* The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights has held 1,000 workshops that have helped 50,000 people become citizens in the past six years. The group has also kept track of who has taken the oath and where they live. Click the pic for a larger version…
Kevin Lyons, state’s attorney for Peoria County, traveled to the state Capitol several times to testify against the [death penalty] abolition bill. He noted that if Quinn signs the legislation, he would also have to act in favor of the inmates now on death row.
“Fairness would demand that if the death penalty is abolished, those persons would surely have to have their sentences commuted by governor act to life without parole,” Lyons said. “Fairness would require it.”
The other way of looking at it would be a compromise. Keep the current convicts on death row while banning the penalty in the future. There’s no hard “requirement” here.
Illinois has one of the three most restrictive eavesdropping laws in the country, along with Maryland the Massachusetts. And Illinois police and prosecutors are not shy about using the law to punish the taping of arrests and interrogations.
The street artist, Charles Drew, actually intended to get arrested in an act of civil disobedience targeting a Chicago ordinance banning the sale of art on the street without a permit. That would have been a misdemeanor, but he ended up charged with a felony for arranging a tape of his arrest.
Tiwanda Moore, the 20-year-old stripper, went to police headquarters to complain about an officer she said had fondled her and left her his personal phone number. An officer receiving Moore’s complaint tried to dissuade her from pursuing it. She began recording the conversation with her cell phone. When officers discovered what she was doing, they charged her under the eavesdropping statute.
Moore was scheduled to go trial this week and Drew in April. Moore is relying on a exception to the eavesdropping law that allows a conversation to be recorded surreptitiously if a crime is about to be committed. She maintains that the officer’s effort to discourage her from filing a complaint was committing a crime.
The ACLU in Illinois went to court to challenge the state eavesdropping law as a violation of the First Amendment, but a Chicago judge threw out the suit last month. The ACLU is appealing.
From the National Press Photographers Association…
“Despite consistent court rulings protecting the First Amendment rights of both citizens and the media to take photographs in public places, and despite many law enforcement agencies spelling it out in their official policies, the officer on the street either doesn’t get the word or decides to act on his own in the name of ‘security’ or ‘terrorism laws,’ often citing rules that don’t exist and exerting authority that’s non-existent. And recently in some states police have started citing old wiretapping laws that have been on the books for decades as their excuse for ordering photographers to cease videotaping officers as they’re doing their jobs in public, either during traffic stops or street arrests or while interfering with photographers who are breaking no rules and who are posing no threats to safety.”
The Illinois Republican Party plans a statewide pre-primary straw poll ahead of the 2012 presidential election.
The party made the announcement Sunday night at an event marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of President Ronald Reagan. The Illinois GOP says the straw poll will be Nov. 5 and measure the support of Republican presidential hopefuls.
“Congratulations to Mitt Romney, whose strong showing today indicates he has begun to put together a strong statewide organization,” state GOP Chairman Andy McKenna said in a statement released by the Romney campaign. “There’s no question that Illinois’ demographics closely match those of the United States and this could be an indication as to whom Illinois voters are leaning toward this coming February.”
John McCain won just 4.12 percent of that straw poll vote. Oops.
Then again, holding the vote in November rather than August might help.
Rahm Emanuel’s campaign says the Chicago mayoral candidate has earned an endorsement from Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White.
Emanuel campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said Monday morning that Emanuel would receive the endorsement from White. Emanuel has already received endorsements from the city’s two major daily newspapers, The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun-Times.
For knowledgeable music fans, two things jump out from the list of donors to the campaign of mayoral frontrunner Rahm Emanuel. The first is the contributions from the two top executives at Ticketmaster/Live Nation, the monopolistic giant that has become the most reviled entity in the music business.
Executive chairman Irving Azoff, the notorious “Poison Dwarf” of the music industry and a man who’s been pushing concert ticket prices ever higher since he started as manager of the Eagles, gave the campaign $10,000. And CEO Michael Rapino, as ruthless a figure as the music business ever has produced, gave $5,000.
The second fact that leaps out is that no fewer than 15 employees at William Morris Endeavor, the Hollywood super-agency run by Ari Emanuel, have donated a total of $141,000 to his brother Rahm’s campaign. Not coincidentally, William Morris co-owns Lollapalooza, which has a tax-free sweetheart deal with the city of Chicago that keeps it in Grant Park through 2018.
