WEEKEND QUOTABLES

R.I.P. 'CHUY' NEGRETE -- “He was an educator of the highest extreme,” James Edward Olmos said of the Chicago writer of corridos some called the ‘Chicano Woody Guthrie.’ “He would go to prisons. He would go to schools. He would go to universities.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) 

“One hundred percent of our focus is on stopping [Biden’s] new administration.” -- [I know this is a quote from last month. Just making a point.]

U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez 

The Bush-appointed federal judge overturned California's long-standing ban on assault rifles after equating AR-15s with Swiss Army knives. “Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment,” Benitez said in the ruling. -- Washington Post 

Carol Burris, Network for Public Education

It is easy to blame Betsy DeVos for giving a $26.6 million grant to a state whose charter sector has come under repeated fire for increasing segregation in an already segregated school system. Now the Biden administration and Secretary Miguel Cardona own the grant. Indeed, they own the whole flawed Charter Schools Program. -- Answer Sheet 

 Monica Martinez, associate professor of history at the University of Texas 

"Whether lessons about racial violence take place in classrooms or on historical markers, if you can teach people how to study how power worked 100 years ago, you are also teaching them how to study how power works today.” -- Washington Post

Carol Anderson is the author of White Rage 

For too long, the second amendment has been portrayed with a founding fathers aura swaddled in the stars and stripes...In other words, concerns about keeping enslaved Black people in check are the context and background to the second amendment. The same holds true for today. -- Guardian 

It will be a great and historic tragedy if this Dem majority fails again on gun control

A solemn group of King Soopers workers, left, some from the Boulder store and some from the same district, brought large displays of flowers for each of the victims of the mass shooting.  (Jerilee Bennett/The Gazette via AP)

It's become a familiar pattern. Dems promise mild federal gun control legislation but get no bi-partisan support so they drop the issue. Then comes another mass shooting and there's a new whirlwind of gun-control chatter that dies down again after a week or so. 

Pres. Biden did not fulfill a campaign promise to send a bill to Congress on his first day in office repealing liability protections for gun manufacturers and closing background-check loopholes.

But after two mass shootings, which took the lives of 18 people, in less than a week, he's once again promising "common sense" gun legislation, including the banning of assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines. He's also promising to take executive action if Republicans block passage in the Senate. 

But we've heard those promises before, like after the Sandy Hook killings in 2012 when Obama tasked Biden with coming up with a legislative package of gun control measures. But the effort resulted in no significant legislative action, and Obama was forced to enact a handful of relatively modest reform through executive actions.

After a February 2018 shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., students launched a wave of activism that propelled gun-control issues to the front of the Democratic agenda, including Biden’s. But since taking office, the president has been swamped by other crises, from the pandemic to the economy to immigration.

Dems fear losing Republican support on potential bipartisan issues. Trump's MAGAs threaten to block enforcement once a bill is passed. Same as it ever was. 

This was the case even in the wake of gun-toting militias storming government buildings and threatening the lives of governors and legislators. Not to mention the horrible rise in the number of shootings in cities like Chicago. 

Federal gun control, including the outlawing of military assault weapons, was dropped to near the bottom of the Democrats' legislative agenda ever since Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told Attorney General Eric Holder to "shut the fuck up" about the issue a decade ago.

And without strong, enforceable federal laws, state and local legislation becomes almost meaningless since illegal guns are easily transported across state and municipal borders. 

Then there are the courts, now loaded up with Trump-appointed judges. Three years ago, the city of Boulder banned assault weapons. A court blocked the measure just 10 days before Monday’s rampage.

It would be one of the great historical tragedies if no significant gun legislation is possible even with a Democrat in the White House and a Dem majority in both houses.

Parkland

I was in Parkland two days after the massacre in 2018. I did some interviews with parents, educators, and students at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, all shaken with anger and despair, feelings that in the following months would inspire the energy behind a movement for gun control. It was a movement led by the students themselves, that would sweep the nation and play a critical role in the political shift towards Democrats in the last election.

Like most of the country, I cheered on the dozens of students who boarded the buses to Tallahassee that day to offer their "reasonable" gun control proposals to the state legislature only to be ignored and insulted by state pols.

Now three years later, some of those feelings of grief and anger have returned as I watch video of gun-toting white-supremacist, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene berating anti-gun student leaders and mocking news of the massacre that killed 17 people at MSD and wounded 17 others and still no significant gun laws on the books. 

Rep. Greene is easy to hate unless you're one of the thousands of north Georgia Republicans who elected her. Or one of the MAGA cultists who make up a large chunk of the party's base and who cheer wildly as she promises to protect gun owners from the claws of encroaching "communists" (You know they're everywhere in Georgia). She even suggests that the horrifying school shootings were pre-staged events. 

But Greene isn't the real problem here. The real problem is that in the three years since the MSD massacre, and despite all the student protests, nothing has been done in the way of meaningful federal gun-control legislation and despite his campaign promise to ban assault weapons, nothing on Biden's current agenda indicates it's a priority for Democrats. 

That's because Dems fear losing their working-class base and red-state Republicans are threatening to block enforcement once a bill is passed. Same as it ever was.

