2009

Building an Illinois We Can be Proud of . . . the 2009 American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois Action Summit

ArchPundit March 25, 2009 No Comments

What: Building an Illinois We Can be Proud of  . . . the 2009 American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois Action Summit

When: Saturday, March 28, 2009 – 9:15 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Where: Brown Ballroom

Bone Student Center

Illinois State University Campus

100 North University Street

Normal, Illinois

Who: Keynote Address by Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU National Legislative Office, Washington, DC

The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois brings the 2009 Annual Membership meeting to the campus of Illinois State University on Saturday, March 28^th.   The event draws together more than 200 ACLU of Illinois members from across the state to make plans to move the organization’s agenda forward with new executive administrations in Washington, DC and Springfield.   The keynote address at the event will be presented by Caroline Fredrickson who leads the national ACLU’s lobbying efforts in Washington, DC.   Ms. Fredrickson will review the first 70 days of the Obama Administration and provide a forecast for civil liberties issues in the new Administration and the new Congress.   Other elements of the program will focus on grassroots lobbying, communications and planning for the future.

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I’ve been under the weather so I won’t be making it, but if you can do.

Democratic Hamlet Continues the Act

ArchPundit March 25, 2009 No Comments

And we wonder how he screwed up Florida in 2000:

Is former U.S. Commerce Secretary Bill Daley getting his chopsticks ready?

•  •  To wit: Sneed hears rumbles Daley may become the next U.S. ambassador to China.

•  •  The backshot: Daley, who has been eyeing a bid for a U.S. Senate seat in 2010, may be on President Obama’s short list for the ambassador’s post.

•  •  The upshot: If Daley decides not to run for the Senate, it provides a clearer track for state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, who’s already formed an exploratory committee for the Senate race.

•  •  Postscript: Sneed also is told Daley is also planning to wed his fiancee, Bernie Keller, some time this spring.

It’s true, Bill Daley is the candidate of change.  Changing his mind several times during a day.

Cornyn to Illinois Social Conservatives: Drop Dead

ArchPundit March 25, 2009 No Comments

Watch the fireworks with this from Cornyn:

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who heads the Republican campaign effort for the Senate in 2010, says he doubts he could elected to Illinois’ seat because of his conservative credentials and warned those in the GOP who wouldn’t back a social moderate that they are destined to keep Republicans in a “permanent minority.”

Cornyn, who was in Chicago on Monday for meetings with Illinois Republican Party officials and a visit to the Chicago Tribune editorial board, said his recruitment efforts for the state and others with a Senate seat up for election in 2010 center on finding a candidate who fits their state. And, Cornyn thinks socially moderate North Shore Rep. Mark Kirk would be a good fit, though he also spoke highly of west suburban Rep. Peter Roskam. Cornyn says he’s spoken to Kirk frequently.

This, of course, directly contradicts certain elements of the right wing of the IL GOP that the way to victory is purity of essence and running from the middle.

Fortunately for Democrats, the Illinois GOP primary voters are increasingly of the purity of essence wing.

Reproductive Health and Access Act Backgrounders

ArchPundit March 18, 2009 No Comments

Here are a couple pdfs related to the RHAA to give everyone some understanding of what is actually in the bill:

Overview

Debunking of Right Wing Talking Points

Thanks to Personal PAC for sending them along.

Today’s Tosser: Tribune Editorial Board

ArchPundit March 18, 2009 No Comments

Defending AIG:

That’s a bad idea. The government shouldn’t be in the business of creating a special tax to invalidate contracts between a company and its workers because it doesn’t like the outcome. The money was promised, it was paid. Trying to claw it back now will only encourage the talented people at any company that took federal help to look for a job elsewhere, preferably a place not so beholden to the whims of politicians and public anger.

Sure, $165 million is a big number. But let’s remember the one-thousand-times-bigger number that is at stake here: $170-plus billion. That’s how much American taxpayers have put into AIG. That means every American has a vested interest in turning AIG around, making it profitable again. A healthy AIG could repay the government’s loans and be sold to private investors at a handsome profit for the U.S. treasury.

What is bizarre about this desire to defend AIG over the bonuses is that the only way they can be considered reasonable is if you accept the accounting for 2008.  Yet, we know that accounting is almost certainly fraudulent or we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Now, if the people who created a financial instrument that has nearly destroyed the global economy are the talented people the Ed Board is talking about above, they should be finding new jobs one way or another.  There is nothing magical about what they did.  They created a fairly complex instrument that supposedly would reduce the risk from bundling mortgages together.  They then didn’t properly value those instruments and led their company and many others into complete collapse because they fudged the valuation.

