* A few days ago, the Chicago Tribune editorial board praised Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Mayor Rahm Emanuel while excoriating Gov. Pat Quinn…
Preckwinkle and Emanuel demand that their respective realms deliver not only for recipients of government spending, but also for the taxpayers who fund it. Both rookie executives plainly are sensitive to what they can, and cannot, ask of citizens battered by job losses, home foreclosures and aggressive taxation. Neither would define governance as the private sector serving the public sector. They talk instead of the public sector serving a private sector that, in return for supplying tax revenues, expects streamlining, value and competence.
Preckwinkle and Emanuel are in touch — with these demanding times, and with the challenges that face individuals and employers.
Then there’s Pat Quinn, a governor whose personal decency and love for his state are givens. Right there, the comparison to his fellow Democratic execs abruptly shifts into uncomfortable, unfavorable contrasts:
The rapid readiness for leadership that Preckwinkle and Emanuel exude is terrible fortune for Quinn. At a time when state government needs a tightly focused agenda and a leader with firm resolve — attributes for which Preckwinkle and Emanuel already are renowned — Quinn in Year Three of his governorship still is all reaction and appeasement. Watching Preckwinkle and Emanuel excel only reinforces a verdict we offered last autumn: Strength, constancy, innovation, iconoclasm, the courage to speak truth to power — by each of these leadership metrics, Quinn stands bent and pale.
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle ran for the job as a reformer, but on Tuesday she found herself defending a decision to put two former southwest suburban state lawmakers on the county payroll.
Michael Carberry and John O’Sullivan served short stints last year as appointees to the Illinois House, but were out of office in January because they didn’t seek election last fall.
Now Carberry has landed as a nearly $100,000-a-year deputy director job in the county’s facilities management department. And O’Sullivan, the Worth Township Democratic committeeman, is making $85,000 a year as a regional superintendent at the Cook County Forest Preserve District.
Former County Board President Todd Stroger was criticized during his term for hiring the politically-connected. On election night last November, a victorious Preckwinkle told supporters she planned to “clean up county government by ending patronage.”
* The BGA helped do the probe, and the BGA’s director is quoted in the original Fox Chicago story…
Better Government Association Executive Director Andy Shaw said you’d have to be a pretty big believer in coincidences not to see the politics here.
“It sounds like a couple of guys went down to Springfield, did the bidding of the party to pass the tax hike, and as a result they’re awarded with jobs in Cook County,” Shaw said. “This sounds like business as usual and on its face it’s troubling.”
Even more troubling is the fact that O’Sullivan was fired by Cook County after the county’s inspector general found he had been falsifying his time card while working as a laborer at Stroger Hospital. O’Sullivan appealed the firing and got his job back. He said he was framed for not supporting Todd Stroger.
“Retaliation from that administration is what brought upon these bogus charges. Unproved on all the charges. And I received full back pay and benefits,” said O’Sullivan.
But Inspector General Pat Blanchard told us he stands by his finding that O’Sullivan was ripping off taxpayers. Preckwinkle said she never considered that allegation before awarding O’Sullivan with a plum county job.
Preckwinkle has a reputation for “being above politics.” Apparently, she’s not. That doesn’t make her corrupt or venal or anything. It makes her a (gasp!) politician. These things happen.
* Meanwhile, this is from the last part of the spring session and I simply forgot to post it. It’s a very good lesson for legislators in how not to deal with the media…
For the CTU, the rally sets the stage for another fight on Wednesday, when the new school board deals with a proposed longer school day and contractually-obligated four percent teacher pay raises.
“I don’t believe in slavery on any level. I don’t believe we should work for free. Ever. And we’re not going to,” said Lewis.
Slavery? Whew. That’s some overly charged rhetoric if ever there was overly charged rhetoric, especially considering this…
CPS officials say that even if the 4 percent hike is denied, 75 percent of teachers will still get a pay increase next year. They will qualify for step increases of 3 to 5 percent granted for more years of service.
Newly-seated Chicago School Board members ruled Wednesday that the cash-strapped CPS system does not have the money to cover promised 4 percent raises for teachers and other union workers.
The Chicago Teachers Union now has until the end of the day Monday to decide whether to reopen their contract with the district to negotiate on the issue.
