• Promote the collection of sexual orientation data in electronic medical records and encourage researchers focused on LGBT health to share findings and develop new LGBT health research.
• Improve the tracking of hate crimes against transgender persons, publicize resources for reporting violence, and conduct outreach on strategies to avoid violence.
• Develop cultural competency training to help educate health care providers, employers and educators on the health needs of the LGBT community.
• Increase tobacco cessation efforts in the LGBT community to address the high prevalence of smoking, which is at 30 percent, 12 percentage points higher than the 18 percent of the overall population.
• Promote inclusion of same sex couples in programs aimed at healthy pregnancies, childbirth and early childhood health.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who recently committed to supporting marriage equality, lauded the new plan, saying, “Chicago’s strength is in the diversity of its communities and I am committed to ensuring that all Chicagoans have access to the care and information they need to live healthy lives and contribute fully to the vibrancy of our city.” Indeed, the plan was developed in consultation with the city’s LGBT constituents to ensure it best meets the community’s needs. The complete action plan can be found on the city of Chicago’s website.

And while the parade’s representatives have since “reached an agreement with the church and moved the parade start time to noon to accommodate services,” George — who initially backed off his incendiary comparison — is doubling down on his remarks in a written statement:

“The Chicago Gay Pride Parade has been organized and attended for many years without interfering with the worship of God in a Catholic church,” George wrote. “When the 2012 Parade organizers announced a time and route change this year, it was apparent that the Parade would interfere with divine worship in a Catholic parish on the new route. When the pastor’s request for reconsideration of the plans was ignored, the organizers invited an obvious comparison to other groups who have historically attempted to stifle the religious freedom of the Catholic Church. One such organization is the Ku Klux Klan which, well into the 1940′s, paraded through American cities not only to interfere with Catholic worship but also to demonstrate that Catholics stand outside of the American consensus. It is not a precedent anyone should want to emulate.

“It is terribly wrong and sinful that gays and lesbians have been harassed and subjected to psychological and even physical harm. These tragedies can be addressed, however, without disturbing the organized and orderly public worship of God in a country that claims to be free. I am grateful that all parties concerned resolved this problem by moving the Parade’s start time so as not to conflict with the celebration of Mass that Sunday.”

Truth Wins Out (TWO) has formed a Change.org petition calling for George’s resignation and Equally Blessed, an umbrella group of pro-LGBT rights Catholic organizations, said the Cardinal “has demeaned and demonized LGBT people in a manner unworthy of his office.” TWO is also taking out a full page ad in this Sunday’s Chicago Tribune calling on George to step down.

Today, while delivering a presentation on a new winter attraction in Chicago, Emanuel was confronted by Occupy Chicago. As the mayor was speaking, a cry of “Mic Check!” rang out, and protesters started delivering complaints about Emanuel’s budget and his attacks on free speech. The protesters also tried to deliver a petition requesting access to a public space to continue their 24/7 protest. Emanuel cut his speech short to escape the demonstration. Watch NBC Chicago’s video from the incident:

Earlier, Occupy Chicago attended a town hall meeting of Alderman Joe Moore, taking him to task for supporting Emanuel’s budget. Watch them confronting Moore here.

Registered nurses from across the U.S. today condemned Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel for his decision to arrest nurse volunteers, as well as peaceful protesters, in a late night crackdown Saturday night at the Occupy Chicago protest.

NNU is asking supporters to call Mayor Emanuel’s office at 312-744-5000 and demand they immediately drop all charges against the nurses and other protesters, and stop the harassment and arrests of the nurses and others peacefully exercising their free speech rights. Nurses will also picket the mayor’s office at 10 a.m. Monday morning, at City Hall at the LaSalle entrance.

Nurse leaders of National Nurses United who set up a nurses’ station to provide basic first aid to Chicago protesters – as NNU has done peacefully in five other cities across the U.S. – were among the some 130 people arrested by Chicago police. The police also tore down the first aid station, and arrested scores of others who had peacefully assembled to support the station.

“Even in wartime, combatants respect the work of nurses and other first responders. Yet Mayor Emanuel and Chicago seem to care as little about that tradition as they do in protecting the constitutional rights of free speech and assembly.” said NNU Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro. “These arrests are disgraceful and unconscionable, and will not deter our nurses from continuing this mission, setting up the station again, and continuing to support the protests.”

