Afternoon roundup
Thursday, Feb 2, 2023 - Posted by Rich Miller * This decision is not a suprise. At all..
Also not a surprise, Darren Bailey urged his followers today to pay $200 and sign up for DeVore’s third lawsuit. The TRO is here. …Adding… From Attorney General Kwame Raoul…
* From End Citizens United…
* Press release…
* Rockford Register Star…
* Paul Vallas education plan highlights…
* Update on recent story…
* Isabel’s roundup…
* WCCU | Police recruits now required to take wrongful conviction course: Schlosser added the course in 2016 to the roster of available trainings for new police recruits in the Champaign facility. This year, the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board embraced the concept and made the course mandatory as part of the training for all news police recruits in the state. * WBEZ | A Woodlawn migrant shelter sparks anger — and reflection — among Black and Latino residents: Asylum seekers are expected to move into the temporary Wadsworth shelter on 64th and University Thursday. And it’s turned into a heated conversation about resources, city transparency and Black-Latino relations in Chicago. Woodlawn resident Benji Hart said the shelter controversy shows how anti-Black and anti-immigrant racism reinforce one another. * Reuters | Illinois top court endorses five-year window for biometric privacy claims: The court in a 5-0 ruling said that because the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) does not specify a statute of limitations for lawsuits, a five-year “catchall” period in the state code of civil procedure applies. * Sun-Times | Federal lawsuit can proceed against Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, judge rules: In allowing the case against Rittenhouse and the others to proceed, the judge said that Anthony Huber’s death “could plausibly be regarded as having been proximately caused by the actions of the governmental defendants.” * WICA | IL DCFS offering college scholarships to current, former youth: A minimum of 53 academic scholarships will be awarded to current and former youth in care for the upcoming school year. Scholarship recipients will receive up to five consecutive years of tuition and academic fee waivers to use at participating Illinois state community colleges and public universities, a monthly grant of $1,506 and a medical card. * WTTW | Englewood Rail Yard Expansion Back on Track With Ald. Taylor’s Support: A 15-year effort by the Norfolk Southern Railway to double the size of its storage yard in Englewood finally got the green light from the Chicago City Council on Wednesday, after Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th Ward) dropped her opposition to a measure long sought by the railroad. * Center Square | As rural areas lose population, some suggest ways to attract residents: Winchester said small communities in a region should come together and coordinate economic and community development plans to attract and retain residents to their region. The survey showed the top three reasons respondents would move to a rural area are to take advantage of a slower pace of life, to live closer to relatives and to find a less congested place to live. * Sun-Times | Cook County’s financial divide is a local example of how policies favor the rich: What happens during the budget standoff in Congress could determine whether it becomes harder for average Americans to build wealth and pay their bills. * Tribune | Tom Girardi, disgraced former lawyer, indicted on fraud charges in Chicago: The charges are the latest legal blow to a once-powerful player who rubbed elbows with politicians and celebrities. As one of the nation’s most prominent plaintiff’s attorneys, Girardi was known for high-profile litigation such as the case that led to a $333 million settlement portrayed in the movie “Erin Brockovich.” * WSJ | Billionaire Ken Griffin Wants to Move a Historic Home Off His Miami Property. Preservationists Aren’t Happy.: The Citadel founder and CEO is considering relocating the circa-1913 house built by William Jennings Bryan to another location where the public can view it. Locals are concerned about moving an old structure and ‘redacting history.’ * Tribune | 50th Ward race: Offensive tweets, including about Israel, threaten challenger’s efforts: Mueze Bawany, 35, who’s backed by the Chicago Teachers Union and the local chapter for the Democratic Socialists of America in his bid to upset three-term incumbent Ald. Debra Silverstein in the 50th Ward, made the statements on Twitter three years ago on an account he subsequently deleted. The Tribune received copies of the deleted tweets and Bawany confirmed he wrote them. * AP | Average long-term mortgage rate falls a fourth straight week: Mortgage buyer Freddie Mac reported Thursday that the average on the benchmark 30-year rate fell to 6.09% from 6.13% last week. That’s the lowest level since September. The average rate a year ago was 3.55%. * Chalkbeat | How to grade schools post-pandemic? States must decide: This debate — in essence, whether to ease up on academic expectations or double down — is flaring up across the country as school accountability systems creak back to life after a pandemic pause. Mandated by federal and