CN February 14, 2013

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Ken

Chicago’s gun violence is slow-motion mass killing. Today’s the 5th anniversary of the horrific slaughter at Northern Illinois University. Five people died and 21 were hurt. In 2012 at Harper High School 21 students were wounded and eight others were killed by gun violence. Bt it was barely noticed because it happened one at a time in a community that’s often written off.  Today, there’s debate over legislative solutions.

“Chicago gets this reputation for having among the toughest gun laws in the country, when it really doesn’t,” says NPR’s David Schaper, talking about recent calls to increase prison time for the illegal possession of guns.  “And Supt. McCarthy likes to hammer on this all the time. In New York they do have mandatory minimums,” he explains. We don’t have that, he says, and New York has another strong advantage – neighboring states with stringent gun control laws of their own. Chicago faces Indiana and Wisconsin and a ring of Illinois counties with lenient gun laws.

Panelist Dan Mihalopoulos (Sun-Times) recalls stories he worked on several years ago “where the building permits and zoning changes were concentrated in terms of new construction – and yes, a whole new city did emerge from the 90’s, but a whole other part of the city wasn’t touched by it.” And it’s no surprise that the communities that saw little investment during the boom years are especially hard-hit today and home to so much of the violence Chicago is experiencing.

Chicago’s urban violence, and President Obama’s (then impending) visit to Hyde Park Academy dominated a sizable portion of our conversation on today’s show, but Mihalopoulos also took us through the details of his and Tim Novak’s powerful story about inside deals at the UNO charter school network.

In 2009, UNO, through its allies in the Illinois Legislature, obtained $98 million in State funds to build several new schools, including the recently-completed UNO Soccer Academy on the Southwest Side. “They have 13 schools with 6,500 students, so they’ve expanded their reach tremendously,” he tells us. “They’re building another school with that money, and there’s still gonna be fifteen million left over. And they want to get more. They’ve asked for $35 million more recently. And Mike Madigan, the Speaker of the House, is reportedly in favor of them getting that allocation.”

He tells us in detail how relatives of the #2 executive at UNO received lucrative construction and operating contracts without a public bidding process, (that executive resigned after the publication of the stories) and how one legislator who voted for the $98 million allocation has two brothers who obtained a contract from UNO, according to Mihalopoulos.

While it isn’t clear that UNO violated any laws, their processes were certainly less than transparent. At the same time, CPS is required to operate by different, more stringent standards. “If this was a pretty powerful principal at any other Chicago Public School,” says Schaper, “they would not have the same leeway in terms of hiring their brother to put in the windows, or even to hire a family member to sweep the floors.”

The UNO issue is, of course being viewed in context with CPS’ announcement this week that as many as 129 schools are eligible for closure under current criteria. Community leaders and CPS critics say that it’s difficult to understand how under-utilization causes CPS to continually close schools, while at the same time allowing private interests to open charter schools.

“The larger criticism of this whole effort to close many schools is not focused on the fact that there are fewer students or that they’re looking to save money, they’re looking at it and saying, well how is it that there’s no money to keep these schools open when you’re providing money to build other schools…”, Mihalopoulos says.

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CN February 7, 2013

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Ken

“One way or another, we have to pay, as a society, for the fact that people don’t have enough money to subsist,” says Mayoral Tutorial’s Don Washington in reaction to Governor Quinn’s call for a $10.00 minimum wage. “Either we pay for it because they resort to crime, or they resort to the underground economy in some other way, or we pay for it because we have to find social programs to meet the needs. So when I hear people talking about ‘oh, it’s gonna increase unemployment, it’s gonna kill the recovery’ I think what they should really be asking is – we’re already paying something. We just don’t quantify those costs. It’s not figured into our GDP.”

A big part of our conversation about the minimum wage was guided by yesterday’s revealing Tribune story by Ameet Sachdev and Ray Long. Among the research findings they cite: wage floors can do more good than harm.

Only a few hours before we recorded the show, two different meetings of the CPS Schools Closing Commission became pretty raucous affairs, with as many as a thousand parents demanding to be heard. Washington was at one of them.

“The parents I talk to, they don’t want their schools closed, they want their schools invested in,” he says. He expresses the view he says a lot of parents believe about the CPS process. “We’re not interested in these meetings to hear people. They are telling you what they’re going to do.”

