POP! . . . goes to Will County

"The beverage tax is not the cause nor the solution to Cook County's financial challenges," said Brian Jordan, president of the Illinois Food Retailers Association.

Didn't sound like much back in July, but now this could be slogan of a Cook County counter-revolution.  Store counter, that is.  The irony of the photo above is just magical.

The Signs of a Cook County tax are everywhere! Bi-lingual of course, but printed in non-union shops to save costs.

A Radical Idea from Your Betters!  -Idea radical de tus superiores!

Way to Tax! Viva!  -Larga vida a los impuestos!

Fight Fat Asses!  No más culos gordos!

Think of the Children, Bitches!- ¡Piensa en los niños, putas!

Let's Give Toni Some Sugar! -Vamos a darle a Toni un poco de azúcar!


Well, Supersize my cynicism!  Toni Preckwinkle, the most humorless and gormless of all government goons, shopped for an found a judge to jam this Sweetened Beverage Tax up, down  or into any orifice considered by individual Cook County residents the most . . .uncomfortable.

CHICAGO — Diet Coke heads, take note: just because the sugar in your pop is fake, you'll still be paying more for it starting Wednesday as Cook County's sweetened beverage tax finally goes into effect, adding a penny per ounce to the cost of bottled drinks.
The tax will hike the price of a 2-liter bottle by 68 cents and a six-pack by 72 cents.
Though often dubbed the "pop tax," the fee, narrowly approved in November 2016 by the Cook County Board, actually applies to hundreds of beverages beyond soft drinks.
The tax is expected to raise $200 million a year for Cook County, which the county needs to keep its books out of the red, according to Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle.

Every ounce of sugary liquid sends a penny to the Cook Coffers.  Gee, what could go wrong?

Pennies from heaven?  Nah, more like corpses stacked high in Toni' crypt until carted off to some subterranean cold storage.  I imagine the 40 oz slurpees purchased  at Kean Gas Station by County, City and State workers added to the larder until . . .Friday.

Then, like so many Chicago residents did with the idiotic plastic bag tax, residents will hop in the Prius and hybrid over to County Line road south, west and north to pick up cases of Mountain Dew, Fanta, Wildwood, Dr. Pepper and his collegaues Dr.s Bold, Skippy and Becker, Sweetened teas and all manner of Gatorades.

At the 7-11 on 111th & Kedzi,  a 28 ounce frozen drink (Slurpee, Slushie, or Whatever) bounces up from blue collar $ 1.75 to the Majestic price of $ 2.03.

Do the math. 12 ounces = 12 more cents and on and on.

Buy a Cook County Case of Coke and that is 288 pennies to Toni! $2.88 on top of City and County taxes already stamped to your receipt.

I expect Slushee sales to sink.

Will, DuPage and Lake Counties can expect a spike in sales of sugary drinks and the State of Indiana will be selling pop like fireworks.

Cook County residents voted all too happily for the obtuse Xanthipe, who ran poor old Zeus off to the Zamboanga, knowing that Todd Stroger could not do worse, will spend more gas buying pop in Peotone and Palatine, in the dim hope that they might come out a bit ahead.

Can't happen, Neighbor. 

We screwed our beds and must lay in them.

Pop goes the weasels like clockwork.

Only the "Uneducated" Voted for Trump? The Plagiarist Says So - Fareed " Od Dead-eyes' Zakaria and Obama Jonesing

"In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others." Mikhail Bakhtin

It is hard to believe, I know, but I met Barack Obama on more than few occasions before he received the Nobel Prize and found him to be kind of a dope.  A real dope, a pissy, snotty and insecure  Ivy League educated dope.  I don't think that all that Hope and Change wised him up, but I wish him God Speed!

I judge people by the way they treat other people and me as well.  I have met many  well educated people ( they went to college) who could not and can not make change, book a hotel reservation, or remember to leave a tip after a huge feed.   I know pipe-fitters who are jazz scholars, readers of Foucualt, Derrida and Bakhtin - very dismissive of the two former and firmly in the camp of the later.

