Month: March 2010

Sullivan for mayor!

Former Oak Parker Sid Sullivan is running for mayor of Columbia MO.  He and his wife Joan, recently married, “established roots for the first time” in Oak Park in 1975.

Sullivan worked for the Circuit Court of Cook County for 12 years. He later joined the private sector in 1988 when he took a job with Roche Diagnostic Systems, a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical giant Hoffmann-La Roche, earning a master’s degree in business administration along the way.

Sid was preceded in politics by his wife.

In 1994 she ran for . . . county commission[er] . . . in Cook County . . .  She says she finished second in the race and came close to unseating the incumbent. In 1996 she ran for U.S. Congress in a crowded field that included Danny Davis, who won the election and still represents Illinois’ 7th District.

Sid’s platform reflects his Oak Park-ness.  He favors:

• Complete transparency in all city departments [which no man dare gainsay]
• Job opportunities for all [ditto, but where does the city come in?]
• An empowered and responsive city council [not now empowered?] 
• Adequate shelter for Columbia’s homeless residents [a la PADS?]
• Neighborhood planning that creates a sense of community [Oak Park!]
• Humane treatment for animals [local issue here?]

Columbia?  It’s

the fifth-largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and the largest city in Mid-Missouri.[6] With an estimated population of 100,733 in 2008,[7] it is the principal municipality of the Columbia Metropolitan Area, a region of 164,283 residents.

vs. OP, with 50G or so, by the way.

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One for all, all for . . . what?

Chi Trib has new policy: advertising on its front page.  You don’t believe me?  Look at today’s home delivery, with this joyous, camaraderie-filled big picture over the fold:

Obama Axelrod Emanuel 100319

Sorry, cannot find the glorious buddy shot on the web — different audiences, you know — and have to go with this.  The glorious one has these three plus two others unnamed in a 48–square-inch shot in which O. sits behind desk, rolled back from it, knee crossed, hand on chin, watching E. and A. joshing with each other, O. watching as a kindly uncle.  Good times at the White House!

The story is by by one Christi Parsons and Peter Nicholas, both of TribCo-owned LA Times, with its lede to die for:

President Obama was certain that he wanted to pass a healthcare bill. The question before his advisors was how to go about it.

Oh boy.  It’s called keeping it soft for the home folks.  And there was lots more to come, such as:

Axelrod and Emanuel are star players in almost every discussion. That might be expected given the common portrayals of the two. Emanuel is the hard-eyed, salty-tongued pragmatist who counts votes and navigates the polarized politics of Capitol Hill. Axelrod is more relaxed and avuncular, more inclined to invoke the aspirational language that Obama used in his campaign.

I love that “hard-eyed, salty-tongued” bit, “relaxed and avuncular” too.  And that “aspirational language,” oh!

You heard about all that rivalry and angst and O.’s being no longer happy with this job?  Or the ongoing ever-intenser struggle with recalcitrant Dems over Obamacare?  Look, that stuff doesn’t belong in a love letter.  Wash Post has it already anyhow.  Give the Chicagocrats something to warm their hearts with over coffee.  What’s a noosepaper for, anyhow?

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One for all, all for . . . what?

Chi Trib has new policy: advertising on its front page.  You don’t believe me?  Look at today’s home delivery, with this joyous, camaraderie-filled big picture over the fold:

Obama Axelrod Emanuel 100319

Sorry, cannot find the glorious buddy shot on the web — different audiences, you know — and have to go with this.  The glorious one has these three plus two others unnamed in a 48–square-inch shot in which O. sits behind desk, rolled back from it, knee crossed, hand on chin, watching E. and A. joshing with each other, O. watching as a kindly uncle.  Good times at the White House!

The story is by by one Christi Parsons and Peter Nicholas, both of TribCo-owned LA Times, with its lede to die for:

President Obama was certain that he wanted to pass a healthcare bill. The question before his advisors was how to go about it.

Oh boy.  It’s called keeping it soft for the home folks.  And there was lots more to come, such as:

Axelrod and Emanuel are star players in almost every discussion. That might be expected given the common portrayals of the two. Emanuel is the hard-eyed, salty-tongued pragmatist who counts votes and navigates the polarized politics of Capitol Hill. Axelrod is more relaxed and avuncular, more inclined to invoke the aspirational language that Obama used in his campaign.

I love that “hard-eyed, salty-tongued” bit, “relaxed and avuncular” too.  And that “aspirational language,” oh!

