The war’s got him down.

In other exciting aviation news, the Tribune’s Jon Hilkevitch got his hands on a study soon to be released by Ricondo & Associates which says that Daley’s expanded O’Hare would result in more delays, especially in bad weather.

Why? Because even if you build out the airport, once the number of flights increases to the projected 1.6 million you’re just going to wind up with more delays. Further, one whole new runway would be completely useless in any kind of bad weather, according to the report.

This is exactly what the much-maligned Sen. Peter Fitzgerald has been saying all along about the Daley-Ryan expansion plan, but nobody paid any attention. By sheer luck were we spared this travesty, thanks to Fitzgerald’s opposition in the Senate and the aviation industry’s self-destruction since Sept. 11.

Tribune columnists John Kass (politics) and Blair Kamin (architecture) both had good things to say today about Da Mare’s outrageous, midnight raid on Meigs Field.

Kass, in “Daley’s abuse of power leaves marks on city“:

This is not a complicated story of insider deals, of contracts, connections, of documented paper trails.

Rather, it is simple, with photographs, something TV is interested in watching: the destruction of a valuable resource simply because it was in Daley’s way, and because he knew no one could stop him.

Little Big Man finally revealed himself as the absolute boss ruling Chicago and Cook County with wrought-iron fists.

Kamin, in “Land grabs don’t get any more naked than this“:

Noble ends don’t justify ignoble means.

As much as I believe that Meigs should become a park, the way Daley has gone about it stinks as badly as the nose-wrinkling stench that once wafted out of the Union Stockyards.

If you ever doubted that all the important urban planning decisions in Chicago are made by a democratically elected monarch whose throne is on the fifth floor of City Hall, then what happened Sunday night — when backhoes appeared at 11 p.m. and jabbed giant Xs in Meigs’ runway — should erase your doubts forever.

My friend Chuck endorses a truly terrible idea in Minnesota to force protesters to pay the extra costs associated with their actions — police enforcement, redirecting traffic, etc.

While the libertarian impulse behind such a position is understandable — protesters should have to pay for the costs they impose on others — the problem is that they already have in the form of taxes. Just because they choose to exercise their free-speech rights does not mean they should be liable to pay more on top of that.

By that logic, those who don’t protest or demonstrate in any way should receive a tax discount of some kind. If someone obstructs traffic or does anything unlawful, he should be arrested. That is the punishment. Forcing people to pay for the right to protest would have the express purpose of discouraging speech.

Once in a while in America, we get a small taste of what it would be like to live in a place that wasn’t “America,” with whatever small shred of freedom, due process and limited government we think that’s supposed to entail.

Unfortunately, our tastings of this non-America are fairly regular here in the Windy City, thanks to Richard M. Daley, mayor.

In the middle of the night, Daley sent his goons in — under police escort — to rip up the runways of Meigs Field, a small airport in downtown Chicago. Here’s what it looks like now.

The action left 16 private jets stranded on the taxiway with no way to leave.

No one knew about it. No one was consulted. No announcement was made. Asked whether any of the City Council’s 50 aldermen had been consulted about the move, Daley answered, “No. Not yet.”

It’s no secret that Daley’s wanted for years to make Meigs into a park, but he gave up that dream in order to get a deal with former Gov. Ryan to expand O’Hare (and build another airport in Peotone). Now that the federal legislation to cement that deal appears dead, Daley has reneged.

Surely, any hopes of his supporting a Peotone airport are gone now too. Not that expansion opponnents ever thought otherwise. Daley’s arguments about expanding O’Hare — that it was necessary to increase flight capacity — ring hollow now that he has singlehandedly decided to shut down an airport that handled 30,000-plus flights a year.

Yes, that’s a blip on O’Hare and Midway’s radar, but the principle is the same. Daley wants what he wants, when he wants it. Only occasionally and seemingly accidentally does what he want actually coincide with the public good.

