Category Archives: Chicago

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Oh!, I’m not stopping my blog. It’s the last post of the year, 2012. It’s New Years Eve. Snow is falling lightly outside. The temperature is hovering at freezing and the forecast calls for more snow throughout the day and into tomorrow.

My wife ran some last minutes errands this morning and we’re set for whatever may come—snow, ice or blizzard. Every year I promise to get an emergency generator and every year I don’t. I just hate to spend money on something that I may never use. I keep reminding myself it’s like insurance and I always forget. We’d need at least a 5KW generator at minimum. Then add the wiring necessary to have it perform properly and venting for the exhaust when it does.  

Not cheap.  And, I’m cheap; a holdover from my Depression Era parents and grandparents.

Truthfully, I’m not concerned about the weather. I have a strong tendency towards Cabin Fever. Before, if I started getting jumpy, I’d just get in the Tahoe and go somewhere…anywhere. The “where” didn’t matter. That’s not a real option at the moment. Saturday, the Tahoe’s transmission started slipping between gear shifts. Manual shifting appears to work but I’d rather not push it. I’ve phoned for an appointment at my friendly auto mechanic. He’ll return my call Wednesday, I expect.

I could drive my wife’s car, a rollerskate, in an emergency but I’d need a shoehorn to get in and help to get out. Not a viable option. So I’ll sit here, waiting for Wednesday and a callback.

Happy New Year!

***

The crazies come out at the end of every year. There were some examples in my American Thinker newsletter this week.

Professor Calls for Death Penalty for Climate Change ‘Deniers’

It is as inevitable as the rising of the sun; the Left, when thwarted in their quest for power, suggests the use of lethal force to compel those who disagree.

There is a nauseating litany of murders done by our betters in their pursuit of the Benthamite vision of “the greatest good for the most people” — which in their minds equates to collectivization and socialism. You have Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Margaret Sanger, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot. Now we can add one more name to the list: Professor Richard Parncutt, Musicologist at Graz University in Austria.

Parncutt has issued — and later retracted after it the public outcry — a manifesto calling for the execution of prominent “Climate Change Deniers”. What is interesting is that Parncutt hates the death penalty and supports Amnesty International’s efforts to end it.

This would be a shocking thing for a college professor to do were it an isolated incident, but this call has been made a number of times in the past. For instance, an anonymous poster at the liberal website Talking Points Memo called for similar action, as did Climate Progress editor Joe Romm, who called for “deniers” to be strangled in their beds. Grist magazine writer David Roberts called for Nuremberg trials for “deniers” and NASA’s James Hansen has likewise called for similar trials.

A common denominator of this kill-crazy proclamations is that they all are made by public employees…state-supported academics and government employees. They all hide behind their tenure, unions, government employee regulations that makes it nearly impossible to fire them; as long as they don’t embarrass their boss…too much.  You see, their bosses agree. That’s the real issue. Imagine the uproar if we declared the same for anyone supporting unproven pseudo-science as do these wackos?

Idiots.

***

Every once in a while an article appears that really invokes thought.  This is such one.  The title attracted me and then I read more. It’s really true that fiction is more often accurate than reality.

There is No Escape

Every once in a while we try to escape to one of those rare, childlike, stay-in-your-pajama’s, popcorn-munching days when we can block out the fear of a collapsing economy and hide from a repulsive culture that seems to embrace everything that is bad. Lately it just doesn’t work.

Settling in for an original “Star Trek” TV series episode called “A Piece of the Action,” I was shocked as it seemed more like a mocking commentary on our current crises.

Searching for a space vessel lost 100 years earlier, the crew of the USS Enterprise arrives on the planet Sigma Iotia II. The planet has been “contaminated” after salvaging a book from the lost vessel called Chicago Mobs of the Twenties; a book they now venerate and base their civilization on. Conventional government had broken down and society was now a tumult of mob bosses, crime, death, and revenge; it could operate no other way. One can’t help but think what an appropriate Rahm Emmanuel/Barack Obama scenario it was; similar to when Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals contaminated our own civilization.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/12/there_is_no_escape.html#ixzz2Gf6aVkRD

It’s a long article but I urge you to follow the link and read the entire column.  The parallels draw in it are astounding, amazing and incredibly accurate.

***

Y’all have a great New Years! Make sure you survive it.

 

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Amazing!

