Chicago

A conviction in Chicago’s highest-profile police shooting in decades.

I’ve decided not to seek reelection.” These words are spoken far too seldom in American politics, but few have spoken them with better reason than Rahm Emanuel. In his nearly eight years as Chicago’s mayor, he has failed by almost any metric.

Hal Koss on the evanescent charms of Chicago’s packaged-for-Instagram “Happy Place” pop-up.

Since the invention of videotape, law enforcement across the developed world has fallen prey to the same folly: If you install enough security cameras, criminals won’t do bad things because they’ll know the cops are watching. The trouble with that view is that it ain’t so, as anybody who’s spent…

A community organizes against his library plans.

Joseph Epstein's neighborhood.

Yes, and the number is growing.

The big news out of Chicago, city of my birth and upbringing, is murder. According to a reliable website called HeyJackass!, during 2017, someone in Chicago was shot every 2 hours and 27 minutes and murdered every 12 hours and 59 minutes. There were 679 murders and 2,936 people shot in the city.…

Five nights a week, Sunday through Thursday, from 1973 to 2012, Milton Rosenberg elevated AM radio and the cultural tone generally in Chicago. Milt Rosenberg died on January 9 at the age of 92. His two-hour talk show was nothing if not anomalous. A University of Chicago professor, his academic…

I was surprised last week to learn that plans for the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago have run into local opposition.

Violence is endemic to American life. We know this because people are largely inured to it, at least when it happens to other people.

My first contact with Leon Wieseltier was by letter. The year was 1977. Written on Balliol College, Oxford, letterhead stationery, the letter informed me that I was a force for superior culture in America, one of the few contemporary intellectuals worthy of respect, and through my writing the all…

Editor's note: This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the death of Chicago newspaper and syndicated columnist Mike Royko, a fixture of the Windy City's media for more than three decades. The Chicago Tribune, Royko's final professional stop, called him the "voice" of the city in its obituary;…

Newspapers aren't just throwing Trumpoplectic fits, they're monetizing them. The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times have all rolled out clothing lines tweaking the new president. The most comic is found at the Post website, which features a T-shirt in rock-concert black…

A good way to look at the Obama era is as a giant experiment in misdirection—the Age of Missing the Point. When a huge majority of Americans told pollsters that they were happy with their health care, the administration decided to remake the entire system of delivering health care. When vast,…

Police tell the Chicago Tribune that four black people who earlier this week broadcast live on Facebook their violent attack on a white man with special needs could be charged with hate crimes. The attackers were shown to be yelling about Donald Trump and race. The Tribune has more:

Chicago

In last week’s issue, Mark Hemingway highlighted the efforts of a few brave college administrators who are attempting to push back against the demands of petulant college student protests that roiled campuses last year. In particular, the University of Chicago and Purdue—where the university…

John Bills was a Chicago city hall flunky who took some $2 million in bribes to expand the Second City's infamous red-light traffic camera system. The Chicago Tribune broke the story in 2012, and the paper has the denouement on Monday, reporting on Bills's fate: A federal judge is sending him to…

It is national news, reported with an urgency bordering on hysterical when

Is crime spiraling out of control in America? Are we letting too many dangerous people out of prison and jail? Is the nation retreating from the policies that lowered crime and restored public safety in the 1990s and 2000s?

Rahm Emanuel still is Chicago’s mayor. So far, anyway. Not that any serious students of the Chicago Way expected Emanuel to resign, even in the face of accusations that he covered up the brutal shooting of a black youth by a white cop. He might not have survived last year's mayoral election if…

On December 7, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced a federal investigation of the Chicago police department. Recent history shows that the Obama Department of Justice cannot be counted on to perform a competent investigation, but at least this particular inquiry is not without cause. The city…

On Wednesday, CNN's Dan Merica asked Hillary Clinton if she thinks Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel should step down. Clinton ignored his question, refusing to offer the former Clinton aide a helping hand in his time of need.

As Jordan Fabian of The Hill reports:

Hal Dardick and Bill Ruthhart of the Chicago Tribune report that

For the last year or so, the issue of whether or not cops have been too eager to punish -- and even kill -- African Americans has dominated the news. Yet, one very big story relating to cops and racial tension has been completely swept under the rug. Guardian reporter Spencer Ackerman has been…

One reads of the crisis in Greece.   And the one much closer to home in Puerto Rico.  The crisis, that is, that inevitably comes after spending too much and taking on more debt than it is possible even to service, much less pay down. One thinks of how unfortunate it is for the people who will now…

First Lady Michelle Obama had some strong words for the graduating class of Martin Luther King Jr. Preparatory High School in Chicago, Illinois. She advised the class on how to get past "struggles."

