Entries associated with the tag "Illinois":

The business-based Civic Federation (PDF) on Illinois state legislators' ongoing carnival of errors:

"The state has provided short-term funding at the last minute to ward off 'doomsday' dates the CTA responsibly planned for.... The reprieves first borrowed from the agency's future state funding and then granted federal capital dollars to be used for operations."

Better than nothing, right? Wrong:

"Granting temporary funding at the eleventh hour is not only unfair to riders, who suffer uncertainty about getting to work and school, but also costs a good deal of money to the CTA. The agency has to reprogram its fleet and stations in preparation for new fare structures, reorganize its bus system, and place signage to warn riders. The CTA estimates that each 'doomsday' preparation costs $1.5 million."

BTW, "a new bus costs $250,000 and a new rail car costs $1.5 million."

(The Federation supports Julie Hamos's Senate Bill 572, which combines long-term funding and reforms.)

Really, if you want to govern halfway decently, all you have to do is ask yourself, "What would George W. Bush do?" and then do the opposite. So I can't beef too much about the Progressive States Network. Except when they're simplistic and Pollyannaish.

Simplistic, as when they tout state or regional "cap and trade" systems for controlling carbon dioxide emissions, without acknowledging why such programs need to be national and, probably, international -- namely, that it may be cheaper for CO2 emitters to move their emissions than to curtail them. (I should add that this willful blindness to Econ 101 when trying to "do something" is not unique to PSN.)

Pollyannaish, as when they do a drive-by on Illinois' trainwreck of a legislative session using the hilariously inappropriate headline, "Progress Amidst Conflict." Their summary gives equal space to a new law forbidding state pension funds from investing in companies associated with Sudan and to the transit situation (which account I quote in its entirety): "The legislature also failed to pass any fiscal relief for the ailing Chicago Transit Authority, causing likely fare hikes, layoffs, and service cuts." Progressives are better served by Oregon US Rep. Peter DeFazio's harsh words, front-paged by the Chicago Tribune: "The state and the governor are walking away from a minimal responsibility to maintain an existing system."

You gotta love downstate law. From People v. Pierce, a case decided October 18 by the Illinois Supreme Court:

"On September 13, 2004, Robert Gallaher was sitting at the bar in the Silver Moon Tavern in Quincy, Illinois, drinking beer. Gallaher had placed $50 on the bar in front of him and, after he paid for his drinks, several bills remained on the bar. Gallaher testified he had his hand on the money while he sat at the bar.

"Defendant entered the Silver Moon and walked up to Gallaher, the only patron in the tavern. Gallaher testified that defendant offered to sell him cigarettes, but he declined. The two then engaged in conversation for several minutes. At one point, Gallaher removed his hand from the money to light a cigarette. Defendant then grabbed the money and ran out of the tavern."

The defendant got six years for felony "theft from the person." What occupied the state supremes in this case was whether sweeping someone else's change off the bar was meant to be felony theft, or just the lesser crime of misdemeanor theft. Brief summary here; free registration required to see the full 12-page opinion. It could be important reading if you're trying to limit your life of crime to petty theft.

Daniel Biss's day job is teaching topology at the University of Chicago. He's also running for the Democratic nomination for state representative in the 17th District. The district, located just west and north of Evanston, went 59 percent for John Kerry in 2004; the seat is now held by moderate Republican Elizabeth Coulson.

What makes Biss different from other entry-level wannabes is that he made the rounds at Yearly Kos last week, and he's been a presence on ActBlue.com, the PAC billing itself as the "online clearinghouse for Democratic action." Since making an impression on the Kossacks, Biss has raised $31,287 from 422 donors on ActBlue.com, placing his campaign second only to John Edwards' presidential campaign's in fund-raising on that site last week [SEE CLARIFICATION IN COMMENTS] -- and a couple orders of magnitude ahead of any Illinois state-level candidate on the site. (Edwards picked up $3.6 million, third-place finisher Rick Noriega, who's running for US senator in Texas, $16,000.) More to the point, this is a significant chunk of change for a candidate running in a small suburban district.

In a phone interview Biss told me he doesn't support Governor Rod Blagojevich's gross receipts tax proposal. Although he says education, transit, and health care need more money, he wouldn't support a tax increase without serious tightening of ethics laws to make sure the money goes where it's supposed to, significant additional tightening of corporate tax loopholes, and provisions like enlarged personal exemptions and increased earned income tax credit to make sure that the burden falls more on those who can afford it.

He thinks netroots groups like ActBlue are a way for left-wingers to do now what right-wingers did after 1964 -- organize locally to change the pattern of politics in the US from the bottom up. Here's his interview at Firedoglake: "I keep coming back to etymology: progressives like progress, which means that we’re focused on the future. Believing in a better future has to also mean planning for and making a better future. And I find it flabbergasting how little of that goes on in our politics today."

Illinois Democrats have failed miserably to govern, by not being able to agree on a state budget for two months and counting. Apparently Missouri Republicans are doing worse -- and their failure is driven, not by faction fighting, but by radical fundamentalist ideology that equates a microscopic assemblage of cells with a human being. As Jason Rosenbaum reports in the Columbia Tribune, (hat tip to Progressive States Network), the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City owns 100 acres there but may invest $850 million elsewhere. Even though Missouri voters have amended the state's constitution to prohibit legislative meddling with scientific research using embryonic stem cells, Republican legislators and the governor continue to try.

"In the event that Missouri embraces policies and enacts laws and regulations advocated by Sen. Bartle and Rep. Lembke, it is unlikely that there will ever be further expansion of the scientific facilities of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Missouri," Stowers spokeswoman Laurie Roberts said. "To do otherwise would be akin to expanding a newspaper operation in a jurisdiction that had abolished freedom of press."

Paul Street, formerly of the Chicago Urban League and now blogging from Iowa City, summarizes the Democratic front runners' position on reviving nuclear power, and questions Obama's image construction as opposed to his reality:

"Edwards has the right answer: nukes cost too much and are unsafe.  Hillary waffles but agrees with Edwards that nukes are too dangerous at present.  It's left to Obama to actually advocate 'explor[ing] nuclear power as part of the energy mix' (as if it hasn't already been deeply explored for decades and found to be [a] too expensive and [b] too unsafe)."

