George Cardenas

George Cardenas

This political misanthrope is the worst kind of thief. He’s the guy who rummages through your pockets while he’s busy telling you it is for your own good (in other words, a true blue Chicago Democrat). He learned his trade from some of the best con men in the game, though. Guys like King Daley II and political hit man Victor Reyes (of Hispanic Democratic Organization fame) brought Cardenas into Chicago’s fold of Untouchables.

So how do you repay a King (or his wannabe mobster replacement) for the right to kiss his ring? By pledging your undying fealty to filling the ludicrous budget gaps he has created. In 2007 Cardenas proposed a 25 cent tax on bottles of water sold in Chicago. Ultimately it would be much less, but the tax still passed. Now Cardenas is calling for a massive sugar tax. According to a statement released by Cardenas, “adding a penny-per-ounce tax on any beverage with added sugar could not only reduce obesity and its accompanying high health care costs, but also generate much-needed revenue.”

So it is our responsibility, yet again, to get Machine Democrats out of a budget hole they created though graft, sweetheart deals and out-and-out theft.

Cardenas’ career-long concern from filling budget gaps does not seem to extend to his own spending or sense of social/political propriety, however.

Cardenas has accepted every pay increase offered to him during his reign. He pulls in around $115,000, making him among the highest paid aldermen in the city. The number is sickening enough, but it turns out that Cardenas is only a part-time alderman. He has two other business ventures, aside from his lucrative career as an alderman, that supplement his sizable taxpayer-funded salary. He owns a business consulting firm which claims some pretty impressive clients and a money wire transfer service named Quick Dinero. The last thing Cardenas needs is a series of salary bumps that come from city funds.

But once you’ve decided to bilk the tax payer for salary you don’t really need, despite the fact you rant and rail about how the city is broke, why not get the whole family on the public servant gravy train? In 2009 it was revealed that Cardenas is paying himself rent with taxpayer funds. His political offices are in a building owned by an LLC controlled by him and his family. According to my most recent Google search (which occurred about 15 minutes ago) his office is still in that location.

Next you’ve got ghost pay rolling for relatives. No truly corrupt Chicago organization would be complete without this little accoutrement. In Cardenas’ case the freeloader is his father, who is paid 13 dollars an hour and works 45 hours week, evidently doing nothing. Cardenas, when pressed for an explanation as to what exactly his father does to earn his salary, could not even come up with a decent lie. “He does a lot of things — a lot of the things in the community that people have no idea about.”

Daley couldn’t have said it better.

We don’t need more taxes, Chicago. We need less Cardenas.

Honorable Mentions

Foster Friess demonstrating how to fit 15 gallons of stupid into a 10 gallon hat.

Foster Friess

As usual, the Republican party can’t get more than fifteen minutes without miring itself in social issues. Typically this is done by the candidates themselves, but this time Foster Friess, one of the biggest backers of a prominent Rick Santorum Super PAC, is the relic from the past that got the GOP in trouble. Santorum has been trotting this guy out at some political events lately, and this put Foster in a position to speak to reporters, which is a horrifyingly miserable idea that Santorum’s staff, knee-deep in their own candidate’s continual gaffes, somehow managed to allow.

When asked by MSNBC (which should rank #1 on the list of news organizations that old, crotchety born again Christian Republicans should NOT talk to) about Rick’s social agenda, Foster tried to downplay Santorum’s wishes to turn the United States into a theocracy. He then decided it would be prudent to tell a joke about birth control. “Back in my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.”

So, while following Foster Friess’ advice on birth control may not be costly, it appears his support is insanely so.

At least Chris Christie's private position on having a double chin is not at odds with the public position.

Chris Christie

The New Jersey legislature has passed a law legalizing same-sex marriage, which means the bill will soon be landing on Chris Christie’s desk. The governor, who recently made a national sport of denying he wanted to run for the presidency in 2012, has already vowed he will veto the measure.

This has come as a bit of a sad news to some gay right advocates, particularly Steven Goldstein, chairman of Garden State Equality, the state’s largest gay rights group. Goldstein recently expressed his belief that Christie does not have “an anti-gay bone in his body” and that Christie’s move to veto the bill has everything to do with national politics. “He won’t veto the bill because he’s anti-gay. He’ll veto the bill because the 2016 South Carolina Republican Presidential primary electorate is anti-gay.”

In other words, we have another prominent Republican who is more interested in appeasing the fringe element of his party than giving American people more freedom and less government-imposed morality. If this is the best you have to offer, Chris, then please stay out of national politics. We’ve already got Rick Santorum.

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A screenshot of a message from the Iranian government informing you that BBC News is, evidently, prohibited pornography

The Iranian government, which has been lovingly lambasted repeatedly by yours truly in the past, made news again the last few days. The Ayatollah’s lackeys, no doubt upon the order of their theocratic puppet master, have essentially made it impossible for people within Iran to access SSL/TLS websites (basically any site that uses https instead of http) outside of the country. So if you live in Tehran and were looking forward to a Gmail from your cousin in Poughkeepsie, you’re SOL, buddy.

