Capitol Fax.com - Your Illinois News Radar » 2004

Friday, Dec 10, 2004 - Posted by Rich Miller

Capitol Fax readers saw (if not read) a long story in today’s edition about Speaker Michael Madigan and the teachers’ unions. My newspaper column is a shortened version of today’s piece.

Anyway, it’s generated some response. Randy Fritz will go first. Fritz is a high school teacher and somewhat of a Renaissance Man. He chairs the Citizens Utility Board and is a website designer in his spare time.

He is referring here to the very costly (to taxpayers) early retirement program for teachers, and Speaker Madigan’s opposition to extending its lifespan by another five years. He also refers to Madigan’s repeated comments about wanting to end teacher tenure.

You know, Rich, I think I’m a minority of one when it comes to teaching and teachers’ unions. I’m IEA-NEA as a teacher at Williamsfield (I wish I was IFT), but I have long believed that we all bear some responsibility for fiscal responsibility. Remember: I’m a high school teacher at this small district in west-central Illinois.

At lunch, etc., when teachers get together and talk about how best to “game” the system and max their retirements, I remind them that we’re doing so on the backs of 1) younger teachers, and 2) the people of Illinois in general.

I can only imagine what the comments about me are when I leave the room. Good thing I don’t care.

It’s all, of course, a part of the larger disease affecting our generation: “I want mine, I want it now, and I don’t want to pay for it.” In other words: “Passing the debt to another generation? I don’t really care.”

I agree with Madigan that an almost absolutely guaranteed job is really passe. Teachers, like everybody else, need to be fired if they’re not doing their job (and no school district is without such teachers, including mine), but they need a system than ensures a fair hearing. “Tenure” is about academic freedom, and how does that apply to a public, classroom teacher today?

The system most non-teaching union shops have in place provides such protections. I’d like to think of myself as a pofessional, but that’s clearly not the case right now–I’m a union employee.

We’ve also got to have a fairer way to fund schools, regardless of what it might be. Politicians have to step up and have some guts about this. FAR too many are too worried about THEIR pensions to do anything that might threaten their re-election. An even sweeter deal is the GA’s retirement system.

BUT, you know and I know it’ll be business as usual, change will be incremental (if at all), and the GA, if they can possibly get away with it, will do nothing. Hope I’m wrong, but I’m not, I’ll bet.

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(Late) Friday Topinka blogging

Friday, Dec 10, 2004 - Posted by Rich Miller

I almost forgot. It’s too late for most people, but there are always a few diehards who visit late and on the weekends.

And here’s the original caption:

Judy Baar Topinka talked with members of AWJ (the Association for Women Journalists) Springfield over lunch in April, 1999. She has been both a news gatherer and a newsmaker. Topinka is a former reporter with a degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. She’s also a former Illinois House and Senate member. Topinka talked informally with our chapter about her days as a reporter and also spoke about politics, lawmaking, elections and dealing with the media. Topinka is a two-term treasurer and probably state government’s best-known accordion player.

Everyone always wants to talk about the accordion. Curiously, Google image search can’t find a photo of her playing one. Maybe I’ll ask her staff to provide me with one next week.

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Not good

Friday, Dec 10, 2004 - Posted by Rich Miller

Jeff Tomczak’s year just keeps getting worse by the day.

He got caught in the middle of a nasty state House race when he appeared to endorse each side’s completely polar opposite argument.

Then, his father was indicted in connection with Chicago’s Hired Truck scandal.

Less than a week later he lost his re-election bid for Will County State’s Attorney to a guy everyone figured was washed up years ago.

Less than a week after that, his wife, who is a judge, left him and filed for divorce.

And now he’s being sued.

Two former and one current trustee from the New Lenox Fire Protection District recently filed a lawsuit alleging they were slandered by former Will County State’s Attorney Jeff Tomczak and one of his assistants. […]

The lawsuit is related to events in 2003, according to court documents. While serving as trustees, the men used a fire district computer and several sheets of paper to challenge the candidacy of Kiebles’ opponents in the April election.

Tomczak was state’s attorney at the time, and his office issued warrants for the trustees’ arrest and charged them with official misconduct.

Hedke, Fronek and Kiebles believe Tomczak had them arrested to retaliate against a change that had been made by the trustees, according to court documents.[…]

Hedke and Fronek subsequently lost the 2003 election, according to the lawsuit. The charges filed by Tomczak damaged the trustees’ reputations and destroyed their re-election campaigns, according to court documents.

In late March 2003, Chief Judge Steve White ruled there was no probable cause to arrest Hedke, Fronek and Kiebles and dismissed the charges.[…]

“I will expect that the (latest) suit will go away in the same manner as the federal suit,” Tomczak said Thursday.

The next time you think you got problems, just be thankful you ain’t Jeff Tomczak right now.

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Thanks

Thursday, Dec 9, 2004 - Posted by Rich Miller

As I always say, it never hurts to be related to geniuses.

My brothers Darian and Doug helped me fix my javascript today. Darian came up with the final fix. Now, when you click on a link in the pulldown menus at right, the page pops up so you don’t have to keep coming back to the blog to find more links. The main blog page should also load a lot faster now.

Thanks to both brothers for taking time out of their busy days. And thanks to my mom and dad for having the foresight to produce several smart offspring.

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Paper owned by National Chamber

Thursday, Dec 9, 2004 - Posted by Rich Miller

The Washington Post busts the Madison County Record.

The Madison County Record, an Illinois weekly newspaper launched in September that bills itself as the county’s legal journal, reports on one subject: the state courts in southern Illinois. A recent front page carried an assortment of stories about lawsuits against businesses. […]

Nowhere was it reported that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce created the Record as a weapon in its multimillion-dollar campaign against lawyers who file those kinds of suits.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce created the Madison County Record.

“We wanted to educate [the people] that their county is the laughingstock of the country” because of the large number of lawsuits filed there, said Stanton D. Anderson, chief legal officer for the chamber, which is a part owner of the Record. […]

Through a common acquaintance, Anderson met Brian Timpone, 32, co-owner of a small chain of community newspapers in Illinois. Over the summer, Timpone agreed to become the Record’s publisher with the chamber as his silent benefactor. The chamber has poured about $200,000 into the 6,000-circulation broadsheet and expects to invest more, Anderson said.

The chamber hopes the Record’s influence will spread beyond Madison County and help push tort reform nationally. Anderson distributes the Record to interested companies and business trade associations. Timpone sells subscriptions to law firms and companies across the nation — some of which have cases pending in the county.

$200,000 and the Chamber is only part-owner? Not a bad gig if you can get it. My hat’s off to Timpone

Seriously, I remember the days when the Chicago Federation of Labor owned a popular music station, WCFL. But the Chicago Fed never hid the fact that it owned “Super CFL.” Its slogan, “The Voice of Labor,” was repeated throughout the day and they did some labor-oriented programming (mostly at times when nobody was listening).

Timpone said the chamber doesn’t dictate the paper’s news content and he defends the stories he runs as genuine news. He said he chose not to divulge the Record’s connection to the chamber in print because “I was afraid we’d be prejudged. I thought, ‘Let people judge us by our actions.’

Actually, the paper isn’t too bad, although its bias is pretty clear in editorial comments and story choices.

Interestingly enough, the Post’s article hasn’t been picked up by any papers in Illinois that I could find , although Reason has an Op-Ed up.

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Chambers scores again

Thursday, Dec 9, 2004 - Posted by Rich Miller

The Rockford Register-Star’s state political reporter Aaron Chambers is also a big music fan, and he scored an interview with BB King not long ago:

Fear is not among the emotions that come to mind when B.B. King, the undisputed King of the Blues, takes the stage. But that’s just what the King said he feels.

“I’m scared when I first get out there.”

Scared of what?

“I don’t know,” he said.

“But I think some people call it stage fright. If you haven’t been married, you won’t understand. But to me, it’s like meeting your in-laws for the first time. … And you say, ‘Oh God, I hope they approve of me. And I hope I can be myself.’

“After I go on stage, after a couple of tunes, it’s like I’m the No. 1 quarterback. I’m throwing the right plays. I start feeling like I’m in control.”

It also turns out that BB is an MP3 guy:

King, relaxing in his cabin beside his laptop computer and his digital audio player, recounted his favorite artists: Lonnie Johnson, Blind Lemon, Charlie Christian, Django Reinhart and T-Bone Walker.

“I was myself. I heard many other people, wished I could play like ‘em, wanted to. But couldn’t. I could never do some of the things,” he said.

“Those five people I got on my MP3 right here, right now, that I listen to. And I still can’t play like ‘em. So I had to go on doing the things the way that I felt that I could do.”

Forget those washed-up hacks U2, IPod should sell a BB King edition.

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Con-Con 2008?

Thursday, Dec 9, 2004 - Posted by Rich Miller

Some people who think we need a state Constitutional Convention in 2008 have set up a Yahoo! Group. The last attempt at holding a Con-Con was blocked at the polls by a consortium of business and labor groups.

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