FBI Director Firing Passes the Hypocrite's Money Moue Test

But it was Senate Minority Whip Richard Durbin, D-Ill., who made the biggest impression, going to the Senate floor about an hour after the announcement to clearly outline the stakes..
“Any attempt to stop or undermine this FBI investigation would raise grave constitutional issues,” he told colleagues.
Trump’s sudden action “raises the question as to whether Russian interference in the last presidential campaign by the Trump campaign will also be investigated by the FBI,” Durbin said.
He demanded “clarification by the White House as soon as possible as to whether this investigation will continue.” McClatchey News

Some say that you can tell a politician is lying, because his mouth is moving.

True.  However, there is more subtle signal offered by political hypocrites, feebs, dummies and grifters in both the Elephant and the Donkey camps: the Time honored Face Suck, grimace, lip compression and the "Tired. Lord I'M Tired" pucker of fraudulent faces at the podium - The Political Pucker Pussies! This is the golden standard of lie detection - The Money Moue!

 If the Face Sucks; the Truth Trucks!

The Money Moue is Capitol Capital!

The Money Moue Maker on the Hill is Senator Dick Durbin.

Here are some Money Moues





These are all very practiced political pucker pusses, but the all-time Champ of the hypocrites Grimace, the Money Moue, is none other than Illinois United States Senator Dithering Dick Durbin!

Durbin's mug is a lighthouse on all blustery and foggy nights signaling the Ship of State, "Avast, Ye Lubbers, thar be rocks and shoals hard by!"   Translated - No Prey. No Plunder!

When Durbin's mug morphs into Pucker Puss, reach back to your wallet and shake hands with Senator Durbin!


Following the Rogue's March played very nicely for FBI Director James Comey, it took Dick Durbin only minutes to leap forth and eat his face the nation. His creature and myna bird, Senator Tammy "Ditto" Duckworth offered an immediate, " What Dick said!" 


Durbin's tight-mouthed hypocrisy lit a prairie fire of faux fury that ignited Sen. Richie  " Chesty" Blumenthal - truth be told.
 Sidney did the Durbin Money Moue!

The Money Moue swept Congress

Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., a Senate Intelligence Committee member, made a more direct connection. “President Trump’s dismissal of FBI Director Comey smacks of President Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre. If this is an effort to stop the investigations into Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, it won’t succeed,” he said.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., saying “the reasoning and timing behind this firing is absolutely preposterous and unbelievable,” added that “It smacks of a Nixon-esque cover up of President Trump’s Kremlin ties on.

Looks like Comey's exit with be healthy for the State of the Nation.

Brother Rice Baseball and Knockwurst from Pat & Jack's Old Fashioned Butchers

Brother Rice 8, Marmion 1: Ryan Palmblad pitched a one-hitter for Rice (21-6, 15-1 Catholic Blue).

I watched Ryan P ( one of my juniors at Brother Rice) pitch a 1 hit-game.  It was very nearly a no hitter until the second to the last batter in the Seventh inning with two outs and a man on for Marmion Academy.  The Marmion hitter skinned a sweet one down the right field line for a single and drove in a walked batter.  The next batter hit a grounder to short and that was the game. Brother Rice 8- Marmion 1.  I was cold. I wore only a La Lumiere School hooded sweatshirt to game and my normally robustly larded frame withstands winds up to twenty miles per hour with temperatures in the mid -40's.  However my perch right behind home plate at Sedlacek Field is shady and the winds were exceptional.  

I immediately thought knockwurst.

Knockwurst, or Knackwurst,  gets it's name from the 'pop' the casing makes when it is cut and seasonings flood the senses. Knockwurst is made of veal, pork, hog casing and plenty of garlic - individual butchers add their own secret spices. Knockwurst packs on the lard. That is why it is so tough to find, in our Euro-globalist dweeb-thin culture. Everyone wants to look like an idiot lane weaving cyclist.

I was chilled.

My thoughts turned to lard fuel and no place on earth is more conducive to fighting the elements than Pat & Jacks  Old Fashioned Meats in Chicago Ridge, a couple of miles from Brother Rice.  This gem of a butcher store is of the old saw-dust and straw Kelly'd butchers type. Love them on Face Book!

The meat is exceptional and the service like no place else.  More importantly, Pat & Jacks is one of the only places left on the south side where one can buy genuine KNOCKWURST.  Can't get it at County Fair, Jewels, Whole Foods, Pete's Produce, or Saveway.  Can't even get it at the usually helpful Mariano's.

Pat & Jack's Old Fashioned Butchers was my next port of call.

Got me four knockwursts, four thuringers, five Russett potatoes cut into thin ( 1/4" pieces) one large yellow onion, a head of  green cabbage ( cut in wedges and cored, a 12 ounce box of pinot grigio apple cider vinegar, caraways seeds, Kosher salt and black peppercorns . . .Oh, and some serious cloves of garlic and half a stick of Kerry Gold butter.

I parboiled the cabbage and then tossed it in apple cider vinegar, Kosher salt and caraway seeds in a big oil oil treated skillet and stir fried the cabbage for two minutes.

Then I place a layer of potatoes in the bottom of the slow cooker, added the cabbage in a layer then more potatoes, then more cabbage. covered all in wine and apple cider vinegar salt,pepper and caraway seeds and set on high for three hours.

After three hours I drained out the liquid and put in the half a stick of Kerry Gold cut into four pieces, added the minced garlic, pepper corns and cooked on low for one hour.

