Preckwinkle: 'Rahm the emperor has no clothes'

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle stuck her boot right up Rahm's rear end yesterday in a speech to the Union League Club. Of course Preckwinkle was simply saying what everyone in this city already knows about the“miserable" state of public education under mayoral control and Rahm's failure to do anything meaningful about the alarming rise in gun violence in the city.

“Clearly this mayor and this police chief [Supt. Garry McCarthy] have decided the way in which they’re going to deal with the terrible violence that faces our community is just arrest everybody.” -- Sun-Times

And then on school reform::

 “I think we’ve failed our young people and we’ve failed our young people because graduation rates are so anemic, particularly for young men of color … and . . . I think as a society, we have to focus more on our public education system and devote frankly more resources to it,” she said at a news conference after the luncheon. “We live in a country, unfortunately, in which we’re much more willing to spend money on keeping people in prison than we are educating them in our public schools, and that’s disgraceful.”

While she tried to soften her comments later, it was too late. The cat's out of the bag. The emperor has no clothes and Preckwinkle has jumped out as a possible Rahm opponent in the next mayor's race.

She's right on of course. More than 17 years of mayoral control of the schools combined with school closings, turnarounds, teacher bashing and privately-run charters have done nothing to close the so-called achievement gap.

However much I like TP calling out the mayor, I don't see where she's doing anything much better --cutting the budget for county health facilities and mental clinics resulting in more and more prisoners in County Jail.

Rahm's flack, Sarah Hamilton responded to TP's verbal assault on the mayor with a duh remark of her own (there were many at yesterday's luncheon):

"Criminals deserve to be arrested.” 

That's right. She said it. Now you know. Criminals are bad.

How's about we start with Daley's son Patrick and  his nephews, the Vanecko boys?