Local bloggers

One creative dad bought cheap bikes for himself and his family. They ride and take the train instead of having a second car. If it's feasible for you to combine bike and public transit, or just use public transit, instead of driving, that may save you a significant amount of money, depending on where you live. Click here for some additional ideas.

I've made a point to choose living locations that are close to transit to minimize car use. That has saved me a thousands on maintenance and insurance, on top of gas savings.

Here are a few ideas for saving money on your phone service.

If you only use a car once or twice a week, consider a car share program instead of owning a car. I-Go has been in Chicago since 200 and has many locations. Zipcar is newer, but they're rapidly expanding. If you don't need a car for daily use, this can be WAY cheaper than owning, maintaining, and paying for a parking space (or parking tickets). If there's no car share location near you but you'd use one if it was available, send an e-mail to I-Go and Zipcar and let them know there's some demand in your neighborhood. I've put in a few requests for a location in Beverly. No news yet. The closest locations are South Shore and Hyde Park.

Got any tips you'd like to share? Leave a comment.

An exceptionally written book that Barack Obama had written in 1996 had "underperformed." I remember walking into Powell's Bookstore in Hyde Park in the spring of 2000 and nearly tripped over the stacks of unsold copies of Obama's book.

The book was re-released after "the speech" in August of 2004 and became not only a bestseller, but is considered a classic in the memoir genre of books. Book Discussion groups across the country have consistently chosen this book as one of their monthly selections. That year Obama sold hundreds of thousands of copies and then was offered a generous book contract.

And if you haven't read Sentaor Barack Obama's classic memoir, Dreams from my Father, now is your chance to order it and read it.

The book traces Barack Obama's life as a child to his emergence into manhood. His life is then transformed and he at last reconciles his divided inheritance. This book will echo far into the future. The universality of its message will resonate with serious readers for many generations to come. John Presta.Reading On Walden Bookstore, on the cutting edge of online bookselling

The book, Obama: From Promise to Power, is written by David Mendell, a journalist who has covered Obama since 2003. Mendell paints an intimate portrait of the Senators life, from behind-the-scenes political tactics to his chances of winning the presidency in 2008.

Order it today from Reading on Walden Bookstore.

And if you haven't read Sentaor Barack Obama's classic memoir, Dreams from my Father, now is your chance to order it and read it.

The book traces Barack Obama's life as a child to his emergence into manhood. His life is then transformed and he at last reconciles his divided inheritance. This book will echo far into the future. The universality of its message will resonate with serious readers for many generations to come. John Presta.
Reading On Walden Bookstore, on the cutting edge of online bookselling

The outsourcing of tech support call centers to India is inspiring a new genre of humor.

...courtesy of This Modern World....

This is just plain silly.

... will be back soon. The Beverly farmers market opens its season on Sunday 6/8 at the 95th St. park and ride lot (at Longwood). At the Federal Plaza downtown, it starts up on Tuesday 5/13.

For a guide to what's in season at various points in the summer, click here.

If only high speed rail were a reality here, not just a dream....*sigh*... Here's an organization that is trying to make it a reality.

A fine bit of silliness....

This Boston Globe article offers a good perspective on Barack Obama's family.

Here's a two-fer from Chaka Khan: My Funny Valentine and Do you Love What You Feel

Here are three cyanotypes I made really quickly earlier this week. They are greatly enlarged scans of parts of small collages I threw together quickly a few months ago at school.


The original collages, and these prints, are meant to be a joke and not serious work (although I kind of like the faux Dada look of these cyanotypes) . This semester, myself and a few of my students have been making collages out of notepads bought at a dollar store. These note pads are decorated with tacky-creepy photos of babies dressed as pineapples and grapes (a sort of bargain basement Anne Geddes look). As the collages are made, they get taped to the computer monitor in the photo classroom at school, to the delight or annoyance of everyone that uses the computer.
I’ve been working with a few independent study students on alternative photo processes this semester, and we had end of semester critiques of their work on Wednesday. I made these prints and put them with the work being critiqued as a joke.


So, my first semester returning to teaching post-sabbatical is nearly at an end. Final exams are next week, then I’m off for the summer. It’s been a busy semester, with my exhibit last month and my usual teaching duties. I’m looking forward to a relaxing summer, and a return to focusing on studio work, which has been pretty much nonexistent for the past month or more.

