Capitol Fax.com - Your Illinois News Radar » 2012

Thursday, Jan 19, 2012 - Posted by Rich Miller

* Actually, it’s two questions. And, please, no snark…

1) What, in your opinion, is the worst thing about Illinois?

2) What, in your opinion, is the best thing about Illinois?

Again, please avoid snarky comments. And do your best to explain your opinions. Thanks.

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Adventures in fundraising

Thursday, Jan 19, 2012 - Posted by Rich Miller

* I get more than a few e-mails like this one every day, but I thought I’d share it with you to see what you think…

URGENT ALERT – FUNDING BADLY NEEDED TO CONTINUE COURT FIGHTS FOR YOUR RIGHTS

COOK COUNTY AND CHICAGO POLITICAL MACHINES HOPE TO BLEED ISRA DRY

As many of you know, the freedom-loving citizens of Illinois are saddled with an ardent gun-grabber for a governor and a state legislature that is absolutely worthless when it comes to protecting the citizen’s innate right to keep and bear arms.

The courts are the last hope for Illinois citizens who honor this nation’s traditions and respect our Constitution. At the very least, the courts provide a pathway for justice to be served as we saw in the Heller and McDonald decisions.

Right now, the ISRA is locked in battle with the gun-grabbers in the Wilson v. Cook County lawsuit. This suit seeks to overturn Cook County’s arbitrary gun ban which prohibits Cook County residents from owning popular hunting and target shooting firearms. On Wednesday, Jan 18, 2012, the Illinois Supreme Court heard arguments in the case. You can watch and listen to the proceedings at the two links below.

Video:

http://163.191.183.117/court/SupremeCourt/Video/2012/011812_112026.wmv

Audio only:

http://163.191.183.117/court/SupremeCourt/Audio/2012/011812_112026.mp3

Watching and listening to the courtroom activities will give you a flavor for the intensity of the battle to save your rights. All out legal warfare is not cheap – and we’re spending a lot of money on your behalf. Our financial reserves are running short so, if we are to continue battling for your rights in the courts, we need your generous donation.

The gun owners of Illinois badly need your support. If our legal funds run dry, the well-moneyed gun haters will run all over the top of us and then you can kiss what little rights you have left good bye. So please click the link below and make a generous donation. The future of gun ownership is counting on you to help, today. Just a reminder, donations to the ISRA are not tax deductable.

Please, do your very best to keep your bumper-sticker slogans out of comments. I will be on the road for part of the day, so I won’t have time to constantly police the comment section. Don’t force me to ban you when I get back to the office. Thanks much for your cooperation.

50 Comments

Nekritz wants state “eavesdropping” law changed

Thursday, Jan 19, 2012 - Posted by Rich Miller

* A state legislator wants to change a particularly onerous Illinois law, which makes it a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison to make an audio recording of an on-duty police officer…

With the constitutionality of Illinois’ eavesdropping law already facing several court challenges, a Democratic state representative from Northbrook has filed a bill that would allow people to audio-record a police officer working in public without the officer’s consent.

“I believe that the existing statute is a significant intrusion into First Amendment rights, so with the prosecutions and the court cases that have been reported about, it just seemed that this is a problem in need of a swift solution,” Rep. Elaine Nekritz said in an interview Thursday.

Illinois’ eavesdropping law is one of the strictest in the country and makes it illegal to audio-record police without their consent, even when they’re working in public. The state is one of a handful in which it is illegal to record audio of public conversations without the permission of everyone involved.

* From the bill’s synopsis…

Exempts from an eavesdropping violation the recording of a peace officer who is performing a public duty in a public place and speaking at a volume audible to the unassisted human ear.

* The Sun-Times editorialized in favor of the legislation…

Police officers have a tough job, and the thought of a passel of citizens with microphones turning an ordinary arrest into something resembling a huge flashbulb-popping press conference might well annoy them. They might also worry that troublemakers will sneakily edit recordings to give a false impression of how police acted. But that hasn’t been a problem in other states where eavesdropping laws are more relaxed.

This is an area where the law has to catch up with technology. Recording devices are everywhere, even in such places as Syria, where citizens have captured images of their struggle for democracy and beamed them to the world.

Here in America, we increasingly are told we have no expectation of privacy when we are in public and that our every move may legally be recorded by surveillance cameras.

