The Daily Parker

A couple of updates. First, Paul Vallas picked up a key endorsement, which may bring over some of Lori Lightfoot's voters:

Newly-retired Jesse White, the first African-American elected as Illinois Secretary of State, is endorsing Paul Vallas, giving Vallas a leg up in his quest to claim the 20% share of the Black vote he needs to win the April 4 mayoral runoff against Brandon Johnson.

White, 88, retired in January after a record six terms as secretary of state. In four of those elections, he was the leading vote-getter statewide. He endorsed City Clerk Anna Valencia as his replacement, but she lost handily to former Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias.

Vallas can only hope White’s endorsement in the mayoral runoff has more weight — and gives other establishment Black elected officials sanction to join him, starting with White’s political protégé, Ald. Walter Burnett (27th).

Block Club Chicago maps out how that might work:

If you’re a local politics geek like us, you’re probably poring over the data to see who won big where, how Chicagoans voted — and what exactly could happen during that runoff.

We pulled together maps and charts to help you understand this latest election...

And Charles Blow sees Lori Lightfoot's decline and fall as typical of other Black mayors, but concedes that her personality probably had a lot to do with it:

[T]wo things can be true simultaneously: There can be legitimate concerns about rising crime, and crime can be used as a political wedge issue, particularly against elected officials of color, which has happened often.

In this moment, when the country has still not come to grips with the wide-ranging societal trauma that the pandemic exacerbated and unleashed, mayors are being held responsible for that crime. If all politics is local, crime and safety are the most local. And when the perception of crime collides with ingrained societal concepts of race and gender, politicians, particularly Black women, can pay the price.

I disagree with Blow; I know crime in Chicago has fallen by more than half since I lived here in the 1990s, and that Lightfoot doesn't have much responsibility for its uptick in the pandemic. I voted for Brandon Johnson because I thought Lightfoot was a bad administrator and didn't know how to get things done without bullying.

We'll see what happens on April 4th.

Perhaps the first day of spring brings encourages some spring cleaning? Or at least, revisiting stories of the recent and more distant past:

• The Navy has revisited how it names ships, deciding that naming United States vessels after events or people from a failed rebellion doesn't quite work. As a consequence, the guided missile cruiser USS Chancellorsville (CG-62, named after a Confederate victory) will become the USS Robert Smalls, named after the former slave who stole the CSS Planter right from Charleston Harbor in 1862.
• Author John Scalzi revisited whether to stay on Twitter, given its "hot racist right-wing trash" owner, and decides why not? It's not like Musk will ever benefit financially from the app.
• Charles Blow revisited the (long overdue) defenestration of cartoonist Scott Adams, deciding it doesn't matter whether Adams was lazy or stupid, throwing him out the window was appropriate.
• Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul revisited the Equal Rights Amendment, but the DC Circuit Court of Appeals decided yesterday not to.
• WBEZ revisited the only other two Chicago Mayors who lost their re-election bids in the past century, Michael Bilandic and Jane Byrne.
• A group of US intelligence agencies revisited Havana Syndrome, without finding sufficient evidence to blame either an adversary government or an energy weapon.

Finally, here's a delightful clip of US Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) patiently explaining to Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and her banana-republican party the difference between an adjective and a noun:

For the first time since 1983, a sitting Chicago mayor failed to win re-election*, sadly keeping the total proportion of women not being re-elected at 100%. So the April 4th runoff will see the Chicago Public Schools candidate face off against the Chicago Teachers Union candidate:

Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson are headed to an April 4 runoff for mayor of Chicago after Mayor Lori Lightfoot conceded defeat Tuesday night, sealing her fate as a one-term mayor.

With 98 percent of precincts reporting, Vallas secured 34 percent of the vote, followed by Johnson with 20 percent and Lightfoot with 17 percent. Under city election rules, if no one candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the race will go to a runoff.

Although opponents attacked Vallas as a conservative during the campaign, he affirmed his support for abortion rights during his speech, and pledged to be a mayor for “all Chicago.”

“I am a lifelong Democrat,” Vallas said. 

(Sure, for a very forgiving value of "Democrat.")

Johnson, a Cook County commissioner representing the county’s 1st District on the West Side, thanked the unions that buoyed his campaign in his speech, including the powerful, progressive Chicago Teachers Union. He said he would work to level out Chicago’s historic inequities, and spoke in personal terms about his background and his progressive vision for the city.

“I know what it’s like to have a long orange extension cord from our window to our neighbor’s window,” Johnson said. “We are finally going to retire this tale of two cities, and usher in a much better, stronger, safer Chicago.”

The race marks the third consecutive mayoral runoff, after [US Representative Chuy García faced off against incumbent Rahm Emanuel in 2015 and Lightfoot defeated Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle in 2019. The city switched to non-partisan elections in 1999, allowing for runoffs if no candidate receives 50 percent of the vote.

