WBEZ | Barack Obama

Pritzker faces few tough questions at Senate hearing

Thu, 23 May 2013 15:56:00 -0500

Chicago businesswoman and current Commerce secretary nominee Penny Pritzker faced few tough questions at her Senate hearing Thursday. Pritzker, a long-time friend of and fundraiser for President Barack Obama, was nominated to the post earlier this month.

Pritzker seemed prepared for the two-hour hearing, answering a questions on topics including cyber security, job creation, manufacturing, travel and the fishing industry.

"The calls you’ll get will be about fish," Alaska Senator Mark Begich (D) told Pritzker. "You will think they’re about trade and agreements and tourism - it’s gonna be about fish."

Pritzker was expected to face tough questioning on a few issues. Her family owned 50 percent of the Superior Bank of Chicago, which failed after losing millions of dollars on risky mortgage loans to borrowers with bad credit. Republican Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the ranking member on the committee, was the only senator to inquire about Pritzker’s role in the bank’s collapse.

"Unfortunately, when problems arose, my uncle had recently passed away," Pritzker responded, saying she was never an officer of the bank or involved in management. "I stepped in on behalf of the 50 percent ownership of my family to try and salvage the situation."

Pritzker said after the bank failed, she went to the FDIC herself, and her family voluntarily agreed to pay $450 million.

When Thune asked Pritzker what she’d say to the depositors affected by the bank’s failure, she responded that she regretted the outcome of the bank.

"I feel very badly about that," she added.

Pritzker was also questioned about her family’s offshore trusts, an issue that was expected to be a point of conflict at the hearing.

"I am the beneficiary of off-shore family trusts that were set up when I was a little girl," Pritzker said. "I didn’t create them. I don’t direct them. I don’t control them. I have asked the trustee to remove themselves and appoint a US trustee."

Rocky relations between labor unions and the Hyatt Hotels Corporation, where Pritzker is a board member, barely entered the questioning. Union members of Unite Here in Chicago have protested Pritzker’s nomination over low wages.

Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) mentioned the back and forth between the union and hotel management in her questioning, but didn’t directly ask Pritzker about her role.

Pritzker was introduced at the hearing by both Illinois U.S. Senators Mark Kirk and Dick Durbin. Kirk was reportedly on the fence at first about Pritzker’s nomination, but came out with his endorsement earlier this week.

"I see her as a voice for business that the president will have to heed," Kirk told the committee Thursday.

Pritzker’s nomination still has to face the full Senate.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Lauren Chooljian is a WBEZ’s Morning Producer/Reporter. Follow her @laurenchooljian.

Deportation protesters use ‘lockboxes,’ slam Durbin

Tue, 14 May 2013 18:25:00 -0500

Police sawed through plastic pipes on Tuesday to pry apart seven protesters at an immigration detention center near Chicago. The protesters, all in the United States without legal permission, demanded a halt to deportations as Congress considers allowing most of the country’s 11 million unauthorized immigrants to apply for legal status.

President Barack Obama’s administration has increased deportations to roughly 1,100 a day, a record pace. Removals have continued as the Senate Judiciary Committee works on a sweeping immigration bill drafted by a bipartisan group that includes Dick Durbin (D-Illinois). The protesters called on Durbin to push Obama to suspend the removals.

“We’ve had over a million families separated because of deportations,” said protester Stephanie Camba, 22, a Filipina who said her parents brought her to the United States when she was 11 years old. “This bill is not enough if it’s not going to stop deportations. It should be deportations being stopped first.”

The protesters, backed by about 100 supporters, held each other using chains and locks inside three-foot segments of polyvinyl chloride tubes — civil-disobedience setups knowns as “lockboxes.” The protesters sat down in a street to block vehicles from the center, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in suburban Broadview.

ICE holds immigrants awaiting deportation in the center before loading them into vans and buses that carry them to flights from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

A statement from Durbin’s office in response to the protest says the senator was “instrumental in pushing the administration” to allow many young unauthorized immigrants to apply for work papers and a deportation reprieve under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama policy initiated last year.

Durbin, the statement adds, is also working on the immigration bill as a member of the Senate panel. “The hope is that next month the full Senate will begin debate on this common-sense, compromise proposal that will provide millions of immigrants with an accountable path to citizenship,” the statement says.

After police cut through the pipes, Broadview officers arrested the protesters, charged them with disorderly conduct and released them.

