“Politics is about enmity,” says Seventh Circuit federal appellate judge and Hyde Park resident Richard Posner in the New Yorker (December 10). “It’s about getting together with your friends and knocking off your enemies. The basic fallacy of liberalism is the idea that if we get together with reasonable people we can agree on everything. But you can’t agree: strife is ineradicable, a fundamental part of nature, in storms and in human relations.”
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Quotes you won’t find anytime soon in a northwest Indiana newspaper. Robert Crandall of the Brookings Institution was quoted in the December 9 Baltimore Sun commenting on a proposed bailout of bankrupt Bethlehem Steel in which federal taxpayers would pay its health-care costs of $1 billion a year so that U.S. Steel could more conveniently buy the failed company. He said such a measure would do little to stimulate the economy because “the entire industry…has a market cap of less than $3 billion. It’s a very small, almost inconsequential part of the economy.”
A Chicago that might have been. On September 28 John Calloway gave a talk at the Design Excellence Awards ceremony of the Chicago branch of the American Institute of Architects. He recalled covering the near west side’s unsuccessful early-60s struggle against Richard J. Daley’s plan to put the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois in the neighborhood. “I remember writing an editorial…and I suggested that they clear Goose Island as a campus. And the more I looked at it, it’s an idea that I don’t think was all that half-baked. But they didn’t listen to us.”
