Chicago Daily Observer

The continuing contest for the Democratic presidential nomination has become a frenzy of debates and proclamations about democracy. Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign has been particularly vociferous in claiming that its candidate stands for a transformative, participatory new politics. It has vaunted Obama’s narrow lead in the overall popular vote in the primaries to date, as well as in the count of elected delegates, as the definitive will of the party’s rank and file. If, while heeding the party’s rules, the Democratic superdelegates overturn those majorities, Obama’s supporters claim, they will have displayed a cynical contempt for democracy that would tear the party apart.

His autobiography was entitled, “In the Arena” and that is most certainly where Charlton Heston lived his life.

When fundamental principles of individual rights and human liberty were at stake, Heston wheeled his chariot into the arena to do intellectual battle. He was the rare iconic figure who did not let his status inhibit him from consistently acting in furtherance of what he knew to be just.

News accounts about his passing have detailed his record on civil rights and gun rights but it is on free speech rights that I am able to give eyewitness testimony.

Today, with apologies to Richard Roeper, who created the format, you get five columns for the price of one—albeit brief ones, national and local:

First, in our (supposedly) newly invigorated dialog on race, are we really talking straight when it comes to a certain demographic that seems to be eluding Barack Obama? I speak here of white folks with less than college educations who earn below fifty grand a year. Somehow that demographic seems coterminous with what we used to call hard-hats or Reagan Democrats who started voting Republican largely on racial issues.

Somehow, a wealthy white Wellesley-grad woman lawyer from the Chicago suburbs seems to relate better to these folks than the half-black guy who bootstrapped himself into a Harvard law degree?

In a recent NYTimes piece interviewing Pennsylvanians in that demographic, almost all of them detailed why they were voting against Obama. Somehow they all began approximately “It ... Read More...

The last time a Park District advisory council weighed in on the Olympics, it didn’t come down on the side Mayor Daley wanted. That was back in July, when the Jackson Park Advisory Council passed a resolution against the city’s proposal to build a temporary 20,000-seat field hockey arena in the south lakefront park, part of its bid for the 2016 Olympics.

Well, this oughta teach ’em a lesson: In February Park District superintendent Tim Mitchell introduced a draft of revised guidelines that would impose stiff new conditions for membership in local park advisory councils, including criminal background checks. They’ve been sent to several advisory councils for review, but the Park District itself has the final decision.

The Chicago Park District board president is hinting the agency might lease assets to help pay for the transformation of the former Meigs Field into a nature park.

In the coming days, the park district is expecting to sign an agreement with the the urban and landscape design firm JJR LLC to formulate redevelopment plans of the 91-acre Northerly Island peninsula just east of Soldier Field, park officials say.