Western organizations, like The Tor Project, are working to get around these new blocks, but it will take time to figure out the best way to get Iranians access to non-government-sanctioned social media and news sites again.

This move essentially cuts Iran off from the vast majority of the Internet, which has been often decried by members of the Iranian government as a vast spying tool for the United States because, well, we’ve got all the cool websites. Obviously Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and the like HAVE TO be in bed with the federal government, because in Iran having such industries not being entirely beholden to the Supreme Leader and his corrupt regime is unthinkable. What they don’t realize is that the reason they don’t make anything useful or invent anything interesting is exactly because industry is beholden to government.

Of course, for the Iranian government to realize that oppressive theocracies have a negative impact on quality of life for citizens and innovation by businesses would be in extremely poor taste right before the 33rd anniversary of the glorious Islamic Revolution. In fact, many Iranians who, despite the wishes of mental midgets like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, still use their brains on a regular basis, believe that this communications blackout is most likely happening to keep people from organizing protests against the government during celebrations of the institution of Islamic social bondage.

What is even scarier is that this move may be the opening overture for the institution of Iran’s National Internet. According to government sources, this network will be entirely cut off from the World Wide Web and contain only government-sanctioned “halal” websites. This will drastically simplify the job of spying on Iranian citizens, who will no longer have access to services that have a vested interest in protecting the privacy of their clients.

If the National Internet of Iran goes online, it means that proud nation will now be included in the hallowed company of other bass-ackwards states that have cut themselves off from the rest of web civilization. Let us take a short tour of the economic powerhouses that have decided that the pesky World Wide Web is best left to the lazy, oafish Western Powers:

North Korea
In North Korea we have Kwangmyong (they have a name for everything over there!), the national intranet, which is free to the fine folks of that robust, economically-flourishing nation – provided they can someone get access to a computer and find a working power outlet to plug it into. To buy an hour of Intranet time at a cyber café in Pyongyang costs about half a day’s wages.

A very small group of North Koreans are allowed access to the true World Wide Web, but that is a privilege reserved for guys like Kim Jong-un, who needs to get in his WoW fix.

Cuba
This small, sad little island nation maintains a separate national network, on which one may access an e-mail program, government news sites and a highly sanitized online encyclopedia. It is possible to get on the true Internet there, but it requires special government permission to access and time on it is prohibitively expensive. If you somehow get permission to access the World Wide Web, it costs seven dollars an hour (the average take home salary in Cuba is 20 dollars a month) and the speeds are pitifully slow. The national intranet only costs $1.50 an hour.

Myanmar
Recently an American hacker exposed that the Myanmar government only allows 118 of the country’s 12,284 IP addresses total access to the internet. The rest of the users are on a tightly-controlled Intranet, which bans all criticism of the government. They have imprisoned a number of bloggers who have dared to question the competency of the government or hold dialogs with foreign media.

Of course no discussion of Internet censorship would be complete without a trip to the Great Firewall of China, a tool of oppression so amazing that the egos of the government slugs that built it can be seen from outer space. Out of the impressive list of countries that make great efforts to control the flow of Internet information across their borders, China is the only one with any economic power. This has nothing to do with their careful control of the World Wide Web, however. If Cuba or Uzbekistan had access to the manpower of roughly one billion slaves and a hundred million middle management types, they too could be building ghost cities in the middle of nowhere and giving everyone cancer.

The one thing that all these Internet-hating, information-fearing despotic countries have in common is that they are, at best, copycats. The do not innovate, dreaming up the next great advancement in human society. The frightened leaders of these nations just desperately clutch at the modicum of power they have, terrified that, if their people actually learn that there is a better way to live, bloody riots will break out in the streets. These nations will need to change the way they think about information, or suffer the same fate as the once titanic Soviet Union, which was ultimately not defeated with bullets and bombs, but with the rise of telecommunications and their utter inability to compete with a freer, wiser and more innovative world at large.

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Sweet, sweet sucrose-injected, fructose-laced damnation awaits us all, at least according to a recent article in Nature magazine. Three researchers in California have produced a report that shows the toxic danger of sugar, eventually going on to suggest that it should be regulated by federal governments as a controlled substance.

I would like to sidestep all the typical (though entirely valid) nanny-state-run-amok critiques. If you want those, please feel free to type the word sugar into news.google.com, where you will get a small mountain of such attacks, peppered liberally (oh, I love a good double entendre!) with articles espousing that the federal government should regulate everything, down to bowel movements.

The main method of regulation being proposed to control sugar mania is taxation. If we have to pay more for sugary things, then we will have less of them, right?

Have you ever talked to a smoker about the price of cigarettes? I used to work with a guy who told me that, back in the late 1970s, he swore up and down that he would quit smoking if the price of a pack of cigarettes went over 50 cents. Well, I can tell you that, as of at least 2006, he was still smoking Marlboros.

