* Let’s return to ProPublica’s story on the attorney general’s public access office (PAC), which handles FOIA disputes…
“Here’s what they need to do: Pull the plug on the PAC’s office,” said Bruce Rushton, a staff writer for the Illinois Times newspaper who has written about delays and inaction from the office. Rushton argued that the attorney general’s office is too politicized to oversee disputes involving other politicians and government bodies, including state agencies it’s charged with representing in court.
“Only a fool would put an elected official in Illinois in charge of riding herd on other elected officials,” Rushton said. “But that’s what we’ve done.”
Madigan was not available for an interview, according to a spokeswoman. But other officials in her office said the PAC has helped thousands of people access government information while leading a shift in the culture of the state toward more transparency.
“We started from scratch and created this, and I think we really do help people every day,” said Ann Spillane, the attorney general’s chief of staff.
“We have areas where we need to improve,” she acknowledged. But in addition to its rulings, Spillane stressed that the office provides education to the public on open-government laws, including through a hotline. “We’re one of the rare places in government where you can pick up the phone and talk to a lawyer.”
* The Question: Should the public access counselor’s office be removed from the attorney general and set up as an independent office? Take the poll and then explain your answer in comments, please. And if you vote “Yes,” tell us how you would set it up.
* The Sean Casten campaign sent along a few news clips today. New York Times…
In a tactical retreat, Republican groups have already withdrawn some or all funding from a few embattled incumbents, mainly in suburbs where President Trump is unpopular, including Representatives Kevin Yoder of Kansas, Mike Coffman of Colorado and Mike Bishop of Michigan. They have abandoned more than half a dozen seats where Republican lawmakers are not running for re-election, including most recently the Tucson, Ariz.-based seat of Representative Martha McSally, who left to run for Senate.
Party strategists said several other incumbents must recover quickly or risk losing funding, including Representatives Peter Roskam of Illinois and Mimi Walters of California, who represent white-collar suburbs near Chicago and Los Angeles, respectively. […]
Former Representative Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia, a former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said … “This is the kind of year where Republican are going to have to give up on some races and they’re going to have to make some hard choices.”
The same dynamic is taking place outside Chicago, where veteran Rep. Peter J. Roskam (R-Ill.) is in the fight of his life against Sean Casten. A clean-energy entrepreneur, Casten has reserved $4.6 million worth of ads, well ahead of Roskam’s $2 million in ads. […]
This energy among liberal donors has forced Republicans into making hard choices about where to spend their dollars. At the moment, the NRCC has no money reserved to defend Roskam, a former member of Republican leadership.
Of the 31 seats rated a “tossup” by the nonpartisan Cook Report, the NRCC is only playing in 14 of them. That means teetering Republicans like Reps. Mimi Walters, in Orange County, Calif.; Peter Roskam, in Illinois’ Chicago suburbs; and Dave Brat, in Virginia’s Richmond suburbs, aren’t receiving air cover from the NRCC’s independent expenditure unit; neither are Reps. Andy Barr, R-Ky., Bruce Poliquin, R-Maine, or Rep. David Young, R-Iowa.
But the NRCC believes its strategy, while counterintuitive, is paying dividends. By forcing Democrats to spend in Colorado 6 and Virginia 10, there is less money to throw against other endangered Republicans who aren’t as well known or battle tested as Coffman and Comstock. Essentially, the two are being used as cover to distract Democrats from easier targets. Additionally, some incumbents, like Roskam, are to begin benefiting from NRCC advertising in the form of “hybrid” ads that are coordinated with the candidate.
So, Roskam may be getting some money after all. We’ll see.
The League of Conservation Voters Victory Fund is launching a digital campaign targeting GOP Rep. Peter Roskam in IL-06 over the environment. The $291,000 campaign features two ads saying “polluters heart Peter Roskam” and that the “polluter in chief” Donald Trump can count on Roskam’s vote.
Sleazy Illinois politicians Mike Madigan and Sean Casten. Madigan and Casten are two sides of the same coin.
Madigan supported a state budget that would raise taxes on our families. So did shady Sean Casten. Madigan opposed the property tax freeze. Casten also opposed it. Higher gas taxes? Madigan supports those. And you guessed it, Sean Casten supported them too.
