Help is Coming

Potatohead promises Chicago help!

• Gov. Pat Quinn is willing to discuss sending in reinforcements from the Illinois State Police to help Chicago authorities deal with the violence, after a mass shooting Thursday night left 13 people injured, including a 3-year-old boy.
  
  The governor “stands ready” to talk with Mayor Rahm Emanuel and law enforcement officials in Chicago “about the possibility of providing additional Illinois State Police reinforcements to help stop the violence,” Quinn spokeswoman Brooke Anderson said Saturday.
  
  Quinn told reporters earlier in the day he hadn’t spoken yet with the mayor or Police Supt. Garry McCarthy.
  
  “If they want to speak to me about that,” Quinn said, “I’m certainly always willing and able to sit down.”

Help will arrive - just as soon as Grau gets the State Police Academy up and running and filled with eager troopers ready to battle crime! Wait, you mean no one told Quinn the State Academy was about as bare as ours had been? That the State Police stopped hiring around the time we did five years ago due to "budgetary constraints" and now they are as short as any police force around the State? That Grau was hired like McCarthy was, to be an outsider wielding an axe.

Unless once again, the solution, is to strip cops/troopers from taxpaying areas and dumping the entire force into the ghetto - that couldn't be the entire plan, could it?

UPDATE: Post clarified to demonstrate the lack of hiring for 5 years and the near-futile efforts to keep up with attrition

Crime is Down...We Pinky Swear This Time!

Good thing they don't count the weekend all the way back to that 13 shot on Thursday - because this weekend doesn't need any help number-wise:

• Coleman was one of at least five people, including a 14-year-old boy, shot to death between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. The spate of fatal shootings came hours after 13 people were shot in a South Side park, once again drawing international attention to gun violence in Chicago.

Darn those inanimate pieces of metal, running around shooting innocent people and folks.  

Um...how about "gang violence?"  Or "poor impoverished underclass violence?"  Or is that too close to the truth for the supposed Fourth Estate, defenders of "truth" and other such bullshit?

Bid Openings

Hey look, opportunity is knocking:

• 001 - 2 spots
• 003 - 5
• 005 - 10
• 006 - 3
• 007 - 5
• 008 - 2
• 009 - 2
• 010 - 2
• 011 - 6
• 014 - 4
• 015 - 2
• 016 - 2
• 018 - 2
• 022 - 2

Where to go where to go.

Bears on the Road

Sunday night, no major injuries, against a Pittsburgh team that hasn't won yet, favored by 2.  And they have yet to cover a spread.

This is it - the season relies on THIS GAME!

Well, no, not really. But we got nothing else to fill the spaces today, so here's a post.

Hey AlderAss - Shut Up

Can't wait to blab to the cameras:

• A Chicago alderman said Friday that police told him that they have a person of interest in the shooting of 13 people, including a 3-year-old boy, at a South Side park.
  
  Ald. Willie Cochran (20th) said police informed him just moments before Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy had a news conference on the shootings Friday morning.
  
  McCarthy said at the news conference that police were talking to “several people” concerning the shootings, although no one he would call “in custody” at this point. The shooting was gang-related, and McCarthy called the fact that no one was killed in the shootings “a miracle.”

Way to go Willie, let everyone know the police are working a certain angle, maybe help in shutting down that single avenue of assistance we might be getting in a community that has a habit of "not snitching" and keeping vital information from being discovered.

And it isn't a "miracle" McWhiskey - it's a lack of muzzle-discipline and almost complete unfamiliarity with the weapon used.

Thursday Count - 23 Shot, 3 Dead

We've seen the number 24 popping up here and there, and it's easy to imagine one or more casualties got lost in the shuffle - in fact, we wouldn't be surprised if someone was trying to lose one or two in the shuffle, especially after you get 13 at one location. A miscount might be grounds for a promotion at this point.

Link here.

And the band played on....

Police Shooting (x2)

Up north:

• One person was seriously injured when a Chicago Police officer fired on a suspect in the Cragin neighborhood this afternoon, authorities said.
  
