Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Andy B. forwarded this neat photo. The machines in the foreground are harvesting beans while the ones in back are preparing the ground for corn planting. The photo appears to have been staged (normally the combines would advance next to each other) but it’s still impressive.
Scott links to this informative article about a proposed Florida law that would allow local governments to condemn private land for the sole purpose of making it available to developers. This is a recent and very bad development in U.S. local politics. The proposed law would formalize the until-now casual predatory behavior of local governments which seize land for the benefit of developers and other well connected interest groups. Legislation should forbid this kind of behavior, not codify it.
That would be the coy Tom Bihn, handbag designer extraordinary.
The bag’s designer Tom Bihn never guessed that purses with the message, “We’re sorry our president is an idiot. We didn’t vote for him” — inscribed in French — would be blowing out of the stores.
“It is a mystery, but since we launched the bags with the label sewn, sales have doubled,” said Bihn, 43. “It is a record in the history of the company.”
He denies the message is targeting US President George W. Bush (news – web sites).
“It depends on either your nationality, or the president you think is an idiot; you choose.”
Ha ha ha! And nobody can accuse Tom of partisanship, because he told us himself that his little canard isn’t aimed at our Prez. Of course not, that’s why the lettering is in French.
Stick to designing handbags, Tom. Leave the comedy to professionals.
(Via Drudge)
I fear two things, mainly. One is that we will lose our nerve politically, and that this war, which we should win handily, will instead become the protracted existential struggle that some of us now say it is when we are feeling pessimistic. The leaders of the Democratic Party, in tacit collaboration with much of the media, seem to be oblivious to this possibility, or indeed even to favor it if it would bring about George Bush’s political downfall. They are helping our enemies to demoralize us into giving up. For all that people like John Kerry talk about Vietnam, it is they who have most conspicuously failed to understand what happened there, and it is they who now allow themselves to be manipulated by our Islamist enemies (that is the kindest interpretation of some Democrats’ behavior). These Democrats, by encouraging defeatism among Americans, risk reenacting past U.S. blunders. The Islamists, unlike the Democratic leadership, have learned the lessons of Vietnam, and are trying to replicate North Vietnam’s success in turning American public opinion. Our enemies would have a much harder go of it if more of our public figures showed some backbone and a better sense of history. Yet as things stand it is we who are having a harder go of it than is necessary.
Wretchard frames our problem:
In one sense, the prodigious American technological engine assures a near chronic imbalance between US military capability, which has increased exponentially and the slow, uncertain and labor intensive process of political transformation.