Unsurprising. The Tribune’s John Kass says the FBI’s raid on the ward office of Chicago’s second-most-senior alderman, Carrie Austin, was just a matter of time.
■ … where she was saying—with apparently unintentional irony— “Today is a day truly that God has made because he made us the star of the show.”
■ Nostalgia from WBEZ’s Dan Mihalopoulos: Austin “gave one of the most stirring and impassioned defenses of nepotism that City Hall has seen.”
■ She inherited her seat from her deceased husband and has repeatedly defended nepotism.
■ A Trib editorial: Austin’s been “consistently on the wrong side of transparency.”
‘Long overdue.’ The Sun-Times’ Mary Mitchell hails discussion in the U.S. House on reparations for the descendants of American slaves.
■ Author Ta-Nehisi Coates told the hearing, “It is impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery.”
■ Candidate Pete Buttigieg faces what a South Bend community organizer calls “his nightmare”: A white South Bend cop who shot and killed a black man Sunday.
■ A freshman Chicago-area congressman and a veteran colleague from the city are joining a small group of Democrats supporting a baby step toward putting Donald Trump on trial.
■ Columnist Neil Steinberg shares the latest hate mail he’s received from one of “the people we let take charge,” a man who signs off with the words “God bless America & our glorious president.”
White flight. WBEZ: The Chicago metro area has lost more white residents than any other racial group.
■ Illinois is one of only two states over the last five years to lose population—including a drain of white and black residents from Cook County …
■ … although the county’s African American population still exceeds that of any other U.S. county.
■ Reform-oriented Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi has been asking county commissioners to share staff to deal with a rush of calls from citizens getting their next tax bills, but the Sun-Times says the answer has been, “Yeah, we’re pretty busy.”
■ The Daily Herald: “More than 71,000 people collecting public pensions from six statewide retirement plans have moved out of Illinois, taking more than $2.4 billion annually with them.”
■ It’s a win for the American Legion and a defeat for the American Humanist Association, which contended “a huge cross such as this can only be understood as endorsing Christianity.” (Photo: Ken Firestone.)
‘I don’t know if we’ve ever reached the end of May with less than half of our corn planted.’ A University of Illinois crop sciences professor says the record rains drowning Midwest farms are extraordinary.
■ A veteran Illinois state climatologist: “I never saw a growing season quite like this one.”
■ Ignoring urgent warnings of a climate crisis, the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is easing up on pollution from coal-fired plants.
■ Chicago’s cold, wet weather is crimping beach time and swimming lessons.
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