Mike Houlihan: One of Our Own - In Praise of Paul Ryan

 

Written by Mike Houlihan
Special to The Irish American News

Most Irish Americans are skeptical of President Obama’s supposed discovery of his Irish roots. That pint of Guinness he was seen hoisting in Ireland last year was no doubt his first. The real reason he made the trip to the tiny village of Moneygall was a craven attempt to cozy up to the Irish American vote.
We’re also not buying Vice-President Joe Biden’s claims to be “Irish Catholic”. This chuckling buffoon is no more Catholic than Ian Paisley, but he still clings to the oxymoronic label of “pro-choice Catholic” like his pals Nancy Pelosi, Dick Durbin, and the late Teddy Kennedy. Actual Irish Catholics find an absurdity in the very idea of pro-choice Catholics. They may call themselves that, but the actual species does not exist. Ask the Pope.
The liberal media has done its best lately to malign the Irish Catholic credentials of Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan. But according to Rick Barrett, retired DEA Agent and Chicago history detective, Ryan is the most Irish of the four candidates running, and his heritage and religion make him “the real deal”- an Irishman.
Barrett’s previous investigative research projects are celebrated in the Irish American community. His work is notable because of his discovery of Irish immigrants as historic figures and then championing these individuals as pioneers in law enforcement, including The Chicago Police Department’s Constable Jeremiah Sullivan, the first Irishman to become a policeman in America; Marie Connelly Owens, the first policewoman in the USA; and Constable James Quinn, the first Chicago Police Officer killed in the line of duty.
The son of legendary Chicago police Lieutenant "Junior" Barrett, of 48th & Wabash-Southside of Chicago fame, Rick Barrett has a history himself of conducting criminal investigations and evidentiary historical research that bloodhounds would envy.
Among Barrett’s discoveries is the heritage of VP Candidate Paul Ryan:
Ryan is fourth-generation Irish, with a paternal line going back to Ullard in County Kilkenny.
Ryan’s people were farmers. His great-great grandparents came from a small townland registered as Clohasty in the 1820's, but now referred to as Cloghasty North. The townland itself was less than 110 acres.
James Ryan and Catherine Shea, Paul Ryan’s great-great grandparents, were married in the local Catholic parish of Graigeunamanagh.
Their first daughter, Ryan’s great-grand aunt, was born and baptized in the same parish in 1849, two years before the family emigrated.
So why is any of this important to the upcoming election? Because Irish Catholics tend to vote for their own. The best example of that is the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley getting the vote out for a young man named Jack Kennedy in 1960 and winning him the election.
Ryan’s Irish roots could help determine how the battleground state of Ohio votes in the upcoming election.
Barrett says, “There are many Irish Catholics residing in the state of Ohio. In fact, there are so many Irish Catholics living there that, years ago, the University of Notre Dame, home of the ‘Fighting Irish', made an agreement with the Ohio State University to never schedule a regular season football game between the two universities. Why would that be? Because neither Notre Dame nor OSU wanted to divide the state’s Irish Catholics—a game between these two universities would divide Ohio with some cheering for the Irish Catholic ND, thereby dividing Ohioans. Two of Paul Ryan’s brothers, Stan and Tobin, graduated from Notre Dame while Paul chose to attend Miami University in Ohio.”
Paul Ryan’s Irish Catholic bona fides, as a Pro-Life candidate and with ancestors going back to Graiguenamanagh in County Kilkenny, could potentially sway Irish Catholic voters in Ohio to “stick with their own”, and very well swing the election to give the Republicans the victory on November 6th.
And that night in Boston might be when Paul Ryan stands before the cheering crowds of Irish Catholics and tells them, “There are only two kinds of people in this world ‘Irish and I-Wish”!

Two Southside Guys . . .Mel Torme Sings Steve Allen

Steve Allen was a south side Irish kid who got kicked out of Mount Carmel in his freshman year; Mel Torme was a Jewish Kid whose folks lived in near Hyde Park; both ended up at Hyde Park High School.  Steve Allen went on the bum and road the rails, Mel Torme was on the radio.

After WWII, these two south side guys became legends in Jazz - Steve Allen composed 5,000 songs including several Grammy winners and Mel Torme sang more than 5,000 tunes better than anyone in a pair of Florsheims. Here they are together!



God gives us so much.

President Diminished Capacity -'Horses and Bayonets and Battleship' Oh My!

Sailors have used bayonets, but Governor Romney was talking about ships, Mr. President.

"You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916," Obama said. "Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed.
"We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go under water, nuclear submarines," he said.
Obama even evoked a children's military role-playing board game, "Battleship," to bash his rival.
"The question is not a game of Battleship, where we're counting ships," he said.

I am sure that 'horses and bayonets' will resonate with the Journolists, MSNBC, OWS, and Soledad crowd.

Ships, if I recall, are nautical weapons platforms.

Horses and bayonets are of some use to ground forces and certainly are being used in Afghanistan.

President Obama's snotty crack, like most snotty cracks, missed the mark and the point made by Governor Romney entirely.  The issue was the diminished capacity of the United States Navy.

Mitt Romney got under the President's skin with the fact that the US NAVY has fewer ships to serve the world and protect our shores than it did when Woodrow Wilson, the first Progressive, was President. President Obama went snotty, purile and true to his character.

This is a President of diminished capacity and he did not bring much to the table from the get-go.   Vote.

Six Questions That Will Settle This Election, or Not

Six question that will settle the election.  Really? That's one.



