Palin’s record in turning out the corrupt, nepotistic old guard in Alaska will allow her to legitimately go after Obama’s role as a facilitator of the Rezko-Blagojevich corruption in Illinois. With the whole world to choose from, Obama chose to become a Chicago politician, and not one of those Quixotic reformers who pop up there intermittently, such as the former junior senator from Illinois in 1999-2005, Republican Peter Fitzgerald. Obama’s predecessor was dumped by the local GOP after one term because he insisted on bringing federal pitbull prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald (no relation) to town, who has since sent to prison Republican governor George Ryan, bipartisan fixer Tony Rezko, and, maybe someday, current Democratic governor Rod Blagojevich.

Obama sure hasn’t made that mistake of using his federal power to help clean up Illinois.

When you understand Illinois politics, Obama’s emphasis on “bipartisanship” takes on a sinister air, since in Illinois the central faultline undermining the commonweal is not Republican vs. Democrat but Politician vs. Public. As ex-Sen. Fitzgerald told John Kass of the Chicago Tribune:

“In the final analysis, The Combine’s allegiance is not to a party, but to their pocketbooks. They’re about making money off the taxpayers. And all these guys being mentioned, [in the Rezko trial] they’re part of it.”

Obama’s ostensible cause was not “fixing the broken politics” of Illinois, but getting a bigger cut of the boodle for his race. Obama’s indoctrination in Saul Alinsky’s cynical “Rules for Radicals” left no room for Fitzgeraldian idealism. Alinsky taught that you question people until you discover their self-interest, then you go from there. In reality, of course, Obama mostly just succeeded in promoting himself. The abstemious Obama appears to have been less interested in money than in the power he could garner as the clean face of the Combine, while allies like legislature godfather Emil Jones and Richie Daley (whom Michelle went to work for in the early 1990s). His most obvious slip-up was bringing Tony Rezko in on his mansion purchase, which I would guess was done for Michelle, who is far more materialistic.

Chicago politics is a combination of the boring (the scams are mostly nickel and dime stuff, just done over and over) and the seemingly bizarre (e.g., the brother of Richie Daley, the brother of Tony Rezko, and the son of Elijah Muhammad teaming up to fraudulently get a $10 million minority set-aside contract from Southwestern Bell for pay phones in Cook County jails). Illinois represents the triumph of post-everything politics: at the highest levels, race, religion, ideology, character, being a terrorist, endorsing the Manson murders, none of that means anything as long as you are an insider with clout and are willing to play ball.

Obama played ball. The media have paid little attention to it, but Chicago politics are a huge part of the Obama story.

McCain’s choice for Veep of the young lady governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, seems, initially, like a good way out of the box of Romney (who would make a decent President but a poor VP candidate) vs. Lieberman. As I always say, there are 300,000,000 million people in this country, more than a few of whom would do better than the usual suspects. Of course, I’m just trying to wave my hands around here without looking too idiotic, because I have only the dimmest idea who Sara Palin is.

Having now read her Wikipedia article, she certainly sounds energetic. Although, with five kids, she may have a little too much on her plate, even for somebody who appears to be a force of nature. She’s definitely the anti-Cheney, the complete opposite of the Washington insider. Symbolically, she seems like an excellent choice–a sterling representative of a young, healthy, energetic, honest grassroots conservative America, the living embodiment of the fact that Affordable Family Formation is the bulwark of the GOP.

The McCain strategy here appears to be to play to Us vs. Them feelings, with Republicans portrayed as the core of America–the married couples, people with a life–while portraying the Democrats as the marginals–singles, elites, gays, underclass, etc — with the Democrats as the Party of Dying Alone.

Whether Palin will actually turn out to be a good campaigner, much less a good President, is totally beyond me. But it sounds like her record in turning out the corrupt, nepotistic old guard in Alaska will allow her to legitimately go after Obama’s role as a facilitator of the Rezko-Blagojevich corruption in Illinois.

One thing I am competent to comment on is that I hear her husband, who works for the oil industry in the winter and is a fisherman in the summer (Alaska fishermen are staples on all those “America’s Toughest Jobs” reality shows, so that will make killer visuals), is 1/8th Yu’pik , which offers you the chance to one-up the Stuff White People Like crowd in terms of minority sensitivity. They will want to correct your gaffe of calling him part-Eskimo and explain that nobody is allowed to say “Eskimo” anymore. Everybody who is anybody must say “Inuit.”

Sorry, but that’s just the majority pushing the minority around.

As I wrote in 2002, you can tell those Canadian-symps:

The official handbook of the 3-year-old Canadian Territory of Nunavut says, “A word of advice, please don’t call Inuit here “Eskimos.” They’ve always called themselves Inuit, or ‘the people’ in Inuktitut, their native tongue.”

The confusion over “Eskimo” vs. “Inuit” illustrates the paradoxes that accompany the many attempts these days to change the names of ethnic groups.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, “Many Americans today either avoid this term (Eskimo) or feel uneasy using it.” For example, a Web site of the University of Wisconsin School of Education advises teachers, “There are no ‘Eskimo’ people.”

That would come as a surprise, however, to thousands of Yup’ik-speaking Eskimos in Western Alaska who much prefer to be called “Eskimo” instead of “Inuit.”

Why? They aren’t Inuit.

Steven A. Jacobson, a professor at the Alaska Native Language Center (of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks), told United Press International, “Yup’ik speakers say, ‘We’re Yup’ik Eskimos; our relatives in northern Alaska, Canada and Greenland are Inuit Eskimos; they aren’t Yup’ik, and we aren’t Inuit, but we’re all Eskimos.’ Yup’ik speakers prefer to be called ‘Yup’iks’ … and — in contrast to Inuit in Canada — don’t mind the word ‘Eskimo,’ but they do not like to be called ‘Inuit.’”

