I did attend week 3 of dance class this past week (no party convention this week) . Mrs. OneMan wore sandals, no pressure there, but if I step on her feet it will leave an obvious mark that I would in fact have to look at for the rest of class. No pressure there at all.

This week was swing, at best I have to down to a sway (sort of like Frankenstien in an early movie), can't say that I was swinging all that much. One difference is in the swing both partners can in fact spin (hypothetically at least) the my spinning looks more like a death spiral than a spin. Also during this process Mrs. OneMan lifted my arm up in order to 'lead' me into the spin. Which I had to stop and point out that in traditional western society it was still expect for the man to lead while dancing.

Or as my daughter put it when I was showing someone the steps to swing, 'You look like Master P.'.

From the Sun Times

A top Illinois environmental official has told investigators he "may have" warned a landfill owner that his state permit problems would not clear up until his relative, Ald. Richard Mell (33rd), patched up a feud with Gov. Blagojevich, sources told the Sun-Times

Read the whole thing....

So if this gets too close to the top does Lisa Madigan name a special prosecutor?

OneMan

CapitolFax has had some stuff about the idea of leasing the tollway out including some comment posts from a State Sen. in favor of the idea.

I guess my concern isn't that we would lease the tollway out, it is in an interesting idea that I think needs real looking at. It is that we couldn't really trust Springfield with the money.

Sen. Jeff Schoenberg (or someone claiming to be him) made this comment in a different post on the same subject.

All - Consider that if a major portion of the proceeds of a public-private partnership on the tollway go toward the state's unfunded pension liabilities, that would in turn free up resources which can be earmarked to funding education. Solving the problem of the unfunded pension liabilities arguably removes a major obstacle on the path to school funding reform, particularly since school districts are now paying a greater share of the costs.

Here is my basic problem with that. With no disrespect for Sen. Schoenberg or any other individual state rep or state senator. I don't buy it.

This administration has taken several pots of money set aside for other purposes and used them as general revenue funds. Does anyone think they wouldn't go after this huge pot of money and treat it like general revenue dollars?

Every project across the state will have their hand out for some money and with the chance for the governor to fly around and give out large checks like State Comptroller Atkins from the Simpsons during an election year lots of projects would get funding.

Also isn't the way we got into the pension mess in the first place is by not putting enough money into the funds every year. So our solution is to give the funds a big check and reduce the amount we are putting in the funds. Seems to me as just a way to get back into the same problem again.

I trust Springfield would use the money in the way they say would before they would get it once they got it about as much as I trust those e-mails I get about $20 million dollars that needs to be transferred out of a country.

Here is a suggestion

Lease the tollway with the money going into the pension funds and as part of the lease deal require that the pensions get at least 96% of their requiredannuall funding during the duration of the lease not counting any funds placed previously into the pension funds as a result of the lease deal. If the pensions are not funded to the 96% level then the pensions funds can place a lean on the tollway system in the amount of the underfunding plus a 10% fee.

That way if they use the lease funds as an excuse to underfund the pensions down the road the pension funds have a option to get their money, a real lean on the tollway. Put this into contracts and the lease deal it's self so the state couldn't weasel out of it later.

If it going to take something like leasing the Tollway to deal with the pension issue, fine lets do it right and make it impossiblee for lease funds to go to shooting complexes, film festivals or communityy centers. Also lets make it so we can't use today's big check as an excuse to not make tomorrows pension fund payments.

OneMan

Hey kids looks like another CMS audit (pdf) went about as well as the last one, at least this time they are not blaming the auditor.

Some of the findings

In a $162 million dollar pharmaceutical contact, a different method than specified in the RFP was used to evaluate the bids using the method outlined in the RFP ( page 22 of the pdf) and didn't notify the vendors that the evaluation method had changed. The vendor that ended up getting selected was at the 'upper end of the market'


In a contact for pressure washing (hmmmm) the department allowed a vendo to extensively revise its pricing during a "best and final" process resulitng in pricing higher that originally proposed by the vendor. (page 44 of the pdf)

In ten fiscal year 2005 award testing only 8 resulted in contacts, six of the eight were not executed in a timely fashion. On average the length of time between the announcement of the awared the time filing of a contact with the Comproller for the untimely 6, was 125 days. (Page 26)


More to come

OneMan

Reply to a comment:

Someone asked if I feel the city should own a drive-in..

Ideally no it shouldn't however since it already ownes one and it is a rather unique asset I think it should try to exploit it better instead of tearing it down and letting someone build a strip mall. A strip mall is going to attract few folks from outside of town to spend some money, a cleaned up drive-in with restaurant/bar might do a much better job of attracting outside of town money.

I think it could be a unique draw for the city among folks in the western suburbs if it was improved a bit.

As for the last time I was there, last year.

OneMan

Old pal Beth, has an post about some former teachers she had. It was an interesting read for me, a common person she mentions (English Teacher Dave) was my high school tennis coach.

He was in some small ways a bit of Phil Jackson before Phil Jackson, he would always do stuff to make us think, suffice to say based off of my grammar and spelling I did not ever have English Teacher Dave for English (I had the b/c team of English teachers to a large extent, to this day I can't hear some 80's pop music without cringing thanks to one instructor)

Sr. year I had a class called World Humanities, while interesting required me to expend no energy to do the assignments. The best thing about the class was the teacher would bring in her Sunday New York Times and I would read it in class on Monday.

I do not get invited over to Dave's house for drinks, nor do I expect to be. The last time I saw him was at the wake for another teacher (my computer teacher so obviously a major influence on my life) a couple of years ago. We talked a bit and I swapped e-mail with another teacher who was at the wake.

As for teachers being underpaid (a point Beth made) I am not comfortable making a blanket statement along those lines. I still think the issue is in part we can't really compensate the good teachers correctly or the teachers in subject areas we have a hard time finding teachers for. The Fact English Teacher Dave may have made as much as the bad teachers I had if they had matching educational backgrounds and seniority isn't fair and I think is the bigger problem.

For what it is worth the way Beth writes is at least in part proof that English Teacher Dave knows what he is doing.

FYI she is doing the Breast Cancer 3-day walk, give her some money.

Openline has some stuff about the Hi-Lite drive in just off of Route 30 in Aurora. It appears that the city owns the land and is not really interested in renewing the lease for the drive-in.

Bummer, I really think the city could spend a little bit of money fixing the place up and doing some work on the theatre building on the site and really make it a nice place. It isn't bad now and a cool local thing, at least according to the Openline gang the city is thinking strip-mall. I live in that neck of the woods, we do not need another strip mall.

OneMan

Not much going on at the moment. So blogging has been lite the last few days.

Some more on the convention. First when Oberweis rose and asked that we approve Denny as chairman unanimously because he could see how things were going some of Oberweis' supporters started complaining about their voices not being heard.

Come on it was your guy asking for the vote to end.

Secondly, I almost felt a bit sorry for Jim. He was trying to step up within the party and take a leadership role. He should be commended for being willing to do that. However like a lot of committeemen I was happy with the leadership we currently have. I also felt he was being used a bit by some other factions within the party when it came to running for chair.

If it had been just about anyone else running who could have run in Kane County for the job, it wouldn't have made Sneed and the Trib.

Seriously I almost feel a bit sorry for Jim.

Also Rick had some posts about the DuPage Democrat's convention including how they were debating the rules (at least we had the rules written out before hand)


OneMan

Yes kids Jim Oberweis did run for Kane County Republican Chairman.
No kids Jim Oberweis did not win election as Kane County Republican Chairman.

I am a bit confused as to what is considered 'public' in the meeting and what isn't so I am not going to provide a ton of details.

I will say that Jim's speech on why he should be county chair sounded a lot like his gubernatorial stump speech. It didn't really cover the why he should or deserved to be county chair. The argument one person made was if he won your precinct for governor it is the will of the voters that he be county chair. I will give you a second to let that idea sink in.

I think it is safe to say that someone somewhere seriously and significantly overestimated the support that Jim Oberweis would get for chairman. As traditional we moved to have unanimous support for the winner and that did pass.

Eric Krol from the Daily Herald was there and I am sure he will have more tomorrow.

OneMan

Convention tonight, we will see if Oberweis actually runs (heck if he shows up). Will post tonight with the scoop.

OneMan

I get to miss week 2 of dance class because we have our county party convention. However I still have to practice with Mrs. OneMan just about every night, still requires full processor power just to to those 8 steps.

FYI, latest is that Oberweis is not going to run for chair or central committeeman.

OneMan

So who gets the most political gain out of the Ryan conviction? There are lots of items covering how Judy will use this against Rod and how Rod will use this against Judy. I see things a touch differently however.

Sen. Meeks ends up the big winner if he decides to run.

Why, a host of reasons.

First and foremost Judy and Rod are going to try and paint each other with the George Ryan brush, Rod will run ads showing Judy dancing with George, Judy will run ads showing all the investigations into the current administration, ads showing the friends of Rod who have done well with Rod as Governor.

Secondly, the conviction points out the whole politics as usual thing as well as the idea that Chicago and Illinois are not ready for reform.

So, that's great but how does that help Meeks.

Judy and Rod's likely rising negatives will help a third party candidate. It also provides a real differentiation for Sen. Meeks

If I were running Sen. Meeks campaign for governor I would suggest he let Rod and Judy just toss the punches at each other for a while and let each of them increase the others negatives to start out. Once that is done, start pointing out as a third party candidate he does not have the traditional constituencies that will be looking for jobs and influence.

I would have him start pointing out that corruption is something that both parties in Illinois have had to deal with for a long time and continue to deal with today. That a third party is the only way at this point to really clean house within the executive branch of the state of Illinois.

