Chicago Got a Very Bad Haircut Last Night

                                                 

Q. What's the difference between Lori Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle?
A.  7,856 Votes

Q. What's the difference between a very bad haircut and a return to some semblance of good grooming?
A. Two Weeks.


Wow.  Two stunning mediocrities will face-off in April with the winner set to close Chicago down altogether,  Talk about a bad hair day.

I was surprised to see Lori Lightfoot best Toni Preckwinkle.  SEIU won that one for Ms. Lightfoot and will allow the idiotic editorial board of SEIU's Sun Times and its cut and paste columnists to crow over a landmark defeat of the really idiotic Chicago Tribune and its help in Bill Daley's attempted hostile take-over of Chicago.

Credit is due to the Purple T-Shirts and not the ink-slinging four-flushers of that daily rag.

Toni Preckwinkle, the humorless former Mrs. Zeus and County Board Boss, will go scorched earth on Ms. Lightfoot these next few weeks and her army of patronage workers will feel the lash for coming up short last night.

Chicago?  Chicago screws itself every election.

Chicago will not recover, but the oligarchs who make millions from the Liberal Gentry Culture here will make millions more in real estate and government set-asides.

The gap between Rich and Poor is closed.

The Middle Class ( the Skilled Trades Members, City Employees, Small Business People) , which is to blame for this situation, truth be told,  is vanished.



Note this telling graphic lifted from Second City Cop (on election day ironically enough) which notes the middle class going the way of the  aboriginal Illinois Confederation.
The Orange represents the poor and the blue represents the rich.  The lighter colors are the middle class of Chicago, which has all but disappeared, since I graduated from Little Flower High School in Auburn Gresham,

I am moving to a south suburb, after twenty years in Morgan Park of the 19th Ward,

Two of my children rent in Chicago and one owns a home just across the street from Chicago.  God help them.

I loved growing up in Chicago.  I got great haircuts from Max Esposito in his shop at Marshfield and 79th Street, next to Billy Ellis' Wooden House.  Max Esposito was an exacting and serious barber, but his shop had no comic books.  


Mac the Barber/Bookie had every DC issue of Batman and Superman, as well as sexy calendars, but haircuts were often given by gamblers, while Mac made book calls in the back.  My folks knew immediately where I had gone for a haircut.

Chicago has opted for Mac haircuts these last twenty years (Daley/Rahm & Whoever).  Last night was the worst chop of all.

We can celebrate that an African American Woman ( one openly LGBTQRSTUNVWXYZ) and Chicago will. . . .ad nauseam. 

Can we celebrate a bad haircut for the next four + years?

We will.

Hey, Chicago!  I see YOUR barber has a great sense of humor!

The Vanishing American Middle Class

"It ain't much, but it is our's" - 1947

"Just go to the ATM" - 2011


The vanishing American Middle Class is one of the wonders of the world, or should be.

Being Middle Class was once a badge of honor. Immigrants who braved coffin ships to scratch out the American Dream, worked, saved, prayed, and most of all learned together and kicked down the walls of economic isolation and poverty. Italians worked along the Chicago River north and south of its flow cutting lumber for this growing City. The Irish largely chased cattle, pigs, and sheep into pens and up onto steep ramps to the killing floors, where Poles, Lithuanians, and Bohemians hammered America's meat to be cut and chopped and processed by more Irishmen and Germans.

The Germans arrived here already Middle Class, as did German Jews, and were skilled craftsmen and professionals - doctors and lawyers. Swedes were skilled wood workers.

African Americans, freedmen, lived among white settlers and immigrants and often were more affluent than newer arrivals all through the Civil War and for a few decades after.

The labor strikes of the late 1880's through WWI brought waves of impoverished black men and women into Chicago, as strikebreakers, forced to compete with white ethnic immigrants. Industry shaped the competition, but learning moved the poor up into the Middle Class.

A man was proud to exchange a blue shirt for a crisp starched white shirt and attachable collar. Paddy learned to do more than dig. Stash learned to do more than hammer a cow, pig. Vitas learned to cut and put pipes together, after he was black-listed by Armour, or Swift, or Cudahy. Vito watched Emerson in the lumber yard and learned how to frame. Washington learned to not cross a picket line with his friends from Georgia and earn the trust of the angry white faces calling him every color-rich sobriquet and animal metaphor imaginable.

