My Blog

Category: Politics

  • Speed Cameras Save Children

    Quinn pulls out an old line:

    Gov. Pat Quinn gave Mayor Rahm Emanuel something he wanted Monday: the power to use cameras across nearly half of Chicago to nab speeding drivers and fine them as much as $100.  Questions linger about the effectiveness and scope of the speed camera plan, but the governor sought to frame the issue as being about protecting children, not raising revenue.  “I think that youve got to understand that if you save even one life, you are saving the whole world,” Quinn said during an appearance at a high school on the Far South Side.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    Reminds me of the Simpson’s:

  • FOID Card Requests Sink Police

    Illinois has so many requests for Firearm Owner’s Identification cards that state police can’t process them in a timely manner.  In addition, people calling the state police to ask why they haven’t received their FOID cards are put on hold for as long as 35 minutes, if they’re lucky enough to get through to an answering machine that puts them on hold.  I tried the number 12 times, received a busy signal 11 of those times and got the answering machine once.  After 20 minutes on hold, I hung up.

    Under law, the state has 30 days to process FOID card requests.  I’ve been waiting 50 days for a response to my application.  …

    According to Monique Bond, spokeswoman for the state police department, Illinois had a record number of FOID card applications in the last three years. Last year, 321,437 people applied for FOID cards, 287,552 in 2010 and 326,008 in 2009. … ”There has been a 16 percent increase in FOID cards applicants in Chicago, which Bond attributed to a Supreme Court decision overturning the city’s gun ban.

    Richard Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association, laughed when I asked if he had heard complaints about the state’s tardiness in responding to FOID card applicants.  “The governor isn’t staffing the FOID processing center of the state police department,” Pearson said. “He’s not replacing people as they retire. And that’s because he’s not enthusiastic about the idea of gun ownership.

    via Southtown Star.

    Would anyone believe that politics is not playing a role?

  • Your Water Bill Doubles For What?

    God bless Ben Joravsky.

    All summer long, in press conferences and at public hearings, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s budget refrain remained the same: no more accounting gimmicks and no new taxes.

    “We have been doing smoke and mirrors on the budget and avoided taking control of our own future as a city,” he said at a public budget hearing in Englewood in August. “That moment of reckoning is here.”

    But the mayor who vowed to bring honesty to the budgeting process continues to rely on one of the oldest tricks of them all: the water/sewer fund sleight of hand.

    That’s the one where the mayor says he’s jacking up your water and sewer bill to pay for infrastructure and environmental protection—but then diverts millions of dollars a year to finance other city operations that have little direct connection to water, sewers, or protecting the lake.

    In this case, Emanuel is proposing to double water and sewer fees over the next decade, an eventual increase of about $500 a year for the average household. Yet how much of that money will actually make it to the water and sewer system is hard to determine, since, despite Emanuel’s promises of transparency, his first budget obscures what’s being diverted.

    A conservative estimate is that the mayor’s 2012 budget will siphon off at least $70 million in water and sewer fees to cover other city spending, according to our analysis of budget documents and interviews with current and former city officials.

    via Chicago Reader.

    Another amazing piece from the Reader.  A must read.

  • Taxpayers Pay for Political Payback

    Kudos to Crains on this unbelievable story:

    Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan cost taxpayers nearly half-a-billion dollars by blocking repeated efforts to restructure McCormick Place bonds and finance a much-needed second hotel at the convention center, a Crain’s investigation finds.

    Between 2005 and 2010, Mr. Madigan stopped five refinancing bills, ignoring declining interest rates that would have saved hundreds of millions. At the time, he never explained why, but his reasons seem petty and political: McCormick Place CEO Juan Ochoa, an appointee of then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, had fired a Madigan ally at the convention center, and lawmakers from both parties say the speaker wanted retribution.

    “It was no secret that Madigan had a beef with Ochoa and wanted him gone,” says state Rep. Angelo “Skip” Saviano, an Elmwood Park Republican who sponsored refinancing bills in 2005, 2007 and 2009. “As long as Ochoa was there, Madigan wasn’t going to give McCormick Place anything.”

    But politics may not have been Mr. Madigan’s only motivation. By holding up refinancing, the speaker also denied McCormick Place the money to build a new hotel. That bought time for clout-heavy developers Gerald Fogelson and Cleveland-based Forest City Enterprises Inc. to push a controversial land swap and hotel deal with McCormick Place on property just north of the convention center. Both were then clients of Mr. Madigan’s law firm, Madigan & Getzendanner, but the speaker denies any connection.

    via Crain’s.

    Five Hundred Million Dollar hit to the taxpayers.  Hundreds of jobs directly in the balance.  Total economic impact of $8-billion and 66,000 jobs all used as toys by Madigan.

    My question is when will someone ask our State Attorney General Lisa Madigan when she’s going to investigate a politician?

  • Ward Map Gerrymandered

    Really?  We didn’t know.

    Residents in this area had hoped Chicago’s new ward map would put homogeneous communities in the same ward. Those hopes were dashed on Jan. 19 when the Chicago City Council passed one of the most gerrymandered maps in its history.

    Second Ward resident Barbara Burchjolla summed up local frustration when she said, “After the Jan. 19 City Council meeting, I am embarrassed to call myself a Chicagoan. The council action memorialized Chicago’s decades long reputation as the most segregated city in America. And I’m tired of living on the plantation we call Chicago electoral politics.”

    via Gazette Chicago.