The same follows for liquor. Constantly upping the sin tax on Canadian Club and Bud Light will never, ever get people to cut back on consumption. They will simply grumble about the price and take money from other parts of their budget in order to get the thing they really, really want.

So, with these examples in mind, can anyone realistically believe that charging more for Dr. Pepper will result in people drinking less of it? Never. All that will happen is that the government will get more money to waste, and everyone else will get more diabetes.

Perhaps we should establish an age limit, like with cigarettes and tobacco, for access to products that sport the most egregiously offensive amount of sugar? We know that banning soft drinks in high schools does not work, but maybe we simply haven’t gone far enough to protect the children!

If we institute ID laws for Pepsi, I can practically guarantee that the high school keger party will take on an entirely new meaning. Teens will gather in the forest on Friday nights to guzzle pancake syrup instead of Natty Light. Cans of Coca-Cola will join the pantheon of illicit substances college students secret in false drawer bottoms.

Besides, why should only adults have the wonderful chance to die of kidney failure? So how about banning sugar then? Ever hear of a little event in American history called The Noble Experiment? If not, you should check it out, cause it is the reason a bunch of mob thugs became multi-millionaires.

And how exactly is that war on drugs going, America? Last time I checked we were still floating on a sea of heroin and cocaine, while the federal government and criminal cartels make truckloads of money and gather ungodly amounts of political power.

Ban sugar and it is practically impossible that a whole new breed of criminal (along with a whole new giant, sprawling, serpentine bureaucratic agency) will suddenly snap into existence in order to profit from the sugar lows of an entire nation.

The only thing that will ever stem this tide of obesity is people getting off their rears and taking control of their lives. Maybe the government can help us learn about our food choices, but in the end we are the ones responsible for our own bodies. The best tools to do the research necessary to find out everything you could possibly want to know about the food you eat are more readily available to you than ever before, thanks to a wondrous series of tubes (rest in peace, Ted) that most people have directed linked into their homes, phones, cars and, possibly, any slow moving pets.

So for everyone who thinks the government can fix this problem – wake up, people. You don’t need to eat all the crap that TV, or the government, tells you to.

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Mitt Romney and Donald Trump

At the press conference held Thursday in Las Vegas Trump was singing the praises of Romney, a decided shift from his previous stance on the former governor. Not even a few months ago Trump was busy taking serious digs at Romney, calling him a “small business guy” and openly bashing the Massachusetts health care system, often referred to as RomneyCare.

All this makes me wonder why exactly Romney would even accept the endorsement of a man like Donald Trump. There is no doubt in my mind that Trump did the whole thing just to get in front of cameras yet again. If he can figure out a way to do it, it is a near certainty that Trump will verbally assault Romney in the future, despite the endorsement, because all The Donald really cares about is being on TV.

So it is difficult to trust the motives of a man like Trump, but is his endorsement actually toxic? Yes. A recent Washington Post/Pew Research Center poll showed that a Trump endorsement would actually have an overall negative effect on the perception of a presidential candidate.

Trump’s all-consuming need to be constantly in the limelight has reduced his reputation to that of a circus clown. He has traded any dignity he once had in order to be a reality star on a primetime TV show saddled with continually dwindling ratings. His insatiable need to be constantly quoted by the media is more befitting a Hollywood diva than a serious pillar of the business community.

While his business ability can be debated, it is a near certainty that, in the political sphere, The Donald is damaged goods. His bizarre obsession with President Obama’s birth certificate not only made him a poster child for modern fringe conspiracy theorists, it also lowered the ideological level of the conflict between conservatives and liberals over the President’s policies. In fact, his inability to have an intelligent conversation about modern politics prompted several Republicans to turn down attending a debate that was to be hosted by Trump.

His credentials as a fiscal or social conservative, aside from recently-voiced opinions on morning talk shows, are non-existent. Trump has even financially backed several prominent Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and U.S. Representative Charles Rangel.

So as the weekend rolls on Mitt Romney better hope that some more interesting piece of political errata drifts past the camera lenses of our voracious 24 news media. The sooner the world forgets that he stood next to, and accepted the endorsement of, Donald Trump, the better off he will be.

This article was originally published in the Kendall Weekly Times

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All these titles, amusing as they might be, still lack the necesary oomph a man like Emanuel needs in order to get things done “his way!”

So how do you bolster your image when you want to be taken seriously? Why, pretend you’re a gangster!

Meet The Rahmfather!

Recently Chicago columnist John Kass recived an anonymous gift. It was a poster (pictured above) portraying Rahm Emanuel as an aging Michael Corleone, circa Godfather 3.

Kass is, of course, interested in exactly who made this stunning mock-up, but I am more interested in what one of Rahm’s aides said to Kass when the writer brought the picture up in a conversation.

“Oh, my God,” said an aide of Rahm’s when I sent a photo. “He’s really going to want this.”