The unanimous decision came after board members were told that nearly three-quarters of the system’s teachers will get some kind of raise — at a cost to the district of $35 million — even if the board refused to cover the 4 percent raises — which cost $80 million. […]
The vote came even after officials said the district’s deficit isn’t as bad as had been thought. During the meeting, new Chief Operating Officer Tim Cawley pinned the system’s current shortfall at $712 million, down from the $720 million the district had previously estimated. Still, plugging that budget hole, Cawley said, will be a “daunting challenge.”
“It would make no sense for this brand new board to shortchange the children who need a quality teacher in every classroom by voting down teachers’ raises. In terms of salary, CPS ranks 71st in salary for high school teachers and 38th in salary for elementary school teachers in this state,” said Karen Lewis with the Chicago Teachers’ Union.
“Mr. Brizzard, come to the school that my daughter goes to, without your suit and tie, just come up there unannounced and you’ll see what these teachers go through. So before you say, ‘Well we don’t have that money,’ the money is in that budget. The school has that money. If you go through the fraud and waste, there’s more than $100 million,” said parent Ronald Jackson.
Friends, colleagues and above all family remembered the late state Rep. Mark Beaubien of Barrington Hills on Friday, as a man of conscience and integrity whose embrace of people from backgrounds and mindsets very different from his own evolved over time.
“Before he was deified by you all for his tolerance, he was quite an Old Testament father,” Beaubien’s son Mark recalled, evoking a chuckle from those attending the funeral Mass at St. Anne Church in Barrington. […]
The younger Mark Beaubien said it was a wonder to watch his father evolve into a Republican legislator capable of lending support to such untraditional causes as same-sex civil unions and a woman’s right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term.
A statement on the back of the funeral program said, “If asked why he was one of the few Republican supporters of the Civil Union Bill, he would respond with humility and simplicity that it was simply time and we should all ‘live our own lives and speak our own values.’”
The younger Beaubien said his father died as one of his best friends, describing him as “oppressively affable.”
“He talked and he talked and that is all he did. . . . They want you to believe his talk is a crime. It’s not.”
That statement Thursday by Rod Blagojevich’s attorney Aaron Goldstein, as reported by the Sun-Times’ “Blago Blog,” pretty much sums up the former governor’s defense in his federal criminal trial:
“I’m not sayin’ . . . I’m just sayin’.”
Mind you, Rod wasn’t saying that he wanted to extract a bribe in exchange for appointing various people to fill Barack Obama’s vacant U.S. Senate seat. He was just tossing around ideas. He didn’t really mean it.
“He’s not perfect,” Goldstein said. “He likes to talk.”
Rod didn’t really want a bunch of billionaires to pony up cash to fund a nonprofit group in exchange for appointing Valerie Jarrett to the Senate seat. He was just talking about it. And the fact that he stopped talking about the scheme after Jarrett withdrew her name means nothing. He just has attention deficit disorder or something. He quickly moved along, and so should we. There’s really nothing to see here.
Um, OK. Hold on. What about when he told his brother to be careful about negotiating a huge cash payoff in exchange for appointing U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. to the Senate seat because the whole world would be listening?
“‘The whole world is listening’ is a phrase I use all the time,” Blagojevich said on the stand.
But, wait. When Blagojevich discovered soon after that his office was being bugged by the FBI, didn’t he then order an aide to “undo” the negotiations on the Jackson appointment?
All talk. No big deal. There wasn’t anything there to begin with.
Excuse me, but what about when he told an aide that he wanted to hit up the CEO of Children’s Memorial Hospital for a $50,000 campaign contribution while discussing a state grant for that hospital? Didn’t he also make a call to see if he could hold up the grant?
Nah, there’s nothing to that. He was just thinking out loud.
But the grant wasn’t actually released until after he left office, right?
Hey, he tried to have the money released after he was arrested by the FBI. So, see? It’s all just talk.
“Look at his actions,” Blagojevich’s lawyer said Thursday. That’s how you will know what was in his mind.
