Rick Kogan, a Real Newsman, Talks Up Danny Goldring, a Real Actor\

                                                                                              

Chicagoans have a nose for BS, that somehow gets all plugged up when they enter the polling booth on election day.  Almost any day other than election day the old collective snot-locker works just fine.

That is due to the fact that Chicagoans were blessed with real newsmen for so long.  One could pick up one of any of the many news dailies and get the straight dope on what was going on -unvarnished, unparsed, nuance and agenda free reporting.

Like Chicago home-grown root beer, potato chips, ice cream and job security, accurate and BS free reporting is limited to a very few sources - The Tribune offers John Kass, Rick Kogan, Phil Rosenthal and Dennis Byrne on the opinion and information beat - these gents are the real deal with leather on the pavement experience reporting the news. The Sun tImes has only Steve Huntley and Mark Brown, but is blessed with great reporters like Natasha Korecki, Maureen O'Donnell, Steve Metsch, Tim Novak and Chris Fusco. The great Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Mark Konkol has moved on.

Rick Kogan is a great read and an even better listen - the man has pipes.  Rick Kogan has the sexiest voice on radio.  The only other voice sexier on the planet in my experience belonged to Barb Stegmiller.  We tended bar at the old Reilly's Daughter in Oak Lawn before and during the Jimmy Carter Administration. Barb and I are contemporaries and moved along the same strands in the south side network - she is a daughter of St. Tommy More Parish, Queen of Peace High School and an alumna of ISU.  Barb has a voice that Lauren Bacall would have murdered an orphanage full of toddlers to possess.  Reilly's Daughter owner Boz O'Brien made an offer to Barb on behalf of male staff of several hundred dollars a month to call each of us periodically at 2,3, or 4 AM.  " Hi . . .Pat, this is Barb . . .did I wake you? "  Not to worry!!!!!!!!

Rick Kogan does exactly the same magic on female listeners and the odd gent to bats for the other side of the plate, every Sunday Morning on WGN and now on WBEZ.  The deep, husky basso profundo words of welcome that links listeners to guests comes through the wires like a Wurlitzer Church Organ in Cologne Cathedral with E. Power Biggs hitting the keys.

More than Rick's great voice, his honest heart and head presents news of people with exacting detail to accuracy.

Rick Kogan's latest presentation is that of Chicago actor Danny Goldring - a guy with the Ashkenzim Irish mug - that combination of Celt & Viking Redheaded pallor that seems to charm and threaten simultaneously, unlike the more Sephardic Micks like me.  Mr. Goldring is just one of the many great Chicago actors in the cast of "Boss" - Kelsey Grammer's brilliant mirror of Chicago politics.  Kelsey Grammer has collected many of the best from Chicago stage Tony Mockus, Francis Guinan, Amy Morton and my personal favorite in the entire series -James Vincent Meredith as Alderman Ross.

Danny Goldring like most of the Chicago based and born cast has that familiar presence - we know this guy.



There is no BS to his character.  He is a Chicagoan.  Mr. Goldring plays the boyhood pal to Grammer's Mayor Tom Kane, former CPD homicide dick, conscience and saloon owner Ryan Kavanaugh. Mayor Kane came up through Streets and Sanitation and out of Bridgeport; He has gone away from what he was to the powerful monster that he has become.  Goldring's Kavanaugh keeps him tethered to the roots.

Rick Kogan goes to the roots - a barbershop -to present this authentic and talented actor -

Look at that face in the photo and try to tell me that is not a great neighborhood face. Aging handsomely and full of life, it is the face of actor Danny Goldring — even the name is neighborhood perfect, Danny — sitting in the barbershop that he has visited with regularity for the last 20 years.
The guys, barbers and customers, at Alfredo's, at 833 N. State St., greeted the actor warmly last Saturday morning. Stories were swapped, a few wicked but well-meaning wisecracks filled the air, and fading photos of customers and barbers past lined the walls.
"I love this place," says Goldring. "It's old school. A lot of characters."

Boss presents an authentic portrait of Chicago politics - it is pure prose, tough quotidian, smelly, nasty and broad shouldered.  Grudges are the grease of our government.  Politics is the sport of mooches and career of geniuses. These days, Chicago politics is characterized by milquetoasts with power and feebs with cover:  Could a ninny like Pat Quinn have been governor twenty years ago?  Could a suburban grifter and name-dropper ever have gotten into the elevator to the Fifth Floor at City Hall, before Richie Daley sold off every asset and authentic apparatus in city government? I think not.

Chicagoans like authentic for the most part.  That is why Ed Burke and Mike Madigan manage to do some good for people. while the milquetoasts gab on Chicago Tonight.

Kelsey Grammer has done more for political science than Thundering Dick Simpson is allowed to do.

We know BS and genuine PS when we see it.

Actors and newsmen men like Goldring and Kogan keep Chicago's nasal passages clear.

Alderman Proco "Joe" Moreno Calls Cardinal George Remarks " Ingenuous and Irresponsible."

“The Bible says many things,” Moreno said. “For the cardinal to say that Jesus believes in this, and therefore we all must believe in this, I think is just ingenuous and irresponsible. The God I believe in is one about equal rights, and to not give equal rights to those that want to marry, is in my opinion un-Christian.”

Candid, frank, guileless, without cant and yet irresponsible?  Say it it ain't so Proco-Joe.