Whence Obama's position?

"For a big part of the answer, please follow this link to Barack Obama's  'Top Contributors' on the 'Open Secrets' web site of the Center for Responsive Politics - the venerable campaign finance watchdog group in Washington DC.  There you will see that Obama's third largest campaign contributor (after Goldman Sachs and Lehman Bros.) so far is Exelon Corporation ($191,000 through the second quarter of 2007).  Exelon is the parent company of Chicago's notorious Commonwealth Edison utility and is owner and operator of what it calls the "nation’s largest fleet of nuclear energy plants."

Obama's already shown a depressing willingness to truckle to the worst of the Democratic Party -- its unwanted and unnecessary intervention in the suburban primary race to replace Henry Hyde, and its coronation of an incompetent County Board chairman on the hereditary principle. Is this more of the same, or just a reasonable difference of opinion?

One out of eight single-family homes built in the US in 2006 qualified for the federal Energy Star rating (details here). In Illinois, fewer than one out of 30 qualified. There's a word for that, and it ain't green. (Thanks to John Porterfield at Informed Energy Decisions.)

What's most embarrassing is that Energy Star's a moderate standard -- at least 15 percent more energy efficient than homes built to the 2004 International Residential Code (IRC). The three states with the greatest Energy Star market penetration aren't exactly environmentalist hotbeds: Nevada (71 percent), Alaska (64), and Iowa (57). But evidently their builders and consumers know something ours don't.

"Affected species have three possible responses to global climate change," write Robert Sullivan of Argonne National Laboratory and Milt Clark of USEPA's Region V in the March issue of Chicago Wilderness Journal: "change, move, or die."

They admit they can't answer their article's title question, "Can Biodiversity Survive Global Warming?" because ecosystems are complex and different climate models predict different degrees of warming. But "it is believed that the net effects of global climate change will favor invasive species -- those opportunists that can quickly exploit the new ecological niches that will open up as native species ...cannot adapt.... The additional stresses on ecosystems (along with higher temperatures) will also likely favor vector-borne diseases such as the mosquito-spread West Nile virus that has devastated populations of many bird species in the Chicago area."

Dying is as easy as ever, but moving isn't. Roads, cities, suburbs, and farms have broken up habitats, so that "species that could once move long distances freely to seek more favorite habitat are now faced with numerous man-made barriers," increasing the invasives' advantage. "Habitat fragmentation also reduces the genetic pool from which species can draw to evolve new mechanisms to cope with change."

The article is heavily footnoted to the scientific literature, some of which is accessible on-line free, including a thorough 35-page 2006 review, "Ecological and Evolutionary Responses to Recent Climate Change" by Camille Parmesan of the University of Texas, who notes that "documented rapid loss of habitable climate space makes it no surprise that the first extinctions of entire species attributed to global warming are mountain-restricted species," specifically frogs in the Costa Rican cloud forests. On a mountain, the only way to stay cool is to move up, and pretty soon you run out of mountain.

Thanks to the Community Media Workshop for pointing to Good Jobs First's update on the ongoing stream of government subsidies to the neediest: Wal-Mart. Illinois is shamefully #1 in both number and dollar value of taxpayer funds being given to the giant retailer. Press release here, Wal-Mart Subsidy Watch web site here.

In suburban Country Club Hills, for instance, the new Wal-Mart supercenter "was awarded a 50% property tax rebate and a 50% sales tax rebate through 2013. Based on local tax estimates, the property tax portion is likely worth $6.25 million and the sales tax portion $6 million."

Who decided that the schools and cops didn't need that money as much as the world's largest corporation did? You might ask Robert Weissman.

As bad luck would have it, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich announced his goals for reducing the state's greenhouse-gas emissions during a February blizzard. The goals themselves are ambitious: back to 1990 levels by 2020, and 60 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. By comparison, two years ago California's Governator proposed the same 2020 goal and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. President Bush has proposed . . . nothing.

The governor's Climate Change Advisory Group has been digging deep into the issue. Its 40 members include representatives from the AFL-CIO, the Environmental Law and Policy Center, US Steel, Waste Management, and many more. Its meetings are wide open, alternating between Chicago and Springfield. 

We're still in the pregame here. And so far the usual interest groups have shown little awareness of the nature of the game. One proposal being floated, for instance, would impose performance standards on power plants' CO2 emissions. The United Mine Workers commented that it opposes "extreme measures that would undermine economic growth, harm particular sectors, or [place] ourselves at a disadvantage to other nations." This of course is a recipe for doing nothing. Better the planet should fry than one coal miner go out of work!

Bear in mind that right now the Advisory Group is far from actually making proposals -- it's still discussing which proposals to consider for modeling, to see how they might actually work if implemented. The Advisory Group's proposals for action are due July 30. What will Blago then endorse? And how hard will he fight for it?

My former boss, Illinois Times president Fletcher "Bud" Farrar, writes an appreciation of the last Democratic governor before Rod Blagojevich: Dan Walker (1973-1977), the Montgomery Ward executive whose report on the 1968 Democratic Convention demonstrations described them as a "police riot" and who in 1972 shed his corporate togs, donned a red bandana, and walked the state on an anti-Daley platform to upset Paul Simon for the Democratic guernatorial nomination in 1972.

Southern Illinois University Press will issue Walker's memoir, The Maverick and the Machine, in May, which doesn't shy away from the story of his doing federal time after leaving office (on a charge unrelated to his tenure as governor).

Farrar reflects on the Walker administration's well-known confrontational nature and a personal trait of perhaps equal significance, which he glimpsed during a summer stint at the Southern Illinoisan newspaper in Carbondale: "Just before Walker and his walk entourage showed up to be interviewed, our publisher supplied all of us in the newsroom with red bandannas to put around our necks. Poor Dan, who had no sense of humor, couldn't figure out whether we were expressing solidarity or making fun."

