PSB: Progressive Illinois Politics - Front Page

Quinn to Speak May 6th at Illinois Manufacturers' Ass.

wegerje — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:58:59 GMT

"This is the first time in seven years that a sitting Governor has spoken at the event."

Illinois Governor Patrick Quinn today confirmed that he will be attending and addressing 2009 Business Day sponsored by the Illinois Manufacturers' Association. This is the first time in seven years that a sitting Governor has spoken at the event. This should be a very interesting speech given the state's budget crisis and Governor Quinn's proposal to balance the budget by hiking the income tax and eliminating tax incentives like the MPC, Graphic Arts exemption, and R & D credit in addition to imposing a new tax on computer software.
In addition, we have invited all four legislative leaders to attend and speak at the event which occurs during the middle of critical budget negotiations. It is imperative that we have a large turnout of manufacturers and business leaders to send a loud and clear message that state government should get its fiscal house in order and not balance its budget on the backs of employers.

More here.

Are we all in this together?

Christine A Cegelis — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:21:34 GMT

I know that the economic crisis is affecting everyone. Some of us are more likely than others to keep our jobs during this time but all of us have friends or family members that have lost their jobs.

One thing that is bothering me is that in my opinion we need a shift in the way we do business. American business is tied to profit. If you are a publically traded company you answer to the share holders and if you are a private company you answer to the bottom line.
What I am hearing in a more recent spate of layoffs is that companies that are profitable are laying off their employees. I certainly understand that a company that is losing money needs to reduce costs but if a company goes from 15% profitability to 10% profitability in this economy is it right to lay-off more people? Often the work is no less so the remaining employees have to pick up the slack.
The worst part about this is that by letting more people go than is absolutely necessary it deepens the problem and makes recovery more difficult. Would an increase in unions help to change the dynamic to make companies more responsible to their employees? It seems the shareholders are at less risk in these profitable companies than the employees that made company profitable in the first place.

I don't really have an answer to this but it does occur to me that government spending alone can't fix the problem and that the market place also needs to be part of the solution.

Crashing the (Tea) Party

bored now — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:30:48 GMT

I admit it. I could say the devil made me do it, but I just couldn't help myself. I had to go down (up) to the 222 Riverside building so I passed Federal Plaza on Adams just as organizers were passing out signs. So I thought I'd blend in.

Except the fact that I had on my Obama fleece, which I didn't exactly realize.

Still, no one seemed to mind. I walked around Federal Plaza -- it wasn't exactly crowded, and estimates of a couple hundred sounds about right -- talking to people and asking why they came and where they were from. More than a few admitted that they worked at the Merc. Only one person admitted that they made their sign. "Where's my bailout?" it said. I wondered if that was (sorta) off message.
As people started to speak, I drifted towards the back but was asked twice to move back in by the wranglers. "We want to make it look good for the cameras," one of them told me. When I turned around, he pointed at my Obama logo and asked, "What are you doing here?" After I realized why he asked, I chuckled. "It's not a public event?" I replied.

Most attendees were pretty open about their anger. The term, socialism, was thrown around pretty liberally. Yet no one got nasty (me being in my Obama jacket) or accusatory. I asked several people if they had a copy of their talking points, but no one admitted having a copy. People did admit that they got an email about the event.

As I got bored, I walked up to the Riverside Building. It being lunch time, there were more people in the building's courtyard than there were at the rally. Probably the biggest contrast with this event and the last one I was at in Federal Plaza (an antiwar event) was the absence of Chicago police. I guess the Mayor isn't threatened by a bunch of right-wing protesters...

Taxpayer Action Board

Christine A Cegelis — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 20:53:05 GMT

Governor Quinn has put together a board of citizens that are volunteering their time to see if they can help with the budget crisis by looking into state spending. I was honored to be asked to be a part of this board. I think it is an interesting process and wanted to share my impressions with you.

The caveat here is that these are in fact my impressions and not that of the Governor or the members of the committee. Any opinions that are expressed should be taken as mine and only mine. In praise of the process it was noted that the Governor did not see any of these proceedings as being confidential in nature and that there should be transparency.

The mission of the board is to look at state spending and to make recommendations on where money can be saved both in the short term as well as long term savings. There are different sub-committees dealing with different issues. I have been assigned to a sub-committee that is looking at various government agencies that are as diverse as Department of Corrections to Department of Natural Resources. Some of the agencies that we have been asked to look at have very small budgets to begin with and so we will not be concentrating on them at all.
Of the agencies that assigned to my committee the largest is the Dept of Corrections. They have a 1.4 Billion dollar budget per year. The Department of Corrections is a large and growing state agency. It is also a political football from at least two different sources. The prison industry has been seen as a source of jobs especially in the rural areas of Illinois and closing prisons is not seen as a politically viable option. In fact building new prisons is often seen as bringing in a new job source for areas without other economic development. From another point of view releasing non-violent prisoners or going lighter on non-violent crime sentences is also not a politically viable option either.

