Jesse Jackson Jr. Feels The Heat

Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL) appeared on the WTTW program Chicago Tonight on Monday 1/24/05. Some general observations:

1) He refers to his father in the third person (i.e. "The Reverend").

2) With regard to the problems with the City's affirmative action program, he was adamant that the solution be found locally. He kept mentioning that the Republicans (e.g. Ray LaHood) would love to start a federal investigation into the program. This has to be a first, a congressman explicitly insisting that we not have a congressional investigation!

3) He seems to be quite happy with the concept of crony capitalism, he is just outraged at whose cronies get capitalized!

4) No one asked how his siblings got so rich (e.g. how they got the local beer distributorship).

5) He never questioned why we need an affirmative action program decades after it was introduced as a temporary expedient to redress past grievances.

6) He did not think to ask what would happen to minority contractors if they were not expected to use union labor. If the unions control the number of minority tradesmen, we will never get a representative porportion of minorities in contracting! And think how competitive a non-union minority contractor could be against a union contractor. Is the answer here to have a right-to-work contracting process?