Daley claims he had the legal right to do what he did (for homeland security reasons, he said, because in the time I worked and lived downtown since Sept. 11 all people ever talked about was how petrified they were of the little planes taking departing from and arriving at Meigs Field). And that may be so.

That one man can essentially decide the fate of an airport is in itself a problem. A reporter asked him at his news conference yesterday — where Daley looked more uncomfortable than a recovering alcoholic in a bar on St. Patrick’s Day — whether his storm trooper tactics were necessary to avoid a prolonged legal fight.

“You answered your own question,” he said. “I’m not going to answer that question.”

That’s not the way decisions should be made in America. But this ain’t America, is it? This is Chicago.

Gene Healy has many right-on things to say about the war in Iraq so far.

Halliburton Co., of which Dick Cheney used to be CEO, has been awarded a no-bid contract to put out fires set to Iraqi oil wells.

The biggest value of the contract, according to this CNN Money story, “could be that it puts Halliburton in a prime position to handle the complete refurbishment of Iraq’s long-neglected oil infrastructure, which will be a plum job.”

I don’t believe this war is solely or even primarily about oil. I think Dubya & Co. truly belive, wrongly, that Hussein’s regime is a threat to the United States. But this stinks as bad as an Iraqi oil fire.

The Iraqi capture of five Americans and killing of as many as 16 others is not any kind of victory for the anti-war movement or argument. It is a tragedy, but no hawk ever said the war would be without any casualties. What does make it regrettable is that putting American lives at risk in that way is not necessary to protect U.S. security.

But it’s no victory for the anti-war side for things to go badly. Unfortunately, I fear it’s a sign of things to come in Iraq under an American occupying government (still administered by Baath Party bureaucrats). There will be civil unrest, riots and war. The only question is how many Americans will die during that occupation and how long the occupation will last.

Steve Chapman, probably my favorite columnist, is once again absolutely on the money with his latest two columns.

The first addresses a fact conservative hawks are so loath to admit (or perhaps not-so-secretly glad about, depending) about the Iraq war, which is that is a huge boost for big government.

And today’s column targets the American military’s biggest enemy: a U.S. government that wants it to police the entire world, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

You tell ’em, Stevie.

What amazes me about yesterday’s protests in Chicago is that plans for direct action have been in the works for weeks among anti-war groups around the country.

Heck, one only needed basic cable to hear speaker after speaker call for anti-warriors to “shut it down” on C-SPAN last weekend. Yet Chicago police somehow were asleep on the job, inconveniencing thousands of Lake Shore Drive commuters.

It just goes to show how ignored the anti-war movement is in this country that they could openly be planning these direct actions and go pretty much unheeded.

That said, what the protesters in Chicago did and how they did it was pretty cool. Somehow they pulled it off without all the usual jerkiness and violence so common to such efforts. It made for great television, which is precisely what they were going for.

I’m not exactly sure what the direct actions accomplish, though. Millions around the world protested a few weeks ago and Dubya called it a focus group. Congress already surrendered any say over the war to the president. It’s in his hands now, and he’s not listening to anything anti-warriors have to say.

So … what? We can either focus on this war and trying to cause a ruckus and annoy city residents who have pretty much no say in the conduct or the decision to go to war, or we can make sure Iraq is the last war of its kind by developing an alternative to endless, destructive war in the Middle East.

Will the Fawell guilty verdict change how politics is practiced in Illinois? Only if U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald doesn’t let it end with him and goes after former Gov. George Ryan, as is much rumored.

Otherwise, the lesson to politicians will simply be to let your underlings do what they want, just don’t give the go-ahead to shred documents, as Ryan — who has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by admirers of his death penalty stance — did.

Some hawks might interpret the market’s two-day rally as a sign that the war’s actually good for the economy. Au contraire.

The markets are just now pricing in where they would have been all along before the uncertainty about a possible war had never come about. The only possible benefit of the war — an increased oil supply coming out of a rebuilt Iraq — could have been achieved by simply lifting the sanctions on Iraq.