In a statement (PDF) released Nov. 2, the Catholic Conference of Illinois lambasted Gov. Quinn for agreeing to present a “Pro-Choice Leadership Award” at an upcoming event for Personal PAC, an abortion-rights political action committee. The leadership award is going to Jennie Goodman, a rape-crisis counselor, and a rape victim herself.

The statement, co-signed by five bishops and Chicago Archbishop Cardinal Francis George, read, in part:

We deeply regret the Governor’s decision to present this award, which so closely associates him with a political action group whose purpose is contrary to the common good. With this action, Governor Quinn has gone beyond a political alignment with those supporting the legal right to kill children in their mother’s wombs to rewarding those deemed most successful in this terrible work.

Upon learning more about the event and about Goodman’s work with rape victims, the Catholic Conference released another statement (PDF) the following day, calling Quinn’s decision to present this award “irreconcilable with any honest profession of Catholic faith” while at the same time trying to offer compassion for rape victims.

Communication director Mary Massingale put it:

“Governor Quinn’s statement today that he is recognizing a rape victim for her advocacy work dodges the issue. Our hearts go out to any victim of rape, one of the most personally violent crimes against women.”

“A rape victim demands all the respect and sympathy that anybody can give,” George told the Tribune, when asked about the incident. He said he “deeply regret[s]” the statements he made about Goodman’s “terrible work” before learning who she was. He told the daily he did not regret, however, telling Quinn, who is Catholic, that participating in the even is immoral.

In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Goodman described how she was violently raped 20 years ago.

From the Sun-Times:

Goodman, who is pro-choice and whose mother sits on the board of Personal PAC, never had an abortion because she didn’t get pregnant after the rape. As a counselor, she said, she never directed a rape victim to an abortion clinic. All of that makes her question why she would be the object of such charged language from the cardinal and other bishops.

“It upsets me when they kind of make me feel like I’m a baby killer,” Goodman told the Chicago Sun-Times.

“It does hurt. And it hurts for all those people who have been raped. Yeah, it definitely hit home and hurt me. You don’t know me,” she said, referring to the cardinal. “You don’t know my situation.”

Members of the Chicago Teachers Union and Stand Up! Chicago performed a “mic check” at the beginning of Walker’s remarks that continued for several minutes, despite attempts by others at the breakfast to stifle the statements.

It’s an outrage and a shame that we sit here at this fancy breakfast to listen to someone who has wreaked havoc on the lives of working families. Governor Walker has vilified unions and insulted the 99 percent who depend on living wages and adequate benefits to support their families while on the payroll of the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers.

It is not so different from our own state where corporations and bought-off politicians clamor to find ways to grant a $100 million tax break to the Mercantile Exchange, one of the most profitable companies in the state, while social services are being slashed, while workers’ pensions are being threatened and homelessness, poverty and joblessness continue to rise. The CME has already taken $15 million of our TIF dollars. That’s our tax money that would have gone to help students in the Chicago Public Schools.

It is ironic that we give Governor Walker free rein to say what he wants while the Mayor has ordered the arrest of over 300 people in Occupy Chicago who have simply tried to express their rights to freedom of assembly. The bottom line is that Governor Walker is out of touch with America, and working people will not honor anyone seeking to undermine our lives for the benefit of the 1 percent.

Demonstrators then repeatedly chanted, “Union busting is disgusting” and “we are the 99 percent.”

Watch:

Only last week, roughly 100 Iowans gathered outside of a West Des Moines hotel to demonstrate against Walker, who was delivering a private message at an event sponsored by The Heritage Foundation. Both Walker and Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad have maintained that they are not anti-worker and that they are trying to protect the middle class.

“It’s an honor to welcome Mayor Rahm Emanuel to the state for the Jefferson Jackson Dinner and to hear him speak to Iowa Democrats in support of President Obama,” said Democratic Party Chairwoman Sue Dvorsky.

“Mayor Emanuel has proven to be one of the great advocates for Democratic values and middle class opportunity throughout his service in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, as a leader in Congress, and now at the helm of the great city of Chicago.”

The dinner will take place Nov. 19 in Des Moines, exact time and location to be announced.

Emanual served Illinois 5th District from 2003 to 2009, when he resigned to join the Obama administration. He was also chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the 2006 mid-term elections, and continued to provide election strategy throughout the 2008 election cycle. He was elected as chairman of the Democratic Caucus in the U.S. House while it was under Democratic control, making him at that time the fourth highest ranking Democrat in the nation.

