Politics
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Posted
by Michael Miner on
Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 3:18 PM
Republicans from Newt Gingrich on down who have been trying to
hang Saul Alinsky on Barack Obama are handicapped by their apparent failure to have any idea who it is they're talking about.
Alinsky was a community organizer born and raised in Chicago who worked closely with friends in high places in the Catholic Church. On what was probably his last visit to Chicago before he died in 1972, Alinsky appeared at the First Unitarian Church of Chicago, spoke sympathetically of the middle class and dismissively of demonstrators, and said the only way to change the system is from within it. He also spoke about demonizing the opposition. An organizer can't afford to grant that the enemy is 45 percent good and 55 percent bad, he said, because "people won't put themselves on the line for 10 percent."
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Tags: Saul Alinsky, community organizing, Studs Terkel, First Unitarian Church of Chicago, Video
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Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Posted
by Ben Joravsky on
Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 4:26 PM
Believe it or not, I have an old friend who works for the central office at the Chicago Public Schools.
I won't reveal his/her name 'cause if I do, Mayor Emanuel will have a fit and send him/her a dead fish for even talking to me.
I'm not sure what the mayor has against me. It couldn't have been anything I wrote—or over the fact that I went to Evanston while he went to New Trier. Those old high school rivalries last forever!
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Tags: Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Chicago Teachers Union, Chicago Public Schools, New Trier High School, The Office
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Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Posted
by Sam Worley on
Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 1:14 PM
Oh, hey—did you catch the Super Bowl? Yeah, me neither. I still don’t even know who was playing. I was at the grocery store buying chicken thighs and canned diced tomatoes. But I did watch the halftime show! And I watched that
two-minute Clint Eastwood spot—the one people are saying is
basically a campaign advertisement for Barack Obama? “Halftime in America”? Nominally it was a Chrysler commercial. God, what a bunch of maudlin schlock, right? What was the deal with Clint Eastwood’s voice? If this is what the campaign’s going to be like, I’ll take those pie-in-the-sky proposals for lunar colonies any day. You know what else the campaign could use? Some YouTube videos of cute kids. A humble suggestion, after the jump.
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Tags: Super Bowl, Halftime in America, Chrysler, Clint Eastwood, Barack Obama, Video
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Monday, February 6, 2012
Posted
by Michael Miner on
Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 8:57 AM
The Michigan primary was the last day of February. “I don’t want to have to actually campaign there,” the Front-runner told his marketing guy, who carried the title of Traditional Values Articulator.
“I’m coming home. I just want to feel the love.”
“They haven’t had much to love in Michigan for a long time,” said the TVA.
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Tags: Mitt Romney, Michigan, Republican presidential primaries, George Romney, Self-deportation, Creative destruction
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Thursday, February 2, 2012
Posted
by Steve Bogira on
Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 9:48 AM
Headlines in the
San Antonio Express and the
Tampa Bay Times this week declared the nation's cities to be "almost free of segregation."
USA Today reported that blacks were "less segregated than ever before." The
Sun-Times noted that while Chicago remained the nation's segregation capital, the city "has experienced some of the sharpest declines" in the nation in big-city segregation in the last ten years.
These rosy revelations stem from a new study, brightly titled "The End of the Segregated Century," funded by the conservative Manhattan Institute. Many of the conclusions reporters have drawn from the study are exaggerated, and some are simply wrong.
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Tags: racial segregation, Chicago, The End of the Segregated Century, Manhattan Institute, Separate Unequal and Ignored, 2010 census, Bloomberg View, Edward Glaeser, Chicago-Joliet-Naperville metropolitan statistical area, housing projects, ghettos, racial prejudice, black migration, New York Times, Douglas Massey, Brookings Institution, William H. Frey, West Englewood
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Posted
by Ben Joravsky on
Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 8:00 AM
I was out of town over the past weekend, so I missed the big news that the Chicago Public Schools had directed its investigators to look into that whole rent-a-protester thing.
I was up in Michigan. Which meant I stayed in a hotel. Which meant that before I could even put my suitcase on the bed, my wife had to check the bed for bedbugs.
Thus, we have a perfect tie-in for bedbugs week at the Reader!
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Tags: Variations on a Theme, Chicago Public School, bedbugs, Chicago Sun-Times, WBEZ, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Rosalind Rossi, Reader, Julia Thiel, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes
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Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Posted
by Deanna Isaacs on
Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 2:59 PM
The folks who gave us the
"Chicago: Second to None" campaign are about to become the only game in town for Chicago tourism efforts.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced today that the city's tourism functions handled by the Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture, will be shifted to the private, nonprofit (but mostly tax-funded) Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau, beginning immediately, with the change complete by this summer. CCTB president Don Welsh will head the combined group, which has a goal of raising the number of Chicago visitors by 25 percent (to 50 million annually). But don't hold your breath: the target date for reaching that goal is 2020.
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Tags: Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Don Welsh, Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture
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Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Posted
by Ben Joravsky on
Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 5:42 PM

- Alderman Munoz, back in the day
Interesting tweeting developments coming out of City Hall . . .
Alderman Rick Munoz wants to keep the city from blocking Twitter during the upcoming G-8 and NATO summits.
Apparently, you can shut down the whole tweeting thing "simply by turning off the power to the cell phone towers," Munoz told the Sun-Times.
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Tags: Alderman Rick Munoz, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Twitter, G-8 summit, NATO summit, Chicago Sun-Times, Days of Rage, Bill Ayres, the Weathermen, Alderman Berny Stone
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Posted
by Steve Bogira on
Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 5:02 PM
On Monday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel
reluctantly acknowledged that while crime was down overall in Chicago in January, murder was up: there were 54 percent more murders this January than last.
What should we make of this? Not much. Murder rates rise and fall, and criminologists have tried forever to figure out what causes the changes, with minimal success. Moreover, when it comes to crime trends, a year shows very little, a month almost nothing.
Which is why a crime-fighting boast by the mayor earlier this month was ludicrous.
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Tags: Mayor Rahm Emanuel, crime rates, murder rates, shootings, crime prevention, City of Chicago, Deanna Isaacs, Politico, Barack Obama, President Clinton
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Monday, January 30, 2012
Posted
by Michael Miner on
Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 9:07 AM
When Newt Gingrich fulminates, the name of Saul Alinsky springs easily to his lips. President Obama is, you know, a "Saul Alinsky radical." The
race for president is "American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky."
Just about everybody who knows anything about Alinsky has weighed in on Gingrich's zany offensive, often with a guess-it-takes-one-to-know-one air of amused irony. For instance, here's how the Tribune's Eric Zorn began his remarks: "I suspect Saul Alinsky would nod with grudging admiration at the way GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich repeatedly injects his name into speeches and interviews."
And here's Philip Klein in the conservative Washington Examiner:
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Tags: Saul Alinsky, David Alinsky, Newt Gingrich, Barack Obama, Philip Klein, Washington Examiner, Eric Zorn, Chicago Tribune, NIcholas von Hoffman, Hillary Clinton, New Republic, Michael Kazin, Catholic Church
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