My guess is that Vallas' 34% represents almost all of the support he's going to get, so I believe (and hope) Johnson will win. As one of my readers pointed out, both CPS and CTU are awful, but I have a strong enough bias in favor of teachers and against school  district administration that I'd rather have the CTU guy than the CPS guy. Oh, and Vallas got an endorsement from our unhinged police union, so there's that.

* Michael Bilandic (1979) and Eugene Sawyer (1993) both lost their first elections, not re-election.

At my day job, we just ended our 80th sprint on the project, with a lot of small but useful features that will make our side of the app easier to maintain. I like productive days like this. I even voted! And now I will rest on my laurels for a bit and read these stories:

• If you don't worry that the entire US Supreme Court has the technical expertise of your 99-year-old great uncle, perhaps you should?
• Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explains how giving economic aid to Ukraine benefits the West.
• In part because Republicans in Congress have no interest in actually legislating, some 700,000 Illinois residents will lose their Medicaid coverage soon.
• Giving loyalty to an unhinged, narcissistic man-child does not get you loyalty in return. And no, this isn't about the XPOTUS.
• O'Hare Terminal 3—the one I use most often—will soon get $50 million in FAA funds for upgrades.
• State schools, which exist so that everyone in the state has a shot at a solid education, have seen the steepest declines in liberal-arts degrees in the past 10 years.
• Jill Bearup updated her earlier video about the Netflix corset mini-scandal, finding her initial surmise was correct.
• Not-racist cartoonists want to know why it took so long for Scott Adams to get his comeuppance.
• WHY IS IT SNOWING IN MALLORCA? I'm vaguely alarmed here...

Finally, the European Space Agency wants to establish a standard time zone for the moon. Since one day on the moon is 29.4 days here, I don't quite know what that will look like.

The first female Speaker of the House of Commons died Sunday:

She served as Speaker from 1992 to 2000, before going on to become a baroness in the House of Lords from 2001.

The current Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle described her as "an inspirational woman" who was known for her "no-nonsense style".

She was the Labour MP for West Bromwich West from 1973 to 2000.

"To be the first woman Speaker was truly groundbreaking and Betty certainly broke that glass ceiling with panache," Sir Lindsay said.

"Betty was one of a kind. A sharp, witty and formidable woman - and I will miss her."

Here is Speaker Boothroyd presiding over Tony Blair's first Prime Minister's Questions in May 1997:

The rain has stopped, and might even abate long enough for me to collect Cassie from day camp without getting soaked on my way home. I've completed a couple of cool sub-features for our sprint review tomorrow, so I have a few minutes to read the day's stories:

• Matt Ford doesn't think US Representative Marjorie Taylor (R-GA) wants secession so much as uncontested Republican rule, which, you know, is on brand for her and her party.
• San Francisco native Michael Moritz worries that one-party rule by the Democrats is hurting the city—and the Party. (Seeing a pattern here?)
• Stars & Stripes highlights a vignette from 1952, when then-Lt. Jimmy Carter helped Canada dismantle a failed nuclear reactor.
• Financial advisor Caz Craffy dissipated hundreds of thousands of dollars from Army life-insurance payouts in a case that highlights the Department of Defense's difficulties screening civilian advisors for soldiers, sailors, and Marines.
• Chester, Pa., a suburb just south of Philadelphia, drove itself into bankruptcy in part because of a useless $77m highway project.
• The Guardian outlines how Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific have spent millions on lobbying and propaganda to advance the kinds of business practices that led to the East Palestine disaster this month.

Finally, Friends of the Chicago Harbor Lighthouse hope to tap into National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act funds to turn their organization's namesake into a museum. That would be cool.

After standing on the Ravenswood Metra platform for 10 minutes in 40 km/h winds and blowing rain, I hearby sentence former Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner to 100 days of standing on said platform without an umbrella or waterproof shoes for the offense cutting off funding to all Illinois transportation projects for 3 years in a fit of ideological pique and general lack of empathy for anyone else.

Each instance of Rauner's prickishness causing suffering and inconvenience to the citizens of Illinois shall be a separate and distinct offense.

Basically, I want him to live out the remainder his life stuck in traffic, getting soaked on "temporary" train platforms, and failing to find shelter for the night because so many homeless shelters closed for lack of funds on his watch.

Newspapers around the country finally chucked "Dilbert" into the bin after the cartoon's creator, Scott Adams, gave them the excuse:

Newspapers across the United States have pulled Scott Adams’s long-running “Dilbert” comic strip after the cartoonist called Black Americans a “hate group” and said White people should “get the hell away from” them.

The Washington Post, the USA Today network of hundreds of newspapers, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Los Angeles Times and other publications announced they would stop publishing “Dilbert” after Adams’s racist rant on YouTube on Wednesday. Asked on Saturday how many newspapers still carried the strip — a workplace satire he created in 1989 — Adams told The Post: “By Monday, around zero.”

Adams, 65, also blamed Black people for not “focusing on education” during the show and said, “I’m also really sick of seeing video after video of Black Americans beating up non-Black citizens.”

