Chicago Daily Observer

The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for people who can’t afford to live anywhere else.

But it’s not safe to live here.

About 99 of the units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale – a score so bad the buildings now face demolition.

It boggles the mind how a culture can lionize the recently departed comedian George Carlin while simultaneously consigning radio guy Don Imus to the lowest precincts of hell.

They both have made a raunchy career out of “offending,” yet one—Carlin—was revered and eulogized while the other—Imus—is despised. After Carlin, 71, died of heart failure last Sunday, the praise rolled in, about his genius and brilliance, his ground-breaking comedy and social commentary, his willingness to challenge the powerful, and his advocacy for free speech. He, indeed, was all of that.

Imus, in turn, got himself in trouble, again, for “insensitive” and racist remarks. He lost one job last year for describing the players on a woman’s college basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.” Now, he’s in trouble again for a comment he made about Dallas Cowboys cornerback Adam (Pacman) Jones, after another of his serial run-ins with the law. Imus asked, “What ... Read More...

Opening a Thursday news conference, Cook County Board President Todd Stroger boasted that after just 18 months on the job, he had successfully fulfilled his three main campaign promises:

• Turning over control of the juvenile center to the chief judge;

• Giving the hospital system to an independent board;

• And creating an independent inspector general’s office.

Trouble is, Stroger didn’t make most of the promises.

U.S. consumer spending rose more than forecast in May as tax rebates drove the biggest gain in incomes in almost three years, enabling households to at least temporarily overcome soaring fuel bills.

The 0.8 percent rise in purchases was the biggest since November, as Americans bought furniture, clothes and electronics after filling their autos’ gas tanks, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. Incomes grew 1.9 percent, the most since September 2005, and measures of inflation were lower than anticipated.

Fr. Michael Pfleger has reappeared on the national ABC program “Good Morning America” as some type of spokesman on race who is also against gun violence being touted as having “spent the last 30 years cleaning up his impoverished south side Chicago parish, fighting the presence of poverty, drugs, gangs and gun violence..” despite the dismal reality of the St. Sabina’s neighborhood floundering in a sea of prosperity in Chicago. Mixing partisan politics with religion has been combustible combination in Chicago for generations. The media practice of using a religious persona to somehow add legitimacy to a political cause is a failure, and in many cases obsolete.

David Axelrod is on the Board of Fr. Pfleger’s fundraising organization “Raising the Roof” at St. Sabina’s parish. Fr. Pfleger is on the Board of David Axelrod’s organization attempting to appropriate Chicago Park District property for a private charity. Fr. Pfleger is ... Read More...

“For Obama, faith is not simply political garb, something a focus group told him he ought to try. Instead, religion to him is transforming, lifelong, and real.” That’s a quote from “The Faith of Barack Obama,” published by Thomas Nelson, the world’s largest Christian publisher, scheduled to be released in early August by author Stephen Mansfield, an evangelical Christian biographer of New York Times bestseller, “The Faith of George Bush.”

Barack Obama’s name could have been invoked more at the corruption trial of his former fund-raiser Tony Rezko.

But it appears prosecutors opted against bringing Obama into the mix during the two-month trial.

Newly unsealed documents show that prosecutors sought to call witnesses to testify about Rezko’s ties to Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

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As Ben Joravsky noted recently at Clout City, one of the most familiar refrains from Mayor Daley’s enablers is that Chicago would have become Detroit if it hadn’t been for him. The good folks here at Beachwood Labs went to their computer banks to see if this was true and, indeed, this is the way life would be here if Daley had never become mayor.