* NewPress Release: Speaker Madigan responds to Gov. Blagojevich lawsuit
In essence, the governor has sued because the House started two of the special sessions a few hours earlier than the governor would have preferred – in other words, because the House acted on his supposedly urgent business too urgently
I believe that the House made every reasonable attempt to comply with the governor’s 16 special session proclamations, even though: none of them could have resulted in the passage of a comprehensive budget bill because they were written to only allow the General Assembly to consider a portion of the state budget; many of them were duplicative; many were received with only a few hours’ notice (in two instances less than an hour); and for none of them did the governor furnish any legislation for the body to consider, permit any witnesses from his administration to testify or himself appear in support of a bill.
* Chuck Sweeney: Syverson and Blago, the new odd couple
Michael McRaith, director of the Illinois Division of Insurance, was in town in the afternoon to get out the governor’s message ahead of an evening budget hearing run by state Rep. Jack McGuire, D-Joliet.
Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the Illinois House have been holding dueling events around the state as they take the Springfield budget battles on the road.
McRaith said the governor vetoed about $463 million worth of spending in the House budget to free up money that will fund breast and cervical cancer screenings for women without insurance.
Many of McRaith’s comments — and those from local officials, including Joliet Junior College President Gena Proulx and Plainfield Economic Partnership Executive Director Alex Harris — focused on local projects that would be funded in a $25 billion Senate capital bill supported by the governor.
Millions of dollars in projects could come to Central Illinois as part of a statewide construction program, state Sen. Bill Brady said in a two-page press release Monday.
Nowhere in the release, however, does the former gubernatorial candidate explain that he voted against a way to pay for many of the projects.
The Bloomington Republican was among 15 senators who voted “no” last week on a plan to expand gambling in Illinois in order to generate the billions of dollars that will fund the statewide construction program.
Brady did vote in favor of two components of the proposal, which is now awaiting action in the House. He supported provisions that outline how the money will be spent and on which projects, but he voted “no” when it came to the gambling expansion idea.
Obama studied the odds carefully, friends say. If he had strong cards, he’d play. If he didn’t, he would fold rather than bet good money on the chance the right card would show up when he needed it.
That reputation meant that he often succeeded when he decided to bluff.
“When Barack stayed in, you pretty much figured he’s got a good hand,” said Larry Walsh, a former senator.
More than one lawmaker teased Obama about his careful style of play.
“I always used to kid him that the only fiscally conservative bone in his body I ever saw was at the poker table with his own money,” said state Sen. Bill Brady, a Republican from the central Illinois city of Bloomington. “I said if he would be half as conservative with taxpayer dollars, the state would be a lot better off.”
The federal government sued the state, contending that Public Act 095-0138, which Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed in August, is illegal because it prevents Illinois employers from participating in a federal program to check the legal status of job applicants.
“Today’s lawsuit seeks to invalidate an Illinois state law that frustrates our ability to assist employers in making sure their workforce is legal, and in doing so conflicts with federal law,” Carl Nichols, deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Division, said in a news release.
* U.S. sues Illinois for blocking immigration crackdown
* Open road tolling could spell end to toll booths
* Ted Pincus: Gidwitz sees Illinois business as lame giant
Ron Gidwitz is alive and well, and fighting mad. The former gubernatorial candidate and influential CEO of Helene Curtis Industries says that the Blagojevich administration is crippling Illinois’ ability to compete in today’s tough global marketplace. While the state successfully shook off the rust belt image years ago and became a key hub of finance and services, vast overspending plus inattention to upgrading needs of transportation, education, workforce quality and tax incentives have greatly handicapped us, he contends.
“We’re at a significant economic disadvantage vs. Iowa and Wisconsin, for example,” he says. “Take a look at workmen’s comp, medical and health care costs. Iowa is at least 25 percent less expensive as a place to live and do business, and Wisconsin is at least 10 percent less.
Weller also doesn’t like answering questions about his ethics problem. When TV newsman Mike Flannery pursued him after his retirement speech in Joliet, he got shoved twice by a Weller aide near a stairway, knocking him into a woman. Maybe that’s the way they did things in Guatemala when Mrs. Weller’s old man was in power. It’s not the way we do things even in as tough a political state as this one.
“We just don’t know. Our budget needs to be passed by September 30th. We have to put a 30-day window out there, put a tentative budget out, advertise it, pass it,” said Dr. Kelly Funke, Superintendent of Limestone Community H.S. District.
Many school districts expect to get more state money for 2008, and that could be about $400 more per student.
* School budget conservative in light of state budget impasse
While Illinois politicians continue to fight over the state budget, school financial planners try to do their jobs without hard numbers. For Harlem — and probably many other school districts across Illinois — it means that budgets will probably be amended after state funding for schools is known.
A public hearing on the tentative budget is set for 5:30 p.m. Thursday, with the School Board expected to vote on it immediately afterward. This process, with revisions likely, would have to be repeated if the budget is altered at a later date.
“My guess is that most districts will have to amend their budgets,” said Rob Holmes, Harlem’s business manager.
At Monday’s School Board meeting, he told board members that with no word from Springfield, the 2007-08 budget will not change from the tentative version that was released in late August. That spending plan showed balanced spending for this school year.
Stroger’s office would not say Monday whether he supports the increase, but at least one commissioner said he got a call from the president late last week asking him to support the proposal. Administration officials have been talking to commissioners in recent weeks about whether they could support some form of higher taxes to fill a 2008 budget deficit estimated by some officials to be as large as $400 million.
“The president supports ways to increase revenue wherever possible,” spokeswoman Ibis Antongiorgi said. “This would be a possible revenue source.”
The Stroger administration could not say how much revenue the increase would generate. At the current rate, the county sales tax brings in about $300 million a year. Critics said such a large increase in the rate would send shoppers outside Cook County and would particularly hurt businesses that sell big-ticket items such as cars and appliances.
* Phil Kadner: State’s Attorney says Cook Co. should issue tax bills now
Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who is in a bitter feud with Madigan, last week used his veto power to amend the House measure and expand and increase the tax breaks for homeowners. Houlihan appeared at a news conference to endorse the governor’s plan.
But the measure now must go back to the Legislature, where sources tell me Madigan plans to kill it.
In the meantime, school districts, library districts, fire districts, municipalities and the county itself are not receiving the property tax money they have anticipated in their budgets.
If the property tax bills are not mailed before Nov. 1, school districts will not have the money they need to make their bond payments, which are due Dec. 1. Property owners have 30 days to pay after receiving the bills.
“There is a panic setting in in a lot of school districts,” said Rob Grossi, Bloom Township’s school treasurer. “People have to start making plans on how they’re going to deal with this situation, and nobody’s sure what’s going to happen.”
Houlihan is hopeful that the governor and Madigan “can put their differences aside” and agree on at least a one-year tax cap expansion to resolve the current dilemma.
“I’m open to compromise, but what is wrong next to Millennium Park?” Daley said. “You see families. They’re not destroying the park. They’re in the Crown Fountain. Look at them there — all types of kids. Their parents are down there. They’re not destroying anything. … Now, those are a little older kids. But these are 5-year-olds. Now, do you really believe that a 5-year-old can destroy your property values?”
* Dennis Byrne: Free, clear endangered by our mayor
After all is said, the rationale for relocating the Chicago Children’s Museum into Grant Park comes down to this: Nothing’s there, something has to go there and it might as well be the museum.
Obviously, that reasoning flunks all tests of logic, but, at base, it’s the best that the move’s backers can do. Put aside all the red herrings (racism, classism, adultism) raised by Mayor Richard Daley. A Tribune headline succinctly got to the heart of the argument: “Fixing ‘nowhere.’” The northeast corner of Grant Park is “underused;” enter it from the serpentine bridge from Millennium Park and you’ll find yourself “nowhere.” Because large-scale work must be done on the parking garage below, we’ll have an opportunity to fix the supposedly desolate park by relocating the privately operated, fee-to-enter Children’s Museum from its cramped Navy Pier quarters.
As you weigh the proposed relocation of the Chicago Children’s Museum, consider this sentence from Sunday’s Tribune: “If located in Grant Park, the museum would also receive a subsidy from the Chicago Park District, part of a program that has netted millions for other museums on park land.”
What a nice bonus: In addition to getting a lease on a Grant Park parcel — perhaps 99 years at $1 a year — the privately owned, nonprofit museum would get a phased-in subsidy from Chicago property taxpayers.
This year, 10 cultural institutions are divvying up $33.8 million in Park District subsidies; the Lincoln Park Zoo gets a separate $5.6 million, according to the district. The money is allotted according to a formula that factors in their respective attendance figures and budgets.
* Mary Mitchell: Downtowners don’t fret about black children
Daley has been harshly criticized for playing the so-called race card in this dispute, which pits him against aldermanic newcomer Brendan Reilly (42nd). Reilly is backing residents who live in high-rises near the park site where the Chicago Children’s Museum would be located.
Last Thursday, Jean Pritzker, president of the board of the museum — and oh yes, a billionaire — told the Chicago Sun-Times that the uproar was “killing” her.
“I don’t think anybody has a right to be fearful of a bunch of little kids and their parents who simply want to go to a place that cares about them, nurtures them and helps them,” she said.
Now that’s two white people of means who hang out with other white people of means, and both of them think some of the naysayers are playing a race card of their own.
“When we decided to do Navy Pier, people had rumors: ‘Oh, there’s going to be a big gaming hall.’ I don’t know who’s getting these rumors out. This will never be a gaming facility. … Navy Pier is for families,” Daley told a news conference at Navy Pier, where he is hosting a “Hemispheric Forum” for mayors from North, Central and South America.
“When I closed … Meigs Field, they said it was going to be gaming. It’s not going to be gaming. And also, gaming is not going to be around McCormick Place because you have conventions. They want to do convention business. If we have an opportunity to do a casino, you place it … away from these venues.”
Note: The links today are by no means comprehensive. But, I wanted to be sure to provide some assistance in getting everyone’s morning off on the right foot. Even if it means dropping a few points on my LSAT score, I’m here to serve my faithful Cap Fax Blog reading friends. - Paul
Even when a judge asks Gov. Rod Blagojevich to sit down and negotiate in good faith, he can’t bring himself to do it.
As you by now may know, Sangamon County Circuit Judge Patrick Kelley dismissed Blagojevich’s lawsuit against the House Clerk last Thursday….
Also, the Senate met last week and didn’t enter any of the governor’s veto messages into its own journal. The governor’s claim that he is simply attempting to uphold his Constitutional right to a speedy hearing on his vetoes would have been strengthened if he had added the Senate to his lawsuit after Monday’s Senate session.
Instead, by failing to include the Senate, the governor’s case was exposed for what it really was: a bogus judicial extension of his intense political fight with the House Speaker.
There’s still one more of Blagojevich’s lawsuits pending. This is the one in which Blagojevich wants the courts to say he gets to set both the date and time of special sessions. Madigan thinks otherwise, which is what got him sued by the governor.
Last week, House Minority Leader TOM CROSS, R-Oswego, quietly filed papers to get involved in the lawsuit as an ally of Madigan. Cross argued that any decision made affecting Madigan also affects the Republicans…
Cross is being represented by former Republican Rep. JOHN COUNTRYMAN. Cross spokesman DAVID DRING said Countryman is doing the work for free. Dring added that Cross wants to see Madigan win so that when Republicans win control of the House and Cross is elected speaker, he will not have to face similar questions about special sessions.
Supporters hope careful negotiations produce an expansion plan that can pick up enough votes to pass after years of false starts.
“There is a gaming bill that can be crafted that can be passed,” said Rep. Lou Lang (D-Skokie). “There’s a lot of questions to be asked.”