A book with one of the worst titles in history, Mostly Good and Competent Men, chronicles Illinois governors up through Blago. Farrar seems to hope that history will eventually apply at least this description to Walker's term. (FWIW, probably the Walker crowd's most famous alum is now lieutenant governor of Illinois.) What do you think? And if you're old enough to remember his governorship, how did you manage to navigate the web to get here?

A gross receipts tax would also encourage Illinois businesses to economize by buying from out-of-state vendors. (Buy plants from an Illinois vendor who bought them from an Illinois grower and they're taxed twice.) This is bad news even if you don't care about buying locally: the best taxes don't distort economic activity beyond the minimum necessary.

Giertz's assessment hasn't garnered much attention. The Illinois Farm Bureau did reprint part of the press release but strategically omitted Giertz's positive proposal:

“For the last five years," he points out, "continuing state revenue sources have failed to cover expanding state spending.”  As a result, Illinois "cannot pay all its current obligations with continuing revenues"--hence Blago's repeated attempts at one-shot fixes--"and revenue growth in the future will likely not keep pace with expenditure needs because of the relative unresponsiveness of the state’s tax system. . . .  A modest rate increase in the income tax (individual and corporate), accompanied by an increase in the exemption level to protect low-income taxpayers and the expansion of the sales tax base to include consumer services, would generate sufficient funds for the state to address its fiscal imbalance if the extra funds were accompanied by spending discipline.” 

For the record, Giertz did serve on Republican Jim Edgar's transition team. But he also has fingered Edgar's political godfather, James R. Thompson, as the original culprit in the state's ongoing failure to properly fund state employee pensions: "Gov. Thompson and the General Assembly chose to direct available state resources to other state programs rather than to pensions" back in the 1980s, Giertz said in 2005. "This was not an oversight, but a conscious policy decision," and an expensive one.

On April 4, Illinois' lieutenant governor communicated with his boss and colleague the governor via press release. 

"(SPRINGFIELD) -- On Wednesday, Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn called on Governor Blagojevich to convene a special session of the Illinois General Assembly to solve Illinois’ Electric Rate Crisis, give ratepayers immediate relief from unfair electricity prices, and....once the immediate problem is solved, we need a long-term, thoughtful plan that will increase utility companies’ use of renewable fuel sources while increasing our energy efficiency and cutting back on the emission of greenhouse gases that threaten the future of our entire planet."

But forget the odd-couple relationship between Quinn and Blago. That's an MSM inside-politics soap-opera-of-the-day thing. The really strange coupling here won't make pretty pictures on TV: the desire for lower energy prices AND lower emission of greenhouse gases. Quinn wants cake now, and he wants a long-term plan to control obesity. Good luck with that.

2007 isn't just the year of the money in Springfield, it may also be the year of the process -- and if you believe some good-government advocates, a better process might be just what the CTA needs for a life-saving cash transfusion. Now that the Capital Investment Accountability Act has passed out of committee and into the full house, here's the simple version; you can also check out the Daily Southtown opinion piece by Michael McLaughlin of the Metropolitan Planning Council.

The bill (House Bill 801, same as Senate Bill 1582) sets up four state transportation goals. Everything the state spends on transportation is supposed to contribute to:

(1) efficiency -- meaning reducing delays and unreliability, shifting modes (probably from cars to transit but it doesn't say) and managing demand,

(2) economic development -- that is, putting money back into local and state economies,

(3) integration of land use and transportation planning, and

(4) safety -- meaning reducing crashes, increasing security, and encouraging use of "physically active modes" (presumably walking and biking, as opposed to driving).

If the bill is passed, a new Statewide Prioritization Committee will turn these four goals into 5-10 specific criteria for judging all proposed highway, railroad, and transit projects. Judging will be done by each Metropolitan Planning Organization on the local level, a new District Prioritization Committee for each of the state's nine transportation districts at the regional level, and the statewide committee for statewide projects. (FYI Chicago's six-county region is one district.) Within limits, the lower-level groups can each choose how to weight the criteria but they can't just trash 'em.

Top-scoring projects get passed up to the statewide committee, which puts them all together, and on January 15, 2009, the statewide committee is to deliver its "comprehensive project prioritization plan" to the General Assembly and the governor. (If Illinois' political culture should reassert itself and members of the General Assembly decide to clout through something that didn't pass muster normally, they'd have to do it in public, but the law doesn't otherwise constrain them by requiring supermajority votes or anything.)

In other words, a public process to generate rail, road, and bus plans based on stated goals and professional expertise, not political clout. 

Will this complex but transparent and open process inspire more tax support for transportation, including Chicago-area mass transit? That's one of MPC's goals, but for the CTA there's little good news yet, as Sick Transit Chicago reports.

Reality check: "If every one of the 70 million acres on which corn was grown in 2006 was used for ethanol, the amount produced would displace only 12 percent of the U.S. gasoline market.  Moreover, the 'new' (non-fossil) energy gained would be very small -- just 2.4 percent of the market. Car tune-ups and proper tire air pressure would save more energy."

That's University of Minnesota researchers David Tilman and Jason Hill in the Washington Post. (Two days later a front-page feature in the Chicago Tribune omitted the big picture, covering only small-towners' questions about whether a new ethanol plant would make the place smell like beer.)

Their point, based on a decade of field research (abstract from Science) on various ways to produce ethanol, is that "renewable" isn't the same as "good." "Ethanol made from prairie grasses, from corn grown in Illinois and from sugar cane grown on newly cleared land in Brazil have radically different impacts on greenhouse gases."

Clearing land releases stored carbon, so that Brazilian sugar cane grown on cleared land releases about 50 percent more greenhouse gases than you'd get from producing and using an equal amount of gasoline. 

Tilman and Hill aren't just criticizing. "We planted 172 plots in central Minnesota with various combinations of [native prairie] species, randomly chosen. We found, on this highly degraded land, that the plots planted with mixtures of many native prairie perennial species yielded 238 percent more bioenergy than those planted with a single species. ... little fertilizer or chemical weed or pest killers was required. ... [and the plants] removed carbon dioxide from the air. Much of this carbon ends up stored in the soil." These plants don't require land now used to grow food and fiber.