  The Independent Police Review Authority was notified around 6 p.m. of a shooting that happened about 5:20 p.m. involving a police officer firing upon someone near Lavergne Avenue and Roscoe Street, a spokesman for the office said. No officers were injured.
  
  One person was taken in serious-to-critical condition to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center following the shooting, according to the Chicago Fire Department's news office.

Glad tt hear no police were injured. Best wishes to the involved Officer(s).

UPDATE: An additional shooting up north - no hits:

• A Chicago Police officer fired a shot during a confrontation with a suspect Friday afternoon in the Portage Park neighborhood on the Northwest Side.
  
  Officers responded about 3:30 p.m. to a call of a person with a gun near the 3500 block of North Cicero Avenue, police said.
  
  A suspect confronted an officer, who fired a weapon, police said. Nobody was struck.
  
  One person was taken into custody and the suspect's weapon was recovered, police said.
  

Again, no cops injured, so that's good.

Pssst....Rahm?

Hey Tiny Dancer!!!  Do we really have to point out the obvious?

• Thirteen people, including a 3-year-old boy who suffered a gunshot wound to the head, were shot at a Chicago park in the Back of the Yards neighborhood Thursday night, authorities said.
  
  Ten adults and the 3-year-old were transported by Fire Department ambulances after the attack in the 1800 block of West 51st Street in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, said Fire Department Deputy District Chief James Mungovan at the scene. A 12th victim was believed to have driven himself to Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park, a source said, citing preliminary information.
  
  Police said later a total of 13 people were shot, the boy, two teens, and 10 adults, with the boy the most seriously wounded. The boy suffered a gunshot wound to the head at an ear that exited through his mouth, and was in critical condition at Mount Sinai Hospital, police said.

FBI labels Chicago the "murder capital."

Not even a day later, 13 people are shot at one location.

It's Friday - no one reads the papers or watches the news after 3:00 PM on a Friday.

Chicago politicos have always buried bad news on Friday afternoons.

Just show him the door. No one is going to care in a week. Plus, you get to pick a new one for us to focus our spleen on with years of scandals and closets full of skeletons to look for and shine flashlights on.

You know you want to.

Murder Capital!

But crime is down!

Yeah, about that....

• Statistics released by the FBI earlier this week show that Chicago passed New York as America's murder capital in 2012 despite the Windy City only having a third of the Big Apple's population.
  
  The FBI recorded 500 murders in Chicago in 2012, up from 431 in 2011. New York reported 419 murders in 2012, down from 515 the year before.
  
  However, on a per-capita basis, the bureau reported that Flint, Michigan was more dangerous than the two larger cities. One in every 1,613 residents of Flint were murder victims last year, as the city of 101,558 reported 63 murders in 2012.

But crime is down!

Yeah, no one cares about "per capita" rates. The only number that matters at the end of the day is what Chicago did compared to New York and Los Angeles. The rest is statistics. And this guy at the helm can squeeze numbers until they scream. No one cares. The perception is that Chicago is out of control and in this case, perception IS reality.

What's really entertaining to us is that the FBI won't accept Chicago stats at the end of the year because they know the numbers game being played. But three-quarters of the way through 2013, they'll still use the big number (which is off by a few - we were well over 500) and label Rahm's (and Obama's) city with the "murder capital" title.

Priceless.

Useful Idiot

Just more proof that Dick "Turban" Durbin would have been right at home working for Josef Stalin and his ilk:

• A prominent "Dreamer" activist named Alaa Mukahhal took to social media to laugh about her cynical use of the American flag as a prop for "messaging" after her story was highlighted by Illinois Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin.
  
  In 2012, Sen. Durbin took to the floor of the Senate and held up a gigantic photograph of a smiling young woman wearing a Muslim hijab with an American flag in the background. He introduced her as Alaa Mukahhal, a Kuwaiti-born 'Dreamer' activist whom he described as being 'of Palestinian descent,' and who was brought to the country illegally at a young age by her parents, went on to become an honor student, get a degree in architecture and now needed a path to citizenship so, Durbin said, she could fufill her American dream. Durbin even went so far as to feature Alla on his own official webpage.