Never nurturing to begin with, the waning days of the Daley administration have been a singularly dreadful time for the city’s relations with the music community. The dismantling of the Department of Cultural Affairs has cast uncertainty on the future of music programming at Millennium Park, and when the push to privatize the free summer music festivals resulted in a stellar proposal that could have created Chicago’s answers to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and Milwaukee’s Summerfest, Daley abruptly reversed himself and arbitrarily rejected it.
*** UPDATE *** From the Emanuel campaign…
Given his brother’s position at WME and on the board of Live Nation, Rahm would ask the City Council to appoint an outside negotiator to handle any negotiations with these companies so that there wasn’t even a question of favoritism.
[ *** End Of Update *** ]
* Meanwhile, Gery Chico’s campaign will receive the endorsement of several labor unions today. From a press release…
International Union of Operating Engineers
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 9
Sheet Metal Workers Local 73
Ironworkers Local 1
Laborers’ District Council of Chicago & Vicinity
Painters District Council #14
* The Sun-Times looks at candidate finances today. This passage about Patricia Van Pelt-Watkins kinda jumped out at me…
Watkins, a community activist, declined to answer questions about why she lives in a house that’s owned by a church whose leader is heavily bankrolling her mayoral run. Also, she has donated sizable chunks of her income to one or more charities that she declined to identify.
Imagine 39,000 government workers being paid to do nothing.
That’s what happened last Wednesday. And it reflects a pervasive and pernicious mindset within government — government serves its employees, not the taxpayers.
As we all know, Illinois got walloped with the mother of all blizzards last week. Many folks couldn’t make it into work. And that’s perfectly understandable. The snow was deep.
Private sector workers faced with this predicament generally were told to take a vacation day or go without pay. Not surprisingly, many chose to brave the snowdrifts rather than face a lighter paycheck.
But most state “workers” were told not to even bother trying to go to work. And they weren’t asked to sacrifice vacation days or personal leave days. Wednesday was just a gift from the governor.
* The Question: Should state employees have been forced to take a vacation/personal day last Wednesday? Explain.
The state’s Secretary of Human Services met with a group representing child care providers last Monday and gave them some bad news. Prepare for $100 million in cuts to child care programs, Secretary Michelle Saddler told the group.
According to a participant in the meeting, Saddler said the state could freeze intake of new clients, “dramatically” increase parental co-pays, cut rates to providers and eliminate child care for parents who are in school or employment-related training.
The meeting resulted in an urgent alert by Illinois Action for Children imploring supporters to immediately call the governor’s office.
The $100 million cut would be for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends June 30. That cut would equal about a third of the child care program’s remaining budget, which comes from both state and federal revenue sources.
After initially refusing to confirm that the Secretary of Human Services had warned activists about that impending $100 million cut to child care programs, the governor’s budget office finally shed some light on the matter later in the week.
The cuts are not “new” cuts, according to the budget office. Instead, a spokesperson claimed, these are cuts that were ordered last year and are just now being implemented.
So, in other words, the Quinn administration waited until after the election and after the state income tax hike was passed to implement huge cuts to a program for mostly poor, single-mother families. And because the administration waited so long, the cuts are now more than twice as deep as they would have been had they been executed at the start of the fiscal year in July.
But, of course, making those cuts last summer would have hurt Quinn with his core constituencies and he needed every possible vote he could get. Women, the poor, minorities and liberal voters would have been outraged by major cuts to child care programs, which help poor families get on their feet. Now, they all can be safely tossed overboard. The election is over.
Liberals and minorities in the House and Senate almost all voted for the income tax hike, believing that the worst cuts were behind them. The deed is done, so the cuts now can be announced.
David Ormsby, a public relations consultant, claimed last week that Saddler’s department is looking at perhaps $400 million in overall cuts — equal to 10 percent of her department’s entire budget.
But since the fiscal year is more than half over, a 10 percent budget cut to the department now would be equal to more than a 20 percent reduction in the department’s remaining outlays.
Quinn sharply criticized state Sen. Bill Brady on the campaign trail last year for proposing an across-the-board cut of 10 percent, but Quinn apparently is planning to double that amount in one of the departments which he has claimed he holds dear.
And to add insult to injury, Quinn is encouraging groups and businesses that have contracts with the Department of Human Services to lobby legislators for a long-term borrowing plan to pay off the state’s past-due bills. The state owes service providers billions of dollars because it didn’t have the cash to pay them on time until the tax hike passed. Many of those providers work in the human service field. So, now Quinn wants them to work to get the money they’re owed while he’s simultaneously eviscerating their funding.
The word “chutzpah” comes to mind.
The state didn’t have enough revenue to pay for the programs it had for the past few years. That’s why we were in such a hole. And everybody at the Statehouse knew that budget cuts would have to happen even after the income tax rate was increased.
But concealing cuts to child care — of all things — until after the election and after that tax hike vote is just downright shameful.
Some think Quinn is trying to create panic by announcing these cuts and then using that angst as leverage to find legislative votes for his borrowing plan. He’s done this sort of thing before, only to back off at the last minute. But using poor single moms as human shields would not be his finest hour, to say the least.
This whole thing makes me sick to my stomach.
* And the Quinn administration is actively lobbying vendors and human service providers to push for the governor’s borrowing bill…
The administration Friday began contacting 36,000 vendors owed money by the state, urging them to call on their lawmakers to support the borrowing bill. Employees in the administration and state agencies are calling each of the vendors, said Quinn spokeswoman Brie Callahan.
About 100 people were making the calls, including people on Quinn’s staff, legislative liaisons, government interns and regional staffers with the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.
“This is a legislative issue,” Callahan said. “This is something the governor has said from the beginning we need to do. Our goal is to help educate vendors.”
Calls and e-mails also are going out to human-service providers asking them similarly to have their clients contact lawmakers, she said. The state also is getting in touch with umbrella organizations, such as the Illinois State Chamber of Commerce.
From the e-mail sent to human service providers that was signed by the governor…
Dear Friends,
This is a call to action. I am writing to ask you to support Senate Bill 3, a debt restructuring plan to pay Illinois’ bills.
As you know, for too long, the State of Illinois has failed to pay its bills - ‘balancing’ its books on the backs of its vendors, health care organizations, and social service agencies.
Not mentioned: They’re going to balance the books on the backs of providers again.
* Related…
* New Medicaid law: Needed reform or ‘Scrooge-like’?: Opponents of the state’s recently signed Medicaid reform law say it will kick thousands of children off public health insurance and hinder the state’s ability to convince low-income families to apply for coverage in the All Kids program. “It’s kind of Scrooge-like,” said Stephanie Altman, policy director of Chicago-based Health & Disability Advocates.
A state, municipal or private worker can get thousands of tax-free dollars through workers’ compensation based primarily on a doctor’s note. All that is needed is a report stating the claimant has a wrist condition known as carpal tunnel syndrome or cubital tunnel syndrome, which can affect the elbow.
Surgery or treatment of any kind is not required. A lawyer isn’t needed.
And the public won’t know anything about it until the money is on the way.
While diagnosis-only settlements pay less, they are part of a little known overall process that takes place primarily out of the public view involving uncontested workers’ compensation claims. According to a database provided by the commission, this procedure allowed approximately 95 percent of 3,500 private and public workers outside Chicago who did not hire lawyers to be given settlements last year without the usual lengthy administrative process, which can include a public hearing. The database did not include awards by any of the 15 arbitrators based in Chicago. There are 32 arbitrators statewide. […]
Of the 3,500 uncontested settlements handled this way in 2010, the News-Democrat found that 117 involved state workers whose total of $2.9 million in awards were paid from the tax supported general revenue fund. Of that amount, approximately $1.9 million involved carpal or cubital tunnel claims or other repetitive trauma injuries.
The number of people 65 or older in the Chicago area will soar 65% to 1.7 million by 2030, estimates William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
That’s less than the 78% increase expected nationally, thanks to immigration in Chicago. Still, about 1 in 6 people in the area will be 65 or older in 2030, compared with 1 in 9 today.
From 2020 to 2030, Illinois’ economy is expected to grow 1.4% annually, down from 2.4% this decade and 3% to 3.5% in the 1990s, when the boomers were in their prime, according to Moody’s Analytics Inc.
One reason: Growth in the labor force, necessary to increase output, will slow as boomers leave the workplace. Chicago’s labor growth will decline to 0.24% in 2020 from 1.03% this year, Moody’s estimates.
* Other stuff…
* Second site bows out of high school rodeo rotation
* Quinn: Auto jobs latest proof NJ isn’t better: “[In] New Jersey, I think the last auto production was about 2005 in the state,” the governor said. “The lights have been turned out over there. We’re doing very well in Illinois, with Mitsubishi, with Ford, with Chrysler, and with Navistar that makes trucks.”
* Reform groups hope for more ethics legislation in Illinois: Political scientist and UIS professor emeritus Kent Redfield said those reforms are unlikely to be addressed in the next General Assembly. “Right now, the overwhelming priority is the budget, and in some sense it sort of sucks the air out of everything else,” Redfield said.
* NBC5 reported last night that the campaigns themselves are claiming that Gery Chico has moved into second place. From the script provided by Channel 5…
Staffers at the campaigns for — Emanuel, Braun and Chico — tell NBC 5 that their internal polls show Gery Chico making movement — this week surpassing Carol Moseley Braun in their internal surveys… Those internal polls do not yet give Emanuel the coveted 50 percent plus one he needs to avoid a run off, however all of the campaigns agree Emanuel is polling in the 40 to 45 percent range, Chico in second, in the 20 percent range and Braun now in third.
VO: Desperate and running out of time, Gery Chico’s making false attacks on Rahm’s plan to lower taxes.
The truth? Rahm would cut Chicago’s sales tax by twenty percent — saving working families up to two hundred dollars a year.
The Sun-Times calls it a “good idea,” saying many Chicagoans will be “paying less in sales tax than they do now.”
Chico would protect tax loopholes for the wealthy, while forcing you to pay hundreds more each year.
More money in your pocket? That’s Rahm Emanuel’s plan.
* And check out who’s showing up at a Chico event today…
Gery Chico Public Schedule Afternoon
Sat., Feb. 5, 2011
WHAT: Mayoral candidate Gery Chico will pick-up the endorsement of Ald. John Pope (10th Ward). Ald. Sandi Jackson (7th Ward) will also attend the event.
WHEN: 2:30 p.m., Sat., Feb. 5, 2011
WHERE: Lakeside Marketing Center (855 S. Greenbay Ave. – Suggested route: Lake Shore Dr. to South Shore Dr. to 86th St.)
* Also, the coppers and the firefighters have responded to Emanuel’s new ad that takes a bit of a whack at city employees…
Statement from Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 President Mark Donahue:
Rahm Emanuel is running a new television commercial in which he says that City Workers should know that they are “actually public servants”. This past year, members of the Chicago Police Department and the Chicago Fire Department lost 8 of their brothers in the line of duty in service to the people of this great city. This past week our brothers and sisters and the other workers in every city department went above and beyond in their efforts to serve the people of this City by ensuring the safety of their lives and property from one of nature’s most violent storms, and they continue to assist in the clean up efforts. None of these public servants need a lecture from Rahm Emanuel on the meaning of public service. I believe Rahm knows better and should take this offensive ad off the air immediatly and concentrate on real issues.
And…
Statement from Tom Ryan President of the Fire Fighters Local 2:
“On behalf of the firefighters of this city, we find Rahm Emanuel’s latest ad attacking city workers including for political gain incredibly insulting.
“We dedicate our lives to protecting and serving the citizens of this city. We run into burning buildings. We ride snowmobiles in the middle of blizzards to save lives. We don’t Emanuel to remind us that we are “actually” public servants.
“In his ad, Emanuel says “city government is not an employment agency.” We, and the men and woman of the Chicago Police Department risk our lives every day for the citizens of Chicago and to suggest we do this for any other reason is cynical and unfair.
“The next time Rahm Emanuel decides to roll out an ad attacking city workers, he should think about who is keeping his neighborhood safe.”
AFSCME also got into the game…
AFSCME Council 31 executive director Henry Bayer issued the following statement:
“City workers are public servants, not punching bags. It’s very disappointing that, in the wake of a devastating storm through which so many public employees worked tirelessly to aid their fellow Chicagoans, mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel’s new campaign ad impugns their integrity and dedication. Fire fighters, police officers, plow drivers, 311 operators, CTA drivers, emergency responders and countless others stood tall in a crisis and kept our city running. They deserve thanks, not a crass commercial that seeks to discredit them. Emanuel should withdraw this ad now and apologize. Chicago voters deserve a campaign focused on the issues that matter to working families–good jobs, good schools, and safe streets among them–not attack politics that try to turn our city against itself.”