“Our mayor’s public policy ideology is that everything needs a market-based solution in some way, shape or form,” he adds. “Inject a little competition, or in some cases just make a market out of it. And the moral compass, the thing that guides this is expediency. He knows he’s right … so they’re not interested in convincing you.”

We’re joined in the second half of today’s show by Peter Harnick, who has written the highly influential Urban Green, a book that guides parks and open-space advocates  in their efforts to add park space – or radically improve what already exists – in big American cities. He was keynote speaker at the Friends of the Parks’ annual luncheon, but he stopped by Chicago Newsroom first.

We talked about one of the most significant problems Harnik says all urban parks face today – competition.  Screens – big, small and mobile- command so much of our attention. Our back yards are bigger and better-equipped. Gyms, retail – everything conspires to limit the amount of time we have for parks.

But more and more, he says, parks are fighting back. Improved playgrounds, fitness programs, modern playing fields and glitzy attractions (think Millennium Park) are making parks relevant again.  We also ask him about how a city like Chicago, plagued with so much youth violence, can make its parks a part of the solution, instead of just a place where shootings often happen. Among his recommendations: focus attention on the edges. Promote retail, residential and entertainment development on the streets that face into the park, so that it generates crowds and excitement.

One of Harnick’s pet projects, since he’s with the Trust for Public Land, is the Bloomingdale Trail, a three-mile linear park atop the old abandoned viaduct that bisects Humboldt Park, Bucktown and Logan Square. It’s been in the planning stages for years, but TPL is now fully committed, and Mayor Emanuel has said he wants it done during his first term.

“It’s definitely going to happen”, he tells us.

 

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CN January 31, 2013

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Ken

Hadiya Pendleton’s murder this week seemed to somehow change the way Chicago perceived the rash of violence that claimed 42 lives in January alone.

Wendell Hutson (DNAInfo Chicago) and Chip Mitchell (WBEZ) cover some of Chicago’s most troubled communities in their assignments, and they were this week’s panel.

It’s a wide-ranging discussion about youth violence. Chip Mitchell says the one thing that seems common to all the underlying issues – poverty, education, disinvestment, unemployment – is an unwillingness to commit any additional resources to help solve these intractable problems.

“You have to have wrap-around social services and educational services beginning at the pre-K level, extending to the parents, not just extending to the young people with the guns’” he says. “We have a jobs crisis in these communities. African-American unemployment is somewhere around 19-20 percent in Chicago right now, the third-highest of any urban area in the country.  Among African-American youths it’s much higher than that, and we have a similar problem with Latino youths. Where are those resources? Mayor Daley and Mayor Emanuel, when they wanted to bring the Olympics to town, to bring NATO to town, they were able to very quickly, with their friends in the business community, raise tens of millions of dollars in a matter of months. We’ve never seen that sort of response to this crisis.”

(Immediately after this program was taped, Mayor Emanuel announced the reassignment of 200 police officers from “desk” jobs to street assignments.)

Hutson addressed the widely-held belief that too many residents fail, or refuse, to co-operate with the police by offering information about the shooters. Officials have asked celebrities such as Derek Rose to help with appeals to the community. But so many victims and their families feel a real, wide-spread fear of retaliation.

And, says Hutson, “ I cover Englewood, and Auburn Gresham, which is right next to it, both very economically challenged communities. The residents there do not trust the police. That has been a historical problem in Chicago. So one of the contributing reasons for this “don’t tell, don’t talk policy, is because they don’t trust the police.”

Also on this week’s program, The CTA’s big plan to construct a bus rapid transit line along several miles of Ashland Avenue, from about the Blue Line station at Division to the Orange Line station at Archer. Chip’s story asserts that many of the City’s top transit and transportation officials are on-board with the plan, which would eliminate the left lane of regular traffic in both directions, assigning that lane to bus traffic. According to Mitchell, if the plan is implemented, it will be one of the most ambitious BRT projects in the United States. But it could potentially upset drivers, whose left-turn opportunities would be severely limited.

Hutson gives us an update on the race to succeed Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr.. Debbie Halvorson, he says, has a strategic advantage in that she’s a prominent white candidate in a district that’s about half white, and her numerous competitors are predominantly black. But there’s a serious effort, he says, to try to unite voters around one strong black candidate.