1.  What do you get when you spell OHIO backwards?


2. If Harry Reid were a man, would you marry her? ( only one answer) - Neigho, pops!


3. Amored heifer over Dakota Rice is nice, but I'll have the hen fruit, Jackson; What's Buzzin' cousin?


4. Do Dewey? Well?  Dewey?


5. Dewers?  Ice or neat?











































6. Are Balls of Steel Yet Maufactured in Gary, Indiana?

Scab-Yanking Genius Scolds the School That Sent Him to Georgetown

Dinaw Mengestu - an asshole's odyssey to MacArthur Genius.

MacArthur Genius Grants.  Nice. 

This year the good folks at MacArthur granted oodles of cash to the poster child for the whining, angry and pussified nature of Progressive* Iconography - Dinaw Mengestu. The Chicago Sun Times editorial board could not be happier with the selection as it gave its celebrity interview writer, Mike Thomas, an opportunity to heap uncorroborated calumny on a fine Catholic prep school - Dominican operated Fenwick  of Oak Park.

During his first day as a freshman at Fenwick High School in Oak Park, Dinaw Mengestu broke from the class tour and vomited in a nearby bathroom.
While his orientation nausea abated, there remained a gut-level discomfort that persisted for the next couple of years. Its primary cause: race. . . . “Most of my freshman year I had students sitting next to me calling me ‘n-----’ in class,” he remembers. “I had students walking down the hallway who yelled, ‘That n----- smells!’”

That, as a Chicago cops are wont to say is " a pretty thin beef."   A thin beef (n.)is a charge that will not stand, given closer scrutiny. where I come from, only pussies (mea culpa for this gender neutral sobriquet) and suckers beef (v.). No one cares to hear about your real or imagined whines. Ask any bartender, cabbie, or coach. Why celebrate whiners as geniuses?  Lookee here!  Rac  ism and hygiene-judgmentalism are fused in this libel of Fenwick, n'cest pas? Well, Mike Thomas is a celebrity interviewer and accustomed to bowing    to whim and will.  'Play on, Genius, I shan't interrupt.' Jimmy the two-headed boy would have probed deeper, but, then again, Jimmy is no celebrity interviewer.

Might I?


It could not have been that the now celebrated genius was in fact a notorious pain-in-the ass with BO (sarcasm), as the writer himself offered; Oh, no, race is the place!  BO has no race. I taught with an Oxford Educated Englishman of the old school school - he wore his skivvies, socks and shirts until they got hard.  Man, the dude would gag a maggot from twenty yards and upwind in a breezy day.  He was a math exchange teacher and for year his presence befouled the atmosphere with not only his British tradition of lousy hygiene, but his mendacity and arrogance. He was the whitest man I ever met.

Victim hood and race are twin Menaecmi of Progressive paradigms everywhere -please note that racism embraces sexism, feminism, homophobia and American exceptionalism. Like the twin lads of old Moschus, they are separated at birth and brought together by political fate and necessity. Victimhood can not live without racism and may only be truly fulfilled when recognized as genius.

Higher criticism begins where educational imperatives fail.  Someone, at Fenwick should have told young Corinthian Dinaw that a bath, a trip to showers after cross-country and note to mom that his Fenwick uniform could stand on its own and needed a quick vacation out of the locker and into Mr. Swifty Cleaners in Oak Forest, pronto, but obviously did not dare to offer that sage counsel.  Instead, we have genius growing out of the befouled Mengestu habiliments and epidermis like the Barnacle Goose of Aristotle.


How's that for a howler? With same political slide-rule governing genius ( lefty, gay, secularist, atheist, angry and isolated) that handed the Mark Twain Humor Award to Ellen Degeneris last night, the MacArthur genius  for 2012 in literature Dinaw Mengestu takes the prize!  Sun Times writer Thomas chronicles Mengestu's travails at a Catholic high school, though he was non-Catholic, non-white, non-American-born because " Having been torn from the “marvelously eclectic” group of pals — Mexican, Asian, Colombian — he’d grown up with in Forest Park, these occasional violent outbursts were at first the only overt way Mengestu knew of to vent his mounting frustration and despair."  

Got That?  Young Mengestu was torn from his publicly schooled Diversity buddies and forcibly chained to desks, lockers, and shackled to a fellow non-Catholic (Muslim) on the Fenwick cross country team for whom there are no pep-rallies, public celebrations, crownings, or triumphs staged, in racist deference to football and basketball.

Dinaw was isolated for four years- alone, bohemian, cast-out; yet, the Guidance Department of Fenwick and it must be assumed a few teachers helped the Granta ink-slinger get into Georgetown University and not on a cross-country scholarship.

Cross Country? It is as dull a spectacle as it gets. Nothing happens.  Runners run and finish. Marathons are the sure sign of a society in decline.  Thousands of people run but only Kenyans and Ethiopians can win.  It is  a fixed and racist race - the Greek who originated the Marathon, Pheidippides died upon finishing the run.

The Sun Times article is one huge scab-yanking whine of unsubstantiated race-based calumnies. Genius.

I work at Leo, a Catholic high school that is now 85% black, 10% white an 5% Mexican.  We celebrate diversity.Our Alumni are largely white and Catholic, growingly black and yet mildly Hispanic.  Last Wednesday, at an Alumni meeting at Father Perez Knights of Columbus Hall in Mount Greenwood, I chatted with two of eight African American Alums at the bar with the beefy red-faced ostensibly racists Honkeys who bought the gents their Heineken's about how our ten white boys are getting along.  Famously, I answered.

One proud black Alumnus offered this, " Those St. Gabe's guys might have been stone-racists with their words, but they'd give us black brothers their last nickels and stand with us in fights. Sounds like things are flipped, but the same."  Facta Non Verba - Deeds not Words. Quite.  Leo kids are poor kids from Englewood, Gresham, Chatham, Scottsdale, Garfield Ridge, New City, Back of the Yards and Canaryville - black, white and brown all wearing Orange and Black.