Talk of expanding gambling has become as inevitable as death and taxes at the Illinois statehouse. But in the past, gambling measures usually died because they got so loaded up with goodies that legislators backed away.
This year could be different, though, because circumstances behind the gambling push are different.
It’s being offered as the answer to two specific problems - repairing roads and bridges and bailing out Chicago’s aging mass transit system- instead of as a source of money for state programs in general.
The deadly collapse of a Minneapolis bridge has driven home the need for Illinois to repair its transportation infrastructure, and the financial problems with Chicago’s mass transit are scaring the area’s lawmakers.
* Editorial: Time to consider a capital plan, casinos and all
We are lukewarm on the expansion of gambling in Illinois and suspicious of rosy revenue projections for three proposed casinos, but the need for local capital projects that are part of this deal make it tempting to support.
Mostly we just want to scream: Do something! If not this, what?
The state hasn’t had a capital plan since Gov. Rod Blagojevich took office. How long can the state’s roads, bridges and school buildings be ignored?
The Senate unanimously passed a six-year, $25.4 billion capital plan last week that includes such local public works projects including road improvements and money for the MetroCentre and the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Rockford’s rural health initiative.
“I began to throw out a number of questions regarding his controversial Latin American land deals,” and asked if there should be a House Ethics committee investigation, Flannery said.
Weller did not speak, but instead went back down the stairs, still surrounded by a phalanx of aides, Flannery said. At that point, the scene began to turn ugly.
“There’s a large man, who begins shoving reporters around, including yours truly. He shoves me one way, then he goes after another reporter with CLTV.… There’s an opening in the doorway, and I begin moving through that doorway, and he shoves me down the stairs; he shoves me into a railing on the staircase and also into a woman in on the staircase who was traveling with Weller,” Flannery said.
* Roeper: Weller shove looks like old-school roughhousing
* Slain Marine’s father to mount challenge against Rep. Melissa Bean
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed that state’s primary seat belt law in 2003. Since then, seat belt use has jumped by 14 percent. The most recent statewide survey of safety belt use, released in July, showed 90 percent of Illinois drivers and front-seat passengers now wear seat belts.
* Police cruisers in Northern Illinois going high tech; more here
* State can help fight global warming, says expert panel
* U.S. Courts back state ban on horse-slaughtering for human food
* SIU plagiarism charge could bolster Poshard defense
* SIU report on plagiarism says it can be unintended, insignificant
The panel’s chairman on Friday called the 17-page report’s release coincidental and unrelated to the unfolding flap over whether Glenn Poshard plagiarized parts of his 1974 master’s thesis and 1984 doctoral dissertation at the university’s flagship Carbondale campus.
“The guts of the report were really done much earlier” than when Poshard’s troubles first surfaced late last month, said Lain Adkins, director of the University Press at the Carbondale school.
The panel of employees at the university’s Carbondale and Edwardsville campuses was created in the wake of claims that Walter Wendler, then chancellor at the Carbondale school, lifted sections from a strategic plan for a Texas school where he worked, then used them in SIU’s long-range plan.
As the summer legislative debacle dragged on in Springfield, Daley laid low. In September, while the clock was ticking down to midnight of the CTA’s doomsday scenario, he was tooling around Paris on a bicycle.
Mr. Gets Things Done is dawdling over a decision on a new police superintendent while schoolchildren are being shot down on the streets, and his administration remains recalcitrant about slamming down hard on police brutality and corruption.
Why? Because right now, Daley has only one agenda. Anyone who has been around him for more than 10 seconds lately knows he has caught a bad case of Olympic fever. Real bad. Snaring Chicago as the site for the 2016 Olympics will forever seal his legacy as the Mayor Who Made Chicago a World Class City. Forever.
Aside from the mayor’s blow up at him, the toll on Reilly is not unexpected given that he is the local elected representative of the city’s marquee ward.
It’s a ward brimming with high-stakes development, from Trump Tower on the Chicago River to the 2,000-foot Chicago Spire planned for the lakefront.
Reilly has already put the brakes on Northwestern University’s plans to sell the historic Lake Shore Athletic Club to a developer who intended to tear it down.
He’s also dealing with Streeterville residents’ concerns about traffic congestion, inadequate parking and a proposed helipad with Children’s Memorial Hospital’s $850 million plan to relocate to Streeterville.
Reilly sought to dispel any notion that he’s against development, stressing that he has already given the green light to a number of projects.
* Zorn: If alderman is in ‘prerogatory,’ where is Daley?
“There’s aldermanic prerogative,” conceded Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley last week, during feisty remarks in support of the effort to move the Chicago Children’s Museum to a new home in Grant Park. “But when it comes to a statement that kids are not welcome to Grant Park, that’s not an aldermanic prerogatory.”
It sounded to me as though Daley inadvertently came up with a very useful new word.
Prerogatory — a state of suffering and repentance in which an alderman must abide until he gets right with the mayor and has his building and zoning motions approved.
I’m outta here for a few days. I want to take some time to fully recharge before the October veto session nightmare begins. I’ll post again Wednesday. Paul is studying for his LSAT, so I doubt he’ll fill in. If he doesn’t have time, Illinoize is in charge…
CBS 2 Political Editor Mike Flannery plans to press criminal charges after he was shoved and sent down a flight of stairs while questioning a congressman Friday, knocking him into a woman who also fell.
The incident happened at a news conference in Joliet, where Rep. Jerry Weller (R-Ill.) was announcing his intention not to run for reelection. […]
There’s a large man, who begins shoving reporters around, including yours truly. He shoves me one way, then he goes after another reporter with CLTV.… There’s an opening in the doorway, and I begin moving through that doorway, and he shoves me down the stairs; he shoves me into a railing on the staircase and also into a woman in on the staircase who was traveling with Weller,” Flannery said. […]
“I realized that I need to ask the police to look into this, and I indicated to them that we get roughed up like this from time to time, but I don’t recall ever being treated his violently; shoved around this violently, to the point where a woman gets knocked down,” Flannery said.
Flannery said he later learned an arrest had been made by police officers from Joliet Junior College.
He said the man who shoved him was identified by others as a Weller staffer, but, “He never said a word to me before during or after his violent actions, nor did he say a word to my colleagues who were similarly mistreated.”
*** UPDATE 2 *** There’s apparently much better video of this thug pushing both CLTV reporter Carlos Hernandez Gomez and Flannery. It should be posted soon.
*** UPDATE 3 *** This isn’t the first time that somebody has been dealt with harshly by the Weller people. Remember this one?
*** UPDATE 4 *** The CLTV video is now posted. It gives you a different angle and shows how the CLTV reporter was pushed by the Weller guy, who is now reported to be in custody.
*** UPDATE 5 *** From the CLTV video it looks as if the Weller guy leaned hard against Carlos Hernandez Gomez’s throat or upper chest. You can hear Carlos grunt in the video. Here’s a screen cap, which shows Carlos putting his hand on the other guy’s hand, but go watch the video…
* Residents of Cook County have been getting a major taste lately of what us Statehouse types have been dealing with all year. First, it was the CTA/RTA fight that featured hot-dogging by the governor, intransigence by Mayor Daley, intense battles between the two legislative chamber leaders and partisan gridlock. Now it’s the property tax assessment cap…
Now, Cook County homeowners may be the ones caught in the middle of the intensifying political feud between Gov. Blagojevich and House Speaker Michael Madigan.
The Democratic governor used his veto pen Thursday to rewrite Cook County property-tax relief legislation, radically reworking plans by Madigan (D-Chicago) to phase out property tax assessment caps in three years. […]
But the move and likely House rejection of it leave in question whether any property tax relief will come from Springfield this year and whether the flow of taxes to school districts and local governments could be disrupted.
Less than an hour after the governor took action, the House appeared poised to block Blagojevich’s move amid questions the governor may have overstepped his legal authority in changing the intent of legislation that passed the General Assembly overwhelmingly.
Illinois Senate President Emil Jones, however, supports the changes, a signal that his chamber will likely approve them.
If the two chambers split, the bill will die altogether, leaving no tax relief whatsoever for Cook County residents.
Oy.
* As usual, the TV news led with the happy stuff, which only serves to get everybody’s hopes up…
Homeowners in Cook County could be in line for some property tax relief. Governor Rod Blagojevich’s plan would give individual homeowners a break, and cost big business big bucks.
There’s good news for homeowners in Cook County who could be getting some property tax relief. Governor Rod Blagojevich announced he’s making a current property tax cap permanent.
* The Tribune did a good job of looking at the impact of what is really at stake…
In taking action, the governor stood in front of a bungalow in Lincoln Square that saw its property value increase 75 percent between 2002 and 2006. But as a result of the 7 percent cap, the house’s tax bills between 2002 and 2005 have increased less than 1 percent, or $27.
Blagojevich pointed out that under the Madigan version the 2006 tax bill due this fall would have increased 4.8 percent, and an additional 22 percent over the following two years.
Under the governor’s version, that house’s taxes will drop 1.8 percent this fall and increase 9 percent over the next two years.
Business groups, say the 7 percent legislation has gone far beyond its original intent of acting as a shock absorber against rapid assessment increases and instead has unfairly shifted burden away from homeowners who are benefiting from rising values.
* By the way, yesterday’s veto also imperils a wind farm assessment proposal.
Gov. Rod Blagojevich rode up on his white horse last week with a $91 million loan to postpone mass transit cuts and a promise to work hard to solve the funding crisis before that loan was spent. Since he also repeated his promise to veto a very good bill already on the table, you might be tempted to assume he had a germ of a reasonable alternative up his sleeve.
Dream on. […]
Blagojevich says the $200 million will “buy some time,” but what it would really do is buy more trouble. […]
If Blagojevich or Jones has an actual idea to fix the transit system, let’s hear it. If not, they should get out of the way.
* The Sun-Times looks at the field if Jerry Weller does, indeed, announce today that he is retiring…
State Senate Majority Leader Debbie DeFrancesco Halvorson (D-Crete) is one of the more well-known Democrats considering a bid. She has already been contacted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) about getting in the race.
Jerry Weber, president of Kankakee Community College, has indicated he will run for the Democratic nomination.
On the GOP side, state Sen. Christine Radogno — the GOP nominee for state treasurer last year — said she was considering entering the 11th District race. Radogno now lives outside the district in Lemont but said she would move into it if she decides to run and wins.
“It’s an opportunity that doesn’t come along very often,” Radogno said.
Weber has proved a more adept campaigner than just about anyone expected. Radogno is up for reelection next year, so she’d have to give up her Senate seat.
New Lenox Mayor Tim Baldermann confirmed Wednesday he had been approached by Republicans seeking a replacement for Weller. Baldermann said he was considering entering the race. […]
Former Will County Executive Joe Mikan said he would think about entering the race, but he’d have to move into the district to do so. Mikan lives about three miles north of the district’s boundary.
The Green Party will also be competing in this district.
Analysts say at least one-third of the state’s 18 [sic] House seats could be hotly contested next year, several of them due to Republican retirements. It’s possible no other state will see as many competitive races.
“To say that Illinois will be a big battleground in the 2008 race for Congress would be a gross understatement,” said David Wasserman, House editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report in Washington. “This is going to be ground zero in the battle for the House, no question about it.”
Democrats and Republicans disagree on how likely it is that any Illinois seats will change parties in the election. But the map clearly puts the GOP on the defensive.
Six seats appear competitive already, five of them Republican-held. Three will be open due to the looming retirements of Republican Reps. Dennis Hastert, Ray LaHood and Jerry Weller. Three others feature incumbents in varying degrees of electoral consternation: Republicans Mark Kirk and Peter Roskam and Democrat Melissa Bean.
