Ald. Ed Burke was in the news again, 6/1 & 6/3/13 for making money for himself where the sun don’t shine, that is, in shady places, where civic virtue fades gradually into many kinds of gray. Social justice issue? I think so.

Ed votes on the one hand for taxes, raising money for gummint, on the other hand lowers it with tax breaks for clients who pay well for the help he gives them. With one hand he giveth (to clients), with another he taketh away (from taxpayers). Blessed be Burke.

He’s the lord of the money rings, a dandy dresser — at thousands a suit and hundreds for shirt and tie, the late Tom Roeser once said on his blog site now removed.

But R. Cooley has the goods on him, it seems, in Ed’s use of the N-word. Consider Paula Deen, called out by Mary Mitchell, who should look up Ed Burke in Robert Cooley’s book When Corruption Was King: How I Helped the Mob Rule Chicago, Then Brought the Outfit Down. Mary could set the ball rolling for a Burke ouster if she ran with pages 162 and 215, where Burke condones murders of two blacks, in each case saying, “It’s only a fucking nigger.”

Long time ago, yes. About the time Paula Deen was telling her husband, apparently in private, that a “nigger” had held her up at a bank where she worked. She said that in a deposition in answer to a generic question, also that she had recounted what some blacks had said.

There may be more to her alleged insensitivity than that, but you can’t tell from Mary Mitchell’s column, which with the howler, “Paula Deen is toast. Because when one white woman alleges that another white woman is calling black folks n