In a December 9 post on the Chicago Tribune's "The Swamp" blog, MarkSilva wrote that the Piast Institute, which is "a nonprofit group dedicated to promoting the understanding of Poland and Polish Americans," condemned Beck for mocking the name of Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) in his comments this week about her and her husband, Robert Creamer. Silva wrote: It...
by MarkSilva It's one thing, perhaps, to challenge the White House -- as FOX News Channel's Glenn Beck has been doing -- for inviting an "ex-con" to a State Dinner: Robert Creamer, the former Illinois Public Action Fund director who did some prison time for check kiting and tax problems. But it's another, it appears, to make fun of the Polish name of the man's wife - Rep....
by MarkSilva It's the holiday season at the White House, decked out for the winter holidays with an array of recycled ornaments from years past as a nod to the need for conservation. But that doesn't mean that anyone at the punch bowl is holding back any punch lines. President Barack Obama, who played host to members of Congress at the first of the White House holiday receptions on...
by MarkSilva On his way to Oslo tonight to collect the Nobel Prize for Peace, President Barack Obama certainly has considered these words as he prepares to deliver his own: "We must ever bear in mind that the great end in view is righteousness, justice as between man and man, nation and nation, the chance to lead our lives on a somewhat higher level, with a broader spirit of brotherly...
by MarkSilva Al Gore, Oscar Award-winning producer of An Inconvenient Truth and Nobel Peace Prize-winner for his advocacy of averting climate change, says he cannot control the "noise machine'' of global-warming "deniers,'' but dismisses the emails that have cranked up the noise. The former vice president discussed the controversy dubbed "Climategate,'' the hacking of...
by MarkSilva They've already had the lecture on "Telomeres and Telomerase: The Means to the End,'' by Elizabeth Blackburn, one of the Nobel Prize winners in medicine. And they've already heard the lecture on "Decoding the Genetic Message,'' by Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, one of the prize winners in chemistry. And the ones on "Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems''...
by MarkSilva It was inevitable. Art immitates life. Memorable memoirs are made of this. The spoof of Sarah Palin's popular memoir, Going Rogue , is entitled Going Rouge . But friends of Sarah may be seeing red if they read this cutline that the AP pasted on its photograph of Palin greeting fans with "the first dude,'' husband Todd Palin: "Sarah Palin greets fans with her husband...
by MarkSilva President Barack Obama's overall job-approval rating has registered somewhat higher than in other recent polls - 54 percent approval -- in a new Bloomberg News-sponsored poll released today. The president receives particularly higher ratings for his handling of foreign policy in the poll - 59 percent approval. And, most notably, 62 percent of those surveyed say they approve...
by MarkSilva Another national poll measuring a loss of majority support for the job that President Barack Obama is performing suggests that the president is "coming up short'' in his promise of unifying the nation. The president's public job-approval stands at 46 percent in the Marist College Poll released today, with 44 percent voicing disapproval of the job he is doing. That...
by MarkSilva President Barack Obama, bowing to other leaders of the world, fails to understand the concept of "American exceptionalism,'' former Vice President Dick Cheney contends. "There's never been a nation like the United States of America in world history, and yet when you have a president who goes around and bows to his hosts and then proceeds to apologize profusely...
by MarkSilva In Washington, President Barack Obama said today, critics are "waxing political'' about curtailing the federal deficit after a decade of compounding it. "One of the central goals of this administration is restoring fiscal responsibility,'' the president in a speech detailing his ideas for redirecting some of the $200 billion from the government's Wall Street bailout...
by MarkSilva The biggest borrowing in the history of Chicago's Water Reclamation District was supposed to be "fair and reasonable.'' Yet it cost taxpayers $8 million in unnecessary interest and spawned a "bonanza'' for bankers and investors, Bloomberg News reports. Michael Quint and John McCormick, weighing in with a look at trading data and documents "initially withheld...
by MarkSilva Credit Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele for reading the White House schedule, the one that features President Barack Obama today proposing a new jobs-boosting program in the midst of pervasive high unemployment. Obama, Steele says in a letter to the White House today, should be looking for ways to create jobs - which indeed is what Obama will be talking...
by MarkSilva As President Barack Obama heads for Oslo this week to accept the Nobel Prize for Peace -- only the third sitting president to accept the award -- he is ramping up the U.S. military deployment in Afghanistan, an eight-year-old war, to nearly 100,000 troops. The irony of the war-time president accepting the world's most prestigious peace prize is not lost on the Obama White...
by MarkSilva In the aftermath of the ACORN workers offering tax advice to self-appointed undercover video-cops posing as a prostitute and pimp, ACORN has investigated itself and found that its employees broke no laws. That may come as little surprise to ACORN's critics. The organization's director calls the results of the internal inquiry "part vindication, part constructive criticism...
