EXTRA: Does Lipinski owe Trump?

The D.C.-based Brookings Institution says it may well be the kind of people in full agreement with this Age of Trump in which we’re now in to whom Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., owes his re-election in last month’s Democratic primary.

LIPINSKI: Got some GOP crossovers

The institution’s Primaries Project did its own analysis of the voter tallies from the March 20 primary in the Illinois 3^rd Congressional District (Chicago’s Southwest Side and surrounding suburbs).

THAT’S THE ONE where the socially-conservative Lipinski managed to fend off a challenge by Marie Newman, a political newby who tried campaigning on the notion that Lipinski’s political leanings don’t fit in with modern-day Democrats.

Not that it worked. The city portions of the district that remember back to the days when Lipinski’s father, Bill, was their Congressman (and their alderman at City Hall before that) gave Dan a large-enough support to overcome the small lead Newman had in the suburban parts.

That has many people thinking Lipinski’s victory was evidence of the Chicago “Machine” of old being able to turn out the vote for a candidate.

But Brookings researchers found that amongst people in the congressional district who voted in the 2016 presidential cycle for Donald Trump, those people were solidly in favor of keeping Lipinski.

OR MORE LIKELY, making sure that somebody like Newman never got anywhere near Capitol Hill.

TRUMP: Can he count on Dan's votes?

Most people in the Illinois 3^rd voted for Hillary Clinton to be president, as did all of Cook County and the Chicago metro area.

But amongst those who went along with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rhetoric, one in every five voted for Lipinski this time around. That compares to only one in 20 of Trump backers who sided with Newman.

Brookings types wouldn’t say definitively why that sentiment occurred, although they did point out that many would-be Republicans cast Democratic Party ballots in the March primary because the GOP only offered the white supremacist Art Jones as their choice for the seat.

NEWMAN: Definitely not the 'deplorable' choice

EVEN THOUGH THE Republican election cycle last month included a feisty fight by Jeanne Ives to try to knock Gov. Bruce Rauner out of the running for the Nov. 6 general election, Ives wasn’t enough to keep 3^rd District GOPers with the party’s ballot.

Some 61 percent of people who cast ballots said they considered the congressional choice more significant than that of governor.

“Our data demonstrates Lipinski enjoyed a great advantage among, and likely a victory because of, self-identified Trump voters,” Brookings researchers wrote.

So is the next two years of Lipinski in Congress (nobody seriously thinks Jones can beat him come November) going to see Dan as one of Trump’s few allies amongst the Illinois congressional delegation. Or will he turn on the president, at the risk of some of his political backers deciding to turn on him come 2020?

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How clueless can some people be?

Dan Piraro's 'Bizarro' strips occasionally hit too close to home

Admittedly, I have a bias – I spent my time in college studying history (that is, when I wasn’t writing copy for assorted newspapers) and got my B.A. degree studying the foreign policy of the United States.

But it always manages to amaze me when the historical cluelessness of the masses is exposed.

WE LITERALLY ARE in danger of being sentenced to relive our mistakes because we didn’t study our history. Or so said the Italian philosopher George Santayana.

Take WGN-TV, which earlier this week wrote up some copy for a news anchor to read about the start of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.

Rather typical coverage that would fill a few seconds of airtime. The presentation was supposed to be enhanced by an on-screen graphic beside the news anchor’s head depicting the Star of David – the universal symbol of the Jewish religious faith.

Except that someone, in picking through assorted stars of David to find one to use on-air, managed to screw up by picking out an illustration of a yellow piece of felt cut into the shape of the Jewish star, with the German word “Jude” on it.

IN SHORT, THE badge that the Nazi-era German government used to require Jewish people to wear so as to make them stand out in the general public – and therefore more open to harassment from what that government considered to be the “real” people.

What WGN-TV intended

Not exactly the symbol that Jewish people want to be reminded of on one of the holiest of holidays in all of Judaism, although the resulting WGN apology was certainly an act of atonement.

Now I don’t think that WGN-TV is employing anyone with neo-Nazi sympathies or who is interested in pushing the idea of an Aryan master race. No one there is pledging allegiance to Adolf Hitler (or not even propagandist Josef Goebbels).

It’s someone who was vacuous enough to think that anything connected to a six-point star somehow is symbolic of Judaism. By that line of logic, many law enforcement officers are Jewish.

What WGN-TV gave us

ADMITTEDLY, THIS IS a symbol of Jewish harassment. But once again, not the concept that was meant to be pushed. All because someone probably took as few history courses as possible while being educated, and probably thought even those were too many.



Of course, this kind of vacuous thought isn’t a one-time incident.

I still recall a moment from a couple of decades ago when the Northwest Herald newspaper in suburban Crystal Lake ran a story about an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., about the use of the atomic bomb to bring an end to the Second World War.

The first of those bombs was dropped on Hiroshima in Japan by an Army Air Corps bomber called the Enola Gay – named as a tribute to the pilot’s mother.