You see, Rod never actually came right out and told the hospital CEO, or a big tollway contractor, or Rep. Jackson or anybody else that he wanted a campaign contribution or a job or whatever in exchange for doing them a favor. Others he sent might have said some words to that effect, but they weren’t sayin’. They were just sayin’. Plus, how can Rod control what his own emissaries say? Not to mention that just asking for a contribution isn’t illegal. Never mind that he said privately that he wanted something in return. He didn’t really want anything. It was all just talk. There’s nothing to it.
“This case is about nothing,” Goldstein said. Blagojevich got nothing and he did nothing.
All Rod did was talk.
“I’m not sayin’ . . . I’m just sayin’.”
His lawyers are clearly hoping the jurors will buy into that line of bunk. But maybe they’ll think about it a bit differently. Maybe they’ll assume it’s what a bookie might say if you fall behind on your gambling debts.
“I’m not sayin’ I’ll break your legs if you don’t pay me tomorrow. I’m just sayin’ you might have trouble walking for a while.”
* Meanwhile, we can only hope that the Blagojevich jury decides the same…
There’s pretty much no doubt that Illinois will be the focal point of national efforts by Democrats to regain control of the U.S. House of Representatives. The new map of Illinois congressional districts puts five traditionally Republican-held congressional districts into play for the first time in a decade.
But if Democrats are going to make those gains, they will need help from the Illinois Democratic Party –and that is where things get sticky. In the 1980s, Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan, the state party’s chairman, began focusing that apparatus on raising cash to elect members of the Illinois House; not members of Congress. Today, that’s the party’s sole mission.
Political insiders have begun raising questions about the state party now that the remap is a done deal. Why? Because a better focused party may have made the difference in two recent unsuccessful, but close, races for Congress: Tammy Duckworth in the 6th Congressional District in 2006 and Lauren Beth Gash in the 10th Congressional District in 2000.
The answer to their original question is “Probably not.” Madigan does what he does and leaves the rest up to others.
* Meanwhile, Real Clear Politics’ Senior Elections Analyst doesn’t quite get an important aspect of how the new congressional districts were drawn. Democratic mapmakers factored in John Kerry’s 2004 presidential race as well as the 2006 gubernatorial contest when drawing up their maps. Looking at just the two landslide years of 2008 (Democratic) and 2010 (Republican) doesn’t give us enough data to make a solid judgement on their mapmaking abilities. And from what the Democrats are saying, some suburban districts are gradually shifting more Democratic over the years, mainly because of Latino migration. That is evidenced, they say, by comparing Bush ‘04 with Brady ‘10. Also, nowhere mentioned in the analysis is the statewide third party performance last year, which contributed to some of the lower Democratic numbers….
8th District (POTUS: 62 percent Dem) (Gov: 48 percent Dem) (Sen: 46 percent Dem) (Treas: 42 percent Dem). Joe Walsh, a political unknown who narrowly defeated Democrat Melissa Bean in 2010, no longer resides in this district, and about two-thirds of his old district has been moved to the 6th. Obama’s vote share increased from 56 percent to 62 percent, a substantial improvement. Overall, this is a pretty Democratic district, but remember that Republicans were able to hold the neighboring 10th in 2010, which gave Obama 61 percent of the vote. In addition, the Democratic ticket had some problems here in 2010. In a good enough Republican year, or if the suburbs swing back toward Republicans, a Republican would be competitive.
10th District (POTUS: 64 percent Dem) (Gov: 50.4 percent Dem) (Sen: 44 percent Dem) (Treas: 44 percent Dem). Bob Dold is probably going to see his congressional career cut short. The partisan makeup of this Northern Chicago district didn’t change that much, but the Democrats in his district now tend to be more reliable Democratic voters. Still, Alex Giannoulias ran poorly for the Senate here (in part because Mark Kirk represented much of this area), while Pat Quinn barely won. It would take a good GOP year and probably a general movement of the suburbs back toward Republicans, but a Republican candidate could win here.
