Tweet madness continues!

Both written and visual tweet tournaments resume today

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3-21-2023

Today’s issue is going out to all subscribers in order to hurry along the Tweet Madness polls (see below). Become a paid subscriber to regularly receive Tuesday’s Picayune Plus and support this effort.

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. Become a paid subscriber to receive each Picayune Plus in your email inbox each Tuesday and join our civil and productive commenting community.

Johnson on policing, circa 2020

WGN-Ch. 9 news anchors Tahman Bradley and Micah Materre interviewed Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson on Aug. 11, 2020 in the wake of a resurgence of racial unrest in the city during that fraught summer. I thought it was interesting ,how even then, currently mayoral candidate Johnson was employing powerful racial-justice rhetoric while avoiding giving direct answers to direct questions. I had the interview transcribed so interested readers can see what Johnson said and what he didn’t say in full context.

WGN: There was rioting and organized looting last night and you're calling to defund the police. Explain that.

Johnson: What we're seeing, obviously, is an outbreak of incredible frustration and anguish from communities that have been isolated through poverty over generations. And what we have is a typical, very standard, quite frankly, a very tired response to the regularly scheduled pandemic, which is structural racism. And that response has been to increase police presence that has not led to anything of substance to secure communities (or) to make communities whole. …

We're spending nearly $5 million a day just on policing while families continue to experience homelessness, unemployment and lack of access to health care and transportation. You can't take a certain level of urgency to protect capital and the wealthy and not have that same tenacity, to provide relief for families that have been devastated through structural racism for generations.

WGN: But, Commissioner, by defunding the police department, what are you hoping to accomplish? And how can that make citizens safer? And how could that, ultimately, do you feel, stop looting?

(click here to read the rest of the exchange)

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

Joan P. — Am I the only Chicagoan who becomes more dismayed about our choices in the mayoral runoff with every passing day?

No, you are not. I’ve been hearing more than a little “Hmm, maybe Lori Lightfoot wasn’t so bad …” talk from those who were so disenchanted with her crispy, counterproductive style that they voted for someone else. I wonder if she’s squirreling away some of her campaign cash for “Miss me yet?” billboards adjacent to area expressways.

Terry S. — In your coverage of Brandon Johnson’s attempt to blame Chicago’s current fiscal woes on Paul Vallas you extensively quoted Center on Budget and Tax Accountability director Ralph Martire and referred to him as a “watchdog." But he’s more like the fox at the chicken coop. Despite the high-minded, independent sound of the center's name, it is funded by public employee unions, and Martire has been a lobbyist for the teachers union.

His view is that the solution to pension woes always is to pour more tax dollars into them and to never make the slightest change to any of the current pension benefits and structure. I say that not from a conservative point of view but simply because that's how he looks at and defends the pension system.

It's never the pensions, the retirement age, the cost-of-living increase, the exemption from state income tax; it's always the amount of money going in to keep the barge afloat. Laurence Msall, the president of the Civic Federation who died last month, was a watchdog.

I’ll just let Martire respond to this letter:

This is typical BS. He can’t argue with our positions so he distorts them and says we are somehow biased because we get contributions from unions. Yawn. Same tired right-wing nonsense we get from folks who don’t actually know our work and view the world thru an ideological lens. 

Yes we get funding from unions. We are also supported by foundations and business groups. So what? None of our backers has any say in our work, and the only reason the letter writer knows we get money from unions is that we report it publicly on our website. We have nothing to hide.

First, it isn’t the benefit levels or salaries that has created the pension problems, it’s years of intentional underfunding. The city’s own data proves the point. Cut pension benefits all you want, you don’t solve any of the fiscal problems nor ultimately save taxpayers anything more than a rounding error.

Second, even the state Supreme Court — in its decision that overturned former Illinois Senate President John Cullerton’s pension bill a few years back ( a bill Msall insisted was constitutional, while we insisted it wasn’t and again were found to be right) — cited CTBA’s re-amortization plan as the only pension funding reform approach that worked.

Interesting side note, the unions — even though they funded us, did not initially support our pension re-amortization plan. It took 6 or 7 years to get them on board.

Third, our approach would put more millions in up front and then level out payment’s, resulting in billions of reduced taxpayer costs over time. I think the savings in taxpayer contributions is in the $3-$4 billion range for the City, and north of $59 billion for the state, but this letter writer would be happier I guess if taxpayers had to foot that excess debt service bill for no reason. By the way, we’ve had strong bipartisan support for our approach. 

Bottom line, this critique lacks merit. 

Joanie W. — Regarding your item on the advance of a bill to allow for “human composting” as a burial method in Illinois, my estate planning documents instruct my survivors that I would like my body to be composted if it is legal to do so in the state where I die. Composting is environmentally friendlier that cremation, which puts millions of pounds of carbon dioxide into the air each year (See the National Geographic article, “The environmental toll of cremating the dead.” Plus I feel that there is something beautiful in becoming soil that can provide a place for other life and life-sustaining plants to grow.

Diane P.— To me, embalming is more of a desecration of the body than cremation or composting. The Bible says, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” and you get neither ash nor dust with embalming.

Kaye G. — I suspect the reason the Catholic Church is opposing human composting is a concern for the money that will be lost to all those Catholic cemeteries.

Jake H. — I've indicated in my will that I wish to be disposed of like George Pullman: beneath an imposing monument in a coffin encased in a block of concrete to prevent desecration by my enemies.

M.H. — At the mayoral candidates’ forum on public safety you co-moderated, I sat next to a woman I didn’t know. When you were introduced, she laughed at the name of your newsletter and said, “Sounds like a title from a long, long time ago.” I told her that actually it is, and she loved that you’ve carried on your grandfather’s tradition.

Thanks for setting her straight! Here is “The story behind the title of ‘The Picayune Sentinel’” I’ve found that many people refer to it simply as “the Picayune,” which might cause some confusion with the New Orleans Times-Picayune, a somewhat larger and more ambitious publication.

Point of information from Wikipedia:

A picayune was a Spanish coin, worth half a real or one sixteenth of a dollar. Its name derives from the French picaillon, which is itself from the Provençal picaioun, the name of an unrelated small copper coin from Savoy.

One picayune was the price of The Picayune in New Orleans when it began publishing in 1837. In 1914 it merged with the New Orleans Times-Democrat.

Tweet madness, the round of 32

Last Thursday’s poll pitted all the winners of the weekly poll from the last year (along with a few other favorites and, due to my editing error, a few duplicates) head to head in the round of 64. More than 800 readers voted, and today’s new poll in the written-tweets division pits last week’s winners against one another so we can narrow the field down to a sweet sixteen. I intend to seed the top 16 finalists by winning percentage as we inch toward naming the tweet of the year.

Meanwhile…

Tweet madness, visual division

I often run across tweets that rely on visual humor and so can’t be included in the Tweet of the Week contest (the template I use for that poll does not allow me to include images). Over the next few weeks I’m going to pit weekly winners from the past year against each other in a set of “brackets.” Today concludes the opening bracket. (See the first five rounds here)

ROUND SIX

ROUND SEVEN

ROUND EIGHT

ROUND NINE

ROUND TEN

Next week I’ll pit the winners against one another!

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