Bakhtin was a Russian literary and language theorist who studied the 'carnivalesque' nature of rebellion, non-conformity and resistance to artificial constraints upon the individual - think of a  Retirement Roast as an example.  The 'honoree' sits and takes verbal abuse in 'tribute' to his/her life.  The Comedy Central Roasting of Ann Coulter comes to mind,, where everything about that persons gender, race, religion, education, career choices and personal relationships was reduced to the gimlet eye of left-wing politics.  Another example might be a a faculty meeting in a Catholic high school to kick off the school, where the educated persons of the same faith are required to read a meaningful group prayer from a Xerox'ed copy.  No wonder most teachers squirm and act out.

Today, once again, a person with the personality of a dial tone and humanity of a Grand Vizier, explains that huge percentage of American voters are uneducated.

CNN's Fareed Zakaria previewed his documentary Why Trump Won Monday on Wolf Blitzer's afternoon TV program. Zakaria said Trump supporters are "tribal" and saw the 2016 presidential election as an act of cultural and class rebellion against the "educated" urban professionals.
"We tried to get at that deeper issue, which is really a portrait of America," Zakaria said of his investigation into Trump supporters. "A kind of cultural and class portrait of an America that feels deeply resentful about the direction the country is going in and the people who run the country. People, you know, who are professionals, urban, educated. This is, in a sense, an act of class rebellion. It is an act of cultural rebellion. And Donald Trump is their guy."

People who run the country are "  People, you know, who are professionals, urban, educated."  Yet, Donald Trump and Mike Pence and Steve Bannon and Kelly Anne Conway and Jeff Session and Gen. Kelly are 'running the country.'  Fareed?  What's the deal?

Why would the uneducated massed vote for educated ( Trump, Pence, Bannon, Conway, Sessions, Kelly et al), urban professionals to be our guys?

This is what my pipe-fitter pal and Mikhail Bakhtin would call a 'carnivalesque' moment.  You see, locked-up mumpish misanthropes with puckered sphincters, like Fareed Zakaria, Bruce Wolf and retired Vice Admiral John Kirby object to pipe-fitters, cops, firemen, school teachers, cab and Uber drivers, especially when they ain't buying what Fareed is selling.  They squirm away from faked good-humor, prayer that requires prayer sheets and snobbery.

The Carnival is a Catholic concept - the Feast of All Fools,  It was the one day where the poor, the eccentric, the naked, the loutish, the buffoonish and the heckling classes were free to scorn the prelates, the viziers, the scribes and the pharisees.

Our scribes and  pharisees, academics and the media,  created Obama and they are really missing his empty rhetorical smirking self-satisfaction.  They are jones-ing bad.

Educated Americans voted for Donald Trump and against Obama and Hillary.   Many educated Americans and many more very wise Americans.

Old Dead Eyes is one of the reason why the Church created carnivals.

Pipefitters know that.

So, Forrest Claypool Walks into a Pay Day Loan Store . . .What Bruce Dold's Chicago Tribune Will Not Tell You.

The Chinless Wonder has done it again!   Forrest Claypool took out  huge Pay Loan for the children of CPS!  What a guy!

Forrest Claypool can do all of these things

• Fires key Park District personnel and calls it "Cost-cutting."
• Scapegoats people for Richie Daley
• Works with Quigley and Orr to ramrod Venezuelan Voting Machines - machines got hacked by the Russians
• Bombardier cars that don't fit the CTA rails
• Tries to hire ex-cons to do the work of union people
• Smears the union leader who objects
• Pushes Ventra Card
• Gives lawyer a CPS sinecure
• Gives CPS jobs to his CTA posse
• Increases CPS debt

and get away with it and move on to ever more lucrative pay days at our expense and fatten up his already lard-assed pension life.  Not only that, he gets protected by Carol Marin, Eric Zorn, Mary Schmich, the goofs at the Sun Times, WTTW, WBEZ and of Bruce Dold. 

Ain't he great?  He is a media protected, multiple tax-payer funded pension collector and career government grifter.  He is Forrest Claypool.