Mike Madigan and Sean Casten, shady Illinois politicians who’d make you pay more.
According to Roskam’s campaign, the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party’s House campaign committee, just committed $1.5 million to a new TV ad buy in the expensive Chicago media market, $702,000 of which will go out the door in the next week.
* I was wondering when they were gonna get around to this, partly because I heard about a polling question on the topic several days ago. A new CLF Super PAC ad…
Liberal Betsy Londrigan is out of touch.
Londrigan belongs to an exclusive yacht club that costs thousands of dollars to join…
…but opposes middle-class tax cuts that are saving $2,000 a year for families like you.
Liberal Londrigan is so far adrift…
…her radical health care plan could cost $32 trillion – and drown us in debt.
Liberal Betsy Londrigan. Too expensive for Illinois.
The Illinois Republican Party has been sending out fliers backing U.S. Rep. RODNEY DAVIS, R-Taylorville, and attacking his opponent, Democrat BETSY DIRKSEN LONDRIGAN.
Among descriptions of Londrigan on fliers is the word “lobbyist.”
Turns out that in 2013, when Londrigan was a consultant to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation, she registered as a lobbyist for the foundation for just that year.
CARLA KNOROWSKI, CEO of the foundation, also registered that year, as the foundation — which purchased the Taper collection years earlier, including a purported Lincoln top hat — was seeking state funding help to supplement private funding. Knorowski said there were “a handful of meetings that Betsy helped me as a staff member, but I was basically the one making the presentations.”
She said no state money resulted from those meetings, which included officials like Senate President JOHN CULLERTON, state Sen. ANDY MANAR, and perhaps representatives of other legislative leaders. Knorowski also said as she and Londrigan weren’t paid as lobbyists, they didn’t have to register, but did so to be “abundantly cautious.”
I’m told that Davis has a new TV ad about the allegedly fake hat, but I haven’t seen it yet.
And with that ad, all four embattled Republican congressional incumbents are using Mike Madigan to attack their opponents.
* This story is based on a tweet that cut off part of the polling memo. I tried getting more info from the CLF Super PAC yesterday, but never heard back, so I didn’t post it. Also, the poll is old (September 29 through October 1), and was released shortly after Londrigan released a poll showing her down by a point, making it a bit suspect. And it was released ahead of the Vice President’s trip to the district. Anway…
Two days after Democrat Betsy Dirksen Londrigan’s campaign released a poll showing her running neck-and-neck with GOP Rep. Rodney Davis, a top Republican polling firm has released its own poll showing Davis with a comfortable lead going into the final month of the election.
The poll released Wednesday shows Davis with a 50 percent to 37 percent lead on Londrigan in the race for the 13th Congressional District, with 9 percent undecided. It also shows Davis leading among independents, 45 percent to 38 percent, and independent women, 40 percent to 35 percent.
Vice President Mike Pence is coming to Springfield Friday for a fundraiser for U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Taylorville.
According to the Sangamon County Republican Party’s calendar, Pence will be special guest at the luncheon at Panther Creek Golf Course.
Wait. Isn’t Panther Creek Golf Course an “exclusive” club “that costs thousands of dollars to join”? Why, yes, it is. /s
* From the Rodney Davis campaign…
Today, Rodney Davis called on his opponent’s supporter, EMILY’s List/Women Vote, to remove a negative TV ad featuring his children. The ad says Davis wants to gut protections for people with pre-existing conditions and features their three children. Davis’ wife Shannon has a genetic form of colon cancer that could also be passed down to their children.
“In my book, kids are off limits in politics and it’s appalling to me that this outside group, who is spending nearly a million dollars in support of my opponent, would use my children in a negative TV ad against me,” said Davis. “My opponent has spoken about her son several times throughout this campaign and I would never use him, nor condone an outside group using him, in a negative way to make a political point. Lying about my voting record over and over again and using scare-tactics to do it is bad enough, but bringing my kids into it is a new low. At some point enough is enough in politics.”
