Statement from Mayor Emanuel on the Loss of Chicago Blues Legend Magic Slim
“We have lost a blues legend, Magic Slim. Like the story of Chicago itself, Magic Slim’s life was defined by persistence and perseverance. Born in Mississippi to sharecroppers, Slim lost his right pinky finger in a cotton gin, forcing him to give up on piano, but never on music, and he taught himself to play guitar on a one-string instrument he made by nailing a piece of wire to the wall. From that one string he developed a sound that would help define the blues forever. A member of the Great Migration, Slim came to Chicago for a new life and a career in music. And what a career he had. Ultimately he would become a legend of Chicago Blues, finding his place among names like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Chicago has lost a dear friend today; but we are grateful for the decades of music we gained from Magic Slim’s life.”
* Check out this hot jam from 1974 at Chicago’s 1125 Club, which was at 59th & May. Yeah, baby…
* I’m really not sure why the two legislative Republican leaders sent a letter to the governor and the Democratic leaders outlining what they see as the budget pressures facing the state, demanding immediate action and then ending it this way…
Burdened by a wave of murders, dissension over proposed school closings and perhaps his own hard-ball image, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s job-approval rating has taken a big hit in recent months, according to a new Crain’s/Ipsos Illinois Poll.
Negative attitudes toward the mayor are significantly higher in suburban and downstate areas than in Chicago proper. That may not be surprising, given Mr. Emanuel’s fierce focus on his extensive agenda for Chicago. But there is slippage among city voters, too.
Overall, according to the survey of 600 voting-age Illinois residents, 50 percent say they at least lean toward disapproval of his performance as mayor, versus only 19 percent who somewhat or strongly approve, or lean toward approval. That’s a margin of 31 percentage points. […]
Specifically, just 2 percent of Chicagoans surveyed said they strongly approve of the mayor’s job performance, with 12 percent somewhat approving and 5 percent leaning that way. At the opposite end, 13 percent strongly disapprove, 9 percent somewhat disapprove and 13 percent lean toward disapproval.
* OK, first, this is a poll of residents, not even registered voters.
* Second, while the statewide results may actually be valid, the Chicago subset is just way too small to make any sort of claim about the mayor’s poll ratings.
Chicago’s population is 21 percent of the state’s. So, if the poll was properly balanced, that would mean only about 126 people were polled. That’s a margin of error of about 9 percent.
There’s just no way to make a realistic judgment about a situation based on that small of a polling universe. Period.
* From Crain’s…
The Crain’s/Ipsos poll is a representative survey of voting-age Illinois residents conducted over the Internet. Ipsos validates the sample against offline data sources such as telephone surveys to ensure the accuracy of its weighting. The survey has an accuracy margin of plus or minus 4.7 percentage points statewide, with higher margins in sub-regions, such as Chicago or its suburbs.
Internet polling gets a bad rap, but it is picking up some admirers. Even so, a purely Internet poll is kinda radical.
* A coverage sample…
* Rahm Emanuel: Liked by Few, Loved by Fewer: Labor insiders call the drop in Emanuel’s numbers “horrendous.”
* Poll: Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s approval rating slipping
* Emanuel Struggling With Approval Ratings In IL & City Proper
* Rahm Emanuel’s allies dismiss negative Internet poll on mayor: John Anzalone, a political pollster who has done work for state Senate Democrats and President Barack Obama, said when Crain’s internet poll last fall showed Emanuel with an approval rating of 37 percent in Chicago, Anzalone’s firm had the mayor at over 52 percent.
*** UPDATE *** I should’ve known to check Drudge. So, with a hat tip to a commenter…
Kelly boasted a double-digit lead over the field in Hutchinson’s internal polling — an automated survey taken before she exited the race, according to a source familiar with it.
Subscribers know more about recent polling.
Also…
Kelly has been on the air as well, and Halvorson’s fundraising has not been strong enough to answer on the airwaves. But while television is central to any modern campaign, this race is about getting bodies to the polls in the middle of the Chicago winter.