It’s entirely possible to make shows about politicians without referring to their party affiliations, especially if you show them mostly in isolation, brooding over power and tactics, and even easier if you don’t engage with policy, just with the exercise of brute force. But especially if you’re making a television program about tough-as-nails Chicago politicians, eschewing party politics means you’re giving up most of the means by which that brute force is exercised, and by which the objects of that force are defined. If you’re going to have enemies in political stories, you have to figure out who they are, and parties are useful identifiers, whether your foe is an ideological rival, a procedural one, or your rival for position within the hierarchy of the party itself.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that the folks who make smart television don’t want to risk their audience before a show even starts airing, especially if, like Starz, you’re trying to establish yourself as destination channel for smart original content that doesn’t involve people getting naked and killing each other in arenas. But Democratic and Republican politics don’t play out the same way on the local level — even in big cities — as they do nationally. Parks and Recreation‘s been an incredibly effective demonstration of that. It would be entirely possible to have Kelsey Grammar, who is playing a Rahm-like politician on the show Boss, have Rahm’s personally aggressive style without attaching Rahm’s voting record and stances in the Obama administration to him, using a series of local issues and relationships with local stakeholders to define him as a Democrat or a Republican.

Or even if that’s too touchy, why not invent a couple of fictional political parties? That kind of work happens most often in science fiction, scabrous satirical humor, or in Dave Barry books, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be done in more realistic dramas, in ways that are usefully thought-provoking. I’d be curious to see a long-running exploration of what it would be like to have one party that’s fairly interventionist on both moral and social safety net issues, opposing abortion, equal rights for gay couples, and the death penalty while supporting universal health care and heavy taxes on the wealthiest citizens positioned against a much more staunchly libertarian party that’s pro-choice, low-tax, low social services, etc. One of the best things about Kings was that it didn’t spend a lot of time explaining the new framework that it was operating in: the show just sort of plunged in and let you figure out the importance of the powerfully active military-industrial complex. While I like Kings, it’s also reasonably obvious why it didn’t find a network following — the lead actor simply isn’t very good, and the religious stuff is incredible, but probably would have found a more natural audience on a network like HBO, which also would have found alternative ways to support its heavy production costs.

But I don’t think that fate would necessarily attach to a show that was more of our world, with smaller but significant tweaks to the positions that, bundled together, define political parties. We can make a nigh-infinite number of television shows about the nature of power as a raw, elemental thing (especially if they star Ian McShane). But they’re not the only kind of fiction we need to help us consider our political system and the future that our politics will define. Our parties are held together by duct tape, temperamental similarities, entrenched hatred, tears, and determination, but not necessarily by consensus or logic. We’re settled into them for now, but at some point, someone more effective than the Reform Party, or No Labels, or Unity ’08 might come along and present a viable alternative. Our pop culture’s daintiness about parties is in odd contrast to the brutality of our political contests.

In the spirit of “be the change you want to see in the world” instead of just whining about the media not talking about where Rahm Emannuel stands on municipal issues I thought I should look into it myself. Here he is on transportation with a number of good ideas:

Every transit station attracts riders and development potential, but the City has not fully integrated the goal of improving rail lines and stations into its capital and economic development strategies. Rahm will issue an executive order that establishes clear and consistent principles for transit oriented development – expedited permitting, set-aside of city-owned property to expand car sharing and bike parking, assistance with land assembly, expanded use of tax credits and loan guarantees, and identification of instances where the City will jointly invest with CTA to improve the transit system. The order will recognize the clear link between housing and transportation costs in keeping neighborhoods affordable, and will evaluate improvements on their ability to reduce the combined cost of housing and transportation for Chicago residents. This policy will help to focus all investment – including in Chicago’s TIF districts – around developments that integrate station upgrades with mixed-use developments.

The devil’s in the details, always, but this is the correct spirit. Heavy rail mass transit is a potentially very valuable investment, but the value lies in the possibility of dense development near stations. Facilitating transit-proximate development is key.

As a fan of urban policy, I can certainly sympathize with Rahm Emanuel’s desire to be Mayor of Chicago. And I definitely subscribe to the Tim Fernholz theory that the Rahm as History’s Greatest Monster account of the Obama administration doesn’t really add up.

But of course one way in which my sympathy for the “big city mayor rather than senior White House staffer” view reveals itself is that here I am with my job at a national policy organization and I’m still always talking about urban policy issues. By contrast, I’ve never heard Rahm say anything about zoning or parking or barber licenses or anything else. It’s a bit odd.

Odd and—problematically for the country—typical. We tend to treat state and local politics as just a JV version of national politics. So if you like a centrist Democrat as a congressional leader or a Chief of Staff, you’ll love him as Mayor of Chicago! The reality, however, is that there’s very little overlap between the issues the federal government deals with and the issues city governments deal with. And even though each individual locality is relatively unimportant, in the aggregate state and local government has a huge impact on American life. These issues deserve to be taken seriously on their own terms and not just as proxies for national political priorities.

With Richard Daley apparently ready to relinquish his long-held post of Mayor of Chicago, it’s worth reflecting on the slight oddness of the American idea that the next Mayor of Chicago should be some other politician who happens to be from Chicago rather than some other mayor who’s done a good job. They’re going to get some Alderman or maybe a member of the US House of Representatives or maybe Rahm Emanuel. My understanding of how they do this in China is that they’d promote the mayor of some other city.