And guess what?

• A look her Facebook page paints a different picture of Alaa than Sen. Durbin's glowing ode: she's a potty mouthed, politically correct, Israel hating radical activist who drops F bombs and politically correct buzzwords with equal acumen.
  
  After Sen. Durbin held up the photo of her with the US flag featured prominently, Alaa took to her Facebook page to chortle about how the flag wasn't there to show any love for the United Stated -- a country she said she hated when she came here -- but a PR prop.
  
  On February 3, 2012 she said:

  Did ya'll notice the flag in the background of the pic? That was no coincidence #messaging #lol

  The photo that Dick Durbin held up mocked patriotism. It was a completely cynical use of American iconography in order to serve a propoganda agenda. Alaa not only brags about it, she laughs about.
  
  In an open letter to her parents, Alaa doesn't discuss architecture but her passion for community organizing.

Oh great...another "community organizer." Probably from the Bill Ayers school. And Durbin just blithely sponsors such a creature for citizenship. We imagine he was a huge fan of the Tsarnev brothers before they started blowing up women, children and exchange students in Boston.

Time to put Dick out to pasture.

Sergeants Get a Contract

Awarded by an Arbitrator, so no vote on it They got raises and protected their benefits, including Duty Availability and Tuition Reimbursement, so the FOP should be using this as a framework.

They also got retro, but that's a whole separate issue about letters and deadlines. And they took the expected beating on medical costs.

Most interesting is the ability to re-open the Contract if Springfield makes significant changes to the pension. The "re-opening" thing is what partly screwed the teachers and led to the first strike in two decades, and we all know that Springfield is going to do something and some point, probably under a court order.

The Sergeants have the whole decision up on their website, listed in our right hand column. The Tribune also has a write up on it.

Koschman Case Closed

No indictments or charges across the board:

• Nearly 10 months after former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s nephew Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko was indicted in the 2004 death of David Koschman, a grand jury investigation into the way police and prosecutors handled the case has ended, and no new indictments will be issued.
  
  The 17-month-investigation led by court-appointed special prosecutor Dan K. Webb didn’t clear police and prosecutors of wrongdoing in their original investigation of Koschman’s death. Instead, Webb said Thursday in announcing the end of the probe that the statute of limitations on bringing criminal charges in that investigation had run out.
  
  “No additional indictments have been sought because the applicable statute of limitations bars any prosecutions under state law for the Chicago Police Department and Cook County state’s attorney’s office actions taken in 2004,” Webb said in a court filing.

Interesting wording there - "...didn’t clear police and prosecutors of wrongdoing in their original investigation of Koschman’s death. Instead, Webb said Thursday in announcing the end of the probe that the statute of limitations on bringing criminal charges in that investigation had run out."

So someone probably did something wrong, but the time-frame for proving it has expired. A lot of sphincters just loosened up across Daley-land.

Better Than Ice Cream Murder

Social Media Slaying:

• A 30-year-old woman gunned down her rival at a West Side gas station last month after the pair got into a fight on Facebook, Cook County prosecutors said Thursday.
  
  Khalila Southall, who fled to Rochester, Minn., following the Aug. 26 shooting, allegedly admitted to Chicago Police that she and Lakeisha Tate had a previous argument on the social media site and "did not like each other."

So she runs into her rival and kills her. That's just awesome, something to be real proud of. No coping skills whatsoever in real life and can't find the "unfriend" button on Facebook, so she just up and kills the bitch.

And amazingly, she'll have an actual lawyer who will try to defend her actions somehow.

The Danger of Liquor Stores

We think they missed something here:

• Chicagoans near a liquor store or bar on the city's South or West sides are up to roughly 500 times more likely to be shot than other people in the neighborhood, according to an abstract of a study released Wednesday by Northwestern University.
  Though violent crime is a persistent issue in some distressed neighborhoods, Dr. Marie Crandall says there is a link between a troubled neighborhood resident's proximity to a liquor retailer and the risk of becoming a victim of gun violence.
  Crandall, an associate professor of surgery at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine and a trauma surgeon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, said she expects the study's conclusions to be controversial.