We also talk about a remarkable story Mitchell did for WBEZ in December about “temporary” workers who staff factories, construction sites and many places where there’s more than an average degree of potential physical danger. Often, these people work for years as “temps”, almost always without benefits and at pay rates at or only slightly above minimum wage.

He tells the story of one such worker who was scalded over 80% of his body in an industrial accident and died weeks later from his horrific, painful injuries. But he wasn’t technically an employee of the plant – he was hired by a staffing agency – and he was given no appropriate safety gear. He was also taken, not to a hospital, but to a company-related clinic by a fellow “temp” staffer in his own car.

It’s a dramatic account that helps illustrate the state of employment in Chicago, and America, today. Well worth a listen.

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CN January 24, 2013

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Ken

Here’s an interesting mind-game. Imagine for a minute that Chicago didn’t have the vast network of Fire Department ambulances and life-support equipped fire engines, along with the incredibly effective trauma staffs at area hospitals.

Now take into consideration the 1,893 people the Police Department says were shot and wounded in Chicago last year. By some estimates, the Fire Department saved hundreds, perhaps even a thousand lives in 2012. So what might the gun death toll have been without this emergency medical heroism? It’s impossible to say, but way more than 506.

Ted Cox wrote about this hidden aspect of the gun toll in an early edition of DNAInfo, Chicago’s newest on-line news source.  “They’re already dealing with the 500 deaths,” he says on today’s show. “That’s bad enough publicity. You don’t wanna say hey, we’re saving 1500 people who also got shot. It’s a hard feel-good story to tell.”

Over the past decade or more, Chicago’s Fire Department has come to the point where emergency medicine is almost the Department’s primary job, because they get so many medical calls. “There was one Fire Department official who said that his best estimate was that the Department treats about 90% of all the people who get shot (in Chicago),” Cox tells us.

Cox’s stories raise an even more troubling hypothetical: If today’s remarkable trauma network had been in place decades ago when shooting deaths were even higher than today, might the death totals for those years have looked more like today’s?

We lead off the show with a conversation about Wrigley Field. Mayor Emanuel seems to be in a strong position to get the deal done this time, now that the Ricketts family has proposed spending its own money on stadium renovations. But there are real sticking points.

“The other thing that complicates this,” explains the Tribune’s Hal Dardick, our other panelist, “is these rooftops. The anomaly is enshrined in a twenty-year contract entered into in 2004 where the Cubs agreed to let them continue to operate the rooftops, they wouldn’t block them, and (the rooftop owners) would give them 17% of the revenue the rooftop owners made. And they in turn went and invested tens of millions of dollars in these buildings. And the contract is still running.”

“And I think there is a dispute brewing about exactly what it says,” he adds. “Does it say you can’t block their views, or what exactly does it say? It’s a private contract – no one has gotten their hands on that.”

So whatever is arranged between the Cubs and the rooftop owners is a private matter, but the City can help negotiate a different deal if necessary. In any case, there’s the complicated entanglement of landmarks issues, since City approval would be needed for anything that materially changes the appearance of the historic park. And there will be contentious negotiations with the neighbors, since the Cubs seem to be demanding a large increase in the number of permitted night games, or possibly an elimination of all restrictions.

We also tackle the impending privatization of Midway. It can be difficult to understand how the average citizen benefits from leasing such a well-run City asset to a private entity, which will be drawing profit from the operation and obviously raising consumer prices to fund that profit. But Dardick says the City could benefit in several ways.

“First of all, there’s more than a billion dollars in debt at Midway,” Hardick says. That’s debt that was accrued during the massive remodeling in the 90’s. “If you get that debt off the books it enables the City to borrow money to do other things.  And all the revenue that comes in at Midway is used at Midway. It’s all part of the Aviation Department. This could not only pay off some debt but it could bring in a new revenue stream that the Mayor ostensibly could divert to other infrastructure projects outside of the airport. So it would give him more financial freedom.”

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CN January 17, 2013

Posted on January 19, 2013 by Ken

Guns and gun regulation policy dominated this week’s news, both nationally and locally. And Steve Edwards was in the middle of Chicago’s discussion, in his new capacity with the Institute for Politics at the University of Chicago.  The Institute held a big-time discussion on the topic this week, at which there was a good deal of discussion about assault weapons. Steve joined us on this week’s show.

