Category: Blithe Spirit

Secret proposals, payoffs, divisiveness, scorched earth? OP is hot: Today’s Wed Journal column

NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS: Is it kosher for the village not to reveal development proposals (RFPs), as it did when Wednesday Journal asked for them in the matter of Colt building renovation? These are secret proposals? What about the soon-to-be-approved protocols of participation? Would the proposals be revealed to participants? One good thing: this refusal spares our village board any second-guessing by citizens with their own ideas. This is only right. Who are these citizens anyway? What trees do they plant?
 
PAYOFF: What about Whiteco paying off the village for honoring its agreement? It’s coughing up $400G for unnamed and so far nonexistent village housing programs, to say nothing of another $200G in environment-friendly additions to the already agreed-on building. That would be your cost of doing business in Oak Park, insofar as this village board is a very sensitive creature, and kid gloves are in order. It’s not under the table, anyhow.
 
TAKING OFFENSE: And hey, since when is it not kosher to ask about conflict of interest, as board President Pope asked a few weeks ago about who would plan the Baltimore Colt redo? You can’t even ask? Trustee Milstein was “offended … deeply offended … angered,” as if he’d been told his mother wore army boots. Trustee Baker found it “repugnant.” But what have board members got better to do than ask about conflict of interest? It’s what legislators do.
 
NAME GAME: These two are of the board majority, but that’s too tame a phrase for the poets among us. “Milstein majority,” in honor of its stormy-petrel spokesman, does have a ring to it, though editor-columnist Trainor has the fetching “fearsome foursome of Bob [Milstein], Baker, Brock and Brady (the killer Bs).” The poets love it. But Milstein’s the man, poetic or not, so we should go with the other one, MM.
 
Indeed, board meetings and local papers offer us no small array of Milstein moments. For instance, the opposition Village Manager Association (VMA) was part of Oak Park’s “growth machine,” until “swept out of power,” he said some months back. Yes!
 
When this paper’s doughty editor criticized the MM, Milstein said the editor had been “smoking something,” making a thinly veiled reference to hashish. Worse, this editor is a writer of “divisive columns,” he said.
 
This has to stop, any fair-minded person will agree. And while we’re on the subject, isn’t it grand that we have no divisive trustees?
 
Two months ago Milstein burst forth with 1,145 words in defense of his majority, taxing developer Taxman with putting out an “unprofessional, scorched-earth press release that debases the integrity of the board.” His sole VMA opposition on the board, Ray Johnson, he said “will milk every ounce of this [Colt controversy] for his re-election campaign.” Johnson, moreover, wants to be “the knight in shining armor.”
 
The tax appeal process—a county process?—favors businesses and apartment building owners; it’s “an onerous old-boys network.”
 
These are the words of a man with a mission. We need people like that in village government.
 
Wait. That’s not right. It should read, “We need people like that in village government?”
 
HOUSECLEANING: Meanwhile, on the school scene, District 97 Supt. Constance C. apparently was not born yesterday. When she hit the ground running last fall, fresh from Zion, she called for an audit of business and personnel operations and found dirt under the rug. Better to find it now than later, when she herself would have some explaining to do. Is this standard for a new super? I don’t think so. But what a good idea in this case, when she succeeded a super of many years tenure, under whom matters got sloppy.
 
FP CALLS: And then there’s the YMCA getting ready for its big move to Forest Park, where there will be room to roam and then some. The market had to be part of that decision. Sitting on expensive land with no room to roam is a nice incentive to sell and move.
 
It’s not expensive? So why is Time & Money restaurant—sorry, Thyme and Honey—also moving to FP? Because a big building is coming to take its place, something in line with that land’s market value. Oak Park is hot, you’d better believe it.

Big question

Is not this country built on the rule of law? asks NJT.  Why did many of the rally participants express beliefs that they were above the rule of law?  Did not many break the law by entering America through numerous illegal channels?
 
Comment: Rule of law is hard for many to understand.  It takes appreciation of an abstraction, which is beyond most, being a statement of what goes regardless of circumstance.  When a rule works badly for someone, he considers it unjust.  But rules always work out badly for someone.  Question is, are they good rules for the most part or not, and what if we didn’t have them, what then?
 

Immigrants

J. Peder Zane, in the Charlotte NC News & Observer, says, “If we’re lucky, the clash of civilizations will not end with a bang but a whimper, not with a mushroom cloud but the cry of the baby that brings a Muslim majority to Western Europe.”

It could happen by mid-century.  It “appears inevitable.”  We have our immigrants, always have had them, and have a formula for handling and absorbing them.  It’s called assimilation.  Europe has no comparable experience and no formula. 

