I’ve set foot in Chicago once in my life leaving aside the airport and the train station. I apprenticed in a low-end-of-second-tier city in Upstate New York.

A challenge process is a necessary feature of a ballot designation system that includes petitioning. Some areas have less crud in the petition process than others, for reasons both structural and cultural. There are ways of improving the process, but state legislatures accomplish little on such matters. No candy in it for anyone.

It’s rough and tumble CHICAGO politics too. Very typical. That was the issue being discussed, wasn’t it?

I think it’s very clear that Obama and Obama forces were behind the unsealing. They had cooperation, of course. I wrote several posts about it.

It’s not altogether clear who was responsible other than the media for publishing other candidate’s confidential divorce files. The media is responsible, of course, and if they were men of honor the files would have been turned over to the candidates in question and the names of the sources who gave the records to the papers would have been published, forwarded to the injured party, or forwarded to the prosecutor. Since the media does not employ men of honor, this was not done. I would assume the Obama campaign had a co-operative mole in the court system or county clerk’s office, but it’s not clear to me who did what.

As for the petition challenges, that’s just rough-and-tumble local politics. Unless the judge was crooked (and that’s possible), her petitions got thrown off because she and her staff were negligent or deceitful. Yes, I have been both a plaintiff and a defendant in petition challenges. I’ve been told that Democratic and Republican petitions in my home county are often shot through with error and fraud, but there’s a gentlemen’s agreement between the parties to leave the other party’s petitions in peace. The challenges are derived from intra-party disputes. I should note that her conduct toward Obama was obnoxious enough that she was asking for it.

He used signature challenges to kick his primary opponents off the ballot in his first race, and MSM campaigns to unseal unsavory court records for later opponents for his Senate race.

She wasn’t an alleged anything. She was his paramour. His wife was most distressed. She was also a veteran, engaged in writing a scholarly biography of him, and had been granted security clearances.

Obama’s a spiteful and unscrupulous man, but he bears little resemblance to a Chicago pol. A lapsed reporter I correspond with (now employed in state government) offered this opinion: politics as practiced by Chicago aldermen and their minions is a labor-intensive enterprise that incorporates vigorous people skills and a genuine interest in others; Obama never had the interest or skill set to prosper in that world.

I don’t think Powerline specifically. If there were nerve centers, it would have been Free Republic and Little Green Footballs. Among those exposing the fraud was an attorney in Atlanta who went by the handle ‘Buckhead’, Charles Johnson, and, especially, Joseph Newcomer. Dr. Newcomer at the time was a computer science professor without political affiliations and had the goods on features of the Killian material that could not have been produced on a typewriter. Other’s chimed in with images of advertisements for high-end specialty typewriters that IBM had placed in trade journals in the early 1970s.

Few can say it better than the perceptive, fearless Miranda Devine:
‘…If there is one defining adjective for Biden’s presidency, it probably is spite. His consuming hatred for “the former guy”, whose name he often can’t bring himself to utter, is palpable.
‘He makes no secret of the fact that he despises Trump voters, too, all 74,223,369 of them. . His unusual malice…has had a corrosive effect on America….’
(Um, just a second, “unusual”? Really? Hmm, maybe it OUGHT TO BE unusual…except that it’s become “de rigueur”…)
Well…maybe a rare slip-up; or maybe…just a dose of irony….

Whatever. Here’s a mega-dose:
‘…If only Biden had been the unifying president he promised he would be, and shown a little grace in victory, commended Trump for Operation Warp Speed, perhaps, not spitefully unwound all his policies, not branded half the country “white supremacists” and “domestic terrorists” in his inaugural speech, not sicced the FBI onto parents at school board meetings, not weaponized the federal government’s security apparatus against his political enemies, not supersized the IRS to go after the little guy, not tanked the economy and lied about absolutely everything…” ‘

All too true…nonetheless, should one make allowances for the “President”‘s rather serious, um, limitations….? (Or for the fact that it’s not even him who’s initiating any of the “Presidential” decisions?)

Alas, the charade—puppet show, actually—continues….
For now, one must be grateful that there are still courageous and honest journalists who are willing and able to call it out for what it is.

File under: “O brave [New York Post], that has such people in ‘t…”

** One might hesitate to use the word “UNPRECEDENTED”—even if in this context it is precisely that—simply because of all the thuggery demonstrated since 2009; simply because it perfectly fits Obama’s thuggish M.O. WRT to his early-career Chicago shenanigans, the “Fast and Furious” scandal, the Tea Party/IRS scandal, going after journalists, the JCPOA BS, Russiagate, the Flynn defenestration, the fake impeachments, the Obamacare fiasco, the Nov. 2020 election, the Jan. 6. entrapment hoax, ETC…

As VPOTUS Biden—make that “DECENT” Joe Biden—is famous for declaring, once upon a time (I’m paraphrasing), the MOST “scandal-free” administration in history!!