state laws, the systems set goals for schools, rate their performance, and direct support to schools identified as struggling. But the pandemic has complicated every step of that process. * Fortune | Once the ‘intellectual blood banks’ of the rich and powerful, can speechwriters be replaced with ChatGPT?: Speechwriter or not: Any good communicator understands that good writing demands good thinking. And everything that’s worth reading has evolved from an unformed interstellar cloud that was in the writer’s mind into something else altogether. I’ve sat down to write a poem and written an essay. I’ve sat down to articulate one opinion and wound up expressing its opposite. “I don’t know what I think until I write it down,” Joan Didion said. Many other writers have expressed a similar sentiment. * FiveThirtEight | How Our 2022 Midterm Forecasts Performed: While some polling firms badly missed the mark, in the aggregate the polls had one of their most accurate cycles in recent history. As a result, FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts had a pretty good year, too. Media proclamations of a “red wave” occurred largely despite polls that showed a close race for the U.S. Senate and a close generic congressional ballot. It was the pundits who made the red wave narrative, not the data. * Block Club | New York City Gets Its Own — Tinier — Version Of The Bean: A bite-sized version of The Bean was unveiled this week under a corner of Jenga Tower, 56 Leonard St., in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood. It was four years in the making. The baby Bean was also created by artist Anish Kapoor, the same sculpture artist behind Chicago’s Cloud Gate, which is more commonly known as the Bean. Kapoor has also snagged an apartment in Jenga Tower, according to Curbed. * Tribune | Why can’t the Chicago Sky attract — and then keep — top talent?: Candace Parker, Courtney Vandersloot and Azurá Stevens have all now chosen to take their talents elsewhere. Parker will be joining the defending champions Las Vegas Aces. Vandersloot hasn’t announced her new team, but did say her goodbye and thank you to the Sky and their fans in an Instagram post. Stevens, who saw her minutes decline in favor of Emma Meesseman, is reportedly signing with the Los Angeles Sparks. And Allie Quigley, a hometown basketball legend, has decided to take the year off from basketball entirely. * Daily Herald | Introducing a new and improved way to engage with our content: As our new commenting tool rolls out, you can expect more lively, yet civil discussions and better ways to interact with fellow commenters. You will have the ability to upload content, like, reply, follow or share right in the comments. * SJ-R | ‘View comments’ button removed from online articles: While we continue to believe in the importance of comments, we had to make the hard choice to move away from the space due to changes in staffing and the time investment necessary to bring you a safe, moderated and productive discussion space. We’re not willing to risk discussions veering off track or people being verbally attacked. With this change, we’ll continue to focus on exclusive, local reporting and finding new and exciting ways to tell your stories. * Sun-Times | Sun-Times at 75: A look back, starting with a story that became a Jimmy Stewart movie: “We’re a spunky newspaper,” says Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell, who began writing for the paper as a summer intern in 1990. “We’ve always been a newspaper for the folks who felt they didn’t have a voice in this city.” * Bloomberg | The Race to Waterproof Your Outdoor Gear — Without Toxic Chemicals: But really: How much of the volume of corporate communication is a sincere attempt to communicate strategies, build culture and create a human connection between an organization’s leaders and its stakeholders? And how much of it is just filling the vacuum with corporate noise, in what Maggioncalda describes as, “a friendly, upbeat, authoritative tone with mixed cadence?” I’ve wondered that for a long time. And it looks like we’re all about to find out. * Sun-Times | After 30 years, ‘Groundhog Day’ holds up, and you can say that again: Yet of all the painful, unimaginable, horrific experiences Phil endures time and again in Harold Ramis’ classic “Groundhog Day,” was there anything more brutal than having to drink a sweet vermouth on the rocks with a twist, over and over and over? * AP | Beyond Phil: Other rodents that purport to ‘predict’ weather: WOODSTOCK WILLIE, Illinois. Saw his shadow Thursday. Site of where the best-ever PR around the day — the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day” — was filmed. * Fox Sports | Iowa sniffs out Illinois student prank ahead of Saturday’s game: The Illinois student spirit group “Orange Krush” had its order for 200 tickets to the men’s basketball game at Carver-Hawkeye Arena on Saturday canceled Wednesday after Iowa discovered the person who made the purchase falsely claimed the tickets were for a Boys and Girls Club in Champaign.
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- Rudy’s teeth - Thursday, Feb 2, 23 @ 2:46 pm:
Is Bailey shilling for Tom DeVore’s next lawsuit? Will Bailey get a taste?
