Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Fifteen minutes after the event was supposed to start, Brown spokesman John Davis walked into the conference room where we were waiting and surveyed the scene. He looked dumbfounded. “What? No Flannery?” he said, referring to Channel 2’s political reporter, Mike Flannery. “He’s the whole reason we called this thing.” As Brown came in and greeted everyone, Davis got Flannery on his cell phone, chatted a minute, then began shaking his head as he hung up. “That’s unbelievable–they killed his story because of the snow!” he said.
But Brown said the praise heaped on Daley by these wealthy black businesswomen “defies logic,” given problems with abusive cops in the police department, inequities in the public schools, and corruption in Daley’s administration. She called on the U.S. Justice Department to investigate the police department and charged that city contractors have been threatened with the loss of city business if they donate to anyone but Daley. “I hear the word ‘vindictive’ a lot,” she said. But Brown said she couldn’t provide the names of the threatened contractors.