We have had students from Kenya, Uganda and the odd Ethiop.  They seemed very happy at Leo, but then there were no white or Hispanic kids in attendance. Our African American kids demanded some diversity, to paraphrase Thomas Phinzey Leo 2011.

Diversity should not be a slide-rule it should just be.   The MacArthur Genius for 2012 sounds to me like a whiny, ungrateful, pussified pain in the ass.  Many geniuses tend to be like that. B & C students make the world a happy, hard-working and generous school.  Most of our biggest financial benefactors were B& C students who went on to be corporate giants, top-flight lawyers and doctors, military men, civic leaders and men of the cloth. They are black and orange.

Fenwick's colors are black and white - the color of the Dominican robes. The Sun Times writer Mike Thomas and the 2012 MacArthur Genius Dinaw Mengestu treated those colors and the robes of St. Dominic with the smears of really crappy calumnies - all hear-say. Fenwick is a wonderful school with whom I have had very close dealings since I became a teacher.  Racism was not, is not and shall never be tolerated there.  I call BS on Mike Thomas and the genius.

He might be a genius, but Dinaw Mengetsu is a sure enough asshole.  Being an anal aperture is not a prerequisite for genius.  Steve Allen was a genius and a great guy.  Carlo Maria Giulini and Sejii Ozawa wonderful gents.  Ed Pashke, a guy the crowd at Keegan's would love to share pints and painting tips.

Celebrate whomever you choose. Celebrate the ingrate, whiny, pussified jerk?   Only suckers and pussies beef.

*Born in Addis Ababa in 1978, Mr. Mengestu came to the United States two years later and grew up in Illinois, first in Peoria and then in Forest Park, a Chicago suburb. During the interview he summoned nostalgic memories of those early years: a white Baptist church’s warm embrace of his immigrant family, his father’s job at the headquarters of the Caterpillar tractor company and the hope of rising to middle-class comfort that that newcomer’s luck inspired.Lurking in the background, though, was the trauma that had driven his parents from Ethiopia, namely the revolution that followed the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie and, he said, “split the family cleanly down the middle.”
Some relatives became high-ranking officials in the new Marxist military government, while others, because of their class background as landowners or their political activities, were arrested or jailed or who even perished, including an especially beloved older brother of his father’s.
“We had no memories in our house,” Mr. Mengestu said. “We were never allowed to, we never spent time talking about it, and yet you’re very aware that it haunts everything. It’s that absence that creates the concern for it. Nothing can be passed on.”
He added, speaking of his own reaction, “You know there is this history that precedes you, but you have no access to it whatsoever.”
At the elite Roman Catholic high school he attended in the Chicago area, his situation grew even more complicated. He was the target of racial epithets from white students, he recalls, but also had to confront “the question of my authenticity” in his dealings with other black students, since “it was always really clear that ‘you are the black kid who sounds white, the black kid who doesn’t seem like he’s black,’ and no one can figure out exactly why.”
Voracious reading provided some relief for the “anger and angst” that Mr. Mengestu

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/16/books/16mengestu.html?pagewanted=all

The Full Mundelein: Chicago's Cardinal George Teaches America History

Francis Cardinal George, Archbishop of Chicago, is a great teacher, This week, His Eminence gives Americans the Full Mundelein. 

Pay attention.  Take notes.  Form Study Groups, if necessary.  There will be a Final on this Lesson.

The wrong side of history

 Cardinal George's Schedule

1. Nov. 1: 7:30 a.m., 54 Day Rosary Novena, Morning Air Program, Relevant Radio
2. Nov. 2: 10 a.m., Episcopal Council Meeting, Residence

Cardinal's Appointments

Cardinal George approved the following clergy appointment August 29:

Rector

Rev. Theodore Ploplis to rector of the National Shrine of St. Francis Xavier Cabrini effective Sept. 1, while retaining his duties as coordinator of spiritual services at St. Joseph Hospital.

Text of Cardinal Mundelein speech

October is the month of the Most Holy Rosary, a devotion associated in modern times with the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima in 1917, during the First World War. Mary asked for prayer and penance, which she always requests in these private revelations that echo the public revelation in the Gospel: “Repent, the kingdom of God is at hand.”

Mary at Fatima also entered into the history of the modern world when she told three unlettered peasant children that the Great War then being waged, President Wilson’s “war to end all wars,” would soon end, but that a greater menace to world peace would arise in Russia, whose errors would spread throughout the world and bring untold millions to violent death. In the end, however, Mary promised that her Immaculate Heart would triumph. This promise, too, echoes the Gospel itself: the risen Christ is victorious over sin and death.

Eternity enters into human history in often incomprehensible ways. God makes promises but gives no timelines. Visiting the shrine at Fatima, pilgrims enter a huge plaza, with the spot of the apparitions marked by a small chapel to one side, a large church at one end, an equally large adoration chapel at the other end, and a center for visitors and for the hearing of confessions. Just outside the main grounds, a section of the Berlin Wall has been re-built, a stark witness to what Mary had talked about almost a century ago. Communism in Russia and its satellite nations has collapsed, although many of its sinful effects are still with us.

Communism imposed a total way of life based upon the belief that God does not exist. Secularism is communism’s better-scrubbed bedfellow. A small irony of history cropped up at the United Nations a few weeks ago when Russia joined the majority of other nations to defeat the United States and the western European nations that wanted to declare that killing the unborn should be a universal human right. Who is on the wrong side of history now?

The present political campaign has brought to the surface of our public life the anti-religious sentiment, much of it explicitly anti-Catholic, that has been growing in this country for several decades. The secularizing of our culture is a much larger issue than political causes or the outcome of the current electoral campaign, important though that is.

