Joe Ricketts – the patriarch of the Ricketts family who started TD Ameritrade and who’s family now owns the Chicago Cubs – was reported to be financing a superPAC that would highlight Obama’s ties to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has backed off that stance late in the day today.

My criticism of Ricketts has less to do with my own personal support of President Obama and more to do with the fact that the $10 million dollars Ricketts was going to spend on the ads is much better spent on an outfielder who can hit home runs or a decent arm out of the bullpen.

I kid, I kid.  But one has to really ask:  what was Ricketts thinking?

There hasn’t been a bigger story than the upcoming NATO summit in local Chicago media in a long time.  If you were to just listen to local media, you’d think we’re in the middle of Baghdad in the spring of 2003.

Because there is going to be a large amount of world leaders and dignitaries in a dense area of a major U.S. city, the threat of terrorism is a concern.  In addition, the descent of what could be hundreds of thousands of protesters has many on edge.

In response to this, Metra has overreacted and shown just how unprepared they are for large events.  Metra is the commuter rail system that connects the suburbs to downtown.  They have released a long list of security precautions, including:  prohibition of backpacks and other bags beyond a small tote, a prohibition on liquids, and random patdowns at stations.

(Full disclosure:  I am a twice daily Metra commuter)

To say this is an overreaction is an understatement.  Most lines will not run near the summit area, and Metra is traditionally less of a target than the CTA or office buildings in the city.

Metra has a history of failing during large events.  During the epic snowstorm in February 2011, Metra came to a near halt, completely abandoning it’s schedule on the evening of the storm and just loading trains and taking off.  The next day, after the snow had stopped falling, Metra could not operate it’s regular schedule and had to resort to running a light Sunday schedule due to the poor preparation and operations.

If Metra needs help figuring out how to properly run a rail system, all they need to do is look to the CTA L trains.

The CTA, who didn’t lose much service on it’s rail lines during that snowstorm last year because of preparation, is taking an intelligent approach to security:

The CTA is taking what many experts view as a more practical approach to increasing security on an open mass-transit system that doesn’t lend itself to airport-style passenger screening. CTA customers will see more police officers and explosives-sniffing dogs patrolling CTA rail stations, trains and buses, but the transit agency is not limiting what passengers bring on board.

Not only is the CTA doing security correctly for NATO, but the CTA is a much bigger target than every Metra line outside of the electric lines that run under McCormick Place.

Metra has had serious problems for years — corruption by longtime Metra Executive Director Phil Pagano, near 24/7 delays on certain lines, and an inability to correctly forecast population shifts that have left huge holes in the Metra system for certain suburbs.

Metra needs a complete overhaul and should look to the CTA for best practices.

Two Republican House members, Allen West and James Lankford have announced support for repealing laws that protect gay people from being fired only because they are gay.  Is that the type of country people want to live in?

Allen West illustrated how insanely idiotic the idea is when speaking about discrimination he stated:

“That don’t happen out here in the United States of America”

If you don’t think discrimination against gay people happens in this country, you are either laughably ignorant or simply trying very hard to conceal the fact that you are a bigot.

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve undoubtedly heard President Obama clarify and strengthen his position on marriage equality for same sex couples.

The right has already had a coronary, amid charges of flip flopping.  While Obama’s position has evolved, he has the benefit of an ideological evolution to the just side of history, which is more than can be said for social regressionists Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee.

It isn’t just ideological.  The open bigotry of some in the Republican Party was one of the catalysts for my exit from the party — I was actually present for a rant from a township Republican Party chairman in Will County (not the township I lived in, but a different township in Will County) in which he made numerous degrading jokes about gays and expressed hatred for gay people.  It was one of the most disgraceful things I have ever witnessed.

While jobs and economy will undoubtedly be front and center during the 2012 election, it’s refreshing to stand up for what is right.  There is no sane argument for not allowing same sex marriage — allowing same sex marriage has no effect on the marriages of heterosexual couples.  The time for equality is now.

I have no words for this.

Keith Judd, who is serving a 17 1/2-year prison sentence for extortion at the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana, Texas, took 41 percent of the vote in West Virginia’s Democratic primary Tuesday night — 72,000 votes to Obama’s 106,000. He would qualify for convention delegates, if anyone had signed up to be a Judd delegate. (No one did.)

How did Judd get so many votes?

It’s likely not his past careers as a superhero and religious leader. Or his passionate FEC report ramblings. Simply put, West Virginia does not like Obama.

“I voted against Obama,” a 43-year-old electrician named Ronnie Brown told the AP. His daughter planned to vote for Judd too, until she found out he was in prison. “I just want to vote against Barack Obama,” she said.