He was elected mayor of Chicago in February, earning 55 percent of the electorate, and was sworn into office in May. William M. Daley, the brother of former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, was subsequently named to Emanuel’s former chief of staff role.

“As we approach the first-in-the-nation Iowa Caucuses, announcements like this will continue to bring Democrats together and build the organization we need to win in 2012,” added Dvorsky.

Tuesday’s announcement follows the party’s launch earlier this month of TheCaucuses.com, the party’s official website for the Iowa Democratic Caucuses.

Republicans and Democrats caucus separately, and currently incumbent President Obama faces no serious primary challenge. For Democrats, the caucuses will likely serve as an affirmation of their support for Obama and several items of political housekeeping that will impact the county and district parties as they move forward toward election day.

The city is planning to sell a former police station located in the North Side of town in a neighborhood commonly referred to as Boystown to a nonprofit housing developer to build low-income housing for senior citizens, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. Daley is expected to announce the sale (for $1), which still requires City Council approval, at a press conference Friday

The station, Town Hall District station at 3600 N. Halsted St., which closed in 2010, was known for being place of discrimination (PDF) to Chicago’s gay community.

The developer, Heartland Housing, Inc., part of Heartland Alliance, is planning to price about 90 apartments for lower-income renters, according to the Sun-Times. Though the project will not be exclusive to gay renters, its location — next door to an LGBT community center and in the ward of openly gay Ald. Tom Tunney (44th) — is expected to attract gay seniors.

On top of one of the three identical boards above an empty lot on 5812 State St. — which reads, “Every 21 minutes, our next possible leader is aborted,” a white banner has been hung to read: “In 21 minutes this sign should be gone”, as The Chicago Tribune reported Monday.

According to the Tribune, an unidentified group has taken credit for the ads.

Life Always has declined to respond to repeated requests for comment.

Even more than the set of three identical anti-abortion billboards using President Obama’s image that went up in Chicago last week, Toni Bond Leonard, president of Black Women for Reproductive Justice, takes issue with where they went up — not because this area of town is a heavily concentrated African-American community, but the specific lot where the group chose to put the billboards and where a press conference was held, is filled, Leonard said, with trash.

The strewn-about garbage and bits of broken bottles, is emblematic of a larger issue faced by the Chicago’s South Side community, she said — one that cannot be addressed by an expensive billboard telling black women they could be aborting the future American president.

“They came into this community and paid no attention to what’s going on,” Leonard said. “They held an actual press conference with the broken bottles. It was not lost on people. … These folks are trying to blame or accuse black women of killing potential black leaders by having abortions, but that’s not the real issue. The real issue is the lack of social and economic resources.”

Leonard said she did not think the billboards will last in the community based on the outrage the message has created among black women in Chicago — as evidenced by angry protesters at the press conference, and the anonymous banner that appeared this week.

John Paul Jones, a community organizer at Developing Communities Project, located in Chicago’s Roseland Community, where President Barack Obama worked as a community organizer at one time, said the billboards are doing their job, in that they are grabbing people’s attention. But, like Leonard, he thinks they’re missing a greater point, though a different one.

“We have a real problem in Chicago,” Jones said. “But we should be finding a way to reduce abortions that speaks to hope. … I don’t see the womb as being a dangerous place. It’s the most serene place of all. We totally have to find a way to talk about this. We have to try to find a way to minimize economic harm, and we have to restore hope.”

Jones also noted that in Chicago there is a huge backlog of child support payments, and many single mothers are having to care for their children in poverty. He said it’s a challenge for church leaders to try to fix this problem and address sex and abortion with men and women in the community, which he said is rarely brought up.

But Jones said, it takes two to make this kind of decision, and to blame women for aborting the future black leaders of America is not right.

And Salon.com has a fantastic piece reviewing the historic and economic issues behind the traditional segregation and why it is changing today. The article notes that whites fled the city in the 70s and 80s as the auto industry and other manufacturing options moved to the suburbs. Most African Americans could not afford to follow the jobs, and the city fell into horrendous unemployment.

This combined with the historic violence used to create the segregation from the 20s to the 60s led to the “urban ghetto,” Salon reports.

But not anymore.

The new census numbers show large numbers of blacks moving to the suburbs, and increasing integration as a result: Detroit’s dissimilarity index fell a dramatic 10 points since 2000, one of the largest decreases nationwide. This good news, however, is only made possible by the broader economic disaster.

