This Is What a Vote for Obama Gets You [Must Read]

I live in Illinois, just outside of Chicago. I live in the state that incubated the political career of Barack Obama and for that, as a resident of the State of Illinois and a conservative, I apologize. But this puts me in a unique position to afford you a glimpse of things to come for our nation should Barack Obama attain the Oval Office, and especially if Democrats maintain or increase their control in Congress. I present to the citizens of the United States the State of Illinois; a working model that illustrates the consequences of a government run by the Progressive-Left.

In 2003, five short years ago, the State of Illinois went blue; not light blue or royal blue but Daley Machine, Chicago Democrat, Progressive-Left cobalt blue. For decades our state existed in a symbiotic political state; the Daley Machine Chicago Democrats controlling Cook County and most of the lesser “urban areas” and the Illinois GOP holding sway in the collar counties and rural areas. But the failure (and I believe cowardice) of Republican Governor George Ryan to take one for the party by stepping down before he was convicted of corruption, ushered in a dark era of Progressive-Left, Democrat political control in Illinois. Democrats now hold all statewide offices and control both houses of the legislature. This being said, everything that has happened since 2003 is attributable to Democrat and Progressive-Left action and leadership.

The governor of the State of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, has an approval rating of 4 percent. Rasmussen Reports ranks Blagojevich as the country’s least popular governor. He is embroiled in the Tony Rezko/Stuart Levine corruption probe. Levine pled guilty and Rezko was convicted for scheming to obtain kickbacks from investment firms seeking business from two state boards. The governor’s wife, Patricia, was a business partner of Rezko. Of course, we know the name Tony Rezko from his shady relationship with Barack Obama.

Under Blagojevich, the state’s unfunded pension debt is the largest in the United States. In 2005 that amounted to $35 billion. But that didn’t stop Blagojevich from raiding the State University Pension System to the tune of $1.2 billion in order to “balance the budget,” something that still eludes the governor. Additionally, Blagojevich raised licensing fees on auto dealers almost 20-fold, required small businesses to print all of their own forms when filing state paperwork and proposed raising the fee for the Illinois Firearm Owners Identification Card from $50 to $500. He said the increased FOID fee, “...was necessary so people would think twice about wanting to own a gun.” Of course, it also put the ability to purchase a gun – to defend oneself with a legally purchased firearm – out of range for many middle and lower-middle income families, the Second Amendment be damned.

Because of the ever expanding entitlement mentality possessed by the Chicago City Council, Chicago now has a $420 million budget deficit for the year and the highest sales tax in the United States at 9 percent. The sales tax is causing Chicago residents to flee to the suburbs to buy big ticket items, thus decreasing the tax revenue earmarked for the city. The $420 million budget deficit – hot on the heels of a 2006 $217 million budget deficit – has caused Mayor Richard M. Daley to institute mandatory furlough days for non-critical, union, city employees, as well as numerous other gimmicks to generate revenue. Shedding surplus entitlement programs and/or trimming the budget of unnecessary programs or agencies would make too much sense.

The City of Chicago, being the caring, diverse, tolerant, progressive city that it is, has achieved a rare distinction among American cities: Chicago is the new murder capitol of the United States. Chicago has experienced 426 homicides this year to date. This compares to 417 in New York City and 302 in Los Angeles, California (both of those cities have Progressive-Left friendly mayors and city councils as well). In fact, Chicago is home to a number of fine, upstanding young Progressive citizens in the form of a plethora of street gangs. From the Latin Kings to the Gangster Disciples, the Insane Deuces to the Insane Gangster Satan Disciples, street gangs that deal drugs, enforce protection schemes and offer a culture of fast-living, easy money and early death reign in Chicago’s neighborhoods. Meanwhile, owning a handgun in Chicago is forbidden and Mayor Daley has shamefully used the murder of a young child to call for a complete ban on civilian owned firearms, usurping the Second Amendment of the US Constitution. Incidentally, the Chicago City Council has also passed a resolution that makes Chicago a “nuclear weapon free zone,” so we’ve got that going for us.

Chicago’s education system is also a jewel. Chicago’s Board of Education pats itself on the back for achieving a 51 percent graduation rate, while sending “graduates” to institutions of higher learning whose proficiency in reading, writing, math and science is arguably insufficient. In fact, an inordinate number of Chicago Public School graduates must take rudimentary classes in math and English in order to be fully accepted to College or University. Violence, including gang related shootings, is not unheard of in the schools of Chicago. In fact, there are special police that are assigned to schools throughout the city and metal detectors adorn many a school’s doors.