Chip Mitchell is WBEZ’s West Side bureau reporter. Follow him on Twitter @ChipMitchell1 and @WBEZoutloud, and connect with him through Facebook and LinkedIn.

Why Assata Shakur was suddenly promoted to terrorist

Wed, 08 May 2013 23:15:00 -0500

Last week, on the 40th anniversary of her arrest, the FBI suddenly put Assata Shakur, aka Joanne Chesimard, on the Ten Most Wanted Terrorists List. She is the first woman to reach such criminal heights. The reward for her capture has been doubled to $2 million.

But that move might say less about Shakur’s alleged crimes than about President Barack Obama. His willingness to use a black woman—a black woman whose political roots date back to a time when official U.S. government policy was to destroy the black liberation movement—to play this kind of politics is soulless.

Because have no doubt whatsoever: putting Shakur—who is at worst a cop killer—on that list has less to do with her and any recent activities to justify her promotion to terrorist status than it does with helping to make an argument to keep Cuba on the terrorist nations list, an appointment that reflects political game-playing more than reality.

Perhaps Obama sees this as a last ditch effort to pressure Cuba into releasing Alan Gross, a USAID contractor jailed on the island for anti-government activities. (This year’s iteration of the terrorist nations list will be released at the end of the month.)

Because Cuba has long ceased being a state-sponsor of terrorism, the main accusation hurled its way by the U.S. is that it serves as a refuge for international terrorists, including about 70 U.S. citizens, many of them affiliated with the Black Panthers and other black liberation groups.

But just one quick look at the rest of the FBI terrorists list—a collection of bombers and international kidnappers and conspirators—makes clear just how out of place Shakur and her alleged crimes are in such company. As a warning, the FBI laughably says Shakur “may wear her hair in a variety of styles and dress in African tribal clothing.”

For the record, this is the FBI’s own definition of terrorism: “The unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a Government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”

If you believe Shakur did what she was convicted of, then she’s a vicious but common criminal—and nothing more. It’s not imperative to be sympathetic to Shakur’s politics to see the disconnect between what she’s been tried and convicted of doing and her new designation.

And nothing in the FBI’s own description of her crimes suggests Shakur has done anything to merit reconsideration. Her new listing merely recounts her previous history: In 1977, Shakur was convicted of first degree murder of a police officer after a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike. She was sentenced to life in prison. Two years later, she escaped, eventually turning up in Cuba.

Shakur maintains her innocence, pointing out that she was also wounded in the incident and that the state police’s own investigation found there was no gunpowder residue on her hands at the time of her arrest. But now the FBI clams Shakur has always been seen as a terrorist.

"Today, Chesimard, now known as Assata Shakur, remains an inspiration to the radical, left-wing, anti-government black separatist movement," said Aaron Ford, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Newark office in announcing the change in Shakur’s status. "While living openly and freely in Cuba, she continues to maintain and promote her terrorist ideology. She provides anti-U.S.-government speeches, espousing the Black Liberation Army’s message of revolution and terrorism."

In other words, Shakur talks and writes about revolutionary change. Writing and talking are not in and of themselves force or violence even if the words themselves call for such actions. It seems not even the FBI, in its announcement of her new status, can actually pin her with terrorist action.

With so many other U.S. exiles in Cuba, why Shakur? Perhaps because she’s the best known U.S. fugitive in Cuba. She is, however, not the only Black Panther convicted of cop killing exiled on the island: Charlie Hill, whose crime took place in New Mexico and involved the hijacking of a U.S. airline (which, in some circles, might actually qualify as terrorism), is also living in Cuba.

Perhaps the bigger question is, without a Florida election to worry about, what Obama hopes to accomplish beyond keeping Cuba on the terrorists list. He is most certainly not going to invade Cuba or send in a drone to kill a 65-year-old African-American grandmother. Shakur is not going to surrender, Havana is not going to turn her in, and good luck to any bounty hunters who want to risk playing in Cuba.

But this is precisely the kind of move that gets the Cubans’ back up. It threatens to not only extend rather than abbreviate Gross’ sentence but to mess with bilateral cooperation on a variety of matters that Havana and Washington have been quietly making progress on. What the hell, Barack?

Pritzker would join growing list of Chicagoans in White House

Fri, 03 May 2013 09:13:00 -0500

Even before Penny Pritzker was nominated to be Commerce Secretary, her detractors had been accusing President Obama of cronyism for even considering her for the job.

