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‘I like Lightfoot.’ The Tribune’s often-conservative columnist John Kass on Chicago’s mayoral runoff race between two progressive women: “Book it. Mayor Lori Lightfoot.”
■ The Sun-Times’ Mary Mitchell says runoff contenders Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle “redeemed a Black History Month … hijacked by … famous black men accused of criminal behavior.”
■ Trib columnist Dahleen Glanton, who feared in November that “Chicago will not have another African-American mayor,” now marvels that it’ll happen—but mostly because of white voters.
■ The Trib’s Eric Zorn: Preckwinkle’s victory speech was “unconventionally churlish.”
■ One political strategist outlines Preckwinkle’s challenge in the runoff: “Shape up a campaign apparatus that shot itself in the foot.”
■ A Tribune map of voting data shows a city splintered.
‘Rahm Emanuel has been … an abysmal political failure.’ Patch columnist Mark Konkol says the mayor’s shortcomings “helped loosen the status quo’s formerly iron grip on the City Council.”
■ Speaking of failure: Mayoral candidate Bob Fioretti—who finished 12th in a field of 14—spent the most per vote …
■ … and U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia flubbed his push to help candidates seeking to unseat several aldermen …
■ … but three incumbents were ousted and 10 others face runoff fights.
■ A retiring alderman accused of striking his wife gets to return home as she reportedly hopes for reconciliation.
Trump’s ‘mild mayhem.’ The president’s sudden departure overnight from his Vietnam summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un left people confused …
■ … but it still looks like a win for Kim, who the AP’s Adam Schreck and Eric Talmadge say “walks away with arguably more legitimacy than he had before, having convinced the most powerful man in the world to come to Asia a second time in less than nine months.” (Cartoon: Keith Taylor.)
■ Meanwhile, in San Diego, prototypes of Trump’s cherished border wall have been demolished.
Cohen’s warning. Among the “10 most stunning moments” from ex-Trump ex-lawyer-soon-off-to-prison Michael Cohen’s testimony to the U.S. House, according to CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger, was Cohen’s caution to Republicans: “People that follow Mr. Trump as I did, blindly, are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.”
■ The president of the progressive American Constitution Society writes in The New York Times that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won the Cohen hearing.
■ An Illinois congressman’s questions broke new ground on the matter of some still-undisclosed “wrongdoing or illegal act” by the president.
■ The Washington Post’s Rachael Bade: “Republicans were so focused on the past criminality of Trump’s former lawyer that they had little time to defend the president” …
■ … possibly demonstrating what NBC News calls “the power that President Trump continues to hold over his party.”
■ Wired: Your perception of the Cohen hearings depends on your filter bubble.
Chicago sinking. The Trib reports geologic shifts that could—among other things—render household sewer mains ineffective are dropping the Chicago area by 4 to 8 inches per century.
■ Also in the Trib: The greenhouse effect is claiming the massive glacier that formed the Great Lakes.
‘Oh, my God.’ That’s the way one real estate agent describes homebuyers’ reaction to the gross disparity in
■ Preservation Chicago has expanded its usual list of seven endangered area landmarks this year—to nine …
■ … including the James R. Thompson Center, whose sale by the state would be authorized by a bill on Gov. Pritzker’s desk. (Photo: Harry Carmichael in the Chicago Public Square Flickr Group.)
■ But, hey, Chicago has landed a couple of dozen semifinalists in this year’s James Beard Awards for the restaurant industry.
Your Cubs dollars at work. The Trump-friendly Sinclair Broadcast Group says it expects to rake in up to $50 million a year from the Cubs regional sports network it plans to launch next year …
■ … as it eyes an expanding sports footprint in other markets, too.
Thanks … to reader Mike Braden for spotting a redundant occurrence of the word property in this edition.