For those of you who denied that the Tea Party has overwhelmingly taken over and controls the Republican Party, you’ve been proven wrong.  The Tea Party is now openly the establishment of the Republican Party…

The Tea Party tossed another veteran Republican overboard Tuesday night, voting six-term Republican Sen. Dick Lugar from office in a heated Indiana primary.

With most of the precincts reporting, Richard Mourdock had 60 percent of the vote to Lugar’s 40 percent, sending Mourdock to a November match-up against Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly.

Now that the Tea Party take-over of the Republican Party is complete and confirmed, what are moderate Republicans going to do?

As each day passes, more and more Republican candidates are taking the “birther” line and running with it.

Richard Hudson, a GOP candidate in the race to unseat Rep. Larry Kissell (D) in the 8th Congressional District, made headlinesin April when he told a Tea Party group “there’s no question President Obama is hiding something on his citizenship.” TheCharlotte Observer reports one of his challengers, Dr. John Wheatly, recently called Obama’s birth certificate a “poorly reproduced forgery.”

Jim Pendergraph, a candidate who recently campaigned with “America’s Toughest Sheriff” Joe Arpaio in his effort to win North Carolina’s 9th Congressional district, said he has “reason to be suspicious” about Obama’s birthplace.

“I haven’t seen the facts. I think there’s a lot of smoke and generally when there’s smoke there’s got to be fire somewhere,” Pendergraph said.

The “birther” lines are red meat to the hardcore conservative Republican voter base in the south, but have never had a grain of substantiation.

Many of the former Republican primary candidates for President expressed similar beliefs.  Mitt Romney has stated that President Obama was born in the United States, but  Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich both have fanned the flames of birther rhetoric.

If Paul Ryan could count on the support of one person in his budget fight, it’s the person he actually got his ideas from about his desire to cut Medicare.  Looks like he won’t be able to count on that support…

The co-creator of the concept that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is relying upon to reform Medicare no longer thinks it will work. Henry Aaron, now of the Brookings Institution, got the chance to tell Ryan exactly why at a recent Capitol Hill hearing.

Aaron and former Urban Institute president Robert Reischauer came up with the idea of “premium support” in 1995, after the failure of then-First Lady Hillary Clinton’s bid to reform the health care system.

The basic idea is simple: let people pick their health insurers in the private market, subsidize the premiums, and competition will drive down costs. That’s the theory behind Ryan’s plan, recently endorsed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in a white paperthe two wrote.

It differs from Aaron’s original vision — in part because it has fewer protections for beneficiaries — but the essential concept is the same. Aaron said this isn’t the time to test it out.

We all know that Paul Ryan’s goals are to end Medicare and Social Security..we just know now that he’s out in the open about this desire.

Remember the hubbub that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker made over Illinois tax rates and trying to get companies to move to Wisconsin?  Looks like he’s failed, because Wisconsin is currently leading the nation in job losses.

While Wisconsin Gov, Scott Walker (R) fights to keep his job in a recall election scheduled for June, he is being forced to confront a harsh reality in his state: It lost more jobs during the past 12 months than any other state in the United States.

Wisconsin lost 23,900 jobs between March 2011 and March 2012, according to data released Tuesday by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The state’s lead in job losses is significantly greater than the rest of the 50 states: No other state lost more than 3,500 jobs.

And it’s not just public sector jobs

 the state lost more private-sector jobs, 6,100, than any other state.

Governor Walker has been an economic and public relations failure for the state of Wisconsin.

Osama bin Laden was the one fugitive everyone has wanted to capture in the last decade.  However, Mitt Romney has admitted, if you believe his own rhetoric, that he would not have went after Osama bin Laden…

“I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to enter an ally of ours… I don’t think those kinds of comments help in this effort to draw more friends to our effort,” (Mitt) Romney told reporters on the campaign trail….

Let’s put this in context — Romney says that he would not “enter” an ally our ours — which was code for not allowing any military activity in Pakistan, who is an ally of the United States.   President Obama gave the order to go after bin Laden in Pakistan — if we had followed the Romney doctrine, bin Laden would not have been killed.  

 

Joe Walsh embarrassed himself again today:

“He was a historic figure. He’s our first African-American president. The country voted for him because of that. It made us feel good about [our]self.” Walsh said

Ouch.  Walsh has played the race card again and again in attempt to save his own career — without politics, Walsh hasn’t really done anything and has a record of failure in the private sector.  The people he represents, hopefully, should understand that he does not need to continue to embarrass them.  There are options — vote him out.

