Spouse Sucker Puncher, Neil Steinberg, Screams Covid-19 Infamy? Remember October 2, 2005!

October Infamy 2005

                                                   December Infamy 1941

 In yet another badly written piece of oligarchy propaganda, Sun Times veteran wife-beating columnist attempts to parse memory of Pearl Harbor with  redundant Trump bashing and lock-down servility.  

Some people may agree heartily with Neil Steinberg.  Many people are needed to to support tyrants. 

Why do Americans remember Pearl Harbor?  Ask any American unimpaired with a bad memory, or public school education and you will learn that Japan conducted a sucker punch on this nation that was answered by millions of Americans, especially the 291,557 men and women who were killed fighting fascism. 

Neil Steinberg is a practiced sucker-puncher ( women only) dedicated to creating an American oligarchy.

Let's Remember Pearl Harbor - it was not a virus; it was a planned attack.

Neither is wife-beating; Steinberg's was a planned attack ( a choice) that the sneak tried to cover up. 

Let's remember October 2, 2005, when a practiced sneak tries to present idiotic lies to pump-up tyranny. 

Columnist charged with abuse
Jason George, Tribune staff reporter
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Chicago Sun-Times columnist and editorial board member Neil Steinberg could face jail time if he is convicted of domestic battery charges related to an incident involving his wife last week.
Steinberg, 45, of Northbrook was arrested about 9:30 p.m. Wednesday in his home after his wife, Edie, called 911 and reported abuse, said Sgt. Michael Keady of the Northbrook Police Department. Steinberg spent the night in jail and posted bail Thursday.
Edie Steinberg had first tried to call emergency services on another telephone, but Neil Steinberg hit that phone out of her hand, causing minor injuries, Keady said.

She was able to call 911 on another phone, he said. Steinberg was charged with one count of domestic battery and one count of interfering with the reporting of domestic battery. Both are misdemeanors and carry sentences of up to a year in jail, Keady said.

This was the first case of reported domestic battery at the Steinberg home on the 2000 block of Center Avenue, Keady said.

Edie Steinberg said Saturday that her husband was not at home and that she had no comment on the incident.

Neil Steinberg, who did not return messages left at his home and office, said he was "deeply humiliated" by the episode and will enter alcohol counseling Monday, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Sun-Times Editor John Barron was quoted as saying, "We hope for the best for Neil and his family."

An editor at the paper said no one at the Sun-Times had any additional comment.

Steinberg, who is the author of five books, has worked at the Sun-Times since 1987, according to a biography that accompanies his syndicated column. He and his wife have been married for 15 years and have two sons.

----------

jageorge@tribune.com

Free People, or Helots. Hoosiers are Free People, for Now.

like donkeys suffering under heavy loads,
by painful force compelled to bring their masters half
of all the produce that the soil brought forth.
(Tyrtaeus West Fragment 6, trans. West)

Description

Helots - The helots were a subjugated population group that formed the main population of Laconia and Messenia, the territory controlled by Sparta. 

noun

1. a member of a class of serfs in ancient Sparta, intermediate in status between slaves and citizens.

   • a serf or slave.

I have been using this term to describe people of the middle class in Chicago, Cook County and Illinois for a number of years,   In ancient Sparta, Helots were the middle class, sandwiched between the upper class and slaves as we know the term. 

In Chicago during my life time (1952-2018) there, I watched the robust American middle/working class diminish, shrink and all but vanish from Cook County.   The upper classes and their stooges ( some journalists, activists, too many labor unions, private charities) have done everything to get people who pay taxes, work for a living and live happy lives get the Hell out of Dodge. 

A few weeks ago, one of the Oligarchy’s stooges with Chicago Sun Times  wrote a piece bewailing the departure of the black middle class from Chicago and positing the possibility of its return.   The stooges of Oligarchy have made Race the basis of everything, but the facts confound this lie.  The Black Middle Class is no different from the Polish, Swedish, Greek, Lithuanian, Bohemian, Mexican, Jewish and Italian middle class.  The only ethnic demographic of the Middle Class that does not get it is the Irish.

As a group the Irish serve the oligarchy with regularity and lick-spittle lock-step for the likes of Pat Quinn, Richie Daley, Toni Preckwinkle, Lori Lightfoot and JB Pritzker like no other.  

This is odd because the Irish were once in the forefront of creating the middle class.  My Grandfather was. a hairy pawed union slugger in the stock yards who helped form one of the most powerful and professional skilled trades unions in Illinois.  He went from coal heaver, to operating engineer, to union official always with a job in the trade.  He was a radical Big Jim Larkin off-the-boat bog-trotter in 1912, who eventually owned a huge brick bungalow for his wife and thirteen children at 7535 S. Marshfield, saw his grandson become a Norte Dame standout and Houston Oiler, but was as equally proud of that man’s younger brother who won an ITT fellowship in engineering design, because merit was a path out of the working class.  All of his 75 grandchildren became solidly middle class citizens. Those blue collar dreams came true in the early 1960’s. 

