* We have a special election Saturday, so I will probably put a post up sometime. You can head to Illinoize for other updates…
* Now, turn the volume ALL THE WAY UP…
Help me baby, ain’t no stranger
* And while the volume is loud…
Destroyed your notion of circular time
I think I blew out three pair of headphones listening to Sticky Fingers. Man, what an album. That big tempo/time break by Charlie in the middle of “Sister Morphine” is worth the price by itself.
Well it just goes to show,
Things are not what they seem
Deputy Governor Louanner Peters, U.S. Representative Danny K. Davis and other elected officials will today respond to allegations that clemency petitions for the African-American community are political.
WHO: Deputy Governor Louanner Peters
U.S. Representative Danny K. Davis
Other elected officials
Oy.
* 3:37 pm - I forgot to post this earlier today, but SurveyUSA has conducted polling in all 50 states matching Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton against John McCain. Illinois’ results can be found at this link. It’s 60-31 in the Obama-McCain matchup and 48-37 in the Clinton-McCain pairing.
All states are here (Obama vs. McCain) and here (Clinton vs. McCain).
*** 4:21 pm *** John Laesch narrowly lost the Democratic primary in the 14th Congressional District to Bill Foster. Now, literally on the eve of Foster’s special election against Republican Jim Oberweis, Laesch has petitioned for a discovery recount. Read it here.
As if the $125 ticket wasn’t bad enough, Lauren Kamm’s illegal left turn onto Ashland Avenue in Chicago earned her an extra surprise: Her driver’s license was confiscated.
Kamm was told it would be returned after her case was completed, a process potentially lasting weeks. While she could still drive legally with a copy of the ticket, the thought of having no photo identification sent her into a panic, especially since she planned to attend a college reunion at a North Side bar the next night. […]
Illinois is one of the few states where officers can — and often do — take a driver’s license during routine traffic stops. But a group of state officials is trying to change that. In an era when a government-issued photo ID is often needed to board an airplane or make a credit-card purchase, the practice is antiquated, they said. […]
Now, state law requires that drivers ticketed for a moving violation post bail. They do that by paying $75 at the police station, surrendering a bond card (usually available from insurance companies) or giving up their driver’s license. Police officers also can just ask for a signature, but such leniency is rare.
* Question: Should Illinois do away with or modify this law? Explain.
* It’s not a good idea to mess with the newspapers, even when they’re greedy…
State lawmakers gave early approval to a law that would allow newspapers to continue selling pictures from high school state championship tournaments without restriction.
The proposal, approved by a Senate committee Thursday, stems from incidents in which the Illinois High School Association barred newspaper photographers from football and basketball sidelines during championship games unless they agreed the images won’t be sold.
Those that refuse to sign such agreements have been relegated to the stands or press box. The IHSA, which is not a state agency, recently relaxed its policy and granted access during the girls’ basketball championships. The boys’ basketball championships start this weekend in Peoria.
DeJuan Kea of the Illinois Statewide School Management Alliance said schools oppose the legislation in part because they fear they will have to start paying dues to cover the cost of student athletics.
“At the end of the day, I think this all comes down to a profit, regardless of whether they want to admit it or not,” Kea said.
The IHSA this week proposed a deal that would let news organizations take and sell any photos they wanted at nearly all high school sporting events, except for the state tournament finals. Photos from those final playoff games could be given away or sold “at cost,” IHSA executive director Marty Hickman told the committee. […]
“The real issue here for us, for the newspaper industry, is that we have a product that’s our product, and what we do with it is our business,” [IPA executive director David Bennett] said. “For them to say that we can’t do that is unconstitutional.”
* They do have the 1st Amendment on their side, and barring shooters from the games is not a good idea. But this isn’t about the photos that appear in newspapers, it’s about the cash newspapers are making from reselling those photos to the public. Check out the SJ-R’s reprint prices…
Size………. Unframed…… Framed
14″ Full Page $29.95 each $129.99 each
21″ Full Page $45.95 each $169.99 each
And if you try to reprint or even post anything without their permission, they get all lawyerly on you.
Most legislators receive pretty favorable coverage in their hometown papers, so they’re naturally reluctant to tell them to stick it.
[Note from Rich: This was obviously written by my intern, a notorious Cub fan. lol]
* Former Governor Jim Thompson has been doing a lot of damage control lately to calm down fans over Sam Zell’s brash comments regarding the possible sale of Wrigley Field. He’s assuaged concerns over a sacrilegious name change, revocation of cherished landmark status, and moans over another TIF on sales taxes.