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Many, if not most, of my neighbors in the Morgan Park Neighborhood of the powerful Democratic 19th Ward would describe themselves or be described as Reagan Democrats:

Reagan Democrat is an American political term used by political analysts to denote traditionally Democratic voters, especially white working-class Northerners, who defected from their party to support Republican President Ronald Reagan in both the 1980 and 1984 elections. It is also used to refer to the smaller but still substantial number of Democrats who voted for George H. W. Bush in the 1988 election. The term can also be used to describe moderate Democrats who are more conservative than liberal on certain issues like national security and immigration.

The work of Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg is a classic study of Reagan Democrats. Greenberg analyzed white ethnic voters (largely unionized auto workers) in Macomb County, Michigan, just north of Detroit. The county voted 63 percent for John F. Kennedy in 1960, but 66 percent for Reagan in 1984. He concluded that "Reagan Democrats" no longer saw Democrats as champions of their middle-class aspirations, but instead saw them as working primarily for the benefit of others: the very poor, the unemployed, African Americans, and other political pressure groups. In addition, Reagan Democrats enjoyed gains during the period of economic prosperity that coincided with the Reagan administration following the "malaise" of the Carter administration. They also supported Reagan's strong stance on national security and opposed the 1980s Democratic Party on such issues as pornography, crime, and taxes. Wikpedia

FULL DISCLOSURE: THE AUTHOR IS NOT AN OFFICAL OF THE 19TH WARD REGULAR DEMOCRATIC PARTY - HE IS DEMOCRAT OF THE 19TH WARD, BUT IN NO WAY SPEAKS TO OR FOR THE 19TH WARD ORGANIZATION.( Well I speak to members of the organization you know,'Hi, Guys!' Hey, Hickey - howsitgoing? Still having the night terrors about the possums in your garage? 'No, thanks for asking though. You guys have been great. Mrs. Bolger now says that the trains keep the noise of my screams down.')


John McCain could very well take 20% or more of the 19th Ward in the November 2008 Presidential Election. This same 19th Ward was a powerful force in getting Senator Barck Obama elected to the United States Senate. We know and like Senator Obama. I will not vote for Senator Obama, because John McCain is and will be much more effective as President. Barack Obama has left the effective political associations far behind him and is closer in world view to Prof. Billy Ayers than he would be to Det.Billy Higgins,CPD (ret.). That is a huge problem for Obama.

McCain will get many Democrats to vote for him over Senator Barack Obama, because John McCain is more like them.

Senator Barack Obama is impressive, but audaciously flawed in his judgment. Senator Barack Obama chose Pastor Wright and identified the insulated and well-heeled domestic terrorist Billy Ayers in his step up into Progressive Democratic Politics.

Obama eschewed the political gradus of Latino,black and white ethnic Democratic politicians and public servants. Regular Democratic elected officials rarely, if ever, get much notice in the media, because like most of us they are too busy being good at their jobs to hold press conferences or shill for Senate seats on MSNBC. They are, like their neighbors, working stiffs. The Media likes glitzy and edgy - posed photos and puff piece journalism.

Obama was born to the political purple and has the exotic resume to go along with the launch of his national political thrill ride. Obama worked closely with very smart and effective Democratic public servants in the Illinois House and later the Illinois Senate, but when he needed to move on to the national scene - those associations melted away - except on Election Days. Obama no longer cared much for neighbors who vote.

Rather, Senator Obama nested with the Progressive Democrats - the people whom the media plump up as 'really effective,' but who, in reality, couldn't get passes to the slides at Kennedy Park for a constituent - or rather couldn't be bothered: Jan Schakowsky, Toni Preckwinckle, Joe Moore, and Mike Quigley leap to mind. These elected officials run by dint of labelling because their constituents tend to be more transient than neighborhood dwellers, while real public servants return to office again and again because they deliver services and representation to people who remember them and vote accordingly. Progressive Democrats depend upon erased memory or at least very, very short-term memory.
The Progressive Democrat generally make jackasses of themselves with goofy ordinances, dubious associations, sometimes criminal activities and always get bailed out of their jam by their pals in the media. The Universities - usually University of Chicago ( which think-tanked Mayor Daley into his current tax-and-spend jackpot - CTA smart guys, the Blue Ribbon Police Haters & the dysfunctional and homicide ridden Chicago Public Schools)and Northwestern University the security blanket of Chicago Progressivism. Progressives worry more about the hypothetical 'rights' of a sexual predator's freedom to look at Kiddie Porn at Mount Greenwood Library, than with actually providing adequate police patrols around schools and playgrounds. Position papers concerning 'systemic racism and brutality' mean more to Progessives than supporting Beat Patrols in Chicago's neighborhoods, let alone treating Police Officers with respect.

