Chicago Tue Nov 24 2015
Laquan McDonald was shot and killed on Oct. 20, 2014 by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke. Exactly 400 days later, Van Dyke was formally charged with murder in McDonald's death. The charges were filed one day before the court-ordered public release of the dashcam footage showing the killing.
If the footage was so blatant that no less than Rahm Emanuel called it "hideous" (albeit without actually seeing it), then how on earth did it take 400 days for charges to be filed?
I asked that question online. Within an hour, I saw three other variations on that question asked by other people.
Unbelievably, Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez gave the answer that she "moved up" filing the charges, saying her original intention was to wait until the concurrent federal investigation had concluded. You can read that article for more of Alvarez's explanation. I'm not going to rehash it here, because there are limits to how much bullshit I can quote.
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— Phil Huckelberry /
Nate Silver is one of America's sharpest political analysts, so when he writes a piece like "Maybe Republicans Really Are In Disarray", it should raise some eyebrows. Silver doesn't come to a definite conclusion, but he does lay out a logical explanation of why "disarray" might be the right term to describe the current standing of the Republicans nationally. I would add that it could easily be extended to the situation in Illinois, where Governor Bruce Rauner seems to be alienating his own party, and where at a glance it would seem increasingly likely that Senator Mark Kirk will lose next November.
Silver, though, also argues against the disarray argument, by making a fairly simple point: excluding the presidency, Republicans are winning a lot more than they're losing. Even here in Illinois, with Democratic supermajorities in both houses of the General Assembly, the reality is that the Republicans hold the governorship, one U.S. Senate seat, and eight of 18 U.S. House seats. The voting profile of the state would suggest that the Republicans should be doing far worse here.
So are the Republicans in disarray? I think the answer has to be yes. But does it matter very much? Maybe not. As bad as things may seem for the Republicans, they're nevertheless the majority party in the country, based on control of both houses of Congress, a large majority of governorships, and most state legislatures.
The party with the worst problems right now is the Democratic Party, and we can even see this playing out in Illinois.
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— Phil Huckelberry
It's now been 11 days since the carbon monoxide leak which sent over 80 Prussing Elementary School students and staff to the hospital. While officials from Chicago Public Schools have partially answered some questions, and CPS CEO Forrest Claypool has informed that he will be visiting the school to field more questions on Nov. 16, many parents remain irate at the CPS response to date. The main point of contention remains the fate of the school boiler system, but it is far from the only issue at hand.
Last week, I focused on the inadequacy of safety protocols for incidents like this. That theme was picked up on by the Reader's Ben Joravsky, who still can't get over how the main school building had no detectors. Had there just been one properly functioning detector, installed in a manner such that it would have alerted school administrators, the worst of the incident never would have occurred.
With that said, the leak did occur. It is critical that all parents citywide should focus on safety protocols at their own schools, but some of the questions about what happened at Prussing, and what is happening in the aftermath, still need to be answered. Not only does the incident itself need to better understood, but so too does the waffling CPS response, and how parents are responding to what they're seeing.
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— Phil Huckelberry /
The story made national news: over 80 students and staff from Prussing Elementary School on the Northwest Side went to hospitals on October 30 because of carbon monoxide exposure. The official word is that the school boiler was the culprit, specifically a faulty gas regulator.
There are a lot of questions which still need to be answered about the boiler. For two and a half years, administrators at Prussing have reported problems with the boiler. While none of those issues suggested the potential for a carbon monoxide leak, the trail of complaints is lengthy, and Chicago Public Schools officials have been put on notice that the school community expects a decision to come down this week that the boiler will not be "fixed" yet again, but outright replaced, and soon.
The other immediate issue raised regards the school carbon monoxide detectors, or the lack thereof. How did CO levels get so high without any alarm going off? The boiler room at Prussing was equipped with a detector. At this time, it is not clear why it did not go off. But the situation begs the question of why a school with 700 children had only one detector in the first place.
As it turns out, there are some answers to be found in state law and Chicago building code, and they're not that great. For a city which prides itself on the most stringent fire codes in the country, the city code regarding carbon monoxide detectors is inadequate, and it is clear that CPS protocols regarding detectors don't even yet exist.
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— Phil Huckelberry
