Peraica's Press Release on his arrest for vandalizing election signs

Here is the press release Tony Peraica issued Sunday afternoon in response to his arrest on charges of election vandalism:

When passing through McCook at about 11 PM, on our way to Willow Springs, a marked McCook police car almost immediately began to follow us as we were going south on Joliet Road. We were followed for about half mile, pulled over without reason given and harassed.  Police searched the vehicle, found nothing, and were about to let us continue. 

Then, a police sergeant came to the scene followed by another, third police car, with a male wearing only jeans who pointed to me and alleged that I caused criminal damage to his property --a cardboard sign.  This apparently inebriated male, who was barefoot and without any clothes above waist, proceeded to say that he saw me damage his cardboard sign. None of this is remotely true. I never even got out of the van.

The arresting officer was apologetic but was ordered to do this and had to follow orders.

This is a blatant abuse of police authority by a desperate candidate who is using his police department to engage in political retribution just because he can. This kind of behavior has no place in our democracy.

If elected officials abuse their authority like this to trump up phony charges against other elected officials, and get away with it, what will they do to an average citizen who does not have the ability to respond or fight back.

I have been fighting corruption and illegal behavior for many years in Cook County and this is just another example of such behavior.

Tony Peraica

BREAKING NEWS -- Cook County Commissioner Tony Peraica arrested for ripping down Tobolski signs

11:45 am SUNDAY

Tony Peraica, cook county commissioner in the 16th District, arrested and jailed in McCook

Cook County Commissioner Tony Peraica was arrested late Saturday night when he was caught ripping down political signs from private property.

Peraica is planning his own press conference later today to call the arrest and jailing a set-up, claiming that the arrest was made in McCook where his opponent, Jeff Tobolski is the mayor.

But Tobolski reports that Periaca, who was dressed in black, and another man, were driving around in a white van tearing down signs when a Stickney police officer observed them tearing down the signs and pulled them over. They were given a warning and allowed to leave, according to Tobolski.

About 15 to 20 minutes later, the same van was seen driving through McCook in what many would describe as a last-minute political trick, tearing down signs. The van was observed by a McCook Police officer pulling out of private property with several signs destroyed on the ground.

"The police officer stopped the van. It was late at night. And as he was questioning them about what they were doing on the property and if they had anything to do with destroying the private property, the owner of the property came out yelling that they destroyed his signs," Tobolski said.

The property in question is the McCook Bohemian Restaurant on Joliet Road.

Peraica was charged with criminal trespass and destruction of private property. The complaint was signed by the owner of the bar. Peraica was held in the McCook Jail until McCook authorities allowed Peraica to be released on an I-Bond without having to post money.

The fact that Peraica was in McCook driving around in an unmarked van in black clothing is evidence enough that Peraica was up to his old mischief. He'll do his best to claim it was a political set-up but you have to be an incompetent imbecile to be allowed to be put in to a position of being caught like that.

"Peraica should resign from office immediately. When you drive through McCook you will see several large signs for Peraica and no one has bothered them or destroyed them or taken any of them down because I believe every candidate has a right to campaign without the fear of your property being destroyed," Tobolski said.

"There are many signs out there for many candidates and we don’t touch any of them. I’m not taking any signs down because I respect the right of the voters to vote for whomever they are right. Obviously, Tony Peraica doesn't feel the same way. What’s he going to do next, storm my home? His erratic behavior of a strange man is outrageous and I think every voter in Cook County and the 16th District must question his ability to run a county district and to represent anyone in this county. I am shocked a man who ran for state’s attorney and a lawyer would knowingly break the law like this.

Peraica was unavailable for comment, but he told the media he was putting his signs up late at night and on public property, even though there are laws in most municipalities that prohibit the placing of political signs on public property.

This event shows Peraica to clearly be one of the most unethical, most despicable candidates running for office. On Tuesday Nov. 2, voters can throw that kind of dirty politics out the window."

THE BIG QUESTION: What was Tony Peraica really doing that late at night driving in a van with a campaign worker dressed in black?

-- Ray Hanania

www.RadioChicagoland.com

The dumbest law I have ever seen

The dumbest law I have ever seen

By Ray Hanania

The City of Belleville Illinois adopted a law two years ago to prevented anyone over the age of 12 from trick-or-treating, but it is starting to get a lot of attention these days.

It’s bad enough that some people think that Halloween is a celebration of evil and devil worship – a distortion of the true history of the children’s holiday and candy industry commercialization jackpot.

But to restrict anyone from going out in costume for Halloween is ridiculous and stupid.