Click here to view the ad. It uses footage of Davis’ own ad which features his kids. And since this is an independent expenditure, Londrigan can’t do much about it either way. We’ll see if the media picks up on it or if Davis uses this in an ad.
Also, it’s clear that Congressman Davis has voted to undermine preexisting condition protections. That’s the bill the late US Sen. John McCain killed with his dramatic thumbs-down.
Republican leaders on Wednesday said they were “appalled” to learn of Democratic gubernatorial candidate J.B. Pritzker’s efforts to get property tax breaks on his Chicago home, and contended that he shouldn’t be elected as a result of the findings.
Lt. Gov. Evelyn Sanguinetti, U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis of Taylorville and Dan Caulkins, the Republican state representative candidate for the 101st District, criticized Pritzker and rallied support for Gov. Bruce Rauner’s re-election campaign during a joint news conference at the Macon County Republican Party headquarters, 445 N. Franklin St. […]
On Wednesday, Davis said he hopes that the U.S. Attorney’s Office is working to initiate an investigation, and said that the calls for it to move forward will not stop.
“Let this sink in: The Cook County inspector general accused the Democrat gubernatorial candidate in the state of Illinois of committing a ’scheme to defraud’ the taxpayers of the same state that he wishes to represent,” Davis said.
JACKSON: Let me stop you right there because you talked about unemployment and crime. And the put it on the front page of the paper that you said that part of this was illegal immigration. Talk to me about illegal immigration, how it impacts crime, and how it impact unemployment in our community, the black community specifically.
RAUNER: So here’s what I said that got spun incorrectly in the media. What I said is violence in part is driven by unemployment. That’s just a fact. When a young person doesn’t see a future for themselves, sees massive unemployment in their communities, no way to get an income, when the gangs call and says “Hey join us, we can get you some money, we can get you a gun, some protection” a lot of the kids say “Okay.” I mean it’s not an unreasonable decision for a young person to make if they don’t see another alternative, join a gang. And the gang violence is horrific. We’ve got to have more economic growth. 79th St. here should be booming. It should be an economic mecca like it was 40, 50 years ago. We can do this, and it won’t take 2-3 years. But it’s the unemployment that drives so much of the violence and the crime because it’s the despair, the lack of seeing a future for our young people.
JACKSON: Well governor as I drive down 79th St. and I am going to be honest with you. You know maybe the media spins it, but I am going to say it. For the black community when we look at illegal immigration and we see working on 79th St., and 87th St., King Dr. King Dr., and they are undocumented immigrants, illegal aliens, not illegal aliens that’s hate speech, undocumented immigrants, and our party pushes to the forefront the issues of noncitizens before citizens it is a real issue. If we say what about the people who are already citizens it seems like we are being skipped over.
RAUNER: Totally, you’re right. So this is what I was trying to say. It’s politically unpopular and the media attacks me but I just try to speak the truth and sometimes I get bopped for it but I got to speak the truth. If an economy is booming and there’s more than enough jobs for everybody illegal immigration, what it does is not cause unemployment, what it does is hold down wages because when companies have to compete to higher people they raise wages up. So wages don’t grow as fast if there is illegal immigration in that case. But if there’s not enough jobs and there’s already unemployment, if there’s illegal immigration, unemployment gets worse. That’s what’s happened in Chicago. That’s one of the reasons. We have hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants here the jobs they’re working, they’re here because they got a job, that could be a job for a Chicago citizen, and American citizen. This is just true. People get mad at me. People criticize, but it’s the truth. And when we make a sanctuary city in Chicago, which we have, so illegal immigrants can come here and be protected here that takes away jobs from citizens of America in Chicago. It’s just true. It’s not debatable.
I don’t think the media spun it at all. All the stories that I read correctly reported what Rauner said.
In September of last year, the president of the American Action Forum, a center-right policy group, told The Washington Post there was no proof that immigration — legal or illegal — “squeezes out native-born workers in any systematic way.”
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who was senior policy adviser to the late Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who leads the group, said, “We’ve experienced waves of immigration and still, on average, reached full employment.”
Additionally, the Marshall Project reported in March that while the number of immigrants — including those living here illegally — overall in Chicago rose by 73 percent from 1980 to 2016, the city’s violent crime rate fell by 14 percent during the time period.
