“Miguel del Valle is the only progressive candidate in the field. With del Valle, Chicago voters finally have the opportunity to take back our city government from the special interests who have long had it under their thumb.”The DFA wasn't so confident - which may have more to do with perceptions of winnability than actual credentials. According to Gaper's Block:
The DFA was not so absolutist, with a number of speakers in discussion acknowledging, in particular, Mosely Braun's progressive voting record. and at least one saying he supported Emanuel. While not one person at the DFA session spoke in favor of Chico (and one speaker said the former schools chief was "full of [it]" for saying he'd never gotten paid for public service), Emanuel came in for the harshest words, with one group leader referring to Emanuel as "Voldemort" and another simply referring to "he who shall not be named" (tho neither said why). By contrast, multiple speakers lauded Del Valle as a proven administrator and the candidate with
the least ethical or other baggage, "squeaky clean." Acknowledging Del Valle's apparent position as trailing in polls and money, supporters urged their colleagues to avoid the circularity of "viability" arguments and to instead take a stand that would communicate to a larger audience why Del Valle should be mayor. This argument was persuasive, with nearly 90% voting to endorse.In the end, they went with the underdog. The man who, about a month ago, polled at about 3%.
Daley, who served as mayor of Chicago from 1955 until his death in 1976, was the most powerful local politician America has ever produced. He possessed a raw political might that today, in an age when politics is dominated by big money and television, is hard to imagine. He personally slated, or selected, candidates for every office, from governor to ward committeeman.... When he wanted something from them - whether it was a congressman's vote on the national budget or a patronage position in the county sheriff's office - he almost always got it... But Daley's influence reached far beyond the borders of his city and state. His control over the large and well-disciplined Illinois delegation made him a kingmaker in selecting Democratic candidates for president -- he was, Robert Kennedy once declared, "the whole ballgame."To what end did Daley use all of this power? He reigned in an era rich with ideological leaders. Martin Luther King Jr. was battling for civil rights, and George Wallace was fighting for segregation; Eugene McCarthy was campaigning to end the Vietnam War, and President Johnson was struggling to win it. Daley had an ideology of his own: the flinty conservatism that prevailed in Bridgeport and in much of white ethnic, working-class America in the 1950s and 1960s. A devout Catholic and loyal machine member, he believed deeply in authority. He favored the strong over the weak, the establishment over dissidents. Daley liked presidents, business leaders, and powerful institutions; he was offended by anti-war protesters, civil rights protesters, and hippies, who sought to influence policy without doing the hard work of prevailing at the ballot box. Daley believed that poor people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, as his Bridgeport neighbors struggled to do. And he believed in racial segregation, of the kind that prevailed in his own neighborhood. Blacks stayed in the Black Belt to the east of Wentworth Avenue, and whites stayed to the west.Daley shaking his fist at those d***ed hippies at the DNC in Chicago in '68. More on this story here, where I lifted this pic.Those were Daley's views, but his agenda in office was less complicated: he was motivated first and foremost by a drive to accumulate and retain power. That was the way of the Chicago machine, and it was Daley's -- make deals and share the wealth with the Church or the syndicate, with black political leaders or anti-black neighborhood organizations, and with anyone else whose votes would help elect the machine's candidates. Daley's primary test of a political cause was whether it would increase or decrease his power... He formed alliances with politicians who could deliver votes, and ruthlessly cut them off when they were no longer useful - or when they became so strong that they posed a threat.Daley came to see the great liberal crusades of the 1950s and 1960s - civil rights, the War on Poverty, and anti-war movement - as a threat to his power, and he battled against all of them. His focus was Chicago, but his power and influence were such that he ended up quickly shaping the national agenda. Nowhere was this more true than on civil rights. Daley was elected at the dawn of the civil rights era... The ... movement first took hold in the South, where Jim Crow enshrined racial segregation in the law books, but its implications for Chicago were substantial. The city was in the midst of a demographic revolution when Daley took office. The city's black population was reaching record levels, as trainloads of blacks fled their hard lives in the rural South for the promise of a better life in northern cities.Chicago under Daley became America's major northern civil-rights battleground. After his success in the South, and after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Martin Luther King Jr. decided to take his movement to the North - and he chose Chicago as the place to start it off. King moved into a tenement on Chicago's South Side for eight months in 1966 and spearheaded the Chicago Campaign, personally leading open-housing marches into the city's white neighborhoods. Daley responded to King's drive with a brilliant campaign of his own. Daley did not make the same mistake so many southern governors and mayors had: he refused to let the movement cast him as the villain in its drama. In the end, Daley's handling of the Chicago Campaign would have far-reaching effects on the civil rights movement across the country. Daley also played a key role in preserving racial segregation in education, both in Chicago and nationally. Chicago's public schools were nearly as segregated as the southern schools that were being ordered by federal courts to integrate. Daley fought back attempts to integrate Chicago's public schools, and took on the federal government when it tried to force school desegregation on the city.Daley was also a leading opponent of President Johnson's War on Poverty, and again his victory was felt far beyond Chicago. Daley did not share Johnson's moral commitment to using government programs to lift the disadvantaged up from poverty, but his greatest objections were political. Johnson's poverty programs incorporated the liberal notion of "maximum feasible participation," which meant that poor people should have as much control as possible over how poverty programs were run. Daley saw these programs as a threat to the machine, because they put money and power in the hands of independent community activists.
