In the matter of what makes Hillary run (and not stop), this from Emily’s List founder Ellen Malcolm touches a nerve:

We might scoff at the identity politics run wild in this election cycle. But this personal identification [of low-income working women with Mrs. C.] and the sense that once again one of their own has been aced out by a young, glib, and underqualified male will be a bitter pill to swallow for many of Clinton’s staunchest supporters.

Young, glib, and underqualified, eh?  You don’t have to be a low-income working woman to find that nicely said.

I see Smooth Stephen Kinzer is letting his activism get the better of him and intends to testify, and not under subpoena, to Chicago’s aldermen as an instrument of Joe Moore’s foreign-policy leftism.  It’s official then, he’s no longer a reporter but a man whose biases — ahem, his conclusions based on extensive research — have got the better of him. 

Here’s one of one of his talking points, as appearing on the (left-wing) UK Guardian website, where it’s not clear for what publication he wrote it:

By naming his favourite military officer, General David Petraeus, to head the US Central Command, President Bush evidently hopes to terrify Iran. Americans and people in the rest of the world, however, have at least as much reason to be terrified as anyone in Tehran.

Kinzer is or was the NY Times man in Chicago but hasn’t written about political corruption.  You can get your hands dirty that way.  Rather, he’s playing ball with Chi Dems dying to see one of their own in the White House, arguing for one of his more notorious policy positions, of the “Can’t we sit down and talk?” variety. 

That would be the Big O., featured in the John Kass column today as “magically unstained” by the “Chicago way” of doing things.  Kinzer is a longstanding believer in the U.S. as mideast bungler, but he might pay heed to his being used by the left.

He will make aldermanic eyes glaze over, I expect.  See K’s ideas on the Iranian matter also in today’s Chi Trib (Left-wing) Perspective section, where he is i’d’d as a journalism and political science teacher at Northwestern U. 

(But in Oak Park we hear of him as teaching at Dominican U., River Forest.  He’s left the Times?  His most recent byline is Feb. 11; so either he has a very easygoing gig or is no longer at the Times.)

In any case, wine and cheese will not be served to the aldermen, those doughty protectors of their right to make money hand over ringed pinky, as Royko used to speak of.  But they will like whatever helps their man Obama.

Last night “What Happens in Vegas,” co-starring Cameron Diaz (or was it Jennifer Lopez? one of the Z-ladies) and (Half-) Ashton Something, with volume turned up so as to make this yet another cartoon with live people.  Comic books used to show “pow” and “bam” when hero socked bad guy.  Movies have bass chords or thunks.  This one had a series of thunks at one point, lest we hoi polloi moviegoers miss something.

That said, it was diversionary, in a semi-crowded theatre (Lake on Lake) half-filled with decent enough crowd.

First thing to remember (after thunks) is that this moviegoer had no spontaneous laughter coming out of his throat, nor any other kind, nor any smile.  The entire attraction was the plot line: something about this movie kept this m-goer wondering what comes next.  The characters, in addition, were not overtly off-putting, and once you accept the presumed sleep-around dating scene — if it feels good, it’s good, genitally speaking, which it is, genitally speaking — you can even appreciate the basically human (i.e., good) responses and developments of the hero and heroine.

Moreover, Dennis Miller as the judge unloads a hard-nosed, credible defense of wedded perseverance: he looks at his wife of 25 years sometimes and wants to set her on fire — but among other things, that’s not legal.

So for a night at the movies, 7:30 version, out in the sweet May air by 9:30, not bad.  What’s more, I had to correct the young woman at the ticket booth, prepared to charge me $8 — “I’m a senior,” I said, without adding my line, “not high school or college either” — and she switched it to $5.50.

Close call, reminding me of telling the booth lady at the State on Madison in 1944 that I was eleven, which I wasn’t, but twelve was the age of adulthood when it came to ticket price.

Phew.

“We may now understand why Barack does not wear a flag lapel pin. He’s afraid that Bill Ayers will stomp on him,” says Larry C. Johnson at Huffington Post, next to pic of Ayers and flag from Chi Mag, as below.

The context is that Hillary has to convince superdelegates that Obama’s unrepentant-terrorist friend and supporter Ayers will be a millstone around his neck in the general election.

I am a pessimist. Even though Hillary is the one who wins the big states that will count in the fall, the “supers” appear to be moving toward Obama. Even though Hillary has more popular votes and polls much better among the Reagan democrats, the supers appear to be moving toward Obama.

Hillary’s only hope is that the super delegates will come to their senses and realize that Barack Obama’s relationships with the corrupt Tony Rezko, the racist-wife stealing Jeremiah Wright, and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers will provide the Republicans with ammunition they have never had at hand to use against the Democrats’ candidate. This is particularly true of that flag stomper, Bill Ayers.

“[I]t will be the relationship with Bill Ayers that will empower the Republicans to destroy the candidacy of Barack Obama.”