The Belleville law fines anyone over the age of 12 who goes out to trick-or-treat with fines of $100 to $1,000. The city actually has assigned their police to monitor the Halloween to arrest the offenders. It’s similar to other laws in a few other communities that set age limits on fun.

The biggest complaints are that older kids and even young adults often stay out late past 10 pm or even 10:30knocking on doors to ask for candy. But most communities don’t burden their police departments and instead adopt time zones in which treat-or-treat revelry can take place, for example between 3 pm and 8 pm.

Putting a limit on the time, say 8 pm, seems more reasonable a response.

Are they concerned that criminals will be out dressed in costume to rob the homes? That’s a problem with any holiday and any circumstance. But it is a criminal problem in which police can be called to investigate. If someone wants to rob someone else, trick-or-treating is not going to make it easier or more difficult.

America is becoming a society that lives in fear. Fear of everything from terrorist threats to adults in children’s costumes.

We would rather put restrictions on ourselves and even violate the U.S. Constitution rather than use common sense and invest our resources in strengthening our police departments and justice systems to make prosecution of criminal acts more effective.

Instead, we prefer to feel good and pass laws that eliminate those potential fears. But it is impossible to wipe away every fear. Creating ridiculous laws only creates more and more fears.

Why not impose a curfew on everyone to keep them off the streets after 8 pm. That would stop prostitution, drug dealers and street gang members.

Why not ban anyone from loitering anywhere at any time? Why not bury our heads in the sand and hope all of the fears that are mongered by leaders who lack the talent to develop good solutions so we won’t see the scary things that exist in real life.

Life is sometimes tragic. Terrible things do happen. But so much good that would happen also gets wiped away when we live our lives cowering in fear and responding to those fears through ridiculous unnecessary laws is also wiped away and lost.

How about our society gets more involved in neighborliness? Why not stop the new cultural trait where we all bury ourselves in our own lives and barely say hello to our neighbors? Why not tear down the huge security fences we build around our homes and families and create security based on neighborhood networking where the protection of our children and our homes becomes a communitywide responsibility rather than the current attitude that it is none of my business?

But then, passing a stupid law is so much easier to achieve than adhering to common sense.

(Ray Hanania is a morning radio talk show host. He can be reached at www.RadioChicagoland.com.)

Chicagoland Syndication 10-24-10: Have we become a culture that enjoys tragedy?

Have we become a culture that enjoys tragedy?

By Ray Hanania

One of my favorite TV programs is America’s Funniest Videos hosted by Tom Bergeron, one of the funniest hosts on television.

It’s also one of the country’s most popular TV programs, too. But isn’t that the problem?

America’s Funniest Videos features videos taken by members of the public of “funny” moments. Moments like when a father tries to tumble like his four year old and ends up kicking the girl in the face. Or when a bicyclist crashes in to a wall. Or two girls on a trampoline, flying off and falling on their backs.

And these examples are not the worst.

I watch these video snippets and while I laugh, I wince, too. They have to be very painful. So why am I laughing?

Maybe that is how our culture has degenerated over the past few decades. We’ve become a society of cruelty, but we will never admit it.

Wiki Leaks recently published thousands of classified documents it obtained from a source in the military and it turns out that some of the things that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney told us about the war were in fact lies.

Far more innocent civilians were killed by our soldiers than we want to admit. But we were so excited to cheer on the war and criticize and even demonize those who had the courage to speak the truth. That our mission wasn’t to free anyone in Iraq. It was to extract revenge and to control Iraq’s oil.

We wanted to profit.

That’s very funny, too, of course.

We’re a society that drives down the expressways and only slow down to gawk at accidents. These gapers’ blocks as they are called, slow down our society but provide the kind of entertainment we have come to enjoy.

Tragedy sells. Just ask the professionals in the news media that spend hours and weeks of hard work to uncover the latest scandals. The news media motto is “If it bleeds it leads.” That means the more tragic an event, the more horrific and the more frightening, the more it pushes its way to the front pages of our newspapers and our TV news.

Is this something we should be proud of? Accepting lies rather than the truth because the lies are more entertaining?

It’s more complicated than that, of course. The truth is we sometimes prefer the lie to the truth because as much as we love tragedy and pain, we don’t like it when it involves ourselves. We don’t want to admit that we have done wrong. Just others.

So we chose the lie as the answer to complicated problems that range from the Middle East conflict to local politics.