Then I added the whole Knockwurst and Thuringer sausages and cooked on low for three hours.

I turned off the pot and waited for it to cool and placed it in the ice box over night.

After 8:30 Mass, I set it on warm and will devour one portion ( 1 Knockwusrt/1 Thuringer ladle of cabbage and spuds) and dip with Dusseldorf mustard.


This will be a weeks work of great eating with a cold salad.

I love baseball. 

Fourth Sunday After Easter - I still need a kick in the . . .pants.

One of my all-time favorite Readings is from today's Lectionary and the Acts of the Apostles.

Someone told me that there was a T.V. series about Acts, I find that hard to believe - no market: no vampires, rough sex, LGBTQ sub-themes, nor a willing cast.

Could be wrong.  I 'll look into it, after 8:30 Mass at Sacred Heart*.   Not that I'll watch it, just out of curiosity.  Maybe I'll watch it.

Anyway, this reading is a good one:

Reading 1 ACTS 2:14A, 36-41
Then Peter stood up with the Eleven,
raised his voice, and proclaimed:
"Let the whole house of Israel know for certain
that God has made both Lord and Christ,
this Jesus whom you crucified."
Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart,
and they asked Peter and the other apostles,
"What are we to do, my brothers?"
Peter said to them,
"Repent and be baptized, every one of you,
in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins;
and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
For the promise is made to you and to your children
and to all those far off,
whomever the Lord our God will call."
He testified with many other arguments, and was exhorting them,
"Save yourselves from this corrupt generation."
Those who accepted his message were baptized,
and about three thousand persons were added that day.

Peter is by far my favorite saint, as he is the most male, the thickest, the most impulsive, the most 'FEET , do your stuff!' and the most honest of the disciples.  Peter is upfront about his betrayal of Jesus in the garden and that is evident here.

Easter was only four weeks ago. The Renewal!  Like New Year's Eve.

I am already dodging my spiritual resolutions, like politicians promises.

The Pre-Resurrection Simon Peter reminds me of me.  Easily fooled - 'Jump out of the boat!'  Quick to anger, "Cut off the guy's ear."  Easily cowered by responsibilities - "Cook-doodle-do!"

The Peter of Acts is nothing like me.

I hope to be.

Thanks for the swift kick.




* yep, it was Roma Downey produced this series. I'll binge watch it sometime.

President Trump and the Media - A Full Press Court in Vinegaroon, USA

You have been tried by twelve good men and true, not of your peers but as high above you as heaven is of hell, and they have said you are guilty. Roy Bean

Much of Trump's cluelessness about issues stems from his refusal to make more than a minimal effort at his job. As his comments about Andrew Jackson and the Civil War confirm, Trump is not merely too lazy to learn; he's too lazy to notice there is anything others know that he might need to. His is indolence on an epic scale. Steve Chapman

 Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.- Truman Capote

The American media is as judicious in its treatment of President Trump as that sound voice of due process from Vinegaroon, Texas - Law West of the Pecos.  Judge Roy Bean is now working under many pseudonyms - Frank Rich, Dana Milbank, E.J. Dionne, David Brooks, George Will, Billy Kristol, and Kat6rina Vanden Huevel. The Judge has morphed into whole editorial boards at Washington Post, New York Times and even the hick burg rags like Chicago Tribune and Sun Times.

Only months ago, Judge Roy Bean had been Truman Capote to Barack Obama - smooching the patron and hissing at everyone else and then Trump won.  Lord the change.  The Resistance!

Me?  I just read the papers - most of them and then some.

Here is the Cinco De Mayo, 2017 sampling of Trump Thumping from the New York Times in Headline  Real journalism. Like nowhere else.

EDITORIAL

• The Trumpcare Disaster

SUNDAY REVIEW

• Mexican Drug Smugglers to Trump: Thanks!
• Trump’s Civil War Comments: Right and Left Reactions
• By ANNA DUBENKO
• A roundup of partisan writing that includes three political myths Mr. Trump has helped to bust and a comic you won’t believe.
• Obamacare Repeal Faces Senate Hurdle
• Fact Check: Is Congress Exempt From the Bill?

 Then,  I read a deceptively titled story -President Trump Returns to New York for a Brief First Visit - Home Boy President?  Nah.

This was a "We Ran Him Otta Town!"  piece by Michael Wilson.  NY, NY!

The Rube Media here in Chicago is mildly amusing with daffy screeds by lightweights like Rex Hupke, Mary Schmich, Eric Zorn and the Bruce Dold editorial ink.  The worst of this sad lot is the Tribune's own David Brooks JV player Stephan Chapman - The Minority of One, his own bad self!

Donald Trump has many worrisome, regrettable and even deplorable traits. But after studying him for the past two years, I have concluded he has an overlooked quality that cancels out many of his bad ones. Say what you will, the man is lazy.
This is a discovery that should gladden people of all parties, philosophies, races, sexes and religions. His detractors can be glad that he will never muster the drive or discipline to actually bring many of his worst ideas to fruition. His admirers can rest easy knowing he will not work himself to death.

 Really? Trump has been like an horny rabbit on bennies putting the blocks to the Obama Legacy - nothing for everyone, BUT Obama and his peeps. 

