Nepotism: Illinois Democrats and the Family Jewels

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Daily Observer

State Rep. Robert Rita has a strange take on government employment. When news broke that Senate President Emil (I Need a Raise) Jones was trying to hand his seat over to his son, Emil III, Rita’s justification was:

“Give him a chance to prove himself.”

Astonishing. Yet, odds are that Chicago and Democratic voters, if given the chance, would elect Emil Jones III to succeed his father. Demonstrating again that they are gratified to be led by the nose by a political system that is more akin to an oligarchy than a republic. Naturally, Rita would jump to defend such a system, in that he, like so many others, is a beneficiary of the system. His father, John, is the longtime Calumet Township Democratic committeeman.

Read more in the Chicago Daily Observer

Open up Annenberg papers or return them

The University of Illinois at Chicago's explanation for not opening up the Chicago Annenberg Challenge paper collection makes a mockery of the kind of rigorous intellectual activity that is supposed to be conducted in higher education.

Here is the full and intellectually flabby response:

“The University Library supports the teaching, research, and service missions of the University by acquiring, organizing, preserving, and providing access to information. The Library is open to the public and dedicated to free inquiry. The University has not received ownership rights to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge collection. The university is aggressively pursuing an agreement with the donor, and as soon as an agreement is finalized, the collection will be made accessible to the public.”

When that will be (before the election?) no one can say.

So, if the university has no ownership rights, why is this tax-supported institution storing the papers? Is the university charging anyone (the university doesn't say who the actual donor is) for warehouse these papers? How much is it costing taxpayers? The university's failure to account for its actions here is outrageous.

A pawn for a pawn?

Here's a strategy that would really make Moscow stand up and listen

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

Russian boss-man Vladimir Putin probably figured he scored a big one for his reawakening empire by barging into the pro-Western, democratic nation of Georgia.

Fine, if that's how Putin Bonaparte wants to play it, we'll take . . . hmmmm . . . Cuba. We'll roll right in, just like the Russian tanks and fleet rolled into Georgia, and say, "Hello, Fidel. Good-bye Fidel."

Why not? The conventional wisdom is that we can't do a lot about Georgia, now a Russian captive nation like Soviet days of old, because ultimately we fear a direct face-off between U.S. and Russian military forces. Thus, we are limited to diplomacy and sanctions. We've got little to offer Putin that would appease his restore-the-Russian-Empire dementia, so diplomacy amounts to nothing more than a stink in a windstorm. Sanctions? To get the UN to impose any, the Security Council would have to approve them, over Russia's veto. We could impose our own sanctions, which might be considered an act of war. Throw Russia out of the global economic powerhouse of the Group of Eight or reject its application for membership in the World Trade Organization? Maybe, but who knows?

So, we are left with a game of "you take my pawn, I'll take yours." In Cuba, we could use the same kind of baloney that Russia used to justify its invasion of Georgia: We installed a free Cuban government for "humanitarian" reasons. Who in this hemisphere has suffered more at the hands of a tyrant than the Cuban people? Who needs more protection from the tyrant Fidel Castro than people would who risk their lives crossing 90 miles of ocean in an overloaded, open boat? Who has a greater interest in securing the liberties of the Cuban people than the tens of thousands of Cubans living in America whose gifts of billions to relatives back home is what has kept Castro's pathetic communist utopia going?

Cuba and Russia are on the threshold of strengthening relations, which were weakened after the Soviet Union fell apart, thanks to America winning the arms race and the intrinsic flaws of the communist system. Ever since Castro marched out of the hills and into Havana almost 50 years ago, Russia has considered Cuba a client state, just as Putin intolerably views Georgia as an American client state. Putin wants Georgia to be his client state, because he can't tolerate freedom on the doorstep of his empire, especially if the Georgian people, in their freedom, prefer to ally themselves with Western democracies.

