Tag: Oak Park

Barack and Joe and all that

Good day today, no one scared me s-less by coming up fast behind me on the sidewalk, running or cycling.  Maybe because clouds are pregnant but have not yet come due.  Water is leaking, but that’s all, and in the slightest spray you can imagine.  That’s the weather report in Oak Park.

Last night’s debate was full of excitement.  Would Obama follow the rules or wouldn’t he?  Like Biden, who in his debate just had to get in this or that.  “I have to respond,” etc.  Like a kid who will stamp his feet otherwise.  Typical Democrats.

Biden vs. Palin is A Pursued Man vs. a Finished Woman, i.e. completed.  The Pursued Man has to be right, he has to be liked also, he pastes on the huge smile reminiscent of the circus clown’s painted grin, then erases it, just like that.  He’s less running than on the run.

He doesn’t matter, however.  Never has a candidate so disappeared below media radar.  Who now reads about Biden?  Palin, on the other hand, is a force to contend with, which is why the zap-a-kid-a-day pro-abort women hate her.  What did that Bernhard comedienne hope for, that Palin would be gang-raped by blacks in Harlem?  Why do Dems always attract such creeps to their bandwagon?

I’ll tell you why.  Because down deep Republicans stand for right reason and controls, and Dems stand for going with the flow, moving on dot-orgying with the zeitgeist, a German word for flow (kidding: look it up, it will do you good).

Meanwhile, McCain limps along, ready to buy all those mortgages.  As usual, it’s the lesser of two bad things this time around.  He’s a battler of sorts and may yet get under Obama’s skin with various attack strategies and may bring in voters who see him as a rock compared to Ba-rock the Slithering Man who didn’t know Bill Ayers was or had been a terrorist! 

Thus ex-Oak Parker, ex-Chi Trib reporter, current chief handler David Axelrod.  Can you imagine?  This adds crass ignorance to Obama’s other unattractive attributes.  Where will it end?

Continue reading “Barack and Joe and all that” →

He comes with lots of tricks up sleeve

Meanwhile, at the Wednesday Journal of OP&RF:

However the cookie crumbles in November, when the final poll is taken, I’m a winner. Even if my man and woman come up short, I will get to watch a miracle-when Big O. and his Delaware sidekick create jobs while raising tax rates. He will truly be The Messiah if he pulls that off.

Needless to say, there’s more more more where than came from.

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The poet and the junior high struggle

Here’s to an American winner:

If Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were alive today, he’d be 201 years old and on his 13th knee replacement. He isn’t, having died in 1882 at 75, young by today’s standards. His bust was placed in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey after his death. It’s the only American bust there.

“Like T. S. Eliot after him, he spoke with authority on the whole of European literature. He wrote six language textbooks, and was fluent in German, French, Italian and Spanish,” said reviewer Jay Parini in 2001. Translator of Dante, Ovid, Virgil, Goethe, and Heine among others, if there had been Nobel prizes, he would have gotten one.

In addition, he had an Oak Park school named after him, posthumously. 

 There’s more more more . . . .

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John Edwards and his family

Paul of PowerLine Blog quotes Elizabeth Edwards:

I ask that the public, who expressed concern about the harm John’s conduct has done to us, think also about the real harm that the present voyeurism does and give me and my family the privacy we need at this time.

And adds:

I am in complete sympathy with this statement and do not intend to write anything additional about the affair.

Yes, but Edwards used his family for political gain while campaigning, as much as if he had bragged about nonexistent military service or legislative record. 

His stated or implied “Trust me” on the campaign trail has been falsified, and he has contributed to public cynicism.

Families are routinely and to varying degrees brought into play by vote-seekers.  In Oak Park, on the other hand, ten or so years ago, a white candidate for the high school board left it generally unknown that he had a black wife, when that might have been a factor in a race in which he went against the black-preferential grain and was once shushed by a black candidate for daring to speak of being color-blind.