For any mossback sneak from down state Illinois, Claypool is a role model.  If the Better Government Association was anything other than flak-maker for the Chicago Oligarchs, Claypool would have been a private sector sneak and at best an orange jumpsuit run-way model.

That said, TRY AND FIND  the name of FORREST CLAYPOOL anywhere in its long article.

"Although the Board believes that it has the capacity to borrow both in the short-term and the long-term credit markets, there can be no assurance as to the terms on which the Board will continue to be able to procure such funding, whether the Board's existing statutory borrowing authority will provide sufficient borrowing capacity, or if market access will continue to be available to the Board," the district said in bond documents.(emphases my own)

The Board is Forrest.  In the recent past Tribune features we see Forrest Claypool

•  In Voice of the People, a reader takes the Tribune to task for its editorial regarding the "crisis" surrounding the Chicago Public Schools led by Forrest Claypool. It is unfortunate to see that there still are those who feel we should function with an..
• In your Tuesday editorial titled “We will do whatever is necessary,” you pull no punches in criticizing Chicago Public Schools CEO Forrest Claypool. You say, for example, that he made a "foolhardy assumption” by relying on a "huge cash infusion from the...
•          Claypool: Illinois' school funding is unfair to CPS students In its recent editorial, the Tribune   correctly identifies the cause of the Chicago Public Schools fiscal crisis: the outsized  payments it must make to the teacher pension fund. The Tribune fails to note, however, that      the state of Illinois imposes this...
• Chicago Public Schools CEO Forrest Claypool vowed recently that CPS will open on time in the fall despite the district's perpetual cash crunch. "We will do whatever is necessary ..." Claypool said in a City Club of Chicago speech. That's a refreshing...

There's no BOARD in CPS!  There's Forest Claypool . . .until he steps on his Johnson and gets shelter from Bruce Dold's investigative and editorial purse puppies.

So, Forrest goes all Pay Day Loan on your wallets again.  You have only yourselves and the Chicago media to blame.

Forrest Claypool will ride all over our backs once again and as long as Chicago and Cook County residents enjoy the consequences of living in a Banana Republic. 

The Racoon on the Fifth Floor and this Skunk of a Grifter created more debt, mayhem and misery for generations to come. 

 

Will the GOP Hear "The Chimes at Mignight?" They be Tolling, Cupcakes.

I could never bring myself to link up with the Grand Old Party.  I am just an old school Regular Democrat, I guess.  Ever since Chuck Percy was the alabaster Illinois Face of the Republican Party, the GOP was as comfortable a fit for me as spun-glass skivvies.

Right up to and through the last GOP Illinois Senator, Marque Kirque, the GOP is the Party that blows off it's own toes, on demand, at the behest of wily Illinois Speaker Mike Madigan, or the offish Sen. Dick Durbin.

I voted for three Republicans in my life: Nixon 1972, McCain 2008, Romney 2012.  I voted for Donald Trump, but I do not believe that he is a Republican. In fact, he may be, like me, a a disgusted Regular Democrat who understands that the national game is rigged between the Progressive 1972 Democrat loonies and GOP dweebs,  like any contest between the Globetrotters and the Generals.

President Trump is one wild card in deck full of jokers.  Against Old Maids like Reince Preibus and Lindsey Graham he is the trump.   Against Aces like McCain, Collins, Schumer, and the media masters, he's a push at best.

He is a ball of confusion; that's what the world is today. Hey, hey.

• North Korea
• Trans GI's
• Tweet du jour
• CNN silly
• Russian Intrigue
• Sessions Up; Sessions Down
• Leakers - pissing out of the Big Tent
• Foul Mouthed Mooches
• White House staff shuffles
• EU weepers

But, the best rattle and hum comes from the GOP.

One of the only Washington writers who makes any sense whatsoever is A. B. Stoddard.  Ms. Stoddard is the sole of integrity and does care if CNN, Fox, of the clowns at MSNBC want to hear what she has to say.  Ms. Stoddard offers up this today,

 Trump can write this all off to his plan to disrupt the GOP establishment in Congress and do things his way, but some have warned his plate-breaking might eventually cut into his base of support. Conservative writer and commentator Charles Krauthammer wrote that not only had Trump revealed “a deeply repellent vindictiveness in the service of a pathological need to display dominance,” but that his assault on Sessions “suggests to those conservatives how cynically expedient was Trump’s adoption of Sessions’s ideas in the first place.”

