White guys in the Latino caucus?

It always amused me that state Rep. Dan Burke, D-Chicago, went out of his way to include himself in the Illinois House’s Latino caucus – making a point of sitting in with other Latino state legislators whenever they would meet privately to derive their stance on certain issues.

Burke said he felt that since his legislative district on the Southwest Side had such a significant Latino population, it was his obligation to try to understand his constituents.

BECAUSE NOT COMPREHENDING them would be a sure-fire way toward having them turn on him and vote someone else into office.

Some people ridiculed his gesture as nothing more than a token effort to understand Latinos, and that just because he sat in on a few meetings did not make him suddenly aware of what his constituents were thinking.

But on the whole, I always saw his gesture as being more than most political people were willing to do – since the usual reaction of a political person representing an area with a growing Latino population is to somehow cling to the declining white population in the area and try to figure out ways to maximize its political power!

In short, political denial.

SO IT IS with a feeling of amusement that I will be observing the City Council in coming months, where the head of the council’s Latino caucus (25^th Ward Alderman Danny Solis) said this week that the caucus is now willing to include aldermen who represent neighborhoods with significant Latino populations.

Solis said he wants to increase the influence of Latino politicos, and figures that this is one way to boost the total numbers – which will go up after the 2015 municipal elections when new aldermen are elected under the new ward map that has 13 Latino-based wards and two more wards that are Latino-influenced.

Now whether that tactic will work is questionable. Because the real factor is whether the white aldermen will want to alter their view of the world to include their Latino constituents more thoroughly.

If they don’t want to, it won’t matter if Solis is able to include their names on his “list” of Latino-leaning aldermen. Latinos might not gain much from this move.

BUT I WILL say that if these aldermen have any sense whatsoever, they will reach out to their growing numbers of Latino constituents (29 percent of the city’s overall 2.7 million population is Latino, according to the 2010 census).

If they have any sense, they will accept this invitation as the least of gestures they can make to representing the people who live within their wards. They ought to be jumping at the chance to make this move. If they’re not willing to do so, then perhaps they deserve to get dumped come the ’15 election cycle.

So 14^th Ward Alderman Edward Burke (Dan’s brother) will get the chance to show some understanding, as will 10^th Ward Alderman John Pope (whose ward includes some of the oldest Spanish-speaking enclaves in Chicago and will now be 63 percent Latino).

Other aldermen who got un invitado include Marty Quinn (13^th Ward), Toni Foulkes (15^th Ward), Michael Zalewski (23^rd Ward), Nick Sposato (36^th Ward) and Richard Mell of the 33^rd Ward, who was in charge of the recently-completed redistricting effort for the Chicago City Council and whose daughter, Deb Mell, serves in the Latino Caucus in her role as a state representative from the Northwest Side.

SO WHILE CANDIDATES such as Pope have been successful at defeating Latino challengers (claiming he can appeal to Latino voters) and people like Sposato had approached the Latino Caucus leadership in the past about being included (only to be rebuffed), we’re going to get a better picture of how interested they are in the growing segment of their wards.

This is one case where a politician acting in their own self-interest would also be beneficial to the people of Chicago as a whole.

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People think it’s acceptable to use the old racial imagery? That’s the problem

One summer just over two decades ago, I remember walking into a hot dog stand and – while waiting for my order – overhearing a conversation of some guys whom I had never seen before, and have never seen since.

Their topic of conversation was about crosses. Specifically, the proper way to build one so that it could be lit afire. Their plans, as I recall, were that they were going to erect the cross and burn it in the front yard of someone who had somehow managed to offend their sensibilities.

NOW BEFORE I go further, I should point out that I never heard of any incidents in the neighborhood (I lived one summer in the part of Chicago near Norridge and underneath the flight patterns of O’Hare International Airport) about cross-burnings.

For all I know, these guys were just a batch of meatheads who were all talk. Because I’ll admit that one of them looked at me briefly, then turned his attention back to the conversation.

They didn’t seem to care that I was close enough to hear what they were saying.