You heard about all that rivalry and angst and O.’s being no longer happy with this job?  Or the ongoing ever-intenser struggle with recalcitrant Dems over Obamacare?  Look, that stuff doesn’t belong in a love letter.  Wash Post has it already anyhow.  Give the Chicagocrats something to warm their hearts with over coffee.  What’s a noosepaper for, anyhow?

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Alinsky, end, and means

Been looking for this reference, Alinsky in Look Mag, and just found it, at Library of Congress:

Saul Alinsky 
     1967 Sept. 15 (date added to Look’s library)   27 photographic prints (contact sheets).     Baldwin, Joel, photographer.
     LOOK – Job 67-3429 <P&P>

This has to be the article in which he is quoted saying (as I distinctly remember), “If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?” which I have referred to on several occasions. 

The date would be right.  It’s when I was living at Xavier U. in Cincinnati, having moved a month earlier from St. Ignatius High on Chicago’s West Side, where as a young priest I’d been involved in community organizing — amateurishly, but so what?  It was a hit-and-miss exercise as practiced by the best of them.

The LOC reference is to its photo collection, donated by Look’s publisher, Cowles Communications, in 1971, as the magazine was on its way out of existence. 

The photos

show social reformer Saul Alinsky meeting with black community organizers(?) at an organization headquarters(?); working in his office; meeting with other black men and Michigan govenor George Romney; travelling by plane.

Note the “reformer” sobriquet.  There’s a long history of lipstick on pigs.

Now I have to find the text in which, as I said here and here, Alinsky said, “If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?”

 

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Alinsky, end, and means

Been looking for this reference, Alinsky in Look Mag, and just found it, at Library of Congress:

Saul Alinsky 
     1967 Sept. 15 (date added to Look’s library)   27 photographic prints (contact sheets).     Baldwin, Joel, photographer.
     LOOK – Job 67-3429 <P&P>

This has to be the article in which he is quoted saying (as I distinctly remember), “If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?” which I have referred to on several occasions. 

The date would be right.  It’s when I was living at Xavier U. in Cincinnati, having moved a month earlier from St. Ignatius High on Chicago’s West Side, where as a young priest I’d been involved in community organizing — amateurishly, but so what?  It was a hit-and-miss exercise as practiced by the best of them.

The LOC reference is to its photo collection, donated by Look’s publisher, Cowles Communications, in 1971, as the magazine was on its way out of existence. 

The photos

show social reformer Saul Alinsky meeting with black community organizers(?) at an organization headquarters(?); working in his office; meeting with other black men and Michigan govenor George Romney; travelling by plane.

Note the “reformer” sobriquet.  There’s a long history of lipstick on pigs.

Now I have to find the text in which, as I said here and here, Alinsky said, “If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?”

 

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Dreams of power

In Dreams from My Father, Obama mulls the limitations of democracy and the free market, excerpted by Steve Sailer in America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s Story of Race and Inheritance:

That the POWER [buy black] campaign sputtered said something about . . . Questions of competition, decisions forced by a market economy and
majoritarian rule; issues of power.

It was this unyielding reality — that whites were not simply phantoms to be expunged from our dreams but were an active and varied fact of our everyday lives.that finally explained how [black] nationalism could thrive as an emotion and flounder as a program. [pp. 201–202]

Yes we can! become part of this dream from his father answering “questions of competition, decisions forced by a market economy and majoritarian rule” with our competitiveness reined in, our economy tied in knots, and our “majoritarian” habits of deciding by voting on things held in check.

Sailer cites it accurately as O. giving up on people power through community organization.  The question is how he looked at the market and the vote.  My implied argument or allegation is that we know now that he’s enamored of neither, unless you dismiss his by-any-means-necessary approach to his health legislation as anomalous.

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Dreams of power

In Dreams from My Father, Obama mulls the limitations of democracy and the free market, excerpted by Steve Sailer in America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s Story of Race and Inheritance:

That the POWER [buy black] campaign sputtered said something about . . . Questions of competition, decisions forced by a market economy and
majoritarian rule; issues of power.

It was this unyielding reality — that whites were not simply phantoms to be expunged from our dreams but were an active and varied fact of our everyday lives.that finally explained how [black] nationalism could thrive as an emotion and flounder as a program. [pp. 201–202]

Yes we can! become part of this dream from his father answering “questions of competition, decisions forced by a market economy and majoritarian rule” with our competitiveness reined in, our economy tied in knots, and our “majoritarian” habits of deciding by voting on things held in check.