As a Cubs fan, I think the proposal sounds moderate enough. I think most of my latte sipping, Birkenstock wearing, yuppie counterparts will tell you that they really don’t care if you relax the landmark status, so long as they don’t change the name.
Many have even expressed positive sentiments over a compromise by selling the naming rights of the plaza, and not the Wrigley Field name. I can live with something like “Wrigley Field at the Bank of America Plaza.”
The upgrades to the Friendly Confines could include repairs to deteriorated concrete, enhancement of kitchen and food service facilities, additional luxury seats, widened concourses, parking, and neighborhood improvements, he said.
Real fans will tell you that, honestly, they just want to see their team win a Championship before they die.
* But the proposal is alienating Cubs fans less and less, and is instead angering many taxpayers, especially downstate ones:
Don’t let ’em fool you. Tax dollars spent to refurbish Wrigley are dollars that can’t be spent anywhere else. The needs of institutions like the schools and parks will have to be offset by service cuts or other tax hikes. As Zell likes to tell his employees, there’s no such thing as free lunch.
* The argument is a valid one, and deserves debate. But many will tell you that the state did the something similar for the Soldier Field renovations. Lawmakers approved a $587 million package for Soldier Field. That plan included about $400 million worth of taxpayer-supported bonds issued by the Sports Facilities Authority, which was created in the 1980s to build U.S. Cellular Field, home to baseball’s White Sox.
The bubble that is more likely to burst is the faction of downstate voters and legislators who are still angry over the CTA bailout fight, and the lack of a capital bill to finance necessary infrastructure improvements:
“I think it’s a bad idea,” said Sen. Dave Koehler, D-Peoria. “It’s nice we can all be nostalgic about the Cubs, but I’m not sure how any of us downstate (benefit) unless they put together a package that does benefit us.”
* What do you think should be done about Wrigley Field? Try, as hard as it may be, to keep your team biases aside.
***UPDATE*** This is the link to the audio of Former Governor Jim Thompson on the Spike O’Dell Show earlier this week that Reddbyrd talked about in their post. It’s pretty funny.
* This may be a better press pop than a legal precedent…
Oberweis Dairy went to state court Thursday to try to stop the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from continuing to air ads that claimed illegal immigrants worked at its stores.
Oberweis Dairy President Joe Oberweis said claims in the political commercials directed at his father — Republican congressional candidate Jim Oberweis — are false and damaging to the business.
“Politics are politics, but at the end of the day, I’ve got to stand up and defend our business,” Joe Oberweis said.
* Here’s the ad in question…
* Illegal immigrants did work in one of his stores, but they weren’t Oberweis employees. They worked for a contractor who was fired. The ad never explicitly says Oberweis Dairy hired them. But it is an unfair hit.
* Even so, Oberweis has his own trouble with staying within the bounds of reality…
Rob Wadsworth is a firefighter. His wife, Amanda, works as an office assistant. They live in Yorkville and get by OK on $73,000 a year. They have a mop-headed little boy and a cute little girl. Take a look at their photo here. Aren’t they just adorable?
Well, life’s not all rosy for the Wadsworths. Rob likes to hit the tavern with his buddies after work, so Amanda basically has two jobs because someone has to ride herd on the kids — one’s a chronic shoplifter, the other likes to play with matches and neither of them can recite the alphabet without prompting — and Rob says he’d come home if Amanda’s hag of a mother wasn’t there all the time …
Actually, we made up that last part … but who cares? Jim Oberweis made up the Wadsworths!
He also made up Juan and Maria Garcia, a construction worker and a bank teller from Aurora who have three kids and haul in $54,778 a year. And DeKalb office manager Sheila Johnson, a divorced mother of two who makes $47,333. And Juan and Elena Marcos, who have a precious little baby boy and live on his $68,044 salary.
They’re all pictured in a mailer for Oberweis’ campaign for Congress in the 14th District.
Talking to Kane County GOP leaders Wednesday, Oberweis begged for help: “This is a challenging race with significant national attention. We need your help. This race is very close. It’s within 1 or 2 percentage points either way. If the Democrats win this seat we will hear nothing but, ‘Boy, the tide has turned. Democrats are taking over all across the country, they’ve just won Speaker Hastert’s seat.’ If we can hold this seat on the Republican side, the story will be . . . a tide turning in favor of Republicans.”
