Like the Late DNA info, Chicago Trib Refuses (Fascism) to Mention Revolutionary Communists

“If you want to know about, and work toward, a different world—and if you want to stand up and fight back against what's being done to people—this is where you go. You go to this Party, you take up this Party's newspaper, you get into this Party's leader and what he's bringing forward.” Bob Avakian - Revolutionary Communist Party

The Tribune is committed to Midwestern values and concerns, and brings that sensibility to the public debate. In both its words and its actions, it seeks out true innovation, but is unimpressed by momentary trend and skeptical of untested theory. This has been a basic hallmark of the Tribune throughout its history and continues to guide this newspaper. It encourages constructive change in the light of tradition and the lessons of history. Experience, as well as intellect, is essential to wisdom. Chicago Tribune Principles

Innovation?   "Innovation, for its part, can refer to something new or to a change made to an existing product, idea, or field.,  says Merriam -Webster 

Innovation like a Revolution"?

How about "give a spoken or written account of something that one has observed, heard, done, or investigated.."  That is the definition of a "Report."  Revolution can come later.

I saw a Malibu and the Malibu is a Chevrolet product.

I saw a Whopper and it is a Burger King product.

I saw a Big MAC and it is a McDonald's product.

I saw a Refuse Fascism (RF) Protest and RF is part of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

I read about the Trump protest organized by Refuse Fascism that was covered in the Chicago Tribune which refused to mention the Revolutionary Communist Party.

Why is that?

Does the Trib assume everyone already knows that Refuse Fascism RF is a product of the Revolutionary Communist Party REVCOM?

Does the Chicago Tribune believe, as the shut-down DNAinfo Chicago did, that people should not know that there is any connection between the two?

I believe it is the later.

More than 100 protesters marched in a light rain through Chicago's Loop to Trump Tower on Saturday, part of demonstrations in more than a dozen cities scheduled nearly a year after President Donald Trump’s election.
The protestors, who carried signs reading “The Trump/Pence Regime MUST GO!” first rallied at Federal Plaza, at Adams and Dearborn streets, then marched north on State Street. They were outnumbered by uniformed police officers.  A group called Refuse Fascism called for rallies Saturday in more than 20 cities. Speakers at the Chicago rally said they hoped the protests would build until millions of Americans took to the streets in opposition to the Trump administration. Steve Schmadeke for Chicago Tribune

Steve Schmadeke probably knows that there is direct link between Refuse Fascism and the Revolutionary Communist Party and Revolution Books. I know that a Malibu is a Chevy, for God's sake and I know that REVCOM was behind most of the Joshua Beal protests last November.  DNAinfo Chicago knew too, but kept it out of print. DNAinfo Chicago and Gothamist were shut down last week by its owner.  Even Wikipedia know offers the connection between between Refuse Fascism and REVCOM.

DNAinfo Chicago failed, because it did not live up to the expectations of owner.  The owner expected solid local coverage of neighborhood events to give ".written account of something that one has observed, heard, done, or investigated." Joe Ricketts said, "while we made important progress toward building DNAinfo into a successful business, in the end, that progress hasn’t been sufficient to support the tremendous effort and expense needed to produce the type of journalism on which the company was founded.”

DNAinfo Chicago ignored the Revolutionary Communist Party's key role in the Joshua Beal protests all last year, even though the signs (paid for by REVCOM) pointed in that direction.

The Revolutionary Communist Party is as dangerous as any alt-right band of bravos.  It is a thug organization that provides street cover for left-leaning activists, journalists  and politicians, while killing off public debate and free speech everywhere.

Protest up a storm against Trump, or fois gras, 24/7!

Just report honestly . . . for once.

Look at the signs.

Look at the players.

Report what is there.

Leave the innovation and revolution to the Edisons and the Lenins.

DNAinfoChicago R.I.P.: Ye Hardly Knew Ye.

I read DNAinfoChicago from the get-go.   It was, at first. a great news aggregate that offered local coverage.

I gotta go with Joe about its demise, Joe Ricketts, that is, the Cubs' Grandpa, “And while we made important progress toward building DNAinfo into a successful business, in the end, that progress hasn’t been sufficient to support the tremendous effort and expense needed to produce the type of journalism on which the company was founded.”

News coverage of local events became less devout and political hack-work seemed to ooze from every column.

DNAinfoChicago somehow morphed into the detested MEDIA.  Same old, same old.

Solid writers like Mark Schipper and Ed Komenda disappeared and activist group-think writers dominated the coverage.

Most telling for me was the awful coverage of the idiot who pulled a gun on people after he was asked to not block the entrance of the firehouse on 111th Street.

The idiot was shot and killed, when he aimed his weapon at people.

The idiot had been celebrating a relative's funeral by weaving in and out of the heavily trafficked lanes of 111th Street, the commercial district for the Mount Greenwood neighborhood.  Traffic stalled and the Hossier Hothead acted out with his weapon and his mouth.

