2008

All the best to my fellow Chicagoboyz contributors and readers! I hope that the coming year leaves you healthy and happy or at least prosperous and contented. Feliz año nuevo, as they say in Japan.

Daimler Dingo

It is funny how things work out sometimes.

I am a big fan of reading about armored cars and other types of scouting vehicles from the WW2 era. There have been millions of pages written about the famous tank battles like Kursk. On top of that, there are many, many picture books that feature WW2 tanks. A few subjects that don’t get quite as much attention are armored cars, scout vehicles, and transports. Heck, Patton once said that his greatest weapon was the good old two ton truck.

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Truth & MLA

A muted quote (notice which part is not in “” and which part is not a cliche) from the University of Boston:

“I support speaking truth to power,” said Rzepka, but that requires truth, he added.

MLA debates resolutions this week. “Defenders of the original version faulted Nelson’s version for being even-handed.”  Rhetorician and president of the AAUP, Nelson knows trends; if he’s becoming “even-handed” perhaps MLA is moving toward an accommodation with what we might describe as reality. Anyone who saw Nelson’s debate with Horowitz and has noted his scholarly interests has seen a man quite political, not particularly thoughtful but extroverted & cheerful. If Horowitz is the street corner Bolshevist polemicist that got religion, Nelson is the establishment bore, radical in an appropriately establishment manner. That someone so immersed in cliches calls for equal treatment of Zionists and Anti-zionists may mean the wind has turned. Or his cliches are out of date. I’m hoping for the former.

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2007 In Review for Chicago and Illinois

2007 ended up with the happiest note for Illinois politics in years. On November 7, 2007 disgraced former “Republican” governor George Ryan reported to Federal prison to begin serving his 6 1/2 year sentence. I put the word “Republican” in quotes because the most prominent events in his tenure include waiving the death penalty in Illinois and continued deterioration of our states’ precarious finances.

When the last governor’s race occurred in Illinois between the Democrat Blagojevich and equally uninspiring Judy Barr Topinka I actually hoped for a Democratic victory (normally anathema on this blog) because I figured that the oozing “snail trail” of corruption could be followed to its logical destination if Blogo remained in power. And, sure enough, on December 21, 2007 the Federal prosecutors formally linked Blogo to the Rezco corruption case with more to come.

As always, the FBI are the only people who fight corruption in Illinois, despite our myriad local police and judicial armies dutifully punching the clock, as I noted in this post (it is from 2006, but some things never change, and likely you could utilize it in 2076). The Chicago Police kicked out their superintendent after a series of shocking events, caught on videotape, including the beating of a tiny female bartender by off-duty cops and the inevitable attempts to cover it up. His name is Weis and he is from the FBI; while I admire his guts for taking on this job (where the locals are already disgruntled that the new top cop comes from outside) I think that his odds of success are about the same as the lone survivor in that new “Justice” movie where he attempts to battle 1 billion zombies.

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