Call It A Comeback
Why is there an uproar over horse slaughter at the Illinois Leader? While I’m all for humane treatment of all animals including livestock for human consumption, frankly hogs are a hell of a lot smarter so what is the moral difference here?
While a little bit ago I claimed the press was seeing through G-Rod’s act, it appears that they are joining in the fun with Crain’s running the headline Blago reaches out to lawmakers. But read the first lines:
Amid growing criticism of his budget proposals, Gov. Rod Blagojevich sent a letter to Illinois lawmakers Tuesday urging them to show “the courage to say no to the special interests” that he says oppose his spending plan.
That isn’t reaching out, that is positioning himself to come out ahead by defining any oposition to an irresponsible borrowing plan as being beholden to special interests, like, ya know, the public good.
It’s just shameless:
“It all starts with us having the courage to say no to the special interests who have benefited at the taxpayers’ expense for far too long,” he said.
He presented the budget debate as a series of stark choices: schools, health care and education vs. special interests, state contractors and big business.
“We can’t afford both. We have to choose,” he said.
What an ass.
Phil Kadner compares G-Rod to Omarosa and make a fairly convincing argument.
But the main problem I have with the governor is I often can’t tell if he’s lying, telling the truth or just playing some sort of game with the citizens of this state.
When asked to explain himself, he often sounds like Omarosa.
In his State of the State speech a few months ago, the governor said that only 46 cents of every education dollar made it into the classroom. The other 54 cents, he implied, were spent on administration.
That wasn’t true. And he knew it wasn’t true.
And his staff claimed that the governor never intended anyone to come away with the impression that 54 cents of every school dollar is actually wasted.
Did the governor plan to clarify his remarks, since many people had come away from his speech believing what he had told them?
“No,” I was told. The governor was delighted that people were getting behind his education reform plan.
Unfortunately, the governor has no education reform plan.
Yeah. The strange thing is the Lt. Governor does. For the first time ever the Lt. Governor is at least bringing up some needed issues while the Governor moves from pointless proposal to pointless proposal.
I don’t even like Quinn either.
The strategy the Governor is employing it to run against the legislator and that is fine, but the problem comes in that he has alienated most of the press–and they are the funnel the message comes through. If all the press is convinced he is a cynical pain in the butt, that perception will eventually leak down.
A topic that has come up here in the past and in comments at Political State Report are arguments over racial slippage–or a tendency in some places for support of black candidates in polls disappearing in the election. Charlie Cook made comments that suggested Obama might suffer from such an effect and Rich Miller took him to task in his weekly column.
Cook usually knows his stuff, but he should have looked at Illinois history before he predicted that Obama would need a big lead in the polls to win.
Unlike those southern states Cook described, Illinois has a history of electing African-Americans in statewide races.
Roland Burris was elected to three terms as state comptroller, beginning in 1978. In 1990, Burris was elected the state’s attorney general.
In 1992, Carol Moseley Braun won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, beating all the polls, confounding the pundits and upsetting incumbent Alan Dixon. In November of that year, Moseley Braun again beat the polls in her win against Republican Rich Williamson.
Moseley Braun lost her seat to Peter Fitzgerald in 1998, but she did better than all but one of the polls predicted.
In 2002, Secretary of State Jesse White won all of the state’s 102 counties in his re-election bid, out-performing every prediction.
This spring, Obama took on six opponents, including two-term comptroller Dan Hynes and multimillionaire Blair Hull, and won with an astounding 53 percent of the vote. No published poll even came close to predicting Obama’s final result.
Another problem with applying this racial slippage theory to Illinois is that it is based on just a few high-profile races in Republican-leaning states.
Illinois is trending more Democratic every year. While Republicans have scored major victories in Virginia and North Carolina, and they practically own Texas, Illinois is dominated by the Democrats. All but one statewide constitutional officer is a Democrat. Both chambers of the General Assembly are Democrat-controlled, and the Illinois Supreme Court has a solid Dem majority.
There is no reason to think that legitimate black candidates in Illinois suffer from the color of their skin with the electorate. While one can find some voters who might have problems with the race of an officeholder, there is no evidence that race has negatively impacted any general election race. Moseley Braun improved over the polls despite have several scandals in 1998. If there is a test case for when such an effect should have occurred, that was it. It didn’t happen.
If Obama were to lose, it wouldn’t be because of his race, it would be because of an effective Ryan campaign that can paint itself as the center and Obama to the left of Illinois. The problem with this happening come from two reasons. One, Ryan is running essentially as George Bush and Bush isn’t popular in Illinois. Two, the campaign has shown little in the way of effectively getting its message out.
And for an great column on the challenges of policing Iraq, read last week’s column on the Illinois 233rd National Guard MP Unit which just returned from duty in Iraq.
‘Do I look like the type of guy who would sit there and actually listen to my wife?”
I hope he invested in a good couch.
Who do I call to get press credentials to the State Convention?
The earlier leaked poll from Harstad for the Obama campaign confirms one reason why I put some stock in it–the Presidential numbers are in line with other polls:
A statewide poll taken for Illinois Democratic Senate hopeful Barack Obama pegs Kerry at 51 percent compared to 37 percent for Bush.
The internals in the poll are interesting: While women generally favor Kerry over Bush (53 percent for Kerry, 34 percent for Bush), the big divide comes between married and single females. Some 60 percent of single women would vote for Kerry; 26 percent for Bush.
Bush was running only 3 points ahead of Kerry in Downstate Illinois, defined in this poll as everyplace outside the Chicago media market, with most of Kerry’s muscle found among Chicago voters, who backed Kerry 73 percent to 12 percent for Bush.
Obama’s campaign shared with me pages from its poll about the presidential race in Illinois. The poll of 653 likely Illinois voters by Harstad Strategic Research was taken March 25-31 and has a 4 percent margin of error.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it again, if Ryan ties himself to Bush he’ll lose.
Mark Brown tackles the Governor’s defunding of a well run program to encourage high quality students to become teachers.
One reason could be the fact that Golden Apple was brought into the state fold under former Gov. Jim Edgar. Blagojevich isn’t going to go further up the political ladder by touting great programs started by his predecessors.
Golden Apple takes students right out of high school and puts them in a summer internship program that gives them classroom teaching experience. The summer program is taught by the award-winning Golden Apple teachers.
If you’re familiar with the teachers honored by Golden Apple in your own community, you probably know that they seem to find the best teachers, the real difference-makers.
An effective evaluation of the program every year could probably be done for about $50,000 if it isn’t already included in the budget. Thus, the state could keep tabs on the program’s effectiveness without reinventing the wheel.
Oneman is addressing Joyce’s most recent column. What he said.
And, umm…state Republicans are right on this issue. One of the ways to mitigate the impact of sprawl is through preservation of green space. These sorts of programs are pretty effective and relatively cheap–without the hassles over fighting over private property restrictions.
ArchPundit