#1
Gutsy guy, tasking on a thug like Rahm Immanual and his chicago-style strong-arming.
In high school civics, Americans learn that public dissent is noble, a cornerstone of our system of checks and balances, a guarantor of the health of the republic. But in Chicago, dissent is not appreciated.
If the political boss suggests that you purchase some expensive wrought-iron fence to decorate your corporate headquarters, and the guy selling insurance to the wrought-iron boys is the boss' little brother, you write the check.
Otherwise, government inspectors may arrive, demanding to know why your thing-a-ma-bob isn't coupled with the whoosy-whatsits, in the manner of the prescribed flibber-mcjibbits, as outlined in the appendix of the municipal code. Then you've got real problems.
No one knows this better than Emanuel, who was elected to Congress with the help of a gigantic illegal patronage army, run by City Hall's Water Department boss Don Tomczak, who is now in prison for taking bribes.
"They're taking over the Census, and Cabinet officers threaten to cut funds to states of critics of the president," Issa said. "Rahm obviously still thinks he's running Chicago politics in Washington."
Criminal f***ing thugs are now running the White House.
From last November, but worth reading again, especially given that it looks like the religious parties, both Sunni and Shia, are losing ground in Iraq. Hattip Lucianne.com
Why, despite everything, George W. Bush was right about democratization in the Middle East.
In the summer of 2002, you could have filled the conference halls of Washington's largest think tanks with people who were in favor of advancing democracy among Middle Eastern Muslims. Few then would have disagreed openly with Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, former counterterrorism officials in the Clinton administration and the authors of The Age of Sacred Terror, who saw the spread of representative government as an essential tool in the battle against jihadism. A wide array of American liberals and conservatives backed the U.S.-led war in Iraq partly because they believed that the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime might give way to a more liberal, democratic order.
Although the "realists," who preferred maintaining the authoritarian status quo in the region, still wielded considerable influence, especially in the State Department, the pro-democracy forces had greater momentum and, in George W. Bush, they had the first American president who believed sincerely in Muslim democracy. For many democracy advocates, Iraq was going to be the great test.
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