Lazy?  Chapman was right with his opener "Donald Trump has many worrisome, regrettable and even deplorable traits."  Can't argue that.  But, the lick spittle who munched Obama's rump for eight years and more should have stopped there,

There was a great line from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Roy Bean-like character exclaims, "I'm not crazy; I'm just colorful. That's what happens when you live "( 8 years alone in a Banana Republic)-, "you get colorful! " Then he is shot dead.



Judge Roy Bean was colorful.   The Press is crazy.

The GOP - Making America Great. . . again, and again, and again, or "Is This Your Homework, Larry?"

WASHINGTON, May 4 (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives was set on Thursday for a cliffhanger vote to repeal Obamacare, as Republican leaders worked to deliver President Donald Trump a win for one of his top legislative priorities.
House Republican leaders have expressed confidence the bill would pass and several party moderates who previously objected to it got behind it on Wednesday, giving the effort new momentum.
Still, the vote was expected to be close. Even if the measure passes the House, it faces daunting odds in the Senate where Republicans hold a narrower majority.

The Grand Old Party.

Say it with me.

Sounds better than Republican.

A Republican, when I was growing up, wore grey clothing and had a very bad haircut. He went to non-Union barbers in Roseland.  There were not many of them. They took commuter trains to work in the Loop at places like the Board of Trade, Quaker Oats, or Morton Salt.

They were Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Baptists and Non-Denominational Billy Graham fans. They were the minority population of Englewood, the Highlands, Scottsdale, West Lawn, or Brainerd.

Their kids went to public schools, belonged to the Cub/Boy/Girl Scouts, the Y and went to Bible camp in the summer.

Our Dads took the bus, the L, drove early model Buicks, Pontiacs and Chevys to the Stockyards, Standard Brands, Central Steel and Wire, Kenwood Construction, Boyington House Movers, Donahue Steel, the County, City Hall, Canfield's Bottling and National Can Corporation.  Some worked in the steel Mills over by the Lake, most worked nearby.

We went to parish grammar and high schools or high schools operated by the Carmelites, Sisters of Casmier, Mercy Nuns, Irish Christinan, or De LaSalle brothers.  Some very few were educated by the Jesuits at St. Ignatius - they were really smart.

We swam at Park pools and they swam at the Y.

We stayed out of the Y - naked swimmers and birth control.

Politics was as easy as being a White Sox, or Cardinals fan.   I do not recall any great affection for George Halas's team back in the 1960's.  We liked Green Bay, Oakland and the Jets.

The Cubs?  I knew two families, the Sitorouses and the Balinas.  The Balinas moved to Rolling Meadows, wherever the hell that was, in 1964.  Nick Sitorous went to mass where Louis Farakhan demands that the Jews get what's coming to them and whitey too. Nick was Greek.  He was not a Republican, but he loved the CUBS and fixed television sets.

The rest of us were Italian, German, Belgian, Dutch, Polish, Lithuanian, Jews and where I lived predominantly Irish.  Many of the younger families were mixed. Diversity was called white flight bigotry.

The Republicans could never win an election.  They supported Planned Parenthood, used to belong to the Klan, kept Catholics and Jews out of the American Eagles clubs and kept to themselves, which was OK by us.  We waved.  They waved back.

I remain a Democrat, even though the Party is more like the cold, humorless and robotic GOP that I recall from my wonder years.  I voted Democrat for President until Barack Obama.  I had gotten to know young Barack Obama, executive director of the Woods Fund, congressional candidate, Illinois State Senator and U.S. Senator, before he became the Untouchable Candidate and President.  I found him to be a dope.  He has not let me down.

Worse, the Democratic Party, which had once been as honestly invested in the neighborhood and its people, as any parish, had become a branch of the Unitarian Abortion and America's Biggest Critic Book and Alchemy Club. 

Try and find a union bug on a Progressive Democrat's business card.  Good luck with that.

However, The GOP is worse.

They are screw-ups.  Hand a Republican a winning Lotto ticket and he goes to debtors prison.

Obama had some of the nastiest, wealthiest and committed  people in America directing his every prompt, move and triumph.  The Progressives.

The GOP remains dominated by the tasseled loafer crowd of Judge Smails opportunists like John McCain ( for whom I worked like a dog in 2008, only to watch him quit like Girl Scout in a downpour ditching the cookies and heading home), Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell and so many others.  Paul Ryan has become as noodle spine-ed as Yertle the Turtle and the other two war-happy phonies.

With seven years of whining about ObamaCare, the Budget and House Committees on Everything, the people voted in change at the executive, legislative and a tiny,tiny bit at the judicial branches of government.  The GOP benefited and has done . . .nothing.

I credit President Trump with keeping his promises and energetically doing exactly what the American people demanded.

Right out of the chute, Paul Ryan screwed the pooch on the Affordable Health Care recall.

Now, only weeks later the GOP are trying to force another failed vote.

These clowns are like a very few of my students who write forty characters of a 500 word essay on Frederick the Great in dull tipped pencil on a single page badly torn from Tommy Doyle's notebook on the way to school, when Times New Roman # 12 font is required and MLA citation demanded,  without any mention of Prussia, much less the Enlightenment- " Is this what you wanted?"

Is THIS your homework, Larry?

That is the GOP.

I do not consider  President Trump to be a Republican.

I find hope and change in that fact.  

