CHicagoland Syndication 10-17-10: Ed Vrdolyak's hand slapping - Is there any doubt the system is corrupt?

Ed Vrdolyak's hand slapping: Is there any doubt the system is corrupt?

By Ray Hanania

Let me get this straight.

Ed Vrdolyak, one of the slipperiest politicians in Illinois who everyone assumed was guilty but had a Teflon career for years until this week, gets 10 months in jail for his role in a $1.5 million kick back scheme involving a Gold Coast property.

And the same Feds are trying to put Rod Blagojevich in jail for 30 years for never taking one cent for his personal use, but did what every politician (including Vrdolyak) in pushing contractors and friends to donate to his campaign.

This is the poster image for Illinois’ infamous and oft cited “culture of corruption.” The culture of corruption isn’t just about the politicians who slip through the cracks and eventually get caught – it only took 30 years to finally put Fast Eddie in a cushy prison after another federal judge – and friend – sentenced him to probation and community service that had him making calls from his limousine to raise money for his clout-heavy cronies.

The culture of corruption in Illinois is endemic to the state government and applies more directly to the system in which the corrupt politicians play.

It’s the system that is corrupt and the people who haven’t gone to jail and the ones pulling the strings.

So what Vrdolyak got caught. Ed Vrdolyak is Mr. Personality. Mr. Popular. The pal of friend and foe. He is one of the smartest politicians in Illinois and pal-ed up to politicians he supported and fought with.

He was well-liked by the political establishment which made it easy for him to rise to the top of the grunge when he led the infamous Vrdolyak 29 to lead a race-based campaign that succeeded in stymieing the administration of Harold Washington during his first term as mayor.

This was the Ed Vrdolyak who found it so easy to bring judges of all sorts to his home for the annual private picnic in a backyard partially built on a Chicago street he managed to acquire without raising one eyebrow from the Feds.

This was the Ed Vrdolyak, who when he lost his power in the Democratic party, slipped easily into the comforting leadership of the Republican Party.

He was liked. And because Ed Vrdolyak was liked, he got a pillow slap from the first judge, who doesn’t deserve to remain on the bench. And now he is getting a slap on the wrist to make the public feel better.

Even the prosecutors, who failed to get the three and one-half year prison term for Vrdolyak that they originally sought, were excited that Fast Eddie was sent to prison at all.

Meanwhile, the unliked and woefully disdained Rod Blagojevich is being forced to defend himself against trumped up charges from the U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.

Oh the Vrdolyak decision to go to summer camp for 10 months must have made Fitzgerald feel extra good, considering that things haven’t been going his way as of late.

Fitzgerald’s crew failed to win a conviction of Blagojevich in the first trial on the 23 of the 24 charges. They did get the jury to agree that Blagojevich lied to the FBI. But they couldn’t get a unanimous jury nod of the serious charges of corruption.

But Blagojevich is easy to attack and Vrdolyak is difficult. The public doesn’t care too much for either, although Blagojevich has gained much support by going public to respond to the public outcries by the federal government that characterized their 18 months of pre-trial public lobbying.

Blagojevich is disliked by the politicians and Vrdolyak is held in high esteem despite his political shenanigans.

I liked Vrdolyak, too. He was a crafty shell game manipulator. But he always went too far, including in his role in the Town of Cicero with former President Betty Loren-Maltese who was sent to prison for 8 years for her role in stealing $10 million – another injustice in that the sentence was too lenient considering how much she stole from the taxpayers there.

Vrdolyak had a pattern similar to that of Loren-Maltese. While they stole, they were doling out favors to many. And in Vrdolyak’s case, many in the public who benefited from Vrdolyak’s charity wrote letters on his behalf that “swayed” the federal judge.

Vrdolyak gets 10 months and Blagojevich gets threats of 30 years.

Did you need anything more to demonstrate the state’s culture of corruption and how bad it really is?

(Ray Hanania is an award winning columnist, media strategist and morning radio talk show host. He can be reached at www.RadioChicagoland.com.)