This is a representative of the Mayor of Chicago, talking to a columnist at a major Chicago newspaper, about how his boss (or his Rahmness) wants a picture of himself as a fake maifoso. Does anyone else find this mildly distrubing?

Mayor Emanuel’s bizarre worship of organized crime isn’t a total shock to me, as he is a born-and-raised member of the Chicago Machine, the most powerful organized crime family in Illinois. Still though, all that backroom dealing and behind the scenes political wrangling that makes up the core strength of the Machine lacks the glitz and glamour of that bygone era of Chicago Outfit hooliganism. While he weilds power that modern Outfit gangsters could only dream of, Rahm Emanuel still buys into the childish intimidation tactics that are the hallmark of every Hollywood mobster flick.

He’s sent dead fish to people (and towns) he doesn’t like, berated moneymen into handing over heavy rolls, assaulted a sitting Congressman in a shower, totally buck naked, at the behest of (or at least in the name of) his Capo di tutti cappi and made a fool of himself ranting and raving (in a fine parody of Al Capone in The Untouchables) about political enemies while stabbing a table with a steak knife.

He even keeps around Outfit-connected politicans-cum-fixers, like the Greylord-indited Jimmy DeLeo.

Are these the behaviors of an adult who takes law and order seriously, or the poseur wannabe thug who would probably pee his pants if a real “tough guy” decided to take a piece out of him?

When you get right down to it, the fake tough guy bravado is painted on a little thin. Rahm’s not a terribly intimidating-looking fellow, despite his (I’m sure) much-practiced Robert DeNiro glare. Despite all the rumors, the origin of his partially amputated finger was a mishap with an Arby’s meat slicer. I’ve heard people bandy about the misconception that Rahm was also some kind of Israeli special forces badass, but all he did was volunteer to help take care of IDF equipment during the Gulf War.

In the end he’s just another white collar machine politican Mayor who likes to pretend he’s a thug – which may or may not be an improvement over the last Mayor who actually was a thug. He can win a few oohs and ahhs from the sheep that worship the mafia mentality, but in the end all these juvenile antics do is prove Mayor Emanuel relies on theatrics instead of substance to get his way.

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The most recent gaffe (author’s musing: is it still technically a gaffe if the speaker actual said what he meant?) came during a New Year’s address to the diplomatic corps at the Vatican. In what could have been a nice little fluff piece about the Church supporting education, the Pope decided to make a odd foray into the world of sexual relations. Evidently, according to his Popeness, children can only learn when they come from a traditional family containing exactly one man and one woman.

The world's honorary creepy-looking uncle, Joey Ratzinger.

As CEO of the world’s largest entity protecting serial child rapists from justice, the Pope’s diatribe about the evils threatening the traditional family is just a little bit hard to take seriously. But, then again, I find it kind of hard to take anything seriously when it is said by men wearing dresses, draped in jewelry and topped off with fancy hats. Chalk it up all those years of watching Monty Python, I guess…

Now, all the protectors of the intolerant Pope and his bigoted Church have screeched over and over again that no body has bothered to print the WHOLE paragraph within which the Pope outlined how gay marriage is slowly but surely melting away our humanity. In a bid to appease these wretches, I shall print that paragraph… but with the caveat that I will primarily use it to illustrate the tremendous idiocy of A) the current Pope and B) Roman Catholicism.

Education is a crucial theme for every generation, for it determines the healthy development of each person and the future of all society. It thus represents a task of primary importance in this difficult and demanding time.

Please keep in mind that this is being said by the man who presides over an entity that used to burn people for doing screwball things like reading books it didn’t like or claiming that maybe Jesus wasn’t EXACTLY fully human and fully divine. The Pope pretending that the Roman Catholic Church wants people to indiscriminately learn on their own is like The Third Reich claiming that the Polish wanted to be annexed.

In addition to a clear goal, that of leading young people to a full knowledge of reality and thus of truth, education needs settings.

Translation: There is one way, and only one way to learn. It is through the Church and in the Church… which may, or may not, also include periodic amateur rectal exams.

Among these, pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman. This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society.

Hmmm… Wait a minute… If families and marriage are such a fundamental and inextricable part of human nature and civil society, then why don’t Roman Catholic priests marry and have children? Orthodox priests marry and have children, Protestant ministers (who can be – GASP – male and female) marry and have children. Rabbis marry and have children. Muslims of all stripes marry and have children. It seems all of them are fully complying with the Pope’s vision of proper human society. The only people that are not in line with this belief are Roman Catholic priests.

(I’m not going to even get into the fact that there have been many, many societies within which plural marriage, and not monogamy, was the predominate family structure.)

Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself. The family unit is fundamental for the educational process and for the development both of individuals and States.

So, in essence, the existence of the Roman Catholic sacrament of Holy Orders is a threat to education, the political structure of the world and the future of humanity. Am I getting this right so far?

Hence there is a need for policies which promote the family and aid social cohesion and dialogue. It is in the family that we become open to the world and to life and, as I pointed out during my visit to Croatia, openness to life is a sign of openness to the future.