Fact is, Obama lied about their relationship.  (And a campaign died?)  Why?

What is he hiding? As I have pointed out before, 1995 was a critical year in the Obama/Ayers relationship. It was in 1995 that Barack was tabbed by Ayers to be the Chairman of the Annenberg Challenge (a failed $50 million project). That same year, Barack sat at a kitchen table with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Bill’s wife, and plotted the ouster of Alice Palmer, who [sic] Obama took down in order to secure his place in the Illinois state senate.

What the supers must do:

If the Super Delegates do not insist on a full and complete disclosure from Barack Obama about his ties to Bill Ayers, the Republicans will force the issue in the fall. It is one thing to have a name that sounds like the terrorist who attacked us on 9-11. But it is an entirely different matter to be close friends with an unrepentant terrorist who bombed U.S. Government buildings.

With friends like Johnson, the Dems could win.

Can you imagine a self-respecting newspaper going with this item, which I know I am going to pass over in silence:

Delmer Reed has told friends he believed it was no coincidence that his former wife, Ramah, divorced him and married [Rev.] Mr [Jeremiah] Wright shortly after the Chicago pastor gave him advice on their troubled marriage in the early 1980s.

Roosevelt Thomas, a lawyer who handled the Reeds’ divorce in 1983, confirmed to the New York Post that Mr Reed long believed Rev Wright moved in on his wife after counselling them.

Even Bill O’Reilly is drawing the line:

Bill O’Reilly told Kinky Freidman and Juan Williams that he’s tired of the Wright story. This sudden Wright fatigue didn’t stop him from mentioning the New York Post story about Wright stealing the wife of a church member. He even held up the front page so viewers could catch the headline and photo.

For documentation purposes, it started here, wouldn’t you know?  With this:

May 4, 2008 — The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s loose cannon of a spiritual adviser, stole the wife of a parishioner - after the man sought Wright’s help in saving his troubled marriage, the former husband told friends.

Delmer Reed, 59, confided to pals that he believed the minister moved in on his wife while Wright was counseling the couple at his Chicago church in the early 1980s, The Post has learned.

“That’s exactly how he said it,” Reed’s divorce lawyer, Roosevelt Thomas, told The Post.

Chicago youth worker Harold Davis backs Reed up.

“Jeremiah knew all the weaknesses of the couple, and he started focusing on the wife, her vulnerabilities, and started doing things she wanted Delmer to do - spending time with her, taking her to the movies, that sort of thing,” said Davis, who heads the Chicago branch of football great Jim Brown’s Amer-I-can youth program.

“Everybody knew Jeremiah took the man’s wife,” said Davis. “It was common knowledge.”

The Wrights deny he ever counselled the woman.  

But a member who chastised Wright for his behavior was denounced from the pulpit:

Activist Derrick Mosley, a self-styled minister who has clashed with Wright, said there’s an “unwritten rule” that pastors don’t counsel married couples separately - as Wright did with Ramah Reed, he said.

In 2003, Mosley said, “I called him on the carpet about the indecorous manner in which he’d obtained his wife.”

In response, said Mosley, “he ranted and raved from the pulpit. He got up and announced, ‘If Derrick Mosley is in the building, I want you all to arrest him.’ “

Wow.  Was Obama there for that sermon?

If it happened.  Let us not trust Mosley too far:

CHICAGO — The Rev. Derrick Mosley, known throughout the Chicago area as a self-proclaimed community advocate, was arrested and charged with wire fraud and extortion Monday in an alleged plot to blackmail the wife of a professional athlete.

NBC5 Image

Mosley is accused of trying to obtain $20,000 from a business manager representing the athlete’s wife, claiming he had a videotape depicting her in a sexual encounter with a musician and another woman, NBC5’s Darren Kramer reported. Sources confirmed the musician on the alleged sex tape was R & B star R. Kelly.

According to NBC5’s sources, the tape pre-dates the woman’s marriage to the unidentified athlete. R. Kelly’s manager said Mosley tried to extort money from him in a separate incident. The R & B artist’s manager filed for a restraining order against Mosley in 2003, NBC5’s Marion Brooks reported.

A tangled web, I’d say

Reporters swoon at Obama:

John Harris, editor of Politico.com, has said he was forced to put certain reporters sent to cover Mr. Obama through a rehab program after they returned to the office. Back in January, NBC News anchor Brian Williams noted that Lee Cowan, the reporter NBC had sent to cover Mr. Obama, had told him that “it is hard to stay objective covering this guy.”

Somehow, however:

Some media reevaluations of Mr. Obama are now taking place, fueled in part by revelations such as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that are hard to ignore. But the simple truth is that Mr. Obama has had a free media ride for so long that he effectively wrapped up the Democratic nomination before any of his political weaknesses were generally known.