On Monday we heard from the Department of Corrections Finance and Budget person. He made his presentation on their budget and was open for questions. The problem for me at least is that I know very little about the DOC. So when a question is asked and or answered I have no point of reference.

Closing a facility is an obvious way to cut costs but at the moment all the facilities are overcrowded and the two points above show why reducing the population could run into political problems. He did say they were looking to close one youth facility "Pere Marquette" which is a small facility downstate. Since it is a 40 to 60 bed facility it can be under the radar and the young people could be moved elsewhere. That sounds fiscally responsible until later my research shows this is a facility that houses only girls with drug problems the majority that have had some sort of sexual abuse or rape in their past. It is program that seems to have a good success rate and the John Howard Association considers it one of the best programs in the State of Illinois and largely because of the small size. Moving them to larger facilities may free up beds but this is a program that is working and helping young girls through a difficult time. In a larger institution they may not get the help they need. Of course are they incarcerated as punishment or do we see this as maybe the last chance to give these young girls a shot at a normal life? That is part of the equation and I did not know anything about the facility when it was mentioned as on the list to close. If this program helps a young girl leave the system and never come back isn't that cheaper in the long run than if she becomes a serial offender that will be incarcerated throughout her life?

In the end I want to applaud the Governor for taking at least the first step and allowing some transparency into the State budget process. What I have learned so far though is that the State deeply in debt and already many critical programs have over the years been cut. Services to the citizens of Illinois are very much in danger and that range is from public safety to social services.

If we are going to get this budget process into control it seems to me that just cutting line items for programs will never be enough. In fact that has been apparently what has been happening for years and it has not solved the crisis. There needs to be a systemic look at the operation of each agency starting with some of the larger like DOC and taking on the political will to make changes. In the end if we continue to have jail sentencing for non-violent crimes like possession of drug paraphernalia or even technical violations of parole and we see building prisons as a way to bring jobs to some parts of the state then we will never be able to get the DOC budget under control.

This is just one example that I see but I am sure that other members of the board have other examples as well. The two other departments that my sub-committee has been charged with are the IL EPA and the Department of Natural Resources. I have not even started to look into these departments since there is so much to learn about the DOC. If anyone would like to share their thoughts on any of these state departments I am all ears.

Shimkus at Citizens Club

Willinois — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:36:29 GMT

This morning I heard John Shimkus speak to the Springfield Citizens Club. He usually attends events for the Republican Party or specific organizations in Springfield, so this is the first time I've heard him speak to a general audience.

Many questions I could have asked went through my head but I decided to listen to him respond to others. He started the forum with a seemingly random introduction about John A. Logan and his family vacation. I found nearly everything he said after that to be uninformed and/or offensive.
In response to a question about his infamous comments on global warming he said that he's a Christian and people are attacking him for his beliefs because he quoted the Bible. I expected him to hide behind the cross, but his faith is not the issue. The issue is his complete failure to understand the problem (no one is claiming the world will be destroyed or completely flooded, as mentioned in Genesis) and his slavish devotion to energy industry special interests.

Several times he repeated what must be the fossil fuel industry line of attack, that a cap-and-trade system is a tax designed to put a price on carbon and enlarge government. What he fails to appreciate is that there's already a price for fossil fuel pollution which is being passed on to the public. A cap-and-trade plan would place the burden of paying those costs onto polluters in a market system. Of course, he made no mention of the taxpayer subsidies he supports for the coal and oil industries.

Shimkus has an interesting way of deflecting criticism of the fact that he caters to industry groups who are regulated by the Congressional committees he serves on. He pointed out that most people belong to a "special interest" group such as a union, the Chamber of Commerce or the AARP, so it's not fair to attack him for serving special-interest groups because everyone belongs to one.

It's disappointing that someone who holds public office makes no distinction between an industry special interest group that represents the narrow interests of corporate CEO's, and broad-based citizen groups that represent hundreds or thousands of human beings in his district. A Congressman should know the difference between lobbyists who represent dollar bills and lobbyists who represent actual citizens.

He probably got the most negative audible audience reaction when he repeated the typical talk-radio scare that a single-payer, government funded health insurance system is a bad idea because it will result in rationing and bureaucrats making decisions about health care. I heard several people muttering something about HMO's in response. Apparently, the fact that bureaucrats are currently rationing health care isn't an issue for Shimkus as long as it's being done by the private insurance industry.

Shimkus spoke several times about the need for voters to raise the bar of standards for public officials. I'd like to ask him how one raises the bar in a gerrymandered incumbent-protection district when the incumbent raises millions of dollars from corporate self-interest groups.