But that doesn’t change the fact that we seem to have some people in our society who want to accept the old symbols of racial hatred as somehow acceptable behavior, or something that can be joked about.

I SUSPECT IF I (or anyone) had confronted those knuckleheads, they would have claimed to be joking.

This memory came back to me when reading in the Chicago Tribune a report about an incident last month in the Beverly neighborhood that involved a hate crime.

In that incident, three teenage boys (all white) lured one of their black school mates (all are, or were, students of Brother Rice High School, which likes to think its students are among the civilized people living on the South Side, as opposed to those riff-raff public school kids) to a house – where they proceeded to beat him up.

It seems the black student was being friendly (if not quite dating) a female cousin of one of the boys. So it seems that in the name of racial purity, these three thugs were going to teach the student a lesson.

DURING THE BEATING (which wasn’t subtle, since the three screamed racial epithets throughout), one of the teens got a rope, created a crude noose, and put it around the student’s neck.

From the information provided by Chicago police, it seems that the three didn’t actually try to commit a lynching. The idea was more along the lines of having him wear the noose while being beaten.

Which means that, once again, we have an incident where someone thinks the sleazy imagery of the past is somehow acceptable in the present. Some people just seem so determined to live in the late 19^th Century at a time when we’re in the second decade of the 21^st!

I won’t even be surprised if some people try to dismiss this incident as somehow being a joke, gone bad. This isn’t humorous – under any circumstances.

I’M SURE THERE will even be some people who will look at this case and put their interest in the futures of the three young people who now face charges (two of them are so young that they merely face delinquency petitions – which means this is a Juvenile Court matter).

As though the kid who got jumped was somehow of secondary importance.

I’ll also be interested in seeing what reaction, if any, the school takes. Because while this attack did not happen on campus, these private schools usually have ways of getting involved in the private lives of their students and Brother Rice officials have said they're investigating the matter to see what reaction, if any, they should take.

They’re supposed to be building their “character” for adult life. I want to see how this incident will be used as an educational “experience.”

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A DAY IN THE LIFE (of Chicago): Kirk wants his Blackberry! Why?

I got my big chuckle for this week from the reports coming from Northwestern Memorial Hospital – the ones that were meant to reassure us that Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., has a good chance at recovering from the stroke it appears he suffered this past weekend.

KIRK: Gimme my Blackberry?!?

For it seems that one of the first things that Kirk did after undergoing surgery meant to reduce the damage that could be caused by the stroke was to ask for his Blackberry.

IT SEEMS THAT the senator from the North Shore suburbs was more than eager to get back to work – even though it will be several months (if ever) before Kirk can claim to be fully recovered.

But the idea of asking for a Blackberry?

Personally, I have been carrying a Blackberry for nearly a year – and there are times I wish I could get away with flinging the thing into the Chicago River (or maybe Lake Calumet).

If I were in recovery from a serious medical condition, I’d want to use the time to get away from constant communication with certain people.

BUT THAT’S ME. As for Kirk, the officials at Northwestern Memorial seem determined to give us optimism. On Wednesday, they were saying they were “hopeful” about the senator’s long-term prospects.

For the talk we have been hearing is that the stroke he suffered affected the side of the brain that impacts his body movement – NOT the side that impacts his mental state.

Which means that his continuance in the U.S. Senate will depend on whether he can continue to move about. It means the image he tries to project of himself as a vigorous warrior is a thing of the past. Then again, he certainly couldn’t be any worse off than some of the near-centennarians (Strom Thurmond, for example) who have served in the Senate.

What else is notable these days on the slushy shores of the southwestern corner of Lake Michigan?

WILL HOOSIER GOPers TURN SUPER BOWL SUNDAY INTO LABOR CELEBRATION?: The Indiana House of Representatives gave its approval to a measure turning the Hoosier State into the 23^rd state to have “right-to-work” laws on its books.

With the state Senate expected to follow suit on this measure in the near future, there is some speculation that final approval of this measure by Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (who got some national attention by giving the GOP rebuttal statement to the State of the Union address this week) could literally be timed to coincide with the Super Bowl – which this year is being played in Indianapolis.

