* 4:54 pm - The blog is running a tad slow right now because several people are accessing an 82 MB audio file of the Senate Executive Committee. Sorry for any delays you might be experiencing, but the slowness appears fairly slight considering the traffic.
* 2:22 pm - No surprise here, but after a raucous two-hour debate, the Senate Executive Committee refused to vote on the proposed constitutional amendment to recall state officials. We’ll have some audio clips later. Quite the show.
State senators advanced legislation Wednesday to allow Illinois voters to say whether the state should put a graduated income tax instead of the current flat tax.
The Senate Executive Committee voted 7-5 to send the proposed constitutional amendment to the full Senate.
Sen. Kwame Raoul (D-Chicago) called the flat tax—which is 3 percent for individuals—unfair and regressive. He maintained putting the measure before voters would allow debate on potential changes in the state tax strucuture.
* 2:34 pm - The governor tried to make a joke yesterday when asked about the Tony Rezko trial…
Well I—I appreciate that question. That’s the first time anybody’s ever asked me that. Um.
And the pressure may be getting to his staff…
To the side, Blagojevich’s press secretary could be seen with her head in her hand.
Illinois’ gambling casinos would be able to ignore the new law banning most indoor smoking under a plan that a state Senate panel narrowly approved today.
The legislation would keep the casino exemption in place for five years.
Sen. Frank Watson, R-Greenville, is the lead supporter of the idea, which he says will help casinos that have seen revenue drop because of the statewide smoking ban. By a 7-6 vote in the Senate Executive Committee, Watson added the casino exemption as an amendment to Senate Bill 2707.
* 3:18 pm - The House is currently debating HB 758…
Amends the Firearm Owners Identification Card Act. Provides that the requirements of sales of firearms at a gun show apply to private sales or transfers of handguns by persons who are not federally licensed firearm dealers.
* 3:56 pm - The gun bill, HB 758, came up short by two votes. 58-58-0.
Amends the Minimum Wage Law. Eliminates provisions that allowed an hourly wage of 50 cents below the regular minimum wage to be paid to an employee under 18 years of age. Makes other conforming changes. Effective January 1, 2009.
* 4:42 pm - The minimum wage bill passed with 62 votes, but a verification has been requested. The verification upheld the vote. The bill is declared passed.
* 4:49 pm - Statement from Gov. Blagojevich on the failed gun bill vote…
“Today’s House vote is yet another crushing disappointment to everyone involved in the fight against gun violence. We need common sense gun legislation and we need it now.” […]
Nationwide, 40% of gun transactions occur through unlicensed sellers and no-questions-asked private deals that require no background checks. A recent report by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives found that unlicensed sellers were involved in about one-fifth of trafficking investigations and associated with nearly 23,000 illegal guns.
* The Pope has arrived in America, but I was raised a Lutheran, so here’s a link to Lutheran Day in Illinois, which is today.
* Consultant releases study claiming low racial minority levels in DuPage County results in low crime rate, then claims…
MGT partner Karl Becker acknowledged the report was lacking supporting data regarding the minority population assessment, but said he stood by the report’s conclusions.
“I have no data, but I’m sure I’m right.” I wonder how much that one cost?
* Unless somebody comes up with a very large (and I do mean large) pile of cash, I promise that I will never use those sneaky pop-up ads like the Tribune and Sun-Times have. The ads are activated when you highlight text on a page. It doesn’t happen every time on every page, but it’s supremely annoying because they get around my popup blocking software in my browsers.
* Google follows through on a public pledge to make sure a new airwave spectrum is open to all by making a huge bid, is then outbid, auction brings in record amount of money, yet Google is accused of gaming the system by congresscritters like Illinois’ own John Shimkus. Seriously weird.
* The Reader and Frank Coconate are being sued by James Sachay, the former assistant commissioner of the Chicago Aviation Department…
James Sachay alleges in court papers that Coconate posted blog comments under Sachay’s name, including one that said: “I am voting for Frank Coconate. I am sorry I challenged his petitions under false pretenses. I am sorry I stole money from Roman Pucinski. I am sorry I got illegal contracts for my son and acted criminally at O’Hare.”