Wallace Stevens and Ron White - Stays Against a Tide of Stupid: Jane Fonda, Dildos and Dick Durbin

Then Judah said to Onan, “Sleep with your brother’s wife and fulfill your duty to her as a brother-in-law to raise up offspring for your brother.” But Onan knew that the child would not be his; so whenever he slept with his brother’s wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from providing offspring for his brother. What he did was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death also. Genesis 38 8-10

There should be no shame in the vibrator game. Heidi Stevens- Chicago Tribune 

          The next time you have a thought... let it go. Ron White

Guess I'm just a crusty old so-and-so.  I read in order to soak up the goings-on, the go-getters and the Grace giving goodness of people on this earth, but often find myself stewing in the bile coughed up by the truly stupid.

Were the world in the capable hands of Ron White things might be just a little more whole some, giggle-giving and affirming that God loves us. T'aint so.

God has given us free-will and too many columnists like Chicago Tribune's Heidi Stevens, Mary Schmich, Eric Zorn and Rex Huppke to wade through to get to John Kass.

Then, from the Merchandise Mart, the Chicago Sun Times thickens the fairway with weeds like Michael Sneed, Lynn Sweet, Mark Brown and Neil Steinberg, in order to play through to reports by Tim Novak.

This morning, instead of averting my eyes like my soul thunders for me to do, I went and read Heidi Stevens' chirpy ad for dildos.  Jane Fonda's frank sex toy talk opens the door for a generation -  Mother of God! Really, this is a regular column written by a nitwit who acts as the culture guardian of suburban women and metrosexuals.

Get this!  "Seventy-nine-year-old Jane Fonda is doing for vibrators what 44-year-old Jane Fonda did for aerobics videos: mainstreaming them.

And not a moment too soon. . . .The new season of her critically acclaimed Netflix series, "Grace and Frankie," co-starring Lily Tomlin, sees the two women launch a business selling sex toys for women. If you happen to drive down Vine Street in Hollywood, you might see a giant billboard of Fonda and Tomlin holding ribbed, purple objects under the words "Good vibes" — in case there was any confusion about what they're holding.  And if you watch "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," you may have happened upon Fonda unveiling a vibrator on daytime TV. (Take that, "The View"!) . . .

Cleansing breath - If you watch the View, you are way past worrying about.

Back to vagina vibrating with Heidi Stevens.

"I applaud her," said Lauren Streicher, medical director of Northwestern Memorial Hospital's Center for Sexual Medicine and Menopause. "I've been trying to talk about this on daytime TV for years, and no one will have any part of it."
Fifty-two percent of American women use a vibrator, Streicher said, according to a 2009 study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. And women over 60, in particular, need to know about their benefits.
"Sometimes nerve endings aren't as sensitive as they used to be, so what did it for you before isn't going to necessarily do it anymore," said Streicher, who wrote "Sex Rx: Hormones, Health, and Your Best Sex Ever" (Dey St.). "In addition, you have a lot of medical conditions — diabetes, cardiovascular disease, multiple sclerosis — that can cause a desensitization of nerve endings, so there is a need for increased stimulation."

So,  data!   As useful to onanists as the Paul Simon Institute's pre-caste polling.

The social engineers Steicher, Stevens, De Generis and Fonda argue that most women practise onanism - you know - wank, jerk off, jack off, toss off, bring oneself off,  and pleasure oneself - to use the Gone With the Wind trope -fiddle-dee-dee!

Isolated, solitary, all by their lonesome vaginas are liberating!  No masters; No God!  No Problems!

How about guys?  They love to Date Miss Michigan!  I must admit, that the image of Barbarella doing the business trumps that guy, Torrence Ivy, from the Red Line.  Celebrity and all.

A Celebrity endorsement in this Age of Resistance is often just not enough - even for a woman with the woke vagina to sit her business end on the business end of a Viet Cong flak pumper in 1967, is not enough - for a Medill-do columnist.  The Chicago Tribune's go-to academics largely come from Northwestern University - home of Medill-do School of Journalism (unaccredited - n'cest pas), where the Sun Times turns to the Blue Demon Social Justice Warriors of City Hall Connected De Paul University. 

The Sun Times wastes a bunch of space tell us that Senator Dick Durbin had an outpatient heart procedure, whatever that means.  Now, if he had an outpatient brain surgery that would be something!  And fun to watch.

As it is, my bile is up.  When that happens I turn to Wallace Stevens.

I chose The Plot Against The Giant - this delightful poem presents women at their best.  Three clever credits to their gender apply the sense smell, sight and sound to bedevil an ogre that is no doubt like meself.

First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.
Second Girl
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.
Third Girl
Oh, la...le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.
Wallace Stevens :

Labials are consonant sounds that require both upper and lower lips in mutual application - POP!

That sure undoes me.

After Fonda, Heidi Stevens and Lauren Streicher, set my bile a bubble, a penis dragging poet put me in fine perspective with touching anything but my soul.

If not Wallace Stevens, I turn to Ron White.



                     

Chicago May Days Considered the Day After the 2017 May Day

The Resistance - 1904: Chicago Strikers wait for scabs being brought in by the Progressive Chicago Civic Leadership.  These five are concerned for the lives of their families, because scabs are being flooded into Chicago by Armor, Swift, Cudahy and other members of the Packingtown syndicate.

The Resistance - 2017: Chicago activists are concerned, really, really, really concerned that Trumpism is hurting their feelings - Big time.


