Call It A Comeback
You see, the national restoration won’t happen unless,
"In my heart and mind, this call for prayer is not to be for one week or one month," he said. "It’s the beginning of a long-term prayer siege in order to have a breakthrough in the court. It’s the paramount prayer issue in this nation right now."
Michael Kinsley has a generally good article up at Slate that suggests privatizing marriage. My only disagreement is that marriage does involve contracts to be enforced and the state should have a role in such enforcement–especially with children involved. I think Michael and I could find a happy medium.
Carol Marin reminds us of the most annoying phrase ever,
"God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!" Surely to be replaced tomorrow with my short attention span. Also a good column on the stupidity of stopping gay people from being married.
Jeff Trigg picks up on an important DCFS Story, but doesn’t go far enough in blasting them…
The Trib is reporting that DCFS is muzzling contractors from talking to the media.
Not only that, but they are threatening to renege on contracts,
DCFS imposed this sudden new condition on two child welfare experts appointed to monitor the beleaguered Maryville Academy’s Des Plaines campus. Both signed a contract with DCFS seven months ago upon taking responsibility for keeping tabs on whether the residential treatment home for adolescents was making progress after a handful of troubling incidents last year. Both had expected to get paid.
But according to Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy, both were informed late last week that if they didn’t sign a fresh new contract sent to them by the end of the fiscal year–Monday–they wouldn’t get paid for the work already done.
The can be done the easy way–a call from the Governor asking what the hell they are thinking–or it can be done the hard way in DCFS losing a lawsuit,
The courts and the U.S. Constitution are fairly clear on the issue of workers’ and contractors’ rights to free speech on issues of public concern.
In 2001, a federal judge in Rhode Island threw out the Providence police chief’s new policy preventing officers from talking to the media without his prior approval, declaring it unconstitutional.
In 2002, a state-funded hospital in West Virginia lifted a similar policy imposed on its employees after the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit.
I’m all for the ACLU, but I’d rather state government not pick up their court costs on lost causes–especially when the state goverment is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Circumventing the normal chain of information is essential in many child endangerment cases and this sort of crap only endangers children.
Schlafly makes another unfortunate appearance ranting about the ERA .
It doesn’t mention women, it only mentions sex. It calls for equal rights according to sex. And that is why it is perfectly obvious that it would require same sex marriage licenses.
If the City Clerk declined to give a marriage license to a man and a man it is self-evident that you have discriminated on account of sex. I was on the platform with the Watergate Senator Sam Irvin (Senator Irvin chaired the investigation of Watergate), who was considered a Constitutional authority when he was in the Senate, and he said, I don’t know any group that the ERA would benefit except homosexuals. Remember the word in the ERA is sex, it’s not women.
Well, no Phyllis, the ERA is referring to this definition from the OED and everyone but you and your lackeys seem to at least understand it,
Either of the two divisions of organic beings distinguished as male and female respectively; the males or the females (of a species, etc., esp. of the human race) viewed collectively.
And let me recommend the OED definition of sex to everyone, their trying to deal with slang in a very uptight OED sort of way is amusing.
Joyce Morrison tries to argue that Tim Johnson (R-IL 15 is a radical environmentalist. I’m guessing he was too drunk to know which button to push…
Wow that was a cheap shot. But seriously folks, trying to paint Johnson as a radical environmentalist along with Peter Fitzgerald tends to sink ones credibility. You might disagree with some votes of theirs, but neither is the Manchurian Candidate.
Never a site to leave the 1950s paranoia where it belongs–the 1950s, the Illinois Leaders’ columnist Dan Zanoza takes on Harry Potter and Buffy.
Now taking on Potter as an occult gateway book is likely to get you scoffed at in the Blogosphere, but taking on Buffy? Watch out pal–there is one thing that unites all political persuasions in the Blogosphere and that is love of Buffy.
However, many feel the Harry Potter books are not as innocent as some would like us to believe
…
Children are being exposed to the occult, while naive but well-meaning adults praise the books simply because students are reading. According to this rationale, we should be happy no matter what children are reading, including pornographic material.
…
Today television is inundated with programs like Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, Charmed and a host of other shows steeped in the occult and certainly targeted at America’s youth.
Some say it’s all fantasy, just good clean entertainment. But it seems many children are taking this so-called innocent flight of fantasy seriously.
…
Adolescents, who are naturally insecure, are experimenting with the dark arts at alarming rates. For example, Wicca clubs are the latest extracurricular fad at many public high schools
Yeah, those Wiccans are taking over…
Cal Skinner contributes one of the best pieces that disects the differences between how George Ryan and Jim Edgar ran the Secretary of State’s Office. The SOS has long been a patronage offices and there are certainly some skeletons in Edgar’s closet, but ultimately, Edgar put in place a system that didn’t tolerate wide spread corruption in the office.
?We did have corruption in that office,? Lawrence remembered. ?The difference is that we addressed it squarely. We had an Inspector General who was a career law enforcement officer. He was on leave from the Illinois State Police, so if he felt he was being compromised in any way he would not be out of a job. He had the full support of Secretary Edgar.
?I can?t think any agency where there hasn?t been some wrong-doing,? Lawrence continued. ?The key to me is the culture that is set by the elected official. If the elected official doesn?t set the right culture, the wrong-doing is going to go unaddressed and it is going to increase.?
Grosboll revealed that he spent almost half of his time each day as chief of staff ?on personnel and undercover operations, matters involving whether someone in the office was doing something improper, how to handle an employee and getting updates on investigations.
Another key difference was,
Grosboll pointed out a structural difference in the way the two administrations operated. Under Edgar, the chief of staff ran the government side of the Secretary of State?s Office. The political side was separate.
Ryan started out that way with the former IRS district head Ira Loeb as his chief of staff with Scott Fawell running the political end. After about a year, Fawell took control. Loeb got sick. With Loeb?s death, power was concentrated both, in fact, and on the organization chart in Fawell?s hands.
For those who want to whine about the do not call registry–blow me. I couldn’t be happier with the Missouri registry to the point that I actually give Jeremiah Jay some credit for it. We get almost no calls except the phone company and I’ve put a stop to those.
This is as it should be–my phone, my choice. Atrios points out how this is actually a market based solution that steps back and defines property rights for phone use. As he also points out, one can then sell their rights to a bidder who wants to call them. I won’t be and I can’t imagine being bothered, but hey that is me.
We have gotten calls for some ne’er do well who passed off some bad checks though. It seems Telecheck hides itself under the name TRS Recovery Services and violates the law by harrassing us to find him despite us having no idea who he is. They threatened the wife with action while she was home alone and then threatened me with degrading my credit history if I didn’t cooperate. Telecheck reps refused to identify themselves to me until I did a little checking with the Missouri Secretary of State and found out who they were. Calls to the Missouri Attorney General, the FTC, Telecheck’s Legal Department and the Better Business Bureau have put a stop to those scumbags though.
Oh, and when you work for a company like Telecheck and I say you–I’m using you as a plural pronoun. Don’t whine that ‘you’ didn’t do anything.
What’s everyone hearing? Is Hynes low? What about the others?
Fawell racks up 6 1/2 years in prison, but is it enough to make him crack?
Probably not,
He said he was disappointed former friends had become government witnesses but said they couldn’t withstand the pressure from prosecutors. He said it was easy to make mistakes in politics.
"It’s a pretty rough and tumble business — always has been, always will be," Fawell said. "I wish I could go back and change some of the things I did. But do I consider myself a criminal? Absolutely not."
If he doesn’t crack can they nail Ryan?
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