Zane points to Bruce Bawer’s “indispensable” new book, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (Doubleday, $23.95, 247 pages), which I happen to be reading.  Bawer moved to Amsterdam to get away from a spoiled love affair — with his male partner.  It looked great to him, until he ran into immigrant Muslims.  His story starts with gay-bashing on the street with onlookers doing nothing. 

It continues with a devastating account of politically correct blindness to Europe’s enemy within, not just of gays like himself but of all Western values.  Women are 4th-class citizens in Muslim enclaves.  The enclaves are often left to themselves by government and become laws unto themselves.

It’s a tough book, full of warning.  It also offers stark contrast between a relatively open society, ours, and a relatively closed one, European.  Europe’s media are often subsidized by government or government-owned.  People much more reflexively approve what authorities do.  Public sentiments, however, are contradicted regularly in private conversation.

Class warfare

My friend Tom Foley pushes term limits as crucial to our society.  I’m beginning to agree with him based on this latest outpouring from the political class, to which almost all of our elected officials belong.
 
It’s their calling on Bush to “launch an investigation into possible price gouging by oil companies” that does it for me:
“Anyone who is trying to take advantage of this situation while American families are forced into making tough choices over whether to fill up their cars or severely cut back their budgets should be investigated and prosecuted,” House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Illinois, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee, wrote in a letter to President Bush. “Therefore, we believe that Federal law enforcement agencies and regulators should take every available step to ensure that all Federal laws protecting American consumers from price-fixing, collusion, gouging and other anti-competitive practices are vigorously enforced.”
Anti-competitive?  This is when the feds protect competition?  When did they get going on that operation?  And it’s while labor unions have privileged status, not to mention affirmative-action measures all over the place.
 
 
William Anderson recalls “economic crimes” and “speculation” as excuses for government crackdown in the late unlamented Soviet Union.
Today, we see the top lawmakers in the United States trying to take a page out of the USSR in calling for prosecution — and, one would suppose, imprisonment — of oil company executives because gasoline prices have risen drastically at the pump.
He has more to say at the Mises Institute site here.  http://www.mises.org/story/2128

Brown, Byrne, Kass

If you’re looking for a real nothing column, Mark Brown today try Sun-Times, where we get the latest off the top of his hairless head about the George Ryan jury.  Setting up the problem faced by the judge, mistrial or not, and to be faced by appeal judges, ditto, he tells “what Ryan’s lawyers seem to think” (he’s not sure? Webb says he’s appealing) but says he will “leave that to the legal experts.”
 
Legal experts.  They wouldn’t return his calls?  None are cited or quoted, not even anonymously.  We know they are a shifty lot, but couldn’t he nail down even one?  Not even on background?  No, he could not.  Instead, he offers his “own take, as [he] wrote earlier.”  Great.  That’s why we buy the Sun-Times, to get his “take,” the hell with experts, and warmed over, at that.  They don’t call him King of the Cracker Barrel for nothing. 
 
Meanwhile, Chi Trib has Dennis Byrne — on a Sunday, no less — asking where the heck are corporate biggies who give millions for a park, support “quixotic-like” (sic: “quixotic” will do, or if he insists, “[Don] Quixote-like”) reform endeavors, and fund civic reports but exercise no muscle to achieve reform.  Byrne gives a brief history of Illinois corruption and gubernatorial convictions and refers to “career criminals like George Ryan and some in Mayor Daley’s inner circle” along the way, concluding:
I don’t mean that we should turn government over to a corporate junta. But the 12 honest jurors who convict the likes of Ryan sure could use some help.
Last but not least, John Kass has questions for jurors in the coming trial of Mayordaley’s patronage chief, as:
If you’re the 19-year-old son of a Carpenters Union boss, shouldn’t you be made a building inspector–in the wake of fatal porch collapse and nightclub disasters–even though you’re unqualified?
 
Doesn’t being a member of the 19th Ward Democratic Organization entitle you to make more than $100,000 a year as a city graffiti blaster? If the answer is “No,” what are you? Stupid?
 
Are you black, white, Hispanic or other in real life and on paper? [For designation as oppressed minority in need of special treatment and rich contracts]
Kass is pretty good in these matters, but even Homer, also of Greek extraction, nodded.  So he speaks of the mayor being “aggravated,” meaning “angered.”  Sorry, Kass, it don’t compute.  “Aggravate” means to make matters worse.  That’s what Kass does when he does all this reporting and summarizing of city corruption: that is, he aggravates the situation facing City Hall and in so doing angers the powers that be.
 
How’s “pissed off”?