The vast majority of Chicagoans and Americans are more like John McCain. McCain is a no-nonsense guy who genuinely loves his work. He does not suffer fools or foolishness gladly; McCain takes criticism for his failings, but absolutely no guff from artificial loudmouths. McCain is a Reagan Democrat. He is very much like my neighbors. I think that he get many of our votes. He has mine and two of my kids.

Two out of ten of us in 19th Ward - the 19th Ward all over America - should do the job and allow McCain to the big job.



Click my post title for article from News Room America about John McCain's wooing of Democratic Voters, following Rudy Clay's Magical Election Returns in Lake County, Indiana and Senator Barack Obama's open sprint to the nomination.


http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/

If only it were this easy...

Check out "Walking Archer Avenue" on Vote with your Feet. Cheers!

Chicago Magazine the chi-chi glossy must read for the Hip and Happening with incomes greater than combined annual take-home pay of the residents of Martinon, Papinaeau, L'Erable, and Beaverville, Illinois is getting FOX treatment.
Disposable income seems to make some folks feel so much more better than about themselves, that they 'Love the Irony' of the Ayers's Photo.

Billy Ayers' Peoples Polka on the American Flag appears to have upset some 'bitter/clinging' Americans.

A seven-year-old photograph of Barack Obama associate and onetime radical bombmaker William Ayers stomping on an American flag is all over the Internet, earning criticism from Obama’s presidential campaign.

The senator’s campaign spokesman said Obama is “appalled by the disrespect” to Old Glory, but decried efforts to associate Obama to the action just because the men know each other.

“Senator Obama is appalled by this disrespect of a flag we love and that so many have fought and died for. There is no excuse for anyone to treat that which we hold so dear with so little regard. But the politics of association required to link Obama to this picture in any way is ridiculous and a silly distraction from the important challenges facing the American people,” said Obama spokesman Bill Burton.

The picture is from a Chicago magazine article in 2001. That is the same time Obama and Ayers served together on the board of a philanthropic organization called the Woods Fund. It is also around the same time that Ayers donated to Obama’s state Senate campaign.

The Chicago Tribune reports Obama held a campaign event at Ayers’ home in 1995 as he began his political career. Obama has described Ayers, who was a member of the radical group the Weather Underground, as a guy who lives in his neighborhood — and the campaign has said they are on “friendly terms.”

http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/05/06/obama-camp-criticizes-ayers-after-flag-stomping-photo/
Ayers/Obama/ComEd/Frank Clark/CPS/Annenberg Challenge now that's a polka!

Click my post title for the Chicago Magazine tribute to the Hyde Park Polka King!

Billy Boy ain't stomping on any ComEd Dividends!

Internet journalist Larry Johnson's No Quarter has been rooting out the facts surrounding Senator Barack Obama's long and disturbing association with domestic terrorist Billy Ayers.

Johnson has pointed out the fact that young Barack Obama, in fact, worked for Billy Ayers on the Annenberg Project for a number of years - well before his sitting on the Board of Directors of the Woods Trust with Chicago's insulated terrorist.

But that is not all. Barack also was essentially an employee of Bill Ayers for eight years.

In 1995, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created to raise funds to help reform the Chicago public schools. One of the architects of the Challenge was none other than Professor Bill Ayers. Ayers co-wrote the initial grant proposal and proudly lists himself on his own website as the co-founder of the Challenge.

And who did William Ayers, co-creator of the Challenge, help select as the new director of the board for this program? Barack Obama. Barack Obama was the first Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. This appointment came at a crucial time in Barack’s life. He was on the verge of challenging longtime state Senator Alice Palmer for her job. When Barack decided to run, it is no surprise that he turned to William Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn for help in organizing the campaign and in hosting his first fundraiser in the district.

Obama served on the board for eight years until the Challenge ended in 2003. Bill Ayers was intimately involved in the Challenge over this same time period.

