Paul Vallas: "Defund CPS."

I will be joining my brother Mike and noted educator Pedro Noguera on today’s Hitting Left, live at 11am CST on Lumpenradio.com and 107.5fm in Chicago.

Later the show will be podcast at hittingleft.libsyn.com and available on most podcasting sites.

This morning we will be talking about the Chicago race for mayor between Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson.

Watching their first face to face match up on tv - I wouldn’t call it a debate - I was struck by a number of things.

First, there was no mention of Covid by either one of them.

How on earth do you talk about schools, reading levels, crime, violence or the city’s economy without mentioning the impact of the once in a century pandemic we all have been going through?

The second was the decision by Brandon to make his main line of attack on Vallas’s ties to racist and reactionaries like Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, our own Dan Proft and hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin.

This attack line may have legs in deeply Democratic Chicago, particularly among Black and Latinx voters where Brandon didn’t do that well in the first round.

An article in this morning’s Chicago Tribune provides evidence for Brandon’s accusation that Vallas is a Democrat in name only by going back over years of Vallas Tweets.

They include Vallas’ own Twitter account likes of tweets that call Black people thugs, that use racist slurs about Lori Lightfoot, that attack Democrats

JB Pritker, Senators Durbin and Duckworth, Michelle and Barack Obama and calls for defunding the Chicago Public Schools.

“I was hacked,” explained Vallas when confronted with his Tweets that go back years.

We’ve been watching the series Poker Face where the main character’s super power is the ability to know when somebody is lying.

When she realizes it, she yells, “Bullshit!”

You don’t need any superpower to tell when Vallas is lying.

But, of course politicians lie.

It’s what he was lying about that is bullshit.