The Chicago Newsroom Weekly TV Program: The new and old media

The Chicago Newsroom Weekly TV Program: The new and old media
Hosted by Ken Davis
In this week's program, Ken Davis is joined by Sun-Times columnist, Esther J. Cepeda, Thom Clark, President, Community Media Workshop, Ray Hanania, independent columnist, and Neil Tesser, Chicago jazz writer. The panel discusses "The New News", a report on the state of Chicago's online media.This program was produced by Chicago Access Network TV.



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Chicagoland Syndication: When Free Speech Just Crosses the Line

When Free Speech Just Crosses the Line

By RAY HANANIA

Free speech has never been more under assault. It has led to the firing of three top journalists: White House dean Helen Thomas, Octavia Nasr of CNN, and popular CNN talk host Rick Sanchez.

It has dominated the headlines with the threatened burning of a Quran (Islamic holy book) by a pastor in Gainesville, Fla.

And it’s before the U.S. Supreme Court, involving a father of a fallen U.S. Marine who was appalled when members of a nearby church decided to protest at his son’s funeral chanting hateful rhetoric about the war, gays and more.

The line that divides what is right and wrong on free speech is not as simply drawn as it once was when people would say you can say anything short of yelling “fire” in a crowded movie theater.

Today, it is so much more complicated. But is it because the issues have changed? Or, are we just giving the free speech of unpopular causes more play in the news media and in our daily discussions?

Thomas, Nasr and Sanchez are all victims of a political battle tied to the Middle East. And so were the threats by Pastor Terry Jones to burn the Quran.

But what about the protests at the burial ceremonies of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The father of a fallen marine sued members of a Kansas church when they showed up at his son’s funeral denouncing homosexuality. The marine was not gay, but the protesters decided to use the high profile burial as a podium to air their views nationally.

Protesters carried signs proclaiming “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “God hates you.”

As offensive as the sentiments are, chances are the Court will rule on the side of free speech. The U.S. Constitution doesn’t distinguish between good free speech and ugly free speech, although sometimes I wish they had.

There is something wrong with free speech when it is OK to scream ugly epitaphs at the grieving family of a man who sacrificed his life so that the protesters could speak. A society that says it is OK to burn a holy book like the Quran, or presumably even the Bible or Torah, and yet in the same breath in many cities around the country, you could be arrested, face a stiff fine and even be jailed for multiple convictions if you burn a pile of leaves in front of your home.

Come to think of it, I really liked the old days when burning leaves in front of a home was OK, and few people thought about hate speech or burning Qurans.

(Ray Hanania's Chicagoland column is distributed to several local newspapers including the Southwest News-Herald, the Lawndale News and the West Suburban Journal newspapers. If you would like to add his free Chicagoland column to your newspaper, email rayhanania@comcast.com.)

Maher-Gorman battle heats up over signs and Maher's past conviction

Democrat Pat Maher accused his incumbent rival this week of tearing down his campaign signs, but Cook County Commissioner Liz Gorman said the charge is another one of Maher's lies.

Some signs have been torn down, but it looks like supporters on both sides are damaging the other signs. The Gorman sign on the lawn of my neighbor was torn down last night. Maher said that his signs were also taken down the same day.

The accusation from Maher came the same day that the Gorman campaign mailed out a hard-hitting two page fold-out detailing Maher's past criminal record and his apparent attempts to hide the conviction. (Click HERE to read a story on the conviction.)

Maher said the story is false, although it has been detailed at length on FOX 32 TV by Dane Placko. The records are filed with the courts and cannot be falsified, Gorman said.

"No signs were taken down at all," Gorman responded. 


"Our volunteers went door-to-door and they got a great response from residences. We didn't open mailboxes like the other side to drop literature."


Gorman said many voters who had put Maher signs on their lawns took them down after reading about his past criminal record.


Gorman said that many voters were not aware of his past, or allegations that he intentionally changed his birth date by one day to make discovery of the court records more difficult to find. The conviction was not detailed in his newspaper interviews at two newspapers including the SouthtownStar, but when word got out that FOX 32 was investigating, Maher acknowledged his past in only one interview with the Arlington Heights Daily Herald.


