John Kass of the Chicago Tribune asks:

Will Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy serve his state and city by finally drawing national attention to the sleazy and corrupt politics of Illinois and Chicago?[The Swamp: Obama unstained by Chicago Way ]

The answer seems to be “Not as long as the national media thinks of Chicago as place to fly over, rather than investigate.” And of course, not as long as the national media is in love with Obama.

As a candidate, Obama will do what he has to do to win. My argument is not with him–but with the national political media pack that refuses to look closely at what Chicago is. They’re fixated on what it was, and they think it’s clean now.

And they’ve spent years crafting, then cleaving to their eager and trembling Obama narrative, a tale of great yearning, almost mythic and ardently adolescent, a tale in which Obama is portrayed as a reformer, a dynamic change agent about to do away with the old thuggish politics.

It’s as if [former Daley strategist David] Axelrod channeled it, wearing a peaked Merlin hat. Obama is a South Sider and does not hail from Camelot or Mt. Olympus or the lush forests of mythical Narnia.

I’ve joked that reporters feel compelled to hug him, in their copy, as if he were the cuddly faun, the Mr. Tumnus of American politics. But I was only kidding. The real Mr. Tumnus never had Billy Daley or Ted Kennedy carving up Cabinet appointments. [More]

To his credit, Obama has promised not to fire Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor who’s been investigating his friend Tony Rezko and the Daleys. But it’s fascinating to learn that John Kass thinks that this promise, that as President Obama wouldn’t interfere in a corruption investigation, is “no easy vow.”

Here’s an item about a Mexican who went the other direction to become an illegal alien. El Universal reported that 24-year old Mexican Hector Huerta, was detained as an illegal alien in Panama. Huerta was removed from a bus by Panamanian border officials, in the eastern jungle province of Darien. See Panama map here .

Kdawson writes at Slashdot:

There are new developments in the case of the counterfeit Cisco routers, which we have been discussing for some time. The NYTimes updates the story after an FBI PowerPoint presentation made its way onto the Web. It seems that experts at Cisco have examined some of the counterfeit routers in detail and proclaimed that they contain no back doors. Others don’t believe we can be so sure.

Cisco, several years ago was one of the heaviest users of the H-1b program. The technical infrastructure of these “American” companies has been gutted by corporate greed and short-sightedness. Foreign interests now not only fabricate their hardware but have access to every detail of that hardware’s construction and software and the management of these companies depend on foreign interests for virtually every aspect of their major technical decisions.

These major security problems were a predictable consequence of hiring hundreds of thousands of young men from politically unstable or hostile nations to work on key technical projects in the US. Many of these workers came from nations in which it isn’t even possible to do an accurate background check. That means that if a foreign agency plants enough employees into any target company, it is likely they can get whatever trade secrets they want out of that company in time.

If the US ever gets into a serious conflict, the architects of US “security” policy could well replace the idiots in Belgium that hired German companies to defend against the German army as some of the biggest fools in military history.

An excerpt from my new American Conservative article:

How did such a smooth operator as Barack Obama mishandle so ineptly the roadblock that he had to know stood between him and the White House: his intimate two-decade relationship with his far leftist minister, the erudite and articulate Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.? And what, if anything, can he do to repair the damage?

As I asked more than a year ago in VDARE.com, “Why has Obama tied his fate to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a tactless race man who is the living opposite of the myth Obama is trying to project about himself?”

Obama’s candidacy is based on encouraging white voters to assume naively that his mixed race ancestry means that he is somehow genetically programmed for racial and political moderation. Indeed, in his long-postponed denunciation of Wright on April 29th, the reeling Obama made explicit the amusingly eugenic thinking implicit in Obamamania:

“That’s in my DNA, trying to promote mutual understanding to insist that we all share common hopes and common dreams as Americans and as human beings.”

This kind of fantasizing about Obama was embarrassingly widespread before television finally began paying attention to Wright in March. For example, back on December 30, 2007, conservative columnist George Will enthused about how he can just tell that Obama must share Will’s views on race:

(more…)

Googling around on the Immigration issue massively increases the awe in which one must hold the MSM’s ability to repress news in America.

Somewhere this week “an immigration-policy conference” was held at which Rep Howard Berman, D- Calif – a Bad News Bear on immigration–was, perhaps, too candid for the taste of the news managers:

House Democratic leaders worried about the November election want to thwart enforcement-only immigration legislation supported by colleagues in districts where immigration is a hot-button issue, a leading House liberal said Thursday.

People who are very committed to comprehensive reform but who are charged with the responsibility for the next elections think about Lou Dobbs and the power of this issue in different local election contests,” said Howard Berman, D-Calif.

Immigration-enforcement bill splits Democrats by Jerry Kammer, Arizona Republic, May 9, 2008

What this story demonstrates is that the Democrats are absolutely terrified by the immigration issue. (Listening, John McCain?–Aw, forget it.)

As Berman - nothing if not a professional Pol–said:

House Democrats want to avoid a vote on legislation that would require employers nationwide to check the legal status of all workers with a federal verification system.

But their problem is it is some of their newer and vulnerable colleagues, such as Rep Heath Shuler (D- NC) want to position favorably on the bill:

The bill’s chief sponsor is Heath Shuler, a freshman Democrat from North Carolina, where a decade of heavy illegal immigration has roiled the political waters.
Shuler is one of 10 Democrats who have signed a petition that seeks to force House leaders to schedule a vote on his bill.
Meanwhile, 178 Republicans have put their names on the petition, bringing it within 30 signatures of the 218 it needs to force the issue.

Berman’s opinion:

if it came up for a vote, the measure would likely pass in the House, with support from nearly all Republicans and a group of Democrats determined to pre-empt campaign ads that might brand them as soft on illegal immigration.

The response:

Democratic leaders “have been working very hard to keep our Democrats from signing” the petition, Berman said. He spoke at a two-day conference in Washington, D.C.

Unsurprisingly the Arizona Republic’s story demonstrates that new Representative Gabrielle Giffords is a Treason Lobby member:

The issue has split Arizona’s delegation along party lines. The four Republicans have signed it; the four Democrats have not.
Two of the Democrats, Harry Mitchell of Tempe and Gabrielle Giffords of Tucson, are freshmen who won their 2006 races against hard-liners on illegal immigration.

It is not a surprise that House Democrats have a problem: a number won election in ’06 by lying about their attitude on immigration–and more particularly their party’s attitude–so they now face difficulties.

Not if the MSM can help it however: as far as I can Google, the Arizona Republic is the only outlet to mention Rep. Berman’s candid and undeniably interesting remarks.The Democrats have a problem. But America has a worse problem: extreme censorship on these issues by the MSM.

The Land of the Free! What happened?