Speaking a few years ago to a group of priests, entirely outside of the current political debate, I was trying to express in overly dramatic fashion what the complete secularization of our society could bring. I was responding to a question and I never wrote down what I said, but the words were captured on somebody’s smart phone and have now gone viral on Wikipedia and elsewhere in the electronic communications world. I am (correctly) quoted as saying that I expected to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. What is omitted from the reports is a final phrase I added about the bishop who follows a possibly martyred bishop: “His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.” What I said is not “prophetic” but a way to force people to think outside of the usual categories that limit and sometimes poison both private and public discourse.

An earlier Archbishop of Chicago once tried his hand at reading the signs of his times. On May 18, 1937, Cardinal Mundelein, in a conference to priests of the archdiocese, called the then-German chancellor “an Austrian paper-hanger, and a darn poor one at that, I am told.” Why did Cardinal Mundelein speak in a way that drew applause from the New York Times and local papers and brought the German government to complain bitterly to the Holy See? The government of Germany, declaring its ideology the wave of the future, had dissolved Catholic youth groups and tried to discredit the church’s work among young people through trials of monks, priests and religious sisters accused of immorality. Cardinal Mundelein spoke of how the public protests of the bishops had been silenced in the German media, leaving the church in Germany more “helpless” than it had ever been.

He then added: “There is no guarantee that the battle-front may not stretch some day into our own land. Hodie mihi cras tibi. (Today it’s me; tomorrow, you). If we show no interest in this matter now, if we shrug our shoulders and mutter … it is not our fight, if we don’t back up the Holy Father when we have a chance, well, when our turn comes, we too will be fighting alone.”

“When our turn comes …” Was Cardinal Mundelein a prophet as well as an administrative genius? Hardly. At his death in 1939 he was well known as an American patriot and a friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he also had a Catholic conviction that no nation state has been immaculately conceived. The unofficial anthem of secularism today is John Lennon’s “Imagine,” in which we are encouraged to imagine a world without religion. We don’t have to imagine such a world; the 20th century has given us horrific examples of such worlds.

Instead of a world living in peace because it is without religion, why not imagine a world without nation states? After all, there would be no American ambassador recently killed in Libya if there were no America and no Libya! There are, obviously, individuals and groups who still misuse religion as a reason for violent behavior, but modern nation states don’t need religion as an excuse for going to war. Every major war in the last 300 years has been fought by nation states, not by the church. In our own history, the re-conquest of the secessionist states in the Civil War was far bloodier than the re-conquest of the Holy Land by the now despised Crusaders. The state apparatus for investigating civilians now is far more extensive than anything dreamed up by the Spanish Inquisition, although both were created to serve the same purpose: to preserve a government’s public ideology and control of society, whether based on religion or on modern constitutional order.

Analogies can easily be multiplied, if one wants to push a thesis; but the point is that the greatest threat to world peace and international justice is the nation state gone bad, claiming an absolute power, deciding questions and making “laws” beyond its competence. Few there are, however, who would venture to ask if there might be a better way for humanity to organize itself for the sake of the common good. Few, that is, beyond a prophetic voice like that of Dorothy Day, speaking acerbically about “Holy Mother the State,” or the ecclesiastical voice that calls the world, from generation to generation, to live at peace in the kingdom of God.

God sustains the world, in good times and in bad. Catholics, along with many others, believe that only one person has overcome and rescued history: Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of the Virgin Mary, savior of the world and head of his body, the church. Those who gather at his cross and by his empty tomb, no matter their nationality, are on the right side of history. Those who lie about him and persecute or harass his followers in any age might imagine they are bringing something new to history, but they inevitably end up ringing the changes on the old human story of sin and oppression. There is nothing “progressive” about sin, even when it is promoted as “enlightened.”

The world divorced from the God who created and redeemed it inevitably comes to a bad end. It’s on the wrong side of the only history that finally matters. The Synod on the New Evangelization is taking place in Rome this month because entire societies, especially in the West, have placed themselves on the wrong side of history. This October, let’s pray the rosary so that the Holy Spirit will guide and strengthen the bishops and others at the synod as they deliberate about the challenges to preaching and living the Gospel at this moment in human history. (emphases my own)

Cardinal's Column Archive

How's She Cuttin, Folks? Personal Touch with a Jesse Junior RoboCall

All too human.  But, now . . .?  RING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! RING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! RING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  (pick up on the 4th) RING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! tone ...................................(wait for it) tone ..........“This is Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. . . .how's she cuttin, lads?  Remember, Obama/Jackson -you can't have one without the other!. . . .  Been some time, I know, but hey, I am human. I am doing my best. I am trying to sort through them all. . . .PRESS ONE to make a donation . . .PRESS TWO to make a Contribution . . .  PRESS THREE to make a Love Offering . . . PRESS FOUR to help with my D.C. Mortgage . . .PRESS FIVE to pay for my Pier Baron Bar Tab . . .PRESS SIX to pay for cab fare for two lobbyist I found in a binder . . . PRESS SEVEN to give Dad some money . . .PRESS EIGHT to pay my soaring medical bills” . . .I am human. I am doing my best. I am trying to sort through them all . . . I am human. I am doing my best. I am trying to sort through them all . . . I am human. I am doing my best. I am trying to sort through them all . . .I am human. I am doing my best. I am trying to sort through them all . . .I am human. I am doing my best. I am trying to sort through them all. . ."



How human, a robocall!  I guess it beats standing at the Metra stations and the Red-line on 95th Street for next few weeks. After all, the Congressman will be home again in Mayo!

" How's She Cuttin', Jesse!" Mayo Songs for Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr.

a choinneáil súil beo - Keep Hope Alive!

Well, it's back to Mayo, God help us All!  All the best!