In such an environment, police officers should not expect that their actions while on duty are private.

“I don’t know why a public official on public business on public property has any expectation of privacy,” Nekritz said.

The issue of recording police came to a head when a Chicago woman, Tiawanda Moore, made a recording with her BlackBerry because she thought two police internal affairs investigations were trying to talk her into dropping a sexual harassment complaint against a patrol officer. That would have seemed to fit an exemption under the current law, which permits a citizen to audio-record police officers if the citizen believes the officers are breaking the law. But Moore was charged with a felony.

In the end, she was acquitted, and last week she filed a lawsuit. But ask yourself this. If attached to your right to turn on a recording device is the very real possibility you could be sent to prison for up to 15 years, how much of a right does that feel like? Most people would be hesitant to assert their rights in that scenario. The Moore case illuminated the flaw in the current law.

* Also from the bill…

Provides that for the purposes of the telephone solicitation and marketing and opinion research exception to the eavesdropping statute, permits a non-employee to record the conversation if the corporation or other business entity announces it may record or listen to a telephone conversation with a non-employee.

That’s also perfectly reasonable. If they’re recording me, I should be able to record them.

33 Comments

Education problems

Thursday, Jan 19, 2012 - Posted by Rich Miller

* This AP lede is more than a bit misleading…

With four out of five students in Illinois community colleges failing to get a degree on time, Lt. Gov. Sheila Simon is calling for better math education in high schools and tying colleges’ funding to student success rates.

You have to read way down into the story to find out why…

Michael Monaghan, executive director of the Illinois Community College Trustee Association, said Simon’s plan to link colleges’ state aid to student performance is a good idea, if it is done right. It’s not as simple as looking at graduation rates, he said, because some students never intend to get a degree. Instead, they want to improve job skills or transfer to a different school.

Exactly. And, just as importantly, lots of community college students work full time. They simply can’t graduate in two years. Chicago State gets a lot of the same criticisms for its on-time graduation rates, but it also enrolls a lot of people who have jobs and kids and other things going on in their lives.

There are legit criticisms of community colleges. But their two-year graduation rates shouldn’t be one of them.

* This, however, is quite disturbing…

Todd Brown, 24, of Bolingbrook, thought he was doing everything right to land a job as a state trooper.

He graduated in 2009 with a criminal justice degree from the DuPage campus of Westwood College. He passed the written and physical tests to join the Illinois State Police. They even began background checks on him, interviewing his former bosses and neighbors.

But Brown’s path to becoming a trooper was abruptly halted when he received a call telling him he didn’t qualify for employment because Westwood didn’t have the proper accreditation. His degree didn’t count. Today, he is $55,000 in debt because of the degree. He works for an armored truck firm.

Attorney General Lisa Madigan announced a lawsuit against the private, for-profit college yesterday…

“Westwood officials lied to potential students about almost every aspect of its criminal justice program, from its exorbitant costs to a graduate’s slim career prospects,” said Madigan, whose office conducted a yearlong investigation into Westwood’s practices in Illinois. “Now, many of these students are left with thousands in debt in exchange for a college degree that has very little value in the real world.”

* More…

Madigan’s goal with the lawsuit is to shut Westwood’s Illinois campuses down and force the college to return students their money.

Madigan says, according the federal government, a degree from a for-profit college costs five times more than a community college.

Madigan says federal student loans account for close to 90 percent of for profit college revenues.

* In other education-related news, the voucher bill may be back, according to Illinois Statehouse News…

Riding the wave of a victory in school reform last year, education activists are gearing up for another push this spring, this time for school vouchers.

Through vouchers, tax dollars are used to help pay for tuition at private schools. Although attempts at instituting a voucher program have been made, the idea has yet to achieve enough support to make it out of the General Assembly.

Past plans in Illinois have targeted vouchers at children enrolled in underperforming schools and those who live in economically depressed areas of the state.

“All of the most serious school choice proposals we have seen over the past couple of years have at least one thing in common; they in their own way try and deliver school choice to students in the worst schools,” said Collin Hitt, a senior policy analyst with Illinois Policy Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.

