And Finally The Big News Breaks
ArchPundit
Jay Cutler to the Bears. Hot damn.
2009
Bowen on the 5th District Race
Tom Bowen (Quigley campaign manager) writes a decent column on the 5th District and the disconnect between local and national progressive:
While Quigley had already assembled a coalition of progressives, Geoghegan was busy forming a different one, outside of the 5th District.
It’s true that Geoghegan brought fresh policy approaches to the table. And it’s always refreshing to see a candidate introduce new proposals into the debate. But a campaign is not just about ideas. As with policymaking, it’s about presenting constituents with clear choices, motivating supporters, building coalitions, surpassing countless hurdles, and finding a way to win.
When faced with a multi-candidate primary field like the one in the 5th District, progressives should ask the following questions before going with the “long shot”: Does this candidate’s agenda vary significantly with the rest of the field? Will he or she be able to push those other candidates towards more progressive positions? And if the campaign is ultimately unsuccessful, will there be lasting infrastructure left in its place?
I’m not entirely convinced about the lasting infrastructure bit, but I think there is something that national supporters missed beyond Quigley’s strong ties locally. This was probably the worst campaign to try at the worst time. Geoghegan is very smart and I think he’d make a good Congressman. That said, he’s a guy who didn’t have strong ties to local community groups and he was running in a very short time frame. Insurgent campaigns usually need time to overcome a money disadvantage and while Geoghegan couldn’t control that the open seat came up with only a special election, it makes a tough race even tougher.
Adding to it–is the Rod Blagojevich side show which pretty much shut out any earned media. Geoghegan even tried to sue for a Special Election for US Senate and the story dropped because of the Rod and Roland show.
It was pretty much a doomed effort given the short time and the media environment that pretty much ignored the race. That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have run, but his chance to even change the debate was limited by the environment. He did run a fairly spirited campaign though and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Separate from Tom Geoghegan himself, I was disturbed by the tendency of national activists to dismiss Mike Quigley though. I stayed neutral in the race–I liked several of the candidates and had friends working for different campaigns and largely I saw the chance for generally good outcomes. I noticed, however, a real tendency to dismiss anyone else who wan’t Geoghegan nationally because of Geoghegan’s great credentials and strong mind. That wasn’t fair to Quigley who has been a strong voice for reform.
Quigley has been a progressive voice in Cook County and has fought some of the worst tendencies in machine politics. He took one for the team when he pulled out of the County Board Presidency race in favor of Claypool–a very classy move that made Claypool very competitive, if ultimately coming up just short.
His environmental record is incredibly strong and he’s fought for better management of the County health system. Those are not credentials to turn up your nose at. He’s not as intellectually grounded the way Geoghegan is, but he is a smart, stubborn in a good way, progressive politician. All politics are local and in local politics, Quigley really deserved credit for being the guy who put the hard work in over the years.
Trib Reports Blagojevich Indictment Coming Down Today
Merry Fitzmas!
Daily Dolt: Shimkus
I know I’m late to the party, but this bag of crazy needs more exposure:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdHjhJTf6RE[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7h08RDYA5E[/youtube]
Oh, and I don’t think we’d want oceans like they had during the time of dinosaurs:
Human pollution is turning the seas into acid so quickly that the coming decades will recreate conditions not seen on Earth since the time of the dinosaurs, scientists will warn today.
The rapid acidification is caused by the massive amounts of carbon dioxide belched from chimneys and exhausts that dissolve in the ocean. The chemical change is placing “unprecedented” pressure on marine life such as shellfish and lobsters and could cause widespread extinctions, the experts say.
The basic problem this sort of nonsense misses is that the problem is not just change, but the rapid nature of the change and the unpredictable consequences it has on the environment. Over time, the Earth can adapt, but in the case of the time of the dinosaurs we are talking about a period of time of about 160 million years starting 230 million years ago.
So in the case of high CO2 in the atmosphere, that occurred over a very long period of time and there was plenty of time for life to adapt. In the case of global climate change we are seeing rapid (incredibly rapid in terms of Earth’s history) change in the environment that is leading to radical changes in human environments as well as a potential 6th Great Extinction event. New species and habitats will evolve from such an event–but that’s over millions of years–not in the couple hundred years we are currently worried about.
Of course, Shimkus may well believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old and is denying the great gift of intelligence God gave him.