This, even in the wake of gun-toting militias storming government buildings and threatening the lives of legislators. Not to mention the horrible rise in the number of shootings in cities like Chicago. 

Federal gun control, including the outlawing of military assault weapons, has been dropped to near the bottom of the Democrats' legislative agenda ever since Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told Attorney General Eric Holder to "shut the fuck up" about the issue a decade ago.

According to Daniel Klaidman’s book, Kill or Capture, Emanuel became enraged after hearing that Holder had given a speech vowing to keep Obama's campaign promise to ban assault weapons.

"The comments roused the powerful gun lobby and its water carriers on Capitol Hill. ‘Senators to Attorney General: Stay Away from Our Guns’ read a press release issued by Senator Max Baucus of Montana -- a Democrat, no less," Klaidman wrote. "Emanuel was furious. He slammed his desk and cursed the attorney general. Holder was only repeating a position Obama had expressed during the campaign, but that was before the White House needed the backing of pro-gun Democrats from red states for their domestic agenda."

"The comments roused the powerful gun lobby and its water carriers on Capitol Hill. ‘Senators to Attorney General: Stay Away from Our Guns’ read a press release issued by Senator Max Baucus of Montana -- a Democrat, no less," Klaidman wrote. "Emanuel was furious. He slammed his desk and cursed the attorney general. Holder was only repeating a position Obama had expressed during the campaign, but that was before the White House needed the backing of pro-gun Democrats from red states for their domestic agenda."

Focusing on Taylor Greene is too easy. She's low-hanging fruit. Now that Dems have taken the White House and there's a Democratic majority in both houses, there's no excuse not to move ahead on this and finally do justice for the murdered Parkland students and the more than 240,000 students who have experienced gun violence at their schools since Columbine in 1999.  

The NRA has gone bankrupt. Public opinion (95% of Democrats) increasingly supports a ban on assault weapons and red-states aren't all that red these days. 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

All school districts across the state of New York are cleared to open, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a news conference by phone Friday morning.

Maggie Mulqueen, psychologist

School has never been just about the curriculum. It’s also about students’ health and development...But schools can’t fill those needs while an epidemic is raging. It is quite possible that reopening schools could actually be worse for children. -- Think

Bill Gates

Commercial labs have left customers struggling with long waits, while “very wealthy people have access to these quick-turnaround tests.” -- CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS

Derrick Morgan, on jump in Black gun ownership

“Whether it was fear of a food shortage, lack of a grocery store, the short response times for law enforcement or whether people were just fearful they were going to be attacked, I don’t know,” said Derrick Morgan, national commander of the Black Gun Owners Association, to Politico. -- Black Enterprise

Trump (#OINk)...

...slammed Ocasio-Cortez as “a real beauty” who “knows nothing about the economy.” He singled out policies in her Green New Deal proposal. “She knows as much about the environment — do we have any young children here? — as that young child over there. I think he knows more,” Trump said. -- NY Post

Gun crazy!

Gun sales are skyrocketing around the country including in the Chicago area. A mainly white racist fear/rage response to Trump's looming election loss, government's pandemic "mask-wearing tyranny," BLM protests, and threatened defunding or disbanding of police is driving long lines at gun shops around the country.

In Illinois, for example, from June 1 to June 17, there were more than 42,000 applications for cards to legally possess a firearm, compared with about 7,000 during the same time last year, a 501% increase, according to the Illinois State Police.

Sturm, Ruger stock shares are at their highest level since before Trump was elected; Smith & Wesson’s stock is at a 19-month high. 

Smith & Wesson Brands Inc.’s stock SWBI, 5.33% ran up 10.1%, to the highest close since September 2018. The firearm maker’s shares have hiked up 42.2% over the past 4 sessions and have powered up 61.5% year to date. -- Market Watch

White panic-buying is overwhelming local gun shop owners. Check out this post from this firearms dealer in the Chicago burbs. 

The image of this white couple "protecting" their wealthy gated community could well become  Trump's re-election poster.

This on top of gun threats and actual shootings of peaceful protesters could presage a new level of Trump-inspired, right-wing violence. In Louisville, Ky., a man opened fire from the edge of a Breonna Taylor killing protest area in a park Saturday night, and a 27-year-old photographer was killed. Some bystanders in the park fired back, injuring the shooter, according to a police report.

Armed vigilantes opened fire on statue protesters two weeks ago in New Mexico.

In the past month, at least seven people with ties to far-right extremist group boogaloo have been arrested for attempting or carrying out violence at recent protests.

Emma Gonzalez, a survivor of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, speaks a rally 

It was just two years ago, following the school shootings in Parkland, FL that the youth-led movement for gun control had gun manufacturers and the NRA on the ropes. Chicago was the jump-off point for anti-gun rallies across the country. The Parkland students “Road to Change” tour was launched at the annual “Rally for Peace” at St. Sabina’s Church. Those students jarred the national consciousness when they were able to swiftly organize a massive “March for our Lives” rally in Washington and related marches in other cities. It was a youth movement, much like the current one but not as diverse, that many believed had the potential to derail Trump and his MAGAs.

