Publisher Dan Haley looks back in barely concealed regret about policing.

But it is true that police departments come to reflect the communities they serve. And for all of Oak Park’s genuine progressive bonhomie, it always came with a giant side of “protect us from the West Side.”

That explains the cul-de-sacs all along Austin Boulevard. It explains the active othering of Austin, a neighborhood that when it was Irish, German, Italian and Greek, was our sister community.

He’s been biting his tongue about the cul-de-sacs, apparently, which to us at the corner of Humphrey and Randolph, to name one of the corners that welcomed them, were wholly beneficial as making for a pleasant block. Some, I know, saw it as a slap at black Austin. If it was that at all, and I think not, it was quite a bit more than that.

Dan closes, out of nowhere I…

Painting a gloomy picture of what’s in store for the village.

“I have come to a point where I no longer have the necessary drive, belief or desire to proceed with what I set out to do two months ago,” Moroney said in an email thanking his campaign supporters.

“Although my concern for Oak Park has increased during this time, my confidence has diminished regarding how much can be done to alter its downward political trajectory.”

Hopeless task, he says.

White man’s complaint.

Some folks have been up in arms that a white guy filed objections to the nominating petitions of two Black men for village trustee. I’m far more concerned over the information [that] objector Kevin Peppard uncovered on Anthony Clark and Chibuike Enyia, regardless of whether or not it disqualified them from the ballot. The information Peppard uncovered should disqualify both men from getting the vote of any citizen who cares about character and competence.

Candidate One:

Chibuike Enyia’s attorney publicly acknowledged Enyia entered into a “deferred judgment plea” in which he was ordered to pay a $2,000 fine and sentenced to three years of probation for delivery of a controlled substance. Because of that, “a felony judgment [wa]s never entered.”

Enyia actually had the gall to label Peppard’s objection “false and defamatory.” Effectively saying, yeah, it quacks, and sure, it waddles, but don’t you dare call it…

Plans were made to do just that.

Cardinal Blase Cupich, the ambitious left-wing archbishop of Chicago, must have imagined that Joe Biden’s inauguration last week would be a moment to savour. He and a small number of his liberal colleagues, known as ‘the Biden bishops’, have been working tremendously hard to make sure that, once their candidate was elected, any mention of his radical support for abortion would be sotto voce and preferably inaudible. They thought they’d succeeded.

It was a best-made plan . . .

But then things went spectacularly wrong. The president of the US bishops’ conference, Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, drafted a statement on behalf of his colleagues that not only mentioned Biden’s pro-choice activism but also drew attention to the fact that the new administration planned to remove certain legal protections or ‘conscience rights’ from Americans who won’t participate in abortions or other…