That was when John F. Kennedy became President and starred down the Communists in Berlin, Vietnam and Cuba.  Today, JFK would be excoriated as a Red-baiting, anti-abortion, Catholic deplorable. JFK would be a helot today.   Our world hates pugnacious people with moral centers.  The Fighting Irish is a logo.  Bishop Shiel is forgotten and the doughy mush Monsignor Jack Egan touted as a working class hero.  Today, a Pastor Michael Pfleger is treated with deference, if not the contempt that he works so very hard to elicit. 

The Irish tend to be generous to a fault, tribally loyal and willing to be counted.  Those same gifts allowed the Irish as a group to be co-opted by people and indeologies that detest them to the marrow.  Hyde Park buried Bridgeport between 1972 and the Progressive Hegemony that controls Illinois.  Abner Mikva and Dr. Quentin Young co-operated with City Hall and County Building and roped in the likes of Tom Hynes, Neil Hartigan and the young Daleys.  The Media, 501(c) # Fortunes and IVI-Good Government cache no longer assaulted The Machine. 

Mike Madigan understood that Ward power was over and played cent-field with Hyde Park.  The Irish fought no one and became most congenial. 

The Congenial Irish took the path of least resistance and all but erased the verbal fighting from their political, religious and moral lexicon.  The Irish got behind Neil Hartigan and went soft on abortion to the point that a mushy mope like Senator Dick Durbin walks publicly in a green sash. 

The Irish of the tail-end of the 20th Century get behind “great gals and guys” who take the coin, the endorsement and condescension of people who detest everything about being Irish. 

As such, huge voting blocks in neighborhoods in the 19th Ward have helped put shackles on the Irish and any ethnic group that marries into their flabby embrace. 

The Irish retain political influence in Cook County and Illinois because the Irish, as a group, go-along with the great enthusiasm.  

As a result, the middle class is being eliminated.  Why?  The middle class is anathema to the Oligarchy who blend Marxism with kleptomania. 

Cook County is Animal Farm.  Pigs get fat and everyone else gets slaughtered. 

Shunning, slogans, group hate and the daffy doings of the Bears and Cubbies numb middle class families  that still remain within the borders of the City and the State.  Like blacks and sharecroppers in the post-Reconstruction American South, the middle class suffer the same burdens hoisted upon their backs by Richie Daleys, Rahm Emanuel, Bruce Rauner and now the completely supine Lori Lightfoot. 

Individuals finally get a bellyful. I planned to move out of Illinois and found a home in Michigan City, Indiana.   Alas, my children will continue to live in Illinois.  

All three were born outside of Cook County, but all three love being close to cousins, aunts and uncles and grandma, as did I. 

I can visit.  They own homes.

Hoosiers have resisted the harness.  The news papers have no reliable stooges, but report on public affairs and actually have local high school sports data and stories,  One might mark the end of freedom in Illinois from the time that the sports pages became propaganda for lovable losers and the milquetoasts of the Midway,

More significantly, the newspapers are independent and a MEDIA.  There are no self-absorbed stooges like Eric Zorn, Fran Spielman, Carol Marin, Michael Sneed, Rex Hupke, or the appalling Mary Schmich.

Politically, there is not a huge block of Woke Millennial Irish to wrap Progressive initiatives like abortion in corned beef and cabbage. 

The editorial boards are not lickspittles for City Hall.  In fact, today’s. headline screams this: 

 La PORTE – Just days before the election, felony charges were filed against Michigan City Mayor Ron Meer for his actions following the arrest of his stepson earlier this month, but no judge has yet agreed to conduct a probable cause hearing.Court records show that on Wednesday – under seal – the La Porte County Prosecutor's Office charged Meer with one felony count of official misconduct; five felony counts of intimidation; and two misdemeanor counts of false informing resulting in substantial hindrance to law enforcement.
The charges were initially filed in Superior Court 4, but Judge Greta Stirling Friedman recused herself from "even finding probable cause on the basis that, among other reasons, the Judge's spouse, whose employment caused him to be included on an email chain and could potentially lead to his being a witness in this matter," according to court records.

No Bruce Dold, Chicago Tribune managing editor could spike the story.  No team of Yahoos like Mark Brown, Neil Steinberg, or Mary Mitchel could blare out distraction yarns of Racism, or Yellow Corn.

