By Helene Smith

there was no Memorial Service for my school.
no mourners in
black.
nor any Memorial Services for the other
49 schools.
all of the schools,
elementary.
elementary years–they say they are
our formative years.
i don’t know about that. but i know that my school was most of my
world at 6 years old.
and when most of your world just goes away when you’re 6–even if most of your friends–yeah, you got to see again–
i don’t know. but i couldn’t wrap my young mind around my school
going away.

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Posted on May 29, 2013

By Steve Rhodes

Only pesky election rules keeping this nine-year-old CPS student off the ballot in 2015.

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Posted on May 21, 2013

By The Chicago Alliance Against Racist And Political Repression

The Illinois Torture Relief and Inquiry Commission (TIRC) voted to send seven alleged police torture cases to the Chief Judge of the Criminal Court for evidentiary hearings. The seven are (links and parens by Beachwood):
* Jackie Wilson
* Jaime Hauad (third poem)
* Tony Anderson (No. 3)
* Darrell Fair (Along with Hauad, a non-Burge case)
* Clayborn Smith
* Harvey Allen
* Vincent Wade
In each case, the commissioners voted unanimously that there was “credible evidence of torture” based on the record of the cases.

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Posted on May 20, 2013

By CHANGE Illinois!

A growing coalition of prominent and diverse organizations on Thursday announced a grassroots campaign to fix the broken process of drawing General Assembly districts in Illinois.
CHANGE Illinois! launched the exploratory phase of an effort aimed at giving voters in the November 2014 election the opportunity approve a state constitutional amendment distancing legislators from the map-drawing process by establishing a nonpartisan, independent commission to create fair, representative districts.

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Posted on May 17, 2013

By Steve Rhodes

“The City of Chicago Office of Inspector General (IGO) has completed an audit of the City’s Red-Light Camera (RLC) program,” the IGO announced Tuesday.
“The audit found that Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) was unable to substantiate its claims that the City chose to install and maintain red-light cameras at intersections with the highest angle crash rates in order to increase safety.”
Perhaps even worse, the audit found that if City Hall instead is really using the red-light program to generate revenue instead of increase safety – something Rahm Emanuel has vigorously denied – it is doing a poor job of that, too. Revenue, it turns out, isn’t being maximized.
So we have the worst of all worlds. Let’s take a look.

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Posted on May 15, 2013

By Kim Barker and Justin Elliott/ProPublica

The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year.
The IRS did not respond to requests Monday following up about that release, and whether it had determined how the applications were sent to ProPublica.
In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups. Nine of those applications had not yet been approved – meaning they were not supposed to be made public.

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Posted on May 14, 2013

By Ald. Brendan Reilly

From the alderman’s constituent e-mail newsletter.
Dear Neighbor:
At City Council on Wednesday, Mayor Emanuel introduced a new Parking Meter proposal to govern the remaining 71 years of this flawed, disastrous lease agreement. Although the new proposal includes some attractive components, there are controversial changes to meter hours that many aldermen do not support. In fairness to the Mayor, he inherited this horrendous contract from his predecessor and has spent much of his first two years in office working to find a way to get out of the contract or improve it for taxpayers. We are fortunate the Mayor has been so persistent in aggressively pushing-back against the parking meter company on our behalf.

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Posted on May 13, 2013

By Christie Thompson/ProPublica

When the Obama administration released its 2013 Drug Control Strategy recently, drug czar Gil Kerlikowske called it a “21^st century” approach to drug policy.
“It should be a public health issue, not just a criminal justice issue,” he said.
The latest plan builds on Obama’s initial strategy outlined in 2010. Obama said then the U.S. needed “a new direction in drug policy,” and that “a well-crafted strategy is only as successful as its implementation.”
Many reform advocates were hopeful the appointment of former Seattle Police Chief Kerlikowske as head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy signaled a shift in the long-lasting “war on drugs.”
But a government report released a day after the latest proposal questioned the office’s impact so far.

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Posted on May 9, 2013

By Steve Rhodes

“Pat Brady’s resignation Tuesday as chairman of the state’s Republican Party was a move months in the making, an effort to leave on his own terms rather than being ousted for his support of gay marriage,” the Tribune reports.
“Republican leaders, who orchestrated Brady’s exit strategy last month at a meeting in Tinley Park, said about a dozen contenders are vying to replace Brady. That number is likely to be winnowed to five or fewer within the next two weeks after a Wednesday conference call of the state central committee members, they said.”
The Beachwood Political Affairs Desk has been busy compiling its own list of possible contenders. Let’s take a look.

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Posted on May 8, 2013

By Kiljoong Kim

It’s no secret that Chicago has a history of segregation. The issue has been debated and researched for decades and has resulted in significant books including Black Metropolis, American Apartheid, There Are No Children Here and American Project, to name a few. While there are ever so slight signs of progress, there is a residential pattern seldom discussed but so persistent that it is a reminder that we are still very much divided as ever.
Many recent issues around the city can be traced to the uneven distribution of residents across the city: The ignorant parents who are too afraid to send their children to other neighborhoods for a baseball game; massive closure of schools under the label of under-enrollment in some parts of the city while many schools in other neighborhoods are bursting at their seams; and numerous shootings that are ignored by the media and remain uninvestigated by the police. All are about negligence of our environment and failure to think beyond few blocks of where we live.
For all intents and purposes, we live in separate cities within miles of each other, begging the question: Why?

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Posted on May 7, 2013