* Today’s “celebrity” harness horse race will be held at the Grandstand today around 2:45 pm. I’ll be racing against flaks from the four legislative caucuses.
Use this post as a State Fair Governor’s Day activities open thread. Or, whatever.
UPDATE: I placed. John Patterson got the win. I’ll have video tomorrow.
The plan is for the Cup to arrive in Springfield around 10 a.m. Friday for a private reception at the Governor’s Mansion with Gov. Pat Quinn for Betty Wirtz and guests.
There will be brunch at the Mansion until noon, and then the trophy will be taken to the Capitol Rotunda for a photo shoot that’s expected to last from about 12:30-2:30 p.m.
Then around 2:30 Friday afternoon, Rocky Wirtz will accompany the Stanley Cup to the Illinois State Fair. For about an hour, the Cup will be at the Governor’s Tent, and then from 4:30-5:30 it will be at the Director’s Lawn for another photo session.
At about 6 p.m., there will be a cocktail reception at the Governor’s Mansion for members of the legislature and Wirtz Beverage Illinois Employees, and the Stanley Cup will spend the night at the Mansion.
* The Question: What’s your fondest State Fair memory?
Bill Brady, the Republican candidate for governor, is pro-life but told a group of Springfield senior citizens on Tuesday that there is not much he can do about abortion if he is elected.
“Yes, I am pro-life,” the state senator from Bloomington told a luncheon of about 40 people at Temple Israel on West Governor Street. “But really, if you look at the makeup of the letter of the law, there’s very little that the governor can do.” […]
He did pledge to implement a state law requiring parental notification before a minor can get an abortion.
“I think a parent should be notified anytime their minor child receives a medical procedure. We can implement that. But other than that, there’s not much a governor can do,” Brady said.
Brady has been hammered by the Democratic Governors Association and others for his pro-life views, so this was a good way to make himself appear to be less scary. And even if there is a total GOP takeover this fall, both the House and Senate Republican leaders are pro-choice. So, he’s got a point.
But Brady’s attempt at moderating the rhetoric didn’t sit well with William Beckman, the executive director of the Illinois Right to Life Committee…
“I think he’s probably, to some degree, minimizing the impact the governor can have,” Beckman said. “Unfortunately, in the state of Illinois, it seems the so-called political advisers seem to be of the mindset that you have to put these kinds of issues under the rug.”
True believers always want their candidates to be as forceful as humanly possible on their issues. But whether it’s the Left wing blasting Obama for being too accomodating with the Republicans or pro-lifers dinging Brady for not being belligerent enough, it’s usually bad politics to follow their advice. What Brady showed with his answers yesterday is that he wants to be the leader of the entire state, not just his base. That’s a good thing.
Republican candidate for Illinois governor Bill Brady says he thinks there’s a “lack of sensitivity” regarding the building of a mosque near the site of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York City.
Brady on Tuesday wouldn’t give an opinion on whether he supports or opposes the mosque site near Ground Zero. He said he hopes “sensitive minds will deal with this in a sensible way.”
Thoughts? And, please, we had a big knock-down drag-out over this mosque thing already this week. There’s no need to rehash it today.
* Illinois Policy Institute Turnaround Tour comes to Decatur seeking solutions to state’s budget woes: About 75 people turned out at the Decatur Conference Center and Hotel on Tuesday for the kickoff of the Illinois Policy Institute’s Turnaround Tour.
* As I told subscribers this morning, Public Policy Polling has a new survey out. Bill Brady is beating Pat Quinn by nine points, 39-30, with 11 for Green Party nominee Rich Whitney and 20 percent undecided. From the pollster…
Pat Quinn’s approval rating is 23% and when it comes to the Illinois Governor’s race that’s about all you need to know. Despite being largely unknown and not particularly well liked Bill Brady leads with 39% to 30% for Quinn and 11% for Green Party candidate Rich Whitney, continuing his path toward becoming one of the most unlikely big state Governors in recent history.
Brady is winning 80% of Republicans while only 60% of Democrats are committed to Quinn. Perhaps most remarkable is the numbers among independents- Brady leads with 40% with Whitney second at 19% and Quinn finishing all the way back in third at 15%.
There’s certainly still room for Quinn to come back but it’s going to depend on whether people vote based on their feelings about the candidates themselves or just choose on party. Among the undecideds 50% are Democrats to only 16% who are Republicans and 67% of them voted for Barack Obama to just 21% who voted for John McCain. Usually you would expect that Democratic leaning crop of undecideds to come home and tighten the race…except that they give Quinn only an 8% approval rating with 49% of them disapproving of him. Getting the votes of Democrats who dislike him is the only way Quinn can pull it out but right now those folks aren’t sure what they’re going to do.
