Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Chicago Preparing For Election Night Riots if Obama Loses


Twitter and Facebook have been abuzz with posters, largely African-American, who have been threatening civil disorder in America's streets if their messiah Barack H. Obama should lose the election next Tuesday.

Free Stuff For Everybody if
Obama Loses -- Or Wins

Seems Obama's African-American amen corner now has come to view a black president as being yet another entitlement, kind of like food stamps, section 8 subsidized housing, or racial preference job quotas for unqualified minorities.

The possibility of election night rioting has not gone unnoticed by Chicago Police. Some privately say they expect something like the 1992 LA Rodney King race riots here in Obama's home town and the Chicago Police Department has plans to go on high alert on election night.

According to today's Chicago Tribune:

"There are indications the city is preparing for issues beyond securing McCormick Place (site of Obama's election night event), whether it's informal gatherings in downtown parks or incidents in neighborhoods. The Chicago Police Department has canceled days off for officers, ordered plainclothes cops into uniform and is scheduling 12-hour shifts for Election Day, police sources said.

"Those moves mirror arrangements for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization meetings in May, an event that should have prepared all levels of law enforcement to handle Tuesday, said Jeff Cramer, a former federal prosecutor who heads the Chicago office of Kroll Advisory Solutions, a global security consulting firm."


The soft-soap peddling, city spokesmen claim the moves are designed to head off overly exuberant celebrators if Obama wins.

But there were no such elaborate preparations in '08 and the rapture of Obama's messianic victory caused no civic disorder from "over exuberant celebrations," by any of the 250,000 celebrants who gathered at Grant park back then.

But with Romney now ahead in national polls as well as in the critical swing state of Ohio and continuing to surge, you can bet that they're really thinking about the Rodney King-styled race riot scenario if Obama loses.

They just dare not say it.

Saturday, October 27, 2012

Attending Alcoholics Anonymous as Court Ordered Punishment

The Chicago Tribune, to steal a line from the great TV host, John McLaughlin, accidentally stumbled into the truth when describing a Michigan court's recent DUI disposition in the case of University of Michigan running back, Fitzgerald Toussaint.

Sentenced to AA as punishment

According to the Tribune on page 7 of its sports section last Thursday 11/25:

"Michigan Tailback Fitzgerald Toussaint received 10 months probation after a guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge of operating a vehicle while impaired. Toussaint, the Wolverines leading rusher in 2011, must attend 10 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the next three months as punishment, according to the Detroit News."

Well, you certainly have to hand it to the Detroit sports scribes because, however inadvertently, they sure got that straight: mandatory attendance at AA is nothing other than punishment.

What else can you call being forced at the point of a gun to join a bunch of self-debasing, morbid mopes in dreary church basements and listen to them drone on and on about how fucked up their pathetic lives are?

That, in a nutshell is what the 1935 religious conversion therapy of Alcoholics Anonymous is: self flagellating bull sessions heavily interlaced with Bible-belt Christian mysticism.

And AA doesn't work -- never has -- and almost certainly never will.

According to Charles Bufe's landmark work, AA: Cult or Cure? AA works for 2.6% to 3.5% of the people who try it.

Imagine that -- 2.6% to 3.5% of those who try AA treatment are sober after 5 years -- AA's own baseline for measuring success.

For no other disease would the public stand still for a treatment that has such a paltry efficacy rate -- they would be demanding major government funding to find a serious medical cure -- such as that currently being undertaken by the governments of France and Canada.

In fact the French equivalent of the FDA has now cleared an alcohol abuse curative drug for public use there.
After attending AA punishment
you'll need a good stiff belt


But in the US, courts and the highly lucrative addiction treatment industry (how many times have Charley Sheen and Lindsay Lohan been thru  very expensive, AA-based rehab now? 5X a piece?) are content to just herd the drunken miserable wretches off to the idiotic 1930s-styled prayer meetings, called AA.

Some years back I went into an office building in Washington D.C. to use its pay phone. One of the building's tenants was an AA club.

I put my groceries on the staircase and went up to make my call. In the interim, an AA meeting let out and the inmates passed my groceries on the stairs and when I returned all the food items were still there -- except one of them had pinched my six-pack of beer.

But I really couldn't blame him or her too much. After sitting thru an hour of AA punishment, anybody would need a drink -- and actually something much stiffer than beer.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Founder of Beck's Books Dies at 91: A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request

Robert Beck, the founder of Beck's Bookstores passed away last month.

Robert L Beck:
Book Man, Cub Fan

He was one of those men who epitomized the grit and good nature of the boys of "the greatest generation."