I taught on May Day this year.  I am proud of American labor. American labor created the American standard of living that flourished in the nation from the end of WWII until rise of Progressive ( Marxist) dominance of the Democratic Party.  The GOP has never made sense of working people and still tends to despise working men and women, as much as Elizabeth Warren and the New York Times.

The GOP continues to blow off its own toes and GOP Mavericks play to the very news media that detests them and the American Middle Class.  Planned Parenthood survived on Republican largess, until lace-curtain Catholics no longer wanted to be perceived as Archie Bunker.  Who happened to be a Protestant, by the way.

College educated sons and daughters who went to De Paul and Loyola  no longer wanted to be traditional Catholics tied to the old country.  They became Tom Hynes and Neil Hartigan Democrats, who later evolved into Dick Durbin milksops. " Yeah, I am personally against abortion, but I will take money from Planned Parenthood and fight to keep the slaughter of babies a Woman's Health Initiative!"

If you are OK with killing a child in womb, you are OK with any other mischief, it seems to me.

Blue collar Catholics found that they had much more in common with black, white and Latino tradesmen, than their starched collar Brooks Brothers bedecked Progressive-owned union leadership and voted for Reagan and then Trump.

Catholics are as thoroughly Balkanized as the rest of the country.  Country Music plays left and right, as much as buying chicken or coffee,  How did this happen?  Slowly and patiently.  Reds were run out of labor in the 1940's with the exception of textile trades.  The textile trades opened banks - Amalgamated banks out of New York. These banks funded activism in the arts and the sciences, as well as direct action causes.

Marxist activism is now what passes for American values these days.  The Orwellian hate speech crafted by 501(c) 3 foundations and universities has created a Balkan America divided by the very grassroots special interest, identity and agenda shouters being coalesced by foundation cockroaches like Gara LaMarche,

It begins with Philanthropic Foundations controlled by Marxists.  Money is the grease of politics and the engine for 'social change' - the elimination of the American Middle Class.

Labor needs money too.  And labor is coalesced along with immigrants, people unclear of their personal identities, foreign terrorists, lovers of abortion, the Beaux Arts, Hollywood, Broadway, the Media, Wall Street and the Ivy Towers - people who hate the idea of being accused of being bourgeoisie middle class - hillbilly chic American.

Yesterday, every carbon foot-print was set to hit the pavement, but here in Chicago it was forty degrees with winds gusting up to 40 MPH and rain.

The crowds were way down from the expected Pussy Hat numbers of January's Resistance.  we know this because neither Chicago daily paper crowed about the throngs and the media uses helicopters.

 Not so throng.

May Day is a Communist Holiday called International Day in Europe.  May Day says little about American labor anymore.

It says plenty about the dark forces of fascism behind Blue Statism.


Real labor showed up in throngs despite cops billy clubs used to protect scabs -

Real Labor resisted, because there were consequences in life -

People died creating the American Middle Class.

People want no consequences for murdering the Middle Class

One Gangster Banked There and Now Ja'Mal Green, His Majostee, Owns It: Standard Bank a Chicago Story

Ja'mal Green - His Majostee!

J 
Old Standard Bank

Spike O'Donnell - king of 79th Street


From the end of World War One until the 1980's the Art Deco building at 7919 S. Ashland Avenue in the Highlands of Gresham - 60620 -was the safest bank in the Midwest.  Standard State Bank was where Edward J. "Spike" O'Donnell kept his loot.  Today, a young anti-police Democratic activist, who  States Attorney Kim Foxx allowed  Ja'Mal Green to plead down nine felony charges to a single misdemeanor charge, is also being gifted with this ediface.

Spike O'Donnell was the only racketeer from the Capone Beer Wars to die in his sick bed without handcuffs, or beefy guards doing the death watch.

Unlike too many of his brothers ( Steve, Charlie, Walter were all killed and a younger brother blinded)  who were taken for the long short-ride, or gunned down in the lobbies their apartments, Spike quit the beer rackets, lived life and enjoyed decades of notoriety and 79th Street celebrity operating asphalt, heating oil and paving operations from his suit above the old Highland Theater one block north of Standard Bank.




He was not too legit to quit. Spike was too smart to become more of a bullet magnet.

Spike O'Donnell owned several large bungalows west of Ashland Avenue in the 1930's.  He lived  at 8145 S Honore. He and his family suffered the gangster life.  In April 1932, Spike's brother Charles was gunned down in the lobby of his apartment near 91st & Ashland and later died of gangrene in Little Company of Mary Hospital.

That same month two men, one Walter Zwolinski who had been kicked out of the O'Donnell mob, for shooting Charlie O'Donnell's pet goat, broke into Spike's home at 8145 S. Honore. " in  hopes of killing Spike, but find only his wife Elizabeth at home. Frustrated in their efforts, they throw her down the basement stairs, but she sustains only minor injuries. Speculation suggests that one of the men was former O'Donnell gang member Walter Zwolinski, who is now a member of the McGeoghegan-Quinlan Gang. Since his expulsion from the South Side O'Donnell Gang for killing Steve O'Donnell's pet goat in a fit of rage, increasingly unstable Zwolinski is suspected in separate attacks on Steve and Spike as well as the fatal wounding of Charles O'Donnell."

In May, Walter Zwolinski was found slumped over the wheel of his car with six bullets in his head.

Spike O'Donnell put the gains of crime into accounts at Standard Bank 7919 S. Ashland.