-- Ray Hanania
www.RadioChicagoland.com

GAP Logo change: Shows you how shallow most people are today

Really. The GAP decides to change its logo and thousands of people -- many in the design industry who did not get the contract, start screaming. Seriously. Is that what people care about these days. The old GAP logo and the new GAP logo are truly the least important things we should be getting up in arms about in today's world. People are starving to death. Unemployment is still outrageous. And what gets people motivated

The old logo, dumped and now back:


The new logo, that has been scrapped

Honestly. The new logo looks far better than the old logo. The old logo is tired and unimaginative. The new one suggests moving in to the new century.

But the GAP owners cower under fear of offending the market, when the reality is the only people offended are a few over-active bloggers and a marketing industry upset that it didn't get the contract to design a new logo.

The GAP's real problem though is in execution. It's how they unveiled it that caused them problems. Instead of preparing the public, and alerting them so it wasn't a surprise -- surprise always makes for bad news in any industry -- they simply posted the new logo on the web site without any pre-notice and it was a surprise.

Pathetic and said reflect on our society. Shallow. Overly critical. Too angry. Ignoring so much that the GAP has done to make our lives easier. I prefer clothes from the GAP and have all my life. If the GAP wants to design a new logo, I support it.

But like with people who write letters to the editor, only those people who are upset take the time to do so. People who are happy have no emotional fuel or temper to push them to write anything. So the one angry letter looks like 500 when in fact it only represents one angry letter. And for every one angry letter, there are usually more than 500 positive people who feel the opposite but don't have the emotion-charged motivation to write and express their views.

Grow a spine GAP and tell the whiners to shut the f up!

-- Ray Hanania
www.RadioChicagoland.com

Battle for freedoms clothes-pinned to too much government-like controls and less freedoms

You'll want to hold your nose on this one, with a clothes pin.

Jill Saylor lives in a mobile home in Canton, Ohio. Yet she has come to symbolize the battle between the old days when people were free and the new days where everything is litigated in court and freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.

Americans are losing the rights to everything and they have nothing left to lose, the Janice Joplin lyrics from her song "Bobby McGee." But for Saylor, who came up with a small way to fight global warming, she's being hung out to dry by her trailer park management company.

The park where Saylor lives has a ban on drying your clothes out in public, in your backyard. If mobile homes even have a back yard. But according to the New York Times, Saylor is not alone. Turns out that in private communities -- places where an owner rents or leases out space for you to live -- the number one ban, among many, is one that prohibits the public drying of clothes on clothes lines outside of the home.

When I was young, I remember looking across out white picket fence and seeing dozens of backyards as far as the eye could see with cloths lines and clothes pins taut with damp clothes drying in the sun and waving in the breeze. Most of the clothes were sheets, shirts and pants. But you'd see the occasional underwear and bras and private things like lingerie. But it's not the saucy aspect of the practice that has the owners of Saylor's trailer park up in arms against her. They just don't like the site of clothes hanging on a clothes line. It makes the neighborhood look, "trashy" maybe?

But trashy has become our life in America these days where more and more controls are stripping away our private rights. We're living under oppressive restrictions that prohibit us from doing things that our parents and grandfathers took for granted. Some of the restrictions are the result of board members with nothing better to do. Others are the result of our own fears or maybe the conditioning which prohibits us from being the free people we are.

When I was young, our parents let us go trick-or-treating "until the street lights came on." These days, a child doesn't walk the street in daylight without a mother or parent closely monitoring them for tragedies like a child kidnapper, sexual predator or bullying by other students their age. And we're not talking just high school. We're talking kindergarten.

I used to walk to my kindergarten class. Was the world safer then or is it just a mental state of mind that is deteriorating?

Some economists claim that you can save as much as 20 percent on your home energy bills by hanging the clothes out to dry rather than running them through the dryer. Everyone has a washer and a dryer these days. It's an expensive convenience, but isn't convenience supposed to be expensive?