So, what if Putin shuts down the petroleum pipeline to Europe and the West in retaliation? Fine. Declaring a national emergency, we take oil-rich Venezuela, which, under its emerging tin-pot communist tyrant Hugo Chavez, also is tending toward becoming a Russian client state. If Putin wants to engage in an empire-building contest, maybe we should take back all the countries that we once had, however briefly, and then gave back to become democracies—the Philippines, Panama and Grenada, for example. After all, they're in our "sphere of influence," just as Putin claims Georgia is in his. Two can play the empire game, and Putin and all his oil aren't up to the competition.

By now, you must be saying that I've got to be kidding. I am, sort of. I described this global scenario because Russia's invasion of Georgia is the scariest global moment since the end of the Cold War. This Putin-inspired conflict could spiral into a replay of the Cold War in all kinds of ways, with nuclear annihilation, mutually assured destruction and tens of millions of combatants, if not hundreds of millions of civilians, dying in a World War III. That's why the presidential and congressional candidates' response to Russia's attempted enslavement of Georgia perhaps is unexpectedly the most critical issue of this election cycle.

Both presidential candidates have issued standard statements calling for "restraint" and "talks," but a clearer understanding about how to meet this newest foreign policy challenge has yet to emerge. Recognition that we might now be engaged in two conflicts—one against terrorism and the other the traditional state-to-state variety—is a good place to start; then we can move on to the details.

Democrat Barack Obama already has said he favors, in essence, a weaker military because he apparently believes that state-to-state conflicts are old hat. Will events require Obama to change his position, again?

This is Chicago. What did you expect?

Why are files housed in a publicly financed university library not being made available for examination by the public?

UIC library is refusing to make available documents that could shed light on the relationships between Barack Obama and his "guy from the neighborhood," Bill Ayers, the unapologetic terrorist.

Obama Details Raising Taxes

We keep hearing that we're supposedly in a recession. If so, why would anyone want to take more money out of the pockets of Americans?

Obama Details Raising Taxes on Gains, Dividends - WSJ.com

Daley gets an Olympic eyeful

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Daley Observer

“Gulp.”

That must have been Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s reaction as he sat in the stands of Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium watching the $100-million, triumphantly staged Olympic opening ceremonies.

Daley’s vision of a 2016 Olympics in Chicago pales in comparison to China’s mind-bending pyrotechnics and its cast of ten thousands, the stupefying grandiosity of the stadium, clean-as-a-whistle new subway lines, the glittering infrastructure, the ebullient but always respective Chinese masses, the permanent new competitive venues and a list of other superlatives as long as the Great Wall.

If Daley wasn’t thinking to himself, “My God, what I have gotten us into?” he’s delusional, or worse.

Read more in The Chicago Daily Observer

If we're to fight a war effectively..

we've got to level with the taxpayers. Taxpayers for Common Sense reports that the Congressional Budget Office lowballed the estimated cost of Iraq contracts.

Andolino in Wonderland

O'Hare expansion moving forward, project leader says -- chicagotribune.com

Rosemary Andolino, the project manager of O'Hare Airport expansion, says that everything is on schedule, despite it being two years behind schedule and say they won't pay for the second, most vital phase of the expansion.

Keep the kids in school

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

That was big of Sen./Rev. James Meeks to dare someone to arrest the kids he's leading out of the city's public schools in an ill-conceived protest, when he's the guy who should be pinched.

As for the students, truant officers ought to round them up and take them back to school where they belong. Of course, no one will do any of that because they don't want to appear mean, racist or elitist. And that's exactly the point of Meeks' plan to haul Chicago students out of the first week of school to protest, at downtown offices and at Winnetka's New Trier Township High School, the "inequities" of the state education funding formula.

"I dare the business community to arrest our children and send them to jail because all they want is a quality education," Meeks said. New Trier School Supt. Linda Yonke, for one, bent to this extortion, saying she wouldn't want to "undermine" his position by "engaging in a public argument." And what would she do? Hold a forum, she suggested. Oh, joy.