Sailer cites it accurately as O. giving up on people power through community organization.  The question is how he looked at the market and the vote.  My implied argument or allegation is that we know now that he’s enamored of neither, unless you dismiss his by-any-means-necessary approach to his health legislation as anomalous.

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Decline & fall of a sermon-time doze

I was neither flummoxed nor gobsmacked when the preacher tossed off a reference to “Captain Grimes in Decline and Fall” this morning.  I was, however, wakened from that pious semi-slumber that too often attends sermonizing.

Of the Roman empire? I wondered, distracted from my fascination with the family of mother, father, and seven kids aged an estimated six months to 10 years old in the pew in front of me.

No, I quickly decided.  Decline and Fall as by Evelyn Waugh.  Said and done.  Without explaining, as in saying, “I was reading a novel the other day called Decline and Fall, by the English Catholic writer Evelyn Waugh, and in it he said . . .”   Blah, blah, and blah.  What you hear in your average parish.

So it goes.  Point he was making would not have been lost, however, on the listeners who got not the reference: Captain Grimes enuntiated the wild “liberal” claim that freedom (and contentment) lay in doing whatever one wants to do, wherever, at any time.  Didn’t work that way for him in the novel, my priest said, going on to point out what should be obvious but isn’t: things don’t work that way.

So.  I was out of my reverie and on my way to a contented half hour or so of doing what I wanted to do, where and when I wanted to do it: hear the rest of mass and let the mystery of it wash over me, not to mention an edifying drama in which two young parents worshiped on Sunday in the company of their seven perfect youngsters.

Not bad, and I had only to walk a half mile to find it.

Decline & fall of a sermon-time doze

I was neither flummoxed nor gobsmacked when the preacher tossed off a reference to “Captain Grimes in Decline and Fall” this morning.  I was, however, wakened from that pious semi-slumber that too often attends sermonizing.

Of the Roman empire? I wondered, distracted from my fascination with the family of mother, father, and seven kids aged an estimated six months to 10 years old in the pew in front of me.

No, I quickly decided.  Decline and Fall as by Evelyn Waugh.  Said and done.  Without explaining, as in saying, “I was reading a novel the other day called Decline and Fall, by the English Catholic writer Evelyn Waugh, and in it he said . . .”   Blah, blah, and blah.  What you hear in your average parish.

So it goes.  Point he was making would not have been lost, however, on the listeners who got not the reference: Captain Grimes enuntiated the wild “liberal” claim that freedom (and contentment) lay in doing whatever one wants to do, wherever, at any time.  Didn’t work that way for him in the novel, my priest said, going on to point out what should be obvious but isn’t: things don’t work that way.

So.  I was out of my reverie and on my way to a contented half hour or so of doing what I wanted to do, where and when I wanted to do it: hear the rest of mass and let the mystery of it wash over me, not to mention an edifying drama in which two young parents worshiped on Sunday in the company of their seven perfect youngsters.

Not bad, and I had only to walk a half mile to find it.

The diem endeth

Sleep-loss alert, peoples.  Prepare to spring ahead (lose an hour of your precious time) because we have to SAVE THE DAYLIGHT, which is easier than saving the whales.  All the gummint dictators have to do is decree it.  A liberal’s dream: DECREEING THE ALLEGEDLY RIGHT THING TO DO.

47% of us think saving the daylight is a mug’s game, says Rasmussen; 40% think it’s hunky-dory, 13% are not sure.  These are people who don’t vote, who think democracy is a given, who don’t realize vigilance is the price of freedom.  Let them go, they are not worth the trouble to chide them.

Whatever.  Set your clocks AHEAD.  It’s the SPRING LEAP.  Pass up that last number at the dance hall, that last hand of whist, that last drink at your neighborhood saloon.  Get to bed early, so you wake up REFRESHED.

Well this advice is strictly in the coals-to-Newcastle category for the whopping 83% of grownups who already know this is a 23–hour day — again thanks to Rasmussen, who is quick to point out that the 17% of us in the dark about it are “a lot.”  

I hasten to agree and must add this: OF THE 83% ANOTHER LOT OF US WILL GO ON AS BEFORE, dancing and card-playing and quaffing brew in devil-may-care manner.  We will carpe the diem, let chips fall where they may, disobey the voice of T.S. Eliot telling us, “Hurry up, it’s time.”  What, me worry?

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