 Days before election Mayor Ron needs to gussie-up his resume.  I spoke with Michigan Citizens and some like what Mayor Meer has done for the downtown area and others said that he was jerk when they worked for him in City Government.   Everyone has a vote and it is not for barter.

I don’t have a dog in the fight and look forward to election day. 

Hoosiers are not helots - yet.   

The Sun Times Remains a Sad Joke

“ Men in sport coats mulled about and women clutching designer navigated the second floor .  .   . “ Tom Schuba Chicago Sun Times (print edition) sentence one of paragraph one to Pot Goes Mainstream

" Men clad in sport coats mulled about and women clutching designer purses navigated the second floor of a Loop hotel hosting a major investment conference."  Tom Schuba edited after paper had gone to print. 

The Chicago Sun Times was once a local newspaper; today it is pamphlet put out by alleged labor lovers and actual Leftists.  Lynn Sweet is doing the black bag work for Mrs. Obama and DNC, Neil Steinberg has still not completed reading Dante's Divine Comedy, but mentions that he is reading it, Mary Mitchell continues to draw a salary and a pasty goof named Gene Lyons make the afore mentioned threesome seem to write like Dorothy Parker, Ted Dreiser and Audre Lorde.  The Sun Times is a pamphlet and a bad one at that.

One pamphleteer for this organ is the above cited Tom Schuba - any relation to the folks who own that fine and hip saloon on the northwest side? Schuba laced up his spikes for another Sun Times fellation  of Governor Pritzker's Weed Empire

Out of the blocks, Schuba sprints into a hurdle - words mean something.

Men is sport coats might very well mull about somewhere and at some time and in some place, but not in this instance.

mull
/məl/

verb
think about (a fact, proposal, or request) deeply and at length.
"she began to mull over the various possibilities"
synonyms: ponder, consider, think over/about, reflect on, contemplate, deliberate, turn over in one's mind, chew over, weigh up, consider the pros and cons of, cogitate on, meditate on, muse on, ruminate over/on, brood on, have one's mind on, give some thought to, evaluate, examine, study, review, revolve; More

or to have been warmed, if liquid men, with spices and sugars added.

Lynn Sweetner, mayhaps?

I believe Master Schuba meant top say "Men in sports coats milled about . . .  the second floor of a Loop hotel hosting a major investment conference."  Millining about suggests an accurate apprehension of what was going down on the 2nd floor lobby.

Thus! mill around. — phrasal verb with mill verb [ T ] uk ​ /mɪl/ us ​ /mɪl/ (UK also mill about) If a group of people mill around, they move around with no particular purpose or in no particular direction, sometimes while waiting for someone: In the square, people were milling around in the sunshine.

Now, as to Master Schuba's missing noun ( purses - designered and clutched) we will leave that to the universally poor editing of the hardest working propaganda organ this side of NEWSPEAK.

That Tom Schuba screwed the pooch at paragraph one is clear to a reader of the print edition --the one that comes out after newsmen scream, 'Stop the Presses!' when a pooch is having been proved screwed.  Proper screwed.

That Tom Schuba would countenance the fact that he did, in fact, have his wicked way with this puppy ain't gonna happen.

Pravda never printed a disclaimer and the Chicago Sun Times will consider no such thing.

Animal Farm requires no inquiry, no memory and no conviction.

Mull that one over. 

12 Hopefuls - One Mayor;Uglier Than Homemade Soup This election

Rahm Emanuel realized that the Jason Van Dyke Trial, assorted Expressway shut-downs, more revelations about the McDonald  Shooting Video shell game coming to light in the next two weeks and the cold fact of the matter that voting Chicagoans can't stand the sight of him, brought him to the conclusion that the Chicago News Media and Bahzillions of dollars are not enough to see him returned to the 5th Floor for a third term.


Rahm is out.


Twelve people want to be mayor.


Less than a handful of them are qualified, but that matters not in Chicago. 


The only thing that matters in Chicago, Cook County of Illinois is the question, " How long can the string-pullers and money pavers endure some Yutz in any office?"


The answer to that question bespeaks the long tenures of


Toni Preckwinkle


Dick Durbin


Pat Quinn


Bruce Rauner
Lisa Madigan


David Orr


Mike Quigley


Jan Schakowsky


Danny Davis


Bobby Rush


Dorothy Brown


These marginal people of marginal talents are the current pantheon of political lions.  I would not ask most of them to cut my lawn and my lawn is disgraceful.


Now, Chicago sits on the cusp of another opportunity to wade through media muck and take seat on that celestial shoreline with a qualified human being in charge of an important political office.

• Paul Vallas  is a man of great talent and nice sensibilities who spent the last thirty years fixing other peoples problems in Pennsylvania, new jersey and Louisiana.