Unfortunately, there is no industrial-scale prairie-plant lobby to battle with the corn lobby for politicos' wallets and minds.

A recent Illinois law requires the 49 municipalities in the state with less than 10 percent affordable housing -- all affluent suburbs of Chicago -- to come up with plans to make it easier for working people to live there. Charles Hoch, who teaches urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has read the plans submitted by the 36 suburbs that chose to comply. His report appears in the winter issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association, not available online to nonmembers. A 2005 PDF version of the report is here; a recent press release here.

Hoch wasn't impressed. "Only five of the documents described how changes in local housing policy objectives and regulations could foster affordable housing on local sites. Most plans included short bullet lists of generalized regulatory, administrative, and fiscal incentives. They used vivid language to explain their commitment to current [i.e., exclusionary] land use, and vague language to explain their commitment to affordable housing. Each had a unique and compelling description of the hardship compliance would create, and a derived and dreamy description of the policies and regulations they would use to foster affordable housing."

He gives details on Highland Park's plan, which is serious, and Wilmette's, which is not. He also decries the state's lack of follow-up: "In Illinois the state housing development agency received no funds to implement the act. The most innovative leadership came from the planners and community development activists selected from local nonprofit organizations and the few municipalities with affordable housing policies in place. These people were invited by the state finance agency to help ccordinate subregional workshops for local municipal officials and staff in the months after the new state law was enacted. The lack of active, dedicated, and competent state planning staff in Illinois placed responsibility for sustained planning support of this type in the hands of nonprofit and philanthropic agencies."

Indiana is best known for a lame Republican vice president (Quayle) and an invertebrate Democratic senator (Evan Bayh). But other politicians are expanding, not shrinking, the range of public policy options on the table.

The state's governor (a former Cheney administration budget official) has leased the Indiana toll road to the same Spanish-Australian consortium that's running the Chicago Skyway (he's taken some political lumps for it, not necessarily for good reasons). A similar arrangement may be the only way the much needed (or is it unwanted?) Illiana Expressway will get built.

Confronted with a similar dilemma, the state legislature is considering a radically different approach. Alarmed that NiSource, the holding company for the Northwest Indiana Public Service Company, is thinking of selling off the electric utility, it's moving in the direction of enabling local governments to buy NIPSCO. A committee of the house of representatives has reported out a bill that LaPorte County Commission president Barb Huston on Friday described as "an early victory in the fight for public power."

Read the story by Rick Richards in the Michigan City News-Dispatch (free registration required; additional coverage here). It's now possible to say in public that government, with all its failings, might serve the people of northwest Indiana better than an out-of-state holding company that can't tell Gary from Grayslake and couldn't care less. (I'm not convinced that government actually can, but the threat of an alternative seems to be the only thing that keeps big-time capitalists honest.)

With capitalist, socialist, and libertarian ideas all in play, things are sure to get interesting. (In Indiana, as in Illinois, the fates of Chicago and northwest Indiana will be worked out in the statehouses, for better or worse.)

"Ty has a plastic skull now, and the old one is still stuck in his insides. He taps the side of his waist, where there is a slight bulge. The lump of bone will be removed one day but he is in no hurry to undergo another operation. There will be plenty of those ahead: he hopes the sight in his blind eye can be restored, though he doubts he is going to rebuild his nose – it involves too many awkward skin grafts."

Sarah Baxter at Times Online tells the story of marine sergeant Ty Ziegel of downstate Metamora, whose truck met up with a suicide bomber while on patrol near Iraq's Syrian border in December 2004. 

Ziegel had met his fiance, Renee Klein, years earlier, when he went to work as a mechanic at her father's garage in their small town, population 2,700, near Peoria. She stuck with him through months of surgery that left almost everything unrecognizable except his deadpan wit. When the doctors removed the tracheostomy tube in his neck that had been feeding him while his lips were too burned, writes Baxter, "He said, ‘Renee, will you be my valentine?’ . . . His next words were: ‘Do you want to make out?’"

Photojournalist Nina Berman's coverage of their wedding last fall is here. (The Sun-Times reviewed her earlier book Purple Hearts Back From Iraq.)

Baxter writes, "He did not join the marines to get thanks and he does not feel strongly about the war one way or the other. ‘I’m not political and I don’t complain.’ His younger brother is also in the marines and may be deployed in Iraq. Sometimes it bothers Ty, but they both signed up, so that’s that."

There's something inherently funny (if not annoying) about "National Historic Chemical Landmarks," but organizers of the American Chemical Society convention at McCormick Place in March came up with five landmarks conferees can visit. Three of them are hours out of town -- two downstate (in Urbana and Peoria) and one on the far side of Indianapolis (in Greencastle).

In the Chicago area there's only Universal Oil Products' Riverside Laboratory in McCook, where scientists patented almost 9,000 commercial applications of petroleum between 1921 and '55 -- and Hull House, home base of pioneer industrial toxicologist and occupational-health physician Alice Hamilton. One landmark for the polluter, one for the pollution fighter. Hey, it all goes into the GDP.

The sizzle may be in Chicago, but the steak is being cooked in Springfield. Our transit, roads, schools, health care, and planning in general are in the hands not of the City Council, but of a state government mired in deficit spending. For that reason, much as I hate the nonconcept "most underrated," I have to say I think the bipartisan Center on Tax and Budget Accountability is the most underrated Chicago policy shop going.

Among those who haven't drunk the anti-tax Kool-Aid, many think 2007 is the year something will finally get done in Springfield -- but not everyone agrees on what that should be. Key points from CTBA's annual fiscal symposium last week:

• CTBA released its own new study (summarized here) documenting Illinois' "structural deficit" -- showing that state taxes are both unfair and inefficient. Illinois' "low, flat income tax places a much greater tax burden on low and middle income taxpayers than affluent taxpayers," and "its sales tax structure fails to track the modern economy." So they fail to produce enough money to balance the budget even with zero growth in programs or expenditures.