Rauner has sought to heal a divide among the GOP’s social conservative base over his signature on laws that expanded immigrant, abortion and transgender rights. Those conservatives have supported President Donald Trump’s push for tougher border protections and actions against those in the country illegally.
He ran as a moderate in the primary and barely won and is running as a Trump-like conservative in the general and is currently getting thumped. Dude has it all backwards.
…Adding… Not a bad point…
Yeah, um, so - according to @brucerauner, undocumented immigrants hold down wages which leads to violent crime.
Also, Rauner opposes raising the minimum wage.
Also, Rauner wants to repeal the prevailing wage, to reduce wages.
First of all it’s heartbreaking that Legionella bacteria got into an ancient Veterans’ Home in Quincy. It breaks my heart ’cause I’m an advocate for veterans. And we’ve done everything humanly possible to protect our veterans there. But this investigation by Lisa Madigan is a fraud, it’s phony. She declared this investigation started 24 hours after her ally, Pritzker, got accused and found to have committed criminal fraud. She said ‘Oh, let’s distract the media. Let’s distract all the discussion. Let’s trump up a phony investigation of criminal fraud.’ The Quincy tragedy of infection has been reviewed by the legislature. It’s been reviewed by the press. We’ve had testimony. All our emails. And there’s been no evidence of criminal behavior whatsoever in the Quincy Veterans’ Home. None.
* Pritzker campaign…
Ahead of the final gubernatorial debate in Quincy, the Pritzker campaign released a new TV ad, “Heroes,” featuring Tim Miller, the son of Eugene Miller who died after contracting Legionnaires’ disease at the Quincy Veterans’ Home.
In the ad, Tim Miller recounts visiting his father at the hospital during his final days and talks about how his family wasn’t told about the Legionnaires’ crisis even while the state was emailing back and forth about the outbreak, concerned about public relations. While Bruce Rauner continues to maintain “our team did exactly what they should have done, exactly when they should have done it,” Tim Miller sees things differently, saying “Governor Rauner was more interested in protecting his image than he was the heroes who served our country.”
“Eugene Miller and 13 others lost their lives too soon because Bruce Rauner cared more about headlines than our heroes,” said JB Pritzker. “This failed governor chose to manage his public image instead of managing a health crisis. The Rauner administration waited six days to tell families why their loved ones were sick, six days when treatment could have started and families could’ve helped keep their loved ones safe. Bruce Rauner’s fatal mismanagement and his cover-up is callous, baffling, and frankly, it’s criminal. Eugene Miller deserved better, all of our nation’s heroes deserve better, and as governor, my administration will serve our Veterans just as they served our country.”
Tim Miller: I met my dad at the ER, and when I walked into that room, he was laying in a fetal position, unresponsive. He just looked like he was about to die. It was not the dad that I saw before.
On screen: For six days the state of Illinois knew of a Legionnaires’ Disease outbreak and said nothing.
Tim Miller: At that moment, my dad needed for the state to honor him and serve him the way that he honored and served his country. Nothing was said about Legionnaires’. While the state was sending back emails about PR and different things, my dad was dying.
On screen: Emails paint a sad, cold reaction to crisis
Bruce Rauner: Our team did exactly what they should have done, exactly when they should have done it.
Tim Miller: My question to Governor Rauner is: If it were your parents who were living at that home, would you have handled it differently? Would the response time have been quicker?
On screen: Eugene Miller was one of 14 people who died after getting sick with Legionnaires’ Disease.
Tim Miller: I looked up to my dad a lot and I loved him, and whatever life he had left on this earth, it was his, and Governor Rauner was more interested in protecting his image than he was the heroes who served our country.
Tonight’s debate is in Quincy, so this sets it up pretty well.
* Related…
* Hugs, Handshakes, And Anger: Before Debate, Quincy Legionnaires’ Families Gather To Reflect: “That’s what makes me sick. Do they think we’re all stupid? Here they are, not telling us for six days, and our family members are in there. We could’ve had a choice, people. We could have took our fathers and others out. We could have gotten them other help, and they have the audacity not to tell us for six days?”