There is a tale on the south side that might be apocryphal - at the start of the Depression there was a run on the bank and Spike O'Donnell showed up in the lobby with several suitcases stuffed with cash and also tucked under his arm was a violin case, also loaded with the long green difference.

The 6'4" O'Donnell announced to the throng of worried depositors, " I am putting dough in Standard and also the cash from Father Steve McMahon's Little Flower Church, rectory and school. This dough is going no where."

Little Flower, St. Sabina, St. Killians, St. Etheldreda and Leo High School held accounts with Standard Bank. It was the safest bank around.

And the dough remained.  Standard Bank has many branches in southwest city and suburbs.

The branch on Ashland closed in the 1980's.

The building is in the possession of young Ja'Mal Green, who has become as prominent as Chance the Rapper, thanks to Democrats like former Governor Pat Quinn, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and her creature Cook County States Attorney Kim Foxx.

Spike O'Donnell once robbed the  Stockmen's Trust and Savings Bank at 5425 S Halsted and did a stretch in Joliet, until he was pardoned by Governor Len Small.  Spike was never given a bank.

Green said he now hopes to focus on the youth center he's trying to establish in Auburn Gresham. Green and his supporters bought a 12,500-square-foot building at 7919 S. Ashland Ave. last week.
Green, who has protested violence and police brutality, has spent months raising money for the Majostee Allstars Youth Center. He hopes the center can become a spot where locals learn about opening businesses, drop their kids off for day care or express themselves at concerts and open mic nights.
The center will also offer mental health services and mentoring opportunities.
"That's what Majostee Allstars is all about, is telling our young people in these communities you may have ... a lack of investment in your community, but no matter where you're from you can still be something and you can still have hope," Green said. 

Ja'Mal Green wants to make this gift an opportunity for more young men like himself.  Donation are funneled through Pastor Pfleger Industries:

How to Help the Youth Center
• Donate on GoFundMe
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There hasn't been this much bullshit on Chicago's streets since the Stockyards closed.

Spike O'Donnell had friends in high places and so does Ja'Mal.

Is this a great city, or what?

35th District's State Representative Aborts the Illinois Abortion 'Trigger' Bill

Illinois House members Tuesday approved a bill that would expand taxpayer-funded abortions and protect abortion rights in the event that Roe v. Wade is overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
However, the vote fell far short of what will be needed if Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner follows through on a promise to veto the bill if it reaches his desk. The House vote was 62-55. A veto override requires 71 votes.

 “Call their state representatives,” Feigenholtz said. “Make sure their legislators are supporting HB 40. This is going to be the most important piece of women’s legislation in this general assembly.”

Unless the woman is in her mother's womb, of course.  Then, Illinois will be an abortion sanctuary state, thanks to my State Representative Fran Hurley.  Fran is a nice person who thinks that a child in the womb is tissue and no different from a bit of fleshy wattle on a woman's neck, or some Lipo that needs sucking.

My Representative should represent my views on abortion - which match the majority of people in the 35th District.

Yet, my State Representative votes with the abortion industry, Boss Terry Cosgrove's Personal PAC Illinois and whatever Mike Madigan suggests.   Fran Hurley serves the 19th Ward, because she worked for State Representative Kevin Joyce, who retired as from Illinois politics to work for Ave Maria University and now the Catholic Extension Society. Kevin Joyce was the last true representative of the people who live in the 19th Ward and the serpentine House District 35 coiling southwest from 83rd & Laflin to Orland Park.

Fran Hurley is the first elected official that I am aware of who has publicly and proudly taken the coin of Boss Terry Cosgrove's Personal PAC Illinois - a a hybrid child of the gay marriage movement and the abortion industry, funded by media mogul Fred Eychaner and the abortion industry.

Most voters in this neck of the woods are not comfortable with abortion.   I believe that America lost its greatness in 1973 with Roe v. Wade - if you are Ok with the cosmetic murder of a human being, you are probably Ok with any else.

Abortion is the original hate crime.

Fran Hurley cast her vote on Illinois HB 40 which would perpetuate the murder of human beings in the womb.  You know, The Vagina is a perfectly wonderful topic for what faux-sophisticates deem conversation and makes a snarky and fun hat worn to show public contempt for President Trump and all who voted for him and many who voted against him and detest abortion.

The Womb is a word that stands to be banned by the semiotic-totalitarians who wear pink P-hats and gush over the Personal PAC appointed representatives like Kelly Cassidy and the HB 40 sponsor Sara Feigenholtz.  Fran Hurley needs to keep her head down. Still plenty of 'unevolved' Catholics and Evangelicals in the 35th.

Fran Hurley voted for this horrible bill meant to overturn the 1975 legislation concerning Roe v. Wade:

“. . . if those decisions of the United States Supreme Court are ever reversed or modified or the United States Constitution is amended to allow protection of the unborn then the former policy of this State to prohibit abortions unless necessary for the preservation of the mother’s life shall be reinstated.”

The Chicago news media backs every command from Boss Terry Cosgrove, who ruled Pat Quinn's time as Illinois Governor, as much as Fran Hurley and other Personal PAC vassals.  

Fran Hurley's website features her endorsements by the blue collar people of the 35th District via the labor organizations.  Her website buries her endorsement by Personal PAC and Boss Cosgrove.

Fran Hurley had no problem betraying Kevin Joyce's mentoring and his political will to fight the American Genocide,  any more than the will of the people she represents in the 35th Ward.