There’s a simple name for it–fraud.  And those aren’t the people who I want determining how to get back the taxpayers’ investment.

Quinn’s Budget and State Workers

ArchPundit March 18, 2009 No Comments

It was a bad sign when Quinn’s team leaked the budget to the Trib first, but Progress Illinois collects the reaction of public employee unions and just how bad it is.  This budget was never going to be good news, and certainly state workers will have to face some burden, but the impact on their compensation is rather drastic:

A typical state employee making $35,000 a year would lose more than $2,500 under these plans—a 7 percent pay cut—on top of any new income tax payment. This is deeply unfair. All Illinois residents depend on the essential services that state employees provide—and all Illinois residents should share the cost of paying for them. In other words, to help the state close its deficit, the average taxpayer making $35,000 would pay no more than an added $525 a year (or less depending on family size). But a state employee making that same amount would be saddled with an additional $2,500 in pay cuts from his or her pocket!

No Matter What the Question Is, The Tribune Knows to Blame State Workers

ArchPundit March 18, 2009 No Comments

The Tribune hates state workers perhaps more than Rod Blagojevich:

• A wage and hiring freeze: The Civic Federation of Chicago proposes capped or reduced state spending. Businesses throughout this state are freezing wages and hiring—some are cutting salaries. Quinn will have to ask for sacrifices in wages and increases in employee benefit contributions.

So we gut departments like DNR for years and then we need to create a hiring freeze to ensure that are parks continue to be degraded because the department is to decimated to do conservation right. Blagojevich scapegoated the ‘bureaucrats’ every day for the last six years and ensured they couldn’t do their jobs well by reducing needed positions and then sending legit funding to political cronies.  The reason that the state could reduce the state workforce so much was because Blagojevich didn’t care if the state workforce did their jobs.  Now is the not the time to freeze hiring, it’s time to evaluate realistic needs and in some places hire more people.  Perhaps hire back some in DNR.  Don’t believe me–go spend time in an Illinois State Park and you’ll see significant facility quality loss.

It’s as if the Tribune didn’t notice the last six years.  But wait, they do:

• Lower-cost internal services: It’s senseless for taxpayers to fund full-time employees, with extraordinary benefits, to perform food, janitorial, technology and other internal services that easily can be outsourced. This is a simple way for Quinn to meet his pledge to “cut, cut, cut” state costs.

Imagine that, the state provides decent jobs to people who work for it. The horror.  They can literally clean our toilets and serve our food, but they ought not to be provided a decent wage and reasonable benefits.  Maybe we can go back to the DNR and have outside contractors paying kids to cut the grass in state parks.  I’m sure they’ll be very concerned with the job they do and the overall impact on the ecology of the park.

The carnard the Trib’s editorial board relies upon is that jobs will go off to low tax states. The problem with that claim?  Companies don’t want to relocate to Mississippi and elsewhere because they need an educated, capable workforce.  Why hasn’t Cat completely moved it’s manufacturing out of the United States?  Because they have a better labor pool in the United States. Illinois specifically has a well trained workforce and infrastructure to maintain highly skilled workers.

An educated workforce needs investment in education.  For the last six years our universities have been underfunded and need investment to be strong institutions or in the U of I’s case, to remain one of the best public universities in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) in the nation.  \

More fine moments in Trib stupidity:

The education industry: If schools are to get more money, the governor needs to demand corresponding reforms in how they spend the money they get today—and in how they do, or don’t, improve student outcomes. Will Quinn demand pension reform in school labor contracts? Easier paths to firing the relatively few lousy teachers? More money only for districts that agree to spend it on tactics—such as smaller class sizes in the lower grades—that certifiably produce better educations for kids?

Unfortunately, smaller class size doesn’t produce better education for kids according to the consensus of research.  Certainly class sizes above 35 start to have detrimental effects on student performance in some respects, but the difference between 20 and 30?  Not significant.  There are good reasons to maintain reasonable class sizes related to teacher sanity and such, but the problem isn’t class size, it’s generally teacher quality.  That’s a tougher issue and I’m sure the Trib will advocate something attacking the unions, but the unions aren’t the primary problem and in fact, are very supportive of efforts to create programs for master teachers and effective mentoring for new teachers. Oh, and expand early childhood education.