It would figure that some ideologues would want to turn an occasion for sports celebration into an excuse to make their anti-organized labor statement even louder than it will be regardless.

Personally, I’d like to think most people will be disgusted by any attempt to turn this over-bloated sports event into a political statement. Then again, I also think many people are disgusted that the Super Bowl this year isn’t being played at some warm-weather locale.

WHITE SOX TO MAKE SUNDAYS PARTICULARLY GARISH: I never cared much for those bright-red pinstriped uniforms the Chicago White Sox wore back in the early 1970s. Yet it seems the ballclub in 2012 will resurrect them.

The White Sox said on Wednesday they plan to wear uniforms modeled after those get-ups for all 13 of their Sunday home games. Since they won’t be using road uniforms, we won’t get to see the light blue-with-red trim jerseys with a zipper up the front that the ballclub used to wear in other cities.

I couldn’t help but notice the Chicago Tribune’s write-up about this act made references to Dick Allen – the slugger who had his best season ever (American League Most Valuable Player for 1972) while wearing this jersey.

Yet I can’t help but think of two other ballplayers from that era who wore those uniforms – Bucky Dent and Rich Gossage. Both were products of the White Sox system and it was apparent that both were exceptional ballplayers while in Chicago. Yet both had their glory days later in the decade playing for the New York Yankees. To me, that inability to keep talent is what is glorified by this get-up.

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Broadcast cameras in the courtrooms? Will they add clutter or comprehension

This may sound odd, but I am a reporter-type person who isn’t all that enthused about the decision by the Supreme Court of Illinois to let broadcasters have cameras in the courtrooms.



We'll soon get to see the inside of this bulding on our televisions.



And not just because I enjoy the sight of those sketch artists who do their quickie drawings that help illustrate for television newscasts what happened in a courtroom on any given day.

A PART OF me would like to think that those sketches would still be included in broadcast reports of courthouse activity. But I’m sure they will now be seen as a frivolous expense that can be cut.

Now, the courtrooms for the circuit courts throughout Illinois will come across as dull-looking activity with a lot of people speaking in legalese. The talking heads will wind up coming across as legal translators – letting people know just what was meant by all the gibberish they just heard.

If that means that people get a more honest view of what courtroom activity is all about, that is a good thing. And I suppose anything that encourages broadcast news reports to spend more time at the courthouse (many ignore it as much as possible BECAUSE of the fact that they can’t have their cameras inside the courtroom) is a positive.

Yet I’m still not enthused.

BECAUSE I WILL admit that during the times of my working life when I covered courthouse activity on a full-time basis (currently, I do some work for one of the suburban daily newspapers that occasionally sends me to the Cook County Criminal Courts building, the district courthouse in Markham and the Will County Circuit Court in Joliet), one of the attractions of the beat was that you didn’t have broadcast types adding to the clutter with their equipment.

The idea that we’re going to have masses of broadcast people cramming their way into what are often cramped courtroom facilities (I have seen rooms about the size of a master bedroom – minus the private toilet facilities) is going to add to the chaos factor.

For a reporter-type trying to comprehend what is happening in several courtrooms simultaneously, anything adding to the chaos is a potential drawback.

I also must admit to a selfish motivation – I always enjoyed the idea that the courts were a place where one had to turn to the written word for serious reporting.

NOT THAT I think allowing the broadcast news outlets more access to the courthouse will make their efforts more serious.

I’m well aware of the priorities of broadcasting and know that the time limits of a news story (1:30, at most; 30 seconds more common) will mean that most courthouse activity will still continue to be ignored.

It will be only the occasional trial that will draw broadcast news coverage. Most trials will continue to be newspaper (and their affiliated websites)-covered only!

I’m hoping that the circuit courts (the Supreme Court’s decision does NOT apply to the U.S. District courts in Chicago, Springfield or Marion) will follow the lead of the state appeals courts that have had limited camera access.

IN THOSE COURTROOMS, there is a lone camera set up, and television stations use the video provided by the courts themselves.

