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| BEAVERS: Will he speak? |
It
hasn’t!
IN
FACT, THIS particular legal battle will come back to life this week, as the
postponed trial of the Cook County commissioner will finally get underway –
after having started up back in December, only to be put on hold ‘til this
week.
It
is interesting for the way that the Jackson and Beavers families have tried to
set themselves up as the political powerbrokers for the South Side. Now, it’s
like the area is leader-less.
In fact, I recall one political pundit
suggesting that the special primary election for the Illinois Second
Congressional District seat was influenced by that fact – since local voters
for the first time in a long time didn’t have a Jackson or a Beavers telling
them who they should vote for.
Could Robin Kelly’s efforts to gain
influence in the Congressional post be aided by the fact that she may not have
either a Jackson or a Beavers standing in her way to try to keep her from
becoming too powerful?
THERE IS A sad aspect to this political
situation – mostly that both Jackson and Beavers appear to have been taken down
for “criminal” affairs that border more on stupid than venal!
Jackson is the guy who pleaded guilty
recently (and faces sentencing some time in June) for using money from his
campaign fund to make all kinds of personal purchases.
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| JACKSON: Awaiting his fate |
He’s going to be the guy who took all
those financial donations made to his fund and used them to buy Michael Jackson’s
hat (too bad he couldn’t get the iconic glove!) and all kinds of other bits of “memorabilia.”
I suppose he could have tried claiming
that he was buying them to decorate the Congressional office, and that they
would have been passed down to whomever eventually succeeded him in office. I
wouldn’t have bought it, mainly because I would think a future member of
Congress wouldn’t want to be burdened with such junk.
AT LEAST BEAVERS didn’t bother to
accumulate all kinds of junk with the purchases he made using campaign funds
that federal prosecutors want to claim are criminal in nature.
For Beavers is the guy who, like many
other South Side residents, likes to indulge his gambling tendencies at the casinos
in Northwest Indiana.
Not that far across State Line Road,
literally, is the Horseshoe Casino, where prosecutors say he spent a good share
of the $225,000 in campaign funds that was not properly reported as income
(which means paying a share of it as taxes to the Internal Revenue Service).
As though if Beavers had reported the income
and paid taxes, there’d be nothing illegal about him using the rest of the
money to gamble with.
NOT THAT THE public would feel that way.
They’d be just as outraged. But this is the technicality upon which the feds
will be out to get Beavers. Which literally does make it seem a bit like Al
Capone – except that Beavers’ underlying actions are nothing more than being a
political blowhard (not like Capone being the bootlegger in violation of the
now-defunct Volstead Act).
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| KELLY: No Jackson or Beavers in her way |
What will be interesting about this case
is whether anyone buys into Beavers’ claim that he’s being persecuted by the
federal government because he wouldn’t wear a wiretap and help gain evidence
against fellow Cook County commissioner John Daley.
I’m skeptical, in part because that “Daley”
name is held just a bit too sacred by too many people. Besides, the only way
Beavers gets to bring up that claim during his trial is if he’s willing to
actually say it for himself by testifying.
Beavers using his sense would keep his
mouth shut. But then that turns this trial into a petty tax case that was
hardly worth the government’s effort to prosecute – except to the degree that
it satisfied the political partisanship of certain people who couldn’t beat
Beavers (or Jackson, for that matter) on Election Day.
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