Will this Bears stadium story never end?

We were hoping for a resolution over the weekend. Oh well.

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Tuesdays at 11:30 a.m. I talk with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.

Is the General Assembly calling the Bears’ bluff?

My feeling all along has been that the Bears’ expressions of interest in relocating to Northwest Indiana has been a bluff to gain leverage with Illinois lawmakers. So my guess is that the teams’ upper managers have been sitting around their conference table in the aftermath of the Illinois state legislature’s failure Sunday to advance a bill to help them with their proposed stadium project in Arlington Heights and saying, “Oh crap, now what?”

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they don’t care about state boundaries and the fact that the proposed site for their stately pleasure dome “sits near several hazardous waste sites, across the street from an oil tank storage complex, and in the shadow of the Midwest’s largest oil refinery, as the Tribune’s Bob McCoppin (gift link) reported:

In the past, area residents fought to get the site cleaned up. The result was a golf course built on top of a mountain of slag — a rocky waste product from steel production — that was capped with bio-solids that are treated human waste.

Maybe they’ll fold and agree to pay the property taxes and construction costs to build a sports and entertainment complex in Arlington Heights in exchange for the necessary infrastructure improvements. Maybe they’ll wait to see if any political pressure builds over the summer for Illinois to agree to their terms. Or maybe they’ll actually go the bio-solids route.

All I know is that it’s preposterous that this story is dragging on now nearly three and a half years after the Bears closed on the 326-acre Arlington International Racecourse site and reached a frenzied crescendo followed by sad trombone noises on the last day of session.

Illinois Senate President Don Harmon:

There was an enormous undercurrent in our caucus to not do anything. People are worried about neighbors being thrown off of food stamps, people not being able to keep up with inflation because their wages aren’t coming up, losing their health care because the hospitals and health care providers that serve them are being undercut by Washington. There was no appetite at all to provide public dollars to a $10 billion sports franchise.

Gov. JB Pritzker:

I don’t want the Bears to leave Illinois … But the reality is, I wasn’t willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money in order to give it to a billionaire-owned family or team, and believe very much that the incentives that we provide for businesses ought to be similar to the incentives we provide to this type of business, as much as an emotional connection as many of us have to the Bears and to keeping them in the city of Chicago or in the state of Illinois. Number one principle is we’re not going to put this on the taxpayers of the state of Illinois.

The Tribune Editorial Board writes that Pritzker “is not relishing the idea of ‘losing’ the Bears to red-state Indiana being part of his campaign for president of the United States.” But neither is he relishing the idea of his prospective presidential opponents accusing him of coddling his fellow billionaires at the expense of everyday Illinois residents.

Very few voters in New Hampshire or South Carolina, to name two states at random, give a sweet, teardrop-shaped fruit where the Chicago Bears play their home games. the majority of voters in last week’s click poll (see below) feel the same.

Exhausted by this story, I’m with them.

Notes and comments from readers — lightly edited — along with my responses

Talarico, the filibuster and veganism

Bill Coleman — In your post about the Texas U.S. Senate race you wrote, “Paxton favors the elimination of the Senate filibuster — a pet cause for Trump that has so far been resisted by Republican senators who realize that, one of these days, their party will be in the minority again and will find that particular check on power useful.”

Surely you know that the Democrats have all but promised to nuke the filibuster at their earliest opportunity. I’ll be curious to learn what you have to say about it when they do.

Zorn — It’s fairly routine for presidents of both parties to express frustration with the filibuster rule that requires a 60-vote supermajority to get most legislative initiatives through the U.S. Senate. Sometimes they muse about getting rid of the requirement altogether, and Donald Trump has been notably persistent in his call for this. Talarico is with him on this:

Texas Tribune graphic

I doubt such an initiative will ever prevail in either party, though, since this form of instant gratification can totally thwart a minority and create wild swings in the law as the parties trade power. I look for cooler heads to prevail, as they generally have over the years, save for the ill-advised decision by Democrats to get rid of it for judges. This, then, created the permission structure for the Republicans to scrap it for Supreme Court justices, which turned out to be a steep price for the Democrats to pay.