Growing up during the Great Depression, Beck left to serve in the Coast Guard during the Second World War, returned home, began a family and started a small bookstore on a shoestring.

He persevered with Beck's Books until it became a major success and something of a Chicago institution, with 10 locations and  several hundred employees so far over its 57 years.

According to the Chicago Tribune's obituary, he had only one major flaw. He was obsessed with and devoted to the Chicago Cubs.

We've endlessly heard the jokes about the Cubs having a bad century and so forth. But I don't believe I've ever seen the futility of being a Cub fan expressed so poignantly as it was in Beck's Tribune obit.

It said (and I am not making this up):

"Having lived only 91 years, he missed seeing the Cubs in a World Series."

Some scientists, however, are now predicting that life spans for humans born today could reach as long as 1,000 years, due to breakthroughs in molecular biology.

That would seem to be a possibly favorable sign for future generations of Cub fans.


Here is the late Steve Goodman singing his famous "A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request" atop one of the Wrigley Field rooftops:



According to his obituary, Mr. Beck's funereal arrangements were handled by the Cremation Society of Illinois.

No word on where the ashes will be strewn.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Feminazi Fritz's NOW Affiliation Covered Up By Redeye

On July 11th of this year the leftist National Organization for Women (NOW) formally endorsed Barack Obama for President.

Stealth feminazi, Niki Fritz

On September 6th, the Chicago Tribune's newspaper for dummies, the Redeye, on page 4, ran a screed by one Niki Fritz, effectively endorsing Obama in terms so gushingly Pollyannish and absurd that it seemed to have come directly from the Obama campaign's talking points.

Fraulein Fritz, who heaves up a periodic column there, was described as a "Redeye Special Contributor." She was listed as having an email address at tribune.com.

Fraulein Fritz also happens to be the PR Chairwomen of the Chicago chapter of the aforementioned NOW.

In a truly outrageous violation of journalistic ethical standards the Redeye's editors conveniently failed to mention that.

Can you imagine the howls of indignation from the left if a mainstream news entity published a glowing endorsement of Romney by an operative of -- say -- the conservative Illinois Family Institute -- and covered up the association?

The call-in lines at the lefty radio outlets, WCPT and WBEZ would be abuzz with protest and soon thereafter, Redeye editorial heads would be rolling in Tribune Tower.
Redeye Editor Tran Ha - journalistic ethics
straight from Mao's cultural revolution

Indeed, The Society of Professional Journalists' code of ethics says, among many other things that journalists should:

"—Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
---- Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.

and

— Disclose unavoidable conflicts."


One other tenet of the Professional Journalists Code of ethics holds that journalists should,

" — Expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media."

So who at the Tribune Corporation can we count on to do this?

Certainly not Redeye editor, Tran Ha, whose ideas of journalistic ethicality and transparency seem to parallel those of the Maoist cultural revolution.

This is an era of unrestrained left-wing media bias and this is the season of what Bernard Goldberg calls, the media's "slobbering love affair" with Obama.

So if you are waiting for journalistically ethical behavior from the Chicago Tribune Corp. ----

don't hold your breath.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

The Election Ethno Name Game Part 2: Larry "Kyle" Frank

Some months back we posted an article about the ridiculous propensity of Chicago area pols to finagle with their names to try and attain an ethnic edge on the ballot.

Larry Frank became "Kyle"
 after he went to Eatin'

We chronicled how this election season we'll have a Fillipina named O'Brien and a Jew named Drury. 

We chronicled how in past election seasons we had a WASP with a Polish ballot name and scores of women of somewhat bland ethnicities who, for ballot purposes, adopted their husbands' Irish names or Italian names.

Well, add to the list one Kyle Frank who is running for State Representative in the North Shore's 17th legislative district.

He is running as a Republican against a truly execrable, ultra left-wing Northeastern  Illinois University (see: "high schools with ashtrays") teaching assistant named Laura Fine.

The fact that candidate Frank's name is "Kyle" today would come as something of a surprise to his former classmates at Skokie's Niles North High School. They simply knew him as an ungainly Jewish kid from Skokie's North side named Larry Frank.

But apparently at one time he set his sites on running for office as a Republican in the Northern suburbs and needed a new, enhanced, ballot name.

Likely he considered "Skippy" Frank and "J. Danforth" Frank but ultimately decided that "Kyle" had a nice enough WASPish GOP ring to it.

Perhaps he figured that it would make voters think that instead of Niles North he went to Eton.

And from the looks of his campaign photo, it is quite apparent that at one time he did, in fact, go to eatin'.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Clarence Darrow's Commencement Speech at Senn High School

Senn High School on Chicago's North side at the corner of Ridge Ave. and Clark St. has been around since 1911.

