Chicago Public Schools wrongly sends students 500 acceptance letters to elite magnet school

If someone in the private sector messed up in such a colossal fashion they'd be fired immediately.

What will happen to the clown who crushed 500 dreams?

From WGN:

CPS admits it made a mistake when it sent out acceptance letters to hundreds of children for a North Side magnet school.

CPS notified over 500 families that their children were admitted to LaSalle Elementary magnet school in the city's Old Town neighborhood. But there were only 16 open spots available.

CPS said an unidentified "internal error" in assigning transfer students to the campus sparked the problem.

Internal error? Perhaps it was sheer stupidity.

Chicago Public Schools is essentially financially insolvent. Perhaps it is intellectually insolvent too.

Fraternal Order of Police calls on Chicago Teachers Union head to denounce "F the police" remarks at rally

CTU members picketing last week

The Chicago Teachers Union is a leftist gang. Of course they are going to have radicals speak at their events.

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

An activist's declaration at last Friday’s Chicago Teachers Union rally — "f— the police, and everybody f— with 'em" has drawn the ire of Chicago police and a sound Twitter scolding for union president Karen Lewis.

And now the Fraternal Order of Police is asking Lewis to condemn the insult tossed out at the end of the CTU-organized rally outside the Thompson Center that has upset FOP members and their families — many of which include Chicago Public School teachers. They took to Twitter and to peppering a popular Chicago police blog with angry comments.

"I did mention that lack of a response is almost like condoning the remarks," FOP president Dean Angelo said of a lengthy phone conversation Monday evening with Lewis. "I know it was her rally, a public school rally, a CTU rally, and although she wasn’t aware of this person closing the rally so to speak, it was something that was under her banner.

"So we're hoping that she understands it's important for the CTU to come out address those comments," he told the Sun-Times. "We are waiting for Ms. Lewis to respond."

The foul-mouthed speaker was Page May of Assata's Daughters, which identifies itself as part of the Black Lives Matters movement. Apparently the radicals get their name from Assata Skakur, a convicted cop-killer and escaped prisoner who now lives in Cuba. She's on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist List.

WIPrimary: Cruz, Sanders win

It was a bad day for the front-runners in Tuesday's Wisconsin presidential primaries. Ted Cruz bested Donald Trump on the Republican side and openly-socialist Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders

With a little more than half of the tally in both candidates have more than 50 percent of the vote.

The fight goes on.

GoFundMe page for Morton Grove's Doughboy Monument

Doughboy Monument this morning

With the centennial of America's entry into World War I just a year away there's a great way to remember the sacrifices of the Great War by contributing to the restoration of Morton Grove's Doughboy Monument.

Visit GoFundMe to kick in "dough for the Doughboy."

(Video) Hillary in '12: Outsourcing American jobs has "pluses and minuses"

Four years ago, while serving as Obama's secretary of state, said in India that sending American jobs overseas has "pluses and minuses."

This is not a popular position in 2016. Perhaps in India it is.

ILL-inois: Draft audit finds Quinn's anti-violence slush fund program was worse than believed

In case you didn't know, violence is way up in Chicago.

And Illinois is broke.

The failed anti-violence program, the Neighborhood Recovery Initiative, was unveiled in the fall of 2010 when Pat Quinn, who succeeded Rod Blagojevich as governor, was in a tough election battle to win a four year term.

From the Chicago Tribune:

In his unsuccessful 2014 bid for re-election, then-Gov. Pat Quinn vowed that sweeping changes had cleaned up an unwieldy anti-violence program, but new findings show that widespread problems persisted for two years longer than previously known.

The findings emerged in a "confidential draft" the Tribune obtained of a new, highly critical audit — nearing release — that focuses on a high-profile issue in the last gubernatorial election.

According to the draft, the state auditor general's office found that bread-and-butter grant protocol was abandoned, leading to sketchy oversight riddled with missing documentation, questionable spending, unclear results and unspent money yet to be returned to state coffers. In one case, auditors discovered, a private agency filed for bankruptcy less than four months after getting more than $583,000 in state money.

The draft also said a top Quinn aide directed which community groups would get taxpayer money rather than putting contracts up for bids. That was independently confirmed by the man who headed the agency that administered the grants, the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority. Neither auditors nor the agency were given any evidence to explain why those groups were the best ones to choose.