“Blacks are fleeing the city and are following the path of least resistance into formerly all-white bastions like Warren and Harper Woods, where houses are often on the market for months or years,” says [Tom] Sugrue [a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of "The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit."]. “But many whites, trapped by the collapsing housing market, are unable to move. Hence a decline in segregation rates.”

Detroit is topped by Milwaukee, WI; New York City and Chicago.

A spokesperson for Lamar Advertising (the company that owns the billboard) said the company decided to remove the billboard because of “concerns for public safety,” according to CNN.

The spokesperson told CNN that the company did not object to the content of the billboard — featuring a picture of a young African American girl and the message “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.” Rather, the spokesperson said patrons were harassing wait staff at a restaurant in the building to which the billboard was attached, and a protest had been scheduled for today.

A Life Always spokesperson told CNN that more billboards will appear “across the country” in the next couple of months.

In December, Follett told the Texas Independent that he hoped to help groups establish crisis pregnancy resource centers in major urban areas such as Chicago and Washington, D.C. He also said he planned on expanding Heroic to places such as Houston, Connecticut and the Los Angeles area.

The Wall Street Journal reported the advertisement cost $20,000 and was expected to be up for a month, and that Life Always now does not expect to be charged.

Read the Texas Independent for previous reporting on the Follett family’s frozen food fortune and large-scale philanthropy, plus Heroic’s campaigns in Florida and Texas.

Read the Florida Independent for previous reporting on a prominent Florida Republican who said he “does not condone” Follett’s comparison of African American abortions to “genocide,” plus Mike Huckabee’s continuing support of Heroic Media despite criticism from a Democratic Florida congresswoman.

Emanuel, a former congressman for part of Chicago, served as President Obama’s chief of staff until he resigned the position in October after current Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley said that he would not seek another term in office. During his stint in the White House, Emanuel maintained ownership of his Chicago home, but had been renting the unit while he resided full time in Washington, D.C. Emanuel and his attorneys attempted to argue that he maintained his residency since he was serving duty in Washington at the president’s request, but the appellate court dismissed that argument Monday. The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

Burt Odelson, the attorney who led the charge to throw Emanuel off the ballot, said the appellate court appears to have adopted all of his arguments that the state municipal code requires candidates for mayor in Illinois to reside within the town in which they’re running for a year prior to Election Day.

Emanuel was successful in hearings before two lower courts, so his standing on the ballot is not yet finalized. An appeal from his campaign to the Illinois Supreme Court is likely. The Democratic primary (which essentially chooses the eventual winner in the left-leaning city) is set for Feb. 22. Emanuel was on the path to an easy victory before this judicial setback, with a Chicago Tribune poll last week putting him ahead of former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun by a 44-21 percent margin.

Read the court’s full decision here (PDF).

Alexi Giannoulias (D-Ill.) and Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) are out to early leads in their Senate contests — two races that were tilted slightly by pollsters to the GOP. And while the New York Times’ Nate Silver thinks Giannoulias’ lead in Illinois is suspect because the vast majority of the vote trickling in thus far is from Chicago, Sestak’s lead in Pennsylvania looks like it could the real thing. That’s because he’s holding his own in the western part of that state and leading his opponent Pat Toomey (R) in the all-important suburbs of Philadelphia. He’s even leading at present in Lehigh County, which Pat Toomey represented while a House member in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

If the Democrats keep their lead in either of these races, they can pad their margin in the Senate and start patting themselves on the back for their get-out-the-vote efforts in recent weeks.

In Chicago and Philadelphia, Obama’s trips were intended to boost turnout in the Democratic-leaning cities to tip the scales for Senate candidates Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) and Alexi Giannoulias (D). While Obama’s approval rating has stubbornly remained below fifty percent in both states, he enjoyed a warm welcome in the cities, especially his hometown:

He traded high-dollar fund-raisers for free rallies; in his hometown of Chicago on Saturday night, 35,000 turned out to see him in an outdoor park. He doffed his tie and shouted himself hoarse, tweaking his standard stump speech — the one with the laugh lines about Republicans “drinking a Slurpee” and driving the economy “into a ditch” — into a more affirmative, upbeat vision of why voters should elect Democrats, and not just reject Republicans. He suffered hecklers. He persevered. [...]

Harking back to his own election, he conceded that times have changed.

“Some of the excitement of Inauguration Day — you know, Beyoncé was singing and Bono was up there and everybody was feeling good — I know that good feeling starts slipping away,” he said Saturday night in Chicago. The crowd interrupted him, shouting, “Nooooo!”