And why would the be controversial?

• The study found that gun violence rates near liquor stores in Chicago's southern and western portions stand in stark contrast with the rest of the city. Crandall found no clear link between liquor retailers and gun violence in more affluent areas but said clear risks are apparent in more impoverished areas such as Austin, Woodlawn, Roseland and Englewood.

Well, the simpleton would associate minority violence with liquor stores, rendering the findings "controversial."

But an impartial observer, like a cop, might associate certain risky behaviors (drug dealing, drug use, prostitution, link fraud, fencing of stolen goods, etc) with high traffic locations such as ::gasp!!:: liquor stores, which makes the findings about as controversial as "the Cubs suck because of a billy goat."

We should be scientists. Our studies would be works of art and revolutionize the entire field.

The Sometimes Holiday

Sometimes, as in "when we remember it:"

• Welcome to the one and only, official, accept-no-substitutes Talk Like A Pirate Day Web site.
  
  Ever since Dave Barry mentioned us in his nationally syndicated newspaper column in 2002, what once was a goofy idea celebrated by a handful of friends has turned into an international phenomenon that shows no sign of letting up. Maybe you read about us on line.. Maybe you caught one of our radio or TV interviews. Or maybe you just stumbled on to our site while googling around for sites your mother probably wouldn't approve of. Or perhaps you're one of the millions of people from South Africa to the South Pole, from New York to the Pacific Northwest, who've made it your own personal excuse to party like pirates every September 19th (and sometimes for days before and after)!
  
  However you got here, stick around an' learn all about September 19 - International Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Arrrrrgh!

Safe Passage Needed INSIDE Schools

Who would've thought there was a need for this (besides an insane person that is)?

• More than 25 people, mostly children, were hospitalized after a student discharged pepper spray at a Deering neighborhood elementary school Wednesday afternoon on the South Side.
  
  A student brought pepper spray to Marsh Elementary School in the 9800 block of South Exchange Avenue that discharged about 1 p.m., prompting a hazardous materials response, authorities said.
  
  A Chicago Public Schools spokeswoman said the incident occurred in the cafeteria and affected 8th-graders.
  
  A Marsh student inadvertently discharged the spray and some students complained of headaches, according to CPS, which said all parents were notified.

Obviously, we need a boatload of signs IN the schools where kids can see them an feel safe along with the teachers and administrators. It's for the children you know. You wouldn't want to deprive the children, would you?

Whoops - Delayed Killing

These have to throw McCompStat for a loop:

• A man who was wounded in a shooting in August in the Austin neighborhood has died, officials said.
  
  Lamarius Tatum, 23, of the 900 block of North Laramie Avenue was pronounced dead at 6:23 a.m. today at Loyola University Medical Center, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office.
  
  Tatum was was shot at about 11:30 p.m. on Aug. 8, on the 1100 block of North Waller Avenue, according to police. He sustained wounds to his chest and back and was taken to Loyola medical center in critical condition where he later died.

So even if everything possible was done to combat the conditions that led to the eventual homicide, even if a shooter is in custody, the "commander" has to answer for something that went down 6 weeks ago and has no influence over, seeing as how the deceased was under a doctor's care for the intervening time.

Let's Ban Everything....Just Because...

Monday, the nation suffered a tragedy at a Naval Yard in Maryland when a gunman killed a dozen people. Before the bodies had even assumed room temperature, in fact, before all the bodies had even been recovered from the scene, the anti-gun crowd was in full swing trying to steer the narrative, demanding AR-15's be banned, gun controls be unilaterally implemented across the board, and demanding the NRA say something to justify yet another mass shooting.

In fact, CNN, which has spent so much time carry water for Obama that they are renaming themselves the Gunga Din Network, couldn't even remember the last time such an act had occurred on a military base:

• CAROL COSTELLO: I used to work in Washington, live in Washington. This seems so unusual to me that a gunman could create this kind of havoc at a U.S. military facility.
  
  BRIAN TODD: Yes.
  
