Tag: Blithe Spirit

Blago as case in point

As the Blagojevich trial offers evidence atop evidence of how weird, childish, nasty, irresponsible, venal, vain, and all-’round strange and off-putting is and has been our immediate past governor, as in this just in:

Rod Blagojevich’s corruption trial resumed today with a former aide testifying that the former governor hid in the bathroom or left the office early to avoid discussing certain issues,

we must conclude that it’s time for an in-depth investigation of root causes.

I speak not of Blago’s upbringing, birth order (sibling rank), schooling, previous condition of servitude to bad habits, and over-all life experience but of the slating procedures by the Democratic Party of Cook County, beginning with the all-important question, Who sent him?

Guns of August in Chicago (and July and the rest of the year)

Daley thinks his new rule about gun ownership passes the constitutional mustard, but it looks ketchupy to me:

The ordinance permits citizens to register only one firearm a month. It bans all operational gun shops and shooting ranges within the city. The new regulations also require those who want to obtain a permit for a firearm to take classes and undergo at least one hour of training at a shooting range prior to receiving a license.

Individuals are not allowed to purchase guns within the city limits and may not obtain firearms by any means other than “inheritance.”

The ordinance mandates that an individual can only have one “functional” firearm in the home while all other firearms must be kept in a “broken down” state.

One a month equals 12 a year, which will inhibit self-defense in few if any households. So that seems not to be a problem. And maybe ditto for having only one gun that works, except where they’re coming in through more windows than one at same time.

But you have to leave the city to buy or learn how to use one and practice using it? The point is to discourage self-defense, but that’s been the idea all along.

Daley worries about a wild-west atmosphere, which is a (grim) laugh. That’s not how it is now?

Not to mention the inability to enforce current laws, meant to disarm bad guys but apparently inefficacious — another (grim) joke.

Hurricane warning

Something very big is coming this fall, to go by Gallup:

By an average 10 percentage-point margin since March, 45% to 35%, independent registered voters have consistently preferred the Republican to the Democrat when asked which congressional candidate they would vote for in their district. Independents’ preference for Republicans has been generally consistent over this time, with the gap in favor of Republicans increasing slightly since March, from 8 to 12 points.

Tsunami coming.

[HT: News Alert]

May the best man win, says Berrios

Manuel Galvan tells us the Berrios for (Cook County) Assessor campaign will not contest independent former Democrat Forrest Claypool’s petitions and will rely instead on vote count in the general election in November.

The campaign’s “extensive review” found 30,000-plus valid signatures (of almost 90,000 submitted, per G.), and 26,000 were needed; so Berrios, who won the early, early (Dem) primary months ago, will not engage in litigation that might go “all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court” and will concede Claypool a place on the ballot — which is more than Obama did for his state senatorial opponent in a long-ago primary when he was fairly new on the scene.

Galvan asks only that Claypool, who enters the race with far less baggage than the grizzled Berrios — traveling light, as it were — “set aside the insults and empty rhetoric and pledge to conduct a spirited, fair and clean campaign,” which is asking a lot.

Chi Trib gives it to us easy

It is to laugh heartily (or cry pitifully) to gander Chi Trib’s front page as presented to home-delivery subscribers, with major big-color-pic-accompanied story about organic foods (“Consumers buying into organic farms“), the gay parade (pic of joyous watchers waving) to go with story later in paper (“A rainbow of issues at pride parade”), HIV testing (“HIV tests of teens still rare“), and “Kagan hearings are set to start,” a “news focus.”

Marshall McLuhan’s telling newspaper publishers,”People don’t actually read newspapers, they get into them every morning like a hot bath” never rang truer. It’s all soft, soft, soft, comfort food for a certain demographic, even the Kagan piece, which is purely a scene-setter.

No news on this front page. God forbid. We wouldn’t want to upset anyone. Not even city workers loafing on the job, as in the Col. McCormick days. Bye-bye newspapering.

color pic of

Soccer ref explains

Koman Coulibaly, the ref that called it wrong in the U.S.-Slovenia World Cup match, has fallen in love with a wonderful guy:

“I am now sitting in my hotel room in Pretoria, South Africa, thinking about adversity. And how Nelson Mandela and I have faced so many similar struggles,” he writes on his blog.

How so?

1) We are both African. [So are lots of refs who don’t blow championship calls.]  Both Nelson Mandela and I suffered under the imperialist yoke of countries like Great Britain and America. And colonialism.

Ah.  That imperialist yoke.  And colonialism.  Surefire recipe ingredients for bad calls and subsequent refusal to explain them.

2) We are talented soccer experts. I heard Mandela considered playing left mid for Bafana Bafana before becoming an activist.

Highly irrelevant, one might say.  Mandela, for instance.

3) We are both kept from achieving our full potential because of racism. Mandela had apartheid. I face the racist Americans and FIFA. Do you think there would be so much doubt about my call if I was from Melbourne, not Mali? I don’t.

I do, somehow.  One hoped against hope that he would not talk that way.  Question: If U.S. were not imperialist, colonialist, and racist, would he have made his call?

4) We have both been imprisoned under horrible hardships. Like Mandela, I am a prisoner. Though there are no physical bars or concrete separating me from freedom, I have had to stay indoors since the US vs Slovenia game for fear of my safety. I guess apartheid whites and some American soccer fans also have things in common.

He guesses?  Why so tentative?  Will he elaborate on his fear?  We think not.  He does not elaborate.  Suffering from imperialism, and racism, he just calls them as he thinks them.  Why can’t we understand that?

Later: Reader D sees “a possible job opening in the White House as our Soccer Czar. He’s got the one necessary ingredient — a desire to cut the USA down to size.”

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The summer when the sun don't shine for Dems

“I used to say I enjoyed taking his money, but now I think he’s taking mine.”

State Senator Bill Brady talking, about Obama the high-taxer, whom he used to play poker with in Springfield when O. too was a state senator.
 
“I think I could beat the president running for governor in Illinois today,” he told Politico, with reference to the bad economy but especially to this summer of discontent when Dems’ dirty laundry will be hung out to dry.
 
Obama would want to keep his distance from his home state: “How close does he want to be to his buddy Tony [Rezko] when he’s on the witness stand?”
 
Downstater Brady, who squeaked by in the primary for Republican candidate, has to concentrate on Chicagoland, where “They think they know me. They think they like me,” he said, based on his polling.
 
His Dem opponent, appointed Gov. Pat Quinn, will portray him as a right-winger, he said, but voters “are realizing that this state has been ruined by Chicago influences that have been in control the last eight years.”

 
And Tom Roesers envisions a “harpooning” of Dems by the Blago trial.
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