Television is filled with programs that involve drama. Recently, while waiting for a doctor to check my back at the emergency room, I sat for about four hours at Palos Hospital with about two dozen other patients and watched the FOX Network and a series of programs involving “judges” who detail the ugliest of relationships in our society to show who is more wrong.

It took that emergency room visit to realize two things. I need to do something about my computer-driven posture. And, I have to stop enjoying the suffering of others.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we all did?

(Ray Hanania is an award winning columnist and morning radio talk show host. You can contact him at www.RadioChicagoland.com.)

Chicagoland Syndication: 10-24-10: Worst candidate I have seen in years

Worst candidate I have seen in years

By Ray Hanania

As voters, we’re used to bad choices. But the Nov. 2 election for the Cook County Board presents residents in the suburban 17^th District with one of the worst candidates to seek public office, Patrick Maher.

Maher is in a mudslinging battle with two term incumbent Liz Gorman. Maher has claimed that Gorman is a puppet of the hated outgoing Cook County Board President Todd Stroger, alleging she supported Strogers many tax increases, which is all a lie, of course.

Gorman single-handedly kept the board from giving up and despite several failed attempts, and she put together the votes by pure stubbornness to repeal half of the Stronger 1 percent Sales Tax hike. She has been the strongest voice against tax increases on the board.

Maher has to lie because Maher has a bad secret. And in political life, there are no secrets. When he was a college student, he brutally beat up a fellow classmate over a girl, who later became his wife. Maher was charged with aggravated felony assault but the jury deadlocked over the fate of a rising star of one of the state’s most powerful political families. Instead, he plead guilty to one count of misdemeanor battery.

The man he beat at Illinois State University in 1991 is Curt Bellone. Bellone is from New Lenox.  (Click HERE to read a story on the conviction.)

This week, Bellone’s mother voiced a robo-call (a political term for a phone call that plays a recorded message to targeted voters) telling the story and urging voters to reject Maher’s candidacy.

In the passioned phone call, which I received and heard, Bellone’s mother, Karen Peterson (who is now 65), says:  "Patrick Maher brutally beat my son and has spent 19 years trying to hide that fact. Patrick Maher has spent his campaign for Cook County commissioner lying about this crime, refusing to be accountable for the crime to which he pled guilty and denying the damage he did to another human being. ... He should never be put in a position of public trust such as Cook County commissioner."

Click HERE to listen to the entire audio message from Karen Peterson about the beating of her son.

Maher is a decent person. I’ve met and spoken with him. He’s just surrounded by the usual rabble of cheerleaders looking to find their place at the public trough, and has the oppressive weight of a political dynasty on his shoulders.

He is the cousin of Illinois Comptroller Dan Hynes, a scion of one of Chicago’s most powerful Machine Organizations, the 19^th Ward. His father  is Orland Park Village Clerk Dave Maher. The Hynes family and friends funds much of their elections.

Maher was put in charge of the Orland Fire Protection District, quickly transforming it in to a Chicago-like bureaucracy with one of the most bloated budgets of any fire protection district in the state.

But to go higher, Maher had to bury his criminal past. He never mentioned it in media candidate questionnaires (except once, after FOX News reporter Dane Placko started investigating).

(Here is Placko's news report)



(Click HERE to view it on the FOX 32 Web Page.)

Maher’s birthdate was also changed by one day. He says it was a mistake. But everyone knows that without an accurate birth date you cannot find a criminal record.

Maher’s past is not the issue. But covering it up, is. And covering up a past instead of being a man to address it makes him a poor choice for public office, one of the worst, in fact.

When this election is over, he should quit the Fire Protection District and instead of listening to the pressures of his political aristocracy, find his place in society, one where he can raise his head up and find respect.

It’s not there, though, in this election.

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

Chicagoland Syndication 10-20-10: American freedoms hanging out to dry

American freedoms hanging out to dry

By Ray Hanania

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

Jill Saylor lives in a mobile home in Canton, Ohio, where she came up with a small way to fight global warming. But, she’s being hung out to dry by her trailer park management company.

Saylor 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 where “freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose” (the Janice Joplin lyrics from her song "Bobby McGee").

Do Americans have anything left to lose?

The mobile 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 our white picket fence and seeing dozens of backyards as far as the eye could see with clothes lines with damp clothes drying in the sun and waving in the breeze held only by wooden clothes pins. 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?

The world has changed a lot.

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 kindergarten. We're talking high school, too.

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?

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’s doesn't look good.

I say the restrictions are all wet.

(Chicagoland Syndication. Ge information at www.RadioChicagoland.com.) 

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.)