So then the path is clear! We need to start passing state and federal laws that will ban Roman Catholic priests! Only by removing these men, who are willfully obstructing the natural order, can we assure the survival of the species.

You know, those Arch-Catholic dinks were right! I was taking the whole thing totally out of context. Now I understand that the Pope wants to help us all by ridding us of himself. Without his funky tradition of denying the proper order by not entering into a monogamous heterosexual union and having children, we will come one step closer to ending the undying threat to the future and progress of humanity that is Roman Catholicism.

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Anyone who has read my work, or the work of countless other brave and intrepid souls who dare to shine a light on the wretched inner workings of Cook County’s byzantine cuckoo clock of corruption, will know that this is simply not true. While the manipulation of these sinister criminals might be of a more subtle variety than the Tommy Gun blasting thugs of the bloodthirsty Al Capone or the ostentatious Sam Giancana, their power is still heavily entrenched in city, county and state politics.

Take, for example, the case of Cook County Judge Jill Cerone-Marisie. In her time on the bench she has committed several grievous violations of her oath as a minister of justice, and I think it is high time that the rest of the world knows about it.

Cook County, still crippled by corruption in the halls of justice.

Jill Cerone-Marisie once served as a longtime corporate officer of Erbacci & Cerone, a law-firm that, according to a federal investigation, was found to have deep-rooted connections to some of the most powerful organized crime lords in American history, including the infamous Chicago Outfit. A federal investigation initially launched by the Reagan Administration served as the mechanism that discovered and acknowledged this law firm’s longstanding ties to organized crime. These findings were enough for the government to prohibit the wild and woolly bunch known as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from maintaining their longstanding business relations with Erbacci & Cerone.

Working for less infamous institutions has ruined the careers of far more promising attorneys, but in the corrupt land of Cook County, Cerone-Marisie’s ties to this mobbed-up law firm has had no effect on her ability to become a judge.

A while back I wrote an article concerned with a trial involving a man named Marc Prosperi, who was well connected to Jill and her family. Cerone-Marisie, despite having previously represented Prosperi in court as his lawyer, failed to recuse herself from the case. Luckily for Her Honor, the case involving Marc entailed a plea of guilty by the defendant, which provides a reasonable argument for Cerone-Marisie to raise in order to fend off any scrutiny over the suspicious courtroom circumstances that I reported.

While I did not hold out much hope for some kind of official censure for Her Honor concerning this one matter, reporting on this instance of Cook County insider dealing has encouraged others to come to me with more stories about Judge Jill Cerone-Marisie. In the matter that I am addressing today, any reasonable person would quickly identify that Cerone-Marisie most likely cooked her own goose, and with the help of Mariano’s Fresh Market.

This matter involves a 2010 shop-lifting case at the grand opening of the Mariano’s Fresh Market store in Arlington Heights, Illinois. I recently discussed the matter with members of the accused’s family for the second time in the last 12-months. The defendant, who we will call Jane Doe in order to avoid further smearing her good name, appeared in front of Cook County Judge Jill Cerone-Marisie in a bench trial.

It was my wish to protect the defendant from any backlash by helping her keep a low profile until her court sentence had a chance to expire. This is why I am covering this story one-year later. Now that she is no longer under the direct jurisdiction of Judge Cerone-Marisie, everyone involved feels a little more comfortable seeking justice and apprising the public of Her Honor’s bewildering, unexplainable, and some would say illegal, actions.

On Friday, February 4, 2011, Jane Doe walked into Cook County, Illinois’ Third Municipal District Courthouse. The defendant came into the appointed courtroom without even an inkling of knowledge concerning the forces she was about to tangle with. Doe’s attorney convinced her that the case against her was very weak. After reading the trial transcript, which I have gone through with a fine-toothed comb, I feel that her defense attorney was correct. The prosecution’s case appeared nearly impossible to win.

This optimistic opinion held by the defense was made plainly evident in their opening statement. Here the attorney described the grocery store’s security guards as “over-aggressive” and “completely out-of-line,” telegraphing, in my opinion, an impending false arrest lawsuit. Of course such a suit could only be pursued after the speedy resolution of the current case but, given the prosecution’s utter lack of evidence, an acquittal, or even an outright dismissal, of the case would surely be coming.

So when Judge Jill Cerone-Marisie banged her gavel and brought the court into session, Jane Doe was confident the whole situation would be sorted out with a minimum of fuss. However, it quickly became clear that evidence would not be necessary for the prosecution to obtain a finding of guilty in this court.

In my exhaustive evaluation of the court transcripts, I counted four different interruptions by Judge Cerone-Marisie in the middle of the trial, where it appeared to me that she examined or lead prosecution witnesses in order to get a desired statement or sentiment expressed. A judge conducting herself this way is extremely bizarre.

Despite these efforts to get the witnesses to say what she wanted, there was one man who still managed to let it slip that charging Doe with theft should have been impossible. A key prosecution witness testified under oath that the merchandise that was considered stolen was not in the defendant’s possession when she left the store.

