Primary fever has hit the Land of Lincoln.
Looking at the TV ads of Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders, it’s hard to discern whether Sanders is running against former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton or Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (currently at a “secure, undisclosed location,” we can all sure).
Or maybe Sanders wants to run for Mayor of Chicago, who knows...it’s difficult to tell…
It’s probably a very good strategy for Sanders to run against the most unpopular politician in Illinois at the present time (and given Governor Bruce Rauner’s job approval ratings, that’s saying something). After all, according to the latest polling data, Secretary Clinton leads Senator Sanders by over 30 percentage points for the March 15th primary. (For the record, I suspect that Clinton has a comfortable lead but not that comfortable; I suspect that her lead is probably in the 10-15 point range.) In some parts of Illinois, there has been record-breaking early voting turnout, so it’s difficult to measure any possible useful momentum that may have been generated by Sanders’ upset victory in the Michigan primary on March 5th (early voting started in Illinois Feb. 29th). Given those factors, I wouldn’t quite call Sanders’ “all Rahm, all the time” strategy to be a “Hail Mary” strategy, exactly, but it’s pretty close.
I don’t think that it’s unfair to suggest that Sanders is hoping to use the Clinton/Emanuel alliance to scapegoat Hillary Clinton for Emanuel’s mayoral sins like the closing of many public schools or the suppression of the Laquan McDonald tape prior to the 2015 mayoral election.
I don’t mean to suggest that it’s unfair for Sanders to do so. This is Chicago politics, after all, we’ve seen far worse.
But don’t be surprised if Sanders’ gambit ultimately fails.
Remember, that ALL politics are local.
There is a ballot option in Cook County far more useful for expressing electoral outrage about Rahm Emanuel than Hillary Clinton.
Cook County State’s Attorney, Anita Alvarez.
Josie Duffy’s November 24, 2015 post lays out a lengthy and damning number of various actions emenating from the state’s attorney’s office. Ms. Duffy’s story is well worth a reread; from Ms. Duffy’s story, I will only excerpt a portion of the story outlining Alvarez’s role in the suppression of the Laquan McDonald case.
Prosecutors knew about this shooting a year ago and had access to the footage. According to the Chicago Tribune, "Alvarez said she has never seen anything like the video in her three decades in law enforcement. She called the video 'graphic,' 'violent' and 'chilling' and said that it 'no doubt will tear at the hearts of all Chicagoans.'"
But she didn't charge Van Dyke last October. In fact, she didn't charge him for thirteen months. She only charged him with murder after a judge ruled that the dashboard camera footage would be publicly released.
Alvarez claims she was waiting for state and federal investigations to finish before charging Van Dyke, but many believe she was trying to protect the cop. “There are an average of 50 police shootings of civilians every year in Chicago, and no one is ever charged,” said Craig Futterman, one of the attorneys that investigated the story, to the Chicago Reporter. “Without the video, this would have been just one more of 50 such incidents, where the police blotter defines the narrative and nothing changes.”
Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn published his own indictment of Anita Alvarez in his Friday column.
As if remembering Alvarez’s role in the suppression of the McDonald video and all of her other malefeseance wasn’t enough, I ran across this In These Times story about Alvarez’s refusal to charge (now deceased) cop Richard Fiorito.
It typically went like this: Fiorito would stop drivers, usually in the Lakeview area, on suspicion of driving drunk. He would then—though not always—conduct a sobriety test on the driver. Regardless of how they performed, Fiorito would record them as failing and charge them with a DUI, often making up details about their drunk driving. The accused, eager to avoid a DUI on their record, would enter a plea bargain and plead guilty to lesser charges.
Fiorito’s actions had the additional ignominy of being tinged with homophobia. Because he worked in Chicago’s “Boystown” neighborhood, a large share of Fiorito’s victims were in the LGBT community, and many accused him of using homophobic slurs while arresting them.
Between January 1, 2007 and June 6, 2008, Fiorito made a whopping 313 DUI arrests; in 2006, he made 230. Given that police officers typically work a 40-hour week, Fiorito was operating at a rate of nearly one DUI arrest per day. For this seemingly zealous devotion to keeping Chicago’s streets free of drunk drivers, Fiorito was honored by both Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Alliance Against Intoxicated Motorists, which named him a “top cop.”
Fiorito was eventually taken off the streets and put on desk duty after dash cam footage emerged in 2009 contradicting Fiorito’s own police report about a different DUI charge. By the time he resigned, Fiorito stood accused of fabricating at least 40 DUI charges, and the Cook County state’s attorney’s office had to drop charges against more than 130 motorists arrested for drunk driving by Fiorito.
When I first arrived at DK almost six years ago, I made an occasional comment about these various cases of “driving while gay.” I was involved with a local gay activist group then, and I’d heard that there were 10-15 of these charges of false arrests that had already been filed. And what did Alvarez do?