“Eskimo” remains the only word that describes all the physically and culturally quite homogenous groups that extend from the Siberian side of the Bering Strait to Greenland. The American Heritage Dictionary sums up, “While use of these terms (’Inuit’ and ‘Yup’ik’) is often preferable when speaking of the appropriate linguistic group, none of them can be used of the Eskimoan peoples as a whole; the only inclusive term remains Eskimo.”

Professor Tim Groseclose has resigned from the Admissions Committee of UCLA, alleging that the university is illegally favoring black students in admissions. This is illegal under Proposition 209, which bans all state-sponsored discrimination by race. Although the admissions committee is not supposed to know what race a student is a member of, each student writes an “admission essay” which may provide a clue.

Campus officials have been under intense pressure to increase numbers of black students, particularly since a 2006 public outcry over the fact that only 96 of the nearly 5,000 freshmen who enrolled at the prestigious campus were African American.

This year, 235 black freshmen plan to enroll for the fall term, about 5 percent of the freshman class and more than double the 2006 number.

“There’s circumstantial evidence to suggest some back door racial preferences are going on,” Groseclose said.

The professor, who holds an endowed chair and has a background in statistical analysis, said he wasn’t resigning from the Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools over that issue, but because campus officials refused to provide him with the information he wanted to analyze the admissions.

Gloseclose said he wanted to use statistical analysis to study the probability that students were being admitted by race. He asked for 1,000 student files, including essays, with the names removed.[UCLA official resigns over admissions concerns | He suspects cheating in racial admissions, which are banned by state law. By Marla Jo Fisher, Orange County Register,  August 28, 2008 ]

They wouldn’t give him the essays, saying that they were private. Of course, this sort of statistical argument is the kind of thing that the pseudonomous La Griffe De Lion has been hammering away at for years. But even if you don’t know statistics, the fact that admissions of black students have more than doubled in two years suggests that something is going on. Professor Groseclose has a report called “Report on Suspected Malfeasance in UCLA Admissions and the Accompanying Cover-Up “, [PDF] which, according to Eugene Volokh, includes “letters from three other (nonvoting) committee members, including two student members, that support his view that the university has not been sufficiently willing to allow possibly critical examination of the underlying data..” Groseclose traces the genesis of the new affirmative action policy to a frontpage article in the LA Times titled A Startling Statistic at UCLA.[By Rebecca Trounson, June 03, 2006 ] which revealed that only 2 percent of UCLA’s freshmen were African-American. This statistic may have startled the LA Times, but I bet it wouldn’t have startled Steve Sailer or La Griffe De Lion.

I moved to Chicago in 1982, not too long before Barack Obama did, but, unlike him, I can’t recall that I ever once thought of getting involved in Chicago politics. To me, wanting to be a Chicago politician would be like me wanting to be an Albanian politician, or me dreaming of opening a shop that buys and sells pre-owned hubcaps.

This is not at all to say that the spider’s web of Chicago political relationships is boring for the disinterested spectator.

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Genuine environmentalists — not the posers in hiking boots at Sierra Club headquarters — are the toughest critics of the immigration-fueled population explosion. How is America supposed to reduce greenhouse gases, about which liberals claim to be concerned, and achieve other environmental goals when Washington’s policies mandate an additional 100 million residents in just 33 years? That’s crazy — we don’t have adequate resources like water for the current residents. But as columnist Froma Harrop observes, neither party will debate the demographic time-bomb facing the nation: Shhh! This scares both parties, Providence Journal, August 28, 2008.

DENVER — There’s a burning concern in the American West — almost an obsession — that Democrats will not touch in their convention here. Nor will Republicans in St. Paul. It is the U.S. population explosion. The West is feeling the brunt of it, as flowing lava of housing developments and big-box crudscapes claim its cherished open spaces - and increasingly scarce water supplies.

The U.S. Census Bureau now expects America’s population to top 400 million by 2039, far earlier than previously forecast. The 300-million mark was hit only two years ago, so if this prediction is correct, the headcount will have soared by 100 million people in 33 short years.

America’s fastest-growing region has been and will continue to be the Intermountain West. Its megalopolises - centered on Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City - are set to add 13 million people by 2040, according to a Brookings Institution study. This would be a doubling of their population.

Hyper-growth still brings out happy talk in some circles. The Brookings report looks at the population forecasts for the urban corridor on the eastern face of the Rockies, spreading from Colorado into Wyoming, and enthuses, “Such projections point to a huge opportunity for the Front Range to improve on the current level of prosperity.” There are challenges, it says, but they can be met - and you can almost hear local hearts breaking - by new roads, bigger airports, more office parks.

And where oh where are they going to find water? Every county in Colorado was declared a federal drought disaster area in 2002, when the population stood at 4.5 million. It is expected to approach 8 million by 2035.

You know a problem has gotten difficult to solve when politicians want to stop discussing it. Take the federal debt. In the 1980s, the budget deficit problems alarmed some in the Senate enough to enact Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, legislation which sought to rein in spending by establishing maximum deficit amounts. But that didn’t help pols stop their obsessive spending. Now, when the debt amount is so much greater, the topic goes unmentioned in the campaign.

Immigration is similar. Nobody in Washington wants to tackle the preventable disaster of another 100 million people in 33 years because it would require leadership on a controversial issue. Instead we hear pretty speeches filled with fluff while the nation is headed toward a demographic cliff.