DL Open Thread: Thursday, April 6, 2023

How To Run As Progressives On The Crime Issue–And Win:

On Tuesday, Brandon Johnson, one of the most progressive mayoral candidates in Chicago’s history, won in a stunning upset over his opponent Paul Vallas, who had backing from Chicago’s police union and raised more than double in campaign cash after vowing to hire more cops. Johnson, a former teacher and organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union, took a more holistic approach to public safety, pledging to address the root causes of violence by funding schools, housing, jobs, and mental health care. (He suggested increasing taxes on Chicago employers and raising levies on hotels and real estate sales over $1 million as a way to fund more community investments.)

Johnson, who is Black, did not shy away from the problem of crime. He lives in a neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side that is no stranger to shootings, and said in his victory speech that he’s had to protect his kids “from bullets that fly right outside our front door.” Johnson argued during his campaign that the city needed to take a new approach to violence by focusing on community development and hiring more social workers, while also being smarter about police resources. He wants to promote cops internally and to increase the number of detectives by about 200, so the department can focus on closing cases.

If Chicago’s election was a test, Johnson’s message of community investment passed. “In a survey of Chicago run-off voters on the eve of the election, we find a city deeply concerned about crime, especially violent crime, but also embracing a nuanced view of the causes of crime and potential solutions,” the advocacy group Vera Action and the national polling firm GQR wrote in a report on Wednesday, noting that a majority of the 750-plus likely voters surveyed said they favored a crime prevention approach focused on funding schools, jobs, housing, and health care, and fighting illegal gun sales.

BTW,  I wonder if half the Chicago cops have quit, as the head of their police union warned/promised they would:

Still, that does not mean reforms will be easy. Chicago’s police union president, John Catanzara, recently warned that hundreds of cops might leave their jobs if Johnson became mayor. “If this guy gets in we’re going to see an exodus like we’ve never seen before,” he told the New York Times, adding there would be “blood in the streets” as a result.

It’s unclear if the police union will follow through or try to impede Johnson’s reforms in other ways, but it wouldn’t be unheard of. In San Francisco, after progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin came to office in 2020, cops resisted working with him, leading to massive frustration among voters that contributed to the DA’s recall last year.

Obstruction like this from the police can make it hard for local politicians like Johnson to fight crime outside traditional “law and order” frameworks, even if voters want them to. We don’t usually think of police unions as an issue of democracy. But maybe we should start.

We’ve already started.  And, yes, police unions are an impediment to democracy.

Fox Was Always Right-Wing Propaganda.  Which could cause its downfall:

Dominion’s pretrial court filings have already provided a rare look inside the company’s decision-making process throughout the election crisis that preceded the Jan. 6 insurrection. The president the network favored was promoting a lie — that Democrats were illegally seizing power through pervasive, systemic voter fraud — to stay in office. That lie excited and angered his supporters, and many of those supporters were also Fox’s core audience. Violence was in the air, the fate of democracy up for grabs. If ever there was a time for Fox News to live up to the journalistic promise still embedded in its name, it was then.

For most of my career as a reporter, I’ve been tracing Fox’s long journey to a dividing line: On one side, journalism, constitutionally protected, even in its nastiest, most slanted and ideological form as part of the brutal scrum of democracy. On the other side, knowing lies, reckless disregard for the truth — the “actual malice” that is at the heart of the Dominion case. The court will decide if Fox crossed that line. But the newly available records show what drove Fox, and its powerful founder, to the very edge of that line, if not beyond: an audience that has reliably delivered influence and profits for decades. Now, in the age of social media and powerfully attractive disinformation campaigns, that audience could instantly move on to even headier stuff from even more adventurous competitors.

Murdoch has always understood the value of his audience, in terms of power and in terms of money. For him the choice may be simple. In his Dominion deposition, a lawyer asked him why he did not want to “antagonize” Trump after the election. “He had a very large following,” was Murdoch’s characteristically terse response. “They were probably mostly viewers of Fox, so it would have been stupid.”

This article provides great insight into the history of Fox ‘News’.  Highly-recommended.

Guess Who’s Asking ‘Big Government’ For Money.  Hint: The same person who said the following:

“As long as I am your governor, the meddling hand of big government creeping down from Washington, D.C., will be stopped cold at the Mississippi River.”

She’s now demanding that the Feds pick up 100% of all costs associated with the tornadoes that ripped through Arkansas instead of the piddling 75% that the Feds are providing.

Might I have a word? “No.”

Yet More Pedo-Predation From The Catholic Church.  This time in Maryland:

BALTIMORE (AP) — More than 150 Catholic priests and others associated with the Archdiocese of Baltimore sexually abused more than 600 children over the past 80 years, according to a state report released Wednesday that accused church officials of decades of cover-ups.

The report paints a damning picture of the archdiocese, which is the oldest Roman Catholic diocese in the country and spans much of Maryland. Some parishes, schools and congregations had more than one abuser at the same time — including St. Mark Parish in Catonsville, which had 11 abusers living and working there between 1964 and 2004.

The Maryland Attorney General’s Office issued the report during Holy Week — considered the most sacred time of year in Christianity ahead of Easter Sunday — and said the number of victims is likely far higher.

“The staggering pervasiveness of the abuse itself underscores the culpability of the Church hierarchy,” the report said. “The sheer number of abusers and victims, the depravity of the abusers’ conduct, and the frequency with which known abusers were given the opportunity to continue preying upon children are astonishing.”

The disclosure of the redacted findings marks a significant development in an ongoing legal battle over their release and adds to growing evidence from parishes across the country as numerous similar revelations have rocked the Catholic Church in recent years.