How could it be feasible, with the outright confession that Jane Doe did not leave the store with the offending item, that she would be found guilty of shoplifting?

This is, evidently, not a problem Her Honor has any trouble ignoring.

In fact, Judge Cerone-Marisie explained in her own words when she rendered the guilty verdict that, “I know there is some inconsistencies or discrepancies with what Officer Barnes says or who told him what…” She is forced to admit there is no actual evidence, either eye-witness testimony or surveillance recording, that shows Doe took the offending item out of the store. Despite this glaring omission, Judge Cerone-Marisie finds no problem in declaring Jane Doe guilty.

I know that horrible, sinking feeling in the gut which comes with being accused of doing something you did not do. I can only imagine how that feeling was magnified for Jane Doe by hearing a judge, a bastion of the law and order that allows our great society to thrive, blatantly admit there was no evidence against her, yet still hand down a finding of guilty.

How could this have gone so wrong? What Jane Doe (and hopefully her attorney) did not know was that, with all likelihood, the die was already cast against her, all in the name of being “neighborly.”

Nina Di Frisco Mariano, who is related by marriage to the family who runs the grocery store in question, is a longtime friend and neighbor of Judge Cerone-Marisie. If Jane Doe was allowed to walk on the trumped up charges leveled against her, then the Mariano family could be sucked into the false arrest lawsuit the defense was already ginning up. For reasons easy to grasp, such an eventuality would be highly undesirable.

I was able to discover the neighbor connection quickly, largely thanks to the work of one of Chicago’s greatest and most fearless reporters, Carol Marin. You see, a while back Marin wrote a negative article about the election of Cerone-Marisie to her judge’s seat, and was roundly accosted in a letter by Nina Di Frisco Mariano. Nina Di Frisco Mariano is the wife of Robert Mariano, a purported officer of and shareholder in Mariano’s Fresh Market.

So, even if all of her misconduct during the trial could be excused, Judge Cerone-Marisie’s personal ties with members of the Mariano family should have automatically forced her to recuse herself from Jane Doe’s case. This violation is such a fundamental insult to the judicial process it is difficult to even think about, let alone witness time after time. How can any of us walk into a court room and expect a fair trial when there is the possibility that the judge might already have formed an opinion about the case before even one iota of evidence has been presented? If this is acceptable behavior for the protectors of our laws, our primary defenders against the tyranny of heavy-handed governments and powerful, corrupt citizens who believe they can buy the truth, how can the great experiment of democracy ever expect to survive?

We must fight to keep people who would bend justice to their needs out of power, and we must start today. I implore anyone who feels they have suffered unfairly as a result of Judge Cerone Marisie’s misconduct to share their stories. I am very knowledgeable on the Cerone-Marisie connections and I should be able to shed light on various matters for you in the interest of justice. Please be advised that any criminal acts must be immediately reported to law enforcement. American News Post will issue cash rewards for information that leads to disciplinary and/or criminal action against Judge Jill Cerone-Marisie. We as a community must not look the other way when public officials abuse their positions and violate the public’s trust in order to serve and protect their friends and neighbors at the cost of compromising justice. Please forward any relevant data to me at jfosco@americannewspost.com.

In closing, I would like to offer the following note to a man who, today, could do something about Judge Cerone-Marisie:

Attention Cook County Chief Judge Timothy C. Evans,
Please remove Judge Jill Cerone Marisie from her courtroom and find a safe place for her in an office somewhere doing paperwork. Thank you.
Sincerely,
/s/ Joseph Fosco, on behalf of many outraged Cook County residents

Postscript

After finishing this article, another piece of interesting information happened to come my way. It seems that Nina Di Frisco Mariano is very closely related to Dominic Di Frisco, a longtime activist against the defamation of Italian-Americans.

It is true that Americans of Italian descent have suffered because of the actions of an inconsequentially small minority of murders and thieves. I fully back the initiative to reclaim our heritage and good name from the claws of these active criminals. I resoundingly join Dominic in saying that judging a whole group by the actions of a few is a gross violation of the principals upon which this great nation was founded. Italian-Americans should never be ashamed of their rich cultural heritage.

So it is in this vein that I appeal to Dominic to please approach his wayward relative, Nina. Her association with corrupt government officials of Italian descent, like Judge Cerone-Marisie, only perpetrates the negative stigma under which we have so long suffered.

Furthermore, I implore Dominic himself to cease his association with Cerone-Marisie’s father, which has been carried out via various American-Italian organizations located in and around Chicago, Illinois for the past few decades. Surely Dominic can recognize that the man who is a partner in a law firm recognized by the federal government as entrenched in Outfit politics is not the sort of fellow he should be seen rubbing elbows with.

Author’s note:
Media and other relevant agencies, please contact me for the identification of the defendant and copy of the official court transcript. However, if you wish to obtain said information independently, please be aware that the case number is 10 MC3 004271 and the official court reporter is Ellen Piccony (Ellen now works in Cook County’s Juvenile Division).