Pritzker, a billionaire Chicago businesswoman, has long been a political ally and big fundraiser for Obama. And if her nomination is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Pritzker would be far from the first Chicagoan to leave the Windy City for the Obama White House.

The city’s reputation for political nepotism has made Obama’s hometown appointments an easy target for his critics. But one expert on Obama presidential patronage suggested presidents are wise to promote from within their inner circle.

After all, Obama helped win election in 2008 with the help of two top advisors, Chicagoans David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett. Once in office, he tapped former Chicago Public Schools chief Arne Duncan to be Education Secretary, University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee to be a top economic advisor, and two successive chiefs of staff to muscle through his agenda – current Mayor Rahm Emanuel and William Daley, brother to the former mayor, and all are Chicagoans.

Then there’s Rabbi Sam Gordon, of Congregation Sukkat Shalom, in north suburban Wilmette.

Gordon was appointed last month to the board that oversees the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of hundreds of presidential appointments that don’t get much press coverage.

So how’d he get it?

Not likely from the $1,000 he’s donated to Obama’s presidential campaigns.

“Last time I checked, I’m not a major donor, that’s right,” Gordon joked.

But Gordon says he did know the president at the genesis of his political career, adding that his daughter even volunteered on one of Obama’s early State Senate campaigns.

So the president already knew Gordon was plugged into the Jewish community – and, yes, the Chicago connection helped him get the unpaid appointment, he said.

“I wouldn’t know the president if it weren’t for Chicago,” he said. “I mean, that’s one of the great things about being in Chicago, uh, and the great things about a community that is so open and where people can know each other so well.”

Not everyone buys the power of Chicago.

“I don’t think it really has too much to do with a geographic location,” said Louis B. Susman, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Susman was a top political fundraiser for Obama before getting his ambassadorship – the kind of cushy posting that’s often seen as a reward for top political allies.

But Susman says that’s not the whole picture.

“Look, obviously you appoint people that have worked hard for you, but he’s not going to appoint people that he doesn’t think can do the job,” Susman said of the president.

Both Susman and Gordon represent two typical types of presidential appointees: The long-time supporter and the political loyalist, said Vanderbilt University’s Dave Lewis, who has studied patronage in the Obama White House.

There is always the risk of bad political optics and the impression of insider dealing when presidents appoint from their own political circles, Lewis said. It’s not uncommon: Lewis said President Clinton had his appointees from Arkansas, and President George W. Bush tapped Texans.

Lewis called Pritzker a “triple threat,” because she was not only an early Obama supporter and a prolific fundraiser, but her business acumen makes her a good fit as Commerce Secretary.

“And you wanna reward people who have publicly supported you for a long time because that sends the right signal to other people who are considering whether or not to support you, and she fills all of those criteria,” Lewis said.

And, Lewis says, the Chicago connection doesn’t hurt, either.

Alex Keefe is a political reporter for WBEZ. Follow him on Twitter at @akeefe.

Conservative legal group challenges Cook County immigration policy

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:02:00 -0500

Invoking the Boston Marathon bombings, a national conservative group has filed a lawsuit aimed at a Cook County ordinance that requires jail personnel to disregard federal immigration detainers.

Washington-based Judicial Watch says the county has no legal right to ignore the detainers, which are U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement requests that local jails hold specified individuals up to two business days beyond what their criminal cases require.

President Obama’s administration says the detainers, which help ICE put the inmates into deportation proceedings, are crucial for focusing immigration enforcement on criminals.

Cook County officials say detainers also erode community trust in local police. In 2011, the County Board approved an ordinance that halted detainer compliance by the county’s massive jail. ICE abruptly lost convenient access to hundreds of immigration violators each year. Lawmakers in other parts of the country, meanwhile, approved bills modeled after the policy.

The suit, which claims federal law preempts the ordinance, asks Cook County Circuit Court to strike down the local measure and compel Sheriff Tom Dart to comply with the detainers. The suit accuses Dart of “failure to carry out his legal duties under both federal and state law.”

At a Monday press conference Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton pointed to last week’s news events. “In light of the Boston Marathon bombings, there is a national-security component to these detainers by ICE.”

Authorities say two Chechen immigrants — one a permanent-resident visa holder, the other a naturalized U.S. citizen — are suspected of having planted the bombs that exploded April 15 in Boston.