Hopefully, the next General Assembly will end the suffering of district 19 voters when they draw new Congressional maps for 2012. I haven't forgotten that state Democratic leaders agreed to draw Democrat David Phelps out of his district and put Shimkus in a heavily Republican district that he can't lose. Those who like to focus on Congress and national issues should remember that they can't afford to ignore state level races in 2010.

Cross-posted from my blog.

Cook PVI Updates

wegerje — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 20:25:11 GMT

In Illinois there were no Republican improvements but the following Democratic improvements in the Cook Partisan Voting Indices. I threw in some surrounding state Democratic improvements since they were there.

District	Member	Party	Old PVI	New PVI	Difference
IL-06	Roskam, Peter J.	R	R+3	EVEN	3 pts
IL-08	Bean, Melissa L.	D	R+5	R+1	4 pts
IL-10	Kirk, Mark Steven	R	D+4	D+6	2 pts
IL-13	Biggert, Judy	R	R+5	R+1	3 pts
IL-14	Foster, Bill	D	R+5	R+1	3 pts
IL-16	Manzullo, Donald A.	R	R+4	R+2	2 pts
IN-02	Donnelly, Joe	D	R+4	R+2	2 pts
IN-03	Souder, Mark E.	R	R+16	R+14	2 pts
IN-04	Buyer, Steve	R	R+17	R+14	3 pts
IN-05	Burton, Dan	R	R+20	R+17	3 pts
IN-07	Carson, Andre	D	D+9	D+14	5 pts
MI-03	Ehlers, Vernon J.	R	R+9	R+6	3 pts
OH-15	Kilroy, Mary Jo	D	R+1	D+1	2 pts

Bridget Gainer chosen by committeemen to replace Quigley

BobB — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 20:13:57 GMT

In a meeting open to the public, except for the deliberation of the committeemen, the Democratic committeemen of the 10th district of the Cook Co. Board choose Bridget Gainer as the successor to Mike Quigley.

The committeemen cast their weighted vote according to the scheme listed in Sandra's earlier e-mail here.

http://prairiestateblue.com/di...

The committeemen's vote is listed over the fold:
32nd Ward proxy vote by Fritchey ABSTAINED.

39th Ward, Barnette votes for Gainer

40th Ward Pat O'Connor votes for Gainer

41st Ward Mary O'Connor votes for Gainer

43rd Ward Michele Smith for Kim Walz

44th Ward Tunney for Walz

45th Ward Levar votes for Walz

46th Ward Sharpe for Gainer

48th Ward Ronen for Gainer

49th Ward Fagus for Walz

50th Ward Silverstein by proxy for Gainer

1,208 vote-Abstain

25,385 votes-Walz

Over 31,000 votes for Gainer

Gainer will replace Quigley shortly after he is seated in the U.S. Congress. Primary election for the nomination is currently in Feb. of '10.

Shut Down Blackwater (Xe) In Illinois Conference

tree — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 04:20:10 GMT

The private mercenary company owned by Eric Prince may run but they cannot hide behind their name change. A name change will not allow this ruthless mercenary company to escape its bloody history.

April 25th will be the first national conference of citizens from all across the US coming together to share and discuss plans for eliminating these private military companies before they turn their lawless weapons on U.S. citizens.

The conference will be held in Stockton Illinois just 20 miles from the Blackwater training site in Jo Daviess County Illinois. Jeremy Scahill author of the NYTimes bestseller, "Blackwater: The Rise of The World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army" will be a keynote speaker. Another keynote will be given in the morning by Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative non-Violence.

The conference is part of a Midwest Regional Retreat of Catholic Workers and will culminate in a demonstration at the gate of Blackwater.

For more info visit No Private Armies Org.

Election Day Stories--Open Thread

Suzanne — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:34:21 GMT

Sandra Verthein just mentioned in a comment that there are some hot and heavy municipal elections happening today. She's right. I spent the day helping out Maine Township Dems (whoa, that is not Kansas out there). Tell your best, funniest election story. Local or road-trip. Telling these stories is a great NDFA tradition.

One of the reasons we're happy he's gone...

BobB — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 19:33:23 GMT

From Politico:

Today's special election to succeed Rahm Emanuel in Congress is getting such little attention that even Rahm himself forget to vote.

"I jokingly asked Rahm if he sent in his absentee ballot to vote for Quigley. He paused and said I ****ed up!"

http://www.politico.com/blogs/...

IL Progressives - If I run against Aaron Schock, I'll need your help!