To Carry that Sad Torch

I will always think about you, even if I live without you -song by Ronnie Rice and Leslie Kummel

Well that's how it goes and Joe, I know your gettin' pretty anxious to close
So, thanks for the cheer, I hope you didn't mind my bendin' your ear
This torch that I found must be drowned or it soon might explode
So, make it one for my baby and one more for the road
That long, long road - lyrics by Johnny Mercer

"Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!" - William Shakespeare -Romeo & Juliet

How many of us have carried a torch for a love?  All of us?  Unrequited?  Requited, but unsatisfying?

How about the kind of passionate infatuation that knocks us completely out of selves?

I was driving home from a wonderful date with with wonderful woman, while listening to heart wrenching phrasing and meticulous intonation of every syllable by the Swedish jazz genius Monica Zetterlund with  Jimmy Jones-p, Al Hall-trp, Milt Hinton-b, Bobby Donaldson-d.

Try this -


My God! I thought of my wife who went home to Christ in 1998 and how we met.  We in love think of having forever. Yeah, right.

I am blessed to know love again. Some people never have that.

Let's think about that and many people who never recovered from God's greatest gift to us - the unqualified love of another person.

Here's a few, real and imagined,  who carried that sad torch:

Don Quixote and Dulcinea
Katherine Hepburn for Spencer Tracy
Oscar Wilde for Lord Alfred Douglas
Dwight Eisenhower for Kay Summersby
Mark Antony for Cleopatra
Heloise and Abelard
Marilyn Monroe and my gender
King Arthur and Guenevere
Errol Flynn for Olivia de Havilland
Frank Sinatra for Eva Gardner

Love and lose. With God's grace alone we might win again.  Loneliness is a killer.

It makes some so unstable that they become stalkers.  It can paralyze an athlete and stultify a happy genius.


May sad songs be our limit.

Woke White Folks? Woke? Really, Jonathan. Take a Walk Up Maplewood Avenue.

The Chicago Tribune picks up the bulk of its coverage from the Washington Post, other papers, the Associated Press and approved lick-spittles.

Today Jonathan Capehart, a real beauty and a signal dandy of reason that the American people detest the mainstream media, offers an insultingly inaccurate hate-piece on white working class Americans: All working people, to be accurate.

The guys who fix the Peoples Gas lines all over Morgan Park, Mount Greenwood, Archer Heights and Ashburn these days are for the most part working class white guys.  I walked up Maplewood Avenue to St. John Fisher for services at 6:12 A.M. yesterday.  I usually take Talman, but changed my route, just for giggles.

At that time half a score of People Gas utility vehicles, accompanied by allied contractors vehicles: back-hoes, bobcats and cement finisher rigs with lumber and tools were lining the both sides of Maplewood Avenue.  By the way,  white working class kids learn the difference between a street and an avenue in pre-school.  A street has houses on both sides and and avenue runs perpendicular (right next to) a street and has trees on both sides.  Well, the vehicles mentioned were populated with working men - black, Latino and mostly white guys.  They were in the majority, numerically speaking.

However, according to Jonathan Capehart, a poster child for W.E.B. DuBois's 'Talented Ten Per Cent, who was immediately made an editorial board member when he began work at the New York Daily News and was married to his boyfriend by the Attorney General of United States, Eric 'Nation of Cowards' Holder and covered for another Attorney General after she met with Bill Clinton just prior to James Comey's absolution of Candidate Hilary Clinton.  Jonathan Capehart is on every cable news show and is a major player, Mosel Tov.

Jonathan Capehart did the black bag work on Bernie Sanders.  You could say, that Jonathan Capehart launched the Trump White House. Oh, I will.  Jonathan Capehart gelded Bernie Sanders and propelled Donald J. Trump into the White House.

Now, Capehart is free to blame anyone for the Trump Presidency, but as a gold-plated black man and as an LGBTQ 4th Estate bullet proof voice, blame white working class people and their supposed fear of blacks, gays, Muslims, Caitlyn Jenner, Elizabeth Warren, BitCoins, science and rainbows for the current rise in global respect, calmer waters in the South China Sea, a sky-high Dow Jones and the Resistance.

Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianism." That was the you-don't-say headline on an April 17 Monkey Cage analysis by Thomas Wood of the 2016 American National Election Study. It was just more statistical confirmation of what we already know. You may recall a column last September about other studies of the electorate by The Washington Post's Dana Milbank with the headline "Yes, half of Trump supporters are racist."
We all kinda know what's going on here. (And by "we all," I'm speaking generally about people of color, African Americans in particular, and woke whites — "the new American majority," . . .

WOKE White Folks*?  Is that not from the coinage of Maxine Waters? Guess not.  We all?

 . . .as author Steve Phillips puts it.) It's fear, anger and economic insecurity mixed with anxiety over the browning of America and the subsequent loss of preferred status that this will naturally entail. A new book by Justin Gest, assistant professor of public policy at George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government, takes that gut feeling reinforced by an overflow of anecdotal evidence and grounds it in research.

Really?  Like that scientific fact that gays comprise astronomically significant random samplings of the American populace?

PRINCETON, N.J. -- The American public estimates on average that 23% of Americans are gay or lesbian, little changed from Americans' 25% estimate in 2011, and only slightly higher than separate 2002 estimates of the gay and lesbian population. These estimates are many times higher than the 3.8% of the adult population who identified themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in Gallup Daily tracking in the first four months of this year.  Gallup

and that Brown is the new White?  