• Mike Lawrence, longtime Springfield journalist and a top staffer in Governor Jim Edgar's administration, invoked the example of another Republican governor, Richard Ogilvie (who instituted the state income tax 38 years ago), but added that controlling spending is just as important as adding revenue.

• R. Eden Martin of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club reiterated both halves of that group's proposal: cut costs and raise revenues. In particular, change the public schools' incentive structure by allowing more charter schools. Putting more money into an unchanged monopoly would be "mostly wasted," he said. Many audience members didn't get it and others just disagreed. (Full report here, PDF.)

• You might think taxes for transportation maintenance and improvement would be a slam dunk, but Mary Sue Barrett of the Metropolitan Planning Council says Illinois needs a single transportation planning process to beat down public cynicism and make sure we actually build what's most needed. Such a priority-setting process would fall under the new Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (C-MAP) -- but how would it encompass Moving Beyond Congestion, the current campaign to lobby the General Assembly specifically for more money for the RTA, CTA, Metra, and Pace?

• Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First pushed Gold Collar (PDF), his group's new report on how state business incentives go where they're least needed (well covered by Stephen Franklin in the Tribune). In times of heightened capital mobility, he said, public money should be invested in things unlikely to move away, including a well-educated workforce.

CTBA director Ralph Martire had the last word:  "If Illinois were a separate country, its economy would be the 27th largest in the world, bigger than Ireland, Saudi Arabia, or Greece. And we can't talk about raising taxes?"

Voters didn't seem much interested in Republican Judy Baar Topinka's fiscal-responsibility message in the November governor's race (perhaps because her party's president hasn't shown much interest in it either). But the dire consequences of Rod Blagojevich's spend-and-don't-tax regime can't be ignored forever. The Center for Tax and Budget Accountability issued a report on state pension funds November 28. We've been skipping payments again. Full report here (PDF). The gist from Illinois Channel:

"'Illinois public pension liabilities are growing out of control, and the state's failure to pay keeps making them worse,' said Chrissy Mancini, Director of Budget and Policy Analysis for CTBA, a bipartisan fiscal think tank based in Chicago. 'If lawmakers don't act to meet these obligations now, the cost of catching up later will force cuts to education, health care and other essential public services.'

"The report concluded that, because Illinois has the nation's fewest state employees per capita, ranks 42nd in state spending per capita, and offers public pension benefits no richer than the national average, the pension debt can only be solved by adding revenue. The best available option is to fix 'the state's poorly designed tax system [that] doesn't grow with the economy' or produce enough revenue to fund both state services and pension obligations."

You can argue with 'em here or attend CTBA's annual fiscal symposium in Chicago January 17.  John McCarron's Chicago Tribune column is also relevant.

How much credit does Rahm Emanuel, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, deserve for his party's success last night? Rick Perlstein has an intriguing analysis of the conservative strategy followed by the Machiavelli of the 5th District at The New Republic Online (registration required, but there's an excerpt at MyDD):

"Not all Emanuel's losing recruits were beaten in primaries. Some were beaten in the general election. . . . Dan Seals, a black moderate in the Barack Obama mold who criticized the Democratic Party even in speeches to Democratic crowds, lost to the Republican incumbent in Emanuel's backyard, Illinois's 10th District -- as did the DCCC's most talked-about recruit, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois's 6th. Emanuel poured as astonishing $3 million into her campaign. It bought her a three-point defeat. Activists say the money would have been better spent on all the promising candidates to whom Rahm wouldn't give the time of day."

Emanuel spent money in the primary to help his handpicked out-of-district candidate defeat grassroots local Christine Cegelis (who ran a respectable race against eternal incumbent Henry Hyde), rather than let the district's own Democratic leadership decide who to put up. Commenters discuss Howard Dean's competing 50-state strategy as well.

Republican spinner Dan Curry speaks bipartisan truth at Reverse Spin: "If Rod pulls off a victory . . . it will mean Illinois has selected the following two governors: George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich, who both padded their campaign treasury with ill-gotten funds. Rejected along the way were four people who raised far less cash but according to the rules: Glenn Poshard, Paul Vallas, Jim Ryan and Topinka."

Michael McDonald of the Brookings Institution takes down five myths about voter turnout. He says apathy isn't on the rise, and negative commercials haven't caused it. (Hat tip to Rich Miller.)

What makes you think Bush is any better at planning for unpleasant contingencies in Iraq now than he was in 2003?  Billmon at Whiskey Bar notices an ominous parallel from 1942.

"Since announcing his candidacy for the Illinois Senate seat, Obama has raised the astonishing sum of nearly $21 million and has built close relationships with a number of traditional fat-cat donors." Ken Silverstein of Harper's magazine responds to the senator's response to his article (which you'll have to read on paper). Closer to home, why on earth does Obama embrace the Crown Prince of Cook County, when Boss Daley can't even stick up for John Kerry? Could it be that was just the easy way out?

 
Reader, May 26:  "[Hastert challenger John Laesch is] also aware that he can help his fellow candidates win or lose: a serious challenge might limit Hastert’s ability to help Republicans elsewhere." Tribune, November 4:  "Hastert homes in on his own district. . . . He's running an ad on cable television, an unusual move for a 20-year incumbent who has won almost every race by a margin of greater than 2-to-1."

There are so many ways to go off-message, especially if the intended victims of your message can deliver it cheaply. Check out this story from Fort Wayne about a Republican congressman siccing the state attorney general on Republican Party calls made in his cause. Speaking in heavily accented voices, the callers deliver an anti-immigration message. (Hat tip to Governing.com: 13th floor.)

Being "tough on crime" has been good politics in Illinois for three decades. But as the 2006 Crime and Justice Index (PDF) just released by Chicago Metropolis 2020 suggests, it hasn't been good government. The state Department of Corrections now spends a billion and a third dollars a year -- 20 times what it did when Jim Thompson was first elected governor in 1976.

"Corrections has become a budget nightmare," says Metropolis 2020 senior executive Paula Wolff, an alumna of that administration. If you put the state's 245,000 prison inmates in one place, they'd comprise the second largest city in the state.