• Garry McCarthy was Rahm Emanuel's 'out of town talent for police matters until he wasn't.  Is he a good cop?  Some cops say he was good boss.  Others, just a political hack.  I see that he a genuine talent for remaining relevant and is a smart and cagey interviewer.
• Lori Lightfoot is . . . a darling of the media and should expect and demand their vassalage.
• Dorothy Brown is a whisper from an indictment.
• Willie Wilson is a self-made millionaire with the oratorical and rhetorical kills of Slip Mahoney.

The latest entry into the lists is Jeremiah Joyce, Jr.  I know Jerry and admire him. Mr. Joyce is smart without being a grafter; thoughtful without being a pest and caring without being Phil Ponce. Joyce should be mayor and would do a damn fine job as mayor.  However, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the only man who should have been President since Harry S. Truman, Jeremiah Joyce will be treated to Trump-like bile and vituperations from Chicago's Neil Steinberg, Laura Washington, Mark Brown, Ron "'68" Grossman, Eric Zorn, Mary Schmich and the always laughable Rex Hupke.
People will buy what they are selling.


If voters want change, they can vote for a competent Chicagoan.


The remaining months before the mayoral election will be uglier than home made soup.

The Sun Times in the 19th Ward? Don't Buy It

The Sun Times has a perfect right to smear a whole neighborhood and I defend its right to do so. 

In the same way, the people who live in Beverly, Morgan Park and Mount Greenwood have a perfect right to ask that the Sun Times no longer be made made available for purchase.

My neighbors do not deserve to be regularly treated to this race-baiting editorial nonsense:

Like a match set to dry tinder, the slur set in motion a chaotic, Wild West-style melee on a sunny Saturday in November. Punches being thrown, bystanders forced to hide under restaurant tables, guns drawn and taunts called out?
That’s a scene that belongs in 19th Century Dodge City, not 21st Century Chicago.

This nonsense followed a fatuous cut-and paste job on Mount Greenwood by Frank Main and Sam Charles as an hors d'oeuvre to the above cited Sunday editorial.  People going to services at Mount Greenwood Community, Mount Greenwood Lutheran,St. Christiana, St. John Fisher, Queen of Martyr churches can pray for strength and a spirit of forgiveness.

After church and over breakfast maybe people can have a neighborly conversation about asking businesses in this neighborhood to stop carrying the Sun Times.

The Sun Times always wants to have a "conversation."


It goes like this , people who live in Mount Greenwood are hateful racists and  should accept any and all behavior - take it and like it and shut up about it. 

Fair enough. Well, in that spirit, sell your papers any where but here.

I pray that gas stations, franchisee-owned convenience stores located in and around the 19th Ward ask that Sun Times stop making delivery, because residents no longer want to read malignant nonsense from the Editors, Neil Steinberg, Mark Brown, Mary Mitchell, Jesse Jackson, Fran Spielman, Michael Sneed and the Watchdogs.

The people of my neighborhood will never, ever get a fair shake from the owners of Sun Times ( ChicagoReader et al) and they never have to this date.  The Chicago Reader called Mount Greenwood the worst neighborhood in Chicago - 'The Upside Down.'

I stopped buying the Sun Times years ago.

Where are our leaders on this?

"Comments Off" - Sum Total of Illinois Media Integrity re Pritzker Firing of Mark Konkol

When Dave McKinney of the Chicago Sun Timjes resigned, because then Sun Times owner's ties to then candidate Bruce Rauner and long-running he-said-she-said embroglio, the media locked shields like Vikings. 

That was then.

McKinney resigned following what he called “disturbing developments” after reporting a story critical of Rauner. In his resignation letter, he says the firewall protecting independent journalism was breached. Meanwhile, the Sun-Times abruptly brought back editorial endorsements, supporting its onetime owner Bruce Rauner without having interviewed either Rauner or Gov. Pat Quinn. 

Mark Konkol was cashiered by the same News Group currently owned by SEIU and run by Edwin Eisnedrath, after ten days and cover art that hair-lipped JB Pritzker and all of the beneficiaries of his . . .largesse.

This is now.

No media outrage.   No Emile Zola for Konkol's Dreyfuss.

• No, Neil Steinberg opaque ouvere.

• No Mark Brown nosing.

• No Eric Zorn squeak.

• No Carol Marin press conference.

Only Rober Feder bothered to report on the disgraceful treatment of a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter at the hand of in-the-tank management of Illinois' mercury spined  ink slingers.  You will no hissy-fitting columnist, objecting to the termination of Mark Konkol. 

Here is the best example of the mind-set of our in-the-tank Illinois media - Capitol Fax Blog. 