The Baltimore Orioles will play tomorrow's baseball game at an empty stadium. It will be closed to the public due to ongoing riots in Baltimore. 

Difficult, they say, to pass a family business on to the third generation. Proof of this assertion is the business known as the City of Chicago, run by the Daley family for two generations but now turned over to non-Irish carpetbaggers, with no future Daley in view. In the interregnum between Daley…

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is removing some of the money-making traffic cameras from the city’s intersections.  But, as David Kidwell of the Chicago Tribune writes, the mayor has:

Former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is up for reelection, and President Obama stopped by his campaign headquarters to praise his mayor.

Last night at a Democratic fundraiser in Chicago, President Obama mentioned that there are some "unpaid bills" on his desk in Chicago--which he left when moved to the White House after winning the presidential election in 2008. Here's what he said:

Sometime in mid-February, after the long winter, baseball fans are delighted to read, usually over a two-paragraph-long story buried beneath the fold in the sports pages, the tag line Pitchers and Catchers Report. They are reporting, of course, to spring training two or three weeks ahead of the…

President Obama has arrived in Chicago, where he'll spend the night before two public events in his hometown. The president did not travel with his family.

One of the Democratic party’s most loyal and powerful interest groups is, evidently, falling out of love with the Obama administration.  As Peter Sullivan of The Hill reports:

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel might be in trouble. If a recent poll is to be believed, Rahm might have trouble getting reelected.

Kristen McQueary, a member of the Chicago Tribune editorial board, has a devastating piece in her paper on Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. In short, the mayor--the former congressman and former chief of staff to President Obama--hasn't lived up to the bluster.

In Chicago (where else?) if you are busted for a serious crime you will, as Mark Niquette of Bloomberg reports, likely be:

Believers in limited government and privatization lost one of their unsung heroes with the death of distinguished economist Ed Clarke on October 10. Clarke conceived of an idea he called revealed demand, a notion that helped make the case for having the market allocate goods and services formerly…

Jean Bethke Elshtain may have been the busiest woman many of us had ever met. Shuttling back and forth between her regular teaching appointment at the University of Chicago and her settled home in Tennessee, she wrote and wrote—and wrote and wrote. Essays, talks, books, memos to fellow directors on…

The headline on this Chicago Sun-Times story is arresting, to say the least:

First Lady Michelle Obama and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel are teaming up to work on "youth empowerment," the White House announced today. They'll join together later this week in Chicago for an event on the issue.

I was watching the Chicago Blackhawks play the Los Angeles Kings in the western Stanley Cup final round when, in the second period, the television camera panned to Tom Cruise, sitting alone in a rink-side seat. “Tom Cruise is a big Kings fan,” the announcer said. 

Later this evening, President Barack Obama will head to his hometown of Chicago to attend two Democratic party fundraisers aimed to help his party help win back the House of Representatives from the Republicans.

Just as the wrecking ball was poised to swing at President Reagan’s home on Chicago’s South Side, where he lived when he was 3-4 and survived near-fatal pneumonia, President Barack Obama put brain research in the national spotlight.

In a petition emailed today to supporters, Organizing for Action, President Obama's former campaign group, uses violence in Chicago to push for more gun control.

Jake Tapper on President Obama's choice for secretary of commerce:

In a speech that addressed youth violence in Chicago, First Lady Michelle Obama compared herself to Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old girl murdered soon after attending President Obama's Second Inauguration. "Hadiya Pendleton was me, and I was her," said the first lady.

First Lady Michelle Obama is headed next month to Chicago to discuss "Youth Violence," the White House announced today. 

President Barack Obama recently went to Chicago to promote his poverty and gun violence initiatives and actually spoke a good deal of truth. “There’s no more important ingredient for success, nothing that would be more important for us reducing violence than strong, stable families, which means we…

The editors of Barack Obama's hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune, urge the president to drop the nomination of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense. The paper endorsed Obama in two presidential elections.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich talked about gun control this morning on CBS:

In 2012, 532 people were murdered in the city of Chicago, according to statistics compiled by the Crime in Chicago website. The number of people murdered the year before was 441, meaning in the city of Chicago, murders have increased by 91 from 2011 to 2012. 