At the time, Coconate was running against Ralph Capparelli for 41st Ward committeeman; Sachay worked for Capparelli. (Both lost to caterer Mary O’Connor, president of the Edison Park Chamber of Commerce)
Coconate denies that he posted the items, but the Reader’s blogs have a horrible reputation for allowing all sorts of ugly stuff in their comments. The courts have already ruled that we’re not responsible for what’s said in our comment sections, as long as it doesn’t violate copyright laws, but the Reader really needs to clean its act up. I hate linking to stories over there because of that situation.
* This means nothing, but he ran for Senate here once, so I guess I ought to link to it.
* We finally have a new prosecution witness in the Tony Rezko trial, and he seems much more believable than Stu Levine. Joe Cari was a bigtime Democratic fundraiser, but, like Levine, backed Jim Ryan for governor in 2002. Cari’s connections to Bill Clinton and his fundraising prowess for Al Gore allegedly brought him to the attention of Blagojevich…
Gov. Blagojevich was sitting across from his then-deputy governor, Bradley Tusk, on the New Jersey-bound private plane in 2003 when Tusk got up and asked well-known Democratic political fund-raiser Joseph Cari if he’d switch seats.
Cari didn’t know the governor well, he testified Tuesday at Tony Rezko’s corruption trial. So Cari was surprised when Blagojevich offered a vision for his political future and told Cari he could play a role.
“The governor wanted to know about my experience in the 2000 election” as one of unsuccessful presidential hopeful Al Gore’s top fund-raisers, Cari testified. “He then slid into how excited he was to be governor, some of the dreams he had and also he had aspirations beyond the governorship.”
Cari quoted Blagojevich as saying Rezko and another fundraiser, Christopher Kelly, were his most trusted advisers and “they were going to be the key people in his public service wherever it went.” Blagojevich told him there would be “investment banking work, consulting work to give to the people who helped them,” Cari said.
“Wherever it went” meant the White House. Remember those days? Seems like eons ago.
Back in Chicago, Cari said he was summoned to meetings with both Rezko and Kelly where they urged him to raise money for Blagojevich.
He said Kelly “pushed me pretty hard — that this would be good for my law firm and my private equity firm, that I could have whatever I wanted but they needed help raising funds nationally.”
Cari said he met with Stuart Levine at Rezko’s office in January that year. Rezko said he had the power to award contracts and get consultants hired through the governor’s then-chief of staff, Lon Monk, Cari said.
“Mr. Monk took direction from [Rezko],” Cari told the jury.
Rezko illustrated his clout by picking up the phone and apparently calling Monk in front of him, Cari said.
Assistant U.S. Atty. Reid Schar then asked Cari, who was a managing director at an investment firm known as HealthPoint, what Rezko told him he could do for him.
“Legal work or help for HealthPoint,” Cari said. “Things like that that would be helpful to me.”
And what did Rezko ask in return? Schar queried.
“To raise money for the governor, nationally,” Cari said.
* Related stories…
* Blagojevich apparently following Rezko case after all
A Cook County judge Tuesday erected a new speed bump in front of Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s efforts to broadly expand state-subsidized health care.
But the judge also allowed the governor to move forward on his expansion of a program to screen uninsured Illinois women for breast and cervical cancer.
[The judge] decided that the administration was within its rights to extend an existing program for breast and cervical cancer screenings to women age 65 and older. He said the legislature approved $6 million for the program without imposing limits, allowing the department to expand the benefits as long as it was within that $6 million appropriation.
The governor wants to spend far more than $6 million on the cancer screening, but that was not an issue. It could become an issue at trial, if this thing gets that far.
“The judge’s decision is mostly good news,” Blagojevich said at a news conference in Chicago.
Yep. It was an “up” day for the governor.
* As I told you yesterday, the judge did block the Family Care expansion…
The FamilyCare ruling simply requires that people enrolled must work or seek work, Blagojevich spokeswoman Abby Ottenhoff said.
“We believe most, if not all, enrollees currently meet this requirement,” Ottenhoff said. “We intend to address the issue raised by the court so we can continue to protect health coverage for people in FamilyCare.”
That would have to be done through legislation. We don’t have a great climate for legislative fixes these days.
In an apparent jab at Blagojevich, House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago) lent support to a proposed universal health-care system far broader than the failed plan the governor offered last year. Rep. Rosemary Mulligan (R-Des Plaines) called it a political ploy by House Democrats to separate themselves from the governor but still back health care.
A Blagojevich administration plan to reorganize and combine administrative functions of some state agencies is drawing fire from a lawmaker who claims it will be used to award contracts to the governor’s favorites.
