on the election. I LOVED the tape where Obama thanked the Chicago workers and teared up. [I only wish I had had the stamina and youth and know-how to HAVE BEEN one of them.]

7) Women: as we have discussed. Women in America like Obama and, while they might also have liked Romney as a person, the things he wanted to do were not in the best interests of modern women. I read that women went for Obama by a wide margin of something like 11% points. I think that people who are right-thinking people just really “liked” Obama, when compared to Mitt.

8) Did you read the piece about Ted Kennedy’s game plan when he ran against Romney in Massachusetts being resurrected again in this race? Take Mitt’s so-called “strength” (i.e., his business expertise) and find the people whose jobs he outsourced and let THEM tell it like it was! [I heard they found eighteen of them and some of them were so vehement that they couldn’t use the remarks on the air in the TV spots. (lol… And so it goes.]

6) They are predicting that AZ, that bastion of nut cases, may well become a blue state as it becomes more Hispanic. [Get ready, AZ.] And get rid of that woman Governor! Who did she think she was, shaking her finger in the face of the President of the United States like a scolding schoolmarm.

7) I feel we have “saved” the Supreme Court and it will now (potentially) re-address this ridiculous ruling about pouring $ into races. In case people didn’t notice, it didn’t work…although I did shell out a standard amount of his contributions for Obama, when asked. Most of Obama’s donors were in the $50 range. Doesn’t sound like much compared to $60 million of the $1 billion Rove and the gang raised and spent, but it’s still money out of my pocket. I also have, framed, the very first Obamacare announcement he made in Iowa City, the declaration of this now “law of the land.” I’m going to get it out and hang it up somewhere, since Obamacare is now here to stay. Did you see the “Newsweek,” that declared Obama to be “this generation’s Lincoln?” I hope that does not extend to Lincoln’s demise. I fear it. Some nutty female employee of a Cold Stone Creamery posted a rant with the “n” word and a veiled threat and lost her job, as well she should, for articulating such threats, idle or no. Then there are the petitions to secede from the South. (Maybe they could have Texas, with “W” there?) Sounds like Lincoln’s “a nation divided cannot stand” Civil War years 1861-1865.

Antonio Villaraigosa, the Mayor of Los Angeles since 2005 and Chairman of the Democratic Party.

One person who has not been mentioned much in the political talk for 2016 is the Mayor of LA, with whom I posed back in 2008 inside the Pepsi Center in Denver, Antonio Villaraigosa. He is a good-looking Latino male, charming and handsome and has just completed a term as Chairperson of the DNC. On the downside, not unlike Bill Clinton, he has had a wandering eye. [Got caught in a scandal with a TV newswoman while in office.]

I listened to a woman on a Sunday talk show describe being inside McCormick Place on election night and I felt so bad that I could not pull that off. (Started too late to request passes after the Film Festival). She said that when it went up on the board that Ohio had broken for Obama, the place just was electric. How I wish I had been there! It was history in the making.

Instead, I went out, camera in hand, and tried to capture a few images of people in the city and spoke to some of these people anonymously. (Shopgirls, cabbies, people in a bar). And then I went on my merry way, because I WAS merry and happy and watching the returns in Chicago.

I was relatively quiescent in politics for years, because I was completely disillusioned by the death of JFK ; Howard Dean brought me back into politics, so, ostensibly, that makes me a liberal and proud of it. BUT, I voted for 2 Republicans on the local ballot, so maybe I’m a raging Independent?

From My Friend, Pam:

Mitt was a very weak candidate for many reasons, not the least of which was that he was completely out of touch with ordinary Americans. He made many, many gaffes. (Olympics, anyone?) Having previously thought him smart, I began to wonder about his intelligence.

It’s incredible to me that the Republicans seemed to think that Mitt could completely change his thinking on big, basic issues and no one would care or remember. The Reps thought Mitt’s business smarts would trump everything but Mitt never gave any specifics about how he was going to put everybody back to work. He never gave any specifics about how his budget plan could give tax cuts and still reduce the deficit. I think a lot of people feared he would take away the mortgage deduction and he probably would have. [After all, that is probably not very important to an ultra rich person.]

I am also very glad that all the billions spent by the Republicans did not get them very much. I’m glad that Karl Rove failed. I hope “Turd Blossom” (“W’s” nickname for him) goes away and stays away. 1 for 10 is NOT a good average. So much for his much-vaunted expertise and the whining that Rush has done on the radio and the accusations that the pollsters were “oversampling” Democrats. The pollsters got it right. The Republican party got it wrong.

Women are over half of the population and they are in the ascendancy. I just read in the paper now that more women have driver’s licenses than men. Women demand safe, fuel efficient cars and that will be good for the environment.

The Republicans whom Obama reached out to on election night (Boehner and McConnell) would not even come to the phone. The message to the newly re-elected president was that “they were asleep,” despite the fact that the election was called for Obama fairly early in the evening (8:30-ish).

They were asleep, all right. Old and asleep.

As a party they did not even recognize that a freight train of change was bearing down on them until it ran over them. Women. Minorities. The regular guy. The changing face of America. Charisma of the candidate. Smart tactics. Superior strategical advantage(s). A nod to Hurricane Sandy.

There goes 2012. And I hope someone burns that piece-of-trash movie “Obama’s America” for the smear job it was.

Go see Stephen Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” instead. It’s closer to what Obama faces now.

Schilling vs. Bustos Race: Most $$$ in Super Pac Spending in Illinois

By Connie Wilson

On November 2, 2012

In Local, Of Local (Quad Cities') Interest, Politics

If you are a resident of the Quad Cities, you might find it interesting to learn that the Schilling/Bustos race in the 17th Congressional District in Illinois has attracted $9.2 million in Super Pac spending.

The closest to it is the 11th District (Biggert vs. Foster).

After that the money comes out in this order in the Congressional races in Illinois:

$6.6 million in 12th District involving Plummer vs. Enyart

$6.4 million in 10th District involving Dold vs. Schneider.

$6.3 million in 13th District involving David vs. Gill.

And, last, and, surprisingly least, $5.5 million in 8th district with amputee veteran Tammy Duckworth running against the bombastic Joe Walsh.

Of course, all of this pales next to the 333 ads a day now running in Ohio. Still, without all that SuperPac money, which has surpassed $2 million in Illinois’ top 6 competitive Congressional races and has allowed Tea Party incumbent Bobby Schilling to send out a newsletter that makes him look like a Democrat, angering many true Democrats who received it, and, also, to put out a false ad accusing candidate Cheri Bustos of having anything to do with a road to Short Hills Country Club (to which she does not even belong).

And so it goes.