Campaign Finance and Ethics Reform
Rich has a very good post up at Capitol Fax discussing the ethics commission recommendations.
Frankly, the commission’s proposed $1,000 trigger for disclosure of statewide contributions within 5 business days and the $500 trigger for other campaign committees may be a bit too high and too long.
I tend to agree on the too high issue, but the 5 business days may be too short in between cycles. If a State Senator is at year two in his term and gets a $500 donation in the middle of April–the Senator may not have a political staffer in place and mailed donations might not even be opened in such cases for a while. The answer is relatively simple though–require 30 day reporting of donations outside of the cycle and then go to 5 days during the cycle and even 2 days in the last 30 days. All of this can be solved by relatively easy technical fixes however.
A very real positive step would be to improve reporting on expenditures as well. They lag far longer than contributions.
Best of all, Madigan is largely in favor of greater and faster disclosure so this general recommendation is very doable.
* The campaign contribution caps are, of course, controversial. Steve Chapman makes a good point against them…
…under the 1st Amendment, the Supreme Court has ruled, contributions may be limited but independent expenditures may not. If an asphalt contractor wants to give $100,000 to an incumbent governor’s campaign, the state can forbid it. But not if he wants to spend $100,000 buying ads praising the governor or attacking his opponent. I’m willing to bet that if a candidate will sell favors in exchange for contributions, he will sell favors in exchange for independent expenditures on his behalf.
I also agree that the suggested donation limits are too low, but there are a couple aspects here that are important to keep in mind.
First, donating $25,000 to a campaign is a lot more useful to the campaign than spending it on your own. If you spend it on your own it may or may not be on message and as effective so the donating directly is far more valuable to a candidate. In this way, independent expenditures are somewhat a good thing. If someone is ideologically wanting to support a candidate, they are free to do so, but the pressure to do it is a lot different than when contractors are approached for cash and pushed to donate large amounts. That alone would have limited Blagojevich–not stopped him, but limited him.
A second thing to consider though is what does limiting contributions do to interest groups. Currently, I think one of the healthier aspects of Illinois campaign finance is that there aren’t the ridiculous efforts to ‘not’ coordinate between campaigns and interest groups. Instead, interest groups can simply making in kind donations as they wish and the benefit of this is that it keeps the candidate accountable.
Once you limit that relationship, then it becomes in everyone’s interest to try and find ways to skirt the law and instead of full coordination, pretend to not be coordinating and this leads to an immense amount of time for both the campaigns and the State Board of Elections to try and police the coordination which is a waste of time for all of us.
So what to do about caps? I don’t know. Caps aren’t some magical cure all, but they can reduce the degree of corruption. Blagojevich exploded the number of high dollar donations and in doing so put the state up for sale. There’s no doubt he would still have been crooked, but his auctions for state contracts would have had a ceiling at least.
On the other hand, caps create all sorts of perverse incentives in terms of interest groups and campaigns. Is the reduction in harm created by caps outweighed by the regulatory fiasco created by the caps? I’m not sure I have the answer.
Finally, the real way to reform government in the Illinois General Assembly is to limit the flow of funds between leadership and members. This won’t happen, but if we want to reduce the power of the Four Tops to set the agenda, reducing that connection and the top down funding of candidates is critical. The current funding model allows the majority’s leader (Speaker or President) to bottle up almost anything in Rules or simply let legislation die without a real home.
But even this isn’t without fairly high costs. We can complain about the leadership power that is so concentrated in Illinois, but the alternative are weak parties that cannot agree on important legislation. A rather dramatic example of how this looks from within the Lege is when Tom Cross was given back the power they stripped the Republican leader of after the Lee Daniels disastrous reign. Cross appeared rather agnostic about the whole thing, but the rank and file didn’t want to hassle with it and found a strong leader a more effective model.
What to do then? Increase transparency at both the campaign level and within government. One of the things Blagojevich did to maintain his crime spree, was to hide behind exceptions to information requests. He always lost, but it would take years for that to happen in some cases and better access to such information would have led to the public figuring the guy out a bit quicker. Improving access to information about internal state government workings is just as vital as improving campaign finance.
While the report discusses the issue of transparency in government in general, it’s not the highlight of the report and it should be.