I had had my haircut on the site of the violence and where the dope met his demise, only an hour before the folly.

However, DNAinfoChicago  reporters, Joe Ward especially. conflated identity politics, race-baiting and social justice warfare with what had taken place - Marist high school was placed in the cross-hairs and community scab-yanking over imagined and occasionally accurate racism became the menu all of the month of November 2016, until the facts un-Pflegered the story.  Joe Ward never once considered covering the Revolutionary Communist Party's orchestration of the post shooting protests.  That would have chopped his narrative.


The DNAinfo Joshua Beal mythology can be found here, because the archived yarns are shut down.
Joe Ricketts owned the site and Gothamist and decided to close shop.

Conflated coverage of the news is what the detested American media is all about.  People want to know what is happening in their neighborhoods.  DNAinfoChicago tried to do that and ended up being another detested outlet for prefabricated opinions.

The Sun Times, owned by the public service unions, did a hit piece on the news of DNAinfoChicago's demise, not unlike the covergae of the late Mr. Beal:

A week before the shutdown, the Gothamist and DNAinfo newsrooms in New York voted to join the Writers Guild of America East, which released a statement Thursday saying “it is no secret that threats were made to these workers during the organizing drive.”
In a September post entitled “Why I’m Against Unions At Businesses I Create,” Ricketts wrote on his personal blog of his belief “that unions exert efforts that tend to destroy the Free Enterprise system.”
“I believe unions promote a corrosive us-against-them dynamic that destroys the esprit de corps businesses need to succeed,” Ricketts wrote. “And that corrosive dynamic makes no sense in my mind where an entrepreneur is staking his capital on a business that is providing jobs and promoting innovation.”
According to a New York Times report, 115 reporters from the websites who are now out of a job will receive three months of paid “administrative leave” at their full salaries, along with four weeks of severance pay.

Joe Ricketts was right.   Joe Ricketts gave his employees a pretty decent severance package.  More than an SEIU janitor can expect when all of the public funding has dried up.

So, we say goodbye to DNAinfoChicago.  Goodbye.

Thanks for the shot at news coverage Joe Ricketts.  It was appreciated by people like me, until the good writers disappeared.

Next time you set up shop, hire writers and tell the 'journalists' to get a union card and get fitted for a purple T-shirt.

Where Did All of Chicago's Hedge Bushes Go?

My childhood home at 1755 W. &75th Place today has all but been de-nuded of hedges - only a slight strip remains.

I walk to St. John Fisher in the morning between 6:00 and 6:30 A.M. - weather, laziness and time permitting.  It is a solid mile to the church and my vigorous gait usually gets me there in under fifteen minutes.  I mediate, plan the day, wallow in guilt and pray during this exercise.

Since childhood, I have had the attention span of parakeet ( 'bite the cuttle bone!' -'whack the bell!'-'head-butt the mirror!' - 'splash water!') and tend to flit the old noggin with varying perceptions - "this guy's lawn is worse than mine . . .Thank Christ. Charleston Chew wrappers!!!!  Where they get Charleston Chews? Love those.  These kids on Talman have more Fisher Price toys than Toys R Us . . . cool fort" for example.

Occasionally, this quality time of mine pulls together larger questions.  These past few days, I have noticed the lack of property hedges - the Right angles of bushy shrubbery that at one time seemed to dominate neighborhood landscapes.  Nellie Stevens Holly, Schip Cherry Laurel and Barberry shrubs once outlined our streets and walkways.  

Where is the Chicago neighborhood Bungalow Bocage?

I remark merely on its absence and wonder how kids can grow up with their heads screwed on straight without having had the experience of being knocked into the hedge on the way to school.

Hedges were magical!  They were castles, forts, Green Walls for Home Run Derby, jungles, zoos, hiding places, bushwhacking opportunities and the leaves could be made into musical instruments.

I spent many early mornings pulling myself out hedges on Honore, having taken the inside lane closer to properties and being Maury Lanigan-ed into a Cherry Laurel fencing the sidewalk in front of Al Balauskas's bunglow.  Paper bag covered books torn, folders of sloppy homework em-barbed in the sharp branches and my ego shocked out of existence to delighted howls of my boon buddies - " Walk on the outside, Hickey!" - prepared me for this  Vale of Tears that is our lot.

Each of us would spend time in the bushes.

Each of us, male and female, would learn that life is paved with unexpected checks into the boards.

The hedges helped.

Lynn Sweet Sweet on Bloomberg? Big Beverage and Little Voters Bad.