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Did you know there is a mayor of an American city who is winning the battle against public service unions? No, it’s not Chris Christie nor Scott Walker.

This mayor “has been carrying out a program of privatizing city jobs, laying off unionized municipal employees and contracting out the work to vendors, who hire nonunion people to do the jobs of a few dollars an hour less than the city employees earned.” This mayor, “pushes around poorly paid members on not just any union, but the very SEIU itself, and the general public hears nothing about it.”

A xxxxxxx neighborhood publication, Our Urban Times, tells the story, using the case of more than fifty recently laid-off library janitors who complete [the Mayor’s] privatization drive in the xxxxxxx’s Department of Fleet and Facility Management (2FM). There is no doubt that the janitors are ideal candidates to be characterized as victims of a heartless and ruthless rich politician. The new working arrangements push several union buttons:

Their rates to the employee tend to be at least four dollars under the $11.90 to $15.90 workers are currently being paid. Further more [sic] they hire people on a part time basis and do not have to provide benefits, according to [Secretary-Treasurer of SEIU Local 73 Matt] Brandon.

There heart-rending stories of suffering by minorities during the holiday waiting for the MSNBC cameras, if only they would come:

“We took furlough days when they asked us to. That cost me $4,000 over three years. Our contract says we are to get a 90-day notice for termination. We got one day. I’m very concerned.  I don’t know what I am going to do and Ihave bills to pay,” said Glenda Thomas, a 17-year employee.

Do you know who the mayor is? And the city?  It’s Rahm Emanuel, Mayor of Chicago.

***

Speaking of Rahm Emanuel, he just made this comment about the newly released movie, Lincoln.

(CNSNews.com) — Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff to President Barack Obama,  likened Obama’s values and “ability to see a clear road where everybody just sees fog” to President Abraham Lincoln as depicted in the 2012 Steven Spielberg movie “Lincoln.” — CNS News.

The dems and academia continue to push the myth that democrats supported African-Americans while  vilifying Republicans. Recently this came out of the White House, “Obama Aide: With These Republicans, ‘There’d Still be Slavery’ Today.”

Contrary to what is being taught today, the Republican Party was created by the spin-off of the Abolitionist faction within the Whig Party.

The United States Republican Party is the second oldest currently existing political party in the US after its great rival, the Democratic Party. It emerged in 1854 to combat the Kansas Nebraska Act which threatened to extend slavery into the territories, and to promote more vigorous modernization of the economy. It had almost no presence in the South, but by 1858 in the North it had enlisted former Whigs and former Free Soil Democrats to form majorities in nearly every Northern state.

With its election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and its success in guiding the Union to victory and abolishing slavery, it came to dominate the national scene until 1932. The Republican Party was based on northern white Protestants, businessmen, professionals, factory workers, farmers, and African-Americans. It was pro-business, supporting banks, the gold standard, railroads, and tariffs to protect industrial workers and industry. — Wiki.

The Democrat Party dominated the South and pushed through bills of Secession through the Southern Statehouses. The Democrat Party created the Confederate States to preserve slavery.

Those democrat political agendas continued well into the Twentieth Century. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, not due to the democrats who opposed it, but due to the Republican Party. It was Republican Senators Everett Dirksen (R-IL) and Thomas Kuchel (R-CA) with the support of some northern democrats who finally broke the democrat filibuster and sent the bill to Johnson to be signed.

So the next time you come across some mouthy democrat saying the ‘Pubs want to return to slavery, just remember who ended slavery and passed the civil rights acts of the 1960s. It wasn’t the democrats.

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Weekend Review for Monday, September 10, 2012

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The local news outlets are having a field day. Cass County Pam Shipley Cleared of Nepotism Charges!  They conveniently ignore the the truth. Shipley was NOT cleared.” Cass County Prosecutor  refused to charge fellow democrat Shipley and chose to ignore the evidence of nepotism.

There is a difference  between being “cleared” and the Prosecutor refusing to file charges.

***

Unions are in the news today. Specifically, teacher’s unions in Chicago.  They turned down a 16% pay raise. Why? Because they demanded a 30% raise!  For you in the private sector, how much was your last raise—if you got one?

Chicago Bled Dry by Striking Teachers’ Unions

By John Fund, September 10, 2012 9:16 A.M

The smartest parents in Chicago right now are those whose kids attend charter schools, private schools, or parochial schools. Those institutions don’t employ Chicago’s unionized public-school teachers, who went out on strike this morning for the first time in 25 years.