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President Obama and William Daley

So the appointment of William Daley, scion of the legendary Daley Clan, Chicago’s preeminent power brokers and kingmakers, as President Obama’s Chief of Staff should have been a perfect fit. Obama and his people all cut their political teeth in Daley’s backyard and the addition of William to the team should have been the icing on the Democrat cake.

But it wasn’t.

Rumors now coming out of Washington are that Daley was disorganized and ineffective as a leader, unable to gain the respect of his underlings and inflexible in his wish to impose a hierarchy on those around him. So when Daley, fresh back from a holiday vacation, tended his resignation almost a full year before his previously announced retirement, the Obama camp was shocked – but they shouldn’t have been.

The reason this supposed match made in heaven failed so horribly is because the White House really IS the 51st Ward. Obama’s inner circle has learned the lessons of holding power, Chicago-style, remarkably well.

Political clout in Chicago was long ago crystallized around the Daleys. For 43 of the last 56 years a member of the Daley family was Mayor of Chicago. Patriarch Richard J. Daley (often referred to as The Boss) built his Machine, a model of patronage that rewarded loyalty to his family with political positions and lucrative contracts. The Machine (still alive and kicking) gave rise to a small, but impossibly tight-knit group of political players through which any deal needed to pass. There is no way to join this club; one has to be invited.

It seems that the White House took the Machine aesthetic and mimicked it to a T. By all accounts the Obama’s inner circle is a small, insular group. William Daley, despite being a titan in Chicago, was never invited into Obama’s private club. It could have been the generation gap or Bill’s ties to banking and big business, but I believe it simply was the Chicago cliquishness that never allowed Daley to become the Boss he wanted, or needed, to be.

There is at least one competing theory, however. The departure of Richard M. Daley from the Mayor’s office and the subsequent (and utterly painless) transition of Rahm Emmanuel into that seat of power coincided with Bill Daley’s ascension to Obama’s Chief of Staff. In a city almost entirely run by backroom deals, the timing seems uncanny. It would be reasonable to assume that some kind of trade was made between the Obama and Daley camps, and it appears the Daleys, who are not the forgiving sort, might have gotten the short end of the stick. One wonders what repercussions that might bring.

This work is based on an article written for The Kendall Weekly Times.

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Jon Huntsman

Yes, I’ll say it: Jon Huntsman is the only Republican (currently vying for his party’s presidential nomination) that could even remotely stand a chance of defeating Barack Obama. There is no doubt in my mind that every other candidate, each of which are wracked with crippling character flaws, will be utterly trounced by Obama’s (There’s So Much More To Do!™) billion dollar war machine.

Why is this? Huntsman has two qualities that matter this election cycle: A) he is actually sane and B) independents like him. As a bonus, some Democrats think they can work with him, which is important given the disturbing level of animosity that currently exists between the two parties. Huntsman is a rare bird in that he has served under both Republican (Reagan, Bush 41, Bush 43) and Democrat (Obama) presidents and has shown his loyalty is to the United States; not just a single political party.

This is a marked contrast to nearly everyone else in the field, all of which are frothing at the mouth to go to war with everyone that is not a Bible-thumping evangelical Christian. (When will the Republican party learn those dolts will ALWAYS vote for the GOP, because there is nowhere for them to go…)

As for credentials, Huntsman has most of his competition beat hands down. He has served on several corporate boards, was the youngest ambassador to a foreign power (Singapore) in the last hundred years, a U.S. Trade Representative, an extremely popular governor and has extensive experience dealing with (and serving as U.S. ambassador to) China, the second largest (not to mention fastest growing) economic power in the world, our largest trading partner and the largest holder of our foreign debt.

As governor of Utah, Huntsman had soaring popularity. The Cato Institute’s Fiscal Report Card on Governors routinely scored him with a B, on par with Rick Perry and always above Mitt Romney. He lowered corporate taxes, helped generate a mountain of new jobs, tried to create one of the largest school voucher programs in the U.S. and a health care system whose costs are controlled via market pressures instead of government mandates.

Beyond his many political successes, Huntsman actually believes that the 99.9% of scientists that back such controversial (at least, to frightened social conservative lackwits) concepts as evolution and global warming aren’t insane. He even backs same sex unions, a sensible response to a question that most GOP heavyweights seem unable to answer without sounding like hillbillies.

In all, he is actually an accomplished Republican with rational ideas decorated in a nice flourish of sanity.

No wonder he is losing.

Republicans, you ever wonder why the liberal media eats our lunch time and time again? This is why. Huntsman, who is a stereotypical (and, by the books, very successful) Republican in the fiscal and foreign relations sense and a common sense human being in social matters, is seen as a horrifying choice to many in our party.

How insane is it that the Republican talking heads on the news are willing to take the opinions of Donald Trump, perhaps the most famous professional swindler in the United States whose foreign policy/business creds are non-existent, on dealing with China over the ideas of Huntsman, someone who has intimate knowledge of that country’s culture, politics and business tactics?