Looks like the moronic comments from Nugent keep coming.

“To think that there’s a bureaucrat in the United States Army that would consider the use or abuse of First Amendment rights in determining who is going to perform at an Army base is an insult and defiles the sacrifices of those heroes who fought for the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights,” Nugent said.

First of all, it wasn’t a first amendment issue — Nugent directly threatened the life of the Commander-In-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces and he’s surprised that an Army base cancelled his concert?

Perhaps it should have had something to do with the fact that Ted shit his pants on purpose to avoid military service because he was a coward.  The essential proof that Ted Nugent does not support the military.

A new book by Robert Draper documents that top Republican lawmakers, including Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor,  Tom Coburn, Pete Hoekstra, Kevin McCarthy, Jon Kyl, John Ensign — and disgraced former Speaker Newt Gingrich and noted spin artist Frank Luntz — decided on election night 2008 that no matter whether he created jobs or did well for the economy, Republicans nation wide would provide a united front against anything President Obama would try to do:

For several hours in the Caucus Room (a high-end D.C. establishment), the book says they plotted out ways to not just win back political power, but to also put the brakes on Obama’s legislative platform.

“If you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority,” Draper quotes McCarthy as saying. “We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.”

The conversation got only more specific from there, Draper reports. Kyl suggested going after incoming Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for failing to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes while at the International Monetary Fund. Gingrich noted that House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) had a similar tax problem. McCarthy chimed in to declare “there’s a web” before arguing that Republicans could put pressure on any Democrat who accepted campaign money from Rangel to give it back.

The dinner lasted nearly four hours. They parted company almost giddily. The Republicans had agreed on a way forward:Go after Geithner. (And indeed Kyl did, the next day: ‘Would you answer my question rather than dancing around it—please?’)

Show united and unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies. (Eight days later, Minority Whip Cantor would hold the House Republicans to a unanimous No against Obama’s economic stimulus plan.)

Begin attacking vulnerable Democrats on the airwaves. (The first National Republican Congressional Committee attack ads would run in less than two months.)

Win the spear point of the House in 2010. Jab Obama relentlessly in 2011. Win the White House and the Senate in 2012.

“You will remember this day,” Draper reports Newt Gingrich as saying on the way out. “You’ll remember this as the day the seeds of 2012 were sown.”

I realized a long time ago that Republicans often cannot provide real solutions to problems and rely on obstructionism to stay in power.  It’s about time the American people stood with good Democrats and good Republicans to compromise on real solutions to put Americans back to work and move the economy again.

Scott Brown, the U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, has always spoke up his bipartisan and moderate bona fides.  However, he has finally decided to support Republican obstructionism of the President’s agenda, even when it’s about creating jobs.  From a news article about a recent Scott Brown fundraising article:

If there is one thing that’s central to Senator Scott Brown’s reelection hopes, it’s his image as an independent politican who’s willing to work across party lines and doesn’t take his marching orders from the national GOP. Polls suggest he’s been very successful at cultivating that image.

That’s why Democrats were so delighted by what they see as a major strategic blunder on his part: The news that he’s raising money from national Republicans by invoking the menace of an Obama second term.

HuffPo’s Michael McAuliff reported late yesterday that Brown circulated a fundraising appeal describing his Senate race in urgent terms. “This race is THE battleground for the United States Senate — the only sure hedge to a potential second term for President Obama,” Brown’s appeal says.

HuffPo reported that the fundraising letter appeared to have gone to an out of state list — meaning he likely is raising money from a national conservative audience by portraying his race as the last bulwark against creeping Obama tyranny.

Scott Brown is not interested in compromise and solutions.  He’s interested in holding up real reform and job programs if it means beating the President on a personal level.  Is that the type of person we need in the United States Senate?

Now that Romney is all but officially the Republican nominee, the choice in November has been made clear.  Neil Steinberg closed a recent column with an outstanding thought:

Sometimes you need to shout “fire!” because the place is burning. The Republican approach is wrong. There is no past to go back to. The only direction to move is forward, and to do that, both sides have to work together. Without compromise, democracy doesn’t work. This election isn’t about abortion or gay marriage or the price of fuel. It’s about buses and the other things we need government to do.

The infrastructure in this country desperately needs to be updated.  People need to be able to find work.  We need energy independence.  All of which are neglected by Mitt Romney in favor of large tax cuts for the most wealthy people in the country and a social agenda that wants to take us back to the era where birth control was illegal and women had to obtain abortions illegally in alleys.

The choice is clear.