What a year 2013 was! School cuts and closings, broken promises, public offices treated like heirlooms, handouts to rich guys, a rubber-stamp City Council—and, amid it all, god-awful baseball on both sides of town. In other words, a typical year in Chicago.

Runner-up: Mayor Emanuel, who was out of the country on another vacation when the Board of Education made about $256 million in additional budget cuts from regular public schools—while increasing funding for charter schools by $80 million.

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for the politician who best exhibits Mayor Daley’s approach to public service: former Mayor Daley, who offered a vivid reminder of what his tenure was like when, during a deposition that the Sun-Times brought to light this fall, he claimed to know nothing about how his appointees gave the Park Grill a lucrative sweetheart deal—or even how Millennium Park was constructed. “I don’t know what I knew,” Daley said, which answered a lot of questions.

for opining as if you’re the foremost authority on something you know nothing about: U.S. senator Mark Kirk, who vowed to curb crime in Chicago by arresting 18,000 people who may or may not have been members of the Gangster Disciples—and may or may not have been guilty of anything. “I would like to do a mass pickup of them and put them all in the Thomson Correctional Facility,” Kirk told Fox Chicago. Enough said.

for pretending to be an average Joe when you’re actually a gazillionaire who has so many homes it’s hard to keep track of them all: Bruce Rauner, Republican candidate for governor, who’s running ads depicting himself as a man of the people even though he brought in $53 million last year from his hedge fund operation and owns at least eight properties, including a waterfront villa in Florida, a condo in an upscale Utah ski resort, a penthouse in New York City, and ranches in Montana and Wyoming. Also, Rauner may have made calls to powerful friends to get his daughter into elite, public, selective-enrollment Walter Payton College Prep.

for managing to finish last once again: the Ricketts family, owners of the Cubs, who—after a year of wheeling and dealing with Mayor Emanuel and Governor Quinn—still ended up with a less lucrative tax-break deal than Jerry Reinsdorf’s White Sox. Along the way, they forgot to sign a major-league team for the 2014 season.

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