John Fund delivering this, for the excellent Wall St. Journal Political Diary.

A little (not much) bold thinking to demonstrate that Obama has been delivering nonsense to gullible Dimmycrats:

In the form of a few penetrating questions:

1, On what unifying principle will he bring us together, as he has been saying from the start, besides general weariness at political squabbling?

2. How long will avoidance of squabbling last when interests are concerned, and they always are?  He means to achieve what’s wanted by some but not by others and in the process bring us together?  Bull.

3. Meanwhile, leaving that question unanswered, what are his inclinations?  What side will he argue spontaneously, as it were, of the hot questions, as in pacifism (rampant among Dimmycrats, to be sure) over security?  Gun rights vs. gun banning (hot potato that Dems leave alone)?  Freedom (of speech and market, to name two) vs. government control?

— He’s a blank slate in many respects, seeking to repair with his brash self-confidence his woeful lack of experience.  But those pesky inclinations are already surfacing —

more more more

John Fund quoting a Dem superdelegate skeptical about a joint Obama-Clinton ticket and the baleful Clinton Effect:

“If Hillary were the vice president you would have Bill rattling around the West Wing and Obama would need a food taster for four years. No way.”

And not checking for excessive calories either.

Father Pfleger may be a crusader, but he also knows what side his bread is buttered on:

Rev. Michael Pfleger, the politically active leader of St. Sabina Church . . .  gave Obama’s campaign $1,500 between 1995 and 2001, including $200 in April 2001, about three months after Obama announced $225,000 in grants to St. Sabina programs.

P. defends himself flimsily:

“At a time when less people vote than ever, I don’t think pastors should be silent on politics,” Pfleger said.

He wants to say fewer, not less.  I am shocked at that mis-usage more than at the money-passing, but am becoming inured to such violence to the king’s English. 

And to elementary logic.

Didn’t Obama the other day on the Meet Russert show condemn Hillary (remember her?) for promoting a summertime gas-tax moratorium, calling it “a political response . . . “ — pausing, searching, as he does, and me wondering in amazement, he’s going to say “economic” problem? (which it most surely is) — and finally completing his thought: “. . . that we have neglected for decades”!

Does he mean there’s no such thing as a political answer to a longstanding problem?  What does he think the 1965 voting rights law was? 

He’s a whippersnapper who should go back to Columbia or Harvard for remediation.

Rev. Thomas Doyle, O.P., the canon lawyer who left a great job in Washington years ago to pursue a life in opposition to clerical abusers, commends Pope Benedict XVI for his facing up to the problem:

It is well worth noting that Pope Benedict said more and did more relative to the worldwide plague of clergy sexual abuse in five days than his predecessor did in two decades.

His predecessor, John Paul II, kept his counsel on the matter for nine years after learning of it “in detail” in 1984.  From then to his death in 2005, he mentioned it publicly 11 times.  Requests for meetings with victims and victims’ groups were routinely ignored.

For all practical purposes, the victims of the worst scandal in church’s history since the dreadful days of the Spanish Inquisition were non-persons as far as the Vatican was concerned. Not so with Benedict XVI.

For that matter, Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Vatican office for defending orthodoxy, “was interviewed and gave the usual party line” in 2002, when the Boston revelations surfaced, calling media coverage of abuse “a planned campaign . . . intentional, manipulated, [motivated by] a desire to discredit the Church.”

But by 2004, he was considerably more open, meeting for two hours with Judge Anne Burke of Chicago and two other members of the U.S. Bishops’ National Review Board who “by-passed” the bishops and came calling on him.  Three American lay people talked, and the cardinal listened, as Burke described the meeting at a Voice of the Faithful gathering in Indianapolis in 2005.

Most dramatically, in 2006 the Vatican put a lid on the infamous Marciel Maciel-Degollado, founder of the wealthy and powerful Legionaries of Christ.  Ratzinger had been blamed for putting one on the investigation of Maciel, but this had been John Paul’s doing.  When Maciel died last January in Houston, he was buried privately, significantly without comment by the Vatican.

For a compelling account of the sordid Maciel doings, see Jason Berry and Gerald Renner’s Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II (Free Press, 2003), in which Ratzinger makes a cameo appearance, by the way, in which he is not sympathetic to the former Legionaries complainers about Maciel’s abuse.

The pope’s pointed commentary during his visit, broken out by Doyle in 10 parts, including his admitting that the problem “sometimes was very badly handled” is

a long overdue indication that the pope and hopefully the Vatican bureaucracy, are beginning to comprehend the profound ramifications of the legacy of clergy sexual abuse and hierarchical duplicity in the ecclesial culture

It is not, however, as some have said, “a sign that the crisis is passed and the Church can now move on.”  To think so, Doyle said, is “a combination of wishful thinking and naiveté.”  Suspicion of official church statements about it “will not be turned around in a week.”

There’s more more more . . .