Skokie's Tsunami of Violent Crimes: Black Males Sought In All

Last week a Cook County grand jury charged a Skokie man with 4 counts of attempted murder for firing off eight shots at a passing carload of people in downtown Skokie during the evening rush hour.

Skokie Police Chief Scarpelli said the suspected shooter
A. Soballe (above) is not black and not on Sec. 8

This is just the latest in a tsunami of violent incidents that have occurred in that once tranquil Northern Chicago suburb since the end of April.

Additionally there have been a series of violent robberies of Skokie residents and most recently a racially motivated assault on a white couple in a Skokie park.

In all of the recent incidents, the suspects are black males.

The rash of violence prompted Skokie officials to hastily convoke a June 14th public forum where they sought to assuage growing citizen fears. Noticeably absent from the meeting was Skokie's usually publicity hungry mayor, George Van Dusen, former longtime aide to liberal Democrat Congressman Sidney Yates.

At the forum, Skokie's new police chief, Anthony Scarpelli asserted that crime was really down in the suburban village, that the suspected downtown shooter, a Skokie resident, despite having clearly African features, was not really an African American and was not a Section 8 low-income housing subsidee.

Nevertheless a survey taken at the event revealed that 62% of Skokie residents "believe they are less safe after dark in their own neighborhood."

Here is the chronicle of recent violent crime in Skokie:

--- June 14th Gunfire incident - 8 shots fired at passing car in downtown Skokie during rush hour - suspect Black mixed race

--- Two violent robberies within an 8 day period at the end of April. One woman stabbed and robbed of $500 near the 7-11 at Main St. and Skokie Blvd. One 54 year old man badly beaten and robbed of $250 near downtown Skokie -- suspects 2 black males


--- Last Week of June, 3 incidents of violent robbery of Apple iphones in residential area near downtown Skokie - suspects 3 black teens

A Skokie woman was robbed of her Ipod
at gunpoint by a black male suspect

--- June 25th incident where a group of black teens attacked a white couple  badly beating the husband in Skokie's Tecumseh Park after yelling anti-white racial slurs - suspects 3 black teens


While the tempo of violent crime in Skokie has reached a fever pitch this Spring and early Summer , apparently it has been going on for a while. Last year these similar incidents occured:


Woman robbed of Ipod at gunpoint on North side of Skokie - suspect black male


Two teens robbed of cell phones March 4, 2011 near Skokie Swift station one assaulted -- suspects 2 black male teens

At an earlier public forum, Skokie residents blamed the new violent crime wave on the politically liberal suburb's encouragement and acceptance of federally subsidized Section 8 low-income housing vouchers, which have become prevalent in some of Skokie's seedier neighborhoods which abut its central business district.

Skokie's liberal political elites have long encouraged racial integration and settlement of low income residents there.

The Government of Niles Township, of which Skokie is the principal municipality,  contributed taxpayer funds to the Interfaith Housing Center of the Northern Suburbs, a Saul Alinsky-styled community organizing group, which agitates for more low income housing in Chicago's suburbs.

And the Skokie Human Relations Commission, an agency of the Village government, is listed as a member of the group.

Beach Boys 2012 Reunion Tour: Is "Rolling Stone" the New "Modern Maturity"?

The Beach Boys are celebrating 50 years together as a musical group with a nationwide reunion tour. That's 50 years as in half a century!


Beach Boys 2012: Happy Hour is Nap Time




I know this because I happened to pick up the June 21st issue of Rolling Stone magazine.

And I have to tell you, Rolling Stone is beginning to look an awful lot like Modern Maturity or the AARP Newsletter.

The magazine -- once considered must reading for the cool and the wannabe cool -- now seems like it would be right at home on the coffee table of a geriatric clinic waiting room.

It seems hellbent on appealing to readers who are as afraid of losing their hips as they are of losing their hipness.