News aggregator and Progressive Democrat activist Rich Miller's Capitol Fax Blog lays out the corpse with yellow-bellied snark but dis-invites the mourners:

Konkol out at Chicago Reader after “tumultuous ten days”Saturday, Feb 17, 2018* The Chicago Reader has been suffering serious turmoil since its new executive editor Mark Konkol took over. Konkol fired the paper’s editor by phone just after the editor got off a plane returning from his honeymoon, killed the transportation writer’s respected column, nixed a couple of columns by longtime Reader columnist Ben Joravsky and lost another columnist after publishing a racist front page cartoon featuring JB Pritzker sitting on a black lawn jockey ornament. Word from inside was that the paper itself could be in peril.
Sun-Times Media owns the Reader and here’s its CEO Edwin Eisendrath…
I am announcing today the departure of Mark Konkol from the Reader. Mark came to the publication bringing great hope for a new direction and a new life to a storied brand. Sometimes things don’t work out as planned. A tumultuous ten days culminated in the publication of a Reader cover that we believe was not in line with either our vision for the Reader or that storied history. We wish Mark well.
While controversy is sometimes seen as part and parcel of the alternative weekly world, we believe it’s necessary in this instance to apologize to anyone who was offended by this week’s cover. The published cover in my view distracted from the publication as a whole.
The reporters at the Reader work hard to be great journalists. They can and will take on the toughest stories — including issues of race, injustice and people struggling to be heard.
We will put in place interim leadership and plan for the future.
* From the Reader’s own Twitter feed…
Ding dong the witch is dead! https://t.co/Npx1zAehpR— Chicago Reader (@Chicago_Reader) February 18, 2018
Ouch.
- Posted by Rich Miller   Comments Off        (emphasis my own) 

Comments Off!  Ouch. 

Illinois is fixed, to quote the brilliant Dan Proft.  Illinois is a rigged game.  The news media plays for one side - the side that is screwing voters; Bruce Rauner plays for that side. 

Mark Konkol paid the price for speaking out turn.   There are no and there will be no media types coming to Mark Konkol's defense.

His voice was silenced, because fair is, after all, fair. 

This is Illinois - a Banana Republic run by oligarchs. 

Take a GOP ballot and vote for Jeanne Ives. Unfix this sad State. 

re is not followed by a colon.  Re is lation for matter.  

Chris Kennedy - Prometheus on the Carpathian Rock

Zeus Preckwinkle is out of town, but might have made the call on Chris Kennedy. 

Chris Kennedy is a good guy and as I said yesterday, a good guy has no business hanging around a Progressive Democrat (Prog Dem).

Prog Dems are not liberals; they are Stalinists with East Bank Club memberships and Brooks Brothers Gold Cards.

Chris Kennedy, the scion of Robert Kennedy and nephew of JFK - the American Gracchi,  grew up in the shadows of history and myth making;   he became a solid, honest and sincere man who is willing to quietly fight poverty and lift people up.

Prog Dems never do that.

I have witnessed Chris Kennedy lend a pair of hands to Catholic Charities (1120 W 79th St, Chicago, IL 60620) humping boxes of food and warm clothing that he bought for distribution - without ever saying, " Do you know who I am?"  He never had a squad of Sun Times ink-slingers at his beck and call like the Nordic Jesus who Popes-up the neighborhood.

Chris Kennedy is among the oligarchs of Chicago but he is not with them.  He Kennedy is a great name to appoint to a Blue Ribbon panel or a directorship, but he is too honest to drawn into the circle of Prog favor.  Chris Kennedy kept terrorist comic-strip academic Bil Ayers from getting Emeritus status with University of Illinois.  Ayers remains a player in the cook County oligarchy.  Ayers helped make Venezuela what it is today and hopes to see Metro Chicago do the same.

The Kennedys are welcome to the Prog Dem banquet, but assigned a table near the men's room exit.

Note this observation from Joel Kotkin fro 2008, when Bloomberg and Schumer checked Caroline Kennedy from folowing Hillary Clinton into the Senate:

. . . the current gentry liberals increasingly reflect the biases of their own social class. The upper echelons of Wall Street, academe and the media have been moving toward what passes for the "left" for over a generation. Ironically, this movement became most evident in the early 1960s in the elite support that gathered around Caroline's father, John, who brought with him into office "the best and brightest."
As historian Fred Siegel has noted, the Kennedy phenomena differed greatly – in both style and substance – from the "lunch pail" liberalism epitomized by President Harry Truman and, to an extent, that of both Lyndon Johnson and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Their Democratic party was sustained by appealing to the economic interests of working and middle-class Americans.
As opposed to gentry politics, whose bastions lay in fashionable urban districts and college towns, Truman-style democracy reached into the vast suburban dreamscape – even into small towns and rural areas.
Over recent years this version of the party, with its more geographically diverse middle-class base, has lost influence. It's been a process of both addition and subtraction.
A series of strong Republican politicians since Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan lured many middle-income voters out of the Democratic Party by appealing to their patriotism, economic self-interest and, in some cases, prejudices.
At the same time, the core of the elite liberal constituency – academics, high-tech businesspeople and media figures – has been growing steadily in wealth and influence. By marrying this constituency to poor minority voters, gentry liberals have turned our core urban areas into a collection of electoral "ditto heads," with so-called "progressives" winning as much as 70 or 80% of the vote in presidential elections.
This year's thrilling primary battle between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama represented a clash of these two tendencies. Although Clinton herself enjoyed strong ties to some gentry liberals, she campaigned, particularly toward the end of the marathon, as Harry Truman in a bright pantsuit. Obama, for his part, sallied forth from a solid base of academics and well-educated professionals, as well as African Americans.  (emphases my own)

Caroline Kennedy became Ambasador to Japan as a participant trophy and America got another harpy in place of Hillary - Kirsten Gillbrand 
The Prog Dems have rewired the Democratic Party so that it is set to blow -up rather than divert the charted course.

Chris Kennedy found this out last week when he called out the conspiracy to kick people out of the city - his only mistake was in pointing only to the black people.  The Prog Dems want all middle class helots gone - White, Black, Brown and Rainbow.  If you refer to your Zipcode as a neighborhood, you gotta go.   If have a wife and kids - out you go.  You have the wrong attitude for a Smart-sized, secular, bike friendly urban paradise with plenty of green open space free of kids for community members with oodles of disposable cash, income and especially inherited wealth.

Chris Kennedy brought a torch into the cave created by the Sun Times, Chicago Tribune, WGN, WTTW, WBEZ, The Reader and the good folks at Disney where news is displayed with a pen-light. For that transgression he will have his liver eaten by Eric Zorn, Neil Steinberg, Mary Mitchell, Carol Marin and Mark Brown for weeks to come.

JB Pritzker is the Prog Dem's porkier Kirsten Gillibrand.  Chris Kennedy is a nice guy, but no Caroline Kennedy and Rahm and  Fred Eychaner are not about to appoint Mr. Kennedy Ambassador to Japan.

A great man wrote Nothings on the Square.

Chris Kennedy should take copy of it with him to read while the vultures gnaw on his liver.

Neighbors, Merry Christmas ! 2017 in the 19th Ward

I am blessed.  I live and work in this wonderful neighborhood.  I live in Morgan Park and work at Brother Rice High School.  Children grow up centered, respectful  and industrious.  This is a neighborhood of families.  It is strong.

The many churches are places where these families draw their strength - Quaker, Lutheran, Methodist, Unitarian, Episcopal, Baptist and very large Catholic parishes nurture what is learned in the home.

A very hateful article by the editor of the Chicago Reader - sponsored by the Sun Times News Group and edited by Jake Malooley, the author of the piece - took the opportunity to stir up race hate for Christmas.

The Chicago Reader is a free press and has been for as long as I care to remember. It's slant is far left of center.

The Chicago Reader is only following exactly what the Chicago Tribune, Sun Times, WTTW, WBEZ and the now dead DNAinfo Chicago have done for decades without challenge.

Why challenge people who are wrong, hateful, bigoted and wildly unfair.

People in this neighborhood are welcoming - that is how journalists ooze into the confidence of people.  They violate welcome.

A very pretty female journalist found welcoming bar stools and chatty drinkers in the saloons of Mount Greenwood, in order to make a case that this neighborhood's vote for Trump was solely due to race hate,

Her editor used her dubious report to do the same,  "No demogorgon roams this netherworld, but a majority of its electorate did back the man who's been called the swamp monster: President Donald Trump. Jake Malooley editor Chicago Reader"

Demogorgon?  Homage to Statius' Thebiad or Dungeons and Dragons?  I think the later, The last pretentious hypocrite to smear the neighborhood is a wife beater.

Neil Steinberg did so after breaking bred with a crowd of 19th Ward people.  After being made welcome he insulted and villainized his hosts as Aryan Nation racists, "But if I know you — and I do — about now you’re asking yourself: “Hey, wait a second. This guy’s a Jew. Why would a Jew be looking out for the best interest of the Iron Fist of Righteous White Anger, Mount Greenwood Corps?” Neil Steinberg Chicago Sun Times 2009"

 Steinberg was just joking, when I called him on it and his hypocrisy.  Steinberg is busy equating square dancing with cross-burning this Yuletide.