Which is a problem if the courts decide to start self-editing what they allow television stations to see. What it means is that anybody who thinks we’re getting unfettered access to the courthouse is reading way too much into all of this.

So we’re not really getting as much of a view of the courthouse as some people might think we are – and the pictures don’t mean much of anything without an intelligible reporter-type to explain what they mean. All the more reason to not get so excited about the change that the state Supreme Court announced Tuesday.

CUOCO: Believable as Stacey?



There’s one other reason I’m not enthused about this change. Because many television stations are only going to selectively send their cameras to the courthouses, it could well be that the first trial of any significance that will get broadcast coverage will be the case in Will County concerning Drew Peterson.

PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY watched that Lifetime network film about the case will get to see just how inaccurate (Kaley Cuoco as Stacey strikes me as a particularly large stretch of the imagination) it truly was. Peterson himself calls the film, “hysterical.”

Of course, I think the real Drew will turn out to be hysterical enough on his own.

And now, we’re likely to get to see him in all his glory. Which I’m sure will feed his ego even moreso.

An ego-bloated Drew Peterson might well be the perfect reason why we should question the idea of a camera recording the courtroom activity for all to see.

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Now, we have to rely on the Chicago Tribune for candidate endorsements

In a way, I can understand the logic of the Chicago Sun-Times, which on Monday said it was going to stop doing endorsements of candidates for political office.

We won’t have the Sun-Times to tell us who they think we should vote for when it comes to Congress, or the state Legislature, or any of the political posts that are up for grabs in the March 20 primary (and, if the policy stays in place) the Nov. 6 general election.

MY GUESS WOULD be that they’re tired of dealing with the letters (both on paper and through e-mail) they receive from people who are pissed that their preferred candidate did not get the paper’s backing.

They want to think they’re appealing to “all” people by doing some reporting on the campaigns (let’s hope they do) and by publishing the questionnaires they normally send to campaigns that many of the lower-level endorsements are entirely based upon.

Supposedly, we can count on the Chicago Sun-Times to give us a lot of raw data to sort through so we can make up our own minds.

Of course, that presumes the “raw data” is, in and of itself, complete and wasn’t compiled by someone with a bias determined to give us a skewed picture of the political people we get to pick from. In short, that it doesn’t make a mockery of the concept like Fox News’ “Fair and Balanced” and “We Report, You Decide” slogans do.

BECAUSE I MUST admit I will miss the endorsements, in large part because they gave us a clue as to just how skewed the newspaper’s perspective might truly be.

Reading through the collections of endorsements to find trends might give us a better clue as to what is going through the mindsets of the people gathering the news. In fact, many of those lesser posts get heavily influenced by which little coverage they get.

One not-so-negative piece of reporting for one candidate could result in his getting the endorsement. Would Napoleon Harris, a former professional football player and Beggars Pizza franchise owner (in suburban Harvey and Orland Park) have got the Sun-Times endorsement for his bid to replace state Sen. James Meeks, D-Chicago, in the Illinois Senate – because the Sun-Times did a lengthy profile about him in their sports section that ran just over a week ago, while the other candidates are likely to receive nothing?

It won’t happen now.

I ALWAYS GOT my kick from reading all the state Legislature endorsements as a whole, and then trying to figure out what kind of General Assembly the paper thinks we ought to have.

Then , we can start evaluating their coverage somewhat to see if “reporting” is trying somehow to back that view, or is somehow trying to report facts. And are they straight facts, or facts that back a certain viewpoint?

To me, the endorsements are more about helping to judge the honesty of a newspaper’s overall report, or letting us know that the newspaper has its own agenda that we ought to keep in mind (such as the Union-Leader of Manchester, N.H., which endorsed Newt Gingrich for president even though that is one place where Mitt Romney truly was the local favorite) whenever we read their dispatches.

It’s less about trying to get people to vote the way you want them to, and more about stating who you are. Which makes me wonder if the signed editorial that appeared in the Sun-Times on Monday ought to be taken as a sign that the Sun-Times would prefer not to do that.