Carl Ray — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:48:06 GMT

PLEASE NOTE: I originally posted this at Daily Kos on March 23rd, but I wanted to introduce myself here before posting anything else.
Today is the day when I try to make a difference. But I'll need your help. I'm launching an exploratory committee today, to test the waters for a run against Aaron Schock in 2010 for the IL-18 Congressional District and I'll only be successful if I have the support of the Netroots. This is a PVI +5 district that hasn't elected a Democrat to Congress since 1914 so resources are scarce. I'm pretty much starting with nothing and facing an uphill battle, which for me is familiar territory.
My family moved to Illinois from West Virginia when I was six. In West Virginia, we'd lived in a one bedroom cinderblock house. My father was a welder and, in fact, he welded our bathtub together from scrap sheet metal he brought home from work. He also built the bunk bed my brother and I slept in. When Dad lost his job, we moved to Illinois where he hired on at a factory that promised steady employment. He worked at that factory for the next 20 years, working outside in the Illinois weather, which eventually took its toll on his body. He would come home from work and my mother would have hot towels ready to wrap around his aching arthritic elbows and knees, knees that eventually needed periodic draining. But he never complained, he never missed work and he gave it his all every 12-hour shift he worked. "The only job to be embarrassed of is a job poorly done," he would say. Regardless of what you do, be the best at it.

I took this valuable lesson with me when I joined the Air Force. Even though I was just there for one tour to earn money for school, I gave it everything I had and received decorations, awards and early promotions. I joined the Base Honor Guard and was nominated for Honor Guard Member of the Year and in my primary job as an avionics technician I was named Maintenance Person of the 3rd Air Force, which at that time spanned all of Europe. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, my base was one of the first called up and I volunteered to go with our mobility unit. During the war, I was very proud to lead a team of 24 exemplary airmen.

After the war, I earned a Bachelor's Degree with Highest Distinction in Political Science from the University of Illinois. I also went on to get an MBA from U of I. (Since I'm on the subject of brains, I should note that I'm a member of Mensa.)

Over the last two decades, I've accumulated an eclectic mix of experience. I've worked in strategic planning and technology with Union Pacific Railroad, been a software consultant, led process improvement teams and performed capacity and capital planning for the US Operations Division at Caterpillar (I now work in Cat's Advanced Systems Division). I've worked with people from all walks of life and led groups in both civilian and military life, peacetime and wartime. While I may not know all the procedural ins and outs of navigating legislation through Congress, I do have a solid understanding of politics and believe I have the experience it takes to be an effective congressman.

My policies and why I believe them:

Single-Payer Health Insurance - When Aaron Schock voted against SCHIP earlier this year, it provided one of the final pushes I needed to consider running. They say many of us are only one medical emergency away from bankruptcy. My family was hit with three. My wife Kristin was stricken with two painful conditions (neuropathy and endometriosis) that quickly progressed to the point that she was debilitated and unable to work.

As terrible as this was, it was only the beginning. Soon after Kristin's problems began, our then 2-year-old son Sam slowly lost the words he had learned and eventually wouldn't make eye contact or respond to his name. We had hoped it would be something minor, like an ear infection affecting his hearing, but the diagnosis came back much worse. Sam was autistic. It hit us like a death in the family. But there was a silver lining to our dark cloud because we had caught his condition at a very young age, giving him the best chance for recovery. The experts told us that the window of opportunity doesn't stay open long, however, and the benefits of treatment rapidly dwindle to near zero by age six. We had to take action right then, or risk losing him forever to his mental prison. To us, there was no choice. We resolved to push ahead and find a way to pay for it.

We had insurance. We paid $400 every month for it, but it just wasn't enough. We soon found ourselves crushed under a mountain of medical bills and ended up seeking bankruptcy protection. The pain, embarrassment and frustration of the experience is still with me, and I guess it always will be. But an even worse memory from that time was the children I saw who didn't get any help beyond what the public school district Special Ed offered (which in some places is nothing). We had been faced with a choice between financial ruin and a child who would never speak, yet there are others who don't even get that choice. Without medical insurance to help pay for the treatment they needed, their children had no chance.

Recently, I was at the hair salon my wife works at and a woman came in and asked if she could post a flyer she had for a fundraising event. The event was for a family whose child had a chronic disease. It occurred to me that I've seen more and more of these flyers and collection jars around the area and nothing could be a better indicator that more and more families are in trouble. Besides, in a country as wealthy as ours, the last thing the parents of a terminally ill child should be worrying about is putting on a raffle to pay for medical expenses.

Canada has a healthier population that we do and they pay less per capita for their healthcare. And despite all the propaganda to the contrary, things seem to be going okay up there. After all, you don't see busloads of elderly Canadians coming down here to buy prescription drugs, do you? I would like to model our system after theirs.

National Pension - Tom Geoghegan mentioned this recently as a candidate for Rahm Emanuel's vacated seat. Increasing Social Security payments from 38 percent of a recipient's working wage to 65-70 percent would ensure people a dignified retirement. I can tell you from personal experience that this is a great idea.