    Worth reading.

  • Illinois, the Greece of America

    It all started with this story:

    Even though the legislature and Gov. Pat Quinn last year imposed a temporary 67 percent state income tax increase, Quinn’s office expects to have a $500 million budget deficit this year.

    Quinn is calling for a 9 percent cut in most areas of state government, except education and health care. But even with cuts at that level, the state would have a projected $800 million budget deficit for fiscal 2015, the year when most of the tax hike expires.  …

    Looking at the bigger picture, the state has a backlog of about $8.5 billion in unpaid bills and owes about $27 billion in outstanding bonds. And then there’s the roughly $80 billion owed to the state’s public employee pension funds.

    via Belleville News-Democrat.

    Think about that: One Hundred Fifteen Billion Five Hundred Million Dollars.  I’m told there’s about 12.9 million people in Illinois.  So were looking at $8,953.50 per person.  That’s pretty astonishing!

    And that story led to this story:

    [W]hy aren’t we more worried about Illinois? It’s more or less the same size as Greece, its finances are in the same generally catastrophic shape, and its leaders are just as feckless and dishonest. It owes tens of billions of dollars to various investors and stakeholders and will clearly have to stiff many of them at some point.  …

    How a state with a constitutional mandate to balance its budget can do this in the first place — and how an “unpaid bill” can be excluded from the annual budget — is a question for future prosecutors. But for investors it’s a clear sign that some sort of default is coming.

    via: Dollar Collaspse.

    Dare to dream that someone (cough cough Madigan) would go to jail on this mess.

    Hat tip to SCC.

  • Occupy Chicago Gets a Home

    Occupy Chicago has secured a new home base to coordinate its winter activities.  The group is leasing two units on the fifth and seventh floors of Riverfront Work Lofts at 500 W. Cermak Road.  …

    The fifth-floor unit is nearly 3,400 square feet, while the seventh-floor unit is about 2,500 square feet.  Kaunert said protesters will use the units for office space and not for temporary overnight lodging.  The lease terms were not immediately clear, but a previous post on the group’s website said the combined monthly rent would be about $5,600.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    This is interesting.  Nearly 7,000 sq-ft for office space?  That could be offices for 100 or more people.  That’s a lot of “office help” for a group of hippies who want to camp in the park.

    And who’s funding all this?  $5,600/mo through May is a lot of money for a bunch of kids using Twitter to organize a protest.

    Looks like this post had it right.

  • Ward Remap: Round Two

    Alderman Bob Fioretti 2nd Ward, one of eight alderman to vote no on the map, stated in his email newsletter on Thursday that he has no intentions of dropping the issue.

    “I believe that new map breaks up communities of interest and includes deviations in population from ward to ward, which may subject it to future legal challenge. Therefore, it remains to be seen whether it will ever go into effect.”

    via Gapers Block Mechanics.

    I wonder if he needs any legal help with that?

  • Church Groups Getting Public Money

    Here’s something:

    Faith-based groups that have become the face of community support for Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s controversial plans to lengthen the school day and close failing schools also receive millions of dollars in grants from his administration.

    …

    One of the key players touting grass-roots support for Emanuel’s agenda is the Rev. Roosevelt Watkins, a minister and longtime ally of former Mayor Richard Daley who has seen an uninterrupted flow of contracts to provide services to Chicago Public Schools students. …

    A roughly one-month, $1 million contract was awarded for this spring to three groups, including HOPE, for a program designed to keep children off the street during school breaks. In June, Emanuel’s then-newly appointed schools CEO, Jean-Claude Brizard, lauded the Safe Haven, Safe Summer program, which the district said involved about 100 churches.In July, Watkins’ group was among 10 community organizations that collectively received a one-year, $6.3 million Safe Passage contract to watch over children going to and from school and to defuse potential conflict, according to public records.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    If CPS is giving all this money away to religious groups for after school programs then there should be no problem moving to a voucher system and giving CPS money away for during school programs.

    This could be the birth of a nice school choice program for the city.

  • #OCCUPYCHICAGO

    I found a post on Second City Cop about the madness coming this spring.  SCC was concerned that the kids were going to “live without dead time for a month in May and see what happens.”  Hardly a threat.

    What I found interesting was their claim that:

    On May 1, 50,000 people from all over the world will flock to Chicago, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and #OCCUPYCHICAGO for a month. With a bit of luck, we’ll pull off the biggest multinational occupation of a summit meeting the world has ever seen.

    via Adbusters.

    Really?!  50,000 protesters?  Do they have any idea what a hotel costs in this town?  Where are they all going to stay?  Oh, wait… they have a plan:

    And this time around we’re not going to put up with the kind of police repression that happened during the Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago, 1968 … nor will we abide by any phony restrictions the City of Chicago may want to impose on our first amendment rights.

    What exactly are “phoney restrictions”?  Would those be the laws that you simply disagree with?  I see.  Occupy the parks.

    And if they don’t listen … if they ignore us and put our demands on the back burner like they’ve done so many times before … then, with Gandhian ferocity, we’ll flashmob the streets, shut down stock exchanges, campuses, corporate headquarters and cities across the globe … we’ll make the price of doing business as usual too much to bear.

    The completely misappropriate reference to Gandhi aside; do you think they care at all about the rights of the good hard working people who live here and don’t want them shutting down the streets that we use to pick our kids up from school, get to the hospital, visit our parents?

    I think a whole lotta people are going to get hurt.