ArchPundit

Call It A Comeback

March 2006

Department of Corrections

Correction: Not THE John Fund

ArchPundit 3 Comments

In attempting to make the pre-primary reports mildly interesting I included a couple of the donations to Roskam’s campaign including one John S. Fund, which is not the John Fund of the Wall Street Journal. In fact, it is not a person, it is a PAC. Fund of the Journal indicates he hasn’t donated to a political campaign in over 20 years. My mistake. Hell, it might not be the former Congressman Michael Flanagan either (actually I’m pretty sure on that one).

Sorry to John Fund of the WSJ for any confusion. Frankly, I was getting bored with the reports by then. Hence, jokes about the amounts of expenditures as well. While a silly mistake, still not as bad as saying Gephardt was the VP nominee.

Blog

You’ll Notice Several Changes

ArchPundit 1 Comment

Primarily to the blog roll. I’m not done, but the new blog roll is streamlined and far shorter. Most importantly it should be more useful. I will eventually update the extended blog roll as well. Feel free to drop me a line if you want to be included, though I anticipate very few changes to the front page.

Blog

New Feed–one week and all the others go away

ArchPundit 4 Comments

If you ready ArchPundit by feed you will want to migrate over to my new Feedburner feed

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Archpundit

The former atom feed is screwed up if anyone is using it. I’ll be eliminating all of the others next Monday.

You can also sign up for daily e-mail updates on the right–I know I had some requests for that, but I really suggest most of you switch to a feedreader which is far easier than you might think. I personally use Newzcrawler, but there are many out there. My second choice would be Feeddemon. Or utilize the built in feedreader on Mozilla (IE is coming with the new version and it’s not bad–really, I know, I didn’t believe it either).

Illinois Congressional Races

One Can Only Hope This is a Metaphor

ArchPundit 1 Comment

Lipinski and others abandon parade float as smoke erupts

Everything was going smoothly for U.S. Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.) during the South Side Irish parade on Western Avenue Sunday until his float got to 112th Street.

That’s when a thick, white cloud of smoke erupted from the front of the Chevy pickup carrying a float that was decorated with a plastic picnic table, a long white platform adorned with shamrocks and green-trim–and Lipinski, another adult and six children.

Lipinski and the others on board scattered, as did the float’s driver. Meanwhile, the crowd cheered mercilessly.

A contingent of marching New York City firefighters, who had been invited to the parade by Lipinski, ran to the smoking vehicle. They quickly made sure no one was still aboard and pushed it out of the parade route. Chicago firefighters later doused the truck’s engine with water.

Lipinski, who faces two challengers in the March 21 Democratic primary in the Southwest Side’s 3rd Congressional District, said the float was rented.

“It was cheap,” he said disgustedly as he decided to hoof it along the parade route. “It was a good thing we had the New York Fire Department right behind us.”

The driver, Robert Munoz, said the truck’s “check engine” light flashed before smoke began pouring out from under the hood. There was no fire, and Munoz thought it possible that a hose burst.

G-Rod

Gubernatorial Primary

ArchPundit 5 Comments

Goobernatorial Primary is what I was thinking of labeling this.

Look, the Governor is a pain the ass. He’s like Al Gore in many ways in that he seems to want to piss me off everyday just to see what it would take to make me vote against him. Let’s be real though and deal with the current situation, his numbers are far better than Bob Holden when Holden lost the primary to Claire McCaskill. And Claire didn’t sound like Peter Brady–she has a deeper, more consistent voice. I can complain all I want about the Governor. And I will.

But ultimately the primary that matters is the Republican primary where we have four candidates (Andy Martin doesn’t count)

Ron Gidwitz who is a slumlord and the media is giving him a pass on the issues surrounding Evergreen Terrace.

Bill Brady who frighteningly enough has best kept his dignity, but doesn’t have the ability to win given his finances at this point.

Uberweis who every Blagojevich supporter has to be thinking about pulling a Republican ballot for.

Judy—not perfect, but a reasonable enough candidate to make me think about which party I’d vote for. Let’s face it, Kovarik’s story is lame, but, dude, Judy doesn’t have better taste than that? Jeeeshhh…

I suppose you can vote for Eisendrath as a protest vote and hell I might do it if I voted in Illinois–I didn’t vote for President in 1996 over welfare reform (but I did vote, I just didn’t cast a vote for Clinton). The reality for Democrats is that Rod Blagojevich is going to stand for reelection. He’s a flawed candidate and perhaps more importantly, an annoying candidate.

After the 21st the question is going to come down to what the Republicans do. If they vote for anyone besides Judy, it’s quite clear that a

1) Slumlord
2) Right wing downstate Senator who is none too bright
3) a right wing ass who sold his soul to the devil (AKA Jack Roeser)

means a vote for Blagojevich.

If Judy is the nominee, it’s more complex. Is she going to find a way to support an All Kids type proposal? So far no, but let’s see in the general

How will she address school funding?

Will she strongly back the pharmacy rule (so far she has)

Will she support reasonable immigration reform instead of pandering to Oberweis’ clan?

Is Rod going to avoid legal trouble?

Is Rod going to turn into annoying Rod again (He’s been on good behavior lately).

You can vote for Blagojevich or for Eisendrath. I’ll suggest whatever makes you feel best. That said, the real questions will be begun or ended on March 21st by the Republicans.

Uncategorized

Claypool and the Hospitals

ArchPundit 3 Comments

I’ve been too busy to cover these, but the three most important races to progressives in the primary appear to me to be Debra Shore, John Sullivan, and Forrest Claypool.

One question in comments when I mentioned the Claypool campaign was whether he supported the county hospital system or not. As with both Sullivan and Shore, life has kept me busy, but I think this race is what can save the county hospitals.