I have yet to read a news alert that young people from 60655 were stealing Christmas deliveries from UPS, FedEx and USPS routes in Roseland, Gresham, Englewood, West Lawn  or Garfield Heights.

On Halloween thousands of residents strolled with their children along the 111th Street business route.  Last week they did the same for Santa's Visit - all sponsored by local businesses and Aklderman Matt O'Shea.

No violence , as in Hyde Park.

No hate.

Christmas lives here every day, unless a few reporters manage to misquote and misrepresent the good people of this neighborhood.

Merry Christmas, everyone and everyday!

Merry Christmas, Maya and Jake!

Our Ramparts: Chicago Trib and Sun Times Share Trump-Thumping Headline

Note the diversity at Tribune Tower!


Great minds think alike . . .and so do very small minds.

Today, after President Trump's Tax Cut, both Chicago rags offer identical headlines warning that, like the internet, we are all in peril, doomed I tells Ya!  Get to the Ramparts!

The ramparts are usually the defensive walls of castles, but in Trumpophobic America it refers to the Washington Post, newspapers that hate Trump in general, or so our later-day Henry Fonda, Tom Hanks, would have us believe.

"I would not have been able to imagine that we would be living in a country where neo-Nazis are doing torchlight parades in Charlottesville and jokes about Pocahontas are being made in front of the Navajo code talkers. And individually we have to decide when we take to the ramparts.” Tom Hanks -on not bringing the projector to the White House

You see, he has taken to the ramparts against Trump and refuses to be part of a showing of The Post at the Trump White House.

Like the Olympic snow bunny who took a Brody last week after say that she will not represent Trump in Seoul, was as good as her word.  Captain Phillips will not be taking Wilson to the White House.

Here on Chicago's sandbags and barbed wire, Bruce Dold and Tom McNamee have planted their ink wells - like their master Rahm Emanuel: No Trump Here!

Voila!

Chicago Tribune - Triumphant Trump celebrates tax win — but some fear backlash

 Chicago Sun Times - Triumphant Trump celebrates tax win, but some fear backlash

With one grammatical shift - the words are identical, as are the authors of said piece: Stephen Ohlemacher and Marcy Gordon | Associated Press

Cut and Paste, approved memes, pre-caste narratives and thin-gruel opines from lightweights like Neil Steinberg, Lynn Sweet, Steve Chapman, Rex Hupke and  Mary Schmich are what has replaced Nick Von Hoffman, Ray Coffey. Dorothy Collins and Mike Royko, in this hick burg.

Only John Kass writes with independence of thought, wit and courage.



The rest of the ninnies are stringing tinsel for barbed wire and piling Kit Kats for sandbags!  Get that helmet on McNamee!  Watch for Cops, Bruce; they might be sixth col-yoom- nists!

When the shelling is over, let me know how Tom Hanks' new flicker is doing at the box office.

Got me a tax cut.

Want to Get Illinois Out of Stupid? Pay Attention and Vote Erika Harold for Illinois Attorney General.

Erika Harold for Illinois Attorney General *- ASAP!

If are happy with your tax burden and the endless parade incompetent, larcenous and creepy elected officials in this City, County and State, vote the way you are told by the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun Times, WTTW, WBEZ, Crain's  NBC, WBBM, FOX 32, WGN, Chicago Business, The Reader and all of Fred Eychaner's Free Newsstand. 

Vote like Eric Zorn, Steve Chapman, Andy Shaw, Mike Flannery, Dane Placko, Chuck Goudie, Phil Ponce, Carol Marin, Mark Brown, Bruce Dold and Neil Steinberg.

That will ensure that, Sneedless to say, the buckshot, the upshot and the bullshot for Illinois will be JB Pritzker, Rahm Emanuel, Toni Preckwinkle and Kwame Rauol  in control City Hall, the County, the Governor's Mansion and, most importantly - Illinois Attorney General.

With 13 weeks till the primary election and Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s surprise decision not to seek re-election, Illinois voters have a crowded field of eight Democratic and two Republican candidates to choose from.

Though the Cook County Democratic Party last month crowned State Sen. Kwame Raoul, D-Chicago, as their choice, former Gov. Pat Quinn has secured the top ballot spot via a state lottery, which might help get him some votes. Raoul and Quinn are perhaps the most familiar names on the Democratic primary ballot.
In the Republican primary, Erika Harold — a Harvard-educated attorney and former Miss America who has the backing of the state’s Republican Party — faces Gary Grasso, a DuPage County Board member.  Sun Times

I don't know a thing about Mr. Grasso - probably a very nice gent. But, I know a little about Erika Harold.