The issue already has been studied, protested and demagogued to death. Illinois school funding has fostered years of debate, lawsuits, constitutional revisions and a complicated formula for allocating state aid that will make your head spin. The formula ensures a "basic" funding level for every school district and takes into account local property tax base, student population, poverty and average daily attendance.

It entitles Chicago to more than $1.1 billion in state aid in 2008. Average spending per student for all grades in Chicago is $9,282, about 11 percent higher than the statewide average, according to greatschools.net, but certainly lower than the $17,184 spent on each New Trier student. But then, nearly everyone spends less than New Trier. That's because New Trier generally is free to spend whatever additional money it wants, and so it does, in large sums.

Would Chicago public school students do any better if this "inequity" were narrowed by New Trier spending less? Of course not. What New Trier spends has nothing to do with the performance of Chicago's students.

Truth is, the biggest problem with Chicago and other major school systems is manifested in the performance of black male students. A recent study by the Schott Foundation for Public Education concludes that African-American males in Chicago's public schools are less than half as likely to graduate as their white peers. The foundation attributes the poor performance to "the resource disparities that exist in schools attended by black males and their white, non-Hispanic counterparts." John Jackson, foundation president, lamented that this is the state of affairs 50 years after the Supreme Court decision ending school segregation. Meeks chimed in: "I want to keep kids out of the 'colored' schools. I don't want kids to have to go and drink from the 'colored' water fountain. I don't want them to use the 'colored' toilet or to have to sit at the 'colored' desk."

But if resource inequities account for the poor performance, why don't their white male, Hispanic and black female counterparts do as badly? After all, they are going to the same public schools in Chicago. Or are only Chicago's African-American male students shipped off to junkier schools, where they can only use the "colored" water fountain? Is it part of the state funding formula to somehow apportion less funding to black males? Are black males forced to use 20-year-old textbooks, while everyone else gets new ones? What precisely is there about how money is spent that mainly leaves black males so dismally out of it?

Maybe a complex of factors, other than funding disparities, explains the troubling performance of black males, and thus, a large part of the schools' problems. Perhaps the same thing that accounts for the decay of neighborhoods at the hands of black male gangs, or for the absence of fathers in the unraveling African-American family. These are symptoms of a cultural climate—corrupted by loosening morals, radical individualism, materialism, Hollywood's adulation of violence and parental irresponsibility, among other strands—that converges on African-American males in particular with all the focused and destructive force of a tornado. I dare say that in this cultural climate, if Chicago were able to spend as much as New Trier spends on each student, black males still would underperform. What is needed is not so much a change in the school funding formula, but a fundamental change in attitudes about family and society.

But I'm not saying anything new, or anything that Meeks doesn't know already. All that I'm saying is that if Meeks truly has the interests of Chicago's students at heart he ought to concentrate his energies elsewhere. He can start by proving to the students why every day spent in school is precious.

The hypocrisy of affordable housing "advocates"

Not a peep was heard from them as Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley set out to bulldoze DuPage County's largest and most vibrant community of low- and moderate-income families.

Read it in the Chicago Daily Observer

No comment necessary

Ohio inmate sues in federal court arguing he's too fat for execution process to work properly -- chicagotribune.com

Democratic leaders need constitutional jolt

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

Why do Illinois Democrats keep voting for those clowns of theirs?

They'd probably reply that their clowns are a cut above the Republican clowns, and they may be right. But that still leaves the question: How can Democratic voters keep electing the very people who keep assaulting health care, child welfare and other social programs so dear to the Democratic heart?

Even the most reactionary, right-wing troglodytes have not been as successfully obstructionist as Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Senate President Emil Jones and House Speaker Michael Madigan—Democrats all—whose budget stalemate is giving social service providers fits.