To be fair, this disturbing reality is more the result of union interference in matters of curriculum creation, teacher quality and classroom instruction and special interest group and civil rights organization influence and interference – along with parental apathy – than it is anything else. Chicago Public School Chief Executive Officer Arne Duncan has made an admirable attempt to maximize the learning experience for Chicago’s students and teachers alike in the face of special interest tyranny, even if he has had to do so with one hand tied behind his back, the other under the critical and political eye of Mayor Daley.

And as Chicago, the city, becomes inebriated in decay, Mayor Daley and the Cook County Board are feverishly trying to salvage their entitlement-based regimes by capitalizing on the process of “community rehabilitation” – the exportation of residents who previously lived in “undesirable,” non-revenue generating “affordable housing” to the collar counties and suburbs. As old high-rise “affordable housing” units are destroyed to make way for the tax-revenue generating condominiums, townhouses and Olympic venues, the stench of Progressive-Left entitlement, along with the consequences its ideology brings, is infecting the rest of the state in a destructive way.

An aggressive “urbanization" of the once peaceful and amiable Chicago suburbs is causing a rise in problems traditionally found in urban areas: struggling schools, overcrowding, crime, traffic congestion, elevated costs of living, municipal budgetary woes, stagnant development, and ideological confrontation, complete with special interest influence from outside the community. Just as with the National Education Association’s encroachment upon local control of schools and their curriculums, the “urbanization” of the suburbs, collar counties and progressively (no pun intended) the rural areas of Illinois is facilitating a culture of urban morality; a society ruled by moral relativism, victimhood and the caretaker nanny state.

We here is Illinois understand the pitfalls of a one party, Progressive-Left, socialist system of government. In a state where the largest urban locale accepts as unavoidable the notion that dead men can vote, sometimes twice, the art of committing voter fraud and eliminating opposition candidates – sometimes of the same party – is handed down from generation to generation in a quest to maintain a stranglehold on power for “the machine.” From precinct captains, aldermen and community organizers to special interest activists, racially biased religious leaders and former Weather Underground terrorists, Illinois, because of the unyielding aggression of the Progressive-Left, has been transformed from a land where individual rights were guarded and constitutional liberty was valued at all costs – the Land of Lincoln – to the home of religious zealots like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Fr. Michael Pfleger and the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan and political opportunists like Jesse Jackson, Dick Durbin, Rod Blagojevich and Barack Obama. Conservatives are left with no voice on the national stage and small quarter in the state where we live.

This is just a limited glimpse into what it is like to live in a cobalt blue state; where Progressive-Left Democrats wield the tenets of socialism – including wealth redistribution and the limitation of constitutional rights – with impunity. Should the voters of America foolishly opt to discard liberty, opportunity and self-reliance in a self-centered quest for unearned wealth and a fraudulently engineered societal equality, we will come to rue the rhetoric of “hope and change,“ just as we will all soon be weeping for the freedoms we so imprudently cast aside.

Government must come before politics. The sanctity of the Constitution must trump political ideology. Country first.

Frank Salvato is the Executive Director and Director of Terrorism Research for BasicsProject.org a non-profit, non-partisan, 501(c)(3) research and education initiative. His writing has been recognized by the US House International Relations Committee and the Japan Center for Conflict Prevention. His organization partnered in producing the original national symposium series addressing the root causes of radical Islamist terrorism. He is a member of the International Analyst Network. He serves as the managing editor for The New Media Journal. Mr. Salvato has appeared on The O'Reilly Factor on FOX News Channel and is a regular guest on talk radio including on The Right Balance with Greg Allen on the Accent Radio Network and on The Captain's America Radio Show catering to the US Armed Forces around the world. His opinion-editorials have been published by The American Enterprise Institute, The Washington Times & Human Events and are syndicated nationally. He is occasionally quoted in The Federalist.

In my opinion, this article deserves a wide circulation!.

We here is Illinois understand the pitfalls of a one party, Progressive-Left, socialist system of government.

Ah, NO YOU DO NOT.
I say this because Illinois will overwhelmingly vote for Obama.
So either Illinois hates itself and America or you have not yet learned your lesson.

"Incidentally, the Chicago City Council has also passed a resolution that makes Chicago a “nuclear weapon free zone,” so we’ve got that going for us."

Best part right there!

As a born-and-raised Georgia boy who spent high school in Missouri, I had no idea IL was that insane until I came up here for school (just north of the city itself, but still as bad) and now find that, even though I'm over 20 miles from downtown, my suburb STILL reeks of Chitcago.

From the traffic to the crap roads to the highest gas prices in the nation to the fees for anything and everything to the sanctuary for gangbanger illegals to the arbitrary ban on ergonomic accessories that are too "assault-y" looking, being part of Crook County is absolutely ridiculous.

