Results tagged “politics”

Former state treasurer Judy Baar Topinka is back in the political spotlight. Topinka is expected to announce her candidacy today for state comptroller, a position vacated by Dan Hynes as he gets knee-deep in his run against Pat Quinn for Governor. We last heard from Topinka in 2006 when she challenged the then-incumbent governor, Rod Blagojevich, in that office's race. Other candidates include William J. Kelly, Raja Krishnamoorthi, and potentially state Rep. David Miller.

The CTA continued its jostling yesterday by electing a new chairman of the board. Former CHA chief Terry Peterson will fill the spot vacated a month ago by Carole Brown.

President Obama held a news conference this morning to address his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps sensing the criticisms of the far right and skepticism of some of his supporters to being awarded the honor, Obama said he was "surprised and deeply humbled" at winning the Nobel, questioned whether he even deserved the honor and said that he doesn't view the Nobel as 'recognition of (his) own accomplishments."

Not a day goes by that we don’t have some sort of press release cross our desk, or get an email promising “secret information that will "distroy" [Sic] Mayor Daley’s House of Cards,”, but it isn’t often that a U.S. Congressman gets on national television to read his love for the Second City into the Congressional record. That said, Mike Quigley’s “Top Ten Reasons the world should still stop by for a slice of deep dish in Chicago, the greatest city in the world” is way too populist on the food angle (really, he couldn’t mention Alinea or the Publican?), and really kind of ridiculous on the schools end (as in, our high schoolers could kick Rio’s high schooler’s asses).

It's not a big secret (at least in Chicago) who stands to win if the city gets to host the 2016 Summer Games. Billions of dollars in construction contracts, the real estate transactions, and the concession agreements will be up for grabs. And that's just the official, big dollar stuff. But what if Chicago doesn't get the Olympics? Who stands to lose? Aside from the political implications for Mayor Daley (and if you listen carefully, you can hear the knives being sharpened, just in case), President Barack Obama has certainly raised the stakes by heading to Denmark to lobby for his hometown.

Poor Todd Stroger. He's had a rough couple of weeks. There was that whole tax-rollback-veto brouhaha and then he found out fewer people approved of his job than approved of Blago. Now, an employee who just got the ax from Stroger's office is accusing the embattled Cook County Board President of firing him out of revenge. As Carol Marin and Lisa Donovan report for the Sun-Times and NBC 5, Byron Steele was fired from his job as First Deputy Director of Cook County’s Department of Facilities Management yesterday morning. Byron alleges it's because his brother, Cook County Commissioner Robert Steele has voted for the tax rollback both times. Not only that, but the Steele's mother is Bobbie Steele who served as interim president of the Cook County Board in the interval between John Stroger's stroke and Todd's election.

Rep. Mike Quigley (D-5th) said he will sleep on the couch in his office at the U.S. House of Representatives when he leaves for his second session of Congress in Washington next week. “It’s not just me,” he said, “There are probably around 40 other members of the House who do it. But it’s worth it.” Quigley, the most junior representative in Congress at 132 days (through Sept. 2), said he flies back home every weekend to see his family in Lakeview - and that he’s sleeping on his couch in his office there because of his daughters, both in private universities. “I had to pay my way through college, and it was a struggle,” he told Chicagoist on Tuesday. “I didn’t want them to go through that… If I could just get the cleaning crew to not wake me up at 2 a.m., it’d be good.”

Last week, Chicagoist caught up with the Master of the First Ward - and the only alderman regularly on Twitter - Chicago Ald. Manny Flores outside the Green Exchange. We've seen Flores in the news a lot lately for his insistence on shining light on government transparency as well as his battle to cap the city's Olympic liability (which he allegedly later backed down on). We talked to Flores about the economy, green initiatives, and he gives us a definitive answer on speculation he's running for mayor in 2011 (but a less definitive answer on if he's got plans for something else).

With election season in Illinois officially underway, this week brought a slough of announcements, and sort-of announcements, about how's running for statewide office, and who isn't.

Begrudgingly, it seems, the city of Chicago made public a new TIF website, per the new ordinance passed back in April. Of course, it sucks. How do we know? Well, besides the fact that they were too embarrassed to link to it in their own press release, Progress Illinois government transparency enthusiast-hackers Dan O'Neil and Max Brooks went through page-by-page and evaluated its strengths (the information is, technically, there) and its weaknesses. They say (and we agree) that the site is a hard-to-use, poorly organized conglomeration of information at this stage in its development. We hope this first-ever attempt to put Chicago's public documents online in this way is in beta.

Sheesh, the race for county board president certainly seems crowded, at least among the Democrats. Toni Preckwinkle, Dorothy Brown and Todd Stroger are running for sure, but the list of people that smell blood in the water is long. Danny Davis has formed an exploratory committee, and Larry Suffredin, and Tom Dart. You can add Terrence J. O'Brien, Metropolitan Water Reclamation District board president to the list of candidates. "I want to do for Cook County Government, what I have done for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago. So, I am officially announcing my candidacy for President of Cook County Board," O'Brien said in a prepared statement issued to the press on Friday.

The state is due to explore it's once-every-10-years redistricting plan in 2011 once the census is delivered. Exactly how does the state go about redrawing those boundaries? It's a pretty crazy process, which doesn't surprise us at all. According to WBEZ:

It's exciting times in Illinois politics - and almost impossible to keep track of the players. The 2010 election, about eight months out at this point features three key races - and enough plot twists to keep even the most well-informed political junkie interested.

Be sure to check Part 1 of the interview here if you haven't.