They learned to read, write, converse and get along. They learned to save, as well as spend from the Bohemians who not only made their beer, but owned the building in which they lived. They became as respectable and dignified in a few years off of the boat, or the train from Alabama.

By the 1920's, America was rolling toward the Middle Class. A Depression nearly choked it but the lessons learned from the previous century had taken root - learn a trade, develop a skill, make yourself useful, take care of others.

Parallel to the striving wave of impoverished Americans were American born, educated, radicalized by the Hegelian university professors who dominated academia, and contemptuous of 'lesser beings.' They became the Progressives. They viewed the Middle Class with scorn and contemptuously abandoned the bourgeoisie for Artist Colonies, or subjected Italian kids to Aristophanes.

They saw the Republican and Democratic political machines who were boosting the Masses toward the Middle Class, as a threat to true Self-Fulfillment, which could only be realized through their human laboratories.

Babbitry was and remains Middle Class hypocrisy - owning a modest home, making a modest income and the value attendant upon such aspirations were subject of laughter and derision. The Great Classless Society was to be fought for with patience and cunning.

WWII accelerated the American Middle Class and the lessons learned from the 19th Century and WWI made America the Moral and Economic Power of the Free Word pitted against the great Classless Societies formed by Stalin and Chairman Mao.

War did not erode the American Middle Class. Values taken for granted at best, or dismissed as stupid infected the American soul.

Labor made a pact with the Devil, when it admitted the Progressive ideologies through the back-door. The Reuthers and John L. Lewis were replaced by a Sweeney and a Stern. Big Labor was no long the trades or the industrial unions, Big Labor was public sector labor - SEIU.

By playing ball with Progressives, Labor and the American Middle Class drugged itself.

Here we are today -

The number of middle-income neighborhoods in the United States has dwindled significantly over the past 40 years, as the rich-poor divide deepens across the country, a study released Wednesday showed.

In 2007, nearly a third of American families -- 31 percent -- lived in either an affluent neighborhood or a mainly low-income one, up from just 15 percent in 1970, according to the study conducted by Stanford University, and released in partnership with the Russell Sage Foundation and Brown University.

Meanwhile, 44 percent of American families lived in middle-class neighborhoods in 2007, down from 65 percent in 1970.

"Mixed income neighborhoods have grown rarer, while affluent and poor neighborhoods have grown much more common," the study said.

For the study, researchers used data from 117 metropolitan areas, each with more than 500,000 residents. In 2007, those areas were home to 197 million people -- or two-thirds of the US population.

The values of faith, hard work, achievement, and charity, have been replaced by a universal ethic of entitlement. Go to the ATM for more money. We are OK with abortion. Too many of us believe that sexual inclination is a Civil Right. The more the Middle Class agrees with Progressives the quicker it will vanish into the Classless Society dreamed of by John Dewey, Roger Baldwin, WEB Dubois, and George Soros.

Treasury Tax-Fraud Geithner says, "Middle Class ! Hyar 'Tis! Hey, Just Forget to Pay . . . Oh, That Was Under George W.Bush . . . Buck Up, Yanks!

Now, there is a puss that just screams out confidence and integrity! Timmy Boy " Fogot Them Taxes" Geithner!

Timmy Tipped his hand. Well the tell was there since January anyway folks, but Secretary Timmy said, "We have to bring these deficits down very dramatically," Geithner told ABC's "This Week." "That's going to require some very hard choices."

Good and Hard, Americans.

Republicans were quick to jump on a lack of a fresh no-new-taxes pledge, with House Minority Whip Eric Cantor's office e-mail blasting Geithner's remarks to the press.

Geithner was adamant that controlling the deficit is vital to keeping the economy cooking along.

"We will not get this economy back on track, recovery will not be strong and sustained, unless we convince the American people that we are going to have the will to bring these deficits down once recovery is firmly established," he said.

Legendary former Federal Reserve boss Alan Greenspan said yesterday the feds had done well controlling the economic crisis. He also said the fear of long-running deficits was legitimate, with this year's and next's deficit running about $1 trillion.

He said health reform and tax hikes could be part of the solution.

Yep, Change you can Feel!

Money, Marbles, or Chalk? Who thinks Timmy will be the FIRST Obamanaut to get launched into oblivion????? Me!!!!!!