My how things have changed. Now, with guns continuing to flood Chicago neighborhoods, gun violence has reached predictable record highs. The terrible brew of pandemic, poverty, youth joblessness, school closures, and readily available guns, has created more free-fire zone in cities like Chicago. 

After 65 people were shot, 17 fatally in Chicago last weekend, including a 1-year-old and 10-year-old Lena Nunez, in our Logan Square neighborhood, blocks from Mayor Lightfoot's home, the Mayor made a powerful statement that caught my attention. 

She said:

Everyone needs to wrap their arms around their children, not just the ones who are victims but the shooters as well, Lightfoot said.

There's a growing recognition that in many cases, but for fortune, the shooters and their victims could be interchangeable. Both they and their families are victims in their own way.

The mayor's statement stood in stark contrast to the Trumplike one made by CPD Supt. David Brown who targeted those he called, "these evil murdering bastards."

He's either got to get straightened out by the mayor or follow his failed predecessors Eddie Johnson and Garry McCarthy out the door.

Cunningham's response to the devastation of black communities? Bring in 'new people'.

Just when you think we've heard the last from the disastrous duo of Arne Duncan and Peter Cunningham, they become media go-to guys on (of all things) gun violence and community development.

Remember, this was the pair that ran the Chicago Public Schools and the U.S. Dept. of Education for years, promoting austerity, mass school closings, privatization and uncapped expansion of privately-run charter schools in black communities. Their policies helped lead to the devastation of urban school districts and contributed to school re-segregation and the push-out of thousands of black and poor families from cities like Chicago.

Why media would turn to them for meaningful solutions to the problems they helped create is beyond me. But here we are.

Cunningham's Sun-Times commentary yesterday (To revive declining South and West Side neighborhoods, import people) was the most egregious. The headline says it all. Now that 300,000 African-Americans have been pushed out of Chicago over the past few decades, Cunningham sees their replacement with thousands of "new, middle-class people" as the city's salvation.

How unoriginal. I have referred to it as the whitenization of the cities. But it's deeper than that.

CUNNINGHAM QUOTES VITO...

Cunningham asks, just how do you attract the gentrifiers into formerly segregated, disinvested and isolated neighborhoods like Englewood? He turns to Godfather mobster character Vito Corleone for an answer. "Make them an offer they can't refuse."

So, what would it take to get 4,000 young middle-class families to move into these neighborhoods? The answer, or at least part of it, is affordable, high-quality housing. Sell the houses at cost.

If that’s too high, help cover the down-payment. Still no takers? Help pay their college debt or give them a 10-year property tax exemption, something Philadelphia has done.

Welp, where has that been? Why wasn't that offer made to the families who lived there before, the ones who built those neighborhoods and went to the now-closed neighborhood schools? The ones whose homes were foreclosed upon during the subprime crisis?

As for Duncan, who now runs Chicago CRED—a counseling and job placement service (not exactly what he was primed for by the Emerson Collective), he's cited as an expert on neighborhood gun violence in a Crain's column by Joe Warren. 

There, he carefully avoids any mention of gun control. Instead, Duncan appeals directly to his corporate pals, asking them to hire some gun offenders.

"My selfish interest is that the business community own this and see this as an economic problem, not a crime problem," Duncan says. "We have to hire our way out of this, not arrest our way out of this."

Yes, hire more and arrest less. But this doesn't even begin to deal with the enormous scope of the problem, as Mayor Lightfoot has pointed out in her recent jousting with Ted Cruz. 

But how do we stop the flow of guns and drugs into the city? What do we do about mass youth unemployment, disinvestment, and under-resourcing of public schools? The notion that the answer to Chicago's gun violence epidemic rests simply with more counseling and job placement is absurd on its face.

To quote the mayor:

“There’s a great need across this country for federal leadership in particular to step up and come forward with a real plan to deal with the gun violence that we’re seeing not only in cities like Chicago but really across the country.”

Duncan hasn't a clue.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Ald. Maldonado

Ald. Robert Maldonado, new chair of the Latino Caucus

“Some of our communities are being completely gentrified. We need to stop that, we need to slow it down.” -- WBEZ

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

"This awful, untrue line got boo'ed for a full minute. John Delaney, thank you but please sashay away." -- The Hill

Howie Klein

Maybe the tent really is too big. If it's big enough for John Bel Edwards to be stinking it up from the inside, why would a normal Democrat even want to be inside it? -- Crooks & Liars

Elizabeth Warren

 “It’s not just the mass shootings. It’s the ones that never make the headlines. It’s the kids who are shot at the playground, on the sidewalk, in their own homes. Gun violence touches families every day." -- Rolling Stone

Fritz Kaegi after corporate lobbyists kill his reform bill

 “Asking our office to continue using a broken system goes against the reform taxpayers and voters want. Opponents of the bill would prefer we wait longer, knowing that the longer we wait, the less likely the bill is to pass. Delays favor a broken assessment system, however, that prolongs inequality.” -- Tribune

Kevin Durant to rapper Drake

Drake was walking in the tunnel near the Warriors' locker room with his head down when Durant trolled him. "Keep your head up young fella. It's alright, it's ok. We have more games to play." -- ABC 7

Thank god former White House chief of staff and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel finally has a platform to do something about all this inequality pic.twitter.com/hWWkGFl9lo

— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan) May 21, 2019

'Flooding the zone' with cops didn't work. It never does.

