Chicago Daily Observer

“The Chicago School of Economics” has become shorthand for a no-holds barred free-markets view of the world that borders on the libertarian. At the University of Chicago, Milton Friedman laid the intellectual foundations for the anti-inflation, tax-cutting, small-government policies of President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

So in some ways it’s strange that President-elect Barack Obama has been bouncing ideas off Chicago economists and counts some of them as his closest advisers.

It’s a sign of how the world has changed, with many ideas championed by Chicago economists finding greater acceptance. It’s also a sign of how Chicago has changed—though many economists at the university hold that the “Chicago School” was never quite what outsiders deemed it to be.

Thirty Six Homicides in Chicago in October, though it doesn’t look like the Hudson family has fully been reported yet. Shown in detail via the link

Sarah Palin’s views make me fear that the Republican party has finally lost its mind.

As for sex, the hypocrisy of her outing her pregnant daughter in front of millions of people, hard on the heels of her concealing her own pregnancy (her faith in abstinence applying, apparently, only to non-Palins), is nicely balanced by her hypocrisy in gushing with loving support of her teenage daughter after using a line-item veto to cut funding for a transitional home for teenage mothers in Alaska.

Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party’s cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not ... Read More...

Few presidential candidates in modern times have been identified with a large urban area like Barack Obama is with Chicago. And sometimes, that can present a problem.

This election season, for instance, the residents of Obama’s hometown are being murdered at a clip not seen in five years.

Murders have risen 18 percent over a year ago. Assaults in the city involving guns are also rising. City officials, Police Supt. Jody Weis and the police force are increasingly coming under criticism.

But some Republicans say part of the blame also lies with Obama.

In Germany, Sen. Obama announced that he is a “Citizen of the World” in a campaign speech directed at many tourists, Germans, and the US media. Being a Citizen of the World is hard to classify on a passport or an Olympic competition, but the process of obtaining World Citizenship seems simple enough: Gather $300 Million, spend it like mad to get your party’s nomination…lure 200,000 Germans into an arena…make a slew of odd and bombastic declarations…and you pretty much get your World Citizenship.

An side effect of World Citizenry seems to be a complete shutdown of your constituency. Here’s a tally of news reports from the 7th Ward in Chicago (within Obama’s previous State Senate District) over the time that Sen. Obama has been travelling.

Bruised and battered…police reports, on July 18 at 5:30 p.m., Barbara Miller, 61, of the 7600 ... Read More...

It’s time to bring back the Chicago Machine. Or the Democratic Machine. Or Machine Politics.

For those of you who are thinking, “the Chicago Machine has never left, so what’s to bring back?” you’re quite right. We’ve still got the Chicago Machine. But some time ago, use of the expression “Chicago Machine” fell out of favor.

But the continued omission of references to the Machine insults reality, disserves the reading public and permits the Machine to go its happy way as if it doesn’t exist. Maintaining this pretense has national implications, allowing Democratic presidential candidate and Chicago favorite son Barack Obama to continue the fiction that he ain’t no scion of no stinking Machine.

Maybe this denial of a Machine by omission was the result of the popular interpretations, that the victory of Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor demolished the machine and handed the reins of government ... Read More...

Like many old, big industrial cities, Chicago peaked in the 1950 Census with a population of 3,620,962. In the 1950s over two percent of the entire U.S. population lived within Chicago city limits. Over a half century later, while America’s population doubled, Chicago’s population declined. The 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990 Census numbers showed Chicago losing population.

Mayor Daley and Chicago residents were quite excited about the 2000 Census showing Chicago gaining over 112,000 people (a growth rate at half the national average for the 1990s). It appears the 1990s were an anomaly for Chicago. Since the year 2000, according to Census estimates, Chicago again continued its population decline with a loss of 63,000 from 2000 to 2006 leaving a total of 2,833,321.