Hitt said his organization plans to ask lawmakers to revisit the issue again this year. […]

Studies on the effectiveness of voucher programs in better educating students are mixed.
Chris Lubienski, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studies school choices, and he said academic gains are minimal.

“Once you control for the fact that there’s more special education students, more English deficient students, more disabled students, in public schools, when you control for those differences, public schools actually might outperform private schools on standardized tests,” Lubienski said. “It’s kind of a surprise.”

But Hitt points to studies such as one by the Friedman Foundation, a group that advocates for school vouchers, to demonstrate the merits for school vouchers. The Friedman Foundation study says “the empirical evidence consistently shows that vouchers improve outcomes for both participants and public schools.”

* And the Tribune editorial board reports on a new development in the legislative scholarship program…

This just in: Republicans in the Illinois Senate are voluntarily suspending their participation in the tuition waiver program that has brought so much dishonor — and so much dishonorable conduct — to the General Assembly. We applaud Minority Leader Christine Radogno for securing commitments that all 24 members of her caucus won’t award waivers for the 2012-13 school year.

Over in the House, at least 38 of Minority Leader Tom Cross’ 54 Republicans also won’t attach their names and reputations to this cesspool of scandal. Which raises an obvious question for Democratic legislators who answer to House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton — as well as to any holdout House Republicans — and who now don’t immediately renounce tuition waivers:

What, exactly, is your problem? Do you think citizens by the millions haven’t learned what a rip-off you’re perpetuating?

The decision by Radogno’s caucus is limited to the next school year. But we trust her senators to make it permanent when they realize that the three reasons they’re giving for their move won’t change in subsequent years:

Thoughts?

29 Comments

BGA finds more private sector employees in public pension system

Thursday, Jan 19, 2012 - Posted by Rich Miller

* People who aren’t public employees really shouldn’t be participating in the public pension system. But they are…

Township Officials of Illinois is a private trade group, not a governmental agency, but its employees are eligible for public-sector pensions subsidized by taxpayers, the Better Government Association has learned.

No one from TOI is currently drawing a pension from the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund. But TOI’s four full-time employees, two of whom are registered lobbyists, stand to draw the potentially lucrative retirement benefit down the road, according to interviews and records.

* And it’s not just the TOI…

The Illinois General Assembly recently passed a bill aimed at curbing public pension abuses by some labor union leaders. But the reforms, signed into law on Jan. 5 by Gov. Pat Quinn, don’t address private groups such as TOI that lawmakers over the years have let into the system.

Similar groups include the Illinois Municipal League and Illinois Association of Park Districts. Like TOI, they work for and lobby on behalf of their governmental agency members – yet they aren’t public bodies and don’t directly serve taxpayers.

TOI was founded more than a century ago. But it wasn’t until 1971 that the General Assembly, for reasons not totally clear, amended the state pension code so TOI could participate in the pension plan. However, TOI didn’t join IMRF — the second-largest public-sector pension plan in Illinois, with $25 billion in assets — until 2001.

Discuss.

* Meanwhile…

House Speaker Michael Madigan has created an Illinois House special committee that will review the investment strategies of the state’s pension funds.

Mr. Madigan, a Democrat, appointed Republican House Minority Leader Tom Cross to chair the committee, according to a letter today to House Clerk Timothy Mapes.

The speaker said in the letter that he was creating the Special House Committee on Pension Investments to “examine the investment strategy of the State pension systems.”

“The pension systems in Illinois not only affect the beneficiaries, but every citizen in Illinois,” Mr. Cross said in a statement. “We plan to invite the systems, their investment managers, outside investment experts and others to examine the state’s systems’ current investment strategies and make sure they are in the best interest of all parties. “

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Durbin goes to ground during SOPA/PIPA protest

Thursday, Jan 19, 2012 - Posted by Rich Miller

* Yesterday saw an outpouring of opposition to the vile SOPA/PIPA legislation. Several members of the Illinois congressional delegation contacted me to say that they were withdrawing their support or announcing that they were opposed. Others announced opposition to local media. And this movement wasn’t just confined to Illinois…

It appeared by Wednesday evening that Congress would follow Bank of America, Netflix and Verizon as the latest institution to change course in the face of a netizen revolt.

