Rahm Emmanuel. Where have I heard that name before?

Oh yes, I remember now. He was Chief of Staff to President Barack Obama, wasn't he?

"A mayor with nearly $10 million in campaign cash, national media and political contacts and a newspaper editorial board — not this one — as a wingman doesn’t just walk away."

I always enjoy the powerful writing of John Kass in The Chicago Tribune. Today he writes about Mayor Rahm Emmanuel's decision not to run for re-election. Read it here.

A bookend to the Tea Party era?

Before the Palin endorsement of Trump today, Jim Geraghty wrote his morning newsletter for National Review, speculating on the meaning of such an endorsement:

Support from Palin would give Trump some cover on the inevitable attacks from Cruz that he’s an establishmentarian in populist clothing. That’s Trump’s biggest vulnerability; any cover he can get for it from another populist with a national profile will help him. The larger meaning of Palin endorsing Trump, though, would be the signal it sends that populist conservatism is now less about conservatism than it is about populism. If you have enough of the latter, you don’t need to worry much about the former. It would be a bookend to the tea-party era, which started with Palin and Glenn Beck yelling at Obama about progressive tyranny and would end with Beck yelling at Palin and Trump about progressive tyranny.

If you consider Ted Cruz the conservative ideal or near-ideal in terms of philosophical grounding, legal perspective, and ideological rigor -- and the case for that seems pretty self-evident -- then watching tea-party leaders flock to Trump over him is pretty damn disappointing.

...Trump, the guy who hosted two fundraisers for Charlie Crist in 2009. He donated to Harry Reid over Sharron Angle in 2010.

Trump, the guy who donated $50,000 to make Rahm Emanuel the mayor of Chicago.

In the founding days of the Tea Party, Donald Trump was exactly what they were fighting against . . . and now some of those adherents have embraced him fully.

read more here.

They can't find their tongues

John Kass writes in the Chicago Tribune,

Sometimes, what politicians avoid, what they won't say, is more compelling than their dog and pony shows and photo ops.

He is referring to the fact that neither Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton has said one word demanding justice in the Laquan McDonald case in Chicago. Why?

The guy who runs Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, is their guy.

Were Emanuel a Republican they'd be all over this town. But since he's theirs, a Democrat who was Obama's chief of staff and served President Bill Clinton as an aide, they've decided not to engage.

Chicago roils. Protesters — white, black, brown — take the streets. And calls continue for the mayor to resign over the monthslong suppression of a police video showing a white cop shooting black teenager McDonald 16 times until dead.

For national Democrats, this should be a perfect storm: race, politics, anger, cops, black votes and the politics of grievance or social justice.

This is the irresistible combination Democrats have used for decades. It is the stuff that drives the Democratic Party's political theater. And of course, Obama, Clinton and other national Democrats certainly remember what a smart political operative famously said a few years ago:

"You never let a serious crisis go to waste."

You know who said that. Rahm said it.

...Obama has had much to say in other cities when things go wrong between communities and police. He's involved himself in the debate a number of times.

He had his say about the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida, and later, the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

Obama even called race into question without having the facts, as in 2009, when Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home after a neighbor reported a break-in.

Gates had forgotten his key, and he and his driver were trying to push open the door when white police Sgt. James Crowley arrived. Gates said he lived there. Crowley said he couldn't take his word alone for that.

Obama weighed in, and didn't bother with a spokesman to maintain a safe distance. The president used his own mouth, and forcefully, and Gates hadn't been shot 16 times.

"Now, I've — I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that," Obama said. "But I think it's fair to say, No. 1, any of us would be pretty angry; No. 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And No. 3, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact."

But when it comes to McDonald and Rahm and what's happening in Chicago, Obama and Mrs. Clinton speak to us by proxy.

They don't hold speeches. They don't discuss it publicly. They won't say a word on television. They don't want to talk about Rahm and Chicago and McDonald on camera.

A Clinton spokesman said she was "deeply troubled" by the killing. And the president's press secretary, Josh Earnest, said Thursday that the president is "concerned."

"I think the mayor himself has acknowledged that a lot of work needs to be done to rebuild trust between the Chicago Police Department and the citizens of that fine city that they were sworn to serve and protect," Earnest said.

Asked if the president and the mayor had spoken, and if Obama still had confidence in Emanuel, Earnest said:

"The last that I heard, which was a few days ago, the president had not spoken to Mayor Emanuel. But — so I'm not aware of any conversations at this point. OK?"

OK, we get it. Nobody knows nothing. That's a Chicago thing, too.

Read more here.