Chicago's Senn High School



 Apparently it's been a very funny place at one time or another, having produced kiddie show comic Shecky Greene, kiddie show puppeteer, Burr Tillstrom (creator of Kukla, Fran and Ollie), National Lampoon comic actor/director, Harold Ramis and TV and movie comic actor Harvey Korman.

Today it is supposedly trying to improve by adding magnet programs and in 2005 added a Naval military program.

But it is pretty much as big of a cesspool as most Chicago Public Schools today. A few years ago a girl was raped in a passageway there during school hours.

Anyway, the best oration ever likely given there was made by famed Chicago defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow at the 1918 Senn commencement ceremony.
Clarence Darrow, famed Chicago-based
criminal defense attorney and social gadfly


Darrow was apparently as prescient as he was brilliant.

After sitting on the stage listening to an hour or so of public school educators blather on and on about how their brilliant graduates must "go forth and serve," etc. etc -- yada, yada, yada -- he got up and uttered the following famous words to the 500 Senn graduates:

"Look -- let's you fellows down there relax now. 

That was as fine a lot of bunk as I ever heard in my life, and I know darned well you youngsters didn't believe a word of it. 

You're no more fit to "go forth and serve" than the man on the moon. 

You're just a bunch of ignorant kids, full of the devil, and you've learned practically nothing to show for the four years you spent here. 

You can't fool me, because I once spent four years in just such a place."


According to Irving Stone, author of the 1941 Darrow biography, Clarence Darrow for the Defense (Bantam Books, p.7) the parents were shocked, the Senn faculty was purple with rage but the kids were ecstatic.

They thought that Clarence Darrow's Senn High School commencement speech of 1918 was the only good sense they had heard in months.

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Chicago Blacks Protest Immigrant Labor - Libs Worried

For two consecutive days last week a group of South side black activists conducted a civil disobedience campaign protesting the overabundance of Latino immigrant laborers on construction sites in their neighborhood.

It seems that all is not well in multiculturalist diversityville.
Activists at one of Ed Gardener's
protests last week


In one incident the black protesters made anti-Latino taunts and sabotaged a city works project, shutting down the construction site for a time.

Led by Edward Gardener,an 87 year old retired black entrepreneur and veteran of General Douglas MacArthur's WWII army, the protesters targeted work sites where close to 100% of the work force was Latino immigrant. They demanded the scarce blue-collar jobs for Americans from their own community, where unemployment has reached staggering levels.

Conservatives of the immigration control movement have taken an odd sort of solace at these developments, We hate to say "we told you so", but we told you so.

Since the 1994 inception of the immigration control movement here, with the founding of Illinois Citizens for Immigration Reform, black leaders have been repeatedly warned that historically, high levels of immigration to the US have led to depressed wages and fewer jobs for black Americans.

To that they turned a deaf ear.

They bought the line propounded by their liberal-left leaders that they were part of a "rainbow coalition" for "social justice."

They sat by and watched as hordes of 3rd world immigrants, many of them illegal, streamed into the country and snapped up jobs and educational opportunities that rightfully would have been theirs.

Blacks watched meekly as foreigners of color were added to the racial spoils scheme known as "affirmative action."

They watched dumbly as their leftist leaders declared Chicago a "sanctuary city" for illegal aliens and refused to cooperate with federal authorities in effecting their deportation.

Today they are protesting their inability to get those scarce jobs that their liberal pals told them that "Americans won't do."

They watched as hordes of foreign born Asians and Indo-Pakistanis snapped up scholarship money and scarce spots at US college campuses. Their liberal leaders cheered this on as "diversity" and "multiculturalism" and even called for the de facto immigrant amnesty of the so-called "Dream Act."

Blacks watched as their hard earned urban electoral power base was eroded and diluted by an aggregation of foreign-born, now organized, voter cohorts.

I watch with amazement as at a McDonald's in the very shadow of Evanston Township High School, throngs of black teens are daily customers at a restaurant that seems to hire only foreign born, likely illegal, Latino workers.
Lame Brain Brown


Ultra-lefty Chicago Sun-Times columnist, Mark Brown, lamented the fact that Mr. Gardener's protests have targeted Latino workers. How terribly un-PC, that.

Well who is he going to target, lame brain Brown? How many times have you passed construction sites with all Latino immigrant laborers? When was the last time that you saw a black teen or a white man on a landscaping crew?

Well now there is, I suppose, at least one black Gardener in Chicago. He's an 87 year old activist and however belatedly, he has shined the spotlight on the devastating economic and cultural effects of 4 decades of uncontrolled foreign immigration.

And that has gotten Libs like Brown worried.