The Chicago mayor and former Obama chief-of-staff is going to court to seek an injunction to stop the teachers strike and force them back to work. Shades of Scott Walker. Does anyone want to argue this doesn’t make Emanuel “Douche Of The Week” or that it won’t hurt Dem election prospects among union members and the left in general?
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Judge holds off on legal action to end Chicago teacher strike
CNN, By Kyung Lah & Greg Botelho, September 17
Chicago — A Cook County judge declined to immediately hear arguments Monday in a request by Chicago school officials to force teachers to end their walkout, according to a city law department spokesman.
Instead, a hearing on the matter could come Tuesday or Wednesday, law department spokesman Roderick Drew said.
Calling the dispute illegal and dangerous, Chicago school officials filed the complaint Monday, asking a judge to end the teacher strike now in its sixth school day.
Union officials in turn accused Mayor Rahm Emanuel of using the courts to bully schoolteachers into accepting a tentative deal.
In a Presidential election year? My Prognosticator’s Guide says “premature”.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
eom.
except maybe Sunday whose theme is not to have one-
Friday and Saturday
and Tuesday are already taken. We could move Cat Blogging to Thursday, unless Raja isn’t up for that challenge (!)
and make Friday Douche of the Week Day –
Is this being too harsh without having some mellow good news theme on Wednesday?
On reflection, all of this is a very bad idea.
The origin of the universe has not as yet been shown to be a conspiracy theory
this teacher’s conflict just let him embrace his inner craven to truly strive to be a douche among douches. Not an easy feat, it’s an increasingly crowded field. Rahm was afraid the Republican governors were in danger of opening a “douche’s gap”, this could not stand. He had to up his game. Well done Rahm, well done indeed.
The only reason he’s not douche of the month or year is because of all the bigger douches out there in politics-land. Unfortunately, he doesn’t even rate being a douche among douches, much less a douche apart. No, not douche extraordinaire, nor douche exceptionale, nor even “above-average douche”.
Nevertheless, out of sheer pity if nothing else, we’ll give him “Douche Du Jour”.
And he’ll just have to be happy with that.
eom.
Shocking Rahm’s Shock Doctrine
The Nation,m By Rick Perlstein, March 29
One thousand Chicago Public School teachers and their supporters, including this correspondent, packed Daley Plaza in forty-degree temperatures on Wednesday for a rally protesting the city’s announced plans to close 54 kindergarten-through-eighth-grade schools next year. One-tenth of the protesters were detained and ticketed (though police originally said they had been “arrested”) at a sit-in in front of school board headquarters a few blocks to the south. What they are protesting is genuine shock-doctrine stuff—an announcement utterly rewiring a major urban institution via public rationales swaddled in utter bad faith, handed down in a blinding flash, absent any reasonable due process. Though Mayor Emanuel is learning that the forces of grassroots democracy can shock back too. And boy, does he have it coming.
The story went down like this. Immediately following Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s defeat in the historic Chicago Teachers Union strike this past fall, the district, claiming massive underutilization of school facilities in light of an announced $1 billion budget deficit, began talking about closing perhaps 129 schools. The district CEO Jean-Claude Brizard—sacked soon after as a “distraction” to “school reform”—had once said he could only imagine closing perhaps three schools, given the paucity of schools performing better than the ones they would have shut down. Knowledgeable observers thought perhaps a dozen or two would end up getting the axe. (You can hear those details in this panel discussion from February of this year).
It took a petition signed by an overwhelming majority of the city’s fifty alderman to even win hearings on the issue. But those hearings were a disaster—“cannibalism,” as one alderman described them, “Good people pitted against each other because each one was trying to save their individual school.” A war of all against all: just the kind of atomization any self-respecting shock doctrineer wants to see among his constituency. Karen Lewis, the Chicago Teachers Union president, called them a “sham” for all the effect she thinks they actually had on decision-making.