NRI was nothing more than a political slush fund.

Jobless Detroit man with 7 kids and 4 "wives" charged with child porn, forcible prostitution

The suspect is Ryon Travis, who is a father of seven. Fortunately he has custody of none of them.

From the Detroit Free Press:

A woman chained to a stripper pole. A man with four wives. Child pornography photos.

This is what authorities stumbled upon during a raid in Detroit, where a house-of-horrors tale is unfolding in federal court, with prosecutors accusing one man of enslaving women, selling them for sex on the Internet and hurting children by taking sexually explicit photos of them and sharing them with others.

The case started with West Bloomfield police investigating identity-theft crimes but turned into something much bigger when officers from the suburban police department raided the home weeks ago and found a woman chained by the neck to a pole.

They would eventually uncover a sex trafficking operation that, according to federal court documents, worked like this: The man advertised women on the Internet, offering them for sex. Men would show up at his house and pick which one they liked. But they paid the homeowner first — in cash.

The woman chained--by her neck--to that stripper pole had tried to escape.

The Free Press adds that this scumbag has been "charged with sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion, and producing, possessing and transporting child pornography." He could end up serving a life sentence.

Urban Decay in Chicago: The abandoned Goodman Equipment Plant

When Carl Sandburg dubbed Chicago "the city of the big shoulders" there were hundreds of factories such as the now-abandoned Goodman Manufacturing Company plant at 4834 S. Halsted in the city's Back of the Yards neighborhood.

Yes, this land is for sale--it's "as is."

Getting to this piece of land was an adventure.

First I had to climb up the embankment from Halsted Street onto this old rail bridge. I'm not sure what happened to the rails--there is scrap value with them but owners of railroad right-of-ways usually leave the ties behind.

Is this a future rails-to-trails route? If it is it's news to me.

I snapped this pic from that bridge.

Then I walked through this container storage plot--and then I crawled through some brush and rubble and then I was finally on the old Goodman property.

The company was founded in 1888. Somewhere along the way it changed its name to Goodman Equipment Company. At least in name the firm still exists--but to learn more I had to visit the W.W. Williams page.

Goodman built locomotives for use in underground mines.

After Goodman moved out in 1989 the building was a warehouse for parade floats, including those used in the Gay Pride Parade on the North Side. In 2011 a tire on each of the floats for that year's parade was punctured while in storage here. As of at least 2014 this structure has been vacant.

Graffiti taggers always find their way inside abandoned buildings.

Nature always finds a way.

Concrete dangles from wires.

I meant to get more pictures at this spot, but despite the snowfall from the day before--which melted the next morning--the wind was blowing dust around and I didn't want to damage my camera lens.

And dust is how this building will end up. As we all will.

Related posts:

• (Photos) Urban Decay in Chicago: The Damen Silos
• (Photos) Urban Decay in Chicago: The Union Bag and Paper Building
• (Photos) The abandoned Wyman-Gordon power plant in Dixmoor, Illinois

Chiraq: 1 stabbed to death and at least 33 wounded over weekend

Amazingly there were no shooting deaths this past weekend in Chicago. However, 33 people were wounded and one man was stabbed to death over this first weekend of April. The stabbing fatality and one of the shootings occurred in the Irving Park neighborhood on the Northwest Side, where such attacks are rare. The homicide victim was found inside a store and shooting victim was a bouncer at a sports bar.

A new scandal: The Panama Papers

We'll be hearing a lot about this story in the coming days, weeks, and months.

From Tech Insider:

An obscure law firm in Central America is the source of what's being called the largest information leak in history.

Emails and documents reveal how the world's richest and most powerful, from Vladimir Putin to the prime minister of Iceland, hide their business dealings using offshore tax havens and shell companies.

For the past year, hundreds of journalists from around the world secretly analyzed terabytes of data uncovered from Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based law firm with offices around the world. Their findings were collectively published on April 3 as the Panama Papers.

About a year ago, an anonymous source contacted German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung with data from Mossack Fonseca, a relatively unknown law firm based in Panama that specializes in creating shell companies. These shell companies are held in countries with strict privacy laws and used to obfuscate business dealings.