53% of voters disapprove of Quinn. He has only a 40% approval rating even with voters of his own party and Republicans (7/81) and independents (17/60) are pretty universal in their dislike of him. Brady isn’t exactly setting the world on fire either. The largest group of voters, at 45%, have no opinion about him. Among those who do it’s a slightly negative one with 25% seeing him favorably and 30% unfavorably. But at the end of the day the main thing Brady has going for him is that he’s not Pat Quinn and that’s good enough to give him a solid lead less than three months out from the election.
Toplines and crosstabs are here. I need to get to the State Fair soon, so I’m in a bit of a rush. You’ll have to debate this without me.
* There is so much wrong with this commentary that I don’t quite know where to begin…
We don’t need to spend $25 million on a face-saving do-over for Patrick Fitzgerald. The next trial will probably last twice as long as this one, as Fitzgerald calls in witnesses he neglected to cross-examine the first time around — partly because he didn’t realize Blagojevich wouldn’t put up a defense, leaving him with half a case.
We can also do without a retrial because it will give Rod Blagojevich another six months to repeat his wearying claims of innocence. Maybe he wants that, but the rest of Illinois doesn’t.
It wasn’t a total defeat for the government: they got Blagojevich on one count. It wasn’t a total defeat for Blagojevich: he can say he was never convicted of selling the Senate seat. Maybe Fitzgerald wants a rematch for vindication, and Blagojevich wants one so he can get more attention. But Illinois doesn’t want a rematch. We just want to put the Blagojevich years behind us.
$25 million just for the retrial? What credible person is saying that outside of Sam Adam, Jr.? Also, I got news for you, Blagojevich clearly showed yesterday that he’s not gonna keep his big yap shut. A trial, at least, will force him to stay off the airwaves for a while, giving us a respite, no matter how brief.
And who says Illinois doesn’t want a retrial? Our infamous commenter Bill most surely doesn’t, but he’s not exactly representative of the state at large. Sheesh, what a goofy mess.
Fitzgerald’s view was — and remains — that Blagojevich shouldn’t get a pass just because he was as lousy a schemer as he was a governor.
And that seems exactly right to us. […]
A couple of hours after the jury’s verdict was read, Blagojevich’s lead attorney, Sam Adams Jr., ripped into the prosecutors for declaring they would retry the case. Adams asked, “Is this worth it?”
To which we say again: You bet. Elvis has not left the building.
Blagojevich and his brother, Robert, were exonerated of nothing, and Illinois remains too crooked a state for the feds to start looking the other way now.
Admittedly, Blagojevich has already been a gift to reform in Illinois. In the wake of his arrest, the state Legislature was shamed into passing a host of bills designed to promote a cleaner and more transparent government and politics. Illinois now has tighter state procurement laws, stronger freedom of information laws, pension board reforms and stricter limits on campaign contributions.
But only by prosecuting public corruption to the fullest extent of the law, retrials and all, can Illinois one day hope to arrive in that happy land of honest government.
We very much anticipate that second trial. The government’s accusations of racketeering and conspiracy are too serious to go unresolved. We trust that another jury will tell the people of Illinois whether the state’s only impeached and ousted governor is guilty or innocent of more than one felony.
Blagojevich offered his opinion on that question after jurors offered their verdict: “This is a persecution!”
No, Governor, this is a prosecution. And we’re thankful that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and his team were swift in assuring citizens that they would take their case to a second group of jurors.
Judge Zagel, never one to dally, could move as early as next Thursday, Aug. 26, to set a date for jury selection to begin. Good for him. The sooner all of us know whether Rod Blagojevich’s criminal record stops with one federal felony, the sooner all of us can concur that justice has been served.
And pretty much every other sane person outside Blagojevich’s inner circle.
* And speaking of goofy arguments, more than a few people have criticized Patrick Fitzgerald for not waiting until Blagojevich sold the US Senate seat before moving in. This is a fairly decent counter-argument…
His backers said that if Fitzgerald had waited to arrest the governor until Blagojevich carried through with an alleged plan to appoint U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., to Obama’s vacant U.S. Senate seat in exchange for a sizable donation, it would have created a constitutional crisis.
“What should he have done?” former federal prosecutor Jeffrey Cramer said. “Wait for him to sell the seat? It would have been a disaster. The arrest was not only proper, it was necessary.”
My own opinion is that Fitz was worried that Blagojevich was busily concocting an alibi. The Tribune reported the week before his arrest that the feds had the governor on wiretaps. Blagojevich knew the net was about to drop, so he started undoing things. If they had waited, he most likely would’ve appointed anybody but JJJ.