Judicial Watch is representing the suit’s plaintiff, Chicago resident Brian McCann, who is the brother of a pedestrian killed in a 2011 hit-and-run collision in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. The alleged driver, a Mexican immigrant named Saúl Chávez, had a DUI conviction. He was arrested and charged with the hit and run. A Cook County judge set the bond at $250,000.

ICE suspected Chávez was in the country illegally and slapped a detainer on him. But after the county enacted the ordinance, Chávez posted $25,000 — the required 10 percent of the bond. He walked free and went missing.

“Dart is thumbing his nose at the federal government and replacing federal immigration priorities with Cook County’s own immigration policy,” Fitton said. “Releasing these criminal aliens before they can be taken into custody by ICE endangers the public.”

Fitton echoed Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and ICE Director John Morton, who have said the Cook County ordinance threatens public safety.

That claim was the subject of a WBEZ investigation that found that inmates freed as a result of the ordinance had not reoffended or jumped bail more than other former inmates had.

Dart’s office, in a statement late Monday, pointed to the sheriff’s support for allowing the county to honor ICE detainers for inmates charged with violent offenses and inmates with a number of prior convictions.

Chip Mitchell is WBEZ’s West Side bureau reporter. Follow him on Twitter @ChipMitchell1 and @WBEZoutloud, and connect with him through Facebook and LinkedIn.

To please GOP, again, Obama offers Social Security cuts

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 12:50:00 -0500

Is President Barack Obama playing the Republicans – or is he playing us?

Do you believe the budget he’s presenting this week – the first time in history a Democratic president tries to cut Social Security – is a shrewd political move to divide the GOP, or do you think the president wouldn’t mind tying Social Security benefits to a new formula, called “chained CPI,” that would effectively reduce benefits to everyone?

This is, after all, the president who came up with the sequester as an idea that was so abhorrent no one in their right mind would let it actually occur … and thus the Republicans would come around and cut a decent debt-limit deal and get budget talks going. Except, of course, it didn’t quite happen that way …

And this is the president who extended tax cuts for the rich as a way to bring Republicans around, and who got his ass handed to him after giving the GOP nearly everything they wanted on the last round of budget talks a couple of years ago.

So when I see Obama proposing what are, for all practical purposes, cuts in Social Security – that is, not a new math on Social Security but actually less money in the paycheck to recipients – as a bargaining strategy, I get a little nervous.

As far as I’m concerned, the president is playing with fire.

And let’s be clear: This scenario – in which the budget proposal is just a ploy – is the one in which Obama’s getting the benefit of the doubt, in which I’m willing to suspend lots and lots of disbelief and pretend his Inner Republican doesn’t actually think Social Security and other social safety net programs should be cut. (Aside: I’m over “entitlements,” the GOP’s irony rich name for these programs which are, much more accurately, social safety net programs.)

Why cut Social Security, which is mere single digits of the federal budget and the national debt? Social Security is probably the best funded government program, with enough of a surplus to lend the government a bushel of billions and still keep enough cash on hand to pay its bills for the next three years without taking in a single dime. In fact, Forbes (!) says Social Security simply can’t go bankrupt – unless we change the rules to make it do just that.

But the Republicans have a boner for Social Security – their rich supporters, who don’t need Social Security in their old age, would like to keep those extra pennies they’re being forced to pay into Social Security.

And Obama has a boner for cutting a deal – any deal – with the GOP so he can say he did it, that he crossed that bipartisan bridge, that absolutely everyone likes him, at least a little. (He’s hosting another Republican Senate dinner this week as part of his charm offensive – a campaign, stealth before and overt now, that has netted him pretty paltry results in his four-plus years in power.)

Never mind that most Americans overwhelmingly support protecting Social Security and other social safety net programs. Or that Obama's proposal will do nothing to ease the debt.

Predictably, the left has exploded over Obama’s proposal. The head of the AFL-CIO – which poured millions of dollars and provided millions of volunteers for Obama’s re-election – has called the proposal “unconscionable.”

I say “predictably” because there’s a certain circular media narrative to all this that, in the end, seems to obscure some crucial facts, such as this: 75 percent of Americans nearing retirement age have less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts. How exactly are they supposed to survive, especially if Social Security gets cut, even by a little?

Does Illinois have a nuclear future?

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 23:00:00 -0500

President Barack Obama was in town Friday visiting Argonne National Laboratory in the Western suburbs. The president talked about his “all of the above” energy policy, which includes alternative fuels and better batteries, but one area didn't get quite as much air time from the president: nuclear power.