Most of the prisoners are black, come from the Chicago area, and return here; most of the prisons are in majority-white counties downstate. That's no accident: for years downstate towns desperate for jobs actually competed with each other for prison sites, while places nearer Chicago resisted them. As in the case of polluting industries, prisons wound up where the locals could get nothing else. People who in another world would have been farmers, factory workers, or coal miners got jobs overseeing prisoners, and it was called "economic development." In 2002, the 12 state prisons south of I-70 (not a misprint, this is far southern Illinois) employed more people than anything else in the area besides Southern Illinois University.

As Metropolis 2020 points out, following this political path of least resistance has made recidivism the path of least resistance for prisoners, who are often cut off from family ties. (Even if you own a reliable car, it's no pleasure jaunt to Grayville or Mount Sterling.) It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what more than 70 percent of released prisoners in Chicago say, according to the report: "family support is an important factor in helping them avoid [returning to] prison . . . . If family relationships have become too tenuous or no longer exist, exiting prisoners are more susceptible to reestablishing gang and other criminal ties." (This group is much too nice to put in the shiv about how few small-government family-values conservatives have objected to this policy, so I won't either.)

Metropolis 2020 identifies a number of encouraging programs and trends, including an alleged softening of public opinion: "The public is more interested in the reasons why a person commits a crime and is increasingly supportive of rehabilitative programs and preventive policies." That would be a welcome change. But in the meantime Illinois taxpayers have invested 30 years and hundreds of millions of dollars building a system that isolates prisoners and makes rehabilitation and prevention harder than ever.

"I had seen too many people on drugs -- their personalities hardly recognizable, their voices slurred, their eyes glazed. I resented drugs. Drugs concealed who people were. I didn't want drugs concealing what my crops were. And what are farm chemicals but drugs by a different name?" 

That's the beginning of Farmer John's Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables: Seasonal Recipes and Stories from a Community Supported Farm, by Boone County's walking collection of ironies, biodynamic farmer John Peterson.  Its generous format encompasses more than 200 recipes (organized by vegetable and season) in more than 300 pages, and it's one of the few cookbooks you can enjoy reading when you're not hungry.

Which is good, because Peterson himself acknowledges being more interested in the stories, the reflections, and the connections between the soil and your dinner plate than in the recipes themselves. It was a team effort, and it's by turns personal, mystical, and practical. Slick-paper photos of his community-supported farm, Angelic Organics, are scattered among the rough workaday pages with identification charts and tips and recipes for everything from asparagus to winter squash.

Ideally you'd view the Farmer John movie or check out the Reader's 1994 (May 13) and 2006 (January 20) coverage first, so as to know where this guy is coming from. He's a farmer and an artist; a steadfast local whose neighbors almost ran him out of town; a Midwestern original who revitalizes himself with periodic visits to Mexico; and a businessman who believes, with Rudolf Steiner, that "the root primarily nourishes the head particularly; the middle of the plant, stem and leaves, primarily nourishes the chest particularly; and fruit nourishes the lower body."

OK, well, maybe you don't need to know. The proof is in the eating.

Or the reading. He's got an autobiography (I Didn't Kill Anyone Up Here) and a book of short stories (Glitter & Grease) in the works too. 

• Former Chicagoan Sean Carroll, who blogs at Cosmic Variance, learned something at the fall meeting of the Illinois and Iowa sections of the American Association of Physics Teachers: "High-school science teachers live in a very different world than professional researchers. Typically a 'department' is only one person, and when it comes to resources one has to be a little creative. So it’s quite common (I’ve just learned), when one first is hired, for the new teacher to be presented with a storeroom full of stuff that their predecessors had acquired one way or another. . . . Sometimes, indeed, it’s hard to figure out what the stuff is! So here at the FM of the IIS of the AAPT, people have been bringing in pieces of apparatus that have been lying around for decades and have become unmoored from their original purposes. They then show the wayward equipment to their assembled colleagues, and ask for help figuring out what the heck this thing is supposed to be." Read the whole thing, and the comments too.

• Treehugger nominates the Jerusalem artichoke, which "looks like a ginger root, tastes like a cross between a radish and an artichoke," as the "most underrated" [hate that phrase!] native American food. Other underrateds include birch syrup, analogous to maple syrup except that it's a lot more work to boil down: "It takes an average of 100 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of birch syrup. Maple syrup, by comparison, averages 40:1." Maybe it's a native food, but the processing sounds really energy-intensive.  Let's not confuse boutiquery with greenness.

• Medpundit offers a close look at something your ancestors didn't want to know: cough syrup ingredients from the good old days.

Some days it just feels like feudalism is coming back -- hereditary nobility, locals banding together for protection, and religion über alles. Either that or the nurse hid my medication again . . .

• The Sunlight Foundation, which broke the Hastert Highway scandal, is putting the grassroots to work:  "Citizen Muckrakers have investigated 438 members of Congress, and tentatively found 19 spouses who were paid by a member's campaign committee -- totaling some $637,424 since January 1, 2005."  Bobby Rush and Danny Davis are the Illinoisans on that list. This looks like good news for organized transparency in government, and bad news in what was found. So, is "family" getting more important in politics, or are we just touchier about it? Bear in mind that 1972 was the last presidential election in which neither a Bush nor a Dole was on the Republican Presidential ticket. A Stroger for your thoughts!

• Sam Smith at Undernews picked this up from Jesse Halladay's USA Today story: "Louisville, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis city officials have agreed to offer one another emergency resources in case of natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or other catastrophic events. In one of the first agreements of its kind in the nation, the cities have pledged to help each other when a disaster overwhelms one of them."

• According to law.com, "The Austin-based Republican Party of Texas played the religion card in a Sept. 21 online newsletter. As alleged in the newsletter, Texarkana solo E. Ben Franks, Democratic nominee for a seat on the 6th Court of Appeals, 'is reported to be a professed atheist' and apparently believes the Bible is a 'collection of myths.' But Franks says he has never professed to be an atheist and is not a member of any atheist organization."

• In related news, the lobbying group Secular Coalition for America has opened a contest to find the highest elected official in the U.S. who is an atheist, humanist, or freethinker. Nominations are open through the end of the year; the person who nominates the winner will get $1,000. The person who next runs against the winner will get a free pass to public office.

I swear, most of the world's work gets done in autumn. Three local activities worthy of consideration:

(1)  The Chicago Architectural Club asks contenders for its 2007 Chicago Prize to answer the question, "How Does the Lakefront-Loving Chicagoan Cross the Road?"  All right, they didn't put it that way.  They said,  "There have been major violations of our open lakefront -- most notably the construction of an eight-lane highway known as Lake Shore Drive. As a result there are few points in which to safely cross Lake Shore Drive. The site of the 2007 Chicago Prize design competition remains one of the most dangerous pedestrian crossings in the center of the city.  This competition challenges entrants to design a connection from/between Buckingham Fountain and the Chicago lakefront by crossing Lake Shore Drive." Rules and info at CAC's website.

(2)  The Illinois Coalition for Political Reform finds that 77 people who gave more than $500 to a candidate for governor haven't told their occupations or where they work, as required by Illinois law since 1998. (For the record, most are Topinka donors.) Says the ICPR, "Some individuals can be hard to find, even after they’ve given you a big check. They must be, or both campaigns would have filed amended D2s with the information." Do you know these folks? Tell ICPR so that their campaign-finance database can be more complete than the state's.

(3)  In These Times, a 30-year-old Chicago left-wing institution (now a monthly), recently emailed its online readers to remind them that it doesn't take advertising and needs money. I don't always agree with ITT, but they're independent and they cover stuff the MSM won't touch--and more intelligently than it would if it did. Typical is David Moberg's report on UIC prof Walter Benn Michaels's new book, The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. Money quote: "The obligation of diversity is to be nice to each other, Michaels writes, but the obligation of equality is to give up some money. Given the choice, diversity has the advantage of appearing to be morally righteous while at the same time preserving economic self-interest." Read the whole thing, or just throw money at 'em.

See-no-pervert Illinois Republican Congressman John Shimkus (head of the House Page Board) and Speaker Dennis Hastert might have to relinquish some power inside the Beltway. That dismays certain ethically challenged conservatives, who reserve their concern for the poor Speaker. (John Cole at Balloon Juice: "Maybe if Foley had been hitting on a fetus, these folks would get it.")

The prospect of a downgrade also dismays certain Illinois courtiers--er, lobbyists. Paul Merrion gathers up a good quote in Crain's Chicago Business, uttered by Caterpillar's William Lane:

"Who's the go-to person in the delegation if Hastert's and Shimkus's stars decline?"

Maybe they should have stuck to the old rules, where you cultivate both parties instead of plunking all your chips on just one. 

No deep moral today, except that those of us who pay close attention to "the issues" can forget how vague it all is to those who don't. And, as Dave Barry was wont to say, remember that in our system these people have the right to vote.

Glimpse #1:  Orange, a guest blogger at Bitch Ph.D., tells a story from her first-day-of-school morning, somewhere not far from here: 

"A Polish mom asked if I could recommend a dentist for her son, David. I warned her that Ben's dentists . . .  like to be paid up front, letting the patient's family do the waiting for insurance reimbursement. Not a problem, she said—they probably take Medicaid, and her son is covered through Illinois's universal health insurance for children.

"'David gets $600 a month of medications for his asthma, and Medicaid pays for that. He can see the doctor, he can go to the dentist. I don't know what I would do without that. Thank you, President Bush,' she said.

"'Don't thank Bush—he'd get rid of Medicaid if he could. Thank the Democrats,' I said.

"(The All Kids program was an initiative from Gov. Rod Blagojevich. He may be corrupt in terms of hiring practices, but he's our corrupt politician. He also ordered pharmacists in the state to dispense Plan B, and is working on universal preschool. I expect I'll be voting for him again, because I care more about issues like those than about cleaning up the state's pandemic corruption. Let's get some more progressive legislation and executive orders on the books, and then we can clean house.)"

No wonder Blago repeats his bread-and-butter initiatives every time journalists ask him about corruption, or how he plans to pay for them.

Glimpse #2:  Saul Levmore at the University of Chicago law school's faculty blog:

"I was entertained last night by my 8th grader's homework assignment, to write a letter to Mayor Daley about what he ought to do [regarding the big-box minimum-wage ordinance]. The assignment was preceded by one in which students had calculated the cost of supporting a family of four in 'their community,' so that they were pushed to think that a job 'must' pay a living wage. Still, not unaware of the problem of discouraging stores from coming in to Chicago, a letter was produced in which the Mayor was encouraged to accept the minimum wage but exempt stores from the high minimum wage if they opened in areas that needed jobs or lower prices."

Hopefully the teacher wasn't depending on each kid having an economically literate parent to point out that trying to do good sometimes has bad side effects.

Ever have one of those arguments with Texans or New Jerseyans over which state is the most crooked? Here's more fodder: the indispensable Illinois Campaign for Political Reform finds that Gov. Rod Blagojevich has collected $1.1 million from out-of-state donors, while Republican challenger Judy Baar Topinka has $195,000.

Much of Blago's out-of-state money comes from places--California, Wisconsin, Ohio, even Indiana--where the donations would be illegal if made within state lines:

"Wisconsin accounted for $92K in giving, including $39K from Bulk Petroleum, $25K from Edison Liquors (a Wirtz company), and $20K from Miller Brewing. All of that giving would be illegal under Wisconsin law, which bars direct contributions from corporations to candidates."

ICPR's David Morrison concludes, "It’s perfectly legal for them to give as much here as they want to, since our laws allow that. Why they would want to give here is, of course, another matter."

The nonpartisan ICPR would like Illinois to enact "fair, sensible contribution limits."

The Cato Institute would oppose such limits on principle, regardless of the evidence. But Cato's Ed Crane makes an interesting point regarding the recent Connecticut primary--which upstart Ned Lamont won, Crane argues, only because he can bankroll himself:

Under current law, he writes, "candidates have rights the rest of us don’t have. Apparently, they can’t be corrupted by their own money, so there are no limits on what they can spend on their own campaigns. More than 60 percent of Ned’s campaign expenditures came from Ned. Without Ned, Ned loses. In fact, no political observer thought any candidate dependent on [the current federal] $2,000 contribution limit had any kind of chance of ousting Lieberman."