Despite the 40 witnesses accusing Fiorito of falsifying charges, and the video footage which showed Fiorito lying about one arrest, Alvarez refused to bring any charges against him. Her office claimed at the time to have been investigating the officer for a year, but one source ChicagoPride.com it was really closer to one month. And in fact, Fiorito had been allowed to keep working as a police officer, making arrests and testifying under oath, even as civil rights lawsuits against him piled up.
Alvarez’s Chief of Staff Dan Kirk explained to reporters at the time that the state’s attorney’s office was declining to prosecute Fiorito because a number of witnesses had “severe credibility issues,” a statement Dean viewed as “a slap in my face.”
According to the latest poll that I could find, Anita Alvarez maintains a lead in the Cook County State’s Attorney race over challengers Kim Foxx and Donna More; it is to be noted that much of that appears to be due to name recognition. In the meantime, a number of black and Latino elected officials (including Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and U. S. Representative Luis Gutierrez) have endorsed Kim Foxx.
I have been talking to reading and watching the local news and talking to various friends and neighbors about the upcoming primary.
I am not hearing any populist-type anger against Hillary Clinton because of her alliance with Rahm Emanuel. Mostly, people seem to feel “meh” about Hillary.
I am hearing a lot of anger against Anita Alvarez.
I know that when I voted March 1st, I did not think of Rahm Emanuel at all when I looked at my choices for the Democratic nomination for President.
I did think of Rahm Emanuel and, specifically, the Laquan McDonald case when my touch screen showed me the contestants in the Cook County State’s Attorney Race.
I doubt that I am the only voter that might think that way.
There was a nice profile in the Chicago Reader detailing the background and career of Kim Foxx. Give it a read.
And if you live in Cook County, vote for Kim Foxx on March 15th (if you haven’t already).
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Well, The Human Rights Campaign endorsed Republican Mark Kirk for reelection to the U.S. Senate over presumptive Democratic challenger Tammy Duckworth.
I saw this one coming a year ago. I was neither surprised or mad about it, really.
I DID NOT see this one coming.
Lost in the coverage of Friday night’s protests was the announcement that Republican U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk, viewed as one of the most politically vulnerable senators seeking re-election, said he would support Trump if he won the GOP presidential nomination. Kirk’s comments came during an interview with WMAQ-Ch. 5 before the Trump event was called off.
According to the Duckworth campaign, Kirk told Channel 5 “If he’s the nominee, I certainly would,” when asked about endorsing Trump.
The Duckworth campaign’s response…
“Two men are making news in Illinois tonight. One of them recently said people ‘drive faster through’ black neighborhoods, called a U.S. Senator a ‘bro with no ho,’ and suggested President Obama’s end goal for the Iranian nuclear agreement was to ‘get nukes to Iran.’ The other man is Donald Trump.
I think that when the Human Rights Campaign is finished with their latest round of champagne and finger-foods, they have some explaining to do.
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There have been plenty of reports and stories about the cancellation of the Trump rally in Chicago, Friday night.
Great job by the protestors.
There has been plenty of coverage of the Trump rally here at DK including here, here, here, and here. The comment sections have plenty of tweets along with several comments of those that were at the rally. I have nothing more to add to that but I did run across an interesting story at DNAInfo (a local newsblog) by Jen Sebella called “A Brief History of Chicago Throwing Shade At Donald Trump.” Needless to say, Chicago’s love-hate affair with Donald Trump leans strongly to the “hate” side of the spectrum.
THE SIGN
When the Trump Tower was constructed in 2008, its design was critically acclaimed. But in 2014 when Trump decided to add a massive sign to the Chicago River side of the skyscraper, things got ugly.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel joined aldermen, Pulitzer Prize-wining architecture critic Blair Kamin and other architecture writers in condemning the sign, calling it "architecturally tasteless," even though aldermen had approved it a year prior. Trump, of course, fired back.
"Everybody loves it. We have people who just love it," Trump told NBC's Matt Lauer. "We're getting phone calls literally by the hundreds and thousands. Including tweets on Twitter."
Ultimately, the sign went up. But Chicagoans didn't give up without a fight: City Hall passed an ordinance making it more difficult to put signs on Downtown buildings, and the sign was added to a "Chicago Disaster Tour," which also includes sites of the Eastland Disaster and the Battle of Fort Dearborn.
Oh, and at one point some locals organized to push the Tower itself into the river. Though that didn't pan out.
First of all, as someone who first learned the urban nomenclature “throwing shade” from my fellow black gay men on the Christopher Street piers in the mid-1980’s, I remain simply unprepared for the frequent use of that phrase in 21st century culture right. Second, the examples of “shade” that Ms. Sebella points out (even the Trump billboard tagged by a Bernie Sanders supporter) are not all that. But, I will say that the shade thrown at the UIC Pavilion on Friday night was fierce.