Illinois continues to be the largest producer of nuclear power in the country.

And scientists at Argonne, and nearby Fermilab, want to keep it that way – by making nuclear part of our sustainable energy future.

But the future of nuclear here and across the country is shaky. After a long hiatus, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is licensing new reactors again, but most of those are in the Southeast, and none are in Illinois.

Reduce, reuse, recycle...

The first rule of Argonne National Laboratories: Don’t touch anything. When nuclear engineer Roger Blomquist took me on a tour, he was sure to show me the Geiger counter the employees use to check their hands and feet on the way in and out of the lab where Argonne builds specialized parts for research reactors.

I learned the second rule of Argonne pretty fast, too: Don’t say nuclear waste.

“The idea that it is waste is somebody’s interpretation,” Blomquist said. At Argonne, the radioactive stuff most of us know as nuclear waste is called spent nuclear fuel.

Part of the reason for the linguistic shift, says Blomquist, is that we could be recycling the materials in nuclear waste.

“With enough recycling you can use 100 percent of the energy that’s in the uranium ore you dig out of the ground,” he said. Today’s technology uses up just one percent of the power we could be getting out of uranium through nuclear fission. The rest comes back out of the reactors, mixed with a slush of more volatile, radioactive elements.

But recycling nuclear fuel is well within reach. Blomquist is working on the development of fast reactors, a type of nuclear reactor that can run on reprocessed fuel and that he says would be smaller, more contained and safer than the reactors we currently use.

Just down the road at Fermilab, Argonne’s sister laboratory, researcher and associate lab director Stuart Henderson agreed that the technology in use these days is way behind the times.

“A lot of what we do with spent nuclear fuel is sort of what Homer Simpson would do,” Henderson said. “It’s not very sophisticated.”

Reprocessing or pyroprocessing nuclear waste would allow us to take the pellets of radioactive fuel out of reactors, separate out the elements with the longest half-lives, and reuse them as fuel for reactors. The only thing left over would be the most radioactive parts of the waste, which decay in just a few hundred years.

Right now spent fuel has to be stored in pools or casks for hundreds of thousands of years.

Henderson’s working on another type of nuclear reactor that would deal with both waste and safety issues, a reactor powered by a particle accelerator.

Right now, what happens in a nuclear reactor is a controlled chain reaction: in short, particles crash into one another and cause other particles to crash into one another, generating an enormous amount of heat.

But once it starts, nuclear fission in a reactor can be hard to slow down.

In the new model, called a sub-critical reactor, there would be no chain reaction. A particle accelerator would shoot particles into the reactor to keep the reaction going.

So if you want to stop it, you just hit a switch and turn off the accelerator.

“That means that the reactor is never capable of having a Chernobyl-type explosion,” Henderson said. He’s in touch with Belgian scientists who are building one of these reactors, called a sub-critical reactor; his job is to help build the high-powered accelerator that’s capable of doing the job.

If you build it

So, what’s the hangup? Where are these reactors of the future?

Both Blomquist and Henderson say having the technology is simply not enough to usher in a nuclear renaissance. We’d need to start building these reactors of the future now if we wanted to be getting power from them in less than 15 years, and in the U.S., that’s just not happening.

They both say the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a part of that equation – it’s expensive and complex to license a reactor design, so much so that companies don’t see an incentive to get involved with the grandiose designs of the future, no matter how much safer they might be. Here in Illinois, Exelon is looking to make its current reactors more efficient, but there are no plans for new reactors in the state.

“Nobody’s gonna build any new ones, anytime soon,” said Mark Cooper, a researcher at the University of Vermont who studies the safety and economics of nuclear power.

Cooper says other options available like solar, wind, natural gas and coal remain far more economically viable than nuclear, and he suggests we should be investing more in other high tech energy innovations.

Plus, he says even the most advanced nuclear reactors still come with risks – and someone has to pay for insurance on those, too.

“As you operate them, you learn that you haven’t done enough,” he said. “Mother nature throws you a curve, human beings don’t behave properly, equipment breaks down.”

Just two years after the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in Japan, those possibilities loom large, especially for people with nuclear power in their own backyards.

Living with nuclear power

Braidwood, Ill. is only 50 miles from the high tech labs, but in a lot of ways, it’s a different world. The fear of nuclear power is real here.

Exelon operates a nuclear plant at the edge of the small town, and in the 1990s the water was contaminated with radioactive tritium from the Braidwood plant. According to the Chicago Tribune, Exelon didn’t admit the mistake until years later.

