Chicago is considering leasing its water system to help fix the budget.
The new boss could charge whatever they want for water, CBS 2's Roseanne Tellez reports.
Could it happen here in Chicago? It already has nearby. Homer Glen in Will County relies on Lake Michigan water, but the supply comes from a German-owned firm. Locals say there's a lot more than water going down the drain.
It's a vital resource you can't live without. But in Homer Glen, the question is can you afford water. Residents say rates are breaking the bank http://cbs2chicago.com/local/water.system.2.1267896.html
Looking at some larger questions, I find the missile defense quarrel to be a good example for thinking about the place of dissident conservatives in contemporary debates. Defending Europe from an Iranian threat that doesn’t exist and wouldn’t be directed at them if it did with a system that probably wouldn’t work is the sort of thing that one would think American conservatives would find laughably unnecessary. It is the purest sort of irrelevant government activity that does nothing for the United States, wastes the public’s money, and inflames other nations against us. The system’s relative, albeit still quite limited, popularity in the countries in question feeds off of Old World antagonisms that most Americans neither understand nor care to learn about. For most mainstream conservatives, none of this matters. The decision is “weak” and it is “appeasement,” therefore they oppose it.
Despite reasonable arguments that Bush was not a conservative in any important respect, mainstream conservatives have shown no desire to distance themselves from him when he was at his most revolutionary and destructive. This is important to keep in mind, because it tells us that mainstream conservatives did not simply “go along” with Bush’s disastrous foreign policy primarily for reasons of tribal or partisan “team” loyalty. They embraced it and believe to this day that it was essentially correct, even if it was perhaps poorly managed here and there.
Foreign policy is not the only source of intense disagreement, but it tends to be a prominent point of contention because it is of particular importance to many of the dissident conservatives, because it is one area of disagreement where fundamental differences are not tolerated on the right, and because it is the only time when dissident conservative arguments seem to interest non-conservatives. As such, foreign policy has an outsized role in defining dissident conservative arguments, and this is probably most true for my own commentary, which has the perverse effect of letting mainstream conservatives classify us as crypto-leftists whenever it suits them because they have already defined any non-hawkish, non-nationalist, non-hegemonist position as left-wing and therefore absolutely unacceptable. The point here is not to rehearse all the reasons why hawkish, nationalist and hegemonist views are antithetical to a conservative disposition and damaging to all of the things conservatives claim to want to preserve, true as these claims are, but to recognize that there is no persuading such people when many of the fundamental assumptions they hold are diametrically opposed to ours and utterly wrong. There no longer seems any value in making the effort to persuade them.
http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2009/10/23/the-gop-is-adrift/
Officials reported ‘intense bombardment’ of the South Waziristan Agency by Pakistan’s military, as General Parvez Kayani vowed to cleanse the area of people with an “anti-state agenda.”
Today forces engaged in a 16 hour battle to capture what is being described as a “significant mountaintop.” 15 militants were reported killed, as well as one Pakistani soldier, in the clash.
Pakistan’s military insists the offensive is going extremely well, though so far they have only managed to capture one hilltop and a tiny village, and the village took over a week of non-stop fighting to gain control over.
Officials say they estimate that the conflict will only take another six to eight weeks, but concede that the offensive is open-ended. If past examples are any indication, it will likely go on well beyond the projected end date.
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/10/25/pakistan-captures-mountain-stronghold-killing-15/#
In April 2005, sheriff's deputies reached a suburban Seattle home in time to prevent a firebomb from detonating. But there was nothing the sheriff's department could do to defuse another volatile situation at the site: a feud between the explosives teams that showed up from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The attempted arson was the apparent handiwork of the Earth Liberation Front, a designated a domestic terrorism group. But trouble at the scene emerged when FBI and ATF explosives experts seemed to believe their own agencies should head the investigation, recalled Sgt. John Urquhart, a spokesman for the King County sheriff's office. "It was clear that there was something going on. There was tension between the groups of ATF agents and FBI agents," Urquhart told TIME http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091025/us_time/08599193209100
A U.S. military helicopter crashed Monday while returning from the scene of a firefight with suspected Taliban drug traffickers in western Afghanistan, killing 10 Americans including three DEA agents in a not-so-noticed war within a war. http://tinyurl.com/yfybgrt