The coverage of the strike has obscured some basic facts. The money has continued to pour into Chicago’s failing public schools in recent years. Chicago teachers have the highest average salary of any city at $76,000 a year before benefits. The average family in the city only earns $47,000 a year. Yet the teachers rejected a 16 percent salary increase over four years at a time when most families are not getting any raises or are looking for work.

…

But beyond the dollars, the fact is that Chicago schools need a fundamental shakeup — which of course the union is resisting. It is calling for changes in the teacher-evaluation system it just negotiated by making student performance less important.

Small wonder. Just 15 percent of fourth graders are proficient in reading and only 56 percent of students who enter their freshman year of high school wind up graduating.

There’s more info if you follow the link above.  Greed, as always, and the lust for power is what is driving this strike.  If Rahm Emanuel had any integrity, he would respond by firing the teachers. I’ll bet he could fill their slots very quickly.

That won’t happen, however. The unions are in Emanuel’s pocket as much as he is in theirs.

***

What do you do if you don’t like the polls?  If you’re Obama, you send your thugs to the pollster and “make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

Obama Thugs Rough Up Gallup For Polls They Don’t Like

By Dick Morris on September 10, 2012

The Obama Administration’s Justice Department announced, on August 22nd, that it was joining a lawsuit by a former Gallup employee and whistleblower against the Gallup Corporation for allegedly overcharging the government on polling work.

The announcement comes on the heels of a confrontation between Gallup staffers and Obama strategist David Axelrod in which he accused the company of using out of date sampling methods which, he said, generated polling data negative to the president.

The whistleblower’s lawsuit has been kicking around since 2009, but the Justice Department joined the suit only after the run-in between Axelrod and Gallup in April of this year.

In a scene right out of a typical authoritarian regime, Fox News reports that “employees at the venerable Gallup polling firm suggested they felt threatened by Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod when he questioned the methodology of a mid-April poll showing Mitt Romney leading the president – according to internal emails published Thursday.”

That poll that sent Axelrod ballistic showed Romney leading Obama 48-43 percent.

The Daily Caller published e mails that started when Axelrod sent a tweet to Gallup saying the tracking poll was “saddled with some methodological problems” and directing followers to a National Journal story in which a professor suggested outdated sampling.

According to the email chain titled “Axelrod vs. Gallup,” the White House in addition asked that a Gallup staffer “come over and explain our methodology,” which was apparently perceived as a subtle threat.

Fox News reported that “a Gallup official said in an email he thought Axelrod’s pressure ‘sounds a little like a Godfather situation.’”

Gallup refused to change its methodology to suit the White House.

The article continues. Follow the link above.  Obama appears to be following the tactics used by his mentors. When you don’t like the news, attack those that published the news.

***

Missed the Darwin award by…that much!

Words fail me on this one.  Take it as an object lesson for gang-bangers and others alike.  If you don’t know how to handle a weapon, get some training.  Like the warnings on TV, “Don’t try this at home.”

PORT ST. LUCIE, Florida — A teenager is recovering after
police say he shot himself in the penis and testicle while cleaning a gun he just bought.

It happened Thursday morning at a home on the 200 block of Verada Street in Port St. Lucie.

Police say 18-year-old Michael Smeriglio first lied to police saying someone shot him while he was walking down the street. After being questioned by police he admitted to accidentally doing it himself.

Even will all the advantages of modern medicine, OHSA and liberal nannies, people will still find ways to cleanse the gene pool.

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Returning to his roots

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Rahm Emmanuel is reported to be leaving Washington to return to the sewers of Chicago to run for Mayor.  

Like draws like.

Deja Vu all over again.

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Do you think that Congressmen running from their constituents after Town Hall meetings about health care is new? Wrong! Here is clip about an event from 1989.

On MSNBC’s “The Ed Show,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky echoed Durbin’s sentiments, asking: “What about the ordinary constituent who’s coming to actually learn something?” These are ordinary constituents, Madam, and they have come to tell you something — they aren’t buying what you’re selling.

Rep. Schakowsky has apparently dropped a few things down the memory hole, such as the “angry mobs” that greeted former House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski over the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act, which expanded Medicare benefits and funded the change with a supplemental tax.