The reality is that with modern technology, transparency is far easier than it ever has been. Quinn has indicated a fairly strong interest in opening up government, but I tend to see many of the basic ideas either too ambiguous to be helpful at this point or stuck in a pre-internet mindset of individuals having to ask for information–the current state of technology really makes it easy to provide information by default.
For Your Amusement
I keep forgetting to link to this blog that is a repository for Rosanna Pulido FREEP posts.
To: Agnes Heep
WHY do they want to do this?? Because the drug companies are losing money!! That’s WHY. Who gives a hoot about our freedoms and your health? Surely not our Government.
Just like they banned L-tryptophan because it is labeled “Natures Prozac” they stood to lose a ton of money if kept legal.
NOW Doctors can prescribe it and they will triple the price.
P.S. Being creative you can still obtain it though!
I do not know where you live but if you go to “China Town” In Chicago, there are probably 101 CHINESE herbalist who are licensed, and are literally Doctors in China! But cannot Practice here because they do not have “American” licenses. They are dirt cheap and most likely will prescibe it for you.
10 posted on Tuesday, January 06, 2004 1:16:10 AM by chicagolady (Jesus, Be my Magnificent Obsession)
Generally this kind of anti-science/rationality screed is simply a Darwin Award in the making, but in this case, it’s not even true. Check out the fourth search result for l-tryptophan
Amazon.com
I wonder if she checks those Chinese herbalists for their immigration status or if only Mexicans are a problem for her?
Because God Cannot Love Me This Much
CBS2 asked Republican strategist and Cicero town/township/park district/TIF district spokesperson Dan Proft his opinion about Dart. Maybe they should’ve also asked Proft about the quite weird but oddly persistent and credible reports that Proft wants to run for governor. I just tried calling him, but there was no answer, so I left a message.
Just think about all the material on Proft from the Illinois Leader and Illinois Review.
The Failing Newspaper
While everyone wants to talk about newspapers dying, and certainly there are long term issues they must deal with, the reality is the problems at the Tribune and Sun-Times are not all about losing readership–they are about debt. In the Sun-Times case, Conrad Black left a $600 million bill with the IRS unpaid. Otherwise, the Sun-Times does not have crippling debt.
On the other hand, the bankruptcy of the Tribune Company is based largely on Sam Zell’s reign of terror and the debt he took on in acquiring the Tribune.
Again, not to dismiss the challenges papers are facing from a loss of advertising dollars, but the Chicago case shows two papers that would be in reasonable financial condition if their owners had treated the assetts as long term investments and not piggy banks to raid for short term gain.
Project Elwood
or How a man child ruled us for 6 years.
Project Elwood—an apparent reference to a “Blues Brothers” character—was code for secret negotiations between former Gov. Rod Blagojevich‘s administration and Tribune Co. for the state to buy Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs.
Two days later, the plan grew far more complicated when Blagojevich was arrested on federal corruption charges. Among the charges were allegations that he was trying to extort Tribune Co.—the owner of Wrigley, the Cubs and the Chicago Tribune—over the state purchase.
And while I would hate to see anything happen to Wrigley Field, the entire motivation of this was Sam Zell wanting to tear it down to build a new stadium. Sam Zell is apparently a ‘financial genius’ who destroys everything he buys and was intent on doing that with the Cubs as well.
Giannoulias to Reject Corporate PACs and Federal Lobbyist Donations
Georgia10 over at Kos has the scoop.
The election of Barack Obama signaled that [the] age of skewed policies is coming to an end. The change Americans voted for in the 2008 election was a call to take back our government from those few, narrow interests that dominated Washington for far too long.
Today, in that spirit, I am taking a step that no major Illinois candidate from either party has ever taken in a run for the U.S. Senate. It is a decision that advances us one step closer to that change that we all fought for and believed in last November. I will simply say “NO” to contributions from all federal lobbyists and corporate PACs.
These special interests do not represent the interests of most Americans, and they should not be allowed to buy a seat at the table when it comes to deciding critical issues or determining the direction of our nation, especially in the midst of our current financial crisis.
While campaign finance reform in Illinois is precarious, this is an important standard to set for the upcoming race–and something that his potential challengers cannot agree to and hope to remain competitive. This also means that Giannoulias will need more grassroots fundraising which means the grassroots can then hold him accountable. Excellent news all around.
So, let’s start with the first let’s go help out post of the cycle.