Twenty years ago an editor for the Chicago Sun-Times told Neil Steinberg—at the time a young reporter for the paper—that he might someday become the next Sydney J. Harris, and Steinberg, for reasons unclear, did not punch him in the kneecaps. Harris was dead by then, but from the 1950s to the 1980s…

Illinois Republican senator Mark Kirk will return to the Senate, after suffering a stroke almost a year ago. The Chicago Tribune reports:

Former White House chief of staff William Daley is considering a run for Illinois governor. The Chicago Tribune reports:

Here's a photo of an election judge checking in voters in Barack Obama's Chicago ward--wearing an Obama baseball cap:

The Illinois Republican party claims early and absentee voting has precipitously fallen since the 2008 presidential election.

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff to President Barack Obama, is politicizing the clean-up of Hurricane Sandy and, he says he offered help to the Democratic mayors of Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Emanuel does not appear to have made the same offer to Republican governors…

Chicago's weekend body count has become a depressingly routine story:

NBC's Chuck Todd reports:

The teachers, if you ask them, resisted the fearful boot of repression and struck a blow for worker's rights:

The courts are moving with customary alacrity in ruling on Mayor Rahm Emanuel's request for an injunction that would have compelled teachers to return to the classroom this morning. Not so fast, the judge said, Wednesday would be soon enough, although “by then, the legal matter could be irrelevant.…

The schools that were supposed to be open today will not be. The teachers need more time to study an offer that gives them a raise even as the city can't really afford it and they haven't done anything at all to deserve it. This, at a time when millions in the private sector would consider it a…

No settlement as of Friday morning.  But ...

Like others who are convinced that reform of public education is possible, Bloomberg believes:

The Chicago Tribune has refused to print an anti-teachers union ad, according to the Center for Union Facts, the group whose ad was rejected by the paper. The Tribune rejected the ad by saying it had "racial undertones."

As the Chicago Teachers Union strike heads into day three, perhaps you should get to know the the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Karen Lewis. She's the one currently demanding the nation's highest paid teachers get a 19 percent pay increase. I should mention that despite Lewis being an…

“To say that the contract will be settled today [Tuesday] is lunacy,” CTU president Karen Lewis told cheering teachers.  Ms. Lewis sounded like she is digging in for the long haul when she said,

The strike by Chicago teachers continues. It is a hardship for parents and one more tough break for the students in Chicago's public schools, some 40 percent of whom drop out before graduating high school. Equally unfortunate are the 20 percent who do graduate but are still functionally illiterate.…

White House spokesman Jay Carney says President Barack Obama has no comment on the teacher strike in Chicago:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney issued a statement about Monday's teachers' strike in Chicago:

The public school teachers are going on strike in Chicago and the first worry of the people who run the city is for the safety of the children—where violence is already sky-high. The political class in Chicago has already failed in its duty to provide for the public safety. Failing to keep the…

The school attended by Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel's children remains open, even though public school teachers are striking in Chicago resulting in school closures across the city.

Former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says Barack Obama should stick with Joe Biden as the vice president. 

In campaign remarks yesterday at the Bridgeport Art Center in Chicago, Illinois, President Barack Obama praised his adopted city, where he lived before becoming president of the United States. "Chicago is an example of what makes this country great," Obama said. His audience applauded. 

David Axelrod tweets: 

Two revealing stories from today's Chicago Sun-Times. First, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel is not welcoming Chick-fil-A to his city: 

It seems the Obama re-election effort, which is now officially underway, will not be run out of Washington. The big decisions will, of course, be made in the White House where, Mark Halperin writes: 

A decade ago I found myself in a town on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, being given a tour of the local soccer stadium by the town’s mayor. During the tour he evinced great pride in their community’s support for the team despite the fact that it had not won a championship since the 1950s—the…

I said a lot of things, but Cissy did them. —Alice Roosevelt Longworth  

Judge Frank Easterbrook, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, is known for two things: First, he writes some of the crispest, liveliest opinions that the federal bench has seen in decades. Second, he has absolutely no tolerance for nonsense. Both of these traits were on display…

Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's former chief of staff, is projected to become the next mayor of Chicago. The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

On Sunday, Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Educational Association Council, instructed the teachers in her union to return to the classroom after many of them skipped school for three days last week. The unexpected move energized Republicans in Wisconsin, who took it as a sign that negative…

In Chicago elections one’s antipathies are always nicely divided. The division is usually between idealistic incompetence and corrupt quasi-competence. Corrupt quasi-competence, the way of the Daley dynasty, père et fils, for better and worse generally wins the day. The result has been that the…

Ben Smith reports: 

Yesterday on Fox News Sunday, Bill Kristol had some thoughts on former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel's bid for mayor of Chicago, particularly the media's coverage of the subject: