Wednesday, May 4, 2011 - Posted by Advertising Department
[The following is a paid advertisement.]
Mike Ervin is a writer, activist and one of more than 27,000 consumers in the Illinois Home Service Program. Home care workers help Mike and thousands of others with everyday tasks like getting out of bed, getting dressed and getting around. Mike’s story is featured in a new radio ad calling on the General Assembly to protect home care for Illinois residentswith disabilities from deep cuts. Listen to the ad…
Cuts to HSP mean that consumers like Mike could face sharp reductions in hours of care or lose their care altogether. As Mike says, consumers’ needs don’t go away if the HSP budget is cut— people with disabilities will only be forced into institutions at a significantly higher cost to the state.
“This program means so much to the people who use it – it means they can stay healthy and independent in their own homes,” said Ann Ford, Executive Director of the Illinois Network of Centers for Independent Living. “When people receive care at home, it saves the state millions. Cutting this program just doesn’t make sense.”
At a shelter for flood victims Tuesday evening, refugees were stunned by news footage of a Missouri farmer comparing the damage that resulted from the destruction of a levee with the loss of a child.
“The crops? What about us? What are we supposed to do?” yelled William Reese, 55, sitting in a gymnasium at Shawnee Community College in Ullin, near Cairo. Reese was among dozens of other people who had fled homes in Cairo.
“You can always get farmland, but you can’t replace human lives. They did the right thing by blowing that levee.”
After days of public outcry and debate about saving fertile Missouri farmland or this impoverished city of 3,000 people at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the Army Corps of Engineers blew a large hole in the Birds Point Levee late Monday night.
I’ve seen that comparison of “fertile” Missouri farmland and impoverished Cairo all over the media. Too rarely will any of those outlets even briefly explain that the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway fuseplug levee was built in order to be demolished in this very type of crisis. For crying out loud, the levee was constructed with hollow tubes inside specifically designed to hold explosives. Far too rarely do they ever point out that the federal government bought the flooding rights to that land decades ago. Not nearly enough do they note that a conservative federal judge (Limbaugh), an appeals court and a conservative (Alito) US Supreme Court justice all pretty much immediately dismissed Missouri’s groundless lawsuit to halt the blast. And almost never are Cairo’s middle class residents portrayed in their stories.
You can’t have an honest public debate without basic information. There’s been a serious media failure here. It’s quite depressing.
* By the way, as of 6 o’clock this morning, the Ohio River was at 59.85 feet at Cairo. That’s way down, thankfully. Here’s the chart…
* Meanwhile, on a far less important note, Illinois Review posted a story about the Illinois DREAM Act last night and bolded this excerpt from a college newspaper story from last Friday…
Lastly, the bill will provide driving certification to undocumented students so they can have permit and an identification card, reducing the number of uninsured drivers.
That provision did not make the final bill. All you gotta do is perform a quick browser search of the bill, or even, gasp, read it. I mean, why do they think all the Republicans on the Senate Executive Committee (including Bill Brady) voted for the thing? C’mon, guys.
Mistakes happen. We all make them. We’re human. I am way too often not immune myself. And I wouldn’t normally even say anything because it’s their shop and they can do what they want, but this is two days in a row now that the publication has run extremely inflammatory and very misleading propaganda about significant legislation which could’ve been avoided by briefly scanning the bills in question.
Senate appropriations committees considered more than two dozen bills that Democrats said would cut Gov. Pat Quinn’s spending plan by $1.2 billion. The committees took no votes on the bills after Republicans complained they were not given enough time to analyze them.
But several rank-and-file Democrats on the committees made it clear they didn’t like what they saw and where budget negotiators chose to make cuts.
“There are too many uncertainties and too many vast cuts,” said Sen. Mattie Hunter, D-Chicago. “I haven’t been satisfied at all.”
“You can be cut on the pinkie or be cut on the jugular,” said Sen. Willie Delgado, D-Chicago. “You’ll bleed either way, but one is more serious.”
* The governor’s proposed spending for next fiscal year on personal services and operations would be cut by 5 percent, and contractural services would be cut by 7 percent in the Senate proposal. But there are other cuts that aren’t going over too well…
One such cut was a 25 percent, or close to $1 million, reduction to the Hope Institute for Children and Families $4.4 million state appropriation Quinn was asking for. The institute focuses on autism-related services.
Jacobs asked Georgia Winson, the executive director for the Hope Institute for Children and Families, what the cut would mean to their average client.
“It means for many children they would not receive an early diagnosis and one of the things our society is hampered with now is many kids who are late to diagnoses and treatment are served by very costly residential placements,” Winson said.
With the full $4.4 million in funding from the state, Winson said she could leverage that into $20.83 million non-state money, which could be used for early diagnosis and therefore keep kids with their families and out of group homes.
Jacobs asked her, if she was in his chair, where she would make the tough cuts.
“I have to say, I am relieved I am not sitting in your chair,” Winson said.
Illinois school districts may soon get the answer to their multi-million-dollar question: Exactly how much money are they getting from the state?
As the Illinois Legislature rushes to beat the budget deadline, lawmakers in the Illinois House are eyeing cuts to the majority of grants for local schools. General state aid also may be trimmed to make the House’ $6.9 billion school spending goal.
State Rep Will Davis, D-East Hazel Crest, said the state has to cut from schools, but lawmakers are limited in what can be cut. Although a good portion of the budget has been decided, Davis is staying mum on exact numbers.
“We’re kind of faced with a lot of, ‘Well, I don’t want to touch that. No we can’t touch that, no we can’t do that,’ and unfortunately if you add up all of the grant lines it won’t get you close to $230 million,” Davis said.
