WEEKEND QUOTABLES

If elected, Lightfoot would become the city’s first openly gay mayor, and the first African-American woman to hold the job. She joins an increasingly crowded field of challengers looking to unseat Emanuel in the February 2019 election. She is the ninth challenger to announce a run.

Lori Lightfoot

“We have seen example after example of top-down dictates that do not reflect any interest in true partnership with parents, teachers and principals. How do we chart a new progressive course? How do we make sure we take our city on a new, different direction? I will start with listening to the needs of the people.” -- Tribune

Joanna Klonsky, Chicago political strategist

“There’s a misconception that you need to out-raise [Rahm Emanuel] to beat him." -- WBEZ

Sen. Elizabeth Warren

“Secretary DeVos has filled the department with for-profit college hacks who only care about making sham schools rich and shutting down investigations into fraud." --New York Times

CPS Parent Lawrence White

“We have to repair or try to regain those losses,” said White, who wasn’t even aware CPS had implemented a secret overhaul of special education until it was revealed in the WBEZ report. -- WBEZ

Eden Hebron, 15-year-old freshman at Stoneman Douglas H.S.

But since the March for Our Lives protest on March 24th,  the media attention to the issue of gun violence has also changed. “It’s starting to die down, a little, all the news and stuff,” she said. “When I see people moving on, it’s like, How can you?” -- Guardian

Dick Cheney

“I think the techniques we used were not torture. A lot of people try to call it that, but it wasn’t deemed torture at the time,” he told Maria Bartiromo. “People want to go back and try to rewrite history, but if it were my call, I’d do it again.” -- Crooks & Liars

Happy Mothers Day from D.T. 

“I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married...

...I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” ~Trump https://t.co/mqcoEj5IKh

— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) May 13, 2018

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Captain Clarion Tweet: "When does that dammed trickle down start, already?"

ANON

"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in
practice, there is. " -Anonymous

NEW CHARTER STUDY

 “The results showed that they were virtually identical,” Mazany said of the 2010 study. “I found that surprising because charters are based on a model that they have greater freedom, opportunity to be innovative and be more flexible. So I would have intuitively expected they would have been performing much better than the neighborhood schools they were pitted against.” -- Terry Mazany, president and CEO of the Chicago Community Trust

"Stark raving Rahm"

PROGRESSIVE MAG INTERVIEWS RAHM

IC: What do you think when you hear the word “gentrification”? 

RE: I know there are a lot of bad connotations. High rents and people being forced out who have been there for years. And there is a reason it has that connotation. But if we are smarter about it, we can do things that allow improvements. -- Stark Raving Rahm

LSC ELECTIONS

 “If these people in the charter school movement see the importance of that local empowerment of the community and the parents and the teachers, why don’t they duplicate it within their own schools?” -- CTU's Michael Brunson  

TORTURE

“If he [Dick Cheney] doesn’t think that was torture, I would invite him anywhere in the United States to sit in a waterboard and go through what those people went through, one of them 100-plus-odd times." -- Sen. Angus King (I-Maine)

SCHOOL FUNDING

“Illinois will never succeed by starving its schools.” -- Gov. Quinn spokeswoman Brooke Anderson.

The thing about autocrats...

"The time for negotiations is over." -- Rahm Emanuel

A few minutes later, in front of City Hall, janitors, lunch ladies, teachers,  parents, clergy and union officials interlocked arms and sat down in neat rows in the northbound lanes of LaSalle Street. "Save our schools," they chanted. -- WBEZ

Shades of Hosni Mubarak and Dick Cheney.

The one thing autocrats and political bosses world-wide have in common -- they don't give a rat's ass about what the 99% think. Their power comes from a tiny reactionary base of support from corporate billionaires  and they have no tolerance for popular dissent, either from inside or outside their own narrow political machines.

Mubarak

Mubarak, who responded to the Egyptian people's demands for democratic reform with violence and terror, was ousted after 18 days of demonstrations that sparked the 2011 Arab Spring. Now he sits behind bars, most likely until he dies.

When I think of Cheney, I recall his curt  response in the Spring of 2008, to polls showing growing opposition to the Iraq invasion. When asked about polls showing that  two-thirds of Americans opposed the war, Cheney replied, "So?"

"You don't care what the American people think?" ABC News' Martha Raddatz asked the vice president. "You can't be blown off course by polls," said Cheney.

Eight months later, Cheney, Bush and the neocons were swept out of office by a mass movement including millions of young voters, energized largely by their opposition to the war and pinning their hopes on Barack Obama.

Karen Lewis out-polling Rahm 77% to 23%

On a day when thousands of angry parents, teachers, students, unionists and clergy turned out in Chicago to protest the announced closings of neighborhood schools, Rahm took the Mubarak/Cheney road.

At a hastily called press conference, the mayor, whose poll ratings of those strongly approving his policies are now at 2%, declared that "the time for negotiations is over". He spoke at length about the "new process" he said has already allowed the public to weigh in on the proposed closings. CPS and a school closings commission held public hearings over more than four months on the issue, and said more than 20,000 people participated, said Rahm. The district now will hold three meetings for each school on the final closing list before the school board votes.

But a group of a dozen African-American ministers who came to the Mayor's Office with a letter urging him to  put a moratorium on closings asked about the point of additional hearings if Emanuel has already made up his mind.

