WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Dept. Supt. John Escalante after 54 holiday weekend shootings: "It's a big city and it's a safe city. It's about 1,500 people driving this violence. I'm confident we'll be able to turn this around." --  DNAinfo

Arthur Goldstein

“Teachers now have a real voice in the United Federation of Teachers, and that voice will not be silenced.” -- NYC Educator

GOP Strategy

Shortly before he died, Reagan’s strategist Lee Atwater explained the game plan of the Southern Strategy in a matter-of-fact clinical policy. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘n***r’ — that hurts you, backfires,” Atwater emphasized. “So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. And you’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.” But Donald Trump doesn’t do abstract and that is what has sent the GOP into a tizzy. -- Carol Anderson at Salon

Breaking up is hard to do.

Kurt Summers

 Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s hand-picked city treasurer, Kurt Summers, is breaking away and joining the call of unions, asking Emanuel to sue big banks over controversial interest rate swap deals. 

“This has been a different question that no one around the country has asked until now. The city of Philadelphia just today joined this lawsuit and they’re in the same position we are as a city. Every municipal government or state has to look at this and pursue it fervently. Our fiscal situation is such that we don’t have a choice.” -- Chicago Tonight

 Ben Joravsky

[Rahm's] lectures go like this: a contract between a city and a bank is etched in stone and can never be renegotiated. While a contract with pensioner is written in sand and can be washed away with the tides. In short, don't mess with my banking boys! -- The Reader