The Chicago Tribune of Aug. 18, 1989, reported: Rostenkowski “was booed and chased down a Chicago street Thursday morning by a group of senior citizens after he refused to talk with them about federal health insurance. Shouting ‘coward,’ ‘recall’ and ‘impeach,’ about 50 people followed the chairman of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee up Milwaukee Avenue after he left a meeting in the auditorium of the Copernicus Center.”

What makes this interesting was that leading the protest against Rostenkowski 20 years ago was one Jan Schakowsky, who was then director of the Illinois State Council of Senior Citizens. Today, she’s the Democratic representative from Illinois’ 9th congressional district and chief deputy whip to Majority Leader Pelosi. The vox populi she once led she now fears.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, August 18, 2009 4:20 PM PT

The irony here is in the last paragraph of the clip. Like a true democrat, Representative Jan Schakowsky hypocritically threw her ideals under the bus for personal political power as Nancy Pelosi’s lapdog.

The lesson here is: Never trust a democrat—never trust a democrat. NEVER TRUST A DEMOCRAT! Liars, frauds, hypocrites and would-be tyrants, all.

I don’t know nothin’!!

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I received this from an e-mail friend of mine. I don’t know its origin but it’s funny—and so very accurate concerning Chicago politics. When the Blago “Pay-for-Play” scandal erupted, Obama danced and said he didn’t know anything about it. He’d not met Blago.
Blago who?

In the era of snark comes this message.

I don't know anything!!!

Please, you did NOT get this from me!

Is that perfectly clear?

To understand the next 4 years, you have to understand
the world according to Chicago. While it is a city in 
Illinois, it is also a completely different country, with
a whole different set of morals and language.

There are only three rules which anybody can understand.
You don't even need an attorney to understand them and
if you need an attorney, well... you know too much... so look
out for Rule #3!

RULE #1...No matter what you see, hear, or do,
you don't know anybody and you don't know
nothing!

RULE #2...If you capture something on tape or
camera, it doesn't reveal nothing!

RULE #3...If you know what everybody knows
in Chicago, well,... you still don't know
nothing.

Now pay close attention!  We don't want to have to say this 
more than once. It's very simple...we'll illustrate. 
Remember, you know nothing.

These two? They don't know each other!
They said they didn't.


The fellas in the background of this picture?
Well, what fellas?
We don't see nothing!
The guy on the left?  For all you know he's Santa Claus.
And the guy on the right...well, he's the Easter Bunny!
That's all you need to know.

 
Go to your eye doctor...your eyes are lying to you!
Ca'pish?

Remember Jimmy Hoffa! He knew too much and now, well, now no one knows where he is. Is the big picture clear? Not these pictures! Remember, You’ve already forgot them…

Now, ain’t that simple? They don’t know each other, ’cause they said so! and
neither do we!
And don’t forget it!

I don’t know nothin’!!

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I received this from an e-mail friend of mine. I don’t know its origin but it’s funny—and so very accurate concerning Chicago politics. When the Blago “Pay-for-Play” scandal erupted, Obama danced and said he didn’t know anything about it. He’d not met Blago.
Blago who?

In the era of snark comes this message.

I don't know anything!!!

Please, you did NOT get this from me!

Is that perfectly clear?

To understand the next 4 years, you have to understand
the world according to Chicago. While it is a city in 
Illinois, it is also a completely different country, with
a whole different set of morals and language.

There are only three rules which anybody can understand.
You don't even need an attorney to understand them and
if you need an attorney, well... you know too much... so look
out for Rule #3!

RULE #1...No matter what you see, hear, or do,
you don't know anybody and you don't know
nothing!

RULE #2...If you capture something on tape or
camera, it doesn't reveal nothing!

RULE #3...If you know what everybody knows
in Chicago, well,... you still don't know
nothing.

Now pay close attention! We don't want to have to say this 
more than once. It's very simple...we'll illustrate. 
Remember, you know nothing.

These two? They don't know each other!
They said they didn't.



The fellas in the background of this picture?
Well, what fellas?
We don't see nothing!

The guy on the left? For all you know he's Santa Claus.
And the guy on the right...well, he's the Easter Bunny!
That's all you need to know.


Go to your eye doctor...your eyes are lying to you!
Ca'pish?


Remember Jimmy Hoffa! He knew too much and now, well, now no one knows where he is. Is the big picture clear? Not these pictures! Remember, You’ve already forgot them…

Now, ain’t that simple? They don’t know each other, ’cause they said so! and
neither do we!
And don’t forget it!

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