I would also have him start preaching about doing the right thing even when it is hard. Doing the right thing even when those around you want you to do wrong. (Yes this one is really cynical I'll give you that). But preaching from a pulpit does give somewhat of an air of moral authority and can be effectively used.

It provides him a second and in some ways very different message for his campaign besides education funding.

I even have a slogan 'The xyz party, we don't owe anyone and nobody owns us'

OneMan

Mrs OneMan signed us up for ballroom dancing class and we had our first class tonight. Those who know me please feel free to laugh. It wasn't as bad as I thought is was going to be then again I thought it was going to be worse as my first root canal.

I have to concentrate so hard on not stepping on Mrs. OneMan's feet that I suspect several times during class I stopped breathing for extended periods.

Seriously, everyone else could have been pole dancing and I would have been completely unaware. 100% of my CPU was focused on the fox trot. I think steam was coming out of my ears.

OneMan

Do Robocallers Dream of Electric Sheep?

I think there was something in the print edition of CapitolFax and Hiram has blogged about it as well. It would appear that the House Republicans did some Robocalling in safe Dem districts about some of the fund sweeps.

I am really going against the prevailing blog/web wisdom on this but... Brilliant!

Why, because I think the fund sweeps may be the real chink in the armor for house and senate Democrats. Special funds are created in order to keep funds out of general revenue for a reason. They are special funds because some interest group and/or interested party pushed to make that happen.

One of the funds that approved by the House and Senate to be swept was 'Illinois Veterans' Rehabilitation'.

Look at the entire list.

A large number of these funds have identifiable groups who can relate to them, who will not be happy when informed of what the Democrats in the House and Senate voted to do to them.

Remember taking the "Pet Friendly" plate money and doing a sweep of that? You don't think that Democratic reps should be called to task on that? You don't think pointing that out in an automated call to activist pet owners isn't a good political move during budget season?

I do.


OneMan

I got a letter from the Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert today. Congratulating me on my election as a committeeman and encouraging me to attend the Kane County Republican Party Convention on April 19th and supporting Denny Winngins for both party chair and State Central Committeeman for the 14th Congressional District.

So does this put an end to any chance Oberweis has of getting either of those positions (assuming he will run).

OneMan

From an AP story on the budget negotiations (or lack there of).

On another budget front, state Sen. James Meeks, who is considering a run for governor as an independent, joined officials with the union representing thousands of state employees to urge leaders to spend $50 million for 2,000 front-line workers who provide key state services, such as prison guards and child abuse investigators.

This raises an interesting point however, if you are a religious conservative. Isn't this in some ways a better way for the state to spend money than on a lot of other things? That is government looking out for orphans and prisoners. Two groups often mentioned in the New Testament not as entities to ignore or place scorn upon but to help and love.

So can you be a social conservative and not a fiscal conservative and still appeal to religious voters?

OneMan

The state sent some press releases about shuting down some Short-Term lenders. It turns out there may be a bit more to the story. I don't want to venture too far into the land of fair use so I suggest you follow the link.

The only conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor in World War II was buried at a national cemetery Monday

Desmond T. Doss Sr. recvied the Medal of Honor for his work as a medic during a battle on Okinawa you can read the citation here and the Washington Post's Obituary here.

Sneed has a bit about Oberweis' running for Kane County GOP chairman. She in fact makes it sound like he is going to do it. She also mentions Denny Wiggins in the bit. So Denny now becomes only the second person who would know me by name to appear in Sneed.

Should be an interesting county convention. If Oberweis is planning to run I figure I should get a letter or something (since I do have some votes at the convention), if I do I will let you all know.

OneMan

Andy Shaw reports that Rev Meeks had a meeting with 79 African-American Minister and that some ministers are concerned that Rev. meeks will split the Democratic vote. It has however this telling quote

Some of the Chicago area's most prominent African American ministers agree with Reverend and State Senator James Meeks that the Democratic Party's taken the black vote for granted much too long and shortchanged their community when it comes to key issues like education.

I have to give Rev. Meeks credit for sitting down with his peers for a couple of hours to talk about this

On the whole tuition credit thing. First this disclaimer ( I teach part time for a private for profit university also my grades as an undergrad were not good enough to qualify under the governors plan)

The B average requirement. Yes OneMan would not have qualified for this until grad school but is this really good public policy. First not everyone can really pull a B especially in a difficult major, do we want to leave out students who try to study something harder who might not do as well? I may end up with a C or D in calculus, perhaps I shouldn't take it since it will hurt my GPA. The rigor of someone's course of study should not be influences by their ability to keep a state tax break. Will this lead to further grade inflation as schools want to make sure students can get their tax credit?

That is has no means test. Yes I understand that this makes it more politically acceptable, but really should a family making 40K get the same tax credit on this as one making 120K a year? Seems to me that you could take the same pot of money, means test it and use it to really help students who need it or even take it and give it to state colleges and junior colleges.

OneMan