Are they suggesting he’s brainwashed?
Thursday, Jun 16, 2016 - Posted by Rich Miller
* Check out this headline…
Mike Madigan’s Re-Education Has Taken Its Toll On John Bradley
Bradley speaks of consistently voting for “cuts,” but voted for the largest spending plan in Illinois history
In a radio interview with WJPF, State Rep. John Bradley performed verbal gymnastics in an attempt to cover up his record of voting for the largest spending plan in Illinois history. Bradley said, “Everybody knows there’s got to be cuts. I’ve voted for cuts. I’ll continue to vote for cuts. I’ve forced cuts through the Revenue [& Finance] Committee over the years. That’s not a problem, so let’s just figure out to what extent we’ve got to cut and do it in a fair way and get on down the road.”
Unfortunately, John Bradley’s words do not match his record in Springfield. Last month, Bradley voted not once but twice for Mike Madigan’s reckless, wildly unbalanced budget (SB 2048). The Madigan-Bradley budget, $7 billion out-of-balance, is the largest spending plan in state history and also contains the largest budget deficit in state history. The budget deficit is so large, it would require a $1,000 tax hike on every Illinois family to balance.
“Illinoisans are tired of double-talking politicians like John Bradley who say one thing in their districts and do another in Springfield. As long as Bradley refuses to break with Mike Madigan, southern Illinois schools, prisons, and social service providers risk closing. Bradley’s record is clear - he chose Madigan over southern Illinois and voted for the largest, most unbalanced spending plan in state history.” - Illinois Republican Party Spokesman Aaron DeGroot
* This isn’t the first time the ILGOP has used the term “re-education”…
Madigan Re-Education Sessions Bar Outside Help
Madigan Bans Republicans from Participating in Meetings to Discuss Reforms
Multiple news outlets are reporting that Republican members of the General Assembly were denied from attending House Democratic meetings on reforms to ensure that the information being presented by the Democratic leadership was factual.
Sigh.
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Question of the day
Thursday, Jun 16, 2016 - Posted by Rich Miller
* US Sen. Mark Kirk has a new legislative proposal…
Kirk’s new bill, sponsored with Florida Democrat Ben Nelson, is aimed at making it easier for the FBI to keep tabs when people on terror watchlists buy guns.
Under the legislation, the name of anyone who the FBI or another Justice Department unit investigates for possible terrorist links would go into the same data base used to perform background checks for those buying a gun. The bill would not ban the sale, but would require the FBI be notified if a gun seller queried the federal data base for a background check.
“This commonsense legislation equips the FBI with a new [tool] to stop threats on American lives,” Kirk said in a statement.
I’d go even further and let gun sellers know that they’re about to transact business with somebody on the watch list. The airlines already have this info, so why not gun sellers? Let them decide if they want to actually sell the guns, but make sure they have this basic information. But, whatevs.
* The Question: Do you support this Kirk idea? Take the poll and then explain your answer in comments, please.
surveys
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* Notice anything missing here?…
Richard Goldberg has accused Democrats of not being able to count, blasted their questions as “hypocritical” and their hearings as “shams” — and he was once booted out of a committee hearing by Democratic legislators.
But Gov. Bruce Rauner insisted Wednesday that his newly promoted chief of staff does not have a “toxic” relationship with the opposition party. […]
A year ago, Democrats kicked Goldberg — then Rauner’s deputy chief of staff for legislative affairs — out of a Committee of the Whole meeting. House Speaker Mike Madigan later told reporters that his members were just enforcing an “established rule” that barred aides to the governor from circulating with representative during committee hearings. […]
Goldberg also butted heads with Democrats last year when they called him before a House committee to testify about why Rauner’s education secretary’s $250,000 annual salary was being paid out of the Department of Human Resources, whose budget is designed to help the state’s most vulnerable.
What’s missing is anything from the past couple of months.
Goldberg has deliberately toned things down. He’s even received some high marks for civility from Democratic legislators. Subscribers know more on this topic, but I think his appointment announcement has been a catalyst to maybe getting something done by the end of the fiscal year.
* Nobody, but nobody, covered Goldberg’s antics more than I did here. This blog published every memo, every comment, every whatever from him when most other political sites barely mentioned his name.
So, I say give the guy a chance to prove himself in a new position before we burn him in effigy. As chief, he’ll no longer be “run” by anyone else. Nobody will be pushing him out there to say or do things because he’ll be the big dog.
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Bond vigilantes still a myth
Thursday, Jun 16, 2016 - Posted by Rich Miller
* This was a widely reported belief until today, so I’m not trying to pick on just one guy…
Illinois paid about 4 percent on its last issue, compared with a median rate of 2.34 percent for AAA-rated state bonds, according to Richard Ciccarone, CEO of Merritt Research Services, a provider of research and data on municipal bonds.