Beale’s team is counting on his Chicago base as the only candidate hailing from the urban part of the district. His team is betting on loyalty and turnout from a base of senior citizens — but local strategists say it’s unlikely he can win.
“They [voters] have to have a compelling reason to turn out for you, and that’s a totally different campaign model than a presidential year or any year when there’s anything else on the ballot,” a Chicago Democratic strategist said. “You have to take a different approach when you’re the only race on the ballot.”
But even luck has been on Kelly’s side. She drew the top slot on the ballot. Halvorson will be third from the bottom.
* Meanwhile, there’s been an attempt to try to link Mayor Emanuel to Kelly’s race. For instance…
The mayor was asked why he’s “giving the appearance” that he’s not involved in the race to succeed Jackson, who plead guilty Wednesday to years of illegal campaign spending.
“Because I’m not endorsing anybody. That’s why. Because it’s not an appearance,” Emanuel said.
Pressed on whether he’s making phone calls on Kelly’s behalf, the mayor said, “No. … I said upfront I was gonna stay out of this race. The voters will pick. But I want to be clear about one thing: Whoever wins has to be on Team Chicago.”
Delmarie Cobb, a political consultant to Ald. Anthony Beale (9th), doesn’t buy it. She thinks there’s a wink-and-a-nod between Emanuel and Bloomberg.
“I don’t think Mayor Rahm Emanuel would be running congressional campaign ads for someone in New York and dictating who should be the next congressman in New York City without the permission of Mayor Bloomberg,” Cobb said.
“It’s hard to fathom that Mayor Bloomberg is inserting himself into this campaign and he’s meeting with no resistance from City Hall.”
As evidence of Emanuel’s behind-the-scenes involvement, Cobb pointed to the tangled web of relationships among the players in the 2nd District.
Cheryl Whitaker is the wife of Obama pal, Dr. Eric Whitaker. Former Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, one of the first politicians to endorse Kelly, who served as Giannoulias’ chief of staff, is one of Obama’s basketball buddies.
Obama’s former campaign strategist David Axelrod, who is tweeting on Kelly’s behalf, is Emanuel’s former White House colleague and friend of 30 years. And Bloomberg is a close friend of Chicago’s mayor.
“If Robin Kelly were in the middle of the circle, you would have the White House, Giannoulias, Axelrod, Mayor Bloomberg, Mayor Emanuel — all these people with an ongoing relationship. It just defies logic that, somehow, all of these people are involved in the race, but they’re not talking to each other” about it, Cobb said.
That’s some conspiracy theory. Bloomberg spent money all over the country last year. I doubt he asked permission to do so anywhere else.
This, by the way, is Axelrod’s alleged tweet on behalf of Kelly…
In IL-2, wonder if Debbie Halvorson would be cryingfoul if Toi Hutchinson had gotten out and backed HER? Very doubtful!
* You can watch today’s House hearing on concealed carry live right here…
…Adding… I’ve put together a ScribbleLive thingy. Blackberry users click here…
* Scheduled to testify today…
Dr. Karen Sheehan Lurie Children’s Hospital
Illinois Restaurant Association
Alderman Willie B Cochran
Rev. Michael Pfleger Ceasefire
Toni Preckwinkle Cook County
Dr. Paula Bradich Second Amendment Sisters
NRA Lawyer NRA
Garry McCarthy City of Chicago
Paul Castiglione Cook County State’s Attorney
Camiella Williams Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence
Val Rendel Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence
Forrest Claypool CTA
Jeanna Wrenn PACE
Jordan Matyas RTA
Laura Calderon Illinois Public Transportation Association
Rob Hoffman River Valley Metro
Sui Moy Chicago Citizens for Change
Maria Pike Chicago Citizens for Change
Yolan Henry Chicago Citizens for Change
Christine Fenno Moms Demand Action
Nicole Moms Demand Action
Amy Moms Demand Action
Todd Vandermyde NRA
For well over 30 years, whenever the subject of gay rights came up in the Illinois General Assembly, legislators ran away in droves.
