southtownstar.suntimes.com

Clarke: Independent agency needed to oversee Illinois’ youth prisons

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 02:18:11 -0500

Too often, it takes a crisis, and victims, to bring about change. In 2004, when policymakers were discussing the need to separate Illinois’ juvenile prisons from the adult-oriented state corrections department, a proposal was made to create an independent statewide group to ensure the safety of children in the prisons. The proposal was left behind in the final compromise creating the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice, whose mission recognizes that youths are different than adults and that emphasizes education and rehabilitation. An independent oversight body might have prevented the incidents revealed in the recent U.S. Justice Department report, which documented …

Reeder: Lazy legislators can’t bother to vote themselves

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:12:35 -0500

For the life of me, I’ll never understand why Illinois lawmakers are too lazy to push their own voting buttons. After all, that’s what we pay them to do — vote on our behalf. In 1988, when I first covered the General Assembly, a lawmaker proudly pulled a seven-foot-long piece of No. 9 wire from under his desk and showed me that he could not only vote for himself but also use his wire stick to press the voting buttons on the empty desks around him — without even getting up from his chair. The practice of legislators having others …

McGrath: Small but crucial moments in a father’s journey

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:06:07 -0500

I never saw much advantage in being a father. My old man had to work every day, even in the summer. And he spent much of his measly two weeks’ vacation yelling at me and my five brothers to clean our rooms and stop teasing our two sisters. Granted, he was free to smoke Salems and drink as much Budweiser as he wanted. And driving his Pontiac was the coolest thing a kid could imagine. But he could have done all that without the eight kids, who seemed to cause him nothing but grief, fatigue and poverty. Becoming a father …

Reeder: Time to stop paying for cable TV for Illinois inmates

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:22:02 -0500

Every time I visit a state prison in Illinois for a story, I’m filled with wonderment at what I see. It’s not the starkness of the steel bars, concrete walls and barbed wire or the men and women locked in their cells that catch my attention. It’s what they are doing — watching TV. And not just your standard television programs but cable television. And guess who is paying for it? Illinois taxpayers. I know lots of people too poor to afford cable TV. I know plenty of middle-class folks too frugal to buy it, too. In fact, for most …

Reeder: Mike Madigan and his marionettes

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 11:11:55 -0500

Twenty-five years ago, I covered my first session of the Illinois General Assembly. During the waning days of that session, the words most often heard were, “What will Mike Madigan do?” Back then, Democrat Phil Rock presided over the Senate as its president, and Big Jim Thompson was entrenched in the governor’s mansion. But it was Madigan (D-Chicago) who ran things as speaker of the House. No one in the know doubted that. Madigan is the consummate South Sider, a proud White Sox fan, a shrewd politician and a behind-the-scenes dealmaker. Back then, the White Sox were threatening to move …

McGrath: The cost of walking up the down staircase

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 02:16:45 -0500

It happens mostly to young teachers. Maybe more often to English teachers, whose classes are forums for a variety of communication. Say a student confides in an essay or an anonymous poem that he is attracted to his teacher. Or infatuated. Or in love. How does the teacher deal with the student crush? The question emerges because of a lawsuit recently by a student against Oakland University in Rochester, Mich. Joseph Corlett, a 57-year-old Sarasota, Fla., man enrolled in a creative writing class at the university, wants $2.2 million in damages after he was suspended for three semesters for writing …

Reeder: Little voice for common man in Springfield

Tue, 28 May 2013 11:02:12 -0500

Shortly before World War II, the famous artist Norman Rockwell painted an image depicting a working man standing to speak at a government meeting. Surrounded by men in suits, he stood there in a flannel shirt and a laborer’s jacket with an agenda stuck in its pocket. The message was clear. We are a nation where the freedom to petition one’s government isn’t limited to the privileged. Not so much in Springfield, where insiders eat ordinary folks for lunch. I’ve seen it time and time again while covering the General Assembly — an ordinary person comes to Springfield to speak …

Handy: Education funding reform essential in Illinois

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:28:34 -0500

A September 2012 study by the Center for American Progress reaffirmed what we had known for decades — tremendous funding inequity exists between high- and low-poverty school districts in Illinois. We have the second-most inequitable education funding system of any state, largely because of public education’s heavy reliance on the property tax in Illinois. General state aid (GSA) is the state’s main funding stream to school districts, progressively funneling about $4.3 billion in state money to school districts based on a district’s ability to raise local tax money and how many of its children live in poverty. GSA is the …

Shapiro: Main arguments against gun control lack logic

Sun, 19 May 2013 02:17:30 -0500

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. In 2008, a sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court held that this part of the Bill of Rights precluded a governmental ban on handguns, primarily because they were the most popular kind of “arms” that people were likely to “bear.” Legal challenges to other forms of gun control are not inconceivable, but at present gun control seems a question more of prudence than of constitutional policy. What …

Reeder: State government policies stymie jobs rebound

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:44:52 -0500

Illinois has the second-worst unemployment rate of any state. At 9.5 percent, it’s two percentage points higher than the national average of 7.5 percent. Two percentage points might not seem like much on paper, but that equates to 130,000 people. That’s more than the entire populations of Peoria, Springfield or Elgin. Think about it — that’s how many jobs Illinois would have to create just to be as bad as the rest of the nation. Only Nevada has a worse unemployment rate than Illinois. And Nevada’s problems lie almost exclusively with an economy dependent on one industry, gambling. But Illinois …

BGA: Iron fists needed to hold public funds

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 06:34:10 -0500

Rita Crundwell’s betrayal of the public trust was staggering. For years she served as Dixon’s comptroller. And for years, because she had almost sole control over town finances, she stole taxpayer money without detection. In fact, nobody noticed until, on one of her vacations, a fill-in aide stumbled across numbers that didn’t add up. When the missing funds were tallied, we gasped: Crundwell had embezzled roughly $53 million. The betrayal and the amount of money are shocking, but not the financial chicanery itself, because fiscal controls and oversight are weak throughout local government in Illinois. Case in point: Calumet City, …

McGrath: Mother’s Day (of reckoning) coming for senators

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 18:10:45 -0500

“This is just a new way of living,” Stephanie Decker told an ABC News reporter. “If the worst thing that ever happened is me losing my legs, I’m good.” The Marysville, Ind., mother traded her limbs for the lives of her two children. And if she had a chance to do it again, she would not hesitate, she said. As a tornado roared toward her small Indiana town a year ago, Decker gathered her two children beneath her body. Seconds later, the funnel cloud slammed into her house, which collapsed onto Decker, crushing her legs, which later had to be …

Reeder: He’s critical of Illinois because he loves it here

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 06:06:40 -0500

Every once in a while someone will ask, “Scott, why are you so critical of Illinois?” My response is simple — Because I love it here. This is the state where I was born and where I was raised. During my adult life, I’ve lived in five states, and the Land of Lincoln is hands down the best. Mind you, a state is more than an amalgamation of laws and policies. It is its people and towns and natural resources and its opportunity. Much the way spouses offer suggestions to one another, my criticism of our state is done out …

Varjavand: Immigrants should respect customs, culture of their new country

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 06:59:41 -0500

Why do we Muslims demand that Americans accommodate, even embrace, every odd thing we do under the umbrella of religion? We seem to have a predisposition to be obsessed with our religious rites so they have an almost