When my father died of cancer in 1989, he passed away secure in the knowledge that my mother would be taken care of. All of his years of unrelenting sacrifice had been worth it because he would be able to provide for her in her old age with his pension. A few years later, his company had some financial problems. You may have heard about it in the news. The company was called Enron. My mother got to keep her pension, but lots of other people lost everything in that debacle. For many months Mom thought she would be one of them. When I see these people, I see my dad and I take it personally. And I want to help.

After seeing more and more companies do away with pensions and 401K's dissolving like a mirage in the recent stock market collapse, I believe the public is ready to give the public sector a shot. Besides, the GOP's biggest criticism of government agencies is that "once they're created, they never go away" and this is a chance to turn that on its head because that's exactly what people want: a pension that won't go away and can be counted on.

How to pay for it? In his book "Plunder and Blunder", Dean Baker (co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research) suggested that a 0.25 percent fee on every stock transaction "can easily raise $150 billion a year" (page 131). I can't think of a more fitting place to get the funds for it than Wall Street.

Another benefit of a transaction fee is that while it would hardly be noticed by someone who buys and then sits on their investments for long periods, it would start to take a healthy cut out of the profits of speculators and hopefully cool the casino-like atmosphere that has permeated the market.

But the transaction fee would only be a first step to supplementing the payroll tax. Once the transaction fee is tweaked and bringing in its optimum level of revenue, other measures will be enacted (such as a "doughnut hole" approach to the payroll tax or maybe something creative like a higher tax rate on a corporate executive's bonus if their company laid workers off that year) to close the gap between current payouts and the 65-70 percent level.

Job Security - Companies that communities built up around and once counted on for their livelihood can now leave with jarring suddenness. In the global economy, everything is portable except labor. We need to ensure that besides having good infrastructure for manufacturing plants to use, we need to have a highly skilled workforce in place to attract them. If someone loses their job, they need to have the opportunity to retrain. And we need to find jobs that don't move - like new wind farms in my district.

We've been all over what government can't do for a quarter century. We need to start looking at what it can do because we've seen that private industry isn't always the answer. We need to start communicating to voters that government has a role to play vis-?-vis the global economy. We need to communicate that government can do more than build a bridge that connects one side of a river with another. It can also build the bridge between a disease and its cure with investment in research. Government can be the bridge between poverty and a good job, the bridge between intolerance and diversity, fear and security, the America that is and the America that can be.

We've turned a corner in the public's perception of government and its role. Americans now sense a need for the public sector. If done right, government can provide a sound footing for the American People and the economy in the years to come. This is why I want to get elected - to help this come to pass.

But I can't do it without you. My name is Carl Ray and I'm asking for your support.

* * * * *

Please visit my web site http://www.carlray2010.com throughout the week as various features come online. It's kind of nice to put my web developer skills to use again.

Why I'm a Mother

Suzanne — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 06:21:10 GMT

(and why I wish I meant that only in the literal sense)

As some of you may know, I devote a significant amount of my time in service of children with diabetes and their families. I also lead a statewide effort to pass legislation related to the care of students with diabetes.

A diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes is devastating. There is no cure, it's life-threatening, life-shortening, and one of the mostly costly chronic diseases. It relentlessness is impossible to appreciate until you experience it. People with type 1 diabetes test their blood 7-10 times a day and inject insulin 4-6 times a day. There are no days off, no breathers. This burden is exacerbated even further when schools fail to accommodate a student because of diabetes.

Too often school health policies are antiquated, based on fear and misinformation. This leaves a disquieting number of families alone in their struggle to make schools safer and healthier for their children. The stories are alarming.
Nearly every week I hear from a scared, angry, bewildered parent grappling with a school they thought they knew. After diagnosis, some children are prevented from going on field trips. Some are excluded from sports or other extracurricular activities. Some parents are forced to quit their jobs to be at school all day every day to test glucose levels and administer insulin. Some are told to take their child home and not to come back.

Mistaking them for cell phones, teachers have yanked insulin pumps out from students' bodies. High school students have been expelled for carrying glucose tablets under Zero Tolerance policies. Schools prohibit students from carrying their equipment and insulin and instead force them to leave their classrooms several times each day to visit the nurse's office. Students get graded down for time spent in the nurse's office.

This week, for the third time this year, I received a call from a mother whose child had lost consciousness during school. It happened because his blood sugar became too low (hypoglycemia), which is easily preventable and treatable with---get this---sugar. Instead, her son was left unconscious in the school cafeteria for some undetermined amount of time until someone noticed something was wrong.

There are federal laws that protect children with diabetes and other disabilities but they are, for all practical purposes, toothless without something more than aggrieved parents to enforce them. Without specific state legislation that clarify federal protections and standardize a simple protocol for care, students with diabetes and their families will continue to face resistance---and worse.