I say "excuse" because (a) Adams has said a lot worse, and (b) "Dilbert" hasn't been funny for at least ten years. I stopped reading the strip about five years ago after (a) Adams said a lot worse and (b) it stopped being funny. Why his comments last week tipped the scales, I have no idea. But you only have to go back to the 2016 Presidential Campaign, with Adams calling the XPOTUS a "genius hypnotist" and praising his persuasive abilities the way Father Coughlin praised Goebbels.

So, for whatever reason, American newspapers have finally got shot of this boring, unfunny asshole. Only the timing was unpredictable.

The other "makes sense if you think about it" story concerns the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. I've visited the place; it's really creepy. But aside from the Treaty Village at Panmunjom, it's a five-kilometer strip of land with exactly zero humans in it. Yet NBC News seemed surprised that it has become a de facto wildlife refuge:

Golden eagles, goats and wild cats are among the 6,168 wildlife species were found in new street view images released by Google this week which offer a rare glimpses into life behind the civilian control line.

Away from landmines buried beneath the border zone’s soil, otters and endangered Manchurian trout swim freely in the Imjin river which flows from North to South Korea.

And animals such as long-tailed mountain goats, classified as endangered by South Korea’s environment ministry, can be spotted in the rocky terrain of the Taebaek mountains.

So, that's cool. A lot cooler than a washed-up, right-wing cartoonist losing his syndication deal.

As a bonus, here's Panmunjom, from about 10 meters from the North Korean border:

Chicago mayoral candidate and Fraternal Order of Police endorsee Paul Vallas blames "hackers" for his own choices to use a weak password and not to use multi-factor authentication on his Twitter account:

Mayoral candidate Paul Vallas on Friday blamed unnamed hackers for his Twitter account liking offensive tweets over the past several years as he faced criticism from rival candidates over the social media posts.

The comments came after a Tribune review this week found that Vallas’ Twitter account, @paulvallas, had liked a series of tweets that used racist language, supported controversial police tactics like “stop-and-frisk” or insulted Mayor Lori Lightfoot in personal terms.

Vallas earlier this week disavowed the tweets as “abhorrent” and said his campaign was investigating. But in an interview with CBS-2 Chicago on Friday, Vallas said it was “obvious we got hacked,” and in a statement a campaign spokesperson late Friday said there was “unusual activity on the account as recently as last night.”

“The campaign is working to identify who is responsible for ‘liking’ these tweets,” the statement said. “Because the account pre-dates and was re-purposed for the current campaign, numerous volunteers have had access to the account in recent years, including some who are not currently associated with Paul or the 2023 campaign. The scope of the challenge was reflected in the fact that we have seen unusual activity on the account as recently as last night even after an initial round of curative steps including changing passwords for security purposes. As a result, the campaign is investigating a possible breach of the account as well.”

I'm so tired of people blaming "hackers" for crap like this. If you can't keep your Twitter account secure, either through choosing appropriate security measures or trusting the right people to manage it, how can anyone trust you with a city of 3 million citizens?

Current mayor Lori Lightfoot thinks the real culprit might not be a "hacker" after all: “Every single time he gets caught … he says, ‘What? Oh not me. This time, it was somebody else. Not my fault,’” Lightfoot said. “Well, at some point, you’ve gotta say, ‘Come on, Paul. Come clean. Tell the truth about who you are.’”

I spent way more time than I should have this morning trying to set up an API key for the Associated Press data tools. Their online form to sign up created a general customer-service ticket, which promptly got closed with an instruction to...go to the online sign-up form. They also had a phone number, which turned out to have nothing to do with sales. And I've now sent two emails a week apart to their "digital sales" office, with crickets in response.

The New York Times had an online setup that took about five minutes, and I'm already getting stuff using Postman. Nice.

Meanwhile:

• David French revisits President Carter's "malaise" speech, which he characterizes as the former president's most prophetic.
• Molly White asks, why isn't Sam Bankman-Fried in jail? (Most likely answer: because the US Attorney's Office are enjoying him making all those incriminating statements online.)
• The mountains outside Los Angeles have gotten heavy blizzard conditions in the past day in a once-in-a-generation storm.
• A few thousand kilometers to the east, Venice has had near-record low tides that have left its canals mostly empty for hours twice a day.
• The electrical engineer heading up Virginia's Marymount University has proposed cutting everything she doesn't understand from the curriculum, ironically demonstrating why the humanities are critical for good leadership skills.
• Long-time Winnepeg, Man., resident Michel Durand-Wood sees the disappearance of a neighborhood park's gardener as an excellent symbol of the "growth Ponzi scheme" perpetrated by highway departments across North America.
• On the other hand, bureaucracy and poor planning have helped make Manhattan's 2nd Avenue Subway the most expensive transit project in the world.

Finally, I've got a note on my calendar to check out the Karen's Diner pop-up in Wrigleyville next month. Because who doesn't want to be abused by servers?