Chicago Daily Observer

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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I haven’t done a count yet — breathlessly awaiting Berlin transcript — but Obama’s speech struck me as so riddled with clichés that even he was bored. It seemed like his speechwriters went through a bunch of old speeches, pulled favorite phrases and strung them together between a few poll-approved Big Ideas. I had the weary feeling I’d been there and heard that. And Obama seemed to feel it, too.

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Obama noted that in a break from his whirlwind schedule, “we’ve got some down time tonight. What are you guys gonna do in Berlin? Huh? Huh? You guys got any big. plans? …I’ve never been to Berlin, so…I would love to tour around a little bit.”

Obama canceled a previously-planned stop to visit thousands of American service personnel, including troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan being treated at Landstuhl, so he could hold a political rally for Germans and go shopping in Berlin. Now that’s a nice set of priorities for a man who wants to become Commander in Chief.

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While on the county payroll, a top urologist at Cook County Hospital solicited nearly $1 million from drug companies over the last decade for his private foundation.

Dr. Paul S. Ray’s pitch was that the money would go toward medical research and education.

But most of the money hasn’t gone to health care at all. Instead, Ray invested it—mostly in Tony Rezko.

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“So the point that I was making at the time was that the political dynamic was the driving force between that sectarian violence. And we could try to keep a lid on it, but if these underlining dynamic continued to bubble up and explode the way they were, then we would be in a difficult situation. I am glad that in fact those political dynamic shifted at the same time that our troops did outstanding work.”—Barack Obama

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It is assumed by most conservatives that big name universities are, for the most part, institutions run and staffed by leftists. This assumption is also, for the most part, true. Thanks mostly to the work of the DePaul Conservative Alliance, DePaul University has been shown to be a hotbed of liberal activism. . Perhaps, as a new report to be published by the Alliance will show, the “Largest Catholic University in America” acts as a foe to alternative ideas because of who makes up the university itself.

Leftists are found everywhere in DePaul’s ivory tower––from the highest levels of university administration to the bustling cubicles of staffers. But as with most universities, the most amount of leftists reside in the classrooms. The usual culprits are not only in the political science, sociology, and philosophy departments, but also surprisingly in the mathematics, nursing, and computer departments. Leftist professors have managed to ... Read More...

A Republican strategist was quoted recently saying if the presidential race is about McCain he loses—if it’s about Obama, then McCain has a chance.

That’s another way of saying this race is a referendum on Obama. Or, to put it yet another way, it’s Obama’s to lose.

Thus far he’s winning.

But before Obamaniacs or other Dems revel too joyously in the thought, there are two points to remember:

1. It ain’t over ‘til it’s over, four months from now.

2. Obama continues to run substantially worse than the hypothetical generic Democrat, meaning the public has not yet fully made up its mind about him.
Which is to say that if the candidate were, say, John Edwards or any such substantial white guy it would, for all practical purposes, be over right now.

I might add that if Sen. Hillary Clinton were the candidate, the race would be ... Read More...

In an election year dominated by the rallying cry of change, an unlikely coalition of some of the state’s most powerful special interests will spend $3 million urging voters to stick with the status quo.

The Alliance to Protect the Illinois Constitution is asking for a “no” vote on one of the most important issues on the November ballot: whether there should be a constitutional convention to make changes to the state’s 1970 governing document.

Every 20 years, the constitution requires that voters be asked whether the document should be rewritten. Sixty percent of the voters must approve the question for a convention to be called. In 1988—a time of more civil political discourse—75 percent of voters opposed a convention.

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Tony Peraica proposed rolling back the Cook County sales tax in a July 22 meeting. The vote came to a roll-call and the Cook County board voted 10–7 to maintain the current sales tax, which is the highest sales tax in the United States.

The results are here:

Voting For Sales Tax Reduction

Claypool (D-12th)
Quigley (D-10th)
Peraica (R-16th)
Gorman (R-17th)
Silvestri(R-9th)
Goslin, (R-14th)
Schneider (R-15th)

Voting to Maintain Sales Tax Hike

Collins, (D-1st)
Steele, (D-2nd)
Butler, (D-3rd)
Beavers, (D-4th)
Sims, (D-5th)
Murphy, (D-6th)
Moreno, (D-7th)
Maldonado, (D-8th)
Daley, (D-11th)
Suffredin, (D-13th)

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When Cook County Commissioner Larry Suffredin was running for Cook County State’s Attorney, he told me that he opposed the tax increase package being rammed through by President Todd Stroger.

But once he lost the Democratic primary to Anita Alvarez, he changed his tune and became one of the most vocal proponents of supporting Stroger’s repressive 1 percent increase in the county wide sales tax.

This week, Republican County Commissioner Tony Peraica, who has been consistently speaking out against unnecessary tax increases and urging trimming waste and the county’s bloated budget, sought to push commissioners to repeal the punitive Stroger Sales Tax.

And who do you think stood up to lead the personal attacks against Peraica?

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Thirty-nine years ago last Sunday America went to the moon, and nothing on Earth was supposed to be the same after that.
Last Sunday was a sunny day around here, and people were talking about gas prices and whether they could afford to drive maybe 400 miles to get the family on vacation this year. They were not – at least not anyone I heard – talking about getting to the moon.
Some guy on TV, as a kicker to a news feature on oil, mentioned with a shrug that next year, on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon shot, there will probably be “a lot of remembrance going on.”
Probably. And they may even drag in Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin to help them remember – if those guys are still around. Right now all three original moon men are ... Read More...