I will say this, though, and it might surprise you. I would almost rather have seen the Blagojevich jury fail to reach a verdict on any counts than to convict him only of the chicken-bleep lying to a federal agent charge.
We certainly should have an expectation that our elected officials would tell the truth to the FBI, and there are times when their failure to do so deserves punishment, as when George Ryan tried to throw the agents off his scent by lying about how he paid a state contractor for use of his Jamaican vacation home.
That was hardly the case with Blagojevich. Here is the false statement on which he was convicted: “Rod Blagojevich does not track, or want to know, who contributes to him or how much they are contributing to him.”
As many witnesses testified and wiretaps confirmed, Blagojevich obviously did track his campaign contributions. In fact, he monitored them quite closely.
But here’s the problem: There’s nothing particularly wrong with a politician keeping track of their campaign donations. It’s certainly not illegal. In fact, he was in his rights to sit there at his desk in the governor’s office and make fund-raising calls on his cell phone.
Were federal agents thrown off the track, or was their investigation impeded in any way when Blagojevich was stupid enough to tell them such a lie?
No way. They probably just said to themselves: “Gotcha!”
And remember the false statements were made in March 2005, more than three years before the wiretaps.
Fitz should’ve busted him before the 2006 election and saved us a lot of trouble.
A juror in the corruption trial of Rod Blagojevich says the panel was deadlocked 11-1 in favor of convicting the former Illinois governor of trying to sell or trade President Barack Obama’s former Senate seat.
Juror Erik Sarnello of Itasca, Ill., said the panel was deadlocked 11-1 in favor of convicting Blagojevich of trying to auction off the Senate seat. He said one woman on the panel “just didn’t see what we all saw.” The 21-year-old Sarnello said the counts involving the Senate seat were “the most obvious.”
[Juror Stephen Wlodek] and the other two jurors disagreed on the exact number of counts in which the jury eventually voted 11-1 to convict, they did agree on this: On at least some of the most serious counts, the overwhelming sentiment was Blagojevich was not just a politician blowing off steam in conversations recorded by the FBI in which he said the power to name a senator was “(expletive) golden” and that he wasn’t going to give it up “for (expletive) nothing.” […]
But [juror Erik Sarnello] and Wlodek told the AP that after three weeks, it was clear one juror, a woman they wouldn’t name, would not be swayed.
“She just didn’t see it like we all did,” Sarnello said. “At a certain point there was no changing. … You can’t make somebody see something they don’t see.”
While some votes were split 7-5, 6-6 or 9-3, the most explosive of the charges — that Blagojevich tried to sell Barack Obama’s U.S. Senate seat — came down to a single holdout vote, jurors said.
That one holdout — a woman whom her colleagues declined to single out — felt she had not gotten the “clear-cut evidence” she needed to convict, Sarnello said.
“Say it was a murder trial — she wanted the video,” Sarnello said. “She wanted to hear [Blagojevich] say, ‘I’ll give you this for that.’ . . . For some people, it was clear. Some people heard that. But for some, it wasn’t clear.'’
She sounds an awful lot like the lone holdout in George Ryan’s trial. That woman was removed by the judge after it was reported that she hadn’t told the truth about her criminal record during the selection process. No such luck this time around.
Sarnello addressed the question of why the jury Tuesday asked for a copy of the oath they took at the start of deliberations. Some jurors felt one of the jurors was not deliberating in good faith. “Some people felt that they were deliberating not under what the law told us to do,” he said.
“What they were looking at wasn’t what we were supposed to be looking at based on what the judge gave us as a set of rules,” Sarnello said.
It’s probably safe to assume that the lone holdout was the target of that action. Yep. She sounds more and more like Ryan’s friendly juror with every revelation.
* Meanwhile, remember that jury note from last week which claimed they had agreed on two counts and were deadlocked on the rest? It turns out, the transcript of Bradley Tusk’s testimony, which the jury requested this week, convinced some jurors to switch their guilty votes to not guilty…
The entire jury had been prepared to convict Blagojevich on the bribery charge that dealt with the ex-governor trying to shake down then-U.S. Rep. Rahm Emmanuel, Wlodek said.
But reviewing testimony from former deputy governor Bradley Tusk on Monday made all the difference for certain jurors, he said.
“Reading the testimony swayed two to three jurors to go from guilty to not guilty,” Wlodek said. “I think it just came down to the testimony of the witness. For them, it wasn’t there - they felt it didn’t prove their case.”
Sarnello, a sophomore at College of DuPage studying criminal justice, said the main problem with the prosecution’s case was that it was all over the place.