But a couple of developments last week suggest the price of profligacy is about to rise. Credit rating agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s cut Illinois’ ratings again, with Moody’s parking the state just two levels above junk status. More ominously, an influential bond investor openly questioned the market’s willingness to indulge a borrower incapable of basic fiscal discipline.
* Today…
Bank of American Merrill Lynch won the deal in competitive bidding, pricing bonds due in 2026 with a 5 percent coupon to yield 3.32 percent, which is 185 basis points over Municipal Market Data’s triple-A yield scale. The spread was 175 basis points ahead of the bond sale, according to MMD, a unit of Thomson Reuters. […]
Muni yields have been hitting new record lows on MMD’s scale in recent days, driven by cash-heavy investors chasing low supply of debt. The true interest cost for Illinois’ bonds, which carry maturities from 2017 to 2041, was 3.74 percent.
With Illinois poised to be the only U.S. state since at least the 1930s to end a fiscal year without a complete budget, some market participants thought the spread should be even wider.
“It’s odd to me,” said Nicholos Venditti, a portfolio manager at Thornburg Investment Management. “Illinois has proven time and time again they can’t get anything done.”
…Adding… But some folks just won’t give up the ghost…
The worldwide rally has pushed Illinois’s 10-year yields down over the past three months by more than a quarter percentage point to 3.3 percent, despite a record-long budget impasse that caused Moody’s Investors Service and S&P Global Ratings to downgrade it last week to the lowest level for a state in over a decade. BlackRock Inc.’s Peter Hayes, who oversees $119 billion of municipal bonds for the world’s largest money manager, suggested investors consider not buying Illinois’s debt to pressure elected officials, a call that didn’t keep the state from returning to the market.
“Clearly the political inaction has soured the taste for many investors,” said Gabe Diederich, a portfolio manager in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin at Wells Fargo Asset Management, which manages about $39 billion of munis, including Illinois debt. “Investors will lend them money again at a very steep penalty relative to the rest of the market, but with the expectation that ultimately the state will take the appropriate steps to fix their issues.”
…Adding More… Interesting…
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Rose-colored glasses
Thursday, Jun 16, 2016 - Posted by Rich Miller
* Former Gov. Jim Edgar speaking the other day…
Edgar said budgets were accomplished in the ‘90s, despite many hardships, “because we compromised.” He called negotiations with Madigan during his tenure as governor during a budget impasse tense, but civil in the end because “we both tried to watch our rhetoric.”
“We might have thought about the other guy, but we didn’t go out and say it,” Edgar said.
The former governor usually has a pretty good memory. It’s truly amazing the number of details he can recall when you sit down and talk with him, as I have.
But when I read that above remark, something in the back of my mind clicked and I went hunting for a long-ago quote.
* Back in July of 1994, three and a half years into his first term, the General Assembly was embroiled in yet another overtime session and couldn’t agree on a budget…
For his part, Madigan opened the overtime session by questioning the governor’s emotional state.
“It would be very desirable if the chief executive of the state of Illinois would operate on a little more emotional stability,” Madigan said.
Edgar said he was “surprised” that Madigan would take that tone.
“I wouldn’t question his stability at all,” Edgar said. “I might question his political motives.”
* From a few days earlier…
Before the House adjourned, Madigan led approval of a two-week emergency spending authorization for the state. Edgar, however, vowed to veto it.
No state services, benefits or paychecks are in jeopardy, although Edgar said that the prospect of a payless payday for state employees in mid-July might be needed to leverage a final session-ending budget deal.
“I think it’s obvious today that (Democrats) are doing this for political reasons,” Edgar said. “I don’t know how long the speaker’s going to figure there’s some political reason to draw this out.”
* Much of this was forgotten because of what happened next…
Gov. Jim Edgar signed the $33.3 billion state budget bill into law Wednesday afternoon from the hospital where he is recuperating from emergency heart surgery, said an Edgar spokeswoman. The bill was a get-well greeting from the General Assembly.
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Practice what you preach, Speaker
Thursday, Jun 16, 2016 - Posted by Rich Miller
* We talked a bit yesterday about House Speaker Michael Madigan’s memo to the UIUC faculty senate regarding the lack of a state budget. Madigan, of course, blamed Gov. Rauner and the Republicans. But he also wrote this…
You will even find the few times when Governor Rauner has set aside his agenda that hurts middle-class families throughout the state, we were able to compromise and move our state forward.
Madigan has said this several times, referring to things like the FY15 patch, the federal-only approp bill, the special funds approps for local government and higher education, etc.
* Well, the governor has once again “set aside his agenda” in order to reach a deal on a stopgap budget for next fiscal year, plus a full-year K-12 appropriation. So far, though, there hasn’t been much progress at the budgeteer level.
Get it done, already. “Move our state forward.” We could all use a break from this impasse madness for a few months.
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Map grant apps drop 13 percent
Thursday, Jun 16, 2016 - Posted by Rich Miller
* The squeeze the beast strategy appears to be working, unfortunately…
Thousand of Illinois students apparently don’t want to risk the state’s MAP grant delays and disappointments.
New numbers from the Illinois Student Assistance Commission show a 13 percent drop in Monetary Assistance Program applications this year.
“It’s unprecedented,” said Jim Applegate, executive director of the Illinois State Board of Higher Education. “That’s thousands and thousands fewer MAP students who’ll be going to our two-year colleges, four-year public (universities), and private colleges as well.”
New applications are down about 13-percent down from the 320-thousand students that the Illinois Student Assistance Commission said were eligible for a MAP grant last year.
The real question here is how many of those kids from poverty-stricken families have given up and decided not to attend any college now.
Ugh.
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The rent is too darned high
Thursday, Jun 16, 2016 - Posted by Rich Miller
* Tribune…
To identify “distressed homeowners and renters,” [John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation] researchers used a housing rule of thumb that requires affordable housing to cost no more than 30 percent of a household’s gross income. In Chicago, 48 percent of people said they were devoting more than 30 percent of their income to rent or a mortgage. In the suburbs, 40 percent were stretching beyond the manageable 30 percent limit. […]
While the problem of finding affordable housing is most acute among people ages 18 to 34, African-Americans and households with incomes under $40,000, 49 percent of those in households with incomes over $75,000 said “it’s challenging to find affordable housing in my area.” Sixty-six percent of people with incomes under $40,000 noted the challenge.
Renters are feeling the pressure much more than homeowners. About 73 percent of renters said they have had to make trade-offs in order to pay for their housing. That compares to 47 percent of homeowners who report trade-offs including building up credit card debt, moving to less safe areas, eliminating their savings for retirement or cutting back on health care.
Lots more better-paying jobs could help, too. Just sayin…
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Sins of omission
Thursday, Jun 16, 2016 - Posted by Rich Miller
* The AP takes a look at minority representation in state legislatures, including Illinois…
Whites comprise 62.2 percent of Illinois’ population, but hold nearly three-fourths of the 177 seats in the state Legislature. Just over 7 percent of the Legislature is Hispanic, even though Latinos make up nearly 17 percent of the state’s population.
Illinois also has two of the top five state House districts in the U.S. with Hispanic majorities but white representatives. Chicago Democratic Rep. Daniel Burke’s district, which ranks fourth in that category, has a Hispanic population of 75 percent. In House Speaker Michael Madigan’s Chicago district, which ranks fifth, Hispanics make up 68 percent of it.
The AP analyzed the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Congress and the National Conference of State Legislatures to determine the extent to which the nation’s thousands of lawmakers match the demographics of its hundreds of millions of residents. The result: Non-Hispanic whites make up a little over 60 percent of the U.S. population, but still hold more than 80 percent of all congressional and state legislative seats. […]
But several factors have contributed to the underrepresentation of Hispanics and Asians in state legislatures throughout the state and the U.S., including low naturalization rates which prevent them voting, said Rob Paral, a Chicago-area demographer. In addition to that, he said some are in the country illegally while others who are U.S. citizens are simply too young to vote or don’t participate.
* The AP chose to lead their Illinois story with a brief profile of Theresa Mah, who won a House Democratic primary in March and will be the state’s first Asian-American legislator when she’s sworn in next January, despite the state having an Asian-American population of 5 percent.
Not mentioned, for whatever reason, is that Mah’s district is majority Latino and she defeated a Latino opponent. That omission is pretty darned weird, particularly in this context.
Also not mentioned is that while African-Americans make up 14.7 percent of Illinois’ population, they comprise 18 percent of General Assembly membership.
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Kennedy gets all flourishy
Thursday, Jun 16, 2016 - Posted by Rich Miller
* Tribune…
Chris Kennedy’s longtime management of the Merchandise Mart may have earned him respect in Chicago’s business community — but his habit of declining to run for a political office after his name has been floated means he has a reputation in the political world as something of a serial tease. […]
Referring to the luxury 46-story apartment building, which was built on land owned by the Kennedy family and bankrolled by the AFL-CIO’s Building Investment Trust, as the “fulfillment of the American Dream,” he employed soaring rhetoric about the founding fathers, and took what seemed to be a swipe at Donald Trump and Bruce Rauner. […]
“We are living in a time when some national leaders and some state leaders are held up as examples to our children, teaching them a new and ugly form of economics, that what you get should not be determined by what you need, but instead that what you get should be determined by what you take,” he said, referring to that as “a lesson that no generation in our country has been taught since the age of the robber barons.”
“America was supposed to be a place free from the oppression of political leaders acting like kings, imposing their views on everyone else, dismissing the pain and the hardship that they cause as nothing more than the collateral damage necessary to pursue some selfish agenda,” added Kennedy, who sold the Merchandise Mart in 2012 and now spends his time running a grocery non-profit, Top Box Foods.
I dunno. It’s just so early. It’s not even time to cover spring training, or even pitchers and catchers reporting. Heck, it’s even too early for hot stove league. They’re barely chopping the wood to heat the stoves, for crying out loud.
Oh, well. Something to do, I suppose. The Democrats really do not love this governor, so they’re desperate to find a replacement. Kennedy seems to understand this and is feeding that hunger. Whether he’ll stick around long enough to file this time is another question.
* And as far as the praise he heaped on organized labor yesterday, Kennedy held a significant stake in Vornado Realty Trust when it attempted to open New York City’s first ever WalMart. The project faced strong opposition from unions, small businesses and local activists and was abandoned. Vornado has also been hit for ties to an anti-union contractor which used undocumented immigrant labor.
And, yes, the oppo is, indeed, already flowing.
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Today’s quotable
Thursday, Jun 16, 2016 - Posted by Rich Miller
* And that’s a big reason why Illinois has gone almost a full year without a budget…
Maybe “half-in” or even “three-quarters-in” could accomplish more?
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Rauner pushes hard for transportation stopgap
Thursday, Jun 16, 2016 - Posted by Rich Miller
* SJ-R…
Gov. Bruce Rauner on Wednesday tried to up the pressure on lawmakers to pass a stopgap budget, this time warning that state road projects will grind to a halt next month without one.
At a Statehouse news conference, Rauner’s transportation secretary, Randy Blankenhorn, said work will have to stop on the projects after July 1, the start of the fiscal year, if lawmakers don’t approve spending authority to keep them going.
“We’re on the brink of what was once unthinkable, the suspension of the Illinois Department of Transportation’s construction program,” Blankenhorn said. “Without stopgap funding proposed by the governor, we are on a collision course with having to shut down road projects throughout the state in a few short weeks.”
Blankenhorn said the state has more than 800 active projects at this time worth about $2 billion. He said about 25,000 workers are employed on the projects, which this summer include work on Interstate 55 both north and south of Springfield, as well as on Interstate 72 west of town. Improvements underway on North Grand Avenue and from Moffat Street to Koke Mill Road would also be halted.
* But John Penn, the Vice President and Midwest Regional Manager of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, begs to differ…
“Governor Rauner’s call for a temporary budget to keep vital road and bridge construction projects funded is misleading. We must keep in mind that the only reason there is talk of a ‘stopgap’ budget today is because Governor Rauner will not sign a fully-funded, yearlong budget unless legislators agree to cut the pay of the very construction workers he claims to want to keep employed, among other anti-worker, anti-middle class proposals on his agenda.
“If the Governor were to drop his insistence on cutting the pay and rights of hard working Illinoisans before passing a full budget, a stopgap budget would be completely unnecessary.”
OK, I get that, but a stopgap is better than nothing, and that’s what we’ll get if we wait for the governor to drop his Turnaround Agenda demands.
* Meanwhile…
Illinois will sell $550 million of bonds on Thursday but lacks authority from the state legislature to spend all of the proceeds due to an ongoing budget impasse.
“The General Assembly needs to grant appropriation authority to fully expend the proceeds from the bond sale, although existing FY16 appropriations could be used to expend a portion of them,” Catherine Kelly, a spokeswoman for Governor Bruce Rauner, said on Wednesday.
Her statement followed a news conference earlier on Wednesday with the Republican governor and his transportation department head, who warned of the imminent shutdown of hundreds of construction projects if the Democrat-controlled legislature does not approve Rauner’s temporary budget plan. […]
The odd timing of the announcement on the eve of the state bond sale handed Rauner’s Democratic rivals in the state legislature fodder to question the first-term governor’s actions.
“We’re hoping none of his activities or staff work is going to drive up borrowing costs like it did for the Chicago Public Schools in February,” said Steve Brown, spokesman for Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan.
I don’t think the timing is really that odd. It’s June 16th. The end of the fiscal year is in two weeks. Without appropriations and re-appropriations, much of the money can’t be spent. That’s not odd. It’s the Constitution.
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“As-is” ain’t compromise
Thursday, Jun 16, 2016 - Posted by Rich Miller
* As you already know, the budgeteers are using the governor’s stopgap budget proposal as the basis for their attempt to reach a compromise. And the governor has criticized Democratic leaders for “slow-walking” the working groups’ progress, including on the budget.
But the governor has now signaled twice, including yesterday, that he wants the General Assembly to approve his own proposal…
Rauner says he wants his budget proposals passed as is. The governor’s two-part solution includes short-term funding for government operations and social services, as well as an education spending measure that would ensure no school district receives less state aid than it was granted last year.
Ruling Democrats in the General Assembly have other ideas. They want to funnel extra money to Chicago Public Schools to help the district start to dig out of its financial hole, an idea Rauner repeatedly has dismissed as a “bailout.”
On Wednesday, Rauner said he wants lawmakers to return to the Capitol and vote on his two bills, and he warned them not to “fatten” the bills up with extra spending.
“We’re calling on the General Assembly, come back here to Springfield, vote on these two bills, let’s get them passed,” Rauner said. “And don’t play games with them, don’t delay, don’t come up with excuses why action can’t be taken. And don’t lard these bills up with a lot of additional spending that we can’t afford in an effort to force an income tax hike next January.”
Subscribers know more about the budgeteers’ process. It hasn’t been easy, mainly because there’s no extra money just laying around.
So, how about we let them try to do their jobs for a while without repeatedly insisting that they compromise by giving in?
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Republicans criticized over anti-Chicago ad
Thursday, Jun 16, 2016 - Posted by Rich Miller
* Gov. Rauner is still taking heat for saying some Chicago schools resemble “crumbling prisons”…
Speaking at Crain’s Future of Chicago conference, [Mayor Rahm Emanuel] said Rauner is “tearing down” school kids and teachers who have made remarkable progress turning around CPS. He went on to accuse the GOP governor of “running down” the city’s economy.
In a phone call later to emphasize the point, Emanuel expressed amazement that Rauner recently likened many city schools to “crumbling prisons.” Said the mayor rhetorically, “Would you refer to schools as prison?” Schools are “the city’s future,” Emanuel replied to his own question.
* And now this..
A new political ad from Illinois Republicans is using a photo of an abandoned building to portray Chicago Public Schools to a downstate Illinois audience.
We talked about the new ad yesterday. Here’s the image in question…
* Back to the WBEZ story…
In fact, it’s on the stock photo website shutterstock.
“It’s up to the individual viewer to decide how they interpret that,” said Steven Yoffe, a spokesman for the Illinois Republican Party. “But the message is that these representatives and the senator say one thing when they’re in their district and they do another thing in Springfield.”
Yaffe said he’s not sure if it’s a photo of a CPS school, and classified the ad as a “substantial TV ad buy, network buy” in Southern Illinois.
Click here to see the original image, which is described as “Low-angle perspective of an abandoned office or school building with broken windows, graffiti, and debris.”
* Emily Bittner at CPS…
“It’s disgraceful that Governor Rauner’s allies are spreading ugly distortions about Chicago Public Schools, where students are improving faster than their peers in Illinois and the nation. Schools all over Illinois need a funding system that treats students with dignity and equality, which is why so many downstate superintendents are opposed to the governor’s status quo education budget. The Governor needs to unite the state to pass a budget, not divide us.”
* Ah, but it gets better. Click here for another angle of the same building. Notice the mountains in the background? Last I checked, Chicago had no mountains.
During the past campaign, Rauner was criticized for using a stock photo of a mountain range in a TV ad about Illinois.
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State Museum to reopen
Thursday, Jun 16, 2016 - Posted by Rich Miller
* Finke…
The Illinois State Museum in Springfield is on track to reopen in early July after a legislative panel Tuesday approved a proposal to allow it to charge an admission fee.
The bipartisan Joint Committee on Administrative Rules voted to allow the Department of Natural Resources to go ahead with the admission fee that Gov. Bruce Rauner’s administration said is necessary for the museum to reopen. The panel did not discuss the issue before voting on it.
DNR said it will charge a $5-per-person entrance fee to the museum, which previously was open free to the public. Children under age 18, seniors and veterans would still get in for free.
DNR previously said that if JCAR allowed it to begin charging the admission fee, the museum would reopen July 2.
I’ve never quite understood why the Rauner administration felt the need to shut down the museum and effectively shoo off so many knowledgeable employees. All over the right to impose a $5 entrance fee?
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