There were multiple accidents involving police cars as cops raced from one shooting to another. In one collision in the Austin neighborhood involving two patrol cars, 10 officers and two civilians were injured and a woman killed.

It's hard to blame Mayor Lori Lightfoot for this Memorial Day weekend's rash of gun violence and deaths. After all, she's only been in office for a week. But I can say that her strategy of pre-weekend preventive mass arrests and then of "flooding the zone", concentrating 1,200 extra cops in targeted neighborhoods in the black community, was a bust -- as it always is.

The body count from Friday afternoon to Monday is reported to be at least 42 people shot, five fatally. This, even with severe storms keeping people indoors yesterday.

Several of the victims were shot within five hours on Sunday at the ABLA housing project on the northwest side. The second shootings occurred on the same block as the first while cops were still present and resulted in five more people being shot and two of them dying.

The Tribune's account presents a scene right out of a dystopian movie:

On Monday night, felony charges were announced against two men in the second shooting. Tevin Covens, 25, was charged with aggravated discharge of a firearm and Lawrence Wilkins, 29, was charged with unlawful use of a weapon by a felon after police found him carrying a gun at the scene, authorities said.

Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said Covens will not be charged with murder after he shot and killed one of the two men at the scene in self-defense.

According to police, Covens was shot in the face at the scene by 28-year-old Antonio Green, who also shot and killed another man, 27-year-old Martez Cox, after Cox fired a TEC-9 machine pistol into the air.

Covens, also armed, opened fire on Green, killing him in self-defense, Guglielmi said. But he said Covens also unintentionally fired shots that wounded two female victims at the scene. Guglielmi said Covens was only charged with aggravated discharge of a firearm and not aggravated battery with a firearm, which is a more serious crime, because the female victims did not want to press charges.

There were slightly more shootings this year than last, despite yesterday's storms and police saturation. But the toll was somewhat lower than in 2017 when 45 people were shot, seven of them killed, or in 2016, when 71 people were shot, six of them fatally. But I doubt that people in the community or the mayor are taking much comfort in that this morning as funeral preparations are being made.

There are viable, tested, long-term strategies for reducing gun violence, strategies that have been successful in other big cities like New York, Boston and L.A.. They begin with gun control and stopping the sale, manufacturing and easy flow of guns into the neighborhoods. If the image of a young man getting shot to death in "self-defense" while firing an assault weapon into the air, doesn't move us to action...

A recent Sun-Times article by Kim Foxx and Arne Duncan (Chicago must learn from L.A. and New York that murder is more than a policing problem) gets it mainly right.

Both New York and Los Angeles have coordinated, holistic, and publicly-funded plans to dramatically reduce gun violence centered on prevention, intervention, and community coordination and support. As a result, New York reached a new low of 287 murders in 2018 and Los Angeles has experienced a 30 percent reduction in homicides since instituting a comprehensive community-based strategy in 2007.

Historically, the response in Chicago to a violent night or weekend is to put more police officers on the streets. The presumption is to deter through police deployment, but the focus should be on prevention — and that happens before criminals become criminals. We all recognize policing has its place among the tools to reduce violence, but we also know increased police presence is not the solution.

A lot more could be added about community engagement, ending poverty with jobs jobs that pay a living wage, community re-investment and and end to mass school closings (pointing at you, Arne Duncan) and neighborhood clinics. Lightfoot understands the need for long term, wholistic strategies but can she put them into action? Certainly not by herself.

But one thing is certain and needs to be reconsidered by the mayor. "Flooding the zone" with cops and filling the prisons with young people of color, are proven failed strategies.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Laura Washington

The whole world is still watching. -Sun-Times

 Martin Ritter, CTU organizer

Three Chicago Teachers Union members have asked to stop paying dues that average about $1,000 annually. That’s out of about 25,000 members — a group that includes some recently added members who teach at charter schools, which are privately managed but publicly funded, including some recently added privately managed charter school teachers. -- Two months after Janus

Jack Torres, a junior at Somerville high school

“There’s times where we’ve thought this is too tiring,” he said. “We’ve all got sore feet. But we keep reminding each other that if we walk, if we stay strong, if we keep sending our message, we won’t know who or where or when, but we might save a life. That’s enough to keep us going.” -- This isn't just Parkland

Prison striker, Kevin Rashid Johnson

Kevin Rashid Johnson, serving a life sentence 

In the past three decades I have been endured every level of abuse they have to offer: I have been starved, beaten, dehydrated, put in freezing cold cells, attacked with attack dogs, rendered unconscious, chained to a wall for weeks. There’s nothing left to fear. -- Guardian

 Tamar Manasseh, founder of Mothers/Men Against Senseless Killings

“When you put cops into areas they aren’t familiar with, where it’s not their regular beat, they don’t know the rhythm of the neighborhood, they don’t know the people, they don’t know the players, they don’t know anything." -- Sun-Times

DeVos and Duncan both bought into gun culture

Sec. of Education Betsy DeVos and her predecessor Arne Duncan, each wanted to buy guns with federal education funds meant for schools. The difference being, DeVos prefered teachers packing guns in their classroom. Duncan spent lots of ed dollars on expensive military hardware for his own DOE team.