She herself was a genuine charmer who nonetheless embraced the liberal black-preferential line.  They both lost in a 12–person race, for what it’s worth, to better qualified people — all of them white as I recall, but to be honest, I’m not sure.

Later: Let us add this to the mix, from Instapundit:

SO NOW THAT WE KNOW THAT THE PRESS COVERED FOR EDWARDS — just as, pre-invasion, they covered for Saddam — that raises a question: What else are they not telling us for fear it will hurt the Democrats’ prospects?

Yet more, from an indignant former supporter:

[The Edwardses] made a conscious decision to make their relationship a focus throughout the campaign. That emotional goodwill you feel for them? They not only let you feel, they took actions and made statements specifically so you would feel it.

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Elementary, my dear Holmes . . .

, . . . , which wasn’t named for Sherlock

Oak Park’s Holmes School is named for Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., a medical doctor and magazine columnist who combined the two skills to help make childbirth safer for mothers.

As a medical man, he taught at Dartmouth and Harvard, serving at Harvard for a time as dean of its medical school. He made his mark in medical history with his landmark 1843 essay, “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever,” about the “black death of childbed,” which was taking a terrible toll on mothers giving birth. Doctors and nurses were to blame who did not wash their hands before helping a woman deliver, he argued.  . . . .

If this be the Wednesday Journal column for July, which it be, make the most of it.

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One of the D.C. gangs

Oak Park (IL) village manager Tom Barwin is not apologizing for saying the Supreme Court is “in alliance with the gangbangers” in its ruling in favor of individual right to own a gun, but he does have advice for others:

“I really think we ought to tone down the emotion, which I will also try to do,” he said. “But I think we should be working harder to find common ground and eliminate these conditions that breed violence.

He will try very hard to tone it down but is willing to leave the Supremes dangling with gangsters.

“I think the … gangbanger comments really just were a way to succinctly express that, in my experience and view, the further proliferation of guns will inevitably result in more drug pushers and those of a criminal mind ending up with firearms.”

As it is, of course, they have to get along with their bare fists?

Later, from Dick Cutler in Ann Arbor:

I have strong sentiments about private possession of firearms.  I grew up on a farm; I had guns then; I have guns now (several, would you like an inventory and a report of my marksmanship?); and FINALLY, “I intend to keep my  guns and my skill in using them  — so as to be prepared to shoot the miserable ass off anyone who comes to take them from me.”

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The devil you say

Hawthorne and Emerson did not see eye to eye when it came to “what evil lurks in the hearts of men.”

In one of his stories, [Hawthorne] has the devil say, “Evil is the nature of mankind.” [he] didn’t go that far, but argued time and again for the “evil impulse” in us all. “Oh, take my word for it,” his devil taunted reformers, “it will be the old world yet!”

Emerson, on the other hand, found The Scarlet Letter a “ghastly” book, apparently recognizing it as an attack on his feelings-based morality.

Read all about it in The Wednesday Journal of Oak Park & River Forest, out today, with special attention to “three discarded Oak Park school namesakes” — these two plus James Russell Lowell, whose paean to June — “what is so rare”? — gets special billing.

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A sociological conundrum

In the summertime spillover of West Side (Austin district) crime, bike-snatching has been to the fore in Oak Park.  But OP police have been at the ready.

Two 13-year-olds were nabbed yesterday afternoon as they pedalled east on Lake Street after copping the bikes of two 12–year-olds in the first block of Pleasant (yes, Pleasant), which is Fulton in the city, after eyewitnesses called the police.

About 90 minutes later, a 16-year-old Chicago boy approached a 13-year-old from Oak Park on a bike near Highland Avenue and Van Buren Street [a few blocks in], grabbed her rear wheel and reportedly said, “I need this more than you.”

This too was witnessed and called in, and the perp was spotted near Menard in the city (a few blocks in) and was chased by an OP cop to the 5500 block of Monroe (a half mile in) and nabbed.

It’s his perceived need that’s arresting here, offered as explanation if not justification to his victim.  How did he know she needed it less?  Or what made him think so?

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