Cowering in our bunkers

Dennis Byrne invokes H.G. Wells to illustrate libs’ foot-dragging in the War on Islamofascism:

In H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine,” the helplessly fattened Eloi spend most of their time waiting around their pleasant surroundings to be snatched away by cannibal Morlocks. Those succulent pinkish Eloi who luckily aren’t invited for dinner this time can only wait their turn, not so much in fear, but–simpletons that they are–in resigned ignorance.

Though he wrote it more than 100 years ago, Wells nonetheless had many of today’s Americans nailed. Today’s Eloi are Americans whose only “strategy” for dealing with the dreadful and grisly terrorist assaults on us is to pull back and wait for the next one.

He also gives a hard-copy hat tip to “blogger Jim Bowman” (me) for putting him on to the liberal Brookings Institution’s “Iraq Index”

to my knowledge, the most comprehensive statistical compilation of Iraqi conditions, tracking economic, public opinion and security data. While partisans make sweeping assumptions about what are factual questions, the periodic report lays out such comparative data as pre-war and current levels of telephone and water service, unemployment, Iraq security forces, troop facilities and coalition strength.

I won’t try to characterize the report one way or another, except to say that those blind to any good news will be surprised.

It’s of course an answer to such attempted rebuttals of an earlier Byrne column as the letter from Mt. Prospect suggesting Chi Trib send Byrne to Iraq and offering to pay his way back, which with its opening faux statement of agreement manages to be snide enough.  But it turns out the Brookings Institution, a liberal organization, has been keeping track and Byrne, who tipped his hat in the earlier column to war correspondents, needn’t go there.  Is that good enough for Mt. Prospect?  We do not know.

OUR INTIMIDATED GENERALS

Chicken colonels we have heard of — full colonels with big bird insigne, versus Light Colonels, the lieutenant variety — but chicken generals?  This is what Judith Apter Klinghoffer thinks, as she says at George Mason University’s History News Network, and may all my rants be as articulate:

I am writing in the hope of lowering my blood pressure. Islamists around the world are on a rampage and all the media focus is on retired generals who did not dare confront their superiors or even tell the truth to the president when asked to do so in the most direct manner.

I have called for Rumsfeld’s replacement months ago but that is besides the point. For the generals to attack the Secretary of Defense on the issue of troop numbers in Iraq in 2003 is ridiculous. I want to know whether they think we need more troops in Iraq today or tomorrow. To hear two and three star generals whine that Rumsfeld is too intimidating causes one to ask who else can so easily intimidate them? Are we talking perhaps of the insurgents, Ahmadinejad, Assad Fils, the North Korean or China? Imagine being a soldier who has served under the command of so easily intimidated a general. Their retired generals’ contention that they are speaking for their active duty colleagues merely makes matters worse.

On This Week Joe Klein, whom no one can accuse of being a Bush fan, said that Bush repeatedly asked the generals in Iraq if they had everything they needed and they repeatedly assured him they did. But when Jerry Bremer asked them what they would do with an additional division, they said, we’d clear Baghdad. Excuse me? The American army in Iraq does not have a single general with enough guts to respond to the president’s question with “depends on what you want us to do?”

Sorry, guys, civil control of the military is not our problem. Gutless military leadership is.

I will quote and endorse Instapundit, who linked this:

Ouch.

30 years late

Chi Trib’s Diane Rado’s sidebar to her page-oner on the cost of textbooks — there’s a markup! you save by buying online! — is a cameo study of journalism today.
 
* “Illinois spends taxpayer dollars” on nonpublic schools, she opens.  As opposed to the other kind of dollars Illinois spends.  “Taxpayer” helps get our dander up.
 
* “. . . even as public schools struggle” to buy books.  Dander rising.
 
* It’s $3 million vs. $24 million for publics.  Oh?
 
* “While taxpayers might be surprised . . . ”  While she’s at it, she might try “although,” which has only one meaning, while “while” has two, one of them having to do with time, as in “at the same time,” etc.
 
* The state has been doing this “since the mid-70s,” she says in the fourth paragraph.  Oh?  This sneaked up on her.
 
* Americans United does not like it, never did: “Taxpayers ought to stand up . . .” says their spokesman.
 
* “Not everyone agrees” with him.  Not everyone?  Hardly anyone, to judge by the 30-year standing-up hiatus.  Who’s even been talking about it, with the George Ryan trial and all? 
 
* The Catholic lobbyist who got the money in the first place has the last word, however: “It is in the state’s interest to keep private schools healthy,” he says.  We don’t know what else he said, but anyhow his last comment hangs there: “They save the public school system money.”  I’d say that’s pretty obvious, but does Rado know it?  If nonpublic schools closed tomorrow and sent their kids to public ones, does she realize what it would do to the price of textbooks?  Heck, readers would be asking, “Who’s George Ryan?”