Trump must be some Machiavelli, there Neighbor.

I think of him as a seedy, aging and cagey Prince Hal.  Young Prince Hal, the scapegrace Prince of Wales  who hung around with disreputable outsiders in Henry IV Parts I & II emerged as the uniter in chief and hero of Agincourt of Shakespeare's Henry V.

Prince Hal, like Trump loves to keep his enemies close and his friends comfortably numb.

Read this and think of the Swamp:

King Henry IV, Part I

ACT I SCENE II London. An apartment of the Prince's.
[Enter the PRINCE OF WALES and FALSTAFF]
FALSTAFF Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?
PRINCE HENRY Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sack
and unbuttoning thee after supper and sleeping upon
benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to
demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know. 5
What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the
day? Unless hours were cups of sack and minutes
capons and clocks the tongues of bawds and dials the
signs of leaping-houses and the blessed sun himself
a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no 10
reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand
the time of the day.
FALSTAFF Indeed, you come near me now, Hal; for we that take
purses go by the moon and the seven stars, and not
by Phoebus, he,'that wandering knight so fair.' And, 15
I prithee, sweet wag, when thou art king, as, God
save thy grace,--majesty I should say, for grace
thou wilt have none,--
PRINCE HENRY What, none?
FALSTAFF No, by my troth, not so much as will serve to 20
prologue to an egg and butter.
PRINCE HENRY Well, how then? come, roundly, roundly.
FALSTAFF Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let notus that are squires of the night's body be calledthieves of the day's beauty: let us be Diana's 25foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of themoon; and let men say we be men of good government,being governed, as the sea is, by our noble andchaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal.PRINCE HENRY Thou sayest well, and it holds well too; for the 30
fortune of us that are the moon's men doth ebb and
flow like the sea, being governed, as the sea is,
by the moon. As, for proof, now: a purse of goldmost resolutely snatched on Monday night and mostdissolutely spent on Tuesday morning; got with 35swearing 'Lay by' and spent with crying 'Bring in;'now in as low an ebb as the foot of the ladderand by and by in as high a flow as the ridge of the gallows.(emphases my own)

I see Falstaff as the GOP leadership, elected and behind the scenes, ready to lead Donald Hal up the garden path for a fleecing from the Progressives - the keepers of policy.

Yet, Hal offers warnings in his honeyed words to Fat Jack of the Swamp.  He must go before the real work begins. In Shakespeare's propaganda plays, virtue remains hidden in the likes of Mark Antony, The Bastard and Prince Hal.  These nimble players keep every one off balance.

Until the moment comes when even the most shameless and cynical rogues, like the Leader of the Senate and the three Mavericks, finally get it.

 FALSTAFF
God save thee, my sweet boy!
KING HENRY IV
My lord chief-justice, speak to that vain man.
Lord Chief-Justice Have you your wits? know you what 'tis to speak?
FALSTAFF
My king! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!
KING HENRY IV
I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane;
But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:
Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn'd away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots:
Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
For competence of life I will allow you,
That lack of means enforce you not to evil:
And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,
We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord,
To see perform'd the tenor of our word. Set on.

I hope that the firing of Preibus and appointment of General Kelly signals that Trump despises the the dream of the GOP being anything but a partner in the Swamp.

That would unite the nation.

I could do without an Agincourt. 

The Devil and Donald Trump, or Strike Tents, Don; Sounds Like the Old Scratch Won

I'm a White Sox fan.  I know the thrill of almost getting there.  The delight of watching back-to-back hits to the gaps and the balloon popping disappointment of leaving two men on - inning after inning.

