Free Republic

In a curious column the Sun-Times' Mark Brown denies that President Obama has much to do with Chicago Politics. Curious because the preponderance of evidence that Brown offers is that President Obama is a typical Chicago politician, working in league with donors and other politicians to fleece their consituents and taxpayers. Here’s Mark Brown arguing against himself

Obama is a proponent of failed economic policies that have left much of the Third World mired in poverty. Rather than acknowledging that centralized economic planning is a failure, Obama faults America’s industrial might as the cause of economic malaise that has crippled much of Africa. The answer, therefore, is not to abandon the discredited economic policies, but to disable America so as to level the playing field. Once America is bankrupt, Kenyan economic programs are bound to succeed! As someone who follows politics and current events closely, I thought that I was better informed about Barack Obama’s radicalism than...

The unctuous and reptilian Rahm Emanuel has always reminded me of the sinister and malevolent schemer played Tony Curtis in film noir classic “The Sweet Smell of Success.” Both men specialize in backstabbing their opponents utilizing character assassination techniques such as distortion and scandal mongering. Having easy access to media figures willing to reprint the defamatory insinuations as news makes it all so simple. It was refreshing, for a change, to see the too slick by half Emanuel stick his foot in it last week when he tried to pile on during the manufactured controversy about issuing licenses and building...

•It seems that recently Rahm came home and found a brown paper bag sitting on his front porch and demanded to know how it got there and what it was from his security detail. After all, there are police guarding his house front and rear 24/7. The police are not supposed to come on the front porch and the 1st watch detail knew nothing about it. Looking inside it was determined that it contained tomatoes and various vegetables. And the Case of the Killer Tomatoes was closed with no evil consequence. And so far as can be determined, just one...

According to some child psychologists, there is a demonstrable tendency among children who have been victimized by bullies to progress to becoming aggressors themselves. Another symptom associated with bullies is a pronounced tendency for such persons to also be braggarts. It does make you wonder. What exactly happened on the playground at recess when Rahm Emanuel was growing up? When it was announced that Bill Daley was leaving the position of White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel came to the defense of his successor at the White House. Emanuel was quoted as saying, “Historically, the modern Chief of Staff...

Two days after the fatal accident, on June 10, the federal Department of Homeland Security filed what is called an immigration detainer for Chavez. The agency believed he was an illegal immigrant from Mexico. The form requested that Cook County notify Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, if Chavez was scheduled to be released. But as Chavez sat in the jail, immigration became an emotional issue before the Cook County Board. Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Commissioner Jesus "Chuy" Garcia pushed a new policy aimed at ignoring federal detainer requests and allowing suspected illegal immigrants who'd been jailed in...

No one will ever be able to accuse of Mayor Rahm Emanuel of lacking chutzpah. It had been widely anticipated that Chief of Staff Emanuel was going to be asked to leave the White House in 2011. Fortuitously, Emanuel bailed out earlier and landed safely in Chicago after Richard M. Daley retired. Emanuel was spared the indignity of being sacked as the scapegoat for Democratic losses in the midterm elections. Ever the nimble dancer, Emanuel, has now hit the road on behalf of Obama’s reelection campaign. Emanuel has taken on a Herculean task greater than solving Chicago’s budgetary woes. He...

Sharon Bialek has had an unfortunate history of mismanaged finances and multiple bankruptcies. Allred never wants her clients challenged for their sins and omissions. Sometimes, it is surreal and it borders upon the equivalent of the pot calling the kettle black. After stirring the pot, Allred frequently does not go so far as to file an actual lawsuit. On numerous other occasions, the celebrity lawyer’s lawsuits filed on behalf of her clients end up being dismissed or voluntarily withdrawn. How does Allred meet her expenses and earn legal fees in these instances? In terms of her behavior, Gloria Allred is...

[T]he film is beautifully composed. There are seductive inserts of bottling machinery and a perfect whiskey old fashioned cocktail being made. Some sequences border upon being high quality advertising agency pornography produced for a liquor industry client. There are no laborers ordering Boilermakers in the final cut... Burns knows his real audience, his business partners at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (your tax dollars at work) prefer sophisticated cocktails rather than canned beer and pork rinds. The documentary praises Frances Willard of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union as a feminist heroine while ignoring...

According to a gushing Carol Marin column, State Representative Deborah Mell (D-40th) “quietly made Illinois history last week” by marrying a woman in Iowa. Judging by Marin’s tone, this must have been the equivalent of Abraham Lincoln issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. Quietly making history? Really? If a same sex marriage conducted in Davenport is splashed across the front page of a daily Chicago metropolitan newspaper, does it make a sound?

Given the fact that so many Illinois residents visit the State Fairgrounds in West Allis, one would think that a riot on the opening night of the fair in which a gang of youths, estimated to be composed of one hundred or more young black males, terrorized fairgoers along the carnival midway and outside of the fair gates would be newsworthy, but you would be mistaken. Searching through the two major Chicago newspapers, the story appeared to have either gone unreported or it was buried. What makes this media blackout more suspect is the fact that the Chicago media has...