A firestorm erupted when news got out this week that DeVos was considering letting school districts use federal Title 1 money to y guns, putting the issue back at the center of the debate over school safety.

This was mainly in response to the Parkland school shootings. But it also raised fundamental questions about the nature of public schools. Parkland students have been calling for tighter gun control while DeVos and Republican politicians, many on the NRA take, argued that a proliferation of guns in schools would discourage shooters and make schools safer. There's not a lick of evidence to support that theory.

Since he left his post as Pres. Obama's education chief, Duncan has been an advocate of gun control, to the point where, for a few days, he was urging parents to keep their children home from public schools until gun laws were passed. As you might expect, he pleas fell on deaf ears.

For one thing, Duncan's standing with parents has been lower than dirt since he attacked those "white, suburban" opt-out parents. For another, Democrats had a chance to push for gun control during the Obama/Duncan era when they controlled both houses. They didn't and Duncan was silent on the issue back then. Now, with Republicans controlling the legislature and White House, the chances of passing even the minimum gun safety laws are slim-to-none, making a long-term school boycott a ridiculous tactic. Finally, Duncan sends his own kids to private school and therefore has no skin in the boycott game he's playing.

Back in 2010, Duncan himself was a free spender when it came to buying military hardware for his department's own squad of student-loan chasers. He spent thousands on deadly new assault weapons, including these 27 shotguns:

 twenty-seven (27) REMINGTON BRAND MODEL 870 POLICE 12/14P MOD GRWC XS4 KXCS SF. RAMAC #24587 GAUGE: 12 BARREL: 14" - PARKERIZED CHOKE: MODIFIED SIGHTS: GHOST RING REAR WILSON COMBAT; FRONT - XS CONTOUR BEAD SIGHT STOCK: KNOXX REDUCE RECOIL ADJUSTABLE STOCK FORE-END: SPEEDFEED SPORT-SOLID - 14" LOP are designated as the only shotguns authorized for ED based on compatibility with ED existing shotgun inventory, certified armor and combat training and protocol, maintenance, and parts.

The were meant to replace 27 that were "worn out". I'm still waiting to hear how exactly they were worn out.

A year later, armed with their new hardware, Arne's troops went out hunting for student-loan late-payers. They mistakenly thought they found one out in Stockton, CA where Arne's army kicked in the door in the early morning hours to collect on the overdue loans and dragged Kenneth Wright out of his home, terrifying his small children. It was actually his estranged wife they were looking for.

Wright's neighbors, who did not want to disclose their last names, said they saw the raid unfold.

"They surrounded the house; it was like a task force or S.W.A.T team," across the street neighbor Becky said. "They all had guns. They dragged him out in his boxer shorts, threw him to the ground and handcuffed him."

According to Becky and her two children, the raid started at 6 a.m. with agents ramming down Wright's front door.

 "I watched until I went to work at 10:45 and they were still out there," Becky said.

Her young daughter, Valerie, said she counted 13 agents and one Stockton police officer outside Wright's home.

"I felt really bad for those kids," said Becky about agents when they brought out Wright's three children. "They were crying really loud."

Let's put an end to this gun madness. Keep schools and the DOE gun-free. 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA

... also pushed to arm teachers and called on schools to be “the most hardened targets in this country.” -- Washington Post

Derek Black

 We Shouldn't Call Teacher Salary Hikes 'Raises' -- EdWeek

Chicago Tribune Guild 

'We did it... We have a union' -- Statement

Charles J. Johnson, Tribune editor & union organizer 

 "We have been badly mistreated by a series of corporate owners, Tronc only being the most recent, and we've decided to take some control over the future of our journalism in the city of Chicago." -- NPR

Atty. Lorna McMillion

“You have a charter school that can, in one breath, say, ‘Hey, we’re a public school, don’t sue us,’ and in the next say, ‘Hey, we’re not a public school, don’t sue us.'” -- Texas Tribune

Greg Hinz

 I'm particularly interested to see if Police Board Chair Lori Lightfoot gets in [Chicago mayor's race] because, more than most candidates, she has a foot in all sorts of political camps. -- Crain's 

Afghanistan 17 years later...

 “They’ve got to screen everybody who’s going to be working directly with the [brigade],” said an Army officer who was involved in preparing bases for the new adviser teams earlier this year and who, like others contacted for this story, agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity. “That means screening basically the whole damn Afghan National Army, and we’re way behind the power curve on that.” -- Politico

Steve Doocy

"Keep in mind, whatever [Gina Haspel] did" to torture detainees, "she was doing it as a directive and it was all within the law". -- Fox & Friends

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

 Father of a Stoneman Douglas shooting victim painting a mural in his son’s honor: abc7.ws/2tAsQPr

Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter, Jaime, was killed at Stoneman Douglas

“This time, the gun rights crowd messed with the wrong community, the wrong kids and the wrong dad...I have dedicated the rest of my life to fighting for the cause of gun safety.” -- Guardian

