Today's state of state, village, nation

Here’s David Diersen on Topinka et al.  Rather good.

GOPUSA ILLINOIS

-- Questions concerning the gubernatorial race - Dave Diersen

www.gopillinois.com

As of 7:30 AM today, the Illinois Republican Party (IRP) platform was still not posted on the IRP website.  Blagojevich and Topinka reject many important planks in the IRP platform.  Many of the people who support Topinka reject many important planks in the IRP platform.  Brady, Oberweis, and Rauschenberger support all the planks in the IRP platform.  Because Topinka rejects so many important planks in the IRP platform, to support Topinka is to reject the IRP platform.  Is someone who says they are a Republican really a Republican if they reject many important planks in the IRP platform and would rather see Blagojevich reelected than see Brady, Oberweis, or Rauschenberger elected?  What do you say to those who believe that Edgar almost ran and Topinka is running to stop Brady, Gidwitz, Oberweis, and Rauschenberger from being elected?

 

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Plus good letter in Sun-Times taking on Andrew Greeley and other Bush-lied people, from Steve J. Ciszewski, in Lake View. “Is Andrew Greeley serious?” he asks.

To say that Bush lied is to say that he knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but proceeded to war anyway.

But the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Silberman-Robb Commission both found it a case of bad intelligence (not presidential dishonesty).  Neither found "evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities,” he writes, quoting the Senate committee.  Greeley et al. know better?

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Plus Sun-Times on Oak Park as suspected burial place of serial killer victims.  425 S. Kenilworth is the apartment where David Maust would have put the bodies, under flooring.  I know the block.  It’s rather densely populated, between Washington and Madison, with condo buildings much in evidence and a new one going up.  Michael Shields is quoted as former resident of the building with recollections that point to victim disposal.  I remember him from school-related parents’ meetings as apparently sincere and earnest guy.  Nothing in his reported remarks works against that impression I had of him.  He lives elsewhere in Oak Park, in a house, the S-T story says.

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Plus Dennis Byrne in Chi Trib with common sense on profiling (a nice corrective to Dawn Trice’s quite skewed commentary of 11/28, already archived and not free).  Byrne says:

Paying more attention to people who look and act like they might be terrorists is sensible, not racist. I had hoped that this would have been accepted by now, but judging by the recent number of people who have been "deeply offended" by the idea, I guess it hasn't.

I especially like this, about reactions to Rep. Mark Kirk’s defending heightened scrutiny of “some” Arab men:

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said she was "deeply offended" by Kirk's remarks, and I'm deeply offended that she's deeply offended, so she should apologize to me.

This is good because more of us should be deeply offended about others’ playing to various audience by saying they are deeply offended.  I’m not quite deeply offended because more of us aren’t, but I am mildly irritated.  And wouldn’t it be nice if Rep. Jan and others would stop, count two, and then say they are mildly irritated the next time they start to say they are deeply offended.  And I certainly don’t mean to offend anyone by saying this, which would start another round, and I was tired two or three lines ago.

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Finally, there’s the lesbian-insemination flareup in San Diego, where bad things are happening, such as the resignation of the bribed congressman, which you can find and read about on your own if you must.  This item is about the doctors who declined to inseminate on religious grounds and got the OK for this from a state court, which cited the woman’s being not married.  You can do that in California, that is, discriminate on grounds of marital status. 

 

The woman argued that she got turned down because of her sexual orientation, which is not permitted.  Her 15–year partnership with another woman did not qualify.  So there you have a rub in the gay-marriage issue: the married lesbian can force a doctor to inseminate her, the unmarried one cannot.  Is it not unlikely, however, that there was no way in San Diego, a city of 1,223,400 in 2000, to be inseminated except by these two doctors who refused on religious grounds?  The suit appears therefore to be a skirmish in the war for gay marriage.