Chicago Daily Observer

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are the platypuses of the financial world. As shareholder-owned companies which rely on state guarantees, the two government-sponsored enterprises are neither public fish nor private fowl. They are also evolutionary relics from another time. The US Treasury looks increasingly likely to bail out the two mortgage giants. But before it does so, Hank Paulson, the Treasury secretary, must think about an intelligent design for what he would like the GSEs to evolve into.

The Federal Reserve and the Treasury are right to try to prevent the collapse of the GSEs. But they must now work to get rid of them. Conservation efforts have kept the duck-billed platypus alive. Freddie and Fannie do not deserve the same protection.

Let’s assume everything is on the square at the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board.

OK. Forget about the fixing of the new hospital that Wisconsin’s Mercy Health Care System wanted to build in Crystal Lake to compete with local biggie Centegra Health Care System’s dominant hospitals in McHenry County.

Governor Rod Blagojevich appointed a new board, didn’t he?

Problem solved, right?

No reason to be suspicious when Naperville’s Edward Hospital gets turned down for the third time, right?

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...

Chicago’s grit is the stuff of legend. The city’s hard-scrabble history conjures images of wind-beaten dock hands; rugged immigrants working punishing factory jobs; and 500 acres of slaughterhouses and their hard-time killing floors.

At the same time, Chicago has always adopted a work-hard/play-hard mentality.

The city drank its way through Prohibition; its brothels became legendary, as author Karen Abbott detailed in a great new book, “Sin in the Second City”; and though Chicago today has a well-earned reputation for fine dining and cutting-edge cuisine, it is more known for sating its hunger with a greasy kielbasa, a thick steak, or an inch-deep slice from Gino’s East.

But Chicago seems to have lost a bit of its hard edge. The town that poet Carl Sandburg called “a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities” has itself gone soft, thanks to meddlesome politicians..

Whatever the outcome of the Tony Rezko trial, it has had one salutary effect: The uselessness of another government bureaucracy is on full display

I’m referring to the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board, which was created in 1974 with the misguided notion that health care costs could be controlled by government clamping down on hospital construction.

Rezko is charged with stocking the board with an acquiescent majority, which he used to try to engineer board decisions for kickbacks. At Rezko’s instructions, according to testimony in the trial, that board approved a new hospital in Crystal Lake, even though state health experts said the Crystal Lake hospital wasn’t needed. Expertise has a way in Chicago and Illinois of collapsing in the face of hurricanes fueled by greed and corruption.

As interesting as the testimony in the lengthy trail has been, detailing the ins and outs of the arcane form of government ... Read More...