What is O’Hare expansion really about?

In a blockbuster story in Sunday’s Chicago Sun-Times, Robert C. Herguth begins:

Ald. Patrick Levar asks for and accepts political contributions from businesses that want approval from the City Council committee he chairs. He does the same with municipal workers whose livelihoods depend on him.

By Chicago standards, that’s not uncommon.

But the old-school Northwest Side Democrat (45th) works a more unusual fund-raising angle, too: He pursues and takes donations from O’Hare Airport contractors who, while not directly involved with his panel, are overseen by his brother Michael Levar, a $93,500-a-year supervisor with Mayor Daley’s patronage-heavy Aviation Department.

Pat Levar and his ward organization have received $50,000 from folks who had contracts up for bid before brother Mike. How cozy!

It just so happened that half of the contractors with business before Mike gave money to Pat in the last three years. How does it go down?

One concrete engineer, Takao Nagai, told Herguth:

I don’t talk to Mike directly on a daily basis, but I talk to a couple of his guys who are in charge of us. They mention a fund-raising dinner is coming up and you should probably attend. I said, “OK, what’s the minimum?” … It was very casually brought up when we were taking care of other business at O’Hare.

He didn’t feel pressured, though:

There was a time when I was interested in getting involved a little more in the political scene to find out what it was like … I’m sure that was my intention.

I’m sure it was. “What’s the minimum?” is often a question asked by those merely interested in learning more about political affairs.

Meanwhile, Greg Hinz reports for Crain’s Chicago Business that all the construction management teams bidding for the contract to oversee O’Hare expansion have ties to Da Mare.

I am shocked — shocked! — that there is cronyism going on in this town.

The prize? Sixty million dollars over the next 15 years. And how much of that will wind up back in the pockets of Da Mare and people like Pat Levar. One only knows.

Just don’t let those Bensenville cemeteries get in the way of all the fun, boys! That’s what we’ve got eminent domain for, isn’t it?

On the wall, on the wall, oh the blood done sign your name:

• Liberia mortar barrage kills more than 90
• Marines set to defend embassy in Liberia

As the White House’s race to pin blame for the nonexistent Iraqi WMD fiasco on the CIA continues unbounded, Joshua Micah Marshall takes pains to point out that it was Dubya & Co.’s encouragement of more aggressive intelligence techniques that got us into Iraq in the first place.

He writes:

… You can’t separate our failure to find a lot of what we thought we’d find in Iraq from the “war” the administration has been fighting with the intelligence community for the last two years.

If the administration spent the previous two years “at war” with the CIA, pushing them harder and harder into a set of assumptions (and in many cases conclusions) that turned out to be wildly off-the-mark, shouldn’t there be some political accountability for what turned out to be at best a very poor call?

Marshall has been all over the intelligence follies and is a must-read.

Steve Chapman thinks so:

Our military is bogged down in a guerrilla war overseas, the federal government is spending way beyond its means, and a president from Texas has opened up a credibility gap. Is this 2003 or 1967?

When we elected George W. Bush, we thought he was the son of George H.W. Bush. But he behaves like the proud progeny of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

I think it’s too early to say we’re “bogged down,” but otherwise Chapman is on the mark.

How nice of CIA Director George Tenet to lie on Dubya’s behalf — even though CIA folks already have gone public complaining that Dubya went with the bogus Niger-Uranium story after they’d told him it wasn’t on the level.

Are we supposed to believe this nonsense? Of course. And just like that, another lie slides right off Dubya’s back.

Dean may not quite be the anti-war candidate, after all. He wants more troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and favors sending troops to Liberia.

As Tom Palmer once told me, “Conservatives favor any war said to be in the national interest. Liberals favor any war not in the national interest.”

Troop morale is really low. Looks like the $4 billion a month price tag is not getting us anything but angry Iraqis.

An Iraqi police officer said it well in a Chicago Tribune story yesterday by E.A. Torriero and Laurie Georing:

“If the Americans want to take over our country, then they have to know what they are doing,” said police Lt. Col. Ehsam Kathom, who looks out his windshield through a bullet hole. “If not, they should give us good guns and let us do the job.”

I don’t think that’s a realistic option at this point, but it nicely illustrates the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.