Rep. Jack Franks, D-Woodstock, a frequent critic of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, said Tuesday he will try to get the House to block the plan.
“I think the governor has been in so much mischief,” Franks said. “This is one way to give him extraordinary power, to have people totally under his thumb, and then bring in outside consultants to increase our costs.”
“It’s basically no-bid contracts galore for the governor,” Franks said.
However, Greg Wass, who holds the newly created title of chief information officer in the Blagojevich administration, said the latest plan is a “carbon copy” of a smaller reorganization undertaken in 2006.
Illinois Senate Democrats [yesterday] took the wraps off their version of legislation to get rid of “pay to play” politics in state government.
The measure, an amended version of House Bill 824, would bar contractors who do more than $50,000 in business with the state from contributing to the political funds of any officeholder who awarded the contract. It also would bar those contractors from making political contributions to any of the officeholder’s declared challengers.
The Senate plan differs in some ways from another ethics proposal that passed the House last year but has sat idle in the Senate. Under that legislation, House Bill 1, individuals who have contracts worth $25,000 or more would be prohibited from making political contributions.
Rep. John Fritchey, D-Chicago, sponsored HB1. He said [yesterday] that he thinks the two sides can reach a compromise on ethics legislation that could pass in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
* Both myself and the Sun-Times called the appellate court’s denial of Bob Sorich’s appeal a “green light” for prosecutors this morning. Background from the Tribune…
After winning the convictions in the Sorich trial, prosecutors promised that they would continue their investigation of City Hall corruption.
But the only high-ranking Daley administration official to face charges since has been former Streets and Sanitation Commissioner Al Sanchez, accused last year of arranging jobs for members of the pro-Daley Hispanic Democratic Organization. And no charges have come yet from investigations into hiring at Cook County and in the Blagojevich administration.
“The presumption of people in politics has been that a lot of other things were waiting on this decision,” said Cook County Commissioner Mike Quigley (D-Chicago). “It backed up a very important tool to ferret out corruption.”
* The Sun-Times scored a former federal prosecutor for its explanation…
“In my opinion, the decision that came down today blessed the aggressive posture that the U.S. Attorney’s office has taken in corruption cases,” he said. “A contrary decision would have had a chilling effect on the future cases considered by the U.S. Attorney’s office.”
Prosecutors were fearful — and defense attorneys hopeful — that the court might throw out the convictions based on a decision last year tossing out a conviction of an aide to the governor of Wisconsin.
“The court went out of its way to distinguish the Sorich case from [the Wisconsin case],” Collins said. “It focused on the massive and systemic nature of the scheme, compared to the sporadic and episodic corruption in [Wisconsin.]”
That case (US vs. Thompson) has been bandied about for months as a possible saving grace not only for Sorich but for everybody else who hasn’t been zapped yet.
* Sun-Times…
The ruling sent waves of angst through City Hall, Gov. Blagojevich’s office and other government offices […]
“I’m sure there are certain people now who are concerned,” a Blagojevich loyalist told the Sun-Times.
Tuesday’s ruling means the 43-year-old Sorich has 72 hours to report to prison, according to his attorney, Thomas Anthony Durkin. Prosecutors said a federal judge would hear their motion to revoke the bond Thursday.
But Durkin noted he would continue the appeal process, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.
“It is important to remember that the city has moved forward and upward on many fronts since the events in question,” said Daley. “We are operating in close cooperation with the court appointed monitor in all hiring.”.
Hilarious.
* Also, a reminder that a Con-Con can do some good…
Shakman filed the suit after he was beaten in a race for delegate to the 1970 Illinois Constitutional Convention. He blamed the help his opponent got from a horde of precinct captains and other doorbell ringing campaign workers who had jobs on the city payroll.
Gov. Rod Blagojevich said Tuesday he would ask legislators for $25 million to help colleges bolster security, a job the state’s public universities estimated would cost $41 million, according to a state task force.
* Cop with most DUI arrests charged with misconduct, other felonies
“Clearly, anyone who wants to ban plastic [bags] or charge another tax would be more interested in seeing people’s grocery prices go up than we are,” he says. “Everybody wants everything, but nobody wants to pay anything. Well, we’re not going to try to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.”
“My job is not to be a cheerleader for the governor but rather a watchdog for the public,” Quinn said. “And I see recall as the ultimate power the public needs to straighten things out when they really get out of hand.”