We were excited to learn that EveryBlock co-founder Daniel X. O'Neil was working with Harper Reed of Threadless fame to develop a new online gadget - but it's not the hyper-local t-shirt you might immediately presume (pretty please?). Instead, the pair produced a new city government transparency toy: CityPayments. And it's likely to be all the rage among us reporters as it gathers momentum. But what does it do? And why do we care?

While the Republicans are beginning to sort out their candidates for the 2010 governor's race, the nation's top Democrat is starting to help state Dems sort out who's running for what, including Attorney General Lisa Madigan. Though Madigan has long been rumored as a serious candidate for governor, it seems President Obama is trying to push Madigan into next year's senate race - for the seat Obama once occupied and is now occupied by embattled Sen. Roland Burris - in an attempt to take on Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk. The Sun-Times' Laura Washington has more.

Ald. Danny Solis (25th) may have to face a runoff in Pilsen if a federal appeals court decides to overturn his 2007 election to the office. The election two years ago hinged on 178 votes originally cast for disgraced candidate Ambrosio Medrano, who was disqualified by the Illinois Supreme Court for his felony conviction a mere four days before the late February vote. Solis won, but by a tally of only 49.95 percent.

Ald. Manny Flores (1st) is still fighting the bacterial infection that is traditional Chicago politics - with sunshine. First he, with Ald. Scott Waguespack (32nd), pushed hard enough to pass the so-called TIF Sunshine Ordinance. Then he and Ald. Ed Burke (14th) won the baby bottle battle last week. Then he proposed even more legislation requiring city government to clear up its muddy financing via online publishing. And somewhere in there, he was the first alderman to attract our attention to the plight of charity magazine Streetwise. So what's he up to this time? More transparency, combined with his favorite constituent-focused hobbies: social media and cable television.

Chicago Aldermen Manuel Flores (1st), Rey Colon (35th), and Brendan Reilly (42nd) proposed The City Asset Lease Agreement Disclosure Ordinance Wednesday that will require documents related to the lease and sale of city assets (i.e., parking meters, downtown parking lots, the Skyway and Midway Airport) to be published and tracked publicly. The ordinance applies to agreements worth more than $10 million.

For people used to being ignored by City Hall, the whole communication and openness thing radiating from Ald. Manny Flores's 1st Ward must seem downright disconcerting. We're interested to hear about the alderman's most recent push: together with Ald. Ed Burke, Flores hopes to ban the use of BPA in baby bottles and other plastic products intended for children. If it passes on Wednesday, it'd make Chicago the first major city to police the product - on the heels of Suffolk County, New York, and the state of Minnesota.

The state of the economy, and a looming $300 million budget gap has left at least 1,100 city employees at risk of being laid off if their unions do not agree to two weeks of unpaid downtime instead of cash overtime. According to the Sun-Times,

"The effect of the Machine's systematic repression [of the urban poor] is the muting of protest, incalcuable stagnation of the general citizenry, and the loss of progress in Chicago," former 5th Ward Ald. Leon Despres told political scientist Milton Rakove in Don't Make No Waves... Don't Back No Losers., published in 1975. Rakove, went on to say, "Despres lead a band that made a valiant, often futile, but occasionally successful fight against the leaders of the [Richard J.] Daley organization."

If you didn't attend any of Hideout's "Soup and Bread" events this winter, you're getting a mulligan today with an encore presentation featuring soups from Hideout bartender Anastasia Davies Hinschsliff Martha Bayne, Celestial Kitchens' Celeste Dolan, and Karen Gerod and the wonderful staff at Swim Caf&3233, which was a regular participant in the series.

The Todd Stroger-Cook County Board patronage scandal has been rocking for more than a week, long enough that his political ally, and our beloved mayor, Richard J. Daley, has finally issued a comment.

Nearly ten years to the day after former British Prime Minister Tony Blair last visited Chicago, he was back in the city, addressing some of the same foreign policy problems in the Middle East. But, he said Wednesday night, to members of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs at the Fairmont Hotel, his post-administration era, and his current work as representative of the Quartet (United States, UN, Russia and the European Union) charged with mediating the Israel-Palestine conflict, has allowed him time to reflect on and refine his administrations’ foreign policies in the Middle East, especially at the intersection of faith and politics.

An ordinance submitted by aldermen Manny Flores (1st) and Scott Waguespack (32nd) intended to implement more government transparency in Chicago planning and development passed through city council today by a unanimous 48-0 vote. The ordinance, unprecedented in Chicago, requires all documents related to tax increment financing districts (one of the city's most notoriously murky development funding schemes) to be posted online in an easy-to-use, searchable format.

The three-tier liquor distribution system established after the repeal of Prohibition was designed after our model of checks and balances between the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government. Ideally, no one branch between the maker (brewery, distiller or winery), wholesaler and retailer should wield excessive power. Here in the real world, however, money talks, or so goes the adage. That's especially true here in Illinois, where legislation regarding how alcohol gets to a consumer is dictated by the wholesalers through the Associated Beer Distributors of Illinois, the powerful lobby for the state's liquor distributors. The ABDI was instrumental in the drafting and passing of HB 429 and SB 123, which prohibits out-of-state retailers (think wine clubs and online retailers) from selling to customers in Illinois.

Cartoon for Chicagoist by Tim Daly

According to a story in the Huffington Post, the seemingly random home burglary in California of Republican Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon March 4 may have some Chicago ties - and some political ones as well.

It's a bit of a sad day as Chicago loses one of its excellent bloggers, FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver, to the East Coast. In an announcement posted on the political site yesterday, Silver said: