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Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008 - Posted by Rich Miller

* Remember when I told you about this?

The Northwestern University and Evanston communities are invited to attend the LEGISLATIVE LEADERS FORUM: January 23, 2008, 7:00 pm, in Ryan Auditorium, in Northwestern University’s Technological Institute, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston.

Participating will be:

EMIL JONES, President of the Illinois Senate;
FRANK WATSON, Senate Republican Leader;
MICHAEL J. MADIGAN, Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives;
TOM CROSS, House Republican Leader.

HENRY S. BIENEN, Northwestern University President, will moderate.

The four legislative leaders of the State of Illinois will meet to discuss top issues of today and the importance of civic participation, followed by written questions from the audience.

* The day is upon us, and Kiyoshi Martinez will be live-blogging the event over at Illinoize.

Be there or be square.

* Also, I was on some little radio show today.

…Adding… Apparently, the snow kept Kiyoshi from the event. Bummer.

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Caption Contest!

Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008 - Posted by Rich Miller

Winner gets a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich.

  77 Comments      


Protected: SUBSCRIBERS ONLY (Part 2) - Schock; Tribune; Froehlich; Jacobs; Boland; Link; Silverstein (use all caps in password)

Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008 - Posted by Rich Miller

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Question of the day

Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008 - Posted by Rich Miller

Are you still undecided about any primary races? Explain.

If you’ve made up your mind about all of them, let’s see your choices.

  75 Comments      


Governor covers up legal fees, changes story from 2006

Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008 - Posted by Rich Miller

* More trouble for the guv, but there’s something important about this story that the Tribune misses…

Gov. Rod Blagojevich, whose administration has been beset by myriad investigations, disclosed almost $1 million in new legal bills Tuesday, on top of the $1.1 million he’s already paid to a prominent Chicago firm.

The governor’s campaign spokesman reported $965,352 in legal fees for 2007, bringing Blagojevich’s total tab to more than $2 million in billings for Winston & Strawn. The legal spending comes after federal investigators began ramping up their probes into alleged wrongdoing involving state hiring, contracting and board appointments in 2006.

The Trib’s number for 2007 is inaccurate. Blagojevich paid another $163,770 to Winston & Strawn in January of last year, plus a couple of other smaller legal tabs to Hinshaw & Culbertson and Robbins Schwartz Nicholas Lifton & Tay.

* But here’s the rub: Blagojevich didn’t report a half million dollars in legal bills until six months after he was supposed to…

Blagojevich’s campaign did not state $555,255 of the legal tab on campaign records until about six months after the information was legally required to be made public.

Campaign spokesman Doug Scofield said the delay was due to negotiations over the bill and he doesn’t expect to receive penalties for the late filing. The amount is listed in campaign records as an unpaid debt, but Scofield said there is money to cover the bill.

* The trouble with Scofield’s explanation is that it’s the exact same excuse they used when they reported a Winston & Strawn debt back in the summer of 2006

A campaign spokeswoman said the debt represented charges the campaign is questioning

So, in 2006, they went ahead and reported a legal debt and said the reason they hadn’t paid it was because they disputed the bill.

In 2007, they didn’t report a debt because they say they disputed the legal bill, but then they reported it in 2008 once the bill was straightened out.

One explanation for two completely opposite actions, and it’s all bull.

* I’ve explained what I think happened to subscribers today. But I’ll speculate further here that the governor was also embroiled in a knock-down, drag-out fight with Speaker Madigan last July 31st, when the D-2 was filed. Disclosing his gigantic Winston & Strawn legal tab would’ve been highly disadvantageous to the governor’s position.

* Either way, the guv ought to be severely fined for not reporting a very large bill that was submitted to his campaign fund. The bills come in every month, and whether you agree with them or not, they’re supposed to be reported.

I know he likes to ignore the Constitution and the law and all that, but he needs to be called to account on this one.

But, let’s move along…

$2 million in legal fees? Over a million dollars in the past year alone? What the heck?

I couldn’t agree more with the BGA

“Despite the governor’s rhetoric of ‘There’s nothing here,’ these [campaign] filings show there is at least $1 million worth of something for somebody to look at,” said Jay Stewart, executive director of the Better Government Association.

* By the way, after subtracting the money he owes Jim Thompson, the governor’s campaign fund is left with about $1 million in cash.

That’s half what Lisa Madigan now has in her account, and $700,000 less than Dan Hynes has in his.

  26 Comments      


Chicago Mag takes a bite out of Blagojevich

Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008 - Posted by Rich Miller

* Chicago Magazine’s article “Mr. Unpopularity” is now online. I’m quoted throughout the piece, but here’s my favorite…

The governor’s strange behavior has been fertile ground for local armchair psychologists. Last summer, the downstate newspaper the Peoria Journal Star declared that the governor was “going bonkers.” Privately, a few people who know the governor describe him as a “sociopath,” and they insist they’re not using hyperbole. State representative Joe Lyons, a fellow Democrat from Chicago, told reporters that Blagojevich was a “madman” and “insane.” “He shows absolutely no remorse,” says Jack Franks, the Democratic state representative. “I don’t think he gives a damn about anybody else’s feelings. He tries to demonize people who disagree with him; he’s got delusions of grandeur.”

Miller points out that people shouldn’t blame Blagojevich’s lousy governing skills on his personality alone: “You can be insane—totally whacked out psychologically—and be a good governor or a good president.”

* The reporter did a good job of capturing what’s going on…

The bitterness between Blagojevich and his chief nemesis, Michael Madigan, hit an all-time low in October, after the Blagojevich administration abruptly fired Bronwyn Rains—the wife of Madigan’s chief of staff, Timothy Mapes—from her job as a child psychologist at the Department of Human Services. Rains had held the contractual position for 24 years and had a clean record. Blagojevich’s office justified the firing by claiming that Rains didn’t meet federally mandated educational requirements. But no one was buying that, at least in Springfield. “Once you start firing people’s spouses, you’ve declared nuclear war,” says one leading Democratic operative from Chicago. “And once you’ve gone nuclear, you can’t get rid of the fallout.”

* And…

But Rich Miller says Blagojevich “believes so fervently he’s in the right that I don’t think he’s capable of understanding when people tell him he’s wrong.” If you don’t support his plan on, say, state-subsidized mammograms for women, then you’re for breast cancer. Or if you reject his education-funding initiatives, then you’re for dumb kids. “Rod has difficulty separating personal differences from the need to govern,” adds Fritchey, a former friend of Blagojevich’s who is now one of his loudest critics. “The role of governor is not that of the kid with the bat and ball who says, ‘If you don’t play by my rules, I’m taking my stuff and going home.’ That’s not how you govern. One does not govern by edict.”

A few people who work closely with Blagojevich’s office say they know that members of his staff have tried to get him to tone down the inflammatory rhetoric. But the governor shows no evidence of having a personality Plan B. “He can’t control himself,” says Miller.

* And…

“Something happened to him after he won the [gubernatorial] primary,” says a prominent Democratic fundraiser, one of Blagojevich’s former friends. “I wish I could tell you what it was—I don’t think anyone has figured out what happened. It was like a personality change.”

The problem may come in part because Blagojevich grew up on Chicago politics. “He wants to govern like Daley,” says Miller, explaining that Blagojevich wants a legislature that is a rubber stamp, as the city council has been for much of the Daley era. “But you can’t automatically govern like Daley.” Miller says it took Daley years to build relationships with council members and establish his iron-tight grip on the chamber.

Go read the whole thing. David Bernstein did a very good job. And he didn’t screw up any of my quotes, for which I’m thankful.

* I’m told I made this piece, too, but I haven’t seen it yet and it’s not online.

  39 Comments      


In defense of the locals

Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008 - Posted by Rich Miller

* We’ve been hearing for weeks from the national punditry that Barack Obama hasn’t been fully vetted by the media. I think that’s mostly wrong, and I angrily told that to a national reporter who called me last week.

Will something else come out about Obama? Could be. One never knows what might get mentioned at Tony Rezko’s trial, for instance.

But the Tribune explains today what they dug through to get at any connections between the law firm Obama worked for and Rezko…

At the Tribune’s request, Cook County Circuit Court Chief Judge Timothy Evans produced a list of all 260 civil and criminal cases in which the firm filed appearances, and the Tribune separately examined 1990s lawsuits that Rezmar Corp. listed in applications for government grants. The paper also examined files from the Illinois Housing Development Authority and the city housing department, as well as the hundreds of clients Obama listed in the unusually frank ethics disclosure reports he filed as a state senator from December 1995 through April 2004.

The scouring turned out mostly to be a dud. Still, it was a heckuva lot of work.

* That doesn’t include all the other stuff the Tribune has done, like this

The Tribune analyzed 119 grants in which Obama steered more than $6 million for Chicago projects between late 1999 and late 2002, the heart of his Statehouse career and the center of a state government frenzy in which Obama said the pork-barrel process was “wide open.”

* The Trib has also filed dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests on Obama, sources say, and they combed through Obama’s list of nearly 100 interns to find one connected to Rezko. And, of course, it was the Tribune which figured out that Rezko had bought the lot next door to Obama’s house.

* The Sun-Times has been doing a lot of work, too, like this piece which tracked down a bunch of people who attended a long-ago Obama fundraiser hosted by Rezko.

* The CS-T also dug into something I wouldn’t even dream of doing

A Sun-Times review of student evaluations from Obama’s 10 years of teaching part-time at the University of Chicago Law School shows that students almost always rated Obama as one of their top instructors — except for one quarter in 1997.

That’s pretty deep, if you ask me.

They also found a photo of Obama and Rezko today that I don’t ever remember seeing.

* And then there’s all the leftover Blair Hull opposition research that’s found its way into the Clinton campaign via her assistant campaign manager Mike Henry, who ran Hull’s disastrous 2004 primary against Obama. One of Hull’s sharpest criticisms of Obama was his “Present” votes in the state Senate, so it’s no surprise that Clinton is now using it, too. Sun-Times’ Lynn Sweet made the connection…

Henry, back in 2004, when he was working for Hull, orchestrated a series of mailings to Illinois voters which referenced the Obama present votes on abortion with a picture of a duck and “He ducked” in the headline. The mailings came out just before the March, 2004 Illinois primary so they would be hard to rebut.

Sweet has been following Obama around for months, tracking his every move. Nobody has more intense coverage of Obama’s campaign than Sweet.

* Again, something more may be found. The Tribune and the Sun-Times might possibly still be working on stories. There may be a “silver bullet” in Hull’s old OR that hasn’t been used yet (I doubt it, however).

But for the national types to claim that Obama’s past is mostly unknown is just a total crock. All they have to do is comb through the Tribune and CS-T’s archives, or try the Google. A lot of very hard work has already been done, and is still being done today. Too many reporters based in DC, or NY, or LA think that all there is to know is in their own publications. Not so.

I often criticize the media, but in this instance I’d like to take my hat off to the locals who have really done a bang-up job on this Obama thing.

  31 Comments      


Morning shorts

Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008 - Posted by Kevin Fanning

* Lawyer’s deep pockets in Ill. judicial race raise hackles

* State renews $500,000 PR contract for health care

* Arlington Hts. trustees favor slot machines at racetrack

* Cook County warns of 1,500 layoffs

* Our Opinion: Governor’s legal tactics a disgrace

* State’s delay in paying bills has impact on everyone

* Tribune Co. probably will still own Cubs this season

* Funding cuts may curtail nuclear waste recycling program

* Citywide WiFi fails to emerge in Naperville, Aurora

* Foster, Oberweis for U.S. Congress

* Oberweis campaign “whacked” for website changes

* Foster, Laesch Pick up Endorsements in IL-14 Congressional

* Already endorsed by Sun-Times

* IL-03 Roundup #4

* Candidate Jimmy Lee focuses on Economic Development During his “Eleven in the Eleventh” Series

* Campaign cash rolls into state’s attorney’s race

* Romney’s son to speak at Lincoln Day Dinner

* Consultant, ex-White House staffer vie to take on Mark Kirk in 10th District

* Kendall coroner faces primary challenge

* Daily Herald presidential primary endorsements

*Durbin helps fight bug battle

* Giannoulias: Some banks agree to waive fees for Holocaust reparations

  8 Comments      


Finally, a candidate I can support

Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008 - Posted by Rich Miller

* Jacob Schulz, better known on this blog as “JakeCP,” has been a commenter here for quite a while now. The high school student appears wise beyond his years, has his own website and a YouTube page and was even interviewed on Chicago Public Radio for his campaign efforts in 2006 after he was featured here.

Jake is running for reelection for student representative on the Local School Council at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago. Here’s his campaign ad…


Go Jake!

You can donate to Jake’s burgeoning empire by clicking here.

  12 Comments      


Protected: SUBSCRIBERS ONLY - Poll results from today’s issue, plus previous results

Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008 - Posted by Rich Miller

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Protected: SUBSCRIBERS ONLY - Today’s edition of Capitol Fax

Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008 - Posted by Rich Miller

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« NEWER POSTS PREVIOUS POSTS »
* Uber’s Local Partnership = Stress-Free Travel For Paratransit Riders
* Isabel’s afternoon roundup
* Caption contest!
* Pritzker calls on new CPS president to resign, citing 'antisemitism, misogyny, fringe conspiracy theories' (Resignation reported)
* Happy Halloween!
* Roundup: Madigan corruption trial
* Question of the day
* The word 'voters' is doing a lot of heavy lifting in these 'voter confidence' stories
* Showcasing The Retailers Who Make Illinois Work
* Open thread
* Isabel’s morning briefing
* SUBSCRIBERS ONLY - Supplement to today's edition
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