Tuesday, March 13th, 2007
300
My review of Frank Miller’s 300 – ” Then we will fight in the shade” – is posted at Chicago Boyz.
Archive for the ‘chicago boyz’ Category
Friday, March 9th, 2007
“DA MARE”
“Chicago ain’t ready for reform”
Alderman Paddy Bauler
Jonathan at Chicago Boyz points to “A Brilliant Analysis of Chicago Politics” by Michael Barone entitled “Mayor Daley Re-elected“. I have to concur.
I grew up reading columns by the legendary Mike Royko and as a small lad of five or six, I was hustled by patronage minions of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Park District overlord, Ed Kelley, along with other children in a park district summer day camp, onto school buses to participate in a parade downtown marching past Hizzoner himself ( this was my first and last moment participating in Democratic politics). Barone’s piece on Chicago politics is one of the few I would put in a league with Royko or alongside the excellent Cohen and Taylor biography of Richard J. Daley, American Pharoah. An excerpt from Barone:
“Things became different after Richard M. Daley was elected to a two-year term in 1989 after the death of Harold Washington. The new Mayor Daley was as popular in the suburbs as in the city–perhaps even more so. He became the face of the Democratic party in Illinois. Even though Republicans, in the Republican year of 1994, were able to re-elect Edgar and get majorities in the legislature, they have fared disastrously otherwise. The Daleys gave great encouragement and tacit support to Bill Clinton in the 1992 primaries, and were amply rewarded: Bill Daley became NAFTA honcho and then secretary of commerce; Richie Daley advanced his plans to expand O’Hare Airport. His father built O’Hare to its present dimensions; he seeks to expand it much more. They both recognized that Chicago established its great eminence in 1850-1950 as the railroad hub of the nation and have consistently sought to make it in 1950–2050 the great airport hub of the nation.
Given New York’s dysfunctional airports, long misadministered by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and the distance of city-mismanaged LAX from the rest of the country, they have had as their major competition only Atlanta and maybe Dallas–Fort Worth; and O’Hare–named after a machine-related World War II fighter pilot who was a genuine hero–is I think the only worldwide equal of Heathrow. Daley’s in with the Clinton administration helped, as did his in with Speaker Dennis Hastert, who is from the collar counties and was so much a political ally of Daley’s that when it came time to redistrict Illinois in 2001, the Democrats in the legislature, led by Michael Madigan and surely not out of consultation with Daley, sacrificed a Downstate incumbent and left the Republicans the majority of the Illinois delegation.
Asked if the sacrificed Democrat would like the plan, Madigan, in the monosyllabic don’t-back-no-losers language of Illinois politics, replied, “No.”
Indeed.
Friday, February 16th, 2007
ARE EMPIRES DRIVEN BY EGALITARIAN DYNAMISM?
An interesting hypothesis by Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz. Reminds me somewhat of Victor Davis Hanson’s belief in the motive force of Western civic militarism.
A topic that is right up the alley of Dr. Nexon and the boys at Coming Anarchy.
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007
ECONOMIC MAN VS. PRIMARY LOYALTIES
I’ve posted this over at Chicago Boyz.
Lex has strong objections to “secularization” as an explanation for tempering historical tribalism in the West. I’ll comment more as soon as I can.
Exceptionally busy day – I’ll try to get some quality blogging in late tonight. No rest for the wicked.
Sunday, February 4th, 2007
RECOMMENDED READING
Sunday…Sunday…Sunday….where action is the attraction…
Bruce Kesler -” Interagency Coordination Requires Dems & Reps To Come Together“
Top billing. The issue, while seemingly a dry one of inside-the-beltway bureaucratic wrangling among deputy assistant secretaries really could not be more important for increasing the resiliency of U.S. foreign policy. Why can’t the United States respond effectively to nimble 4GW groups ? Look to the lack of “operational jointness“, ” unified action” and ” System Administration” and the plethora of turf battles and bureaucratic empire building. More on this topic in the near future.
James McCormick -“Iklé — Annihilation From Within“
A deep and probing review at Chicago Boyz of an important book (I’m reading it now).
Gabriel Kolko at DNI -” The Age of Perpetual Conflict“
Kolko is the well known Marxist historian and one of the more credible scholars (i.e. he’s a real historian, not a Noam Comsky type polemicist) with an unrelentingly critical view of the United States. I’m holding this one up as a negative example; as a vigorous argument for isolationism and for a weakness of reasoning that assumes as static benefits of global interventionism ( bad actions deterred by the potential of intervention are ignored but are assumed to continue after a shift to isolationism) as a given while counting only the costs.
Catholicgauze -“Turkish Payback to Ralph Peters and Signs of Things to Come? “
I agree this is disturbing. I am no expert on Turkish politics but there seems to be an emerging strand of crypto-Islamist rejectionism of the West in Turkey that is larger than issues over Iraq. To hazard a guess, anti-Americanism is partly a safe “euphemistic” discourse to hide opposition to secularist Kemalism ( which if you oppose openly in Turkey -or even not so openly -that gets your party banned and perhaps you a jail sentence). Anti-Americanism or anti-Westernism can be presented as Turkish nationalism, even when it masks an ideology that is decidely transnationalist.
Marc Schulman – “Who Is George Soros? “
Speaking of disturbing. George Soros appears to be becoming unhinged. Does he realize that he – a major Democratic Party and liberal organization contributor – is openly suggesting introducing Kangaroo Courts to try Republicans and conservatives or is he so isolated in a bubble that he does not realize how that statement sounds to folks who are not on the MoveOn.org email list ?
How would Soros like somebody saying ” We should de-naturalize and deport politically active, authoritarian, crackpot, billionaires who violate the Logan Act ?”
Gunnar Peterson – “Protect the transaction“
System security expert Gunnar Peterson opines on Col. David Kilcullen’s post Two Schools of Classical Counterinsurgency from his professional perspective.
That’s it.