There is no reason that an already overbloated urban gutter needs to swallow up dozens of surrounding areas...it should have its own county to ruin (like St. Louis) with a separate county as at least somewhat of a buffer. I'm still holding out for the secession several of the towns have considered to form a new "Lincoln County" that would be at least somewhat free from the Daley machine...

Btw, Illinois is not a blue state. It’s quite red, and if you were dropped in central IL you wouldn’t know whether you were there, in MO, or IN.

Unfortunately Chitcago, and even more so Crook County, has the population to make the state very top heavy (especially when combined with the gerrymandering around other urban gutters). Everyone south of the city hates it because Daley’s cronies dominate the state’s politics, funnel money from the rest of the state into his failing city, and dictate their orders from on high.

But the city itself just keeps voting in the same parasites...

If Arizona looked like Chicago the media would be all over this like flies to sh##. If Obama is so great and has done great things for his community and Chicago lets see it! I THOUGHT SO! On a bigger picture, most US cities and states that are rat controlled are in big financial ruin sounds like thier all taking a page out of the Cloward priven strategy of which Obama and Ayers are students, bury them in financial crisis until collapse. The domino theory, 1 state at a time until collapse of the capitalist system and the birth of socialism in America. Sounds logical.

I think we could readily identify Chicago and the majority of the state...as an independent country...very much a combination of Bolovia, Cuba, and a mafai-state. We could refer to it as Chicagostan, and probably put a border fence around the whole state to protect....us from them. The fact that every problem they dig up....leads to more money and more problems...ought to be an indicator of their philosophy being bankrupt. With an Obama presidency...Chicagostan will only grow bigger and incorporate more of the US.

Ya know more folks have died in Chicago than the war in Iraq this year. If he can’t take care of his own state how can he take care of an entire nation? If he wins there will be no more flying under the liberal media radar, he will be under a microscope just like Bush. There is always impeachment

a working model that illustrates the consequences of a government run by the Progressive-Left.
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We must call them what they are: MARXISTS!!!

Conservatives are left with no voice on the national stage and small quarter in the state where we live.
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Is Walter Williams is right? Is it time for conservatives to move to red states? Is it time for those states to peacefully secede?

In my opinion, this article deserves a wide circulation!.
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Those who most need to read this are unfortunately too illiterate to get through it...thanks to our Marxist dominated government K-12 indoctrination camps.

Impeachment? With a Democrat Congress? The RINOs and “gentlemen” in the Senate who would not stand up for Henry Hyde and the conservatives in the House and REMOVE the allegedly “popular” Bill Clinton give me little or no hope for much “brave” leadership there. (It WAS NOT just about “sex”!)

All in the name of being “gentlemen” and protecting their own little “gentlemen’s club” status.

Obama can’t even take care of his own FAMILY members out of his pile of money just a little bit; you see, WE THE PEOPLE are to do it for him. How? Once he bleeds the producers - us - (the “rich”) dry with taxation, where is all the money for his big plans going to come from?

We live in Tennessee. How does a state, or group of states “peacefully” secede from the Union? When, or if, this radical Marxist takes over, he will have his “National Civilian Security Force”, the U.S. military and authority over it, the National Guard and all that to assure he can FORCE us to do as he (and his buddies) say. - A group of states disagreed with the federal government and seceded one time, and paid in blood and history rewritten history. Obama has a perfect secession precedent scenario from history as a guidebook to running a Civil War and bringing the offending (and damn the Constitution) group of states to their knees. Lincoln suspended the Constitution at will.

But, yes, IF this country votes for this sort of corruption and stupidity, maybe Walter is right. Let them have the corruption they crave, let them have the king they want. Let those conservatives who want to live in peace and have very limited federal government just do it and let the rest of the country that wants to grow the Chicago Cesspool have at it. Without the conservatives (the “rich”), I don’t know how they’re going to pay for it - and there’s the sticking point.

Is Walter Williams is right? Is it time for conservatives to move to red states? Is it time for those states to peacefully secede?

I am not familliar with William's proposal but I should be. I am thinking in terms of the blue states seceding from the U.S.A. rather than the other way around. Something I have been thinking about is there being three states - Mexifornia on the left coast. A free country consisting of Alaska, much of the west, midwest and southeast (a reconstitution of the U.S.A. with the Constitution, balance of powers, etc.). Then another socialist state consisting of the northeast and parts of the midwest rustbelt. All three states would have access to ports and would border on Canada and/or Mexico, so all three could trade and prosper. Of course, only the free country would prosper - the two socialist countries would at best be stagnant or at worst would become violent, third-world countries. The socialist states might even put up borders to keep their slaves from escaping, while the reconstituted U.S.A. would be more wealthy that the current U.S.A. Maybe after 50 years or so the socialist states would revolt and overthrow their rulers and petition to rejoin the U.S.A.

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