Just between us , lad (whisper) -Beidh sé deas a fháil amach as an bhean*, is dócha! Here's a song for your journey!



A fháil ar roinnt eile agus na blonds fhágáil ina n-aonar - Rest up and leave the Blondies alone!

Having been away for so long, this might help you to communicate your desires and wishes -



See you when you get back! Dea-Slán!




*(loosely) Ah, what the good woman don't know is all the shakings of the bag.

Mitt Romney has no Irish Ancestors! He's Got My Vote

"When money's tight and hard to get 
and your horse is also ran, 
When all you have is a heap of debt 
a pint of plain is your only man"  Flann O'Brien, Irish Literary Genius


Mitt Romney, unlike Richard M. Nixon, William J. Clinton and Barack H. Obama has no relatives in Dear Old Donegal.

That can't be bad. Instead of streaching Ancestry Dot Com. to breaking point in search of some relatives who may be sons and daughters of Dear Old Erin's Isle, we Celts ,to use David Lloyd George's sobriquette, can vote rest assured that Willard Mitt Romney is not related to any Knackers, Jackeens, BIFFOS, Corner Motts, Pikees, Bosthoons, Culchies, Layabouts, Bowzies, or IRA hangers-on.

A Romney Presidency might just be free of a trip to the Snakeless Shores and the requisite hoisting of pints and proud platitudes with Skinless Murphy, Baldy Knackers Quinn, Bug Bugger Hynes, Jackee-Joe Jackson, Paddy the Bat, Larry the Langer and Blind Oscar.

Saints be Praised!

Nope, he's a Proosian Morman Mexican fella with Scots/Brit Yeoman tossed in.

2012 Republican Presidential Nominee  Former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney

Romney Ancestry

While Romney’s documented ancestry does not quite reach the heights of the family legend, which claimed that they are descendants of the fourth-century dragon slayer, St. George (the patron saint of England), it is still an impressive one, with some of the most celebrated thinkers (maternal great-grandfather, Parley Parker Pratt, was one of the chief literary defenders of Mormonism), famed fighters (Carl Heinrich Wilcken, a member of the Prussian army, and later, Utah’s militia) and natural leaders (Miles Romney, who founded and administered the Mormon sanctuary in Mexico in the 19th century) of post-Independence America. The family can trace their lineage to modern England, Scotland and Germany. Miles Park Romney, Mitt’s great-great grandfather (paternal), hails from Lancashire, England, while on the maternal side, Archibald Newell Hill was a resident of Renfrew, Scotland. His great-great grandfather, the legendary Prussian soldier, Carl Heinrich Wilcken, was a native of Holstein, Germany. Romney's family tree is rife with polygamists on the paternal side, though there is no indication of polygamy on the maternal side of his family. According to a research by The Salt Lake Tribune, Romney's ancestry harbors six polygamous men with forty-one wives. Romney, however, is a confirmed monogamist and polygamy has been absent in his family background for more than two generations. Note: The full name of Mr. Carl Heinrich Wilcken was provided by Mr. Ulrich Oesterle from Hesse, Germany.

Prussians and Scots and Brits for blood; it is time for a Change I Hope!

Cousin Barry needs to build a library.

Charming Retro Comix -The Little Prique, Part III - Richie Daley in the Afterlife

The Little Prique, Part III

"Jezass, God, I wuz a Alter Boy at Nutivahtee fur years.. . . Dis izza a very t'in beef!"

Chapter One - Richie Daley in the Afterlife - Richie kops a plea with the Prime Mover

With the return of such arcane comic strips like Tin-Tin and Little Nemo, I was delighted to see that a series of animated political fanasties based on the after-life of Mayor Richard M. Daley are in the offing.

Michael Phelps -Fittest Man of "All-Time," Me Arse!

Good morning, Hickey Old Son -fit man yourself!

I read with great interest a piece on a Baltimore CBS affiliate website touting Olympic Gold Medalist Swimmer Michael Phelps as the Fittest Man of All -Time.

 Fitter than Samson?

Fitter than Johnny Weismeller?

Fitter than Muhammad Ali

Fitter than Janet Guthrie?*

Fitter than . . .My broad manly arse!

Here is the fittest man ever!


Fit for the ages and with a fine crown of flesh on his noggin into the bargain!

* Have YOU ever punched a spout into an oil can with such ease?  I think not.  Old Janet must have had muscles in her stool samples.

Toni " The Crypt Keeper" Preckwinkles Midnight Madness Morgue Miscreants

Investigators caught overnight workers at the Cook County morgue sleeping and watching a martial arts movie before determining that those were not isolated incidents, according to a report released Tuesday by county Inspector General Patrick Blanchard.
"Certain intake attendants working the overnight shift routinely watched movies on county computers and certain intake attendants slept or 'nodded off' while on duty," the report concluded.

Everybody was Kung Fu Fightin', except for one little sleepy head at Toni " The Crypt Keeeper" Preckwinkle's Stiff Stackin' Warehouse ( AKA Cook County Morgue).  Todd Stroger, like President GW Bush, is not, nor has he been in office for quite some time.  Progressives, e.g. Crypt Keeper Toni, President Obama and Mayor Coon Eyes, spend their terms of office blaming their predecessors, which takes up much ink and space in Chicago's compliant news dailies face and air time on WBEZ and of course WTTW in support of the much put upon Progressive Protective Species in office. Here is pure Crypt Keeper Toni and Progressive palaver solid gold -

"You know, I wanted this job despite the bad publicity that went on prior to my tenure. So I think there are probably other people out there who would want to take on the challenge," Preckwinkle said.