Madonna: No Spring Chicken Anymore

Look at who Rolling Stone profiled in this issue: a grey, balding Neil Young (someone ought to tell him that a day's growth of white facial hair is not cool), a granny-looking Madonna, Mick Jagger (who in his 70s is beginning to look an awful lot like Barney Fife) and, of course, the septuagenarian Beach Boys.

It also featured pictures of a quite shriveled Bob Dylan receiving a medal from Obama and looking like he is impatient for the waiter at the diner to bring his soup -- and semi-shriveled Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood doing some creepy old head butt greeting from their Faces days.

Mick Jagger:
Looking more like Barney Fife?

And the cover of the Rolling Stone doesn't seem to be the cover of the Rolling Stone anymore.

This one featured that young whippersnapper, Charlie Sheen. Not really known for his clean living and health food obsessions, the years have not been kind to young Charles.

On the cover, Charley, 47, face pock marked and lined, is puckering on a Marlboro and sporting a sagging t-shirt. He could readily pass for a 57 year old grammar school janitor, not exactly everybody's idea of young, hip.

The years have not been kind to Charley

But anyway, this edition devoted a full 7 page photo spread to the ongoing Beach Boys anniversary tour (they played 2 nights at the Chicago Theater in May)  and I have to say it was kind of sad.

The Beach Boys, to my mind, captured and epitomized the youthful energy of the 60s, more than just about any other musical entity.

And today they are pictured, sitting in a diner over cheeseburgers, like so many Seal Beach retirees at the early bird special. They look really old and it is sad.

The Beach Boys actually promoted their reunion tour by performing on a QVC shopping network show -- their performance on the small set was pretty bad and the mere fact that they were at such a low-life venue was really sad.

What? Do these guys really need the money that badly?

When crooners like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett continued performing well into their golden years there was nothing odd or incongruous about it. They were adults who always had performed adult music.

But rock and 60s/70s pop were the anthemic music of youth. Energy was the hallmark. And when the over-the-hill gang hangs on after much of the energy has dissipated and the youthful looks have faded, it just seems kind of wrong.

Two years ago, the Swedish pop supergroup ABBA was offered a cool $1 billion to do a reunion tour. At the insistence of the 2 girls, Agnetha and Anna Frida, they declined.

ABBA in their prime

ABBA passed up all that cash, because to them it was better to stay fixed in the popular mind -- like Garbo -- as they were in their beautiful prime.

If economic necessity isn't an issue, it would be nice if more of the old rock 'n roll greats would be so prudent.

In fact, I heard that during the Chicago stop on the Beach Boys tour, a groupie went up to Brian Wilson, took one look at him and said: "I'd invite you to come upstairs and have sex with me, but I doubt that you could manage either."

Here is the Beach Boys QVC channel performance from May 2012. These guys look like their idea of "Happy Hour" is nap time:

Cook County Morgue Scandal: Follow the Money

Finding a Chicago Ward or Township committeeman of either party with a common sense solution to a public policy matter is about as rare as a Wrigley Field game date in October.

Homewood Memorial Gardens gets $1,600
 from the State for each indigent burial

But Niles Township Republican Committeeman, Joe Hedrick, is one of those very rare political operatives who actually embraces ideals and actually has ideas.

In the wake of the recent spate of scandals surrounding unburied indigent corpses at the Cook County Morgue, Hedrick penned the following letter which the Chicago Tribune, duly printed:

I find it hard to understand with all the scandals in connection with the burials by the Cook County government why there are burials. It would be cost-effective and eliminate many of the current problems to do cremations of these individuals.

I think we are well past the time when cremations were unacceptable.

— Joseph Hedrick, Morton Grove

Why this patently obvious common sense solution did not occur to the vaunted Cook County Board President, Toni Preckwinckle or any of the members of the Cook County Board defies comprehension.

Or does it?

Homewood Memorial Gardens in unincorporated Cook County holds a long-standing contract with the state whereby it is paid $1,600 for each public burial it performs.

It is owned by the politically connected Thomas Flynn family.

But cremation costs as little as $555.