Betsy DeVos

 Lesley Stahl: Have you seen the really bad schools? Maybe try to figure out what they're doing?Betsy DeVos: I have not-- I have not-- I have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming.Lesley Stahl: Maybe you should.Betsy DeVos: Maybe I should. Yes. -- CBS 60 Minutes

Jeff Biggers

As the son of a union teacher and the grandson of a union coal miner, I believe the West Virginia teachers have renewed a strategic call for other movements engaged in what we have called a “resistance” against the onslaught of policies decisions and regulatory rollbacks by the Trump administration. -- Guardian

Stable Genius on NBC's Chuck Todd

 “He’s a sleeping son of a bitch." -- At Penn rally

Megyn Kelly

“I would not say that Putin likes Trump,” she said. “I did not glean that at all from him. I did glean that perhaps he has something on Donald Trump." -- The Hill

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Emma Gonzalez, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

“If the president wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a terrible tragedy and how it should never have happened and maintain telling us how nothing is going to be done about it, I’m going to happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association."  -- Student protest rally in Ft. Lauderdale

Flint Taylor, Hampton family attorney

“When I told him I needed a recess to come to Bill’s funeral, the judge sent his respects." -- Village Free Press

Maria Thorne, 5th-grade Florida teacher to Paul Ryan

 She then told [Ryan] she was a teacher and a resident of the area, to which he responded, “Nice.” That set Thorne off. “Nice? You’re here celebrating the death of 17 children,” she admonished.Ryan weakly replied that he “didn’t want to talk politics” — an odd statement to make at a political fundraiser. Thorne persisted in her critique, and was escorted out of the event as she chanted “no more guns!” -- Ryan caught raising campaign cash in Florida

Arlie Hochschild

...if the Democratic party is to pose a magnetically attractive alternative to Donald Trump, it must address the grievances, the life experiences, the sense of losing ground, of people like those I met and describe in my book, Strangers in Their Own Land. Millions of Trump voters saw the Democrats as beholden to corporate interests as the Republicans, and I believe they are right. -- Guardian

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Neo-nazis, white supremacists march again in Charlottesville.

Carl Bernstein, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist

“This president is the president of his base... We’ve never seen this kind of chaos in a presidency before. This is different because it goes to the character and competence — a feeling that the president of the United States, including among those on the White House staff, may be unfit to hold the office.” -- CNN

Republican senator Bob Corker 

“He’s hurt us as it relates to negotiations that were under way by tweeting things out. A lot of people think that there is some kind of ‘good cop, bad cop’ act under way, but that’s just not true.”  -- New York Times 

Erika Whitfield, St. Louis teacher

Issues of race and policing are not abstractions for my seventh-graders...I can’t ignore that my students are growing up amid high-profile police brutality. -- Washington Post 

Joshua Bitsko, Las Vegas police officer

"We were trippin' over guns. Trippin' over long guns inside. There was so many." - CBS News

Yasmin Tayag

Tom Petty is the joint they share in a starry backyard in Brooklyn the night they kiss. He’s the beer they drink brazenly on a crowded beach as cops amble by. He’s the band playing to a backwoods dive bar and the shrug when nobody stays to watch. He keeps playing anyway. -- Medium 

What Junior forgot to mention about Chicago gun violence

D.T. Junior had so much oil on his head last night, Dad was worried the stage lights might ignite him. And wouldn't that be tragic on top of everything else, Melania-gate and all?

Looking for some easy claps from the convention's dwindling gaggle of racist Trump sycophants, Junior called out Chicago, cynically using the rising death toll that gun violence has taken in the city's black and Latino neighborhoods to make his case against any and all gun control legislation.

"Just look at how effective those laws have been in inner-city Chicago, a city with the toughest gun laws in our nation, where 70 people were murdered last month alone and where over 3,400 American lives have been lost since this administration took office in 2009." 

No Junior. Chicago doesn't have the toughest gun laws in the country.

But I'll give him a point for trying. He's right that local gun laws alone don't do much to stop the shootings. They may save a life now and then. Not a bad thing.

But the reasons for the city's pandemic gun violence are complex. They are rooted in institutionalized racism, poverty, joblessness, school closings leading to more blight, worsening post-industrial socio-economic conditions, feelings of despair and anger, and neighborhood segregation and isolation. Add easy access to guns and a competitive, largely unfettered drug market and you get Chiraqs.

But Democrats can't blame all this on the Republicans.

Junior could have mentioned that IL's concealed-carry law was struck down by the court back in 2012. And it's all but impossible to get any laws with teeth passed in the legislature for fear of being taken out with NRA money.

While buying a gun inside the city limits may be slightly more difficult for some, all they have to do is drive across the Indiana line into Gov. Pence territory, for one of the largest gun buffets in the country. Everything from Saturday Night Specials to heavy artillery is there for the taking.

Almost 60% of the guns used to commit a crime in Chicago are first bought in states like Indiana, Wisconsin and Mississippi, Those states do not require background checks for gun sales at shows or over the Internet.

