Chicago Daily Observer

Sheriff Tom Dart and The Cook County Jail took a 98 page study ( prepared, indexed, rolled and greased with warmed up left-overs from the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board, University of Chicago MacArthur Center for Justice, Chicago Magazine, and the usual assortment of lawsuit addicted lefty lawyers and, it seems Commissioner Quigley) from Federal Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the shorts this past week.

A few years back, The Chicago Tribune and the usual suspects listed above took a long sprint at Sheriff Michael Sheehan with a series of ‘heart-tugging tales’ from prisoners and diappointed Correctional Employees and had their efforts tossed by a jury in about twenty minutes.

The Tribune’s ‘investigative’ efforts were laughed out of court by the jury and the lawyer most linked to the case against Sheehan was a nano-second away from charges of impropriety for tipping prison gangs about finding just the right time to riot ... Read More...

There does seem to be a pattern of distraught companies under the influence of politicians, and successful politicians in Washington DC.

Perhaps the politicians are also under the influence of the distraught companies, or previously on the Board of Directors of a very distressed bank, as in the case of Rahm Emanuel at Freddie Mac.

Here’s a $1000 for Rahm ‘02
from a Freddie Mac/Senior Vice President $1,000…and another $1000 from Freddie Mac/Senior VP Capital…just going through the A’s and B’s in a 6 year old list of campaign contributors.

My guess is that there is more money that came into the Emanuel campaign from Freddie Mac from other letters of the alphabet.

Perhaps ther could be some explanation from a former board member and “financial wiz” on how Freddie Mac has become one of the biggest banking problems in the United Sates.

(Sen Obama) lectures us that instead of worrying about immigrants learning English, “you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish” — a language Obama does not speak. He further admonishes us on how “embarrassing” it is that Europeans are multilingual but “we go over to Europe, and all we can say is ‘merci beaucoup.’ ” Obama speaks no French.

His fluent English does, however, feature many such admonitions, instructions and improvements. His wife assures us that President Obama will be a stern taskmaster: “Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism . . . that you come out of your isolation. . . . Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

It’s time to bring back the Chicago Machine. Or the Democratic Machine. Or Machine Politics.

For those of you who are thinking, “the Chicago Machine has never left, so what’s to bring back?” you’re quite right. We’ve still got the Chicago Machine. But some time ago, use of the expression “Chicago Machine” fell out of favor.

But the continued omission of references to the Machine insults reality, disserves the reading public and permits the Machine to go its happy way as if it doesn’t exist. Maintaining this pretense has national implications, allowing Democratic presidential candidate and Chicago favorite son Barack Obama to continue the fiction that he ain’t no scion of no stinking Machine.

Maybe this denial of a Machine by omission was the result of the popular interpretations, that the victory of Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor demolished the machine and handed the reins of government ... Read More...