Candidly, Proco Joe, I believe that Mayor Rahm twisted your ear like Kesley Grammer did to that Hispanic Alderman in last season's Boss on Starz ( New Season Begins August 17 on Starz -catch Chicago actor Tony Mockus as Kesey's Father-in-Law!) and said, " Proco Joe, prove your fealty, and go out and test the Gay waters for me - send Chick-fil-A a dead fish . . .Don't make me come into your shower!"  No Alderman goes off on his own hook . . .not in decades.


Proco Joe is wriggling on the pike and Chick-fil-A is frying up a storm.




"The Bible says many things " and the dictionary has many words.  Chicago's Alderman Proco "Joe" Moreno said a mouthful there; no doubt he needed to immediately sit down and catch his breath following such vigorous display of intellectual dexterity and rhetorical exertion.The Ghost (Rahm) had Mr. Chick-fil-A gallop gamely to the finish line with this -

Moreno also called the cardinal’s reference in the blog to a fictional Council Committee on Un-Chicagoan Activities “hyperbole and rhetoric.”
Moreno noted the church scandal surrounding pedophilia among priests, questioning George’s right to the “moral high ground on equal rights.”
Moreno, who has called gay marriage the civil rights issue of our time, also said the mayor and he are not trying to force their values on anyone, but rather to ensure equal rights. (emphases my own-natualment)

Pretty Ingenuous yourself, there, Proco! You know, candid, frank, honorable, noble & etc. Did you mention that there had been a pedophile scandal? Oh Yes.  But, of course, That's So, 1990s Proco Joe - unbefitting of the above postered beefcake-punk rock-theologian and one might find that last bit rather irresponsible for an American elected official to condemn a churchman for defending his church - This Ain't Your Daddy's Political Party notwithstanding. Well, First Ward First; now, to that Bible.


That Bible says a lot of stuff - Lot for example.Lot was the guy who defended God's angels from be gang-banged by the lads of the Boystown of the Central Plains -Sodom.  God, according to the Genesis account, was determined to destroy Sodom and its suburb.  God told Abraham "find 50 just men." Abraham, the old desert haggler, tried to gyp God down successively. . . " 40, 30, 20, 15 15 & 1/2 . . .10?"


Lot was it. He was a Breeder and had big family. 


"No Dice, Clay, " God said to Abraham, but I'll help get Lot out of this coming jackpot."  God sent two angels to help Lot and the wife and kids

Genesis 19:1 ¶ And there came two angels to Sodom at even; and Lot sat in the gate of Sodom: and Lot seeing them rose up to meet them; and he bowed himself with his face toward the ground;² And he said, Behold now, my lords, turn in, I pray you, into your servant's house, and tarry all night, and wash your feet, and ye shall rise up early, and go on your ways. And they said, Nay; but we will abide in the street all night.³ And he pressed upon them greatly; and they turned in unto him, and entered into his house; and he made them a feast, and did bake unleavened bread, and they did eat.

Here's where it gets problematic with regard to sexual preference.  Lot had two handsome gents as his guests and the neighbors wanted to "know" them - Knowing causes choice or coercion. Know in the Bible means to have marital relations - between man and woman.  However, the gents of Sodom and its suburb, took a far less natural approach to the requisite act of natural selection*. They stormed Lot's door -


6. Calling out to Lot they said, 'Where are the men who came to you tonight? Send them out to us so that    we can have intercourse with them.'

7 Lot said, 'Please, brothers, do not be wicked.

8 Look, I have two daughters who are virgins. I am ready to send them out to you, for you to treat as you please, but do nothing to these men since they are now under the protection of my roof.'

9 But they retorted, 'Stand back! This fellow came here as a foreigner, and now he wants to play the judge. Now we shall treat you worse than them.' Then they forced Lot back and moved forward to break down the door.

That was it! So much for Chicago Values in Sodom.


The God of the Phoenicians ( in the Bible the Moabites and all those folks; Philistines and such) Astarte was a sexually ambiguous deity of pan sexuality and human sacrifice. Them folks in Tyre and Sidon and Biblus and especially the sensitive and civil rights conscious folks of Sodom along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea worship up a storm and tried to force other folks to accept Sodom, Tyre, Sidon and Biblus Values.  Didn't take.


Nope, a barbered blind man breeder pulled a whole temple to Ashtarte ( Baal -whatever) down around their noggins. These were pretty much the last of the sexually ambiguous folks who eschewed Old Time Chick-fil-A.


Earlier, some sort of 'natural occurrence wiped out the 13 cities of the plain around Sodom. The Koran, the Torah as well as the Bible mention the calamity and so do the secularist Greeks, who by the way did not make a religion out of preference -Spartans notwithstanding, because they didn't get along with anybody.  Greek geographer Strabo states - "there were once thirteen inhabited cities in that region of which Sodom was the metropolis". Strabo identifies a limestone and salt hill at the south western tip of the Dead Sea, and Kharbet Usdum ruins nearby as the site of biblical Sodom."


Proco Joe you are free to believe in "The God I believe in is one about equal rights" Knock yourself out!


Francis Cardinal George is, as you so correctly state INGENUOUS, but he is no way irresponsible.  In fact, Cardinal George pretty much presented the view of most people of faith.   So are we ingenuous.  

* Natural selection is the gradual, non-random, process by which biological traitsbecome either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution. The term "natural selection" was popularized by Charles Darwin who intended it to be compared withartificial selection, what we now call selective breeding.

http://www.catholic.org/bible/book.php?id=1&bible_chapter=19
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-cardinal-blasts-city-government-over-chickfila-opposition-20120801,0,3109917.story
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodom_and_Gomorrah
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/thayer/e/roman/texts/strabo/16b*.html
 http://www.catholic.org/bible/book.php?id=1&bible_chapter=19