Chicago Daily Observer

I’d like to be able to feel Andrew Greeley’s pain, but he hurts in so many places, I wouldn’t know where to start.

It’s a darn shame Obama had to “defend his outspoken pastor,” says G. in his Sun-Times column. I would have said he had to defend himself for picking the guy, and not in a month of Sundays at Trinity UCC on 95th St. or in any other church would I let him off the hook with “outspoken.”

“There is no evidence at all that the senator identifies with his clergyman, and overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” Other than he picked him as a veritable soul mate and guide and stayed with him 20 years.

David Axelrod has long been known for his political magic. Through his AKP&D Message & Media consultancy, the campaign veteran has advised a succession of Democratic candidates since 1985, and he’s now chief strategist for Senator Barack Obama’s bid for President. But on the down low, Axelrod moonlights in the private sector.

From the same River North address, Axelrod operates a second business, ASK Public Strategies, that discreetly plots strategy and advertising campaigns for corporate clients to tilt public opinion their way. He and his partners consider virtually everything about ASK to be top secret, from its client roster and revenue to even the number of its employees. But customers and public records confirm that it has quarterbacked campaigns for the Chicago Children’s Museum, ComEd, Cablevision, and AT&T.

Driving down the Dan Ryan one recent day we passed a Wal-Mart semi headed south on its way out of Chicago. It easily could have exited the expressway at 83rd Street, turned right and proceeded several blocks past the new Lowe’s store and a Potbelly Sandwich Works in the Chatham Market to deliver goods to what by now should have been Wal-Mart’s second Chicago store. But the semi stuck to the Ryan. And the lot at 83rd and Stewart on Chicago’s South Side? It’s a vast expanse of vacant land, empty and forlorn.

On Easter Sunday, March 23, 2008, several adults interrupted the Easter Mass being celebrated in the auditorium at Holy Name Cathedral Parish. This is a profoundly disturbing action.

The celebration of the Holy Mass is, in Catholic faith, the action of Jesus Christ through His Church that changes water and wine into Christ’s real Body and Blood. No one should be allowed or encouraged to use this sacred rite to voice protests or perform guerilla actions under any circumstances. It is a sacrilege that should be condemned by all people of faith and good will. Freedom to worship God should be inviolable.

Many children and adults were traumatized by the sudden sight of what appeared to be blood and by the screaming of several protesters who dropped to the floor. Church attendees were also hit by the red-staining stage blood. Several individuals have indicated that they and their children were ... Read More...

It was a sacrilege of ignorance that produced the invasion of Holy Name cathedral during Easter Sunday Mass when six members of the aptly named “Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War” interrupted Cardinal Francis George’s sermon and tossed vials of phony blood on people. Aptly named because it was indeed a immature insult to civility, more evocative of a bad baby tossing over a bowl of porridge than a legitimate protest.

It was also a sacrilege because as all Catholics should know, the celebrant at the altar is offering Mass in the name of all of Christ’s members, since he represents Christ, the Savior, head of the Church, the Mass offered in the fullness of Christ’s mystical membership which includes all who belong to the Mystical Body. By standing up, raising a ruckus, terrifying children and tossing vials of “blood,” the latter day hippies who carry the name Catholic failed to ... Read More...

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan says she is a champion of open government.

But a Springfield State Journal-Register analysis of more than two years of records requests received by Madigan’s office shows that the state’s highest law enforcement officer routinely answers requests for information later than the law allows.

Under the state Freedom of Information Act, public agencies have seven working days to respond to records requests. If requests are complicated or voluminous, agencies can give themselves seven-day extensions.

Between Jan. 1, 2006, and Feb. 13, 2008, Madigan’s office received 537 FOIA requests. According to her files, Madigan’s staff missed the deadline in 220 cases.

Madigan’s office says cracks in the system are being patched so that records requests are answered promptly.

By spending most of his adult life on the South Side of Chicago, and launching his careers as activist and politician there, Barack Obama has benefited from an unusual political and social base that is perhaps hard for the rest of the country to fully understand or relate to.

The area is both patchwork and blend of hardscrabble inner-city Black neighborhoods, well-to-do enclaves of the city’s Black elite, and the racially-mixed Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood with its strong Jewish presence where Obama and his family make their home. (The Obamas much-discussed house and lot are just across the street from my synagogue.) But it is much less a cauldron of conflict than an exceptional place of political cooperation where certain pacts and understandings were reached long ago that make for bedfellows that might seem strange to other parts of the country or the East Coast commentariat.

I was browsing through “the Irish Sporting News” a few days ago. For the uninitiated, this dated slang expression refers to the obituary columns. The term probably had its origins in the propensity of the Irish to consult the obituaries in order to attend wakes and funerals in decades gone by.

Still, once you are of a certain age, you check the daily obituaries to make sure that
you are still breathing and to fulfill your obligations towards others.

In any event, what struck me was the obituary for an elderly gentleman who had passed away in his nineties. What caught my attention was that this person was listed as a proud graduate of Crane High School.

Crane has been in the headlines too often lately for the escalating gang violence that has been occurring there on an almost daily basis. One teenager shot and killed another student in ... Read More...