(People fronting for Ron Paul actually had the gall to insult Huntsman because he knows one of the native languages of our largest trading partner. I have rarely seen such sickening tactics on the national stage.)

How insane is it to kowtow to the blatant hatred and religion-based bigotry of Rick Santorum and Rick Perry, the current mouthpieces of members of the GOP who cry about Democrats passing overly restrictive laws but in the same sob extol the need for federally-mandated teaching of Creationism and the utter requirement for a Constitutional ban on same sex marriage, instead of the tolerance of Huntsman, who apparently knows how to read a book besides the Bible?

How insane is it that the GOP wants to encourage and support flip-floppers like Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, candidates that changes their opinions on vital matters (health care mandates, corporate legislation, separation of church and state, science, etc.) depending on who’s standing in the room, over the conservative fiscal record of Huntsman, who didn’t comprise his beliefs when building his state’s health safety net?

So I am making a bold suggestion here: vote for Huntsman. He may not be the perfect fit, but he’s a damn sight better than the slop we’ve got right now. While his chances are next to none, I salute him for sticking it out, trying desperately to tack the GOP away from the ultra-conservative shoals his party seems hell-bent on shipwrecking itself upon. If by some miracle he manages to get the party’s nomination, then Obama and his war machine might be forced to actually talk about issues, and that is the only way we can avoid another four years of “Change.”

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Thank God the Secret Service is doing a good job protecting President Obama...

Joe Biden, the foul-mouthed mental midget that is currently the Vice-president of the United States, went out of his way to prove, yet again, that he has no f*cking idea what he is talking about.

In a recent interview with Newsweek, the man who is second in line for the most powerful and influential job in the entire world had the gall to say that the Taliban, the Muslim fundamentalist movement that formerly governed Afghanistan and protected agencies that carried out terrorist attacks against the rest of the civilized world, is “not our enemy, per se.”

This must be some new definition of the term per se, one which means “just kidding” or “stop listening to me right here, ’cause I’m Joe Biden”, because it is utterly impossible that someone in Biden’s position could even remotely believe the Taliban is not the primary problem in Afghanistan. The monumental stupidity necessary to even premise that thought boggles my mind.

While I sincerely doubt that the term per se has some alternate, Bizzaro World meaning for Joe Biden, I included it in the quote because White House spokesmen have defended this heinous (not to mention serially gonzo) comment by saying that the VP’s point was taken out of context. I even am willing to go one step further to assuage any fear that the thinking people of the world are being unfair to Joe Biden and reprint the entire comment.

To keep from having to reprint the entire interview, let me first explain that, in this exchange, Newsweek and Biden have been discussing the fact that, in the past, the United States was willing to leave the Taliban alone provided they did not harbor or materially support terrorist organizations. Obviously the Taliban was unwilling to accept those terms. Now that they are effectively out of power, but not done trying to take it back, Newsweek wanted to know what the path forward entails.

BIDEN: Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests. If, in fact, the Taliban is able to collapse the existing government, which is cooperating with us in keeping the bad guys from being able to do damage to us, then that becomes a problem for us.

In a long, long, long list of gaffes (just in his scant time as VP), this one has to be in the top three.

Biden also backs the idea of negotiating with the Taliban in an attempt to end the movement’s resistance to Afghanistan’s new government.

The Taliban is not populated with people you can cut deals with. If I know this, how in the hell doesn’t Joe Biden know this? Biden was brought on to the Obama ticket because he supposedly was a foreign policy heavyweight. How could someone with those sorts of credentials EVER believe that an organization like the Taliban can be negotiated with?

Name me even one instance where negotiations with a group like this has ever ended a guerrilla war. What draws people towards groups like the Taliban is that they do not negotiate. The stand up for what they believe in, and will fight to the death (or, more likely, the hapless deaths of their followers) to see things through. There are no half measures with them, and all you need to look at to know this is the way they ran Afghanistan before the United States flung them from power. Did you see a lot of half-measures in the way they dealt out their twisted totalitarian variant of Islam? No. There is the right way, and that way is not open to deals or alterations.

I can guarantee that they will lie, cheat or steal in any “peace” negotiations to get as much as they can, and make sure to give nothing in return. Why would they honor deals with us, anyway? We are the enemy.

There is only one way to deal with such groups. The only thing people like the Taliban respect is power and the willingness to go the extra mile, so we should oblige them. Every time they stick their heads up, we bring the hammer down. We must do this for as long as it takes. We have had troops stationed on the border of North Korea for over fifty years, and we should make it very clear to the Taliban that will never, ever leave them alone unless they disband.

In short, we need to convince them (and the world), yet again, that crossing the United States is like signing your own death warrant. The only alternative is a mess of Biden-backed, half-assed peace talks with terrorists which will only serve to make us look weak. With Obama and Biden in charge, we look weak enough already.

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