“We know that the vast majority of crimes committed with guns in the United States, and certainly in Chicago, have to do with hand guns,” Steve tells us. “So in some respects a big debate on assault weapons may be acutely important for the broader picture, it’s less important on the City of Chicago’s doorstep.”

As much damage as has been done with powerful military-style weapons, he points out, America’s big cities are being victimized by the smaller hardware.

“Eighty percent of guns owned in the United States are owned mostly by people in rural communities,” he says. “They own a lot of guns, multiple guns. Most of them have no criminal record and no criminal intent. And it’s that twenty percent of guns in circulation, and in circulation particularly among young people, that is the acute problem. And so the policies really should be focused on trying to address that issue, and it remains to be seen how much of this package will address that issue.

Attorney and activist/blogger Matt Farmer is also on the panel this week. We asked him for some perspective on the on-going schools-closings controversy. Earlier this week, the committee set up to advise CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett on closings issued a statement opposing the closure of any high school and many categories of elementary schools. It all has to be decided soon, because the plan has to be made public and submitted to the State by the end of March.

“CPS I think made a mistake when they got this extension to get more time to consider school closings because what this has done is it has allowed the community more time to organize,” Farmer tells us.

“We’re on the cusp of closing a bunch of schools, supposedly because of utilization,” he says. “But the Commission’s report, that came out just a week ago, brought all sorts of academic and performance factors into its calculus, saying – leave level one schools, the high performance schools, alone, and level two schools that are ‘on the rise’, whatever that means. So now we’re bringing in this performance standard. Barbara Byrd-Bennett started this by saying as part of this there will be a five-year moratorium on school closings. What she hasn’t said though…they’re still gonna reserve the right to turn around schools, close schools for performance reasons, phase out schools, so this really isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.”

“Since 1996 we still don’t know what are the criteria for closing schools,” Edwards adds. “We still don’t know what actually proves to be successful thereafter, we don’t have a process for how you bring the public in, every single time it seems ad-hoc, and it would seem this late in the game, the school district should do a much, much better job of being clear and being able to deliver on this.”

(By the way, we still miss Steve’s wit and wisdom on WBEZ, but we wish him the best with his new job in academia.)

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CN January 10, 2013

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Ken

Well, that fragile thread of hope that the Illinois General Assembly might, in its waning hours, find the courage to enact some meaningful pension reforms – that hope vanished pretty quickly, didn’t it?  And nowhere was the criticism more withering  than on the Tribune Editorial pages, so we invited Kristen McQueary, who’s the lead writer for many of their editorials, to visit our little show.

“We’ve been told for years that there was this little window of opportunity in the lame duck session where it was going to happen”, she says. “And I think the first red flag was when the House and Senate came up with differing schedules that didn’t even overlap. It’s very hard to get anything done down there unless you have lawmakers confined to Springfield, away from their families, and they can get down to business. You can at least nudge proposals along.”

“And now they’re not even coming to work for three weeks,” adds WGN-TV’s Randi Belisomo, this weeks other guest, referring to the just-sworn-in new Legislature. “So now nothing will happen. The liability grows, what $17 million a day?”

So is there hope for a short-term solution to the pension crisis? “I wish I had something optimistic to say,” laments Mc Queary. “Now you have a whole new class of freshmen who rightfully can say, look, we need to be brought up to speed on this. I’m not going to take a big vote on something I don’t fully understand. So I think we’re looking at May.”

There’s been an extraordinary amount of discussion about Governor Quinn’s leadership on the pension matter, and this weekend’s collapse is being seen as  major failure of leadership. “I don’t see how he can unwind himself from this at this point”, McQueary concludes.

But what about Rahm Emanuel, the renowned dealmaker? Where was he?

Again, Kristen McQueary: “He went down to Springfield in May, and he got all this great news coverage because he testified before the Committee and floated his own pension plan for city workers, and said then, I’m willing to expend political capital to get this done. He hasn’t lifted a finger since then.”

Both guests express skepticism that the new Legislature, even with its veto-proof Democratic majorities, will be able to enact even classic progressive legislation, such as Marriage Equality and an assault-weapons ban. But both agreed that the permitting of drivers’ licenses for undocumented residents will be a benefit in the long run, because it will reduce costs overall for law enforcement.

Belisomo says that Bill Daley, currently riding a wave of speculation that he might challenge Quinn, might make a more effective governor. “He would have to be attractive to many Democrats,” she claims. “I think he’d be running against Bill Brady, who’ll be running again, so you’ll have two business-oriented people who are gonna be running on a platform of fiscal responsibility, and I think the State could benefit from two people who have exercised leadership in other ways.”