  COSTELLO: Have you ever heard of it happening before, Brian?
  
  TODD: I'm sorry, Carol. I missed that question. Could you repeat it please?
  
  COSTELLO: I was just saying that this is so unusual, because this is such a heavily-secured military facility. I've worked in Washington for many years, I've never heard of such a thing happening.

Well, we suppose when you've been pretending that the Fort Hood Massacre in 2009 was just an incident of "workplace violence" and not a terrorist attack, anything can be new and different to you.

Then it really started to get surreal.

NBC and CBS started reporting a named suspect was being sought, after getting caught up in the same hype as during the Boston manhunt, which once again, turned out to be completely wrong. Then CNN started going on about an "AR-15 shotgun" being used along with two pistols, and then finally, a bit of truth over 24 hours later:

• The only AR-15 style weapon used was the one police killed the gunman with;

Used in the massacre? A Remington 870 shotgun, the exact shotgun deployed by thousands of police departments and armies worldwide (and advocated for by VP "Shoot thru the door" Biden), and two pistols that he stole from his first victims. So we need to ban rifles?  How does that work again?

Something must have failed somewhere, right? It's not like this guy had a criminal record, right?

Oh yeah, he did. Two separate shooting incidents that might have clued someone in to his mental instability. 2004 in Fort Worth Texas and 2010 in Seattle - what we would call Reckless Discharge or Aggravated Assaults. Neither incident was prosecuted.

And the mental instability charge we make? He was "hearing voices" for the past few years, had self-admitted anger issues, paranoia, sleep disorders and had a Navy record that ought to have raised a few red flags over his owning a gun.

In fact, Virgina background checks kept him from even getting the AR-15 he wanted.

But here comes Feinstein and the Bloomberg groups and the parents of murdered children to Washington to point out to everyone that.....what.....just about everything worked as intended except the part about keeping guns from the mentally ill, something the NRA has advocated for years, but gun groups want attached to a barge full of other nonsensical rules that serve only to disarm the law abiding?

Opportunists, one and all, making their stand on the still cooling bodies of the victims.

Judges Are Special

They must be bullet proof....and immune to logic, physics,etc:

• Getting through a security checkpoint can be a hassle. It's a modern day reality most of us have to deal with. But, some Cook County judges are thumbing their noses at strict new security measures at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse.
  
  It all started earlier this year when Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart tightened up the security procedures for the criminal courts and jail complex at 26th and California.
  
  FOX 32 and the Better Government Association have obtained copies of incident reports, showing a dozen judges are flatly refusing to obey the new rules and displaying behavior that some might call "injudicious."

Pretty much a whole bunch of cases of "Don't you know who I am?" outlined in the entire article. Judges ripping on sheriffs, blowing through checkpoints, refusing to answer basic security questions, fighting with Dart and his people, etc. In other words, childish bullshit typical of Cook County politicos.

Robbing Peter to Fix Paul's School

Rahm doing a little soft-shoe tap dancing for the media:

• Even as Chicago Public Schools has closed about four dozen schools and blamed a financial crisis for slashed school budgets across the city, Mayor Rahm Emanuel this past week has been busy announcing district construction projects.
  
  On Sunday, the mayor was at Gallistel Elementary Language Academy on the Southeast Side, pitching plans for a new $35 million elementary school to be built nearby to ease overcrowding. Parents complain that the site is potentially toxic, lies near a highway and was acquired in a land deal that profited a relative of former Ald. Ed Vrdolyak, who served prison time for his role in a real estate scam.
  
  On Monday, Wildwood Elementary in the North Side community of Edgebrook got the answer it wanted after months of complaining at board meetings about classes being conducted in hallways: A $15 million annex that will address the overcrowding and be ready in fall 2015.
  
  On Tuesday, the East Garfield Park community, which has seen a spate of school closings this year, was told that Raby High School would be refurbished and turned into a science- and math-focused high school. Two of its feeder schools, Melody and Faraday, will receive new computer and engineering labs to get students ready for Raby. The total price tag: $24 million.

That screams "plenty of money" to us...how about you?