If you hate government and insist it cannot work, it won’t.  However, if you want to not just pretend to be serious, but to look at the actual problems and find solutions, cutting workers and privatizing aren’t magical solutions to default to every time.  It’s a cop out–the kind of cop out Blagojevich and Daley have tried to time and again with poor results.

Daily Dolt: Illinois Review

ArchPundit March 18, 2009 No Comments

As usual, complete shlock,  this time on the RHAA.

The Reproductive Health and Access Act, HB 2354, often referred to as the “Freedom of Choice Act”, or FOCA, declares that “every individual posses a fundamental right of privacy with respect to reproductive decisions”( Section 5).  In support of this the bill mandates that “All Illinois public schools shall offer medically accurate,  age appropriate, comprehensive sexual health education” (Section 30).

But will this sex ed have to be “anthropologically accurate”, i.e., will it approach sexuality in a manner similar to how human societies  throughout history have approached sexuality, as a physical/emotional attraction between males and females that is the basis of marriage and the natural family?  Or will the various approved curricula be “politically correct”, and view sexuality in the manner of the psych/educrat establishment, as sensation to be gratified in any way the individual desires provided everyone involved gives their consent, and no one approach is to be “privileged” over any other; casual sexual contacts among multiple individuals are “just as good” and traditional marriage.

This is what we refer to as making shit up and presenting a straw man argument no one is actually advocating.

Medically accurate isn’t too hard to understand for most people.  You use actual biological terminology to refer to body parts like penis instead of pee-pee (and yes, this is a not uncommon problem in some such sex ed).  It also means you explain how the reproductive system works, how contraception methods work, and medically accurate information about STDs.   This is in contrast to much of the abstinence only education that often teaches things like HIV can pass through latex condoms even if there is not a break.

Essentially, medically accurate means teach the biology behind reproductive systems in an accurate way instead of making up garbage.  Young people have a fundamental right to understand their body with medically accurate information.  If we wish them to make wise choices with their body, the only way to do that is to start with accurate information.

The head in the sand routine calling for only sex during marriage ignores that well over 90 percent of the population has premarital sex and that’s been true for essentially 40 years.

It’s a fairly easy to understand point for most of the population. Like over 90 percent of it.

Time To Contact Your Legislators

ArchPundit March 18, 2009 No Comments

Cardinal George is being a bit disingenuous about the Reproductive Health and Access Act.  In his letter to the Sun-Times he makes several claims that the law will force health care professionals to perform abortions.

Yet, the law’s text doesn’t require that at all:

So actually what has to happen is that health care workers have to explain what services they will not provide and offer medically accurate advice to an individual seeking care and then, if that health care worker won’t provide the service, help them find an institution that will.

Offering up medically accurate information to a patient is all that is required.  The situation George is advocating would allow a Christian Scientist  to offer someone who broke their leg nothing but instructions to pray if they didn’t want to violate their conscience and not offer any other options for the patient.  That doesn’t seem like much of a way to run a health care system.

Today’s Tosser: Daily Herald Editorial Board

ArchPundit March 11, 2009 No Comments

Progress Illinois does a rather good job demolishing the main ‘points’ of the Daily Herald’s rather ill-informed whining about high speed rail.  But one point stood out at me:

The Herald goes on to suggest that Quinn and Durbin instead devote their energy to securing resources for flood control and pothole repairs, problems they consider “immediate and visible.” But in advocating for their own pet projects, the editorial board displays their ignorance about the stimulus bill.

You know the best flood control?  Stop building and rebuilding in flood plains.

Of course, Adam leaves out a tremendously important point about the development of high speed rail. Currently passenger rail in the Midwest is terribly unreliable because it has to share corridors with freight trains that have the right of way on tracks.  So quite often it isn’t a 5 1/2 hour train ride from Chicago to Saint Louis–it’s often up to 8 hours if the schedule gets just a little out of whack.  High speed rail would have precedence on the new tracks and wouldn’t be delayed for long periods of time.

Additionally, the 4 hour estimate is at the high end of the new corridor and ignores several other factors.  Rail also makes it far easer to travel to destinations not in the actual two cities and getting it under 4 hours also hits the time it takes to realistically fly by the time you deal with security and other issues with flying and flying doesn’t generally get you into the central city.

Overall high speed rail is far more efficient in moving people than is air travel or medium distances.  Add routes to Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Des Moines and perhaps Madisan and Minneapolis and you dramatically improve the transportation infrastructure for the midwest and are an incredible economic development tool for the cities not at the hubs.