I also watch politics - a rigged sport - like old time Bob Luce Pro Wrestling, or Women's Roller Derby.    The Democrats, controlled by the nut-bag Progressive wing of American politics since 1972, and the GOP, run by the Nels Rockefeller-Chuck Percy moderate doormats since the 1960's, is a push-me-pull-you spectacle sport that gets ever more soul-sucking and sad.

Donald Trump is the product of this cynical enterprise.  I believed Candidate Trump to be a gross, loud, boorish and vain man.  I was wrong. That is his shtick and it works. It sucks the oxygen out of the room.

I really believe that President Trump wants to end the Dem-GOP perpetual taffy pull and drain the swamp, pool, or puddle that makes a Daniel Webster want to be convicted along with Jabez Stone.

This wonderful American story is no longer taught in our public schools and far too many of our Catholic schools.

Daniel Webster is an American historical figure, chosen by the poet Stephen Vincent Benet as the core character for his legend the Devil and Daniel Webster.

The Devil, Old Scratch, is a soul-sucking lobbyist, with piles of money at his command.  He lures a New Hampshire son of the soil, who is very down on his luck, Jabez Soul with a contract offering earthly wealth and honors, so long as his soul goes to OLD SCRATCH, Llc. for eternity.

Today, the soul is a secular punchline and laugh button for Bill Maher and latte night TV.

Congressman Daniel Webster, not to be confused with Senators Dick Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Susan Collins, or John McCain, is a rock-ribbed Union Forever American Patriot.  He is no maverick. Webster is no moderate and would never appear on Rachel Maddow, or Sean Hannity.  Webster died and is buried:

Yes, Dan'l Webster's dead−or, at least, they buried him. But every time there's a thunder storm around Marshfield, they say you can hear his rolling voice in the hollows of the sky. And they say that if you go to his grave and speak loud and clear, "Dan'l Webster−Dan'l Webster!"  the ground'll begin to shiver and the trees begin to shake.
And after a while you'll hear a deep voice saying, "Neighbor, how stands the Union?" Then you better answer the Union stands as she stood, rock−bottomed and copper sheathed, one and indivisible, or he's liable to rear right out of the ground. At least, that's what I was told when I was a youngster.

Me too.

Durbin, Collins, Schumer and McCain chirp,  "Neighbor, How's They Polling?"   Maverick up!

They all work together and not for the State of the Union.

Donald Trump wants to change things and change does come easy, unless it is candy-coated in good old American bullshit, like the last eight years of Obama Hope & Change.

Old Scratch has The Union by the throat and is not letting go.  Obama Care is making too many people richer at the expense of everyone else.  Tax reform will never take place as long as 1/3 after a thick retainer means anything.   America will not be allowed to be Great Again, because the global oligarchs are winning.

When Jabez Stone wanted to weasel out of his contract, like any good Yankee Unitarian, Daniel Webster was forced to face a rigged jury of the worst traitors, cut-throats and back-sliders in American history, up to the 114th Congress anyway.  Old Dan'l reminded the louses of their birth on this soil and appealed to their Nativist love of country.    <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bXfU2AaJDEQ?list=PLWX-t5q2SkI0xslMuPftjy6mCioqZx_em" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Can't appeal to that anymore.  Faust has no sense of any universal truth - Americans are mavericks, no more Alamo, Valley Forge, or Khe Sahn for New York Times subscribers and listeners and viewers like Angie's List, Prudential, Northwestern Mutual and the Alliance for Climate Change.


Donald Trump is the President of the United States for a now.

I have a feeling that after yesterday's GOP betrayal on Health Care Reform, the traitors in the White House including the new guy, who already leaked to Ryan Lizza about his war on leakers, and  that Old Scratch has real cut-throats and crumbs in the jury box - no lightweights like Benedict Arnold, Edward Teach, or Simon Girty.

• David Brock' sAmerican Bridge
• Hollywood
• Neo Cons: McCain, Graham et al - "There's War Needs a Startin'"
• George Soros Move-On enterprises
• The Clinton Machine
• The GOP
• The Media

Strike tents, Neighbor Trump, or do something smart.  Now. Scratch wants his pay-out.

Next up - White Sox play Cleveland at home. Get excited, expect the let down.