The Flynns do not operate a crematorium.

As with everything in Chicago, if you really want to figure out what is going on, follow the money.

Lincolnwood And Radical Jewish Immigration Lobby Pave Paradise to Praise Immigrants

All summer, the Village of Lincolnwood has been working hard to transform its portion of the MWRD sewerage canal park into a vast concrete parking lot.

Bulldozers have been energetically ripping up grass and knocking down trees in the bucolic setting along McCormick Blvd. between Touhy and Devon and filling it in with Stalinesque quantities of concrete.

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society seemed
 bashful about using their actual name

To further this aesthetic end, Lincolnwood joined a radical Jewish immigrant's lobby group in erecting two concrete memorials there extolling the joys of unfettered immigration.

On June 21st, the new "Ain't All Immigrants Great!" monuments went up at the point where the park meets Pratt Ave, amidst a gala celebration.

 Oddly, the immigrant lobby group involved kind of downplayed its own name on the memorials. It almost appeared as if they were trying to camouflage their involvement.

The group in question is the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. But nowhere on either of the 2 "Ain't All Immigrants Great!" plaques erected in the park does their name appear, just a cryptic reference to the fine work of "HIAS."

One of the concrete slabs contains the basic mantra used by the illegal alien lobby as a smokescreen for their amnesty push.

Its inscription quotes one Judge Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals (apparently Judge Wapner was unavailable) as saying:

"We are a nation of immigrants, built by immigrants and continually enriched by the flow of immigrants."

Real nice sounding words, but they omit the reality that a mere 20 years after 1912, when the Hebrew Immigrant's Aid Society began assisting immigrants, Congress found it best to enact a de facto moratorium on immigration. The US economy, they reasoned, did not need scads of cheap laborers during the height of the Great Depression.

And those fine words omit mention of the fact that during earlier waves of immigration, the emigres required sponsors who would assume economic responsibility for them if they should become destitute -- no Food Stamps, Section 8 housing vouchers or SSI paychecks like today.

And, of course, those fine words omit mention of the fact that earlier waves of immigrants came legally -- under the eye of US officials who screened them for such things as contagious disease and criminal behavior.

The Lincolnwood government-sanctioned feel-good  propagandizing in cement should really come as no big surprise, considering the source.


It turns out that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society is a full-blown member of the radical illegal alien lobby, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

These are the very same fine folks who have spent the last 25 years making Chicago and Cook County "sanctuary cities" for illegal aliens, pushing the so-called "Dream Act" to give taxpayer-subsidized in-state tuition to illegals and banging the drums for outright amnesty of the 12 to 20 million illegal aliens in our midst.

And in this election year, with the illegal alien issue moving to the forefront of the national debate, the lunkheads in the Lincolnwood Village government see nothing at all amiss about staging an "Aint All Immigrants Great!" dog and pony show, in cahoots with a radical Jewish immigrant lobby outfit, complete with a tax-supported permanent monument on public ground.

The Chicago Tribune recently did a multi-part report on numerous illegal alien felons who have committed atrocious crimes - rapes, murders, etc. - while in "sanctuary city" Chicago, jumped bail and then hotfooted it back across the border to reside in complete anonymity and safety there.

This very Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society lobby was part of the larger coalition that stopped Chicago judges from treating immigrants as a flight risk. They were instrumental in making sure that even felons weren't allowed to be queried on their immigration status after arrest.

Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society's
 Suzanne Franklin: "Trees are immigrants too"

At the dedication ceremony for the monument, the chief honcho of the stealth Hebrew Immigrants' lobby, one Suzanne Franklin, glowingly and quite peculiarly compared immigrants to trees.

"Trees are like immigrants who come to this country," she babbled. "Their roots grow deep, they enrich the earth and they become tall and plentiful, a canopy that shelters us and makes our world stronger and more vibrant," she swooned.

And of course, let's never utter a discouraging word about the possibility of Dutch Elm disease or the Emerald Ash borer, right Lincolnwood?