Oil-Can Trump could have scored big points against Mayor Rahm Emanuel by pointing out how he, as Pres. Obama's chief of staff, put the kibosh on every attempt to pass national gun control legislation. Remember in 2009, when Rahm told Atty. Gen. Holder to STFU on gun control?

But national gun laws would have cramped gun sales in V.P candidate Pence's home state and so many others controlled by Republicans and the NRA. So Junior was left with nothing but a few claps.

Of course I want to hear a #GOP platform on education from the son of a billionaire who attended a $55k/yr boarding school. #RNCinCLE

— Helen Gym (@HelenGym2015) July 20, 2016

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Rev. Barber, now on a 22-state speaking tour, will be main speaker at the July 8th Save Our Schools March in D.C. 

Rev. Dr. William Barber, Pres. of the N.C. NAACP

Evangelicalism is about how you deal with policies that affect the poor, the least of these, the hurting. We need to challenge this perverted use of the term evangelicalism (sometimes, they even say "white" evangelicalism) which really has no biblical basis. -- MSNBC 

George Will jumps sinking ship

“This is not my party.” -- PJ Media 

Pope Francis 

"I believe that the Church not only should apologize to the person who is gay whom it has offended,' the Pope told reporters, 'but has to apologize to the poor, to exploited women, to children exploited for labor; it has to ask forgiveness for having blessed many weapons." -- Talk to journalists

 Warriors coach Steve Kerr

“When 90% of our country wants background checks on gun purchases and we’ve got our senate and our house not only voting it down, but using the Bill of Rights as a reason for people to have rights to carry these automatic weapons, and we’re getting people murdered every day at an alarming rate. I just have to get this off my chest, our government is insane. We are insane.” -- Sports Illustrated

Reps. Conyers & Rangel

Reps. John Conyers & Charles Rangel

In 1948, the year we both put on U.S. Army uniforms, Strom Thurmond won 39 electoral votes as the nominee of the Dixiecrats. But Trump’s dangerous provocations—the forced expulsion of 11 million people and the creation of secret police and special religious ghettos for Muslims—represent crimes that we simply did not travel half a world a way to defend. -- TIME

Naomi Klein

If we don’t demand radical change we are headed for a whole world of people searching for a home that no longer exists. -- The Saturday Paper

Blog Fodder Rahm admonishes his alderman: 'Will yuze guys, keep some decorum?'

You've heard of the Godfather. Well for me, Rahm Emanuel is the Blog Fodder. He's the gift that keeps on giving for us bloggers and Tweeters.

Here's his latest. I know he's now residing at the bottom of the ratings food chain and trying to clean up his image. But really? Scolding Chicago aldermen for -- wait for it -- using profanity in public?

You all know what a high-class joint the Chicago City Council is. Right?

Fran Spielman writes:

Is the Chicago City Council “slouching towards Gomorrah,” as former federal appeals court justice Robert Bork once famously put it in a 1996 book by the same name?

You might think so from some of the debate at Wednesday’s City Council meeting. It prompted Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who is famous for his use of profanity, to admonish aldermen to maintain “decorum.”

 Emanuel has kept his tongue in check in public. But, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis has accused the mayor of telling her, “F— you, Lewis” during their earliest meeting.

Then there was the time when Rahm, as Obama's chief of staff, said "F--- the UAW." I read that in Steven Rattner's 2010 book "Overhaul."

Or that time when he told Attorney General Eric Holder to "Shut the F--- Up" about gun control.

I guess Rahm means, don't use profanity unless your talking to black women or about unions.

I actually liked it when Rahm, in 2006, after Dems took back the House, told Republicans to "go f---themselves." The way I look at it, it was just his way of reaching across the aisle.

Don't worry. Chicago violence problem 'only 1,500 people in a big city', says Rahm.

 Here's the updated numbers on the city's Memorial Day Weekend gun violence: 6 dead, 69 wounded. 

 The month of May saw 66 murders, 318 shootings, and 397 shooting victims in the city. CPD doesn't even count the shootings now happening with increased regularity out on the expressways since these are handled not by CPD, but by the State Police. 

So it turns out that all the gun violence in Chicago is driven by just 1,500 people. This out of nearly 3 million Chicagoans. Not bad, right?

That's according to Rahm and one of his top cops, John Escalante. And not only that, but Rahm knows exactly who the 1,500 are. He's even got a list. It's scientific. Based on the Culture of Calm model that former schools chief Ron Huberman back in 2010. And you know what happened to that, don't you?

The Huberman model of predictability. (Substance pic)

Huberman had claimed that it was possible to identify statistically 10,000 or so students who would most likely be either shot or shooters. It was his recipe for a preemptive strike against school violence without need to go more deeply into the roots of community and school violence. It was a total bust. So was Huberman.

So now Rahm's new list is down to 1,500. There's also no need for all those stop-and-frisks of mostly young black men on the south and west sides (250,000 S&Fs in just three months in 2014 with few arrests or guns found).

No need for the roundup and imprisonment of 18,000 young black men as Sen. Kirk (with Sen. Durbin by his side) has called for either.

Also, no mention by either Rahm or Escalante about the need to deal with the rising tide of youth joblessness, battered communities, lost social services, closed schools or easy access to guns.