“It confused people,” he said. “They didn’t follow a timeline. They jumped around.” […]
Wlodek described the jury’s deliberations as methodical, with the foreman assigning each juror a specific job. Wlodek’s job, for example, was to review the hours of recorded conversations that the government used as a primary piece of evidence against Blagojevich.
Fitzgerald, who is anything but a politician, used his own awesome power in this case with too heavy a hand. And so Blagojevich wasn’t hit with a federal indictment but a veritable Mack truck of complicated and redundant charges.
The feds are accustomed to winning. They wear it, too often, as a righteous entitlement. There is value in this loss.
* Alexi Giannoulias’ reaction to the Blagojevich verdict arrived late yesterday, so many of you may not have seen it…
“Today, the jury found Rod Blagojevich guilty for lying, and on November 2nd, the voters of Illinois will reject Mark Kirk for lying. The people of Illinois deserve leaders they can trust.”
That was, by far, the most pointedly political reaction of the day. Mark Kirk’s react was more muted and generic, for instance…
“This is a sad day for Illinois. Rod Blagojevich disgraced our state and deserved the full weight of justice. For the sake of our economic future, the citizens of Illinois need to turn the page from Rod Blagojevich and the team he brought to power by electing thoughtful independent leaders who will restore integrity to our state.”
Since few people saw Giannoulias’ statement, I doubt it will make much of an impact beyond these electronic pages, but I’m curious what you think of it.
*** UPDATE *** OK, I apparently hadn’t seen all the reacts. Get a load of this one from the chairman of the Illinois Republican Party, the same guy who said he probably wouldn’t “make political hay” out of the verdict…
“I fully support U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald’s decision to seek a retrial of Rod Blagojevich. Let’s be clear, Rod Blagojevich isn’t concerned about the use of taxpayer money; he is concerned about the use of Rod Blagojevich’s money to mount another high-priced defense.
“Well, Rod should be worried. With Broadway Bank closed, I’m not really sure where he’s going to find a bank willing to loan millions to a convicted felon.”
While white Illinois seniors saw their average ACT scores rise from 22.0 five years ago to 22.4 in both 2009 and 2010, the state’s African-American students saw their scores go in the opposite direction.
The average African-American Illinois senior scored 16.9 in 2006, compared to 16.8 in 2009 and 16.7 in 2010, new data released today showed.
Illinois’ Hispanic scores dipped from 18.2 last year to 18.0 this year, but were up slightly from five years ago, when Illinois Hispanics averaged a score of 17.9.
The state’s highest-achieving ethnic group — Asians — saw the biggest gains on a test used by many Illinois colleges as one measurement of college readiness. Their scores rose from 22.6 five years ago, to 23.7 last year and 23.8 this year.
Revenue Director Bea Reyna-Hickey was suspended for a day over the Aug. 10 memo that told police the city “will witness a dramatic decrease in annual revenues and not meet 2010 targets” if a slump in parking tickets and vehicle-compliance tickets continues.
“Stupidity. It was stupid. Just stupid. Some bureaucrat sent that out,” Daley said at an unrelated news conference. “The revenue department has nothing to do with the police department, period. They [officers] will determine whether you violated a law. No one else can. Especially revenue can’t.”
The mayor reacted after several critics, including Fraternal Order of Police President Mark Donahue, said it’s improper to emphasize ticket writing at a time of high-profile crimes, including the murders of police officers and children. The critics also noted that the Police Department is short of personnel because of budget constraints.
“This law is very difficult to enforce,” said Kristiansen, supervisor of the traffic unit for the Buffalo Grove police. “They will usually have their phone down low, where it’s hard to see.”
As always, the plan includes everything from airport, water and sewer improvements, street resurfacing, sidewalk, curb and gutter repairs to construction of new libraries, police and fire stations.
“Capital improvements are absolutely essential to keep a city moving forward if we want to be a global city,” Daley told a news conference at the Lawrence Avenue viaduct being rebuilt by the city over the Kennedy Expy.
Gregory Gordon Jr. committed the crime of standing. He has the ticket from Country Club Hills police, accusing him of unlawfully obstructing the roadway with his person, to prove it. […]
On Aug. 3, at 5:47 p.m., Gordon was on the street outside of the house where he lives with his parents in the 3600 block of 175th Place - less than a block from the County Club Hills police station. According to Gordon, 25, he was saying goodbye to his cousin, his cousin’s girlfriend and his cousin’s children as they were filing in to their car to head home.
A squad car drove by once.
The officer driving the vehicle circled the block and came back with some instructions for Gordon.
“He said, ‘Get the ‘F’ off the street!’ ” Gordon recalled.