Lyons TLC Party Disgraced Just in Time for This Week's Municipal ElectionUpdate: Go TLC!

Here in Lyons, the village elections aren't slated by either of the two national parties. Our acrimonious elections are battles of acronyminous local parties. Our ruling faction for some years has been the TLC Party, to which the current Village President and a majority of the Trustees belong.

I did some comparative reading on the three parties up for election, then made a decision to support TLC (which I'll get into below). Soon a TLC sign decorated my front grass.

Last Thursday night I was the last one awake, alone in the quiet of my living room, when after midnight I was startled by the sound of someone tampering with my front door. No one was visible out the windows. To my relief, it turned out not to be a burglar, but a stealth campaigner handbilling all the neighborhood doors with a note to watch the local Fox News broadcast for some disturbing news about Village President David Visk. The signature "TLC = MVP" indicated it was probably from the third faction in the election, the UCP.

What they showed about the Village President wasn't pretty.

Here's Part 1:




And here's Part 2:




In our usually tightly contested elections, the TLC has squeaked by with a thin plurality time after time. After this bombshell dropped, the once prolific TLC signs have been disappearing all over town. My own street's front yards are denuded of all of them, including the one in my recycle bin. TLC is toast.

So now it's effectively a two-way battle between MVP and UCP.

The campaign literature has as little meat on it as one would expect. Every party lists candidates who have a face, a name, an age, usually a spouse and some number of kids. They've lived in Lyons for a number of years, have usually worked some job, and don't say much in particular about what they'll do if elected. So, how to pick?

MVP has a "progressive vision" for Lyons and lots of union endorsements. Say no more. Pass!

UCP has a 27 year old candidate for Village President named Getty, whose father was indicted by the Feds. The Gettys are a local oddity. One of them has run on the ticket for mayor or village president every election during all my time here. In addition, before the national, state, and county election, the Gettys mail out letters to the registered voters of our community with their endorsements of every race (congressional, judicial, etc.), with no substantial reason given for their choosing them. I'm sure I'm not the only voter who wonders why the heck they spent so much money printing and mailing these dumb things out. Both parties are represented on the endorsements, but in the aggregate the list sways to the Democrats.

That leaves us back with the "n***er and watermelon" guys at TLC. Can't do that either.

They all stink. I have yet to decide which stinks the least.


Update:
TLC officials rang my bell when they canvassed the block this afternoon. It gives you a great hometown feeling when the main guys running the village are right there talking to you on your front lawn. (How many Chicagoans have ever actually seen Mayor Daley?). And, by the way, I'd bet the ranch they don't even know this blog exists as of this writing.

We spoke for some time, and Mr. Visk gave me a personal apology. He offered to send Dick Schuppe by later. I've met both men before and have come to like them, which deeply saddened me more than your average Lyonsian when this broke.

My reasons hold for not supporting Son O'Getty, and there's now a better reason not to support the MVP candidate for Village President. While Patty Krueger served as Village Trustee, an angry elderly woman asked her how much money she stood to gain from a land development project. Using the village attorney, Krueger has sued this lady for the outburst four times including appeals, finally demanding to settle with an apology and $5,000 damages. According to UCP literature, the lady has run up over $30,000 in legal fees. That sort of bullying of a citizen for speaking up at a village council meeting is not the sort of leadership we need.

Go TLC!

The Allen Family in Mozambique

When my oldest son went to preschool, I would pick him up after school was out and would stay afterwards out back to chat with Dan Allen, one of the few other dads who wasn't working a job that time of day. We would adjourn to the schoolyard, with his kids and mine running ahead and climbing all over the playground equipment.

In those days, Dan and I spoke of many things. Dan is a deeply convicted and devout Protestant, and I the same thing, only Catholic. We discussed abortion, evil cultural influences on children, Islam, and morality. We spoke of sin, redemption, forgiveness, faith, heaven, and hell. We saw something unfold over time, a truism I first heard from Mark Crutcher at one of his seminars I'd attended 15 years before - namely, that because religious conservatives seek, affirm and embrace that which is true, they find more in common with each other beyond sectarian lines than they do with liberals bearing their own denominational label, who reduce and deny that which is true.

All the while our children played near us, sometimes cutting in competing for our attention. His two beautiful little girls had a way of hugging each other "sorry" when they'd accidentally hurt one another, and would hug my kids when they accidentally hurt them.

Those people are very far away from me now. After having given the matter much prayer and thought, the Allen family - Dad, Mom, and girls - sold their home, packed everything up and went off to Mozambique to do missionary work for their church. I've added their new blog to my blogroll.