The excuses were always the same.
Homosexuality is immoral, so religious businesses owners shouldn’t have to hire a gay person, or serve a lesbian in his restaurant, or sell one of “those people” a home. The state shouldn’t “condone” this immoral act by passing such a law.
Besides, they said, Illinois just wasn’t ready to provide the same protection for gays as everybody else.
It’s been a long road.
Way back in 1819, a year after Illinois became a state, a law was passed setting the criminal penalty for sodomy between two males at 1 to 5 years in prison, plus 100 to 500 lashes with a whip and a fine of up to $500.
In 1845, the state kind of evolved a little and removed the flogging and the fine. But the Legislature also increased the prison term to one year to life.
Yes, life.
That penalty was “softened” in 1874 to 10 years maximum behind bars, with no minimum imprisonment specified.
In 1919, a minimum of one year in prison was added to the penalty, where it remained in the statute books until 1961, when Illinois finally repealed its sodomy laws, the first state in the union to do so.
And the world did not end.
The issue of gay rights didn’t surface in the General Assembly until the late 1970s. But no gay-rights bill ever received more than 15 percent of the vote in the Illinois Legislature until 1991, when 40 House members and 21 senators voted for a bill. That was far short of the 60 and 30 needed to pass both chambers, but times were starting to change.
By 1998, things had progressed so far that Republican gubernatorial candidate George Ryan won some liberal Chicago wards because his Democratic opponent Glenn Poshard opposed gay rights.
Even so, no gay-rights bill ever made it to Ryan’s desk.
Conservative Republicans controlled the state Senate and the bill went nowhere. They did pass a bill protecting motorcyclists against discrimination, which Ryan used his amendatory veto powers to rewrite into a gay-rights bill. His proposal died.
When the Democrats won control of the Senate in the 2002 election, gay-rights proponents thought their path to victory looked clear. But it took more than two years before the Senate went along with the House and approved a gay-rights bill.
And the world did not end.
Not only that, but not a single legislator lost a re-election campaign based on a vote for that gay-rights bill.
Six years later came the civil unions bill.
Oh, how our world would surely crash if gays were allowed to legally consummate their relationships, we were told.
The bill passed in January of 2011 and was signed into law. No legislator who voted for civil unions lost in the next election.
The only serious consequence of the civil unions law was that the state stopped giving Catholic Charities’ adoption program any taxpayer funds after the group refused to place children in the homes of gay civil union couples. Otherwise, the world kept spinning.
Now, it’s gay marriage. And the gnashing of teeth and predictions of imminent demise are all around us.
The Senate passed the bill with one Republican vote. The House will likely pass it this spring sometime.
Facing a free-speech outcry, an Illinois lawmaker decided Thursday to pull the plug on anti-bullying legislation he introduced to require website managers to pull down anonymous, hate-filled Internet posts if they were requested to do so.
A measure sponsored by state Sen. Ira Silverstein (D-Chicago) would have made website administrators, upon request, to remove comments by any anonymous posters unless those people attached their names to their posts and confirmed their Internet Protocol addresses and home addresses.
The plan called the Internet Posting Removal Act, which Silverstein introduced earlier this month, was inspired by anti-bullying legislation that surfaced in New York but died in that state’s legislature last June.
“I’m going to kill the bill,” Silverstein said Thursday afternoon after the legislation drew national attention and provoked criticism from Internet free-speech advocates like the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Earlier in the day, before deciding to mothball his legislation, Silverstein explained its motivation.
“It really has to do with cyber-bullying,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times. “The Internet is a great thing, and everyone is for it. Saying something is one thing; but once you put it on the Internet, it’s there forever.”
Silverstein said his intention wasn’t to clamp down on free-speech rights and that he merely was looking for a way to stop hate speech, particularly if it was directed at children or teen-agers.
