Achy Obejas

by Achy Obejas | Feb. 17, 2012

Don’t be fooled by the crazy carnival around Obama’s contraception rule. The GOP’s main mission here is not to protect religious freedom. It’s simply to destroy Barack Obama and his signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act.

Yesterday was a red letter day for their efforts: California Congressman Darrel Issa held a hearing on the president’s new rules for employer provided insurance and contraception. But he didn’t call it that -- he bald-faced called it a hearing on “religious freedom” and lined up a host of male witnesses to tell him everything he wanted to hear. Women witnesses? No, not necessary, said Issa, who apparently doesn’t think women can opine on even his ostensible subject of religious freedom.

An attack on women? Of...

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The Republicans' 'working digits' candidate

by Achy Obejas | Feb. 14, 2012

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The chatter among Republicans about a deadlocked, or brokered, convention grows but don’t be fooled: barring a miracle, the GOP nominee will be Mitt Romney.

There’s no guarantee Romney will get the necessary votes for the first convention ballot through actual primary voting. But there is a pretty sure bet that party officials, invested in Romney up to their eyeballs, will pull out all the stops to make that happen.

You’ve been seeing it happening since Iowa. Remember Matt Strawn, the state GOP chairman? He’s the guy who insisted that though there were missing ballots and pissed off affidavit-signing Republican election judges,...

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Santorum rides the anti-contraceptive conservative wave

by Achy Obejas | Feb. 10, 2012

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I bet Rick Santorum is a very happy man right now.

Not only is he being treated like a rock star at this week’s CPAC conference, the big conservative political action committee get together, but President Barack Obama’s inept handling of the contraceptive rule for the Affordable Care Act just handed Santorum a big platform on which to really distinguish himself, not just from the incumbent, but from the GOP frontrunner, Mitt Romney, whose record on contraceptive mandates more closely mirrors the president’s.

In fact, Romneycare’s mandates on contraceptives were exactly like Obamacare’s...

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Proposition 8 likely headed to the Supreme Court

by Achy Obejas | Feb. 08, 2012

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Same sex marriage is on the way to the Supreme Court, thanks to California’s 9th Circuit Court. The ruling, though, is super narrow -- it’s unlikely to create a federal right to same sex marriage. More likely, it’s going to allow states to continue the march toward same sex marriage equality and to create greater barriers to referendums rescinding legislature-approved same sex marriage laws. (The majority, by the way, makes explicit appeals to swing Justice Stevens while the dissenting judge clearly aims at Justice Scalia in his opinion.)

But the best, best part of the ruling is the straight...

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The GOP DREAM Act is just an act

by Achy Obejas | Feb. 03, 2012

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One of the most curious things to come out of the Florida primary (where Mitt Romney won with less than 50 percent of the vote but somehow regained his inevitability), is the Republican version of the DREAM Act. Be certain that that as the GOP primaries wander into states with greater Latino and other immigrant populations, Romney and the others still running for president on the Republican ticket will be trotting this sucker out as evidence of their embrace of immigrants.

The big difference between the Republican proposal and the original DREAM Act? The GOP bill would grant legal residency to undocumented young people only through military service. It completely eliminates the option of gaining residency by going to college and earning a degree.

In fact, the Republican take on the DREAM Act is a game of mirrors, pure politics at the expense of the disfranchised. Most importantly, the GOP version is...

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What Chicago can learn from last weekend's Occupy Oakland riots

by Achy Obejas | Jan. 31, 2012

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Occupy Wall Street may have started out as a global movement but, in the last few months, as numerous encampments became embroiled in turf wars that were more and more local in nature, it began to look as if some of the movement’s more agglutinating issues were getting diluted. Occupy Oakland, which is practically engaged in hand to hand combat with Mayor Jean Quan, seemed the poster child for this kind of parochial diffusion.

Last Saturday night, rioting broke out again in Oakland. On face value, it seemed the same as before: protestors trying to maintain a foothold on public space as an aggressive and widely discredited police force used excessive -- almost gleefully excessive force -- to keep them out. (There isn’t a lot of debate about what a debacle the OPD is as it verges...

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The Florida winner? Barack. Here's why.

by Achy Obejas | Jan. 24, 2012

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Every single time a Republican primary rolls around, it’s the real test. Remember Iowa? It was going to separate the wheat from the chaff. But all it really did was get rid of Michelle Bachmann (not a small thing, but no one believes that was all the chaff).

Then came New Hampshire, where Mitt Romney -- under the illusion he’d won Iowa -- was going to make it two in a row, score a historic precedent, and prance to the nomination. New Hampshire was a test of money -- who had it, who didn’t. And all it really proved was that Jon Huntsman couldn’t get his dad to give him more of his millions to prop up his campaign (a campaign that was never, not once, about 2012).

Then there was South Carolina, where the strong, evangelical Republican base was going to...

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Santorum's bad day

by Achy Obejas | Jan. 20, 2012

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Yesterday should have been Rick Santorum’s day.

The Iowa Republican Party, though desperate to make his rival, Mitt Romney, the official certified winner of its caucuses had to cough up that, in fact, it looked like Santorum had won.

“One thing that is irrefutable is that is that in these 1,776 certified precincts, the Republican party was able to certify and report Rick Santorum was the winner of the certified precinct vote total by 34 votes,” Matt Strawn, the state GOP chair, told the Des Moines Register. There are eight precincts outstanding with missing paperwork.

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Achy Obejas

With Citylife, longtime Chicago journalist and writer Achy Obejas seeks out adventures, large and small, in urban living. Obejas is a former award-winning reporter with the Chicago Tribune, where for almost ten years she penned the popular and critically-acclaimed column, “After Hours.” She is also the author of Ruins and three other books of fiction. She is currently the Sor Juana Writer-in-Residence at De Paul University, is a member of the Editorial Board of In These Times and the editorial advisory board of the Great Books Foundation.