Chicagoans were treated to many months of hand-wringing and sob soaked investigative reports and columns about the cord-wood staked corpses in Cook County Morgue. The medical examiner was given the same treatment as John the Baptist when Toni Preckwinkle tap-danced for the political wizards* and media apparatchiks who helped ooze Todd Stroger* into his Dad's big chair in the first place. The wife of Zeus gamboled gamely until Dr. Nancy Jones, MD had her noggin served up on a platter.

Toni Preckwinkle might very well become the governor of Illinois . . .no, really.

As Cook County Board President she has accomplished exactly . . .give me a month of Sundays . . .nope, I got nothing.  Oh, dope!  That's right!  The Crypt Keeper is cool with reefer, she hates Romald Reagan and wants to tax bullets. "Ain't she great???!!!!!!!!"

She sure is Progressive.  She has alot of time to yet to tune up Todd Stroger, pee in Governor Quinn's Wheaties and get some more boffo endorsements from the likes of Carol Marin, Bruce Dumont, Eric Zorn and Billy Dec.

The morgue seems to improved since Toni took charge, don't it?  On the up side the County Morgue workers were watching vintage Bruce Lee, thanks be to God, and not that Tea PartyRacist Chuck Norris movies. Something to think about.  Here's another . . .Governor Crypt Keeper - Somebody Else's Troubles Go Statewide!

* Lest we forgets - 

Stroger's plight and the race for governor are impacting this race directly. Stroger is the son for former Cook County Board President John H. Stroger, who often received huge campaign donations from the nation's top bond counsel, Chapman & Cutler. It so happens that Tom Hynes, the patriarch of 19th Ward politics, is of counsel to the firm, one strong link between the 19th Ward and Stroger, and a reason for the Hynes' family to dislike Gorman, who also has some strong ties to the 19th Ward.

Tom Hynes is a close relative of Patrick Maher through his father, Dave. And, of course, Tom Hynes is the father of  Dan Hynes, the Illinois Comptroller who threw his hat in fast to challenge beleaguered Gov. Pat Quinn.

It's the 19th Ward Hynes honchos who have been working hard over the past several years to install Pat Maher at the OFPD and to take control of Orland Park, which is distinguishing itself as one of the southwest suburbs more monied and affluent communities. They back another Democrat, Paul O'Grady, who took over as Orland Township Supervisor. O'Grady relied heavily on his 19th Ward ties and had 19th ward precinct captains working the election polls this past Spring.

Quinn, Quigley and Suffredin will make their endorsement of Forys at a Forys fundraiser Sept. 29 at White Eagles in Chicago, 6839 N. Milwaukee Ave. Maher just had his own fundraiser at O'Callaghan's, at 29 West Hubbard Street in downtown Chicago, too. The keynote celebrity there was, of course, Tom Hynes. 

Terry Sullivan Trio at 12 West Elm Every Month

Tommy Muellner on piano and Eric Hochberg on bass accompanied the elegant and lovely Miss Terry Sullivan's vocals this past Sunday afternoon at 12 West Elm.

 
12 W Elm St
Chicago, IL 60610

Each month the Terry Sullivan Trio graces the atmosphere of Chicago's new jazz venue in the heart of the Viagra Triangle. Check the calendar for Real Jazz on a lovely Chicago Sunday afternoon.

Debate Deux - Candy Crowley: One Big A$$ Fly on the Townhall Wall

“I understand that I’m there. I’m not a fly on the wall,” Candy Crowley CNN corresppondent who looks like the guy who blew out his brains in Dances with Wolves

The moderators’ role is always complex. Journalists and news organizations jockey to get one of the coveted slots and become, in effect, partners with the commission and the candidates. But they are, of course, also reporters who fiercely guard their independence and bristle at any actual or perceived sense that their function is controlled by the organizers or the campaigns. All parties acknowledge that Crowley’s behind-the-scenes role will be influential. She will cull the questions submitted by the voters who are invited to attend the debate, and then decide which ones will be asked and in what order.
Crowley seems unfazed by the behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Even after concerns were raised in the wake of the Malveaux interview, Crowley made additional comments that make clear she does not feel bound by any agreement between the commission and the Obama and Romney camps. On Oct. 11, the day of the vice-presidential debate, she told Wolf Blitzer, ”I’m always interested in the questions because you don’t want to — in a debate, you don’t want to go over plowed ground. Now, this is the vice-presidential candidates as opposed to the presidential candidates. So is there room there to come back to a presidential candidate and say, Well, your vice-presidential candidate said this? I’m always kind of looking for the next question … So there’s opportunity for follow-up to kind of get them to drill down on the subjects that these folks want to learn about in the town hall.” Marl Halperin

I expect things to go like this tomorrow night -

Candy - " Mr. President, in the light of allegations that your administration, according to the Romney camp of course, sir, has given a nuclear Iran the ability to have a bomb by Spring of 2012, how many victims of America's own nuke attack on Japanese civilians were there in 1945?"

         President Obama - " Well, Candy, at the risk of seeming too apologetic ( laughter) . . .
         about America's past . . .interesting that the bomb could not have been rushed into 
         production against the white fascists . . .but we can have that teaching moment in my 
         next term, Candy ( uproarious laughter from Candy)!    The answer, Candy, is 135,000
         total deaths for both Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

(applause)

        Candy - " Please hold your applause . . .in fairness to both candidates.   Romney in the same
    theme and context - a nuclear Iran - President Obama rightly identified the sum total war 
    deaths from the world's only use of atomic weapons as 135,000.     Mitt, . . .name them.

No fly on the wall, but Candy sure am one husky fly in the old vanilla icecream.


Read more: http://thepage.time.com/2012/10/14/moderator-role-under-scrutiny-before-the-debate/#ixzz29OdMlX1d

Because Felix Baumgartner Jumped at the World, Does That Mean We Must? Hmmmm?