OR MAYBE THEY’RE not eager to deal with the hostile e-mails (inevitably anonymous) that will come from the crackpots who think that everybody who doesn’t believe exactly what they do should be locked away from society.

While I don’t exactly enjoy those people, I figure they come with the territory of expressing an opinion. Because no matter what one thinks, there will always be someone else who completely disagrees with them.

Which is why sometime in a couple of months, most likely the morning of Election Day, I will do my very own “endorsements” on this weblog. Although since this is a one-person operation, what I really will be doing is telling you who I cast my vote for – just as I have done in all the election cycles that have been held since I began publishing this site in late 2007 some 1,503 posts ago.

I view it as a way of letting you know my overall perspective on candidates and how it translates to a perspective on issues. Then, you can take the rest of the commentary published here, and figure it for yourself. I don’t expect anyone to be swayed by who I “endorse.”

I MUST ADMIT one other point. I’m going to miss the idea of an endorsement for the Illinois Second Congressional district Democratic campaign. I was eager to see who the Sun-Times would decide should represent the Far South Side and surrounding suburbs on Capitol Hill.

Would they decide that the “scandals” that have attached themselves to the name “Jesse Jackson, Jr.” (many of which they had a heavy hand in reporting) be so intense that we should send Debbie Halvorson to Congress in his place?

Or would they find a certain verbosity that would allow them to decide that Jesse, Jr. is worth a 10^th term in Congress?

It seems we’ll never know.

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EXTRA: Kirk to get character test in coming days on health issues

I must confess – I gained a significant amount of respect for soon-to-be former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., in recent days.

GIFFORDS: Soon-to-be former



The Congresswoman who was shot in an incident a year ago says she’s giving up her seat on Capitol Hill. She wants to focus her attention on long-term recovery from the gunshot wounds she suffered.

NOW IT’S NOT that I never had objections to Giffords. But it’s just that many political people I have encountered would have gone out of their way to hold onto their political position for as long as humanly possible.

Even if they weren’t capable of fulfilling the duties, they would have wanted to keep the post – which in Giffords’ case would have run through the end of this year and early into January of 2013.

Even if they decided not to run for re-election (which Giffords would have had to do in the Nov. 6 general elections), they wouldn’t have wanted to resign.

Yet that is what Giffords is doing. By the end of Monday, she is to have completed her last duties as a member of Congress from the Tuscon, Ariz., area. She is expected to submit her letter of resignation later this week to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (a Republican) and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.

I’M SURE THERE are Democrats who would have wanted her to stay in office – even though she would be an absentee member – just to keep the congressional seat within the party – instead of boosting by one the Republican majority in the House of Representatives.

It has me wondering how we, in Illinois, would handle the same situation. Which could very well happen if circumstances take a turn for the worse.

KIRK: On road to recovery

Yes, I’m referring to the situation involving Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., who checked himself into suburban Lake Forest Hospital during the weekend and was transferred to Northwestern Memorial Hospital – where on Monday he underwent surgery to relieve swelling around his brain.

He has been diagnosed as having suffered a stroke.

NOW I DON’T have any evidence that this is a life-threatening situation. For all I know, the statement from Kirk’s office that he is expected to recover in full is completely true.

A part of me certainly hopes that he’s being truthful, and can claim to being as noble as Giffords has been in recent days.

But if it turns out for the worst, I’d like to think that Kirk could contemplate making the same high-ground stance as Giffords did. Even if I can already hear the rantings of the Republicans about Pat Quinn “stealing” away a seat from them.

Avoiding that kind of rhetoric may well be the best reason to hope for a full Kirk recovery.

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Paterno death brings back memories

Former Penn State University football coach Joe Paterno is dead. It appears to be so. We certainly hope so.

PATERNO: What a diff'rence a day makes



For having a pair of screw-ups with relation to his health would just be too much to bear.

IT SEEMS THAT this particular incident started with a website that covers the Penn State scene. They reported Saturday that Paterno – who had been hospitalized for eight days – had died.