The Cook County pop tax: Conceived Nov. 10, 2016, when Cook County Board members approved the one-cent-per-ounce Sweetened Beverage Tax. Born on Aug. 2, 2017, its effective date. Date of death was decreed by a 15-2 repeal vote on Wednesday. The tax dies at the end of the county fiscal year, midnight on Nov. 30.
Bloomberg is crusading for higher taxes on sugary drinks as a way to reduce the obesity epidemic in this nation, with allies including the American Heart Association, active in the Cook County fight. Lynn Sweet Chicago Sun Times Cheerleader

Lynn Sweet really has a sweet gig.  Hang with the mighty and do their bidding.  Many of us out here in the fly-over land of helots are not so fortunate.

Lynn Sweet lists every government that took Mike Bloomberg's coin to kill Pop USA, as if any of these bought agencies matter to any of us.

Referendums in Oakland and Albany in 2016 approved the beverage tax, aligning these California East Bay cities with Berkeley, with a tax in effect since 2015.
Boulder and Seattle also have sweetened beverage taxes.
In 2017, however, Bloomberg’s team is hitting a rough patch when it comes to beverage taxes. Will the Cook County repeal give the beverage industry anti-tax drive momentum?

It do seem to be the case!

• Michigan state lawmakers took notice of the uproar in Cook County and last week, in a pre-emptive move, sent a bill to the governor to ban local governments from imposing soda taxes.
• On Oct. 4, the St. Helen, Oregon, city council voted down a sugar-sweetened beverage tax.
• On May 2, voters in Santa Fe, New Mexico, defeated a proposed 2-cents-per-ounce tax on sodas.
• Last spring, West Virginia state lawmakers dropped a beverage tax proposal.

Yeah, that Oakland CA is one head's up burg, Lynn, and Berkeley sends me too.

Not a bit. Not a sugary bit.

Try running a family owned gas station in Morgan Park, like Kean, and then have something like the Glorious Sugar Tax imposed upon your filling station, that also depends upon a steady flow of customers who not only gas up, but purchase pop, sweetened tea, Slurpees and sports drinks, as well.

A small fortune in revenue was lost over the past months thanks to a social engineering scam dressed up as a health issue to shore up political budgetary screw-ups.

Fat kids were not responsible for Cook County spending sprees:

. . . Preckwinkle sweetened the deal by giving each commissioner control over $500,000 in gas tax revenue to spend on transportation projects in their districts. She also rallied public health advocates to point out that downing fewer Mountain Dews could lead to a drop in obesity and diabetes.
Commissioners deadlocked, and Preckwinkle cast a rare, tie-breaking vote to impose the tax. If it hadn't gone as smoothly as Preckwinkle hoped, at least the new tax had passed, the budget was balanced and the heat was mostly on her.
Then it all started to unravel.
While the vote was taken in November 2016, providing plenty of distance from the March 2018 primary election, the tax wasn't scheduled to take effect until July 1.
The vagaries of federal law, the Illinois Constitution and state statutes meant it took months to come up with the rules of how the tax would be put in place, and changes were still being made late in the game.
For example, county officials at one point planned to tax low-income folks receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, but the state later told them that could not be done.

Not mention a sugary carrot to union County employees"

 However, it's worth noting that Teamsters Local 700 endorsed passage of the penny-an-ounce tax on sweetened beverages, saying at the time that it would "guarantee job security for hundreds of people that work for Cook County." The levy passed with Preckwinkle casting a tie-breaking vote.
It's also pertinent that Local 700 has been one of Preckwinkle's main campaign donors in recent years, with the Local and an affiliated Teamsters group using the same Park Ridge address giving her campaign fund at least $68,000 since 2014.
In the memo, Robinson is trying to build support for ratification and perhaps exaggerates a bit if only to look good.
The proposed pact includes some things taxpayers may like, with wages frozen the first year and then rising 2 percent across-the-the-board in each in the second and third years. "Step," or experience-based raises, also would be frozen for two years, but then be fully implemented.

Like the Proco Joe Chick Fil A Purge, Chicago and Cook County Values are not spun from Marilyn Katz's MK Communications, but born in the neighborhood values forge by faith and family.

Lynn Sweet of the Sun Times,  a very dependable Cook County, City of Chicago and Democratic Party cheerleader makes the argument that the Beverage Tax was merely a victory of Big Soda over Big Nanny Bloomberg. Not so.

People have had enough of this nonsense coming from political and media hacks.

People beefed loudly, because the steady streams of kids from St. Cajetan's, Clissold, Morgan Park and Chicago Ag School, as well as Mount Carmel, St. Rita, Mother McAuley, Brother Rice, Morgan Park Academy, Leo, Marist and legions of tradesmen, teachers, cops, firemen, retirees ad even an Alderman could not buy a bottle of pop, a Slurpee, or an Arizona Iced Tea without hitting a Pay Day Loan Center.

It is nice that some Cook County Commissioners were not totally tone deaf.

What would be nicer is a repeal of Cook County Ofiice Holders universal.

Sweet.