David Leitschuh —The reason opponents have tagged Talarico as a vegan is that during a fundraiser four years in 2022 he announced that his campaign for the state House of Representatives had officially become a “non-meat campaign.” He said, “We are only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses.” He framed the decision as a moral and environmental effort, adding that reducing meat consumption is “necessary to fight climate change” and is “the right thing to do and the moral thing to do.” So no, he never said he was vegan, but the Texas GOP is effectively using his own anti-meat comments against him in meat-loving Texas.

Zorn — Reducing one’s meat consumption makes sense to me for health, environmental and humane reasons, but framing that argument as “vegan” strikes me as politically tone deaf. People want cleaner air and water and they want to be healthy and they don’t want to have animals suffer needlessly, but by God don’t even suggest that they actually make personal sacrifices to achieve these ends.

Rick Bindler —I have another Chicago Tribune question for you. We still get only the Sunday paper home delivered alongside our weekly digital subscription, because my wife prefers the print version over reading on her phone or iPad.

On Sunday, May 31, the paper included a couple of inserts—one slick advertisement for Buffalo, NY, and another for Road Trip. I usually call every six months to make sure I’m not paying extra for these “premium” inserts, but customer service couldn’t give me a straight answer on whether these were “premium” inserts or not. Their billing statements aren’t very clear and the agent said I am permanently unsubscribed from the premier issues.

Do you happen to know if these specific inserts carry an extra charge?

I want to support local newspapers and believe if done correctly, they are a valuable local resource and they can hold our politicians somewhat in check. But the Trib is a shell of its former self and the shady subscription and pricing just makes it harder as time goes by to keep supporting it.

Zorn — The “premium” issues — inserts for which home delivery subscribers may be charged an additional $20 each — are not labeled or priced on the cover. This is part of the scam. You can tell the two Sunday inserts from last weekend were not “premium” because they contained advertising and the customer service reps —at 312-546-7900 — ought to have reassured you.

Still more letters about public vs. private schools and school board elections

Jake H. — Plenty of unionized public schools do just fine, including top selective enrollment schools in CPS itself as well as wealthy suburban schools. The “secret sauce” for good schools, generally speaking, is overwhelmingly the clientele. A lot of nature and nurture go into those test scores, and schools are but a small part of the nurture piece. The “good schools” have a larger proportion of good students, those likely to do better on the tests. That explains most of the differences in test scores that show private schools outperforming many public schools. It’s important to internalize this reality, because we otherwise expect far too much of schools.

At the same time, it would be wrong to carry this insight too far, lest we give up on trying to improve measurable results. Pretty strong evidence in favor of the “no-excuses” approach adopted by the most effective charter networks for lifting up academic performance for low-income, low-achieving students, especially in math (which is probably more responsive to instruction than reading).

Eric has asked what the supposed “secret sauce” is that cause private schools generally outperforming public schools. The best answer we have is an environment that insists on high expectations and emphasizes academic accountability and behavioral discipline.

Jim Grimes — Private schools can pick their students and families. The most direct determinant of success in school or by school districts is the rate of poverty in its communities. We keep picking one leg of the social stool to fix, but never work on all three (or four) legs effectively at the same time. Education is only one leg. Our nation, state, and local communities need to debate how to raise up all our families — to fix all four legs on the stool.

Zorn — Schools, communities and families all have a culture with regards to education, and that culture is shaped in part by a variety of factors, some of which are demographic and many of which are out of the control of the administrators and teachers. The idea behind charter schools was to try to isolate some of those factors and see what sorts of variables we might control — tweak — to show us how to improve all schools. Does wearing uniforms improve student performance? Do shorter or longer days make a difference? Teacher pay? Class sizes? Discipline policies? Extracurricular offerings? That vague term “expectations”? And so on. Which are scalable/replicable?

My issue with the”school choice” movement is that it doesn’t actively engage these questions when it labels public schools as “failing.” It wants to blame stubborn, unionized teachers or sclerotic educrats who just aren’t trying hard enough — how many times have I heard the claim that public schools just need competition from private schools to make them better. My view is that we should focus our resources on as many variables as we can into improving public education.

And yes, I know, money isn’t the only answer. But it’s part of the answer.

