Terry O'Brien: Cook County's Only Tax-cutter and Toni Preckwinkle: Stroger Without the Laughs

Jim Bowman, legendary Chicago Religion writer and newsman cuts through the Chicago Tribune's idiotic slight of Terry O'Brien for Cook County Board President.

Jim Bowman and most voters know that Terry O'Brien has been and continues to be the only Cook County Tax-Saver.

Toni Preckwinkle is the genius who slammed the late Saul Bellow ( Nobel Prize for Literature) as a racist. It's funny, I met two young women who were students of the humorless and not-all-that-bright Preckwinkle at Visitation High School who transfered to another school as the direct result of Ms. Preckwinkle's race-baiting classes. Could be. Hearsay, I suppose. I tend to agree with the two women, having met and listened to Alderman Preckwinkle on many occasions. Not a huge deal in the great scheme of things.

What is a huge deal is that Alderman Preckwinkle is a tax gouger and that is public record. Jim Bowman goes right at the issue:

"Has Trib been fooling us all this time?
O’Brien, polling behind Madame P. the alderwoman, who has run nothing bigger than a ward office in her whole life, has run an ad exposing her tax-raising history. In her book it’s a “desperate attack” of the sort “some candidates make when they’re behind a lot.”
Not that O’B has it wrong. She denies it not, namely her votes “to raise her salary in 1995, 1998, 2002 and 2006 (from $55,000 to $98,000, cumulatively) . . . to create a real estate transfer tax (1992), boost the sales tax on beer and wine (1993), raise the overall sales tax (2004) and raise the real-estate transfer tax (2008).”
Unable to deny it, she mounts a desperate counter-attack of the sort some candidates make when they are caught doing what voters most resent in the record of the despised and last-in-the-polls incumbent (Stroger).
Why wouldn’t Chi Trib have endorsed O’Brien, who has said from the start of his campaign that he would get rid of the penny increase right away, while Preckwinkle said not right away, she would have to think about it." (Click my post title and read more for Jim Bowman).

Why yes, yes they have, Brother Bowman.