Personally, I wouldn't do that with my kids. Mozambique is poverty stricken, AIDS ridden, and not as safe as America. By Dan's first blog entry alone, it looks like the country suffers from poor infrastructure, scarcity, and overpricing as well. Personalizing the situation by imagining my own family in it clarifies in my mind why the Catholic Church defines unmarried vocations for missionary priests, brothers, and nuns. But this family feels led there by the Spirit to do God's work, to bring the Gospel and loving hands to the people of Mozambique.

And so they have. And so they do. I pray for their success and eventual safe return.

Boy Eating Halloween Flesh Fries. Yechh!

Between the school party and trick or treating, our kids got lots of loot on Halloween. And because we strictly ration their candy consumption, they still have lots of Halloween loot.


A couple days ago, Patrick dug through his bag (the one from the school party, not the trick or treat bag) and found a sealed black plastic bag from one of his classmates. Inside that bag was a wrapped french fries cup that held 5 candy severed human fingers.

Here they are out of the package.

Yechh! Even though they're made of the same gummy stuff they make chewy fruit snacks out of, no one would actually raise one to their mouth and take a bite of it, would they?

No, wait. Oops!

Even kiddom has its limits. One bite is all he took, and so they remain back in the cabinet to this very day.

Takers?

Added: Glenn Walker's French Fry Diary has more on these foul confections here.

Can I Get the Padding in Mauve?

Now that it's official that I'm on board St. Blogustine, I've been given my monk's garb, and writing desk, and shown to my cell.

I had to have my head Photoshopped onto St. Augustine and come up with a personal tag line in Latin, but what to do about the tag line? Since I don't know Latin, I could either coopt a listed saying or motto or run my own concoction through an online translator.

Matt sent word back that he would run the picture I submitted even though my head is too big (which it always has been in the Real World). That's pure inspiration that describes me, and thus became my signature phrase on the front page:

"Meus Caput Capitis Est Nimius Magnus"

(My Head Is Too Big)

All human readers are invited to correct any flaws in the robo translation in the comments or by email.

Update: My friend Todd emailed me this, which I'll go ahead and accept at face value since I know nothing of this subject.

I am a beginning Latin student so take all of this with a grain of salt. Latin uses different "cases" for nouns if they are the subject of a sentence or direct object or indirect object, etc. Caput means head used a subject. Capitis is a possessive meaning of the/my head. Capitis is also second person plural meaning you take or receive. Obviously this was done on purpose to torment Latin students.

Word order in Latin is not terribly important. Latin uses different forms of the word to tell us subject and object, while English more so uses word order. That said, the most common word order is noun adjective verb. For "my head is too big," I suggest Caput meus nimius magnus est. Free advice and worth every penny.

Done. Thanks, Todd!

TheSeriousBlog and StBlogustine

The resolution of a few short conferences with Matt Cassens is that St. Blogustine is officially our team blog. Over there, I'll post issues related pieces that are national in scope, and here I'll keep everything else, the lighter and more personal stuff. St. B has a larger, established readership that's come to expect a National Review Online lite, and thus much of what I find amusing to post wouldn't have a happy home life there. The Serious Blog will stick around for the less serious stuff.

On St. Blogustine, we discuss how the USCCB is playing post-election catch-up ball. The bishops are defunding ACORN, now that they've done so much damage over these many years, funded in part by Catholic money.

The conference failed to unify against Obama before the election, and consequently now risk shutting down the nation's Catholic hospitals because of Obama's support for FOCA. There's a little you can do yet to fight FOCA.

If Only He Were President

Friday was the parent-teacher conference at the school and, per laws of physics, the chain of parents ahead of me extended over their alloted face time with the teacher; thus, arriving at the appointed time entailed a wait out in the hall. In anticipation of parental wait times, the teacher hung up essays written by the entire first grade class out in the hall, entitled If I Were President.

With one exception, every child's essay's points were confined to the following:

• I would stop the war in Iraq.
• I would bring all the soldiers home.
• I would give the poor people money.
• I would give the poor people food.
• I would move into the White House.

Two of the boys added "I would play" as the final point.

My son reports that the entire first grade class except himself voted for Obama in the mock election. Were they under the misimpression that we don't give money and food to the poor people now, and that Obama's the only candidate who would do it? Who guided them to think that the only policies worthy of the President are of pacifism and redistributive socialism?

As I said, there was one single exception to the above manifesto; I'm proud to report that my son singly strayed from the lockstep with this opening sentence of his essay:

First, I would stop uborshin.

You done your daddy proud, son!

The Democrats Want to Confiscate Your Retirement Portfolio

Got money in an IRA, 401k, or pension plan? Now that the election is over, the Democrats have wasted no time to remove the boxing gloves, and hatch plans to reach their bare fingers into your savings - and move all of it to the Social Security Administration fund.

Read my post on St. Blogustine for more.

Now that you Obama voters drunk yourselves blind on Obamania and did something stupid on election day, how come I have wake up with him in the morning?