The Illinois Alcoholism and Drug Dependence Association warns that the budgetary inaction could throw 42,000 of their clients "out on the street." Almost $600 million in Medicaid-related cuts, which will cause the loss of federal Medicaid funds, will "artificially" hold expenditures to last year's budget levels in the Department of Children and Family Services, despite generally rising health-care costs, said Sen. Christine Radogno (R-Lemont). Other state agencies and providers have joined in the lament and demand action.

All told, Blagojevich line-item vetoed $1.4 billion out of the state's proposed $59 billion budget, with more reductions in the making. The governor made the cuts because, he said, the Illinois House, under Madigan's direction, had passed a budget without enough revenues to cover the costs. That is true enough.

(A clarification: "Cuts" is a term used too loosely by politicians and journalists. Cuts are not always reductions in year-to-year spending. In fact, a cut could leave a program with an actual funding increase over last year. That's because the cuts discussed here actually are reductions in what was originally proposed. Senate Republicans said of the $1.4 billion in Blagojevich's cuts, 70 percent are simply the elimination of proposed spending increases. For example, some politicians moaned that education funds were being cut, but schools still were in line for tens of millions of additional state subsidies.)

Anyway, the House has restored some of the governor's cuts, and the budget has now gone to the Senate, where Jones refuses to consider it until after the November election. Waiting until then is cowardly enough, but it's even worse. Jones and other lawmakers hunger for a 7.5 percent pay raise and if they wait until after the election, they don't have to vote on it to get the raise; it's automatic, thanks to an arcane system they have rigged to not get blamed for voting themselves more money. So, there'll be no vote on the budget until after the election, thank you very much.

I'm not usually the one pumping for more spending, but government support of private-sector service providers has become such a critical part of our social service financial infrastructure that it would be wrong to suddenly leave such agencies as Chicago's Haymarket Center, a refuge for the addicted and homeless, holding the bag. Of course, all this confusion and delay is part of a complex and self-destructive game designed by these top-dog Democrats to make each other look like idiots, which is about the only thing they have accomplished this year.

And now it is Jones' turn to look like the idiot, and to feel the heat. He should. His office denies that the delay of the Senate vote has anything to do with pay raises, but the excuse that is offered—that the Senate already has passed its own budget with sufficient revenues—isn't credible. If Jones were serious about his Democratic principles, he'd do the moral, responsible thing and find a way to get the budget done now. But I don't blame Jones as much as I blame the Democratic voters who keep electing these self-serving, petty people.

The Democratic leadership needs to be disciplined, if not stopped, and I am beginning to think that term limits might be the only way to pry these men out of their seats. That would require a constitutional amendment, which we know lawmakers would not approve under any circumstances. That leaves a state Constitutional Convention. Truly, I'd be glad if we didn't have to resort to opening up the entire constitution to alteration as the price of straightening out this state. But what else is there?

So, to the well-funded special interests that oppose a Con Con, as the convention is informally known, I again ask this question: What is your solution?

Dennis Byrne is a Chicago-area writer. His blog can be read at http://dennisbyrne.blogspot.com

Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune

Tens pounds of airplane in a five-pound bag

Here is an actual message sent from Orbitz to airline passengers who were delayed today while transferring flights at O'Hare Airport:

Passengers scheduled to arrive at Chicago O'Hare airport through the late evening may encounter delays averaging 45 minutes. The large number of flights scheduled to arrive at the airport exceeds the number of aircraft that can land hourly. This does not change your scheduled check-in time. Thank you for choosing Orbitz and have a good flight.

The answer, as aviation experts have said for years, isn't building new, inefficient runways at a small, 1950s style airport (O'Hare), but to build a new reliever airport in the south suburbs. If Mayor Richard M. Daley had not so jealously guarded his O'Hare jobs and contracts by using his political power to put a brick on the south suburb airport, it could already have been doing its job, easing traffic congestion at O'Hare.

Also posted on The Reckless Expansion of O'Hare

Why do Chicago newspapers end up with owners like this?

Sam Zell's Deal from Hell

As if Conrad Black's near destruction of the Chicago Sun-Times weren't enough, the Chicago Tribune now has to contend with this guy, who tried to peddle the view that he was doing everyone a favor by saddling the paper with $8 billion in new debt.