Now, let’s revisit Obama’s claim about Ayers in the ABC debate:

“Not someone I’ve accepted endorsement of, it’s not someone I exchange ideas with on a regular basis…”

That is a lie. Both parts of Obama’s statement are obviously false. Obama not only evaded Stephanopoulos’s question, he was deliberately deceptive and misleading.

Ayers helped select Obama to exercise a leadership role on the Annenberg Challenge. And Obama wants us to believe they never talked? Never exchanged ideas? Never identified issues to raise and policies to pursue? What is Barack hiding?

Senator Obama, how did you become acquainted with William Ayers? When and how did you and Bill meet?

Maybe Barack met Bill Ayers through his wife, Michelle Obama? That is one possibility. Michelle started working at the Sidley Austin law firm in Chicago in in the summer of 1988 (and stayed there until 1991). Who else worked there? None other than Bill Ayers’ wife, Bernardine Dohrn, who worked at Sidley from 1984 through 1988. Indeed, she is widely thought in Chicago to have gotten this position due to the influence of her father-in-law, Thomas Ayers, former CEO of Commonwealth Edison, who was one of the law firm’s biggest clients.

http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/04/26/why-is-obama-hiding-the-truth-about-william-ayers-follow-the-money/

Today, Johnson directs attention to Emil Jones' best pal in the world ComEd's Frank 'The Mailroom Guy' Clark.

Clark is currently CEO of Commonwealth Edison. If that doesn’t ring a bell for you, Commonwealth Edison is the same company that boasts the well-connected Thomas Ayers as its former CEO. Mr. Ayers also served as Chair of the Board of Trustees of Commonwealth Edison after his tenure as CEO, so you can easily imagine he had a hand in selecting Mr. Clark as CEO.

Thomas Ayers was also the father of that fine upstanding citizen, “Guilty as hell. Free as a bird” domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. Isn’t that a coincidence? I guess Chicago is a small world for sure. (And it no doubt helped that DADDY had all those $$$ because Billy’s well-paid attorneys unearthed prosecutorial misconduct that kept Billy out of prison — where he belongs for all the bombs he brags about setting!)

As a relevant side note, it seems that Mr. Thomas Ayers, who died last year at the age of 92, was also a friend of the infamous famous Mayor Richard J. Daley Sr. in the 60s. According the the blog of a former member of the 1960s SDS, “He was always a man pulled between his role as a representative of big business and advisor to the Daley machine, and his basic values of equity and fairness…“.

It seems that, besides having connections with the Daley Machine, Mr. Ayers was a bit of a community activist himself, but in a much nicer way than his son was. Instead of blowing up buildings and killing and/or paralyzing people in terror, Thomas worked peacefully on civil rights. That’s why during the 11 years that his slime ball son was a fugitive, Bill was estranged from him–until of course Bill needed his Daddy to get him out of trouble. Most of us recognize that scenerio in smaller ways, don’t we? As parents, many of us rescue plenty of “independent” “upscale” Obama supporters regularly, generally financially.

Anyway, as I mentioned, Chicago is a really small world isn’t it?

As an additional side note, given the longstanding relationship between the Ayers family and the Daley family, it is suddenly more than understandable why the current Mayor Daley would speak out in defense of Bill Ayers when his terrorist activities resurfaced as pertinent to Barack Obama and their ongoing friendship. It also certainly helps to punctuate why hanging out with the connected Bill Ayers would be key to an ambitious Chicago politican who wants to Pass-Go-And-Collect-$200 in a hurry– and get to the Oval Office by skipping as many steps as possible. Look how well things worked out for Barack with Commonwealth Edison to the tune of $200,000!

I'll think about that when the lights go on.

I'm one of those guys who actually reads Vanity Fair as well as looks at the dirty pictures. Vanity Fair is the Victoria's Secret of periodical literature. My late wife Mary never allowed me to subscribe to either fine magazine and she generally purchased Vanity Fair herself at the Kroger in Bourbonnais, Illinois and only allowed me Xeroxed copies of the articles she thought would improve her husband's mind and soul.

Ten years a widower have freed me to scan Vanity Fair, but now I am more likely to become aroused by the pastry shots on the cover of Bon Appetite than by Annie Leibowitz's air-brushed shots of pouting hot babes and nightmarishly aging Hollywood Cougars. Actually it has more to do with the native propriety acquired in my 'close-knit ethnic' Catholic environment than with anything else. I read Vanity Fair, because I am also a Thackeray Geek. William Makepeace Thackeray is the author of Vanity Fair the novel that inspired Tolstoy's War and Peace , Anna Karenina and Mitchell's Gone With The Wind. R'ally, Rhett!

