Kissing was discouraged, public dancing was outlawed, and spitting on sidewalk became a police matter, as the Sun-Times reported in this story originally published Oct. 16, 2005
Three political strategists with ties to neither candidate agreed that, barring an ‘earth-shattering development,’ the runoff is likely to be a Lightfoot laugher, the seeds of which were planted weeks before the first round of balloting on Feb. 26.
I think a lot of people expected Rauner to move back to the middle after the election so he could govern as a pragmatic and moderate businessman. Now it’s becoming plain he’s an ideologue who could end up making noted union antagonist Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker look like the late-labor leader George Meany.
So much for baton-swinging cops and tear gas and mass arrests.
So much for police riots.
If the whole world was watching this time, good.
What we saw in Chicago over the weekend and on Monday was police training that paid off. We saw crowd-control tactics that worked. We saw patience.
We saw police work at its best.
A small number, perhaps 200, of the several thousand NATO protesters who hit the streets were begging for a fight, looking to provoke the police into swinging those nightsticks.
The Chicago Federation of Labor said today it would ask its City Council allies to reject Chicago’s second Wal-Mart after an unprecedented meeting between five Wal-Mart executives and five union leaders failed to produce follow-up talks.
Jorge Ramirez, the CFL’s secretary-treasurer, accused Wal-Mart of “going through the motions” when it sat down with organized labor on May 3 to hammer out an agreement that would avoid putting aldermen on the hot-seat.
