Is Rahm falling from White House grace?

Following up on my post from Saturday, I'm told that Nancy Pelosi had a come-to-Jesus talk with Rahm Emanuel following her Saturday appearance at Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH. It looks from here like Rahm, the autocrat, has been taken down a peg by the party bigwigs and told in no uncertain terms to heal his rift with Jackson. .

It was only a little more than a week ago that Rev. Jackson openly sided against Rahm and with the CTU and community activists, who had packed a CPS board meeting to protest the board's decision to close more neighborhood schools and hand them over to a politically connected, private turnaround company, AUSL.

Jackson and CTU President Karen Lewis openly denounced  the policies of Rahm's hand-picked board as "education apartheid," a move which immediately re-framed the whole reform discussion and put Rahm and his cronies on the defensive. A day later, Rahm made his schools boss, J.C. Brizard get up in front of the media and deny that he was running an apartheid system.

Pelosi then flew in to Chicago, stood side-by-side with Rev. Jackson at PUSH and then endorsed Jesse Jackson, Jr. in his congressional  re-election bid. The timing and place of the endorsement was an obvious slap at the mayor who then was forced to to come out himself and openly endorse Triple J.

The party leadership is obviously worried about Rahm's rift with Jackson as well as the growing resistance to Rahm's attack on public schools, especially in the black community. There's the risk that the growing school protests will spill over into upcoming Occupy protests scheduled here for May and possibly lasting up until election time.

Teacher unions are are a badly-needed ally of Democrats in the November elections. But Rahm's war on the unions, reminiscent of the anti-union assault by T-Party guvs like  Wisconsin Gov. Walker, is obviously becoming a concern of the White House. Yesterday, Brizard stunned many of his own supporters when he came out in favor of using federal education funds to be used to send CPS kids to private schools.

Chicago Reader pic

To make matters even worse for Rahm, the White House announced yesterday that it was pulling the G8 Summit out of Chicago and moving it to Camp David. The White House says the change was not in response to the possibility of protests, which means that's exactly what it's about. Rahm had essentially moved to suspend Constitutional freedoms during the May 18-19 Summit.

According to a report in the Monitor, Rahm didn't even learn about the change until yesterday making it pretty clear that he has fallen from grace in the party's inner circles.

Monday's announcement appeared to catch many in Chicago by surprise. A spokeswoman for Emanuel said the Chicago mayor was informed about the location change in a Monday phone call from a White House official. Chris Johnson, spokesman for the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, said his organization was "just as surprised about the announcement as anybody else."

Chicago will still play host to the NATO Summit, May 20-21at great expense (conservatively estimated at $65 million) to city residents, mainly for a massive police presence. Thousands of anti-war and civil-liberties protesters are still preparing to come to the city and make their voices heard, according to Joe Iosbaker of the United National Antiwar Committee in Chicago.

Check out the Chicago Reader's Ben Joravsky who has been writing the best local stuff on this.

Now we'll see if the CTU and it's allies can take advantage of this rift in upcoming negotiations and in support of legislative efforts to stop the school closings.

Ohio leads the way: Pay attention Obama

"Ohio voters just gave public school teachers something they haven’t received in a while — respect," writes Valerie Strauss at the Answer Sheet.  

Across the country, several other Republican-backed measures were also dealt setbacks, including a crackdown on voting rights in Maine. In Wake County, N.C., voters dealt a blow to the racist Republican clique that had taken over the school board by electing a progressive Democrat and educator, Kevin Hill. In Mississippi, voters rejected an amendment to the State Constitution that would have banned virtually all abortions and some forms of birth control by declaring a fertilized human egg to be a legal person. Michigan voters recalled Rep. Paul Scott who was a front man for T-Party gov, Rick Snyder and a pal of Michelle Rhee. The new law repealed in Ohio would have severely limited the bargaining rights of more than 350,000 teachers, firefighters, police officers and other public employees.

Lots of credit for its defeat goes to the Occupy Movement and the unions for re-framing the current national political debate and turning out the troops. Big losers were the Koch Bros. and other corporate interests who spent millions to pass the union-busting bill.

While the movement is non-partisan and crosses party lines, especially in Ohio, the trend is becoming clearer. The victory in Ohio, like those in Wisconsin, is energizing the labor movement and should help Democrats in 2012. But today's Democratic Party, especially its big-city mayors, appears to be as nervous about the movement as are Republicans. In Chicago, for example, Mayor Emanuel has a similar approach towards unions, teachers and other public employees as Republican governors in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and New Jersey. Until last night, Obama was silent on the events in Ohio.  His achilles heel is his failed education policies which amount to little more than a Bush re-hash of austerity, privatization and mass teacher firings, while using the rhetoric of reform. There needs to be a shake up in the Dept. of Education and a rethinking of anti-teacher and anti-union Race To The Top.

This morning, in what one AP journalist called, "a signal of the issue's national resonance", White House spokesman Jay Carney issued a statement saying President Barack Obama "congratulates the people of Ohio for standing up for workers and defeating efforts to strip away collective bargaining rights, and commends the teachers, firefighters, nurses, police officers and other workers who took a stand to defend those rights."

Remember Mitt Romney visited Ohio recently and said he was not sure where he stood on the issue. A day later, he said he stood against the labor unions and collective bargaining rights for teachers and other public employees. After yesterday's shellacking, Ohio's T-Party Gov. Kasich was contrite and is now claims he will throw his support the state's workers. Here's hoping Pres. Obama is watching all this closely and drawing the appropriate lessons. His road to victory in 2012 should be apparent by now.

All eyes are on Wisconsin

30,000 turn out today for pro-union rally

The British Guardian reports on the Tea Party's takeover of state government. Gov. Walker wants to ban unions and take away rights of all public service workers.

Wisconsin is rapidly becoming a disturbing showcase of where America as a whole is headed, as Tea Party political ideas takeover the Republican party. What began as a ragtag scattering of conservative activists two years ago is now starting to have real political power and putting its anti-government, slash-and-burn ideas into practice in ways that impact millions of Americans.

Schools throughout the state closed as thousands students walked out in support of their teachers.

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)

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Mike Klonsky photo

Teacher Jamie Worsek
Like me, she came to President Obama's get-out-the-vote rally on Saturday in Chicago.

"I've actually never been less excited to vote in my entire life. I think all the candidates are awful. I'll do it because it's like my basic patriotic duty," said the 24-year-old Chicago resident who worked for Obama's campaign in 2008. (Huffington)

John Stewart

"We live now in hard times--not end times." (Huffington)

Mike Huckabee on Rove and the T-Party

This country club elite is happy for Tea Partiers to put up signs, work the phones and make “those pesky little trips” door-to-door that it finds a frightful inconvenience. But the members won’t let the hoi polloi dine with them in the club’s “main dining room” — any more than David H. Koch, the billionaire sugar daddy of the Republican right, will invite O’Donnell into his box at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center to take in “The Nutcracker.” (Frank Rich)