Innocent But Guilty
So, the FBI recommends no criminal charges against Hillary — which was precisely what we who aren’t wallowing in Hillary-hate knew would happen all along.
FBI Boss James Comey Let’s Hillary Off The Hook
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No matter. To those convinced of her arch-criminal nature, today’s announcement will be meaningless — or it will be further proof her villainous fingers reach into every single aspect of government and society.
Give Hillary-haters this — they view her as the most powerful human on the planet. Huzzah for women’s equality!
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A Good Man Gone
Abner Mikva is dead. He lived a good long life. He was never my Congressperson — my last two reps in the House before I moved out of the city were Rahm Emanuel and Luis Gutierrez — but all Chi. Dems held Ab close to their bosom. He was a great guy, as liberal as anyone, the man who urged Barack Obama to run for president.
Mikva Receives The Presidential Medal Of Freedom
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To understand how Chicago politics worked in the old days — and forget about dead voters and all that mythic baloney — you need only read Mikva’s own tale of his first visit to a local Democratic boss to offer his services in the 1948 elections:
“I came in and said I wanted to help. Dead silence.
” ‘Who sent you?’ the committeeman said.
“I said, ‘Nobody.’
“He said, ‘We don’t want nobody nobody sent.’
“Then he said, ‘We ain’t got no jobs.’
“I said, ‘I don’t want a job.’
“He said, ‘We don’t want nobody that don’t want a job. Where are you from, anyway?’
“I said, ‘University of Chicago.’
“He said, ‘We don’t want nobody from the University of Chicago.’ “
[From Milton Rakove’s book, We Don’t Want Nobody Nobody Sent: An Oral History of the Daley Years.]
With the Shakman Decrees and other court rulings against the establishment of such a blatant patronage army, that kind of conversation rarely, if ever, takes place in Chicago or anywhere else for that matter. Politicians have learned not to build their power bases through a lot of little guys who needed jobs. Now they amass their power through a few big guys who rain torrents of cash upon them. Quite frankly, I’ll take the old way of doing business.
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July 5th Birthdays
Mary Walcott — As a 17-year-old in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, she was accused of advising a neighbor couple to bake a “witch cake” and feed it to a dog so they could determine who had been casting spells upon them. Mary’s aunt actually showed the neighbors how to bake the cake. At trial, it was determined Mary had acted innocently and in good faith. And you think today’s world is weird.
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P.T. Barnum — Despite the mythology that has grown around him, he never said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Too bad; if he had he would instantly have been recognized as the most astute political observer in the history of this holy land.
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Caryn Navy — Blind from birth, Navy earned a bachelor’s degree in math from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin. She also minored in computer science and was instrumental in creating computer word processing and translating software for the blind.
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Bill Watterson — Author and illustrator of one of the greatest comic strips of all time, “Calvin and Hobbes.” He grew up, ironically enough, in Chagrin Falls, Ohio.
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On this date in 2001, Ernie K. Doe died.
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