And for those who remember 38 years back:

"This antiwar election is directly analogous to my late friend Gene McCarthy’s race for the presidency in 1968. Gene used six-figure contributions from wealthy liberals like Stewart Mott who opposed the war in Vietnam to fund a campaign that ousted a sitting president from his own party. Gene often said that had the ’74 amendments to the FECA been in place in ’68 [i.e. contribution limits], he would not have run."

Who wins this argument? Is it OK for Illinois to be for sale in order to allow for the rare upsurge to be funded by wealthy noncandidates? 

The MSM and blogs are coevolving into . . . who knows what. I'll leave the details for the techies to sort out in the future, but right now no one with even a passing interest in politics can keep up with the conversation without reading certain blogs--or talking to someone who does.

• In Illinois, Rich Miller's Capitol Fax Blog and its cousin Illinoize--a metablog incorporating many points of view--are the best. This morning Miller drew on Tribune reporting to make clear the fact that Gov. Blagojevich's administration is setting up the same defense that Mayor Daley patronage chief Robert Sorich tried. Sorich claimed he only made "recommendations." That defense didn't save him, and Miller thinks it's unlikely to work for Blago.

• In the U.S., Brad De Long's Semi-Daily Journal is a gateway drug. Thursday morning he drew on New York Times analysis and other sources to explain why the upset of incumbent Senator Joseph Lieberman in the Connecticut primary was an uprising of "irate moderates." In the process he pulverized what little is left of Washington Post columnist David Broder's reputation.

• For those who'd rather think about politics than commit it, Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has a splendid post ("The Libertarian Vice") explaining how libertarians often beg the question: "The libertarian vice is to assume that the quality of government is fixed. . . . But sometimes governments do a pretty good job, even if you like me are generally skeptical of government. The Finnish government has supported superb architecture. The Swedes have made a good go at a welfare state. The interstate highway system in the U.S. was a high-return investment. In the area of foreign policy, we have done a good job juggling the China-Taiwan relationship. . . . It is possible to agree with the positive claims of libertarians about the virtues of markets but still think that improving the quality of government is the central task before us. One could love markets yet be some version of a modern liberal rather than a classical liberal. This possibility makes libertarians nervous, thus their desire to fix the quality of government in advance of making an argument."  Oh, just read the whole thing.  (FYI:  He links to his May 2, 2005, post on the characteristic vice of liberalism:  "The modern liberal vice is to think that everyone can be taken care of.")

A few years ago, I had to subscribe to multiple magazines--and wait up to a month--to find this much great reading. Now all this and more is at our fingertips every day.

Contrary to reports in the Tribune and Daily Herald, Republican state treasurer and gubernatorial candidate Judy Baar Topinka was specific about the main issue separating her from incumbent Democrat Rod Blagojevich at yesterday's annual meeting of the Metropolitan Planning Council:

When you're in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

Like any well-prepped pol, Topinka knew about arcana dear to her audience, like the CREATE program for rail freight and the still-aborning CMAP (Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning). But she turned each of MPC's three questions back to rather obvious references to the spend-and-don't-tax incumbent.

• Asked about how the state would help local governments plan for growth, she promised a special assistant in her office, but no resources or incentives "until we get the fiscal problems under control."

• Asked about capital investments in transportation, she agreed that without them "Illinois will not be first in anything" and promised a systematic assessment of need. But, once again, "We're not going to hit the credit card again--we are going to pay our way."

• Asked about education funding, she again agreed with her audience that Illinois relies too much on local property taxes. But "changing the system will require new state funds that frankly don't exist today." Her forthcoming education plan "will be detailed, and whatever we put out,  it will be funded."

Of course she needs to be held to these promises, and give more specifics. But in the context of the fiscal train wreck that is today's Illinois state government, could the mainstream media manage to report the unambiguous common thread running through what she did say?

FYI: According to the Trib, Blago was busy meeting with union members in Las Vegas. He'll give his answers to MPC's questions September 7 at a location to be determined. With an extra month to prepare, they should be good.

Over at the Becker-Posner Blog, Seventh Circuit Federal Appellate Judge Richard Posner declines to comment on the constitutionality of Chicago's new big-box minimum wage.  (That question is likely to wind up in his in box one of these years.)  Meanwhile, he makes some interesting admissions, in his characteristically Olympian way.  Final paragraph: 

"At the current minimum wage in Illinois of $7.75 an hour, an employee who works 2000 hours a year (a 40-hour week with two weeks of annual vacation) and is paid the minimum wage earns only $15,500 a year. This is a pittance,"

You're coming in loud and clear, judge. 

"though if the minimum-wage employee's spouse is employed at a significantly higher wage, the family's income may not be at a hardship level. Similarly, the minimum-wage employee may be an elderly person who receives social security and Medicare and may have a company pension in addition."

Also true for some. 

"These possibilities show that minimum wage laws, even if they had no disemployment effects, would be a clumsy instrument for combating poverty. A better approach than raising the mininum wage would be increasing the earned-income tax credit (negative income tax), which is a method of increasing the earnings of marginal workers without confronting their employer with a higher cost of labor and thus inducing the employer to discharge those workers whose marginal product is lower than the minimum wage."

Illinois has a state EITC. 

"But this would be difficult for an individual city or even state to do; it would require federal action."

Gee, I wonder which party would be more likely to enact this.  But, further deponent sayeth not.

Old man Roeser barks and shows some teeth at former governor James R. Thompson, now of the law firm Winston & Strawn, whose $687,000 worth of services to the ethically challenged current governor have yet to be adequately explained.

"Why," Roeser asks, "has Jim Thompson turned a brilliant legal reputation and a quality law firm to the indentured service of hack boiler-room lobbying clients . . . ?  Why was he the source of freebie criminal lawyer services to a convicted governor with the services so egregious that t