At the moment, the House’s primary and secondary education budget still is more than $230 million higher than its allotted budget, said Davis, who noted that he can’t cut mandated categories without risking federal matching money.Mandated categories cover everything from school buses and special education to free and reduced price breakfast and lunch programs.
That leaves the grants.
State grants subsidize a variety of programs, including state testing, vocational programs and bilingual education.
The Illinois State Board of Education receives about $548 million in grants annually, said Matt Vanover, spokesman for ISBE, who noted the elimination of many grants in recent years.
Plans to reform the state’s pension system are not sitting well with some unions representing state employees.
They’ve launched a television ad campaign about a reform movement that they say will rob them of money they’ve earned. Illinois’ largest public employee unions — representing hundreds of thousands of workers including teachers, police officers and firefighters — have joined forces for a major media campaign aimed at protecting their pension benefits.
The 30-second ads feature Illinois public employees or actors posing as such. One ad says: “I worked my whole life, I gave money from every paycheck, I never missed a payment because they promised us a modest pension.”
Public worker unions, under the banner We Are One Illinois, will spend over $1 million airing the commercials statewide. They want the public to meet the potentially newest losers in the so-called pension reform movement.
* That’s a pretty decent sized buy. Here’s one of the group’s two ads. Rate it…
* The unionsalso have a new poll which shows that only 48 percent of 807 Illinois voters know that public employees contribute to pension funds. Also, 29 percent thought that public employees have already seen their pension benefits reduced. They were also asked this…
As you may know, Illinois currently has a pension debt of seventy billion dollars in unfunded pension liabilities for public employees. Which statement comes closer to your point of view –(A) public employees should receive the pensions they were promised, despite these deficits, or (B) given the state’s budget problems, we just cannot afford to pay the full pensions of public employees?
60 percent thought public employees should receive the pensions. 34 percent said the state can’t afford it.
Following a signing ceremony in his Capitol office, Quinn also shot down suggestions raised by some that the state should go even further and change benefits for employees already on public payrolls. The changes Quinn signed Wednesday apply only to workers hired after Jan. 1, 2011.
“That’s the wrong way to go because it’s unconstitutional,” Quinn said. […]
The Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago said it has determined that benefits for current employees could be changed, but only for future benefits. Any benefits earned up to that point could not be reduced.
But Quinn produced former Illinois Appellate Court Justice Gino DiVito to back his assertion that would be unconstitutional. DiVito said he and a colleague “reached the undeniable conclusion that the pension benefits of present employees, those who belong in a pension plan, cannot be diminished or impaired. All the General Assembly and governor could do is affect the pension benefits of future employees.”
Anybody wanna bet on whether Quinn changes his mind on this topic?
* As you’ve probably heard by now, the concealed carry bill will likely come up for a vote on the House floor tomorrow. I thought you might like to comment on the places that concealed carry would be prohibited if this bill becomes law…
(i) Any building under the control of the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Comptroller, or Treasurer.
(ii) Any building under control of the General Assembly or any of its support service agencies, including the portion of a building in which a committee of the General Assembly convenes for the purpose of conducting meetings of committees, joint committees, or legislative commissions.
(iii) Any courthouse or building occupied in whole or in part by the Circuit, Appellate, or Supreme Court or a room designated as a courtroom for court proceedings by any of these courts.
(iv) Any meeting of the governing body of a unit of local government or special district.
(v) Any establishment licensed to dispense alcoholic beverages for consumption on the premises if less than 50% of its annual gross income comes from the sale of food.
(vi) Any area of an airport to which access is controlled by the inspection of persons and property.
(vii) Any place where the carrying of a firearm is prohibited by federal law.
(viii) Any elementary or secondary school without the consent of school authorities. School authorities shall inform the appropriate law enforcement agency and any law enforcement personnel on site of such consent.
(ix) Any portion of a building used as a child care facility without the consent of the manager. Nothing in this Section shall prevent the operator of a child care facility in a family home from owning or possessing a firearm or license.
(x) Any gaming facility licensed under the Riverboat Gambling Act or the Illinois Horse Racing Act of 1975.
(xi) Any gated area of an amusement park.
(xii) Any stadium, arena, or collegiate or professional sporting event.
(xiii) A mental health facility.
(xiv) Any community college, college, or university campus without consent of the school authorities. School authorities shall inform the appropriate law enforcement agency and any law enforcement personnel on site of such consent.
(xv) A library without the written consent of the library’s governing body. The governing body shall inform the appropriate law enforcement agency of such consent.
(xvi) Any police, sheriff, or State Police office or station without the consent of the chief law enforcement officer in charge of that office or station.
(xvii) Any adult or juvenile detention or correctional institution, prison, or jail.
(b) A municipality or school district may prohibit or limit licensees from carrying a handgun into or within any building owned, leased, or controlled by that municipality or school district by a majority vote of members of its governing board.
A resolution or ordinance shall not prohibit a licensee from carrying a handgun in any building used for public housing, on any sidewalk, on any highway or roadway, or in any public restroom.
A resolution or ordinance shall not prohibit a licensee from carrying a handgun in a public transportation facility or while accessing the services of a public transportation agency. […]
(c) The owner, business or commercial lessee, or manager of a private business enterprise, or any other private organization, entity, or person, may prohibit licensees from carrying a handgun on the premises under its control. However, any owner shall allow for any lessee to carry or possess a handgun in accordance with this Act in any part of a building or upon any property he or she leases.
Please, take a deep breath before commenting. Also, ignore the trolls on both sides. These gun threads can go awry in a hurry if everyone doesn’t do their part. Thanks.
* Roundup…
* Gov’s threatened veto of concealed carry may not matter
