I'm sorry you feel you can’t work with someone that works for Cook County, Greta, but I totally understand. Couple things. First, I hope your opinion about County workers doesn't preclude, for example, working with the many outstanding doctors and nurses in the County health system, or the rank and file union workers from a host of County agencies who've showed up at everything from anti-war protests to pro-union pickets. Someone queried about my background: I do not now, nor have I ever had relatives who work for Cook County, and as hard as it might be for some to believe, I had to compete for my day job in 1992 just like the vast majority of the rest of Cook County's workers. Each elected official is afforded the right to hire in workers of her or his choice -- Shakman-exempt positions, more commonly known as 'patronage' jobs -- and it was into one of these positions that the former basketball player come busboy and HR college student Tony Cole was hired.

I think that the comment from ‘well’ raises an extremely valid point: is it acceptable for the current political system to prevail? It’s a vital question, and one that goes to the heart of our political infrastructure. It bears noting that only very rarely is someone elected to office, however local, without some sort of engagement by the larger political establishment, and this system won’t change until real grassroots efforts are able to serve as a competitive counterweight to this. That would also likely require something like actual party platforms that stand for something, instead of the prevailing system, where you can be an anti-choice, anti-gay marriage, anti-corporate tax advocate and still call yourself a Democratic Party politician. That said, if third parties like the Green Party are going to be competitive, they probably want to do a better job of vetting their candidates, as well, since a couple in recent memory have not only not agreed with the Green Party’s professed national platform, they’ve exhibited some, er, racial insensitivity that has no place in this third-party effort.

In terms of local political dynamics, I won’t apologize for calling out hypocrisy where I see it. That includes hypocrisy in the corporate press. I’ll use one local example. One of the biggest fundraising bundlers for Forrest Claypool, fake progressive extraordinaire, is Jim Mabie, a principle with the investment firm William Blair & Co. Mabie is also a member of WBEZ’s board of directors. Does Mabie’s enthusiasm for Ayn Rand fan Claypool impact the editorial line at WBEZ? No-one can say for sure, but why is such a nakedly politically partisan guy on the board in the first place? The reality is that WBEZ HAS had some problems of its own when it comes to bias for favored voices and against disfavored individuals. I can’t count the number of conversations I’ve had with news staff at WBEZ, particularly one news director who shall remain unnamed, about fairness in covering Stroger’s administration. These were not calls to solicit positive spin, mind you, but just some fairness. Every time the station pulled some sort of questionable frame and was challenged on it, there was an excuse, until the pattern was so incontrovertable that the news director finally admitted that the approach was ‘editorial’ in nature and not subject to ‘negotiation.’ At least the individual was finally honest, albeit in an oblique way. I subsequently contacted the station’s ombudsman about this and things have gotten a bit more fair. But the larger issue remains: anyone who thinks that there is such a thing as ‘objective’ journalism out there is just kidding themselves. In another example, I know for a fact via one of Cook County’s beat reporters that there is routine interference from higher ups in the food chain to frame everything from story headlines to actual story content to portray Stroger negatively at all times and his sacrosanct white male opponents as walkers on water. So much for the fictional bright line between news and editorial.

The public is not served by this kind of bias in the media. For one, it obscures what is actually going on in Cook County Government, and by extension in government units throughout the region. On another note, it portrays what is essentially a political faction fight falsely as some sort of titanic epic battle of good and evil – and nowhere in electoral politics is the environment either that pure or that cut and dried.

For a less biased take on local news that actually focuses on the news instead of the politics of personalities and the political smear, I like local outlets like the Chi-Town Daley News (www.chitowndailynews.org). Another excellent source of info is Chicago Reader columnist Ben Joravsky, who is never shy about going after Todd Stroger but cuts through the crap and exposes some of the deeper dynamics at play in the local political environment. You can find him via the Chicago Reader's main page at www.chicagoreader.com, by poking around through the site’s archives, which are a wealth of info on insider politics re issues that range from TIFS to Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics, and via the Reader's blog section at blogs.chicagoreader.com/politics/ plus at other various locations on the web. Another good outlet for the political skinny is Steve Rhodes' Beachwood Reporter (www.beachwoodreporter.com)