Chicago Daily Observer

When the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority (ISTHA) was established in 1941, Austin Wyman (the initial head of the organization) said the tolls would be eliminated by 1984 when outstanding bonds were paid off.

Instead, the Authority has done just the opposite, maturing into a self-perpetuating bureaucracy without any end in sight. It’s an excellent case study on the instinctive nature of bureaucracy; a testimony of self-preservation, growth, and government waste.

With the economy stalling, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s chances of winning the White House depend more on convincing voters he can save their jobs than on promising to change Washington’s ways.

For all his rhetoric about moving beyond partisanship, his economic policies hew closely to classic Democratic lines and differ little from those of his primary opponents. Except for a few business-friendly wrinkles, he mostly caters to the party’s traditional base.

There is a school of thought in journalism according to which it is bad form to mention the race or ethnicity of a criminal suspect or defendant unless there is a compelling reason to do so. The idea is that such references gratuitously perpetuate stereotypes while imparting information that is of no use to the reader.

But racial and ethnic groups are not the only ones who take offense at such stereotypes, as the New York Times reports:

There’s a mad, multi-candidate scramble for the Democratic nomination for Cook county state’s attorney, not only because the office is a giant plum but because its outcome has not always been determined by the Democratic machine.

Running as an independent Dem in 1980, a fellow named Richard M. Daley trounced the “slated” Alderman Ed Burke and went on to upset the two-term Republican incumbent Bernard Carey (yes, a Republican won the office in 1972 in an upset with strong racial ingredients).

Then, when Daley won the 1989 mayoral race he appointed an old-line black politician, Cecil Partee to fill his term. In the 1992 race for a full term, Partee was weakened by a race-based primary battle against a north side alderman and subsequently lost to Republican Jack O’Malley in yet another race-tinged election—the last time the GOP held a countywide office.

O’Malley was later upset by the machine ... Read More...

Hard Work—Not a Snap of the Fingers.

One of the more ridiculous debates going on in the Democratic party primary rages between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Obama’s people charge that Clinton is disparaging the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. because she has said that achieving civil rights takes more than a flurry of speeches. As everyone knows, the argument is valueless. The civil rights movement needed Martin Luther King to make the case and provide a sterling example. It also needed legislative craftsmanship to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the Congress. The skills of movement motivation which touched the conscience of America and legislative leadership worked in tandem.

Hillary made the perfectly reasonable statement that following King’s crusade and assassination, it took tough political action in the Congress by the Johnson administration to pass civil rights gains. For proof, read it again in my “Flashback” ... Read More...