A recent post on one Rogers Park blog began: “Proof that Barack Obama is a friend of Satan.” Another asks, “Commander Sobczyk, what are you planning to do about GANGS, sir, like the Latin Kings, Gangster Disciples, and whatever other SCUM roam the streets of the 24th District?”
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“Of the tens of thousands of local officials in the United States, the choice of a shady, ineffective, unresponsive official like Joe Moore seems odd indeed,” Tom Mannis wrote at the Chicago News Bench (rogersparkbench.blogspot.com). “The only good thing about this is that the Nation didn’t waste any paper on it; the ‘awards’ are online only.”
On the Broken Heart of Rogers Park (morsehellhole.blogspot.com), regular contributor “Hugh” responded with a series of entries. One had the straightforward heading “Joe Moore Is an Abomination of a Choice”; another, called “On the Twelfth Day of Christmas,” listed things “my Rogers Park true love gave to me,” from “12 high school students rumbling” to “2 corner boyz dealing/And a red-capped vial of crack.”
Mannis maintains that bloggers are a bigger problem than Moore will admit and that they cost him votes in 2007, when he barely won reelection. Since then, Mannis says, the alderman’s staff and supporters have tried to intimidate him by sticking a camera in his face or standing in front of him at community meetings. He says that last summer things escalated to the point that a Moore supporter threw a beer at him at a street fair. “They’re just very hostile,” he said.