BUT SOME COPY editor had no clue what Enola Gay was, and the resulting headline referred to the “Enola Homosexual.” Probably based on some higher-up’s editorial decision that gay people aren’t gay, they’re homosexual. Or a whole bunch other pejorative slurs too crass to put in the newspaper.

The reality that somebody forgot

Aside from the fact that it was intended to not put a positive spin on gay people, it bothers me that someone was so unaware of what brought that world war to an end. A little more attention to our past would have allowed for better comprehension.

The sad part of all this is that I fully comprehend that such gaffes are going to occur again. Our attitude toward the past – many think something happening in 2001 is ancient – can be downright depressing.

We’re in for a lot of misery as a result, all because too many people think we, ourselves (that is what history is about) are too boring to study in depth.

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Most segregated, Chicago is? Or as close to integration as exists in U.S.?

One of my pet peeves is those people who always try to tag a label of “most segregated” when it comes to Chicago’s population.

Diverse or segregated?: Mexican Independence ...

They’re usually people who come from communities that are so overwhelmingly white (with people who like to say they’re “American” and not make any other reference to their ethnic origins) that the issue just doesn’t come up.

WHEREAS CHICAGO LITERALLY is a place where just about every ethnicity on Planet Earth can be found. And the city’s historic character has always been one of various neighborhoods representing ethnic states – of sorts.

The late newspaper columnist Mike Royko may have put it best in “Boss,” his biography of one-time Mayor Richard J. Daley, when he stated that the ethnic state-neighborhoods got along with each other about as well as they did back in the old country.

And in some cases, he wrote, they developed new prejudices to go along with the ones they already had.

I’m not denying the truthfulness of any of this back then, or the fact that it continues to exist to a degree in 21^st Century Chicago.

BUT I COULDN’T help notice a study done by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia. They literally compiled a map of the United States that can show you the racial breakdown of just about every community across the mainland (no Alaska or Hawaii).

It confirms a Chicago with a predominant white north lakefront and Northwest Side, with predominantly black West and South Sides. As for the southwest and northwest, there are strips that separate the white from the black comprised of the growing Latino population.

And all throughout, but usually not in the black portions of Chicago, there are visible dots that indicates pockets of people of Asian ethnic origins.

... South Side Irish, or ...

But to what degree is an ethnic enclave an example of racism and segregation – except to those people who would prefer that the particular group in a given neighborhood didn’t even exist!

THE COOPER CENTER map for Chicago was very predictable to someone who was born here (in the South Chicago neighborhood, and lived at various points in Pullman, the East Side, Belmont Heights, Ravenswood and even a summer on the Near North Side) and has lived his life moving back and forth from other cities.

Although looking at maps of places like Detroit (where 8 Mile Road is literally the dividing line between black and white) or Atlanta (where it seems like the majority is African-American, with Latino and Asian pockets mixed in with white people who live separately), Chicago comes across as having quite a variety of people.

Even Sacramento, Calif. – the capital city that the study calls a “well-integrated large city” – seems to be integrated because the Asian population mixes in with both white and Latino neighborhoods; while having a lack of black people overall.

Chicago definitely isn’t a black or white place like some other cities (such as St. Louis, where it appears black people are grouped on the north side and white people are to the south – Chicago’s negative image, so to speak) in our nation appear to be.

IN FACT, LOOKING at the United States as a whole (rather than zeroing in on specific cities), the nation comes across as a mass of blue (for white people) in the eastern half, with multicolored dots that pretty much indicate cities of significance.

 

To the west, the map is largely colored in white; as in vast areas that are so sparsely populated that not enough people live there for any race to register.

 

So when I hear people argue that my wonderous home city is so segregated, I can’t help but wonder if they’re merely revealing their own hang-ups with regards to race.

 

We as a society have a long ways to go in terms of true integration -- and it's not helped by certain elements who are determined to thwart such efforts.

... Bud Billiken parades?

 

BUT I CAN'T help but think that a city well on its way to being 30 percent black, 30 percent white, 30 percent Latino and the bulk of the rest being Asian has already taken significant steps toward that direction.

 

Maybe it's the rest of the U.S. that has to catch up to us!

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EXTRA: Legalese vs. English

PRECKWINKLE: Legalese translator?

The Cook County Board gave its approval Wednesday to a measure that will have county government spend just over $3 million to have access to Lexis/Nexis for the next three years – with options to renew for two more years.

Lexis/Nexis, of course, is the computer database that provides so much detailed information. For those of you wiseacres who are going to claim the county could use the Internet for free, keep in mind that Lexis/Nexis provides access to credible information – rather than the babble that pollutes too many websites.

IN DESCRIBING THE need for the access by the court system, the state’s attorney, the public defender’s office and the county sheriff, county Commissioner John Daley, D-Chicago, described the need for “legal research” by those entities.

To which county board President Toni Preckwinkle retorted, “You mean a substitution for law books?!?”

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