Parents can appeal to principals or local school boards but if these entities authored the misguided policies in the first place, parents are unlikely to prevail. Parents can file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, or file a federal lawsuit but these options take years and tens of thousands of dollars. Parents can also complain to the Illinois State Board of Education but a recent study shows that without a lawyer, it's highly improbable that parents will find relief there either.

The result of these complaints---no matter the outcome---is discrimination because protections afforded by federal law become available only to those children whose parents are resourceful enough to argue and sustain their case, sometimes over a period of years.

Anyone who cares for someone with a chronic disease already performs the heroic every day. Parents shouldn't have to add a federal case to their to-do list just so their kids can go to school and be safe.

But they do.

One mother in Illinois campaigned a two-year federal complaint against her child's school. Rather than train its staff, the school instead required staff to call 911 each time the child needed help with routine diabetes care.

Another mom built a team of legal and medical experts to fight a school district that suddenly decided to implement a "No Needles, No Blood" policy, a deliberate attempt to drive her child out of school.

Some families are forced to sell their homes, upend careers and move to other districts, sometimes to other states like Virginia, where legislation protecting students with diabetes has been in effect for more than 10 years. Other families keep their children on older therapies that do not require a lunchtime injection just to avoid the possibility of losing the goodwill they currently enjoy at their child's school.

This week, the Illinois Senate passed a shell for The Care of Students with Diabetes Act. It's a start. In fact, it's the third start we've had in as many sessions. But each session, opposition by the teachers' unions has been enough to kill the bill. Each session we ask for an alternative to the modest bill I've drafted, even an edit, something that better addresses their members' concerns. Each session we receive the same response, "No."

The Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT) and the Illinois Education Association (IEA) are two of the largest, most influential unions in Illinois. The IFT and the IEA represent more than 200,000 teachers throughout the state.

In past sessions, I've asked people to contact their legislators and press them to vote for this bill. This session, I'm asking for something different---contact the IFT and the IEA and ask them to engage negotiations on this bill with a commitment to reach a fair and reasonable compromise.

Mr. Ed Geppert, Jr., President
Illinois Federation of Teachers
500 Oakmont Lane
P.O. Box 390
Westmont, IL 60559
800-942-9242

Mr. Ken Swanson, President
Illinois Education Association
100 East Edwards Street
Springfield, IL 62704
800-252-8076

Do Voters Matter to Progressives?

bored now — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:02:55 GMT

David Sirota would probably like to think his column, Measuring Electoral Success, adds to our understanding of how to advance the progressive agenda but it seems to serve basically as an apology for outside support of Tom Geoghegan's candidacy in the IL-05 special election.

Sirota writes:

There is a value in backing long shots, even if those long shots lose. In Geoghegan's case, many progressives supported someone who has been an important voice on so many issues, and who has had the courage to fight the good fight.

Tom Bowen, someone I certainly count as a friend, responds to the Sirota apology in this Progress Illinois column:

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.

I think that Bowen is extraordinarily kind to both Geoghegan and Sirota here. Because I didn't find any evidence that Geoghegan was able to "introduce new proposals into the debate."

Especially if we are talking about the debate among voters.

Let me be clear here: if you use Bowen's measure, the "outsider" candidate that most influenced the debate was Charlie Wheelan, who's carbon tax proposal was quickly picked up by other candidates.

And Sara Feigenholtz and SEIU certainly tried to make health care central to the debate in this special election. But neither Geoghegan's nor Feigenholtz's policy approaches appear to have had much, if any, influence on voter decisions on March 3rd.

As people who know me already know, I have a practice of talking to voters after an election to see what kinds of campaign efforts influenced their decisions. In this case, I called voters in Ward 38 (one of the wards where I sampled voters at the end of January) to see why they voted as they did.

Here are the results as they came out of the 38th Ward on March 3rd:

Ward 38
Victor A. Forys 1311 25.86%
Mike Quigley 1036 20.43%
John Fritchey 771 15.21%
Sara Feigenholtz 586 11.56%
Patrick O'Connor 382 7.53%
Tom Geoghegan 272 5.36%
Charlie Wheelan 204 4.02%
Paul J. Bryar 157 3.10%
Frank Annunzio 137 2.70%
Jan Donatelli 85 1.68%
Carlos Monteagudo 67 1.32%
Cary Capparelli 62 1.22%

It's important to note a few things. First of all, 38 is in the western part of the 5th, and was outside of any of the districts served by the elected officials in the race. However, it is adjacent to Mike Quigley's County Commission district, and is served by Forrest Claypool, who not only endorsed Quigley but was prominently featured in Quigley's mailers. Many of the voters I talked to who said they voted in the Democratic primary acknowledged the connection between Claypool and Quigley, even if they didn't know he was their County Commissioner.

Secondly, the Geoghegan campaign told me when I visited their field office that this was one of the wards where they thought they had an opportunity to gain a foothold in the district.