[M]any of Blagojevich’s former friends and playmates deny knowing him or they are keeping their distance. Erstwhile friends such De Leo, Saviano, Quinn and others have vanished or suffered political amnesia. [F]ormer Illinois State Senator Barack H. Obama used to count Blagojevich and the wheeler dealer Antonin “Tony” Rezko as his friends. President Obama, US Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-9th) and the newly elected Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel used to actively court Blagojevich when they were climbing the political ladder or seeking favors. Emanuel and his family contributed to Blagojevich’s campaign fund on a reliable basis. Schakowsky, herself, sought to be...

The rope line stretched from the Washington Street entrance to City Hall, wound its way past the City Clerk’s office and continued to the bank of elevators servicing the fifth floor. Surprisingly, the expected overflow crowd never fully materialized. There was a modestly respectable afternoon turnout that inched forward at a leisurely pace, but not much more. A private reception for invited guests had occurred earlier in the day. Mayor Richard M. Daley welcomed visitors to his office, shaking hands and posing for photographs one last time yesterday. Some of the mayor’s morning guests were even entertained by the Shannon...

While I generally agree with the decision not to permit Bin Laden’s burial place to become a memorial shrine which could be visited by his radical adherents, I do question the decision to accord him an “appropriate” Islamic funeral service before his remains were buried at sea. There were better alternatives. According to an apocryphal story, General John J. Pershing, dealt more harshly with hostile Muslims. During an insurrection in the Philippines, “Black Jack” was tasked with the job of pacifying the Moro Province, a stronghold of Muslim rebels. As a means of suppressing the rebels, captured guerilla terrorists, subject...

During the challenges to his residency status and the campaign, Emanuel labored to behave himself. Now, that the election results have been certified, he has relaxed his guard and allowed his inner radical self to exhale. If selecting former State Representative Judy Erwin, who was guilty of various ethics violations, to serve on his transition team was not embarrassing enough, Emanuel compounded his errors by naming Father Michael Pfleger and former Fire Commissioner Cortez Trotter to his team of advisors. Former Fire Commissioner Cortez Trotter was criticized by the Department of Homeland Security for having one of the worst interagency...

It took an almost incoherent and incomprehensible opinion from the Supreme Court of Illinois to restore Emanuel to the ballot. It was supremely ironic that Michael Kasper, one of Emanuel’s lead attorneys, had the audacity to argue that the same one year residential requirement for municipal candidates that was in controversy in the challenge to Emanuel’s mayoral candidacy ought to have barred an aldermanic candidate from the ballot in the 27th Ward. As the Irish cynic and scholar, Jonathan Swift, famously observed there are lawyers who can argue “White is Black and Black is White” according to how they are...

To exclude Emanuel, to throw him off the ballot because he had the temerity to go to Washington to serve the president, would have been an outrage against this inclusive spirit of democracy. And, according to Thursday’s slap-down of the state Appellate Court’s Monday ruling, it would have tossed out 150 years of settled residency law. We have defended Emanuel’s right to be on the ballot in two earlier editorials, leading some to question whether we would have so forcefully run to the defense of a less prominent candidate. In truth, probably not, though the same legal and common-sense arguments...

In a unanimous decision, which revealed divisions within the Supreme Court, released yesterday, the court ruled that Rahm Emanuel was eligible to run for mayor and that he was a resident of Chicago for one year next preceding the election. The Court held that the candidate’s intent to return after being absent from the city for twenty months and having leased his residence to tenants for approximately two years, through and including June 30, 2011, trumped the fact that he had no permanent abode in the city during the relevant time frame for determining candidate eligibility. The majority opinion written...

One of the most useful ruses used by skilled magicians is called misdirection. If the audience can be distracted momentarily, the prestidigitator can engage in some sleight hand maneuvering to make a trick appear real. Emanuel has been doing that for weeks and months until the appellate decision was released. Emanuel and his spin doctors have planted stories about his grumpy tenants and how Rahm the white knight nobly answered the call to serve President Obama as a matter of patriotic duty and chivalry. Rahm stressed how he paid property taxes and owned a building in Chicago without acknowledging that...

Watching events unfold in Springfield earlier this week, I imagined the late Kevin McCarthy perspiring and dodging cars along Interstate 55 vainly trying to warn Illinois taxpayers about “The Invasion of the Tax Snatchers.” Imagine yourself listening to his ranting, “Listen to me, you fools! They’re here already! Your wallet is next! Your job is next! You’re next! You’re next!” The derisive laughter that you hear has been coming from the executives of our neighboring states, particularly the Republican governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels. With the passage of a massive increase in personal and corporate tax rates, our neighbors are...