Legislation that just weeks ago had overwhelming bipartisan support and had provoked little scrutiny generated a grass-roots coalition on the left and the right. Wikipedia made its English-language content unavailable, replaced with a warning: “Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet.” Visitors to Reddit found the site offline in protest. Google’s home page was scarred by a black swatch that covered the search engine’s label.

* The online protest was so intense that it knocked several Senate websites offline…

Around 11 a.m. PT [yesterday], the rush of visitors looking for ways to contact their members of Congress overwhelmed several Web pages of individual senators. […]

The amount of traffic “temporarily shut down our Web site,” Sen. Ron Wyden, the leading opponent of the Protect IP Act, wrote on Twitter.

By noon PT, the Senate’s Web sites were loading again, but slowly or with difficulty. The Web site of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who’s a sponsor of Protect IP, was generating a 500 server error.

Other Senate Web pages displayed this message: “Sorry, the web page you have requested is experiencing technical difficulties. The Webmaster has been alerted. You will be automatically redirected to the www.senate.gov home page after 10 seconds.”

* But not everybody was happy with yesterday’s actions…

In one early sign that the blackouts and protests would have an effect, the MPAA yesterday characterized them as “stunts.” The group’s chairman, Chris Dodd, took a thinly veiled swipe at Wikipedia by denouncing the protests as “an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on [the sites] for information and [who] use their services.”

* Chris Dodd is a former Democratic US Senator and is a longtime friend of US Sen. Dick Durbin. Sen. Durbin is still listed as a co-sponsor of this legislation. And despite a promise by his press person yesterday, Durbin’s office never did get back to me about why he is still supporting this goofy bill. He did, however, send a form letter to an Illinois blogger…

Effective enforcement of intellectual property laws is critical to the encouragement of innovation and the creation of jobs. In recent years, we have seen a proliferation of Internet websites that are devoted to the unauthorized distribution and sale of pirated and counterfeit goods. These websites deprive innovators and businesses of revenue and result in the loss of American jobs. In addition, these websites present a public health concern when they sell counterfeit, adulterated, or misbranded pharmaceutical products.

I will keep your views in mind as the Senate considers this issue in the coming months.

* Let me make something very clear here. I hate pirates. I publish a copyrighted newsletter, and I have had to take action against people who posted material from that newsletter online.

But pirates, by very definition, operate outside the law. They’re gonna be with us pretty much no matter what. Stomping on the 1st Amendment and breaking the Internet in order to stop some pirates who will find another way to evade the law anyway seems pretty stupid to me. In other words, Congress shouldn’t mess with people like me in order to get at the pirates. It’s insane.

* Here is a good summary of some of this bill’s harmful impact…

1. Guilty until proven innocent. One huge issue with the ways these bills are written is that you don’t necessarily have to be a proven violator of copyright infringement, all you have to do is be accused. An accusation alone is enough to cause detrimental harm to your business. You could lose your domain, have your website shut down and even be sued. All with no warning.

2. You’re held responsible for your user content. If you have any part of a website, blog or social networking page that allows for users to submit content, you will be responsible for what they submit. For example, if you have a blog and allow comments, you’ll be responsible for monitoring them to make sure you don’t have any pirated content submitted or links provided to sites that contain pirated content. Or, if you are on Facebook or Twitter, you’ll be responsible for monitoring your followers’ posts on your page to make sure they don’t have forbidden content. Can you imagine how difficult this will be?

3. Social networking as we know it will change. We all use social networking to build our businesses, but if these bills are passed, social networking sites will be forced to drastically censor their sites, limiting the content that can be shared and changing the way we use them for our businesses.

4. Where to sell your items? If you rely on sites like Etsy, Ebay or even Facebook to sell your items, you’ll be up a creek as they’ll be forced to shut down to avoid prosecution. Each of these sites contain photos submitted by users, the problem is, there would be no way for them to inspect every single photo uploaded to their sites to make sure it has the appropriate copyrights.

* And I couldn’t agree more with this…

The world has changed. The way that people discover and purchase new content has changed. It’s a new world. They should try living in it — and continuing to prosper in it — instead of trying to shove it back the way it was when Groucho Marx still had a hit TV show.

Exactly.

Get a clue, Senator Durbin. Man up and tell your old buddy Dodd that legacy media shouldn’t be allowed to write legislation that regulates new media. And, trust me, I will never forget this vote. Ever.

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