In the end, I talked to 113 voters. After they were screened ("Did you vote in the March 3rd special election?"), I asked them three questions:

1. When did you decide who you would vote for in the Democratic primary (voters could have chosen any ballot -- Democratic, Republican or Green party -- when they went to the polls on March 3rd)?

2. What was the most influential factor in your decision?

3. What was the most important issue that influenced your vote?

I also asked if they would tell me who they voted for, as a check, although answers to this question have rarely added up correctly after a winner is known.

Because my interest is to understand why the winners won and how effectively they communicated their message -- or influenced voters -- I take copious notes. In looking through my notes here, I don't find any indication that Geoghegan's message about increasing social security's payout made an impression on the electorate. Not a single voter I talked to after the election said that this or Geoghegan's interest rate cap were the reason they supported a candidate. And health care, an interest shared with Sara Feigenholtz, was the 9th most important priority for voters in the 38th Ward.

What was important to voters I talked to? The economic crisis was by far the most important issue on voters minds in the first half of March. Taxes were the second most important reason in this overwhelmingly Democratic district. And the third most important factor was what I call a feeling of abandonment by these voters, that they weren't being represented in Congress.

As the results from this ward demonstrated, voters felt that Dr. Forys, Commissioner Quigley and state Rep. Fritchey embodied the values they wanted in their next Member of Congress. The values and the issues that Tom Geoghegan voiced were barely a blip on the electorate's mind.

Mike Quigley's success was in being able to talk to voters in the language they understood and felt comfortable with. He focused on their core values and conveyed a determination to take their values to Washington. Is that all that a Cong. Quigley will do? Not bloody likely. Mike Quigley is as wonky as they come, and has strong progressive/reformer credentials that will undoubtedly please the progressive community. But Quigley's campaign focused on the issues that were important to voters. He didn't try to use this short election as a teaching moment.

David Sirota sought to take advantage of progressive's profound distaste of the electability argument. In his column, he implies that Tom Geoghegan would have been more electable if the "institutional players" (or unions) would have coalesced around Geoghegan. I tend to agree, and made that argument early on. But the fact is that Geoghegan's message was always directed at the progressive elites and had great difficulty being translated down to the voter. Part of the reason for this was that Geoghegan's voter contact efforts relied far more on personal contact at their door than in their mailbox or through the airways. While I'm a great believer in direct voter contact, I know that it must be reinforced through direct mail and broadcast media.

The fact that a prominent union lawyer was basically rejected by the local unions couldn't have helped. But it doesn't appear that Geoghegan's campaign made as much of an effort to gain their support as did John Fritchey or Sara Feigenholtz. So one might wonder what was the rational behind Geoghegan's campaign. In attempting to explain the candidates to someone from outside of Illinois, I had previously referred to Geoghegan as a "pure play" for progressives. Inherent in that definition was the inference that Geoghegan was the least likely to win election.

The question that Sirota wants to answer is whether supporting a pure play advances the progressive agenda (even though he never asks -- or answers -- this question). Like Bowen, I remain dubious. Mike Quigley's win -- and Geoghegan's defeat -- does offer lessons, but not the ones that Sirota prefers to focus on. Illinois' 5th Congressional District has been described as "very Catholic, very conservative." Some residents of the 5th have taken exception to this definition, but that's not my point. A wonky progressive, a proven reformer who will get involved in the nitty-gritty of legislative work, won this "very conservative" seat in Congress. It isn't a moral victory at all. It's an actual progressive victory that deserves duplication throughout the country.

Mike Quigley can -- and should -- serve as the same example for progressives running in less solid districts for Democrats and progressives that Melissa Bean has served for centrist Democrats. I have argued (for far too long, it seems) that for progressives to advance their agenda they must move the center leftward, just as Republicans following Reagan moved the center to the right to enact their conservative agenda. Mike Quigley fits this example, by sticking close to the issues actually on the minds of the electorate while understanding that his own progressive agenda could be advanced, as well. Quigley will have his teaching moment because he won.

David Sirota may have preferred Tom Geoghegan over the other (and, I'd argue, equally) progressive candidates in this race, but the voters clearly did not. While one might have expected that voters would jump at a message of increasing the social security payout, they have proven to be much more circumspect. As a means for getting activists to remember the limited time that most voters will spend thinking about candidates and elections, I advise them to think of voters as stupid. You have to connect the dots -- directly and simply -- for voters if you want to influence the electorate. Geoghegan's central message of economic security was too convoluted, too much of a stretch, for the voters I talked to. Quigley's message of reform, taxes and improving mass transit spoke to the electorate. That's why he won.

Do voters matter to progressives? They should. David Sirota seems to think it's all about the elites. But to win elections, the electorate remains supreme. We should never forget this, and we should never assume that the electorate naturally shares our interests. Voters have interests and successful candidates speak to them. The Quigley campaign did that...