“If nobody is going to be heard at the hearings, what’s the use of having the hearings?” said Pastor Marshall Hatch of the New Mount Pilgrim Church in West Garfield Park. “If it’s a done deal, then stop wasting everybody’s time.”

Rahm believes that a huge campaign war chest and his links with Obama will be enough to keep him in power after 2014. But growing anger in the black community over these targeted school closings could change all that. Yesterday's mass protest, including civil disobedience arrests of some 150 people, has raised the stakes. The mayor can now talk all he wants about no negotiations but he faces a potential Chicago Spring if he does. Not to mention the dozens of Civil Rights law suits and possible injunctions he and his lieutenant Byrd-Bennett face as they move ahead on school closings.

An NBC News poll (scroll to bottom of the page to vote) yesterday on the heels of the protest, asked: "Whom do you support in the school closing battle, Rahm Emanuel or Karen Lewis?" So far, with some 80,000 people voting, it's Rahm 23% -- Karen 77%.

Expected Rahm response -- "So."

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Catalyst

1st SOS/Chicago Meeting

“I’m still waiting to see a group that is able to ensure teachers have a real voice. I’m looking around and listening and not hearing the voices of teachers.” -- Former Chicago mayoral candidate Miguel del Valle. 

N.Y. Education Reform Summit

"We need more resources financially, we need to stop vilifying [teachers] and we need to change the tone on how we've been approaching education divisiveness that this administration has added between charter and public schools." -- Bronx Borough Pres. Ruben Diaz, Jr. 

Diane Ravitch

"People are beginning to look ahead and say, 'Now what?'" Ravitch said in an interview with the Daily News. "We're moving toward a new post-Bloomberg era, and it's time for some fresh thinking." --  Daily News

Maureen Dowd

"He acts like he is America. But America didn’t like Dick Cheney. It’s easier for someone who believes that he is America incarnate to permit himself to do things that hurt America — like torture, domestic spying, pushing America into endless wars, and flouting the Geneva Conventions." -- NYT

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Cheney, Mubarak BFF

'I think President Mubarak needs to be treated as he deserved over the years, because he has been a good friend." -- Former V.P. Dick Cheney at event commemorating the Reagan centennial.

Re-segregating Wake County schools

"We used to be held up as a national model," resident Jamie Dunston said. "Now we're being held up … as objects of ridicule and disgust, and rightfully so." -- L.A. Times

Bachman finds meaning in life

"I take my first political breath every morning with one thought in mind," the Tea Party darling told her audience, the Missoulian reports. "Repeal Obamacare... That's my motivation in life."  -- Michele Bachman

Candidate for president of UTLA 

"Right now we're the big, greedy teachers.... We are not the villains in education; we are the saviors." -- Julie Washington

Good for peace?

I asked an old friend here in Cairo, a woman with Western tastes that include an occasional glass of whiskey, whether the Muslim Brotherhood might be bad for peace. She thought for a moment and said: “Yes, possibly. But, from my point of view, in America the Republican Party is bad for peace as well.”-- Nicholas Kristoff (h/t brother Fred)

OWNERSHIP SOCIETY NEWS

Rhee's "turnaround" contractor gets the boot 

More than two years after Friends of Bedford,  a N.Y.-based private operator was hired by Michelle Rhee to run one of the city's most venerable schools, her replacement under new mayor Vincent Gray, has given them the boot. 

D.C. officials said Tuesday that Dunbar High remains plagued by a litany of troubles: Nearly half the senior class is not on track to graduate, more than 100 students are taking courses they've already passed and the campus is growing increasingly unsafe. (Bill Turque at WaPo)

New Chancellor Kaya Henderson said the school's record, as well as classroom observations and complaints from teachers and parents, led her to conclude that the environment at Dunbar had "deteriorated significantly" under Rhee's turnaround plan. Henderson, who was a top deputy under Rhee, said that because Bedford was given autonomy and a premium of about $1.2 million in the past year above usual funding levels, she expected more progress. Some of those funds also paid for the contractor to run Coolidge High School.

Money talks, Cheney walks

Halliburton is paying Nigeria a $250 million bribe to drop bribery charges against Dick Cheney. The move followed the intervention of ex-president George Bush Sr and former secretary of state James Baker, according to Nigerian press reports.

Running the schools, controlling the info flow

New York's billionaire Mayor and likely 2012 presidential candidate. Michael Bloomberg has made three giant moves to expand and consolidate his massive information/education/political empire. Last year, he bought Business Week. Now, he's building a huge D.C. operation, aptly called Bloomberg Government, that will sell information about government contracts to lobbyists. Next he  bought two big-name, politically connected editorial writers — James P. Rubin, a former assistant secretary of state under Bill Clinton, and David Shipley, editor of The New York Times Op-Ed page — to lead a push into the editorial market, which will be named Bloomberg View.

“Our aspiration is to be the most influential news organization in the world,” said Mike Riley, the managing editor of Bloomberg Government in Washington. “I think Bloomberg sees a great opportunity here, and they are wisely investing on the front end,” he added, declining to say exactly how much the company has spent building the service over the last nine months. “Suffice it to say, it’s not inexpensive.” 

Now his placing of Hearst publishing CEO Cathie Black atop the city's public school system and former chancellor Joel Klein's move over to Rupert Murdoch's media plantation begins to make sense. More reasons to put an end to mayoral control of the schools.