Chicago Tribune endorses Emanuel, Tribune staff on drugs?, John Kass of Tribune slammed Obama and Emanuel

“Why has Obama, for over 2 years, employed numerous private and government attorneys to avoid presenting a legitimate birth certificate and college records?”…Citizen Wells and millions of concerned Americans

“Why did the Illinois Senate Health & Human Services Committee, with Obama as chairman, create and push Bill 1332, “Illinois Health Facilities Planning Act,” early in 2003, which reduced the number of members on the Board from 15 to 9, just prior to rigging by Tony Rezko and Rod Blagojevich?”…Citizen Wells

The Chicago Tribune has just endorsed Rahm Emanuel for mayor of Chicago. Does that surprise anyone? No. Emanuel becoming mayor will strengthen the hold on Chicago that corruption has had for years and continue to provide the Obama thugs a base of operations.

From the Chicago Tribune  February 4, 2011.

“The next mayor probably has a short window in which he or she can make agonizing choices and halt Chicago’s downward financial spiral. Standing in the way — some in pinstripes, others in blue collars — will be powerful beneficiaries of the status quo.

The skills and the will

This is a formidable moment. Chicagoans can best negotiate it by placing their faith in Rahm Emanuel and his ethos of dogged effectiveness. No other candidate combines Emanuel’s candor about the threats facing Chicago with the will to take necessary steps — some of them unpopular — to tame those threats.

Specifically: We’re hugely impressed by Emanuel’s forthrightness about the overarching crisis in city finances. He alone is frank about the immediate need to reform a pension system that otherwise will implode on city retirees and everyday taxpayers alike.

Emanuel offers Chicagoans a skill set, and eclectic expertise in national and global policy realms, that are extraordinary for a mayoral candidate. He is among the most able practitioners in American politics and governance. Two U.S. presidents have recognized that, entrusting him with senior leadership positions, embracing his advice and dispatching him to turn ideas into outcomes.

He has an immense network in government and politics that he can use to lure the best minds in Chicago and around the country to the task of building an even more vital city.

He knows what it will take to keep Chicago competitive in a global marketplace, to drive a school system built on competition and innovation, to protect the citizens of the city, and to shed the legacy of a government where political favoritism endures. The Tribune today endorses Rahm Emanuel for mayor.

Miguel del Valle and Carol Moseley Braun bring strengths to this race. We especially admire the independence and high ethical standard del Valle has set throughout his public career.

But it was the other major player in this crowded field, Gery Chico, who made this decision difficult. It’s rare to have two competing candidates who could do this job so well. Chico, too, has a record of effectiveness in government, particularly during his tenure as head of the Chicago Public Schools board during the first, groundbreaking wave of education reform.

Chico, though, is largely a product of Chicago government. He has built a successful career in law and public service via his hard-earned clout at City Hall. We do not see Chico as the candidate likeliest to disrupt a status quo of which he is such an integral part. That is the realpolitik reason why public employees unions have been gravitating toward Chico. And without disruption, this municipal enterprise is doomed.

What Clinton and Obama saw

Who would influence a Mayor Emanuel, in the way that Bridgeport friends and generous developers have influenced Mayor Richard M. Daley? By force of intellect and personality, Emanuel surely would co-opt others. It’s fair for Chicagoans to ask who would try to co-opt him. Consider:

Much attention has focused on the large number of companies that have employed Chico’s law firm and won business from city government. A different crowd could try to make demands of Emanuel: wealthy donors who have funded his campaigns. We hope those connections aren’t behind his vagueness over whether he, like the other major candidates, would block the Chicago Children’s Museum or any other institution from a land-grab in Grant Park.

That said, we think Emanuel embodies a healthy blend of tactical shrewdness, ethical conduct and inexhaustible energy. Emanuel could not let himself fail. He is among the most results-driven people to walk this Earth. That might mean more expletives fly and more fish corpses arrive by ground mail. But if Chicago emerges from an Emanuel mayoralty with its finances stabilized, its job market thriving, its schools improving and its middle class intact, his successes once again will have eclipsed his excesses.

Given all the enemies an effective mayor will have to make, he could be one term and done. But what a term it would be. We hope that, between now and Feb. 22, Chicago voters reach the same conclusion as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did when they brought him to the White House: This guy deserves a chance to get this near-impossible job done.”

Read more:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-20110204-mayoral-endorsement,0,6092899.story

From John Kass of the Chicago Tribune November 18, 2010.

“White House Bare-knuckle strategy to douse residency questions harkens to Obama’s 1996 state Senate race”
“Rahm Emanuel’s campaign demanded Wednesday that his opponents condemn efforts to challenge his candidacy and knock him off the Chicago mayoral ballot.
“News reports indicate that political operatives are organizing an attempt to limit the choices of Chicago voters in the mayoral election,” Emanuel spokesman Ben LaBolt told reporters about my Wednesday column.
That column detailed the coming legal challenges to Rahm’s candidacy. These include the fact — confirmed by all sides now — that while he lived in Washington, Emanuel was twice purged from the Chicago voter rolls yet was allowed to vote absentee even though he wasn’t living at his old North Side address.
How this was done may be explained any day now, as election law expert Burt Odelson is expected to challenge Rahm’s candidacy before the city elections board.
Naturally, the Emanuel campaign put its own spin on things.
“Every mayoral candidate has an obligation to state whether they are involved in this effort,” LaBolt said. “If they’re not involved, they have an obligation to publicly condemn it.”
That’s an admirable strategy by an able public relations guy. And I’m in agreement that Rahm is a Chicagoan and should be allowed to run for mayor. But then, there’s that irritating law, which says in order to run for mayor, a candidate must live in the city a year before the election.
Yet this highly principled demand from the Rahministas, about condemning political operators who seek to limit the choices of the voters, reminds me of a guy.
He’s a famous Chicago politician, known across the world. And he, too, used bare-knuckle tactics before the Chicago election board to knock his opponents off the primary ballot.
He not only knocked off his main rival. By the time he was done, this politician knocked all of them off — The Chicago Way.
And “voter choice”? Are you kidding? After this guy was through, voters had no choice at all. He was the only one left on the ballot.
This candidate’s name?
Barack Obama.
Yes, the very same fellow who is now president of the United States and was, until quite recently, the boss to both Emanuel and LaBolt in Washington.
In the 1996 Democratic primary campaign for the Illinois Senate, Obama used every trick in the book before the election board to get rid of his four opponents.
He didn’t challenge their residency. Instead, Obama challenged their petitions of candidacy. And years later, as he campaigned for the presidency, he was billed as a reformer, not some old-school Chicago pol.”

Read more:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-met-kass-1118-20101118,0,3391748,full.column

Someone at the Tribune is obviously on drugs.

Hell, why not endorse Tony Rezko.