I gottcha, Felix!!!!!!  - Fred Snodgrass*

Some one, at some time and some where, told Felix Baumgartner to take flying leap.

. . . Felix Baumgartner jumped off the edge of the space, from 127,000 feet of altitude all the way back down to Earth, breaking some world records and getting vital information for NASA in the process. Watch as he jumps out of the capsule. It's a frightening, adrenaline-fueled, historic moment.

Apres Vous, Felix, Apres Vous.

* Fred Snodgrass


*In the second, the 1912 Series, Snodgrass committed one of the most famous errors in baseball history. In the 10th inning of the deciding game, Snodgrass, who was among the National League's best outfielders, dropped a routine fly ball that put the tying run on second base. He proceeded to make a spectacular game-saving catch on the next play, but the Sox went on to score two runs in the inning to win the series.^[1]

Snodgrass before a game of the 1911 World Series

Giants manager John McGraw was not among those who blamed Snodgrass for the loss. In his book My Thirty Years in the Game, McGraw remarked, "Often I have been asked what I did to Fred Snodgrass after he dropped that fly ball in the World Series of 1912...I will tell you exactly what I did: I raised his salary $1,000."^[2]Just the same, the error became known as "Snodgrass's Muff" and also, the "$30,000 Muff."^[3]

America's Montaigne -Joseph Epstein Baffles BS in Biography

"I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself." --Essays Montaigne

Learning to write sound, interesting, sometimes elegant prose is the work of a lifetime. The only way I know to do it is to read a vast deal of the best writing available, prose and poetry, with keen attention, and find a way to make use of this reading in one’s own writing. The first step is to become a slow reader. No good writer is a fast reader, at least not of work with the standing of literature. Writers perforce read differently from everyone else.  Heavy Sentences -Joseph Epstein New Criterion

Mr. Epstein's ability to capture a subject in a memorable 3,000 words should be the envy of biographers, who write at greater length but sometimes with no greater effect. Biographies are vats of facts that take patience to digest; Mr. Epstein's essays are brilliant distillations. Biographers are rarely as nimble and pithy as he can be, and they labor under constraints he would surely chafe at. Indeed, the author once returned the advance for a biography of John Dos Passos that he had agreed to write, an enterprise that would surely have taxed his desire to say what he really thinks. Wall Street Journal

Yesterday I placed my order with the good folks at Amazon.com for Joe Epstein's 23rd book Essays in Biography (Axios Press $24).

I have been reading Joe Epstein for decades.  I first learned of Mr. Epstein from a professor ( a tag Joe Epstein eschews -"You mean a piano player in a Kankakee Cat House?") at Loyola University in 1974.  Dr. William Hiebel taught American Literature and Prose.  Joe Epstein had a reputation for crafting brilliant and very readable prose, which he practiced upon the contributing authors to American Scholar. Dr. Hiebel introduced me to writers who wanted people to actually understand what they wanted to say and not build verbal labyrinths to themselves -writes like Joe Epstein, Mark Harris and the much too overlooked James Salter.

Joe Epstein writes with an invitingly genuine quality that makes the reader a comfortable guest in his home.  Charm is a lousy word. To call Joe Epstein charming is an affront to his honesty.  Mr. Epstein  is not charming - he is delightful.  Charming, where I come from, is an insult.   Joe comes from the same bungalow, two-flat, raised ranch helot dwelling environs up on the top of Chicago - Rogers Park.

A Charmer is a bullshitter - a charming Billy, a grifter, a sneak.

One who delights is a like a young Dad whose whispered  words to his six year old son elicit a wild display of little-man heroics and infantile wrestling moves in a crowded Mexican fast-food joint at 43rd & Wallace. " What kind of sides you want? "

" Masha Putatahs!"

" Masha Putatahs? This ain't Schallers."

" I want Masha Putatahs!"

Ready!  Wrestle! That is delight.  Dad and lad going at it over menu selection with squeals and giggles from both indicating their delight in one another and this precious time together alone. Joe Epstein does exactly that, he delights a crowd in lunch hour rush waiting for their orders in Mexican fast-food joint.

In his recent book of stories and essays Fabulous Small Jews Joe Epstein presents a variation on Irish Alzheimers Disease* - ''Psychotherapy is what Jews have instead of golf,'' one character says. ''Gentiles try to improve their backswing, Jews their past.'' 

Joe Epstein reads broadly and deeply, be it a Mexican menu or the canon of John Dos Passos and, as a result, gives back better than he gets within his capacity to be himself -monster and miracle.  All of us know the monsters we drag around and keep at bay, for most part, in the company of people.  We do our best to be more miracle worker than monster.  We all want to be Prospero, but manage to be more like Caliban - you should get a load of me in most waking hours.  Over whom do hold dominion, my monster, or my master?  The Monster ( appetites, follies, vanities and foibles) in two falls to a submission! Maybe not.  The more we read of others and the monster we be, perhaps the more we might master ourselves and serve others better. Maybe not.  Joe Epstein helps.

I believe Joseph Epstein to be America's Montaigne ( the Dad of the essay) and it was Montaigne who gave us Caliban and the assorted anthropophagi who dominate literature from Renaissance on. I too, sprout my head below my shoulders on some very bad days.

Joe Epstein succeeds where charlatans only become celebrities.  More people know of our Norman Mailers, Susan Sontags, Michael Eric Dysons, or Gore Vidals because they never question their own personal Caliban and promote Prospero Mailer on Dick Cavet, or Sara Prospero-Paretsky on the Oprah Show ( dec.).

Joe Epstein is the real deal.  He is America's Montaigne.

* Irish Alzheimer's Disease -You forget everything but the grudges!