Trump won the white working class vote, because guys like Jonathan Capehart undid the Progressive base by going all Maxine Waters on Bernie Sanders.  That and white working class people, as well as black working class people, and brown working class people like to have their bank accounts reflect their efforts.

But, Steve Phillips, one of the archtects of the 2016 strategy argues:

The first step the next chair (DNC) should take to fix this problem is to conduct a transparent and brutally honest assessment of exactly what happened in 2016. There are a lot of misunderstandings, incorrect conclusions, and false and facile assumptions floating around and influencing preliminary plans for progressives in the future. One such myth, for example, is that millions of voters abandoned Democrats and flocked to the Trump campaign, when in fact Clinton got just about the same number of votes that Obama did in 2012 (Trump exceeded Romney’s 2012 numbers by 2 million votes, and third-party candidates received 5 million more votes than they did in 2016). Understanding exactly what happened and why is an essential first step to winning back the White House.

Brown might be the dominant demographic in the coming years, but stupid is color blind.

The progressive message stinks, Steve. It stinks in technicolor!  The WOKE whites at the Nation, Salon, The New Republic, the NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, NBC, CNN and Al Jazera  continue with same idiotic, diffisive and race baiting messages spouted by WOKE whites like Elizabeth Warren, Dick Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Michigan Fats Moore and Chris Matthews.

Working people fear nothing, Jonathan.  They go to work, go to war, go to the polls, go to church, go to their children's events and go to the aid of their neighbors.

The guys fixing the gas lines under the sidwalks all long Maplewood Avenue were all laughing with one another, running for coffee at Dunkin Donuts over on Western Ave. for their crews and showing absolutely no signs of Trump terror and nor did they make nosie as their neighbors slept, before they too went to work.


* WOKE Whites  do not work back-hoes, Bobcats, nor do they labor with working men and women of color:

The latest revolution of “woke” doesn’t roll its eyes at white people who care about racial injustice, but it does narrow them at those who seem overeager to identify with the emblems and vernacular of the struggle. For black activists, there is a certain practicality in publicly naming white allies. Being woke, Stovall says, means being “aware of the real issues” and willing to speak of them “in ways that are uncomfortable for other white folks.” But identifying allies poses risks, too. “There are times when people have been given the ‘black pass,’ and it hasn’t worked out so well,” Stovall says. “Like Clinton in the ’90s.” A white person who gains a kind of license to use power on behalf of black people can easily wield that power on behalf of themselves.

Uh,huh.

My Writing Exercise: A Heavy Mule at the Pierian Spring

Some have at first for Wits, then Poets past,
Turn'd Critics next, and prov'd plain Fools at last.
Some neither can for Wits nor Critics pass,
As heavy mules are neither horse nor ass.

I was told by my teaching mentor, " If you plan to teach writing, you had better write for at least two hours before you come to teach."  That meant getting up well before "It's time to get up."

It also meant that I needed to steal myself to a habit of engaging my craft.  Aristotle wrote, " We are what we repeatedly do,"  The famously taciturn President Calvin Coolidge said, "  Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."

A grammar school coach, Tom Spatz said, " Losers have potential."  He also, asked me if I had polio a few years earlier, when he saw me dribble a basketball.

I still dribble a basketball like an exceptionally challenged human being. All Up in here!

However, since signing my contract at Bishop Martin D. McNamara High School in May of 1975, I have written for two hours before I went to teach my students.

This habit did not make me a great writer, but it did help me become something of an effective teacher.

Reading, speaking and writing forces one to engage other human beings.  Reading introduces thoughts, deeds and manners of expression far beyond our immediate social circle.  Speaking helps us say what we mean.  Writing requires exactness.

I write whatever comes to mind and that is a mixed bag to be sure.  What I hope will happen by end of my scribbling and correcting and modifying will be short, satisfying defense of all the things have made my life fun, fruitful and favorable to someone who reads what I have written.

Lessons learned from good people, who have provided for other people as tradesmen, butchers, milkmen, nurses, police officers, firemen, coaches and teachers mean as much and often more than picked up from pages from Balzac, Turgenev, Gorky, Joyce, Tacitus, or Swift. The harmonies of sounds pulled from the din of a loud basement full of relatives and family friends at a Christmas Party among picnic tables lifted from the forest preserves covered in table cloth and loaded with potato salads, cold cuts, pots of Italian beef, corned beef, Kapusta, Mostaccioli, cakes and soad bread; with blaring accordions, fiddles, tin whistles played by Cuz Teahan, Jimmy Neary, Tom Masterson and Kate Neary, or a powerful HiFi loaded with Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Prima and John Coltrane.  Cousin doing Irish step-dancing, or Sugar push and out back steps to Gene Krupa.  Then of course just free-form, white guy moves to This Old Heart of Mine by the Four Tops.

An uncle pulls you aside and tells you to knock off whatever the hell it is that you think you are doing.

Your aunt tells him to go and have another beer and mind his own business and to turn the car keys over - Now. 

Scores of kids scream with delight, or terror.  Several cry because they being picked on and comforted until they can go and pick on someone for themselves and all is good.

Words impact from everywhere.

The meanings of those words will be lost on the world, unless someone remembers what the hell was said.  Memory can often be very convenient.

Memory is the burden carried by one who writes and that burden only gets eased with writing down the words.

Sometimes words seem like leftovers from a party.