Meanwhile, Back in Chicago

“Chicago’s $22.5 Million Payout To A Gang Rape Victim Is Probably A Bargain.” Doug Johnson of the Wizbang blog notes:

Chicago Alderman Edward Burke says the city could have lost $80 million or more had a jury learned of all that Eilman went through and the nine desperate calls her mother made to police in the 27 hours. She had begged officers not to release her daughter because her daughter was bipolar and having a breakdown, but to no avail.

…Despite doing things like babbling incoherently and smearing menstrual blood on the holding cell walls, and after her parents’ frantic calls, Eilman was released to fend for herself in a high-crime area. She ended up in a nearby public housing building, where a man raped her at knifepoint before she fell from a seventh-story window.

Read the whole thing; follow the link to this Chicago Tribune report from 2010 for the horrific backstory.

And speaking of Chicago, is a once-great town with some of America’s best architecture (both Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, and both architects’ talented acolytes worked there over the years) now on the road to Detroit? In a typically well-crafted essay at the Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson tries to make sense of the 21st century Second City: “Whose Kind of Town?”