The key note of the Gospel, Derek, is the need for it. I am well-known in this little backwater of the internet for saying that any random sinner is "just like me"... The problem with that is that Jesus didn't die to establish common ground, Derek: Jesus died because the wages of sin is death, and that's the common ground of all men of all times and all places. I may actually be worse-off than the homosexual, morally: my sins may be more wide-spread and more deeply-rooted (which is an interesting question, given your position here; again: more on that in a second). But what that does not do is mitigate the fact that the homosexual's sin is actually an offense to God from which he must repent, and not merely recognize as a different expression of self.
One of the hallmarks of following Jesus is to pursue and love people who are different than we are and have different beliefs than we do, and to live our lives loving, understanding and coming into common ground with those people.Yes, I know what you're thinking! OmygourdshowDAREhe!
A lot of "Christian art" is about the lens [Christian artists are] looking through, rather than the world they see through it. I'm not going to criticize anybody for doing that, but I would rather look at the world through the grid of following Jesus and tell you what I see. But that doesn't presume that all the art I'm going to make will be about following Jesus.I can't help but agree with that statement. We take the lens - our Christianity, or our theology, or our particular brand of theology/philosophy - and we talk about that so much that it's lost all meaning to the real world. The lens (theology/doctrine/'Gospel Message') becomes more important than the object (our neighbors) or the subject (God). It's yet another reason that, if I weren't a Christian and the only image of Christianity I were to see were evidenced in his open letter, I would never be a Christian.
The year I made Stockholm Syndrome, there were a lot of triggers that brought issues of race and sexuality to my mind. I have a lot of friends and family that have suffered because of the church's judgment; my best friend in the world is gay. I felt a lot of people around me drawing lines in the sand, and that year I decided: I don't want to draw lines and have to be on one side or the other, but if someone's going to push me to one or the other side of the line, I'm going to stand on the side of those being judged because that's where I feel Jesus meets people. Making Stockholm Syndrome was about that journey. That same lens, this year, brought Feedback to life.
if you see a brother or sister online (even if they’re a total stranger to you) engaging in behavior or espousing ideas that seem contrary to your view of clear biblical teaching, here is a proven and rigorously practiced method for providing them with accountability and ultimately bringing them to repentance...fire off a few suspicious, even pre-judgmental and leading tweets (e.g., “looks like i was right about [insert name]. have you seen this? [insert shortened link]” or “so sad to see [insert name] totally abandoning the faith. glad i unfollowed [him/her] a year ago”). this will show your clear concern for their spiritual well-being and restoration right from the get go...as shown in the many examples of shepherds mocking and shaming wandering sheep in the bible, a public shaming can be very useful in restoring a lost brother or sister to the faith.lastly, and THIS IS IMPORTANT, remember that once you’ve engaged someone online with the intention of holding them accountable based on all or any part of this method, they are MORALLY OBLIGATED to respond to you. if they don’t respond, it’s a clear indication that they are indeed guilty of the sinful behavior that you have publicly accused them of...
It had the look and the excitement of a political convention, and indeed it was: a convention of Chicago’s grassroots...
Q: What do you like about del Valle?
Q: So what’s wrong with the new national healthcare plan?
Young, the former chairman of medicine of Cook County Hospital, is a healthcare activist who heads Physicians For a National Health Program, a Chicago-based non-profit that lobbies for a single-payer health care system. A Hyde Park acquaintance of Barack Obama’s, Young sat on the committee Obama created to draft a health care plan that would cover all Illinoisans. Young’s Movement roots go deep: he provided medical care to civil rights demonstrators in the South, and protestors at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. He also served as a physician to Martin Luther King Jr., Harold Washington and Studs Terkel.