Quinn Reform Commission Preliminary Rollout

Jeff Smith — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:12:48 GMT

The 15-member Illinois Reform Commission convened by Gov. Pat Quinn and headed by former Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Collins, and including State's Attorney Anita Alvarez and Prof. Sheila Simon, today rolled out in dual press conferences in Chicago and Springfield its preliminary proposals for reform of Illinois's pay-to-play political ecology. I have posted a summary at Gapers Block and am referencing that to avoid duplicative posting. You can also just cheat and watch the slideshow.

There are some expected ideas, such as contribution limits and a later primary (yay), but also some intriguing ideas that some reformers hadn't kicked around as much, including disclosure of "bundling" and year-round real-time contribution reporting. Have to ponder the latter; it has some implications for rights of privacy and association, since it would essentially "tip off" any incumbent to political activity that might be opposing them.

But then, any reform will to some degree serve as an incumbent-protection program, because them's that has already built up a warchest and favor list will continue to have it. That's the nature of closing the barn door at this stage.
Another consideration is that the paperwork requirements for all committees may be amped up considerably; again, this becomes more of a burden on the small committee than on the large one that is staffed year-round.

As might be perhaps expected from a panel with a couple of prosecutors on it, there are some left-undefined expansions of wiretap powers, which will have to be watched closely so as to be narrowly applied to the targeted behaviors. Unfortunately there does not seem to be any new particular ban on pay-to-play outside of state contracts; say, selling a U.S. Senate seat, for example.

Overall, I imagine the proposals will be greeted as good steps in the right direction. Because the entire legislative schedule is compressed (due to the impeachment), extra monitoring will be required to try and get this as right as possible.

Who will replace Mike Quigley?

Sandra_Verthein — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:20:17 GMT

Did you hear one about Illinois politics? You know, that funny joke about how people get jobs because of clout, or nepotisim, or because they are in the "$25,000 club", instead of, you know, qualifications? Or ability to do the job? Or, for elected officials, as a response to the priorities of those they will represent?

On April 11th a group of Democratic Ward Committeemen will choose a successor for Mike Quigley should he win his election for Congress on April 7th and resign as 10th District Cook County Commissioner. His record as a reformer is well documented. But he was not only a Cook County reformer, he was a progressive leader who stood up against the powers that be while others remained silent. He is leaving some very, very big shoes to fill.

Two groups that I am involved with, Northside DFA and IVI-IPO, are working together to ask the potential shoe-fillers a few questions about their positions and priorities for Cook County. For instance:

Do you support removing the cap on the number of abortions performed at Stroger Hospital?
Should County Board approval be required prior to the creation of TIF districts in Cook County?
What should be done by the County Board to foster affordable housing, including subsidized housing?
Do you support the sale or transfer of forest preserve land to private interests?
Do you favor extending the Civil Service System to replace patronage in County employment?

In addition, we are co-hosting a public forum for these potential candidates on Saturday, April 4th at 1:00 p.m. at Truman College, 1445 W Wilson Avenue, Chicago.

One of the challenges of organizing this forum has been trying to figure out who the candiates are. People that we are told are candidates, when asked, become coy and say that they've "been asked" to run and are "considering" it. Maybe this is part of the culture of making appointments -- not wanting too seem to eager? But the fact of the matter is that at the April 11th appointment meeting they will have to make their candidacy public, so why not come out now and make their case?

Working on this forum has also been extremely rewarding. It is exciting to think that, before the appointment happens, I will be able to learn where potential candidates stand on the issues, will be able to ask them questions in a pubilc forum, will hear them talk about their vision for Cook County government, and then can advocate for my now well-informed choice of candidate to my committeeman. And do it all prior to the appointment -- not as an after-the-fact complaint about a choice I disagree with.

And with any luck there will be some press at this event. The Chicago Tribune has already written two editorials on the subject of who will replace Mike Quigley, and it has been covered by others as well, so I know there is interest. And of course it will be covered on Prairie State Blue!

There is another big upside to this event It is a chance to educate the public, and ourselves, about the fact that this is happening, and about the appointment process itself. When Mike won the primary there were conflicting reports about who would be making an appointment -- the committeemen or the Cook County commissioners. It took some time to figure out how it would all actually happen. Clearly we all could stand to learn more about the mechanisms of our own government.

Ultimately the decision will be made by the committeemen. But that doesn't mean that we, as activists and consistuents, need to stand idly by. We can participate, we can make our voice heard, and we can work to change this process for the future -- legislatively if need be. I'll have some more ideas to share about that in a future post.

In the meantime, tell your friends and neighbors about this event. You can download an event flyer, which includes the breakdown of committeemen votes, here:

http://democracyforamerica.com/uploads/0006/6244/10th_Cook_County_Forum_Flyer.pdf