The panel has plenty of witty things to say about the Mell Family and their effort to institute an orderly transition in the 33rd Ward. Perhaps, they agree, Patti Blagojevich, who is apparently unemployed, might be able to assume Deb’s House seat when she moves to the City Council.

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CN January 3, 2013

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Ken

For more than 20 years, David Scheiner was Barack Obama’s doctor. The relationship lasted until Obama got a new job in Washington, DC, and could no longer visit Scheiner in his cramped little office in Hyde Park.

But during those years they spent quality time talking about health-care policy, and Scheiner made it clear to his patient that the only way to fix the American health-care mess was with a robust, government-centered, single-payer system. Obama may or may not have agreed, but that wasn’t the policy he pursued when Obamacare began to take shape.

Dr. Scheiner hasn’t hidden his disappointment. Even if Obamacare is fully implemented, it will still leave more than 20 million Americans without any form of health care, he says, and that’s a disgrace for the world’s largest economy. He’s certain that the Affordable Care Act simply doesn’t go far enough.

We invited Dr. Scheiner to be our sole guest on this week’s show to start 2013 with a discussion about where America’s health-care system is today, and where it might end up by year’s end.

Scheiner has plenty to say about the current state of the medical industry itself. Creeping corporatism, he says, is wiping out private practice. And just as the coming expansion of the health-care system will require vastly increased levels of primary care, the number of primary-care physicians is dropping, he says. Long hours, high stress and relatively low pay make the field unattractive to young practitioners, he claims. Instead, they prefer the more relaxed lifestyle of the sub-specialties.

Scheiner also laments the introduction of “hospitalists”, doctors who work exclusively in hospitals, managing dozens of patients simultaneously while excluding the patients’ own  physicians. It’s all part of the continual pressure to move patients out of hospitals more quickly, and that involves many more expensive and, Scheiner says, inconclusive or even deceptive, tests.

It’s an interesting view of American health-care from a man who’s been a vital part of it for five decades, and is still  very active, and very opinionated, today.

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CN Dec. 27, 2012

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Ken

In our final show for 2012, we sit down with labor historian Bob Bruno of the University of Illinois.

It’s been a tumultuous year for organized labor in Chicago, in Illinois and in the nation as a whole. We began our conversation with the omni-present policy of government privatization. Bruno is, generally speaking, not a fan.

“We’ve had a couple of decades to study the impact of privatization”, he says. “And what you find is that the promises of privatization fall far short. The reality is that there isn’t a great savings over the public sector. The work isn’t done any better. In fact, about a third of privatization comes back – it gets in-sourced back into the government agency. There’s all kinds of hidden costs that aren’t calculated, and typically you then find political connections.”

A major topic of our talk is the public perception that labor unions are a cause of economic decline, rather than an engine of capital expansion. Historian Bruno says the earliest seeds of anti-union sentiment can be traced, not surprisingly, to the beginnings of the labor movement. But the attempt to paint teachers, police officers, firefighters, garbage workers and street light technicians as the cause of our financial woes is relatively new.

“This national demonization of teachers, who, by all standards, given their skills, given their education, are underpaid vis-a-vis people who are similarly situated in the private sector – and we’ve now demonized them. It’s counter to what a prosperous society would do.”

But he applauds the Chicago Teachers’ Union, saying they could teach other unions a few things.

“They’re a wonderful model about what the labor movement could do to push back against this right-wing, neoliberal political attack”, he says. “It starts with educating your members. They not only built a relationship in a way that previous leaderships of the teachers’ union hadn’t done…but they then very strategically got into every single school and they built a structure that could fight back. And they looked for allies.” And no ally was more significant, he adds, than the large numbers of parents who stood with their teachers.

Bruno talks at length about the history of “right to work” legislation, which just became law in Michigan. He also talks about the general perception that Mayor Emanuel has not treated organized labor fairly, especially in the most recent dispute with janitorial services at O’Hare. He points out that cost savings don’t necessarily benefit the taxpayers directly, but simply add to the profit margin for the maintenance companies.