This might be the only time you read about Erika Harold, Sneedless to say. Lisa Madigan was an access ticket for our lazy Illinois media and she had fourteen years of unexamined performance protecting Illinois politics from scrutiny.


Lisa Madigan has done nothing in her fourteen years as Attorney General but become the first woman to hold that office. 

Ms. Madigan argued successfully before the United States Supreme Court in Illinois v. Caballes," where the court reaffirmed the ability of police officers to use specially trained dogs without a search warrant or probable cause to detect the presence of illegal drugs during traffic stops."  Not exactly groundbreaking.

Ms. Madigan raised her profile by speaking out on many issues and accepted awards.

Illinois cork-screwed deeper into the rich soil of this State.

Kwame Rauol and Pat Quinn are equally challenged human beings, in fact the Lake Zurich Patch called them 'an unbeatbale ticket 2014.'  They lost, huge.

Now they face each other in duel of the challenged for Attorney General.   Pat Quinn secured the top spot on the ballot, but Kwame nailed imprimatur of the State Democratic Party.

The Illinois Attorney Generalshould not be a security blanket for crooks, cons, conniving creeps and cretins. Instead the States Attorney General's homepage reads like programming from NPR

• Advocating for Women
• Protecting the Environment
• Safeguarding children
• Advocating for the Older Citizens

Name one crook sent to the Illinois Corrections System by Lisa Madigan. Name one investigation of corporate collusion in the explosion of Pay Day/Car Title Loan industry in Illinois during Madigan's tenure.  

These Usury Utilities prey on the poor, but the Attorney General's Consumer Affairs site offers this advise to the desperate: 

Consider Other OptionsWith their extremely high interest rates and many charges and fees, small consumer loans, payday installment loans, and payday loans can quickly transform a short-term financial crisis into a long-term debt problem. You should exhaust all possible resources – family, church, friends – before you even consider taking out one of these high-cost loans.

Should you exhaust all possible resources -family, church, friends - turn to gun violence on yourself after you have been taken to court by the good folks at PLC Illinois.

Thanks Lisa!

Like President Obama, Erika Harold is Harvard Law Alumna and, unlike POTUS 44, a practicing attorney in Illinois with a list of legal achievements.

• When she was blessed with the opportunity to attend Harvard Law School, she was thrown a curveball. She couldn’t afford the tuition.
• But Erika didn’t give up. Lacking the funds to pay for school, she got creative. She decided to compete in the Miss America Organization to attempt to earn the scholarship money necessary to pay for law school.She won. And she used her platform to not only pay for school, but also to give back.

• As Miss America 2003, Erika became a national leader in the fight to end youth violence and bullying, sharing with more than 100,000 students her own experience of overcoming bullying. Erika was named one of Fight Crime, Invest in Kids’ “Champions for Children” and received a leadership award from the National Center for Victims of Crime.

• Upon graduating from Harvard Law School, Erika worked as an attorney in the litigation groups of Sidley Austin LLP and Burke, Warren, MacKay & Serritella, P.C.

• Erika represented businesses in commercial disputes and advised religious institutions in matters involving First Amendment protections. She also was active in the law firms’ respective legal education efforts, teaching students about the U.S. legal system as part of the Lawyers in the Classroom program and coaching a team of high school students in the City-Wide Mock Trial Competition. She was also part of the teaching faculty for Harvard Law School’s 2017 Trial Advocacy Workshop.

• In 2015, the Illinois Supreme Court appointed Erika to serve on the Illinois Supreme Court Committee on Equality.

• Erika is also a member of Trinity International University’s Board of Regents, and serves as a Commissioner on the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism.

• Erika currently serves on the national board of directors of Prison Fellowship, the world’s largest outreach to prisoners and their families. In that capacity, she advocates for criminal justice reform.  She was also recently selected to the 2017 Emerging Lawyers list and was recognized in the categories of commercial litigation, civil rights/constitutional law.Erika Harold works as an attorney at Meyer Capel, one of Champaign County’s largest law firms.  

I doubt if Erika Harold will receive the Caroline Kennedy New Frontier Award, like Lisa Madigan, because Ms. Harold is not a child of nepotism, but she is willing open the books on Lisa's Dad and his minions, because, " Erika Harold knows that home is worth fighting for. That’s why she’s stepping up to take on Mike Madigan’s political machine."

Jeanne Ives should be linked arms with Erika Harold, ASAP.  Jeanne could point out all of the bones in Springfield graveyard of deals. 

That is something worth bucking the trend. 

Let's see if Illinois is ready to grow a pair. 

* My apologies - I had earlier confused States Attorney with the office of Attorney General.  My error was pointed out by a kind soul.  I am nothing, if not flawed.