Actually, he was dying. He wasn’t actually pronounced dead until Sunday morning.

But in the desire to be on top of things, the website got a premature tip and went with it – one that turned out to be wrong. Several other websites helped spread the word by also writing about Paterno’s demise hours before it actually happened.

They based their reports on the Penn State student website, and all wound up having to take it back. Of course, they were quick to blame the student website, and my understanding is that someone officially gave up his editorial post with the website on Sunday – expressing shame at what went wrong.

OF COURSE, BY the time this happened, Paterno was actually dead. So it’s not like the report was all that far off the mark.

Now I’m not justifying the reporting of anything that was off the mark. If someone reports the death of a prominent person, the last thing one wants is that person being able to call up the reporter-type who wrote the story and say, “I’m not dead!!!”

DeANGELIS: Caught the error

But I also comprehend how such things can happen. Some times in the confusion of circumstances, people spread bad information and reporter-types get caught up in it.

One of the most-famed of these incidents involved one-time 26^th Ward Alderman Vito Marzullo, who got to read his obituary on the front page of the Chicago Tribune some two decades ago – about a decade before he actually died.

BUT IN MY own time as a reporter-type person, there have been a couple of moments I experienced with this same circumstance.

One was back in the early 1990s when I was working for the now-defunct City News Bureau of Chicago. One day, my editors got a call informing them that one of the leaders of the Republican caucus of the Illinois state Senate – Aldo DeAngelis of Olympia Fields – had died that morning.

Supposedly, the person who spoke to us had got the information directly from a hospital official who “recognized” the man’s name as an important official when she saw the paperwork indicating he had been pronounced dead.

Unfortunately, the man who died that day was someone who had a name similar to that of the state Senate member. It wasn’t the senator, even though a hospital official had said it was.

SO WHEN I started making calls to try to piece together, I quickly found out from the senator’s staff that their boss had been in the office earlier in the day, and – unlike Generalissimo Francisco Franco – most definitely was NOT dead.

Of course, my editor initially didn’t believe me, and persisted with talk that I needed to write an obituary. It was only when I personally interviewed the senator later in the day and got his reaction (he thought it was humorous) that my editor became persuaded that the senator was not dead – and an obituary was not warranted.

I only wish I had been that fortunate a few years later – by which time I was working for United Press International in their Springfield, Ill., office. One day, I got a call informing me that state Sen. Kenneth Hall, D-East St. Louis, had been hospitalized – most likely in St. Louis.

I started making calls, both to St. Louis hospitals (none of which had him) and then to his district office on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. Nobody knew nothing.

UNTIL …

A call was made by me to the office of the Illinois Senate’s Democratic leaders. I asked an aide what he knew about Hall’s health, and that aide informed me that Hall had been pronounced dead that very morning. He also informed me that he was preparing an obituary for the Senate Democratic leadership to release – and would I like to see a copy when he was done, so as to help me put together my own obituary of Hall for the wire service.

HALL: Too early



At that point, I wrote something that UPI called a “spotlight” – a two-sentence blurb that said Hall (at that point, the longest-serving member of the state Senate) had died. It was transmitted to the wire service’s clients.

I then started piecing together what information I had in the file cabinets about Hall so as to write a basic obituary that could back up the “spotlight.” It was during my preparation of that basic obituary that I learned Hall had not died. He was admitted to a hospital, and as it turned out he died two weeks later. Yes, I got an apology from that legislative aide – who admitted it was his error.

I WAS SPARED the sight of an obituary for Hall with my name attached. The wire service straightened out the mess, and that basic obit turned into a story about how long-time state Sen. Ken Hall had been hospitalized.

But I’m still the guy who “killed” Kenny Hall a couple of weeks prematurely. (And when Hall eventually died, the competition wire service managed to report that before we did; that really hurt!)

So I can appreciate how someone trying to be diligent managed to get too diligent in their efforts to report a tidbit that would catch national attention (unlike the death of Hall, which wasn’t noted outside of Illinois).

Just like what seems to have happened with Paterno this past weekend.

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