The people in Braidwood have developed a sort of gallows humor about living near a reactor.

“You’re gonna be the first one to go if you live by one,” said resident Mike Franklin put it. In other words, you won’t live to suffer through the devastating effects of radiation – and that’s a good thing. Franklin, like a lot of people I talked to, grew up in Braidwood, and said he generally doesn’t think much about the plant.

In a grocery store parking lot at Braidwood’s main intersection, just up the road from the reactor, I caught an older man named Charles Crick unloading his grocery cart. He worked at the Braidwood plant.

“I started in a nuke in 1971, and I worked in ‘em until I retired,” he said. “Do I glow in the dark? No.”

The Stumble Inn is a bar just a mile down the road the other way, in the 600-person town of Godley. The morning crowd at the Stumble Inn was small but enthusiastic - and none of them like living near the plant.

“I’m not for nuclear power,” said Arthur Wallace, who goes by Slick here. Slick’s son-in-law worked at the Braidwood reactor, and died of leukemia at age 44; some research suggests links between leukemia and radiation. His daughter worked in security at the plant.

“They sent her home every once in awhile with her badge gettin’ too much rads. Too much radiation,” he said. “She quit after 11 years.”

The bartender, Ronda Bally, was a school bus driver for a long time, and recalled getting trainings from Exelon on how to pick up children and the elderly during a nuclear emergency.

“My life is half over,” she said. “My kids and my grandkids still have a lot of years left ahead of them, and if something as basic as a water supply could cause them serious health issues or even possible death, I have a problem with that.”

A lot of people here say they’d support safer nuclear power in a heartbeat. But Bally, like Slick, isn’t sure she wants a nuclear future at all.

“I’m kinda more interested in the whole wind farm thing that they’re doing now”, she said. “Nuclear anything is very scary.”

The nuclear future

“Nuclear power is the worst investment in the current environment,” said Mark Cooper. “You have gone through a series of these pursuits of a technological holy grail. And they have failed.”

His point: scientists have known about safer nuclear for decades – and companies just aren’t willing to spend the money to make it happen.

But Roger Blomquist at Argonne thinks it’s only a matter of time before climate change eclipses the barriers to nuclear innovation.

“Then getting rid of burning fossil fuels will become a national emergency,” he said. “And when that happens, that’s when this technology will be blindingly obvious to most people.”

At that point, he says, maybe living in the nuclear future won’t seem so bad.

Follow Lewis Wallace on Twitter.

President to travel to Chicago this week

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 15:52:00 -0600

President Barack Obama will head home to Chicago this week, where the White House says he’ll address gun violence.

The president's visit Friday is part of the traditional post-State of the Union travel. He'll also stop this week in Asheville, N.C., and Atlanta after he delivers his address Tuesday. But Mr. Obama's stop in his hometown will also close the end of what's looking to be another week of discussion on the city's struggle with gun violence.

First Lady Michelle Obama was in Chicago this weekend for the funeral of 15 year-old Hadiya Pendelton — the honor student and majorette who was killed just a few days after visiting D.C. for the inauguration. Police say two men, ages 18 and 20 years old, were taken into custody Sunday for questioning as persons of interest in connection with the homicide investigation.

Later Monday morning, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez and Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy will all come together to push new statewide gun safety legislation. The mayor’s office says they want to increase minimum sentencing for the most serious gun crimes and require offenders to serve at least 85 percent of the imposed sentences.

All this before the City Council Wednesday is scheduled to vote on a proposal that would fine gun owners up to five thousand dollars and possible jail time for not reporting a lost or stolen gun.

Photos: President Barack Obama's second Inauguration

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 12:59:00 -0600

Illinois gets official float in inaugural parade

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 11:28:00 -0600

Illinois will be well represented during today's Inaugural Parade.

The procession that follows President Barack Obama down Pennsylvania Avenue following his swearing-in ceremony will feature more than 60 groups and eight official inaugural floats. One of those floats will recognize Illinois, as the birthplace of First Lady Michelle Obama.

The float will feature American flags, the state flag and a panorama of the state Capitol.

It will be one of the first floats in the parade and will be immediately followed by Chicago's South Shore Drill Team.

Hawaii, the state where President Obama was born, also will have an official float.

The parade is scheduled to begin about 1:30 p.m. More than 8,800 people and 200 animals are expected to participate.