Tag Archive 'Chicago'

Blagojevich’s Football

Lee on Dec 14 2008 | Filed under: Domestic Politics

I was in no doubt that Rod Blagojevich was a troubled and exceedingly peculiar man. These past few days have seen a flood of revealing details from aides and Democratic Party insiders which cast even his sanity into question (potentially doing him a great legal service). But one of the oddest aspects of the governor that I’ve yet seen reported is his obsession with a plastic hair brush:

And yet, Mr. Blagojevich, 52, rarely turns up for work at his official state office in Chicago, former employees say, is unapologetically late to almost everything, and can treat employees with disdain, cursing and erupting in fury for failings as mundane as neglecting to have at hand at all times his preferred black Paul Mitchell hairbrush. He calls the brush “the football,” an allusion to the “nuclear football,” or the bomb codes never to be out of reach of a president.
(NYT)

Sphere: Related Content

No Comments »

An Immunity to Ecstasy

Lee on Nov 05 2008 | Filed under: Domestic Politics, Election 2008

So we had an election. For those in the new opposition the outcome was variously enviable, troubling, or contemptible. For the victors it was…what else, an occasion for gathering an enormous outdoor rally at an urban theatrical stage to chant.

For my own part, I’m always somewhat reluctant to criticize the phenomenon of Barack Obama, because I cannot do so without confessing I miss the point itself. That’s because I possess a certain immunity to his allegedly irresistible charm. I miss the intimate personal connection supposedly conveyed through elaborately choreographed and cinematically lit mass spectacles, I find his celebrated speeches largely barren of purpose, and perhaps above all, I remain permanently unmoved by the emotional ecstasy his presence provokes in so many.

It should be acknowledged as true that if these impressions precondition your criticism, you do miss the point of Obama as political leader and cultural phenomenon on a profound level (and I surely do). For the critic, this can pose a difficulty that one must become an opponent of the phenomenon itself, rather than just its policy projects. And for the moment, that is to be the adversary of a powerful political tide.
(more…)

Sphere: Related Content

No Comments »

Deaths in Chicago

MikeR on Sep 04 2008 | Filed under: Around the Web, MikeR's Page

Instapundit
About the same number of gun deaths in Chicago, over the summer, as US deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wonder why the media focuses on US deaths abroad but ignores the violence to US citizens here at home.

Sphere: Related Content

1 Comment »

A New Libertarianism of Paranoid Revolt

Lee on Aug 02 2008 | Filed under: Lee's Page, Libertarianism

Jordan Page (who is a kind of Ronpaulist Joan Baez) reflects on the “Revolution March,” a July 12th Ron Paul protest rally in Washington DC, in part organized by Adam Kokesh (who of late believes the Washington police are involved in a clandestine conspiracy against him).

Now, I grew up in the libertarian movement such as it was. Although I no longer consider myself a libertarian out of respect for the philosophy, I think I knew it well. My libertarianism was of the rightish sort, but fundamentally a movement for liberty through reason. A movement of the great economists and political philosophers of the Austrian School and the University of Chicago. The movement of Mises and Friedman. But this paranoid, revolutionary rubbish presented by Page as libertarianism, is utterly unrecognizable to me.

(more…)

Sphere: Related Content

24 Comments »

Kool-Aid Man on the Loose on North Side Chicago

ChrisB on Jun 24 2008 | Filed under: Around the Web

Oooooh yeah!

No Comments »

Exit Trinity. Exit Church.

Lee on May 31 2008 | Filed under: Domestic Politics, Religion and theology, Uncategorized

Pfleger

Well, Mr. Obama has finally quit that ludicrous Chicago institution known as Trinity United Church of Christ. His membership had survived Rev. Wright, but was ultimately done in over the visiting Rev. Michael Pfleger’s bizarre self-hating white guilt trip, and radicalized political rally in sacred masquerade.

Having seen the deranged, obscenely ideological sermons of Wright and then Pfleger, it may be that conservatives are experiencing for the first time in national politics what the left has endured for decades: the insufferable and corrosive experience of seeing clergy involved in brutish political editorializing from the pulpit, done allegedly under the sanction of God, for and toward His rather famously unpredictable purposes.

Perhaps there might then be a collective recognition in this country that aggressively involving the church in politics isn’t such a swell idea. Perhaps even a deeper understanding that God –who by His nature rules only through decree– might not be such a logical source for consultation in a democracy, which rules through consent of the governed.

Too much to hope for, I know. But one can dream of a better day. Even in an era where the preacher pirates in the Evangelical social conservative movement hold a cutlass at the Republican party’s throat every election. And thereby a patently preposterous, explicitly theocratic ignoramus like Mike Huckabee, can experience significant support within that party for its vice presidential nomination.

Sphere: Related Content

1 Comment »

Challenging the Super-delegates

Lee on Feb 06 2008 | Filed under: Around the Web

Barack Obama

Obama in Chicago: “If this contest comes down to superdelegates, we are going to be able to say we have more pledged delegates, which means the Democratic voters have spoken. Those superdelegates, those party insiders would have to think long and hard how they would approach the nomination,” he said.

Sphere: Related Content

No Comments »

Ouch, Ouch, Ouch.

Lee on Feb 05 2008 | Filed under: Around the Web

Barack Obama supporter on Hannity

of Sean Hannity asking Frank Luntz’s group of Democratic Obama supporters to name one (1) specific accomplishment of their candidate. They all fail embarrassingly and resort to offering Obama’s personality characteristics as achievements. One young girl does manage to meekly submit “community organizer,” which may be a valid allusion to Barack’s accomplishments on behalf of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago in the 1980s. The rest…ought to be ashamed of themselves. Anyone this uninformed about who they intend to vote for, should probably not be voting in an election to begin with.

From: HotAir

Sphere: Related Content

1 Comment »

Get rewarded at leading casinos.

online casino real money usa