* Since it’s so close, the Oberweis campaign is trying to get the dirt out on Foster. This is from ABC 7, the most widely watched news in the region…
Oberweis has earned a reputation for tough tactics in his repeated runs for public office in Illinois, and this race is no exception. But now the man Oberweis and Foster are competing to replace, former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, is getting his hands dirty, slamming Foster in a radio interview Thursday morning.
“He’s had some personal problems in his life. He’s not as squeaky clean as everyone thought he was,” Hastert told WLS-AM.
Insiders say the “personal problems” Hastert referred to are veiled reference to Foster’s messy divorce a dozen years ago.
The problem with that line of attack is that Foster’s ex will defend him. This will only work as a last-minute ploy when Foster can’t rebut.
But after meeting at length with both candidates, this endorsement was not such a difficult call. Oberweis was forceful and informed, while Foster was a disappointment. Though a respected physicist, he failed to do his homework, unable to discuss important issues in anything but superficial terms.
Wilmette businessman Tony Rezko raised money for candidates in both political parties — including Democratic Gov. Blagojevich, former GOP Gov. Jim Edgar and Illinois senator turned Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama — but he never asked for anything in return, Rezko’s lead defense counsel said this afternoon.
“The government has embraced what will probably be the most corrupt individual you will ever see in your life –a very, very sophisticated con man in the fullest sense of the word,” Duffy said in an opening statement.
He said claims about Rezko’s role in the corruption by Levine are false and began as name dropping to impress people. He said Levine is now lying about Rezko in hopes of getting a lenient 67-month prison sentence.
* A surprisingly large number of the charges against Rezko are based on what Stu Levine told others. And Levine has a whole lot of problems…
“Mr. Levine’s days at times would include the substance Special K — and it wasn’t the cereal,” he said.
Instead, it was ketamine, an animal tranquilizer that Levine took in liberal amounts, as well as cocaine, ecstasy, pot and crystal meth, he said.
“Defendant Rezko was the man behind the curtain pulling the strings,” Hamilton told jurors as the trial expected to last three to four months and hand Blagojevich a nasty black eye got under way.
One of the first witnesses, FBI agent Charles A. Willenborg, said that federal investigators have identified $1,437,350 raised by Rezko for Blagojevich from 2000 to December 2004.
* Barack Obama wasn’t mentioned by prosecutors yesterday, but the defense dropped his name, which got some people all atwitter…
Antoin “Tony” Rezko’s attorney on Thursday invoked presidential front-runner Barack Obama’s name in telling jurors what good judgment Rezko has in picking friends — an unwelcome compliment for Obama — as yet another federal corruption trial involving Illinois politics gets under way.
As if to make sure jurors were getting the point, the defense also noted that the star witness against Rezko was a disciple of disgraced former Gov. George Ryan.
He needs to do it soon, because half-baked stories like this are beginning to spread…
Accused Illinois fixer Antoin “Tony” Rezko is in debt by $50 million and relies on “family” handouts of $7,500 a month to pay monthly costs, according to a previously sealed court transcript reviewed by ABC News.
Rezko’s bleak financial picture raises the question of how the Rezkos were able to buy a vacant lot adjoining the home of Sen. Barack Obama in 2005, at a time Rezko says he was already in deep debt.
Super-active, bigtime developers like Rezko rarely have a lot of cash on hand. They live on borrowed money. They were able to “afford” the lot because Rezko, like most other developers, had a giant line of credit, which dried up after he was indicted.
* And, finally, I will say this again: if Jimmy DeLeo was the “real” governor, we wouldn’t have been in session for eleven months last year. That notion simply defies all reality. Influence? Sure. Friendship? Certainly. Does he call the shots? Preposterous.
This is sent on behalf of Director Roger E. Walker Jr.
As many of you already know, the CMS Garage has implemented an interim policy that requires IDOC Central Office approval on ALL vehicle repairs and maintenance issues. This new policy is due to IDOC’s overall lack of payment to CMS Garage for services rendered over the past few years. Given this, we need to curtail the amount of vehicles we are sending through the CMS garages for repairs. Please only have vehicles repaired if it is an emergency situation. This may mean “sidelining” a few vehicles from your fleet for the remainder of the fiscal year if necessary.
The e-mail was sent under the heading “CMS State Garages will not work on IDOC vehicles.”
Despite the memo’s title, Corrections spokesman Derek Schnapp said later, “CMS is not turning away work.”
