Chicago - A message from the station manager

The [Wednesday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

Campaign notebook:
“But even if the House voted to impeach, Trump needs only 34 Senate Republicans to keep his office. (It takes 67 votes to remove a sitting president.) Trump’s standing with Senate Rs is sky high, especially after last night,” Axios notes.


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“It is true that the House is the more likely chamber to flip in the first midterm of a president. But, it is also the purest test of the president’s popularity. Everyone is up for re-election. The entire country voted, and Democrats won. Easily,” Politico Playbook says.
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“And [the election] revealed that many of the right-of-center voters who backed Mr. Trump in 2016, as a barely palatable alternative to Hillary Clinton, were unwilling to give him enduring political loyalty,” the New York Times says.
Ya know, three million more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 than Trump. That fact always seems to get lost in the reporting. Last night’s results, then, reflect 2016 pretty neatly: Democrats won the popular vote, as represented by the House, and Republicans won the Electoral College, as represented by the Senate. People vs. land.
To wit, via the Washington Post:
Senate popular vote
Democrats: 40,558,262 (55.4%)
Republicans: 31,490,026 votes (43.0%)
Senate seats: Republicans +3
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Another case in point: The GOP retained governorships in Ohio and Florida.
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So there are state elections (and state polls) and national vote totals. National vote totals (and polls) essentially don’t mean a thing.
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If only Illinois Democrats now proclaiming that checks and balances in the form of legislative oversight have been restored to the federal government felt that checks and balances in the form of legislative oversight should be stored to Chicago’s government.
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In production: An Illinois campaign notebook.
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New on the Beachwood today . . .
The Political Odds
Updated with clever/dumb punny one-liners reflecting last night’s results.
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Horn From The Heart: The Paul Butterfield Story
A South Side white guy’s blues.
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Goodbye, Apu
‘Hollywood doesn’t know how to address criticism of its racism. Hollywood doesn’t know how to recognize racism even when it consciously perpetuates it. And, as audiences, we sometimes perpetuate the cycle of racist portrayals because our options seem so limited.’
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An Illinois Governor’s Crusade Against Slavery
“Edward Coles was a wealthy heir to a central Virginia plantation, an ardent emancipator, the second governor of Illinois, the loyal personal secretary to President James Madison, and a close antislavery associate of Thomas Jefferson. Yet never before has a full-length book detailed his remarkable life story and his role in the struggle to free all slaves.”
Until now.
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Mmm, Chillicothe Bottoms
‘One hundred and fifty two bird species have been identified at the site. These include American black duck, great egret, lesser scaup, canvasback, brown creeper, northern harrier, marsh wren, yellow-billed cuckoo, northern flicker, bald eagle, wood thrush, yellow-breasted chat, short-billed dowitcher, hooded merganser, Connecticut warbler, Kentucky warbler, osprey, pied-billed grebe, prothonotary warbler, brown thrasher, greater yellowlegs and blue-winged warbler. Two of these species – the northern harrier and osprey – are state-listed endangered species’.’
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Illinois Campaign Notebook
The aforementioned notebook is in production, as aforementioned!
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Blackhawks/Cubs Election Day Shockers
I might put together an aggregation of Joel Quenneville/Joe Maddon tweets regarding the former’s firing and the latter’s lameduckedness. Consider it “in production.”
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And here it is:
Bizarro Chicago Sports World | Quenneville Fired, Maddon Lameducked, Renteria Extended
What in the world of the College of Coaches is going on?
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ChicagoReddit

Gentle Reminder: 56,000 voted for a literal Neo Nazi from r/chicago


It’s true.
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ChicagoGram


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ChicagoTube
Interview with McCool

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BeachBook
Inside An Underground Women’s Mud Wrestling Ring In Chicago.

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In An Act Of Guerrilla Art, The Father Of A Parkland School Shooting Victim Put A Bulletproof Vest On Wall Street’s ‘Fearless Girl.’

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TweetWood
A sampling; the really good ones will appear in my upcoming campaign notebook!


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Beachwood Tip Line: Your move.

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Posted on November 7, 2018