Christopher Hitchens, the boozy Bible battler, is one of my favorite writers and a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair. Hitchens foots a pen, like a Kerry Farmer on methamphetamine toes the turf. ' Look at that Man dig, so!'

Hitchens, who detests all forms of organized religion, is one of the most urbane and gentlemanly voices in any debate. Unlike the more strident ACLU addicted public Atheists, Hitchens sticks his rapier wit through the body of oafish bigots and lightly lettered loudmouths. In this issue of Vanity Fair, Hitchens review Peter Ackroyd's study of Issac Newton from his Brief Lives series, which dispels the popular illusion of Newton, getting whacked by an apple under the tree's shading boughs:

In contrast with this clarity and purity, however, Newton spent much of his time dwelling in a self-generated fog of superstition and crankery. He believed in the lost art of alchemy, whereby base metals can be transmuted into gold, and the surviving locks of his hair show heavy traces of lead and mercury in his system, suggesting that he experimented upon himself in this fashion, too. (That would also help explain the fires in his room, since alchemists had to keep a furnace going at all times for their mad schemes.) Not content with the narrow views of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life, he thought that there was a kind of universal semen in the cosmos, and that the glowing tails of the comets he tracked through the sky contained replenishing matter vital for life on Earth. He was a religious crackpot who, according to Ackroyd, considered Catholics to be “offspring of the Whore of Rome.” He was also consumed by arcane readings of the book of Revelation and obsessed with the actual measurements of the Temple of Solomon. Newton elected to write his already difficult Principia Mathematica in Latin, boasting that this would make it even less accessible to the vulgar. He is still revered in the little world of esoteric and conspiratorial mania, featuring as a member of “the Priory of Sion” in The Da Vinci Code. And secularists and rationalists conspire, too, in their way, to keep his mythic reputation alive. The beautiful “Mathematical Bridge,” which spans the River Cam at Queen’s College, is still said to have been designed by Newton to stay in place without nails or screws or joints, and to be supported by gravitational force alone. When later scientists dismantled it to discover the secret, according to legend, they could not work out how to put it back together again, and had to use crude bolts and hinges to re-erect it. Newton died in 1727, and the bridge was not built until 1749, but rumors and fantasies are much stronger than fact.

Rumors and fantasies are much stronger than fact and that truth is what allows Hitchens such masterful turns of phrase when considering Barack Obama's pitiful progressive patina:

What can it be that has kept Obama in Wright's pews, and at Wright's mercy, for so long and at such a heavy cost to his aspirations? Even if he pulls off a mathematical nomination victory, he has completely lost the first, fine, careless rapture of a post-racial and post-resentment political movement and mired us again in all the old rubbish that predates Dr. King. What a sad thing to behold. And how come? I think we can exclude any covert sympathy on Obama's part for Wright's views or style—he has proved time and again that he is not like that, and even his own little nods to "Minister" Farrakhan can probably be excused as a silly form of Chicago South Side political etiquette. All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, "Keep my wife out of it," or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse's influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company—and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable—then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.

I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama's 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be "read" at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language. Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she's much influenced by the definition of black "separationism" offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. I remember poor Stokely Carmichael quite well. After a hideous series of political and personal fiascos, he fled to Africa, renamed himself Kwame Toure after two of West Africa's most repellently failed dictators, and then came briefly back to the United States before electing to die in exile. I last saw him as the warm-up speaker for Louis Farrakhan in Madison Square Garden in 1985, on the evening when Farrakhan made himself famous by warning Jews, "You can't say 'Never Again' to God, because when he puts you in the ovens, you're there forever." I have the distinct feeling that the Obama campaign can't go on much longer without an answer to the question: "Are we getting two for one?" And don't be giving me any grief about asking this. Black Americans used to think that the Clinton twosome was their best friend, too. This time we should find out before it's too late to ask.

http://www.slate.com/id/2190589/

When a writer deflates the nonsense, gravity really does its job. Barack Obama's lightning run at the White House was ill-advised and arrogant. Like Newton, some ugly thoughts and not apples seem to be making history.

Christopher Hitchens - May You Be in Heaven A Half Hour Before the Devil Knows Your Dead!