Laurence E Siegel — I still favor elected school boards. I have read the negatives. You mean things could be worse than they have been for decades? Look, we live in a republic. We give the taxpayers choices. Do they always make wise choices? They elected Donald Trump and Brandon Johnson, didn’t they? But so far as Chicago Public Schools is concerned, what’s the alternative? The status quo? Most of you seem to be concerned about the influence of the Chicago Teachers Union over elections. I consider that irrelevant. If the voters want to back CTU choices, that’s their right, wise or unwise. How many of you have have gone into the voting booth and later regretted your choices? It’s called America. Besides, what’s the alternative? Leaving the power with mayors? Let the voters decide.

Zorn — I would rather hold mayors accountable because voters tend to pay attention to who the mayor is and what he or she is doing or not doing regarding education. The alternative, hoping the voters make informed decisions in 21 low-profile races, doesn’t strike me as wise, particularly when big money — huge money — is likely to go into the race,

Unpopular opinions?

Is God non-binary?

I’m not a theologian, exegete or even a believer so I don’t have a strong opinion about Democratic Texas state representative James Talarico’s assertion in 2021 that “God is non-binary.”

Talarico, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, made this remark during a 2021 floor debate over a proposed requirement that student athletes compete on boys or girls teams based on their biological sex. And of course it conflicts with Biblical references to God as father and king, numerous uses of the masculine pronoun (capitalized!) in references to God, and, of course, cultural depictions of God as a man with a lush gray beard who speaks like James Earl Jones.

CBS News reported that, when pressed recently on the “nonbinary” remark “Talarico said he was being ‘intentionally provocative,’ but added that ‘what it means is that God can’t be defined by human categories.’”

Backers of Republican nominee Ken Paxton are already using Talarico’s five-year-old quip to attack him, but, as Texas Monthly reported, it’s quite defensible:

Most Christian traditions adhere to the theological belief that God, the Creator, is genderless—also, not actually a created, anatomically correct human person. In his gospel, John writes that “God is spirit.” The notion of God’s masculine nature persists, however, particularly within more theologically conservative Christian denominations. The Bible does use terms such as “abba” (Aramaic for “father”) and “melek” (Hebrew for “king”) to describe the various roles of God, and the Hebrew and Greek scriptures often use the masculine construction when referring to God. ...

But plenty of theologians point out the numerous feminine, even maternal, references to God throughout the Bible. The Hebrew term for the Holy Spirit (also God) is a feminine construction. Old Testament verses describe God as one who gives birth and compare God’s protection to that of a mother hen gathering her chicks. …

Still, most generally agree that God lacks a biological sex, even while disagreeing on how to think about God’s nature and what that means for how to arrange the church. Some faith traditions, like the Southern Baptist Convention, Paxton’s faith group, believe that God self-identifies in masculine terms throughout scripture, given that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. (This insistence on a masculine God is also a useful proof point on which to hang a policy that denies women positions of authority.) In 2011, the SBC passed a resolution condemning an updated New International Version of the Bible for its gender-neutral language; it then commissioned its own translation.

I don’t know what the belief that God is male is supposed to signify — surely not that God has a penis — or, for that matter, what the belief that God is a non-binary spirit has to do with transgender girls and women in sports. Certainly by highlighting Talarico’s quote, the Paxtonians are hoping to duplicate the success of the 2004 Republican campaign commercial that ended with the line “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you."

But let’s ask the question anyway, this time offering you the “who gives a damn?” option that so many of you request for other polls.

Last week’s result

490 votes

NewsWheel

Inspired by the WordWheel puzzle in the Monday-Friday Chicago Tribune and other papers, this puzzle asks you to identify the missing letter that will make a word or words — possibly proper nouns; reading either clockwise or counterclockwise — related to a story in the news or other current event. The solution at the bottom of the newsletter includes a link to a related, explanatory news story.

Speaking of the WordWheel puzzle, syndicated in the Tribune, I got an email from famed University of Chicago paleontologist and fellow WordWheel enthusiast Paul Sereno objecting to the printed solution to the May 25th puzzle. There are two possible solutions, and one is about 12,000 times more common than the other according to Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)’s word frequency data page. The puzzle gave the less common solution. Which one do you see?

See the bottom of the newsletter for both solutions (Sereno and I both saw the more common one that was not the solution under the puzzle).

The week’s best visual jokes

Here are some funny visual images I've come across recently on social media. Enjoy, then evaluate:

There’s still time to vote in the conventional Quip of the Week poll!

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Info

Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise.

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Answer to the NewsWheel puzzle

EUPHORIA

More common: STANDARD

Less common TANKARDS