Sun Times' Natasha Korecki Scoops National with Jesse Jackson, Jr. Saga

The Chicago Sun Times is blessed with very talented reporters ( Dan Mihalopoulos, Chris Fusco, Tim Novak, Art Golab and especially Natasha Korecki). 

The columnists? Not so hot; with two notable exceptions -  Mark Brown and Steve Huntley are very exacting with the facts and wholly independent.  The reporters are old school fro the most part.

No reporter in Chicago did a better job of covering the hair-ball that was the Blago yarn, than Natasha Korecki. That particularly epic fabrication had more twists than a Chubby Checker retrospective on WTTW, or single Carol Marin column. 

At the core of the Blago trichobezoar remains the campaign for and election to the Presidency of Illinois Senator Barack Obama with its cast of characters* Homer would be hard-set to catalog - Tim Novak somehow managed to do so.

This weekend, the young woman who reported the Blagojevich Trials with the keenest eyes to detail, Natasha Korecki equals the tenacious pitbull Novak with a close look at Jesse Jackson, Jr. - Illinois' Congressional Howard Hughes. 

The first of two reports centers on the Federal probe of the reclusive Jackson's ( odd saying that) Congressional cash piles of taxpayer-lifted spondulices (archaic and so am I)**

The snowballing troubles of Jesse Jackson Jr. took a new turn Friday with the revelation that federal investigators have launched a probe into “suspicious activity” in the South Shore congessman’s finances.
Focusing on a completely new area of scrutiny for the son of the famed civil rights leader, the investigation is not related to former Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s attempted sale of a U.S. Senate seat, a scandal that has ensnared Jackson in the past, sources told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Rather, the probe — based in the Washington, D.C., FBI field office —is focusing on “suspicious activity” involving the congressman’s finances related to his House seat and the possibility of inappropriate expenditures, the sources said. . . .News of the probe — first disclosed by the Sun-Times — comes as questions increasingly swirl around Jackson’s absence from not only his official duties in Washington, but the campaign trail as the Nov. 6 election nears.

Citing exhaustion, Jackson, 47, stopped working, according to his staff, on June 10. His staff did not make that known until two weeks later.
He went to a clinic in Arizona then to the Mayo Clinic, which released a statement saying he was being treated for a bipolar disorder. Jackson is up for re-election Nov. 6 but has not campaigned since he won the Democratic primary in March.

The next places the hairball, not unlike Felonius  Guv doing a few semesters in Club Fed Colorado, into voter responsibility and same-old-same-old Cook County Context:

In Jackson’s South Side and south suburban 2nd Congressional District, even people who don’t like him think he will easily get re-elected.
“I don’t see how he can deal with all these problems and still deal with the district,” said South Shore resident Carlos Jones, 64. “But I believe he’s going to get re-elected and try to make amends.”
William Davenport, 29, said he knows Jackson “has definitely been in hot water with Blagojevich and has issues with his [mental] stability.” Now the new investigation “makes me wonder what’s going on with him.”
But, Davenport added, “The Jackson name carries a lot of weight around here.”
The newly disclosed federal probe is not related to the attempted sale of the U.S. Senate seat that figured in Blagojevich’s corruption conviction, but it’s focusing on “suspicious activity” involving the congressman’s finances related to his House seat and the possibility of inappropriate expenditures, sources said.
The probe was active in the weeks before Jackson took a leave from his U.S. House post on June 10.
“I don’t think this is going to affect his re-election in 2012,” said a Democratic strategist who didn’t want to be named. “I gotta believe that the day after his election, the gun goes off on his next federal primary.”
Jackson has been through the political wringer since 2008. He was initially under federal scrutiny tied to charges leveled against Blagojevich. In 2010, it was revealed that a donor to Jackson, Raghuveer Nayak, told federal authorities that Jackson asked him to approach Blagojevich with what the ex-governor believed to be a $1.5 million offer to be appointed to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President Barack Obama.

Sun Times reporters, especially the great ones like Novak and Korecki, scoop up the hairballs of political hypocrisy and present them to the careful reader and thoughtful voter.  They do great civic service and honor their craft.

The editorial boards of both Chicago papers never seem to read, much less understand the work of gifted writers like Korecki, Novak and Kass at the Tribune.  

The editorial boards send in the clowns and vigorously licking cats; they help elect the mopes and frauds and grifters as much as the "benighted" electorate. Psssst! Read the reporters and skip the editorial pages. Well done, again, Ms. Korecki!

*The following fact pattern was out in the open long before Obama severed his ties to Rezko (sometime in late 2006): In 1983, Rezko started raising a lot of money for Chicago politicians. In 1989, he and his partner Daniel Mahru started vacuuming up deals with the city to develop low-income housing, despite having virtually zero experience in the field. They proceeded to obtain over $100 million in city, state, and federal grants and bank loans to develop 30 run-down properties into affordable-housing projects, earning $6.9 million for themselves. By 2007, the city had sued them numerous times for failing to heat these properties; over half of the properties had fallen into foreclosure, and six of them were boarded up.

Obama helped put one of these deals together during his time as a junior associate at Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland. Other lawyers at Davis Miner helped Rezko acquire half of the properties that fell into disrepair. And many of these properties were located in the district Obama represented as an Illinois state senator. Nonetheless, Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times that he was unaware of Rezko’s growing reputation as a slumlord until he read Sun-Times reporter Tim Novak’s two-part series on the subject. So we are to believe (yet again) that Obama was the last person to know what one of his longtime friends was up to. (National Review June 5, 2008)

**

spon·du·licks

   [spon-doo-liks]  Show IPA

noun Older Slang .

money; cash.

Also, spon·du·lix.

Origin: 
1855–60, Americanism ;  origin uncertain