And they laughed at Reagan for this

While president, and in a discussion about the urgency of "addressing" the man-made production of greenhouse gases, Ronald Reagan suggested that the cows had something to do with it. For this, Reagan was ridiculed in all the politically correct salons and among "activists" as a fool.

Now comes this well-researched article in the Chicago Tribune: "Raising a global stink: Activists target methane gas from, um, cows." The methane from belching, farting cows, it turns out, is a much bigger source of destructive greenhouse gases than man-made carbon dioxide. Explained the article:

Methane is a big concern because it is so much more potent than carbon dioxide, the chief source of man-made pollution behind rising global temperatures. So is nitrous oxide, another byproduct of manure and fertilizer production. It has a whopping 296 times the heat-trapping potential of carbon dioxide.

Expect a new assault on red meat eaters from the ecology police.

So, who's laughing now?

What blockhead is responsible for this?

Steve Schmidt, John McCain's senior adviser, that's who.

Schmidt is turning McCain into a grumpy old man with this latest TV ad for the Republican presidential candidate. It mocks Barack Obama's "world's biggest celebrity" status and fails to tell us a lick about what John McCain would do as president. It makes it appear that Obama's celebrity is getting under McCain's skin, which makes McCain look bad.

Schmidt explained the reasoning: "We will pose the question--stipulating the fact that he is the biggest celebrity in the world--do the American people want to elect the world's biggest celebrity or do they want to elect an American hero?

Where has Schmidt been? Given that choice, the American people will take the celebrity every time.

Still waiting for the recession to begin...

while Democrats say they are waiting for it to end. The Commerce Department today reported that gross domestic product (GDP) rose at a seasonally adjusted 1.9% annual rate April through June, showing that the economy accelerated over the previous quarter. We're still waiting for the first quarterly decline in the GDP, which will be the bellwether for only the beginning of a recession. Then it will take at least two more consecutive quarters of decline before we are even in a recession. What will Barack Obama and the Democrats say now?

Just in case the world tips and...

Ald. Eddie Burke's 14th ward slips into suburban Republican territory, he might need all this money to get re-elected.

The Sun-Times reports that "Ald. Edward M. Burke has more money in his four campaign funds than the combined total of all 49 other Chicago aldermen, more even than Mayor Daley's $2.9 million."

Where does Illinois rank on Traffic Fatalities, Deficient Bridges and Congestion?

Check out Reason Foundation's annual report on the performance of America's highways.

Good luck with that

Crain's Chicago Business reports that the city of Chicago is fighting the Federal Emergency Management Agency over a nearly $6-million tab for snow removal. Said the publication:

In a complaint filed in federal court, the city claims it had a right to use a total of $5.9 million in federal disaster funds to clear snow from O’Hare International Airport and Midway Airport in 1999 and 2000. FEMA disagrees, the complaint said, and has tried for the past three years to recover the $4.79 million given to Chicago for a severe storm in January 1999 and another $1 million for a December 2000 snowstorm.

FEMA contends that airlines operating at O’Hare and Midway are responsible for paying for snow removal and that federal disaster funds should not have been spent on it, according to the suit.

FEMA obviously doesn't remember how hard it was for the Federal Aviation Administration to collect several million in fines from Chicago after Mayor Richard M. Daley one midnight bulldozed the federally subsidized, lakefront airport known as Miegs Field.

This all is in character for Daley, who wants taxpayers to cough up millions for costs the airlines at O'Hare rightfully should be covering. Except that the 1999 and 2000 snowjobs amount to but a tiny slice of the billions that the airlines should be paying for the expansion of O'Hare Airport. Instead, Daley is pushing the costs on to the taxpayer, through such things as the passenger seat tax.

Some things never change.

Here is Crain's complete story (subscription required):
FEMA wants blizzard money back | Crain's