Just round up the 1,500 hundred on the list, I guess,  and the violence problem is solved. Bada-bing, bada-boom. Right Rahm?

"It's a big city and it's a safe city," says Deputy Police Supt. John Escalante. "It's about 1,500 people driving this violence. I'm confident we'll be able to turn this around."

Safe city? For whom is it safe?

I must admit, that despite his reassurances, I'm worried. Not so much for my own safety (not many old, north-side, white guys are being shot) but for the city's youngsters. I have a grandson who goes to high school in the city and one of his 15-year-old schoolmates, Veronica Lopez, was shot and killed the other day, while riding in a car on Lake Shore Drive. Her killing was basically written off as "gang-related".

The Guardian reports:

At North-Grand high school on Tuesday, students returned to classes in blue and white clothes, the same colors Lopez was wearing when she was fatally shot while sitting in the passenger side of a car on Lakeshore Drive. They held a vigil for their fellow student, a few days before the end of the school year.

“I just want my baby back, she was everything,” Lopez’s mother, Diana Mercado, told reporters.

I don't know if Veronica was on Escalante's list or not.

Tale of two cities. Another new school for South Loop

At Least 20 Shots Fired On Woodlawn Block As School Lets Out -- Yesterday's DNAinfo headline. 

So far this year, as of Tuesday, at least 1,382 people have been shot in Chicago and at least 244 of them have died of their wounds. Last year at this time, 904 people had been shot, 157 of them fatally.

No, I don't blame MRE personally for 50% increase in the shootings (of mostly black and Latino youth) over the past year, on his watch. No one individual should bear that responsibility alone.

But I do blame the mayor for his misguided tale-of-two-cities policies, some of which are based on the notion that this is first and foremost a matter of policing strategy, stop-and-frisks, and mass incarceration. Cops, who have a role to play in protecting the community, at times have been the initiators of the gun violence. Problem is, they are usually a post-violence response. Rahm's police-based strategy has been a complete bust.

I will give him some credit for coming clean back in December, amid the fallout of the Laquan McDonald murder, about the "code of silence" within the CPD. His statement certainly won't endear him to the little fascist clique that runs the FOP and will probably open the city up to lawsuits and big payouts to the victims of police malpractice, torture, and shootings. But the mayor still appears unwilling to testify before a federal jury about the code. Why not?

This, even while his newly-appointed Supt. Eddie Johnson maintains that he has never seen even one case of police wrongdoing in all his 27 years on the force.

But nothing has been done under Rahm's watch to alleviate the city's concentrated poverty or prevent easy access to guns in the community. Quite the opposite.

Instead we see widespread gentrification and the continued isolation of poor and African-American communities and the push-out of black and poor from the city ("whitenization"). Chicago lost about 2,890 residents between 2014 and 2015. This, on top of the loss of 181,000 black residents between 2000 and 2010, pre-Rahm. On top of that, CPS and Emanuel closed nearly 50 schools in poor neighborhoods in 2013 and still about 313 schools--more than half of all schools--are considered underutilized, according to CPS.

I see that Rahm is offering the upscale South Loop (Rahm-friendly Ald. Pat Dowell) a new elementary school. But, according to the Sun-Times,  the "broke" school district doesn’t have details about how it will pay for the school to be built in the South Loop for up to 1,200 elementary students (way too big). This as CPS is facing a $1 billion deficit and has told principals to expect to cut an average of 26% from their budgets. S-T says that the flurry of new schools and school additions will apparently be "bankrolled by that $45 million school construction levy." I believe that's a fancy way of saying, more taxes.

That allows Emanuel to curry favor with aldermen emboldened by his 25 percent approval rating by unveiling school construction projects all over town.

From my post, this is just more have/have-nots division of a shrinking pie. How about from yours?

Does anyone think this is a recipe for good schooling and less violence?

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino

“I completely and utterly reject the ‘bad apples’ argument,” Tarantino said. “Chicago just got caught with their pants down in a way that can’t be denied… and the chief of police, is he a bad apple? I think he is. Is [Chicago Mayor] Rahm Emanuel a bad apple? I think he is. They’re all bad apples. That just shows that that’s a bullshit argument. It’s about institutional racism. It’s about institutional cover-ups that are about protecting the force as opposed to the citizens.” -- The Wrap

Mark Konkol

In our town, everybody knows all roads lead to the mayor's office, no matter who’s in power. -- DNAInfo

Arne Duncan

“It’s hard to educate a kid that’s dead.” — Washington Post

Civil Engineering Prof Marc Edwards

 "They discovered scientifically conclusive evidence of an anomalous increase in childhood lead poisoning," Edwards wrote Monday on the website he created to track Flint's water crisis, "but stood by silently as MDEQ officials repeatedly and falsely stated that no spike in blood lead levels (BLL) of children had occurred." -- Huffington

Woodburn, Oregon Supt. Chuck Ransom 

"By becoming a dual-language district, we’ve made a statement about how much we value diversity and different viewpoints. We’ve been a big player in helping to bring prosperity and solidarity." -- Huffington

Mika Brzezinski to Rick Santorum 

Why aren’t you working on white men with guns? -- Think Progress