Chicago Daily Observer

Trust me—the last thing I want to do is wade in the muck of 49th Ward politics. ‘Cause, lord knows, you’re all a bunch of lunatics up there.

But, gulp, here I am . . .

I posted yesterday about Don Gordon taking a surprisingly strong stand against construction on Park District property, and that prompted alderman Joe Moore to give me a ring.

“Looks like you’re endorsing Don Gordon,” he told me.

Well, not really—just saying I like what he said at the meeting and wished he had said it when he was running for office against you last year.

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“I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen – a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.” Barack Obama 7–24-08.

Is anyone else completely sick and tired of this “citizen of the world” garbage. Look, I’m in the world but I’m certainly not a citizen of the world. If I was I wouldn’t know who to root for in the Olympics next month.

Hey, at least he’s a citizen of this world. We’re still trying to figure out where Dennis Kucinich came from.

But I wonder if by declaring himself a citizen of the world is Obama therefore renouncing his American citizenship making him ineligible for the Presidency. I’m being half-serious here in that I wonder if he feels that an Obama Presidency (shudder) might be responsible more to the entire world than to America. Because when someone ... Read More...

Forty years ago, a quiet gentlemen from Northern Italy named Giovanni Battista Montini caused a big stir with a little pamphlet. The stir was not because his pamphlet said anything new, but because many people were hoping that it would say something new, and it did not. Instead, it courageously restated what the world had known for—I do not exaggerate—thousands of years. History remembers Giovanni Battista Montini as Pope Paul VI and his pamphlet as Humanae Vitae, the papal encyclical that confirmed what the Catholic Church (and all Protestant churches until 1930) had always taught: Artificial contraception is intrinsically evil.

It’s not altogether true that Humanae Vitae, which turns 40 on July 25, said nothing new. Expanding on centuries of Church teaching, the document laid bare in a manner that can only be described as prophetic what was in store for a world that embraced contraception: “conjugal infidelity and the ... Read More...

Chicago’s second biggest daily responds to my article on the Windy City’s Nanny State proclivities with an endorsement of many of the policies I criticize.

Reason mocks the city for requiring that fat cops shape up, providing them with nutritionists and trainers to help.

We don’t. Police work is physical work. A cop has to be in shape.

Fair enough. But my mocking was more about the fact that after a year of headlines about police abuses, it just struck me a bit odd that the Board of Aldermen’s biggest concern while I was in town researching the article was a proposal to assign cops personal trainers at taxpayer expense.

Reason knocks the mayor for regulating thousands of taverns—evil peddlers of demon rum—out of existence. Chicago has only about 1,300 taverns today, compared with about 7,000 in the 1940s.

We don’t. A lot of those joints were buckets of blood ... Read More...

But Back Home Obama’s Iraq Views are Seen as Pompously Wrongheaded.



He may cause emotional kids and idealistic old ladies in audiences to swoon, but Barack Obama’s flabby views on the Iraq war will likely do him in. More than any other issue, McCain is right to make Iraq…even though it’s an unpopular war…as the litmus test to show how wrongheaded Obama has been-and how his inexperience and Jimmy Carter-like timidity threaten to make his presidency a disaster. Already polls are showing that Obama is not getting his “bounce” from the ecstatically immature mainstream media camp followers.

Small wonder. The American people are wary of this con-man rhetorician…inflated as if by a bicycle pump manned by David Axelrod with the help of Big Foot media.

Several points.

In the long view of history, President George W. Bush will go down as the true great one…ranking with Harry ... Read More...

I thought his speech was disappointing. He played it very safe. What he said was insubstantial even by his standards, and sometimes painfully banal. And it seemed to me to lack the flair in delivery that usually makes up the deficit. There were no memorable lines. All that stuff about tearing down (metaphorical) walls was predictable and lame. It was a mistake to evoke memories of “Tear down this wall,” an unrepeatably dramatic stroke. And who thought it was a good idea to recycle “This is the moment”? Old hat by now in the US and entirely without resonance in Germany. He seemed subdued and a little nervous, too, which would be understandable, since it is difficult to please two such different audiences–the one in Berlin, and the one back home–at the same time.

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llinois should go to a military strongman form of government.

Instead of the pretense of representative democracy, we should submit to one of those charismatic, totalitarian dictators with the Captain Kangaroo get-up who makes people disappear.

After all, isn’t that what the “Chicago 9” are doing?

The Chicago 9 are the nine Chicago Democrats who live within about five squares miles of one another and who control more than $70 billion worth of government and more than 125,000 public sector jobs in Illinois.

[The 9: Daley, Blagojevich, (Lisa) Madigan, White, Hynes, Giannoulias, Jones, (Mike) Madigan, Stroger]

It was reported last week that the Chicago 9 had made more than 6,000 private sector jobs in Illinois disappear between May and June. Only four states in the nation lost more jobs during that period.

The Chicago 9 have Illinois’ unemployment rate at a robust 6.8%, nearly 25% higher than the national average ... Read More...

It amuses me that some of those who criticise the present US Administration for its Manichaeism – its division of the world into good and evil – themselves allocate all past badness to Bush and all prospective goodness to Obama. As the ever-improving myth has it, on the morning of September 12, 2001, George W. and America enjoyed the sympathy of the world. This comradeship was destroyed, in a uniquely cavalier (or should we say cowboyish) fashion, through the belligerence, the carelessness, the ideological fixity and the rapacity of that amorphous and useful category of American flawed thinker, the neoconservative. They just threw it away.

I say, eventually, we will hate or ridicule Mr Obama too – provided, of course, that he is elected and serves two full terms.

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