11th District (POTUS: 62 percent Dem) (Gov: 49 percent Dem) (Sen: 48 percent Dem) (Treas: 45 percent Dem). Current 11th District Congressman Adam Kinzinger now resides in Jesse Jackson Jr.’s district. This Southwestern Chicago district is actually more of a new district, drawing about half of its voters from the old 13th District (the district that was technically eliminated), and a quarter each from old 11th and 14th. Once again, this will tend to elect a Democrat in most years, but the 2010 Democratic ticket’s performance was underwhelming. In a good GOP year, the Republicans should be competitive and, once again, if the suburbs shift a bit toward the Republicans in the next decade, the Democrats would find this a 50-50 district.
12th District (POTUS: 56 percent Dem) (Gov: 47 percent Dem) (Sen: 48 percent Dem) (Treas: 48 percent Dem). Jerry Costello will probably keep this Southwest Illinois district for as long as he wants it (although an obscure opponent held him below 60 percent in 2010). But at age 61, it is far from certain that his career will span this entire decade. Should the seat open up, it would be a competitive district.
13th District (POTUS: 56 percent Dem) (Gov: 40 percent Dem) (Sen: 41 percent Dem) (Treas: 40 percent Dem). Since the old 13th was technically eliminated, this is really John Shimkus’ renumbered 19th. But Shimkus will see a lot of new voters; only about 30 percent of his old constituents live in this district. Still, aside from Barack Obama, the Democratic ticket fared poorly here in 2010, and in all but the best Democratic years, the seat should still elect a Republican.
17th District (POTUS: 61 percent Dem) (Gov: 42 percent Dem) (Sen: 42 percent Dem) (Treas: 45 percent Dem). This is probably the biggest head-scratcher of the bunch, and it may be that some incomplete data are making the 2010 Democratic performance look weaker than it really was. Freshman GOP Rep Bobby Schilling’s district has been made much more compact. It’s also been made more Democratic; Obama’s vote share here was improved by about four points. But Obama ran unusually well in the northwest portion of the state, which is traditionally a GOP stronghold. As you see, the rest of the Democratic ticket apparently had a terrible showing here in 2010. To be sure, a Democrat can win this district, and Schilling, who came to Congress with little experience, could have a rough time in 2012 with Obama atop the ticket. But a GOP candidate could win here as well; the district is probably more of a tossup in a “normal” year.
* There’s no question that the Democrats did horribly Downstate last year. There’s also little doubt that Obama won’t do as well in the Metro East as he did in 2008. So, the Republicans may be simply attempting to gin up a little negative chatter with a low-cost Web video…
Costelllo is hit on Medicare–in a web ad that basically says he did not support a GOP Medicare overhaul plan. It’s a bit of table turning; Democrats are going after Republicans–(re the Democratic recent win in a New York House race) over the Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) Medicare proposal.
A GOP source told me they National Republican Congressional Committee did the spot because they think Costello left himself weaker in the new district he drew for himself to run from in 2012. Illinois Republicans asked Gov. Pat Quinn not to sign the map and signaled they will fight the Democratic plan in federal court.
* ’Burbs flex muscle in new congressional map: The new 8th Congressional District, drawn without any incumbent, creates an open seat that’s already attracted interest from two Democrats, both of Hoffman Estates — former state comptroller candidate Raja Krishnamoorthi and Iraq War veteran Tammy Duckworth, who lost to Roskam in 2006. The circular shaped district, which Roskam’s new Pac-Man shaped district is seemingly eating, contains some of the most independent voting portions of Northwest Cook and DuPage County — Addison, Hanover and Elk Grove townships, and parts of Wheeling Township.
* Representing the 17th District - Today a long time Quad Cities politician Mike Boland came to Rockford to express his interest in representing the 17th district.
* HERITAGE: ACTION — Heritage Action says it ’s spending $300,000 in 11 congressional districts thanking them for “an unflinching commitment to conservative principles on issues both large and small; including an adult-like and essential reform of Medicare.” They’re calling the lawmakers the Magnificent 11: Republican Reps. Justin Amash (Mich.), Bill Huizenga (Mich.), Dan Benishek (Mich.), Tim Walberg (Mich.), Steve Chabot (Ohio), Steve King (Iowa), Mick Mulvaney (S.C.), Steve Pearce (N.M.), Steve Southerland (Fla.), Joe Walsh (Ill.) and Alan West (Fla.). Just King was part of the 111th Congress. Pearce, Walberg and Chabot served in previous congresses.