Everything has become a cause of a problem for someone else. We didn't have big backyard fences when I was a kid. They were short, picket fences you could see past and through. Today, everyone wants privacy. They erect wall-like wood fences that are six feet high to separate themselves from their neighbors. Maybe that is the real problem. We don't talk to each other any more. It's easy to dislike someone you don't know, and disliking people increases in a society where people lock themselves inside their castles to protect themselves from their neighbors, who might be sex predators and criminals on parole.

Common sense should rule but common sense is going out the window. The clothes lines that Saylor put up were not like the old days when the line stretched from the back fence to the brick wall of the back of the house in several rows. Or from poll to poll -- many people actually had clothes line polls cemented in the backyard as permanent fixtures, a service they paid for just as they pay for dryers from Sears or now Costco.

Saylor has a unique system of squares that minimized the visual size of the drying process. It is kind of like a rectangular maze with inner lines of clothes drying. It made it all look so efficient.

Why not? Well, some think what Saylor does doesn't look good.

I say the restrictions are all wet.

-- Ray Hanania
www.RadioChicagoland.com

Scott Lee Cohen's campaign stands out above the rest when it comes to positive messages

Scott Lee Cohen's campaign for governor stands out about the rest

Television commercial breaks are filled with mudslinging from the various candidates. The candidates for the U.S. Senate, Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Alexi Giannoulias, spend most of their time bashing each other. During the 5 pm news on WLS TV, I saw six commercials from each of them bashing each other.

It's the same in the race for governor between the anointed lead candidates, Democrat Gov. Pat Quinn and Republican challenger Bill Brady are hammering each other with accusations and attacks.

It's sickening that in our culture, the only way to stand out in an election is to throw mud and broadcast a tsunami of negative commercials.

There is one candidate who stands out above the crowd. Scott Lee Cohen. Every commercial I have seen of his has been positive. Instead of bashing Quinn or Brady, Cohen has been pushing his idea to host job fairs to help people out of work -- there is 10 percent unemployment in the state -- to find new jobs.

It's so positive that the mainstream news media -- which benefits from the attack ads because they are purchased on their stations and in ads in their newspapers -- have been attacking Cohen, challenging his positive messages and questioning the job fairs. It got so bad that Cohen lashed back at the thinned-skinned hypocritical media which loves to dish it out but can't take the criticism. Cohen chastised the media for focusing on the negative, ignoring his campaign and then rushing in with absurd claims that the public is not interested in his job fairs.

It sounds like the mainstream media is protecting its election campaign revenue flow. Data predicts that $3 billion will be spent on election ads by the November 2 election, much by unanimous organizations that don't have to identify themselves or their sources. The media allows the other candidates to bash each other because it brings in big money. Bashing Cohen allows the media to suck up to those candidates.

It's pathetic. Voters are tired of the name-calling, the attack mailers and TV commercials. They are nauseating. I want to see one candidate who spends his money focusing on what he will do to help the people of Illinois, not waste money attacking his opponent so that he can bring him down and make his own poll numbers look better. That's what negative ads do. They bring down the opponent and make the attacker appear to be better. In reality, the attacker doesn't look better. They stay the same as they were.

But they could be better if they would focus their attention telling voters how they plan to deal with Illinois' gargantuan economic problems. How do we get people back to work? How do we raise revenues without increasing the burden on the already over-burdened taxpayers? How do we trim waste and end corruption and make sure that the taxpayers get their money's worth from our elected officials.

I'm not hearing that from Kirk, Giannoulias, Quinn or Brady.

But I am hearing it from Cohen.

Voters should wise up and stop allowing the media and the negative attacks to lead them through another election in which the same old people are put in power and nothing changes. Nothing.

Take a careful look at Cohen and judge for yourself. The guy has his act together.

As for those who would attack him for his personal issues -- a failed marriage, a bad relationship -- well, everyone is in the same boat. Every person in Illinois has something that is embarrassing in their life. No one is any better than Scott Lee Cohen. He's just a human being like all of us.

But if a candidate can be judged on how they conduct themselves in an election, Scott Lee Cohen has risen above the rest.

-- Ray Hanania
www.RadioChicagoland.com