“We are taking a tighter look at what we are spending. We want to prioritize spending. We’re going to keep repairing and maintaining our vehicles.” […]
Corrections this year budgeted $6.8 million for automotive fuel and maintenance. Schnapp said Corrections owes about $2 million to CMS for work done on Corrections vehicles, some of it held over from previous budgets.
“It’s all money coming out of the same pocket,” said Sen. Larry Bomke, R-Springfield. “It makes no sense at all. This is similar to what we are seeing out at the fairgrounds. It’s the governor’s office cutting everyone back so much they can’t run their offices.”
Bomke is right on target. These are chargebacks that mean little except to provide a way to squeeze money out of agencies.
* Apparently, a failure to budget for high gas prices is partly to blame…
Corrections spokesman Derek Schnapp blamed high gas prices and higher maintenance costs for creating the debt. In addition, Schnapp said the agency hasn’t purchased any new vehicles in recent years.
‘’We are working with CMS to resolve this issue,'’ said Schnapp.
Prison officials contend the situation will not affect the operation of the department.
If it won’t effect operations, why bother with the memo?
The state is paying more than $1 million over two years for 235 parking spaces in private garages around the Thompson Center.
It’s a questionable expense, especially when the state is so strapped for cash, says Ed Bedore, a member of the state’s Procurement Policy Board, a little-known watchdog agency. He points to the wealth of public transportation options that are available. […]
The $1.1 million parking tab includes $47,400 that the state prisons are paying InterPark, Inc. for 10 spots near the Thompson Center. All of those are for top prison officials, according to an Illinois Department of Corrections spokesman and a spokeswoman for Gov. Blagojevich — though a Blagojevich administration memo, written in June and obtained by the Sun-Times, says some “parking spaces serve the governor’s office staff.”
$47,400 is a drop in the bucket, but when your prison department can’t fix its fleet, every little bit helps.
* Once again, Cook County Board President Todd Stroger is his own worst enemy. Right on the point, but severely bumbled execution…
Cook County Board President Todd Stroger on Thursday disputed the findings of a report suggesting patronage was alive and well in county government, then admitted he had not read the 54-page document.
“I haven’t read her report yet,” Stroger said, referring to the review filed in court last week by retired Cook County Circuit Judge Julia Nowicki, a federally appointed hiring monitor.
Stroger said he knew about the report’s details from newspaper accounts. “I can read the newspaper,” said Stroger, a freshman board president and former Chicago alderman. “I’ve got a good education.”
“We have cooperated with her office, but the way the report was written, it makes it appear there have been things that have been going on that are illegal in hiring since I’ve been the president, but it’s not the case.”
* I had the exact same reaction to the report, which relies on a whole lot of hearsay from disgruntled employees and never really pins down when any of the alleged violations happened. And if you read it closely, you’ll see that some of those violations obviously happened under Stroger’s father. Others aren’t clear when they occurred, and that obfuscation looks deliberate to me. Go read it yourself and see.
* But, that reality is barely mentioned in the press. Instead, stuff like this is buried or ignored…
County taxpayers have now paid almost $1 million to Nowicki, with another nearly $1 million due in expenses, as she and a staff of investigators and attorneys comb through hundreds of patronage claims from 2004-2006.
Doesn’t that timeline prove Stroger’s argument? He was elected in 2006, the end point of the probe. Yet the coverage so far has made it appear as if Stroger himself is responsible.
* But, for crying out loud, it only took me a few minutes to read the report. Stroger should have taken time out from his schedule to at least glance through it. This shows supreme goofiness on Stroger’s part. Read it, pick it apart, praise some areas, criticize others, and then move on. Is that so difficult?
* ComEd, shocked by high interest rates, may pass costs to customers
ComEd, a division of Exelon Corp., is obligated to service a whopping $343 million in auction-rate, tax-exempt debt—pollution-control bonds with interest rates that in some cases have jumped from about 3.5 percent to as high as 12 percent.
Beaubien is sponsoring House Bill 4905, which would require analyses of how pension bills for police and firefighters will affect finances for specific cities around the state.
Spurning another effort to modify the new statewide smoking ban, an Illinois House committee on Tuesday voted against a proposal that would allow businesses to buy special licenses if they want to permit indoor smoking.
“We’ve had eight shootings over the weekend, [four] homicides, and we’re here dilly-dallying, talking about 50 [veteran officers] still behind the desk, turning classes away and all of our wards are in need of police protection,” said Police Committee Chairman Isaac Carothers (29th).