Consider Boston, for example. The metro area is about half the size of Chicago’s, but the city proper has only 645,169 people to Chicago’s 2,851,268. And incumbent mayor Tom Menino has shown a Daley-esque ability to get endlessly re-elected. What’s more, in terms of crime and school system performance, Boston is clearly among the best-governed cities in America. Why not give him a chance?

And of course promotion needn’t go strictly in terms of upward size. Michael Bloomberg has been a good mayor of New York, but NYC has strong fundamentals and it was clear from the last election that the voters there are getting a bit sick of him. So since he’s effective, why not have him bite off a more challenging city like Baltimore or Detroit? Obviously, “that’s not how we do things” but the logic of relentlessly promoting from within seems pretty weak to me.

I’ve seen both Ezra Klein and Cato’s David Boaz except this exact same paragraph about Chicago Public Schools under Arne Duncan:

Miami, Houston and New York had higher scores than Chicago on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Boston, San Diego and Atlanta had bigger gains. Even fourth-graders in the much-maligned D.C. schools improved nearly twice as much since 2003.

I don’t really understand this line of criticism or even why it’s supposed to be damning. I don’t think that anyone ever said that becoming Secretary of Education was like a prize that’s supposed to be handed out to the urban education chancellor who gets the very best results on the NAEP TUDA. Rather, common sense indicates that if you’re going to pick the chief of an urban public school system that you want to find one who’s delivered positive results. And the data shows, rather clearly, than under Arne Duncan Chicago public school kids improved their performance.

Now it’s true that New York City Public Schools under Joel Klein arguably did even better. But if you look back to press coverage of the choice you’ll see that Duncan’s asset over Klein was never based on denying this. Rather, the feeling was that Duncan and Klein have a similar general approach to education policy—an approach that Obama supports—but that Duncan has more of a reputation as a consensus-builder and Klein more as a fighter/bulldozer type. Duncan, consequently, was deemed more likely to be able to build legislative support for a reform program. Many of the other cities that have shown good results in recent years have school systems that are much smaller than New York or Chicago, so their leadership, while impressive, may not have been deemed as qualified to run the federal bureaucracy.

Chester Finn, in the same piece as that critical graf, had a smart take:

“Chicago is not the story of an education miracle,” said Chester E. Finn Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank in Washington. “It is, however, the story of a large urban system that has made some gains and has made some promising structural changes.”

In education, I think we should be suspicious of miracles. Improving schools is hard. Improving whole school systems is harder. Improving educational outcomes is rendered even more difficult by the fact that things that happen outside the classroom make an enormous difference—school administrators are operating a lever that has limited efficacy. But better schools do make a difference for the kids who attend them, and better school systems make a huge difference for the cities that have them. So improvement is worth seeking, especially non-miraculous improvement that can be scaled-up.

On Duncan, long story short he was the chief executive of a large urban school system that implemented some reforms that had theoretical support behind them and that seem to have led to some real improvements. He’s also someone the president knew personally, whose political style matches Obama’s, and whose reputation suits the administration’s political strategy. That seems like a very reasonable choice to me, though there are also other big city school chiefs who have done a good job and a number of different people around the country who could succeed as Secretary of Education.

This article about Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Olympics seems like as good a time as any to reiterate the idea that the International Olympic Committee should fix a permanent location for the Games. Presumably in Greece, but really just about anywhere would do.

Even though competition is always fierce for the hosting honors, the reality is that cities only very rarely manage to reap the financial windfall that Olympics-boosters advertise. But if you actually got to reuse a given facility across three or four or five Games before it needed serious repair/replacement then mounting the event would be much more economical. Besides which, a fixed location would be more in the spirit of the original Olympics which were non-rotating.

Here, for example, is 4th grade math where you see that racial achievement gaps grew. On the other hand, scores for minority students went up . . they just went up more for white students:

I don’t think that’s necessarily the worst thing in the world. You see the same pattern for 8th grade math:

By contrast, in 4th grade reading you saw the same general upward trend but also a slight narrowing of the white/nonwhite gap:

In 8th grade reading, the whites stagnated while Hispanics improved so that gap narrowed. But black scores got worse. Since Hispanics improved by more than blacks declined, this constituted an overall improvement in average scores:

In terms of writing, 8th grade scores went up across the board in Chicago between 2002 and 2007, and racial gaps narrowed:

To me, this makes Arne Duncan look pretty good. It also exposes some conceptual problems with efforts to narrow the achievement gap. It would have been politically difficult for Duncan to somehow try to implement policies that were designed to prevent white students from improving their performance. Nor does it seems like deliberately thwarting the efforts of the highest-performing groups purely in order to close gaps makes much sense as a policy. I think about the most you can ask of a city superintendent is that achievement broadly increases — including for poor students and minorities — during his tenure. A federal policy maker, by contrast, has the ability to not only back policies that enhance achievement but also to back policies that substantially increase the volume of resources available to high poverty schools and, therefore, will plausibly have some gap-narrowing bite.