Sunday, July 09, 2006

Carol Marin's Blinders

Former television anchor’s Carol Marin’s Sun-Times column Sunday explains why she wanted Mayor Richard Daley’s patronage chief Robert Sorich and his fellow defendants to be found not guilty.

I guess her message is that they weren’t close enough to Daley.

Marin refers to how the U.S. Attorney did not want Mara Georges, Daley’s female chief lawyer, to be questioned by defense attorneys about

how she could possibly be “unaware” of irregularities in hiring at City Hall when she herself had turned over patronage records subpoenaed by the feds back in 1997 that directly pointed to that.
Then, Marin includes this stunning sentence in parentheses:
It was something neither she nor the feds bothered to investigate nine years ago.
What is she talking about?

That’s the whole point of what is happening today, in my opinion.

Nine years ago, President Bill Clinton’s then-U.S. Attorney and the Daley administration completely ignored the blatant violations of the anti-patronage Shakman Decree, not to mention the accompanying fraud that can’t have been very different from what was proved in the Sorich trial.

The man U.S. Senator Peter Fitzgerald’s picked for U.S. Attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, has not had blinders on.

That, Carol Marin, is the story.

Of course, the feds and Daley’s folks did not “bother to investigate nine years ago.”

Marin needs to read more John Kass column’s. Like today’s, which explains how people like Algonquin’s Michael Hall has helped “eviscerate” the
"My client didn’t take one dime"
defense.

You know, the ones written by the guy on the State of Illinois beat in the James R. Thompson Center when Marin was a big TV news star.
= = = = =
Today’s column also reminded me of Marin’s July 31, 2005, puff piece about the pristine purity of former Democratic Party Finance Chairman and now Downstate Teachers Retirement Fund felon Joe Cari—recent TV star in the California Democratic primary—just two days before he pled guilty.

(Still waiting for a mea culpa on that one.)

(And, I'd link to the original column, if I could find it on the Sun-Times web site.)

Also posted on McHenry County Blog.

7 comments:

Anonymous,  10:34 PM  

Interestingly enough, Maras George's own husband, Michael Mutz, happened to be hired to the high ranking and well paying position of Vice Chancellor at the City Colleges of Chicago, which has the only unelected community college board in Illinois -- all board members are appointed by Mayor Daley. George claims to be unaware of patronage hiring when her own spouse is a beneficiary of such a plan.

Bill Baar 6:24 AM  

There are a lot of people with blinders on when it comes to Daley. Including President Bush...

pathickey 8:10 AM  

Dear Cal & Bill,

Journalists don't wear blinders; they wear bibs.

They have political source pipelines who feed them media tucker.

Anonymous,  1:07 PM  

Talk about blinders it seems that all the media in this city has had blinders on. Mark Brown in his column when the charges were released said I knew alot of these people (City workers) were connected but I just thought that they (Daily admin) found a way around it.
Imiagine you were a high paid professional with your profession having a reputation of being some of the toughest and best ever. You spend decades giving each other awards and patting yourselves on the back telling everyone what a great job your profession has done and how great your profession is. Then someone appoints someone from out of town who comes in and shows the world you and your profession have done nothing! Someone without your contacts and connections comes in and shows that all you and your cohorts made your job look hard when it really wasn't. They come in and make it look like shooting fish in a barrel. That is the media in Chicago. All the talk of them being tough yea they were too new people but not the powerfull. They would sit and have lunch at Gene and Georgetties and write what they were told by the higher ups. How hard was it for Mark Brown or Andy Shaw or Dick Kay or Carol Marin to ask "How are all of these people from the 11th ward working for the city still?" Kass seems to be the only one to be pointing out how blatent it was! It is time for someone to look into the media in this city and find out how many were part of the problem!
Was it blinders or was it something else?

Anonymous,  7:57 AM  

'Kass seems to be the only one to be pointing out how blatent it was! It is time for someone to look into the media in this city and find out how many were part of the problem! '

Kass is fed directly from the hand of Eddie V himself. Don't kid yourself.

Anonymous,  9:34 AM  

Carol Marin is a joke. Her writing, sources, analysis gets routinely worse and worse.

She is not as corrupt as the late Steve Neal--whose pipeline was Jerry Joyce. Neal had contradictory stories, bad facts, and was so obviously doing hit pieces.

Carol Marin brought the crooks of Cicero in and helped elect HDO alderman in 12. She defended Sorich and Slattery before the conviction not understanding up the food chain or the legal issues.
Defending Cari is a real joke. She is laughed at.
She did do a good story on Jeff Fort a long time ago.

Anonymous,  11:07 AM  

757
Eddie V don't control the city and county! If he did it would be a different story. You gotta take what you can get and Kass is the only one writing about the clout and the guy on 5.

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