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CN Dec. 20, 2012

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Ken

The Tribune’s revelation this week that CPS and the Mayor’s  Office did, indeed, prepare some kind of memo identifying schools to be closed must have been something of an embarrassment to the administration. But the Reader’s Ben Joravsky had said months ago that nobody should believe the Mayor when he says there’s no list.

“He says he has no list of schools he intends to close,” Jarovsky wrote in the Reader. “OK, everybody, let’s have a show of hands. How many of you actually believe him?Look, he’s been mayor since May of 2011. They’ve been studying school closings for months. We already went through one round of this months ago. Remember the paid protesters? They’re the people the mayor bused in to cheer on the school closings. And he wonders why no one trusts him.”

Ben is joined this week by WBEZ’s Achy Obejas. They talk about the complicated mess the CPS has created for itself as it prepares to close lots and lots of older, neighborhood schools, many in heavily-minority communities. And worst of all, the extension  Barbara Byrd-Bennett requested and won from the Legislature will probably all be used for meetings, bureaucracy and process, and  parents will still find out about school closures at the very last minute. Both panelists express skepticism that parents will be allowed to participate any more in the decisions than they were before.

Also, Achy makes a confident prediction – that as the gun-control debate heats up, nothing much will get done. Maybe a reinstatement of the automatic weapons ban, she says, and possibly a small amount of funding for mental health programs. But nothing that really counts, such as controls on gun shows and sales limits on large-capacity ammunition clips and devices.

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CN December 12, 2012

Posted on December 14, 2012 by Ken

The National Rifle Association has conferred its “Expert Rating” on Andrew Patner for his shooting expertise, so who better to weigh in on the Concealed Carry flap? Well, he did get his rating at Camp Minocqua in 1973, and has never owned a gun, so you decide.

How does the Reader’s Mick Dumke react to  news of the Court’s decree that Illinois will become the last concealed carry state? “In some ways I find it comforting,” he explains. “I sorta proceed from the assumption that there are people who are carrying already. Like elected officials.”  “Yes”, adds Patner. “Concealed even from himself”.

Speaking of Donne Trotter, Patner tips his hat to Mark Brown, who writes today that we may soon see something unprecedented even in Cook County politics – a candidate who shows up for his slating session with his criminal attorney at his side to answer the sticky questions about the gun in the carry-on bag at O’Hare.

Dumke has been following in great detail Mayor Emanuel’s successful effort to place gigantic electronic billboards all along the City’s expressway system. “It’s not gonna be a static billboard, bottom line, the screen’s gonna be moving around. It’s gonna be more like a big TV screen as you’re driving down the highway.”

It’s a big, complicated contract that involves decades of obligations from the city in exchange for a vaguely-defined payback over the years. Unlike with the parking meter mess, when aldermen admitted they hadn’t read it, says Dumke, “This time Ed Burke says, I actually read through the contract and I don’t understand what it says”. “As he pushes it through”, adds Patner.

“Any time you zoom in on anything,” says Dumke, “it’s like the law firms who put these together, they get city work and now they’re working for the contractor on this deal for twenty, thirty years. And it’s, like, they’re working both sides of it. They’re lobbyists.”

Two union stories get the panel’s attention. The Michigan Legislature’s pushing through of “right to work” legislation and the dismissal of at least 350 union janitors at O’Hare.

“The day that Obama’s in Michigan saying – we need unions, and we can’t kick out unions – (the Emanuel administration) kicks these unions out,” says Patner.

“The bottom line is, we’re outsourcing more middle-class jobs,” Dumke asserts. “We’re downsizing more middle-class jobs and making them lower-class jobs. Making them below-living-wage kinds of jobs. The city, in its move toward efficiency over the past few years has shed thousands of jobs. And when you look at the maps of where these employees disappeared from, they’re neighborhoods on the south, southwest and west sides, primarily, and not coincidentally, these are the same neighborhoods that have had skyrocketing foreclosures.”

If you’re more familiar with Andrew as a cultural and music critic, you might be taken aback at his ability to rant about politics. Here’s a sample, dealing with the random assignment of Arthur Hill as judge in the RJ Vanecko trial:

“He sits on the bench and he makes a speech: I worked for Daley, I worked for Daley’s political campaign. I worked for Richard Devine, I ran his political campaign. I worked for Anita Alvarez, the Mayor put me on the CTA Board and gave me municipal bond work. But I can be completely impartial. I mean we just have lost sight that there’s ever anything to be ashamed about.”

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