Ignoring that the bill makes no attempt to avoid the obvious dormant commerce clause issues inherent when a state tries to regulate what has to be on all Internet websites, and ignoring that New York tried the same thing last year with nothing to show for it, and ignoring that the average Internet user probably doesn’t know how to find their IP address (you can here), and ignoring that IP addresses are dynamically assigned on most ISPs and therefore one’s presence at a given IP address does not actually help to identify a person, and ignoring that the definition of "anonymous poster" does not include the critical ingredient that a poster be anonymous, and ignoring that the same State Senator also sponsored a bill to prevent disclosure of identities of firearm owners in Illinois (leading to the pithy critique "guns don’t kill people; comments do") – the entire premise of this bill is fundamentally repugnant to the First Amendment and may actually harm those that it is likely intended to help protect.
This is hardly the first battle in the "nymwars," and the obvious unconstitutionality of this bill will come as no surprise to those that have been following along. First Amendment doctrine has long held that, in the words of the Supreme Court, "[a]nonymous pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and even books have played an important role in the progress of mankind," and that "an author’s decision to remain anonymous, like other decisions concerning omissions or additions to the content of a publication, is an aspect of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment." The courts that have looked at this in the context of anonymous posting online have rightly noted that First Amendment concerns play with equal force on the Internet, and that "[a]nonymous internet speech in blogs or chat rooms in some instances can become the modern equivalent of political pamphleteering." To force identification of the originator of a comment “upon reques” without any limitation is just the Talley v. California case replacing each instance of the word "pamphlet" with the word "blog;" it is painfully unconstitutional.
But more importantly, there are very, very good reasons for opposing forced identification for all online speech. As danah boyd noted in one very influential blog post, the "real names policies" that are imposed on platforms like Facebook and Google Plus (with some qualifiers) – while usually done with the intent of increasing civility by forcing identification – can actually levy the greatest harm against the vulnerable persons and groups that such policies are intended to help. There are many people who have a desire to speak out on issues affecting their lives that simply cannot do so under their real names out of fear of harassment, abuse, or physical harm: think of a high school student who secretly gay, a victim of domestic abuse, a whistleblower at a government or corporation, or the victim of an oppressive government. We desperately need these people speaking out as much as they need to speak, and the thought of forcing them to provide their names and address or face deletion is unconscionable.
* 9:13 am - I just got a call from the NRA claiming that the full Seventh US Circuit Court of Appeals has denied Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s request for an en banc hearing of the recent ruling by a three-judge panel that Illinois’ public gun carrying laws are unconstitutional. Madigan wanted all of the appellate judges to hear the case. Not gonna happen.
AG Madigan’s next step - if she decides to take it - would be to appeal to the US Supreme Court.
More when I know more.
* 9:18 am - The order denying Madigan’s en banc rehearing motion is here, including a dissent by four out of the circuit’s ten presiding judges.
In so many public settings, carrying and using firearms present lethal risks to innocent bystanders. Yet when people go about their daily lives in public places, they have no choice about whether to consent to the dangers posed by firearms in public. We can all choose whether to visit homes where firearms are present.
To illustrate the dangers posed by lawful use of firearms in public, consider a deadly confrontation on the streets of New York City in August 2012, when police confronted an armed man who had just shot and killed another man. The police officers were well trained in both how to shoot and when to shoot and not shoot. The officers fatally shot the gunman, but the officers’ many shots also wounded nine bystanders.
I intend no criticism of the officers, who confronted an urgent, dangerous situation that few have experienced first-hand. We will always need armed police officers, and some harm will be unavoidable despite their training, skill, and experience. But consider how much worse the situation on the crowded streets of New York might have been if several civilians, without the officers’ training but carrying firearms lawfully, had tried to help with their own firearms.
Unless the Supreme Court is prepared to embrace the view attributed to it by the panel majority, that the Second Amendment right to bear arms does not depend on “casualty counts,” 702 F.3d at 939, we should not assume that the logic of Heller extends naturally and without qualification to firearms in public.