I agree with ArchPundit that Roskam won’t get a major challenge. That’s a stretch, added for dramatic effect. LaHood’s seat may be in play, but there’s only so much the Democrats can do. Still…
Former NBA and Bradley basketball coach Dick Versace hopes to add another win to his record with a bid for Congress.
“I’m all in,” Versace, a Democrat, said Thursday.
His confirmation ends several weeks of speculation about whether he would seek election for the 18th Congressional District seat held by Ray LaHood, who is not seeking re-election.
He said he’ll hold a news conference to officially announce his bid in the next couple weeks. After that, Versace will take off in a 38-foot motor home he will call “The Common Sense Express.”
* More congressional stories, compiled by Paul, who is studying hard for the LSAT this weekend…
* Billy Dennis: Schock playing fast and loose with election rules?
* Normal man joins fray for Weller’s Congressional seat
*** UPDATE 1 *** The Kankakee Daily Journal got an advance peek at Weller’s speech…
“For the benefit of my family, I can no longer seek another term in the United States House of Representatives. At this time, my wife, my child, my family, must come first,” Weller said.
He said the couple found it impossible to balance the demands of family life with both serving in their respective national legislatures. She was recently re-elected to a fourth four-year term, while at the same time caring for their daughter, Marizu Catherine Weller Rios. The couple, he said, decided this summer that he would leave the House when his term ends next year.
“When it was just the two of us, it was a lot easier, but, now we have a little one and we must balance family life even more. Frankly, it has been a difficult balance,” Weller said, adding that he plans to be a “full-time father and husband” and that they may have a second child.
The voices we’re especially eager to hear from the many aldermen who complain Daley is forever steering into downtown Chicago the city resources and people-magnets that should be spread to their neighborhoods too.
For them, nowhere is a place to walk their dogs under an archway of honey locust trees — not on sidewalks, but on dirt paths worn by footsteps. “Nowhere” is an antidote for downtown office workers seeking a breath of air and a quiet stroll. “Nowhere” is where people push baby strollers, where art students sit and sketch, where elders congregate on benches in the shade. To people who use this corner, Millennium Park’s country cousin is truly “somewhere.”
Has the mayor even been to the Children’s Museum at Navy Pier? I used to go with the boys all the time, back when they were little. Fun, with lots of attractions — a water sluice to splash in and a ship’s rigging to climb and a room that lets kids invent their own machines.
It doesn’t have a lot of windows, however. Which is just as well because a 2-year-old playing in a ball pit doesn’t need windows. That’s why it is a travesty to suggest the museum must be moved to Grant Park. There is no reason to put it there, and suggestions to the contrary — such as Jean Pritzker’s daft notion that the museum should be in Grant Park so kiddies can toddle over to the Art Institute and admire Goya after they’re done finger painting — are ludicrous.
Attorney General Lisa Madigan called Thursday for a united lobbying front to strengthen access to open government, which she says is improving in Illinois but still has a long way to go…
Madigan said she had no timetable for making the legislative push.
She rebuffed a question about whether she intended to run for governor in 2010, saying she’s happy being attorney general. She also declined to answer when asked whether she had an opinion on the public access track record of Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s administration.
The nephew of a former Northwest Side congressman on Thursday emphatically denied making racist and sexist comments to co-workers at the city’s Department of Transportation and said he was falsely accused — and fired — for cracking the whip against unproductive city inspectors.
Joseph Annunzio, a nephew of the late Rep. Frank Annunzio (D-Ill.), said the woman who filed the bogus complaint is the girlfriend of Cook County Commissioner William Beavers, a former alderman.
* One third of pharmacies overcharged customers in city investigation
A former Carpentersville woman filed a $30 million federal lawsuit Thursday, alleging that anti-immigrant sentiment in the village contributed to paramedics’ failure to take her son to the hospital, causing him permanent brain damage.
Ted Karavidas, a lawyer for Gloria Lopez, said “virulent anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic rhetoric” in the northwestern suburb led to an atmosphere where paramedics denied care for the boy, violating his civil rights.
- Paul