- RNUG - Thursday, Feb 2, 23 @ 3:02 pm:
== SJR removes … ==
Yet another step in the long decline of the SJR. It’s barely USA Today lite. Helen Copley would barely recognize it.
- SpiDem - Thursday, Feb 2, 23 @ 3:22 pm:
Wait,
I thought Politico said Christian was headed to the Presidential campaign? /s
- H-W - Thursday, Feb 2, 23 @ 3:22 pm:
RNUG, I am not so sure. I have visited a lot of news sites (newspapers, television stations, etc.), and the vast majority of comments tend to be hateful. If I were responsible for monitoring such comment sections, I think I would be overwhelmed with the number of comments I would want to remove, and would probably be fired as some point for refusing to allow incivility and hate speech.
- jackmac - Thursday, Feb 2, 23 @ 3:24 pm:
== Yet another step in the long decline of the SJR.==
Copley Newspapers once had a broad presence in Illinois and I like to think her husband, James Copley, might be more dismayed by the SJR’s decline. Helen? Not so much. And their late adopted son, David, not at all.
- Payback - Thursday, Feb 2, 23 @ 3:31 pm:
“Police recruits now required to take wrongful conviction course” This is good news, so props to the ILESTB. It should have been done 40 years ago, but better late than never. The old cops teach the new cops their dirty tricks, that’s how the corrupt culture is passed down from generation to generation, like fraternity hazing.
Personally I would bring a team of lawyers from the U.S. Attorney’s office into the police recruit classrooms, and tell them we will prosecute you if you break the law. Scared straight for cops.
- Good fit - Thursday, Feb 2, 23 @ 3:35 pm:
Christian to academia? A perfect place to chill out and take a break from the stress of being bad cop in the gov’s office these past four years. Doesn’t seem to be a path to a future political campaign or to riches in the private sector but he’s probably not taking too big of a pay cut and gets to dip his toe in a wide variety of pools. Vaya con dios.
- Dysfunction Junction - Thursday, Feb 2, 23 @ 3:53 pm:
=…due to changes in staffing and the time investment necessary to bring you a safe, moderated and productive discussion space. We’re not willing to risk discussions veering off track or people being verbally attacked.=
Rich, maybe you could take a couple days off, go over to SJ-R and show them how it’s done. Those don’t seem to be issues here, and you’ve got many hundreds more comments a day than their publication along with the most diverse and opinionated commentariat in the state. Far as we know, you’re moderating this whole site pretty much single-handedly (Or is Isabel the real enforcer here?)
- cermak_rd - Thursday, Feb 2, 23 @ 3:54 pm:
Vallas’s plan is … actually not bad. I was expecting private school vouchers, so this is actually not bad at all. And a concentration on those not going to college (the majority!) is well overdue.
- JoanP - Thursday, Feb 2, 23 @ 4:09 pm:
@ Good fit -
The previous VP for Civic Engagement at UChicago had an annual salary over $700,000. I don’t think Christian is going to go hungry.
- Demoralized - Thursday, Feb 2, 23 @ 4:20 pm:
Well, we can thank the Supreme Court for the pandora’s box they opened with their gun ruling. Now, apparently, those under domestic violence orders are just fine and dandy to have guns. I would hope that the gun rights folks would at least acknowledge that this sort of thing is just crazy.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/02/politics/domestic-violence-guns-fifth-circuit/index.html
- Club J - Thursday, Feb 2, 23 @ 4:23 pm:
Wonder if Greg Bishop is part of DeVore’s lawsuit. He’s such an advocate for DeVore.
- Stormsw7706 - Thursday, Feb 2, 23 @ 4:26 pm:
I’m related to Williams Jennings Bryan. This decision by Ken Griffen to rewrite history is just another example of woke decision making by billionaires to rewrite history. This is causing me endless angst. Can I sue under Florida law? I contacted Tom Devores office and he said he’d take the case for $245. I called Dan Caulkens and he said he’d class action it for $150. Darren Bailey couldn’t talk because he was cashing his federal farm subsidy checks. Will keep everyone posted
- Todd - Thursday, Feb 2, 23 @ 4:55 pm:
hey Demoralized — so I see some of the same historical cites Kwame likes to use, just got shot down in that opinion.
Wanna bet how long the gun ban hangs around? Of the FOID card? tick toc. . .