The claim from Stroger is that Claypool wants to destroy the hospitals by reducing their staff. The reality is that Claypool wants to consolidate non-medical personnel into one staff that can serve all of the hospitials.

It’s heart breaking to hear that hospitals are going to have cuts in staffing. The image it evokes is fewer doctors and fewer nursers. Cook County’s hospitals are in tough shape so that may happen too, but the best way to avoid it isn’t to ignore the bureaucratic problems, it is to take them head on. One of the most basic problems is that the administrative positions are duplicated at each hospital. Claypool has been attacked for wanting to consolidate those positions. The reality is that Claypool’s ideas are likely to result in the county hospitals better able to keep medical personnel employed, while there will be reductions in adminstrative positions that don’t impact patient care.

I’m realistic enough to understand the tough position that the hospitals are in, may mean a reduction in personnel across the board, but any such reduction should start with administrative personnel that are not involved in patient care. Stroger’s basing his claim on reduced personnel on the loss of essentially patronage jobs. That sucks for him, but it’s damn good for the people seeking treatment.

Volunteer/Donate.

Another race I wished I’d spent more time on…

Uncategorized

The Trib Gets One Right: Debra Shore

ArchPundit 1 Comment

Point source water pollution is a passion of mine. Most of you wouldn’t know it largely because I understand that most folks fell asleep at the third word.

Another passion of mine is electing qualified, quality progressive candidates who watch out for the public interest. Dean, with all of his failures, also understood building from the ground up was essention and here in Misery, we are seeing some progress even.

Those two interests come together in a race that I’ve ignored far too much, especially given how strong one of the candidates is.

The Trib labels her:

Priority One this year is the nomination of Debra Shore, a founding director of Friends of the Forest Preserves and editor of Chicago Wilderness magazine.

Frankly that’s too weak of an endorsement. Another obsession of mine is how local and state government is ignored despite their greater impact on people’s lives (hence, Archpundit was one of the first state politics blogs).

Debra Shore has built a campaign that actually grabs people’s attention for a slot they never knew they voted for before. And she gives a damn about clean water to boot.

Most of the time, Metropolitan Water Reclamation District positions are filled by union backed candidates who will support new construction ignoring what might be best for our environment and the consumer. I normallly respect the Chicago Federation of Labor’s endorsements even when I disagree with them, but this and the Stroger endorsement ignore far larger issues that should be important to the area.

The only regret I have about this endorsement is that I meant to do it some months ago and got sidetracked. Debra even contacted me and I dropped the ball. That is unfortunate because between her, Claypool and Sullivan, there are not any races of clearer importance to Chicagoland voters. Debra is a hell of an activist and with your help, she’ll be a fantastic commissioner. Donate and volunteer as you can.

G-Rod

The Disadvantages of Being Down South

ArchPundit 2 Comments

I had no idea how big this would be–though neither did many in Chicago. Worse, the Governor is, again, making me praise him–it’s some sort of plot.

Actually, I do believe that in one sense, but it doesn’t involve angry people on the internet. The best thing you can do right now from a Team Blagojevich vantage point is activate the Oberweis anti-immigration supporters to get them to the polls on election day. It’s good policy meets good politics. It also makes Judy take a stand which puts her in a sticky position–though I think it’s safe to say Oberweis won’t be running any immigration commercials in the primary.

This was huge and make no mistake about it–in Illinois, a strong anti-immigration campaign isn’t going anywere.

Illinois Congressional Races

The Buchanan-Lipinski Front

ArchPundit 4 Comments

Leo hits a point that has been missing on IL-03 race. The issue of social conservatism is too often thought of as an issue of abortion only. There are many issues that social conservatives have latched on to though and one of the important ones is immigration and trade.

Lipinski looks like a Dem because he voted against CAFTA, but not for the same reasons most Dems would have (I’m pretty agnostic for a whole bunch of reasons). The reality is that Dan Lipinski is a guy by all accounts I can gather, voted for Pat Buchanan in 2000 and I’m pretty sure that Buchanan’s views on social issues and immigration were key. 36 Democrats voted for HR 4437 and I’m betting the Lipinski was the guy with the highest Latinor or close to the highest Latino population to vote for it at 21.3%. The continued exploitation by both parties in Southwestern Chicagoland of Latinos must stop. Parties have used and abused them throughout the area including Cicero and other areas where Latinos were only allowed to progress if they helped the machines out (remember this is an area of both Democratic and Republican machines–Skippy).

Via Illinois DemNet we see what Blagojevich had to say:

“Whether their names are Gutierrez or Lozano, Lipinski or Blagojevich; it doesn’t matter. This is a country built by immigrants.”

I don’t know if the Governor realized it or not, but either way, he made a fantastic point. Go down to Elmwood Park or that area and see the Polish immigrants that still live down there. When I worked for Circuit City back when it opened the Chicago market, I visited that store. The number one salesman was a guy who worked the warehouse until they figured out he could speak Polish and needed him on the sales floor. A guy like Lipinski might get that. They were people who and/or both fled persecution and a bad economy and that is the most American thing of all.

My relatives fled the potato famine from what I understand and some of them became thugs on the East Side in St. Clair County when Irish gangs ran the rackets for others. Most of the family worked hard and made a better life for themselves.

I’d bet the Lipinski’s have a similar story, but with more of him around, there won’t be many more families like that. We’ll be the poorer for it.

One-fifth of the 3rd District is Latino. It would be a shame if they were represented by a guy who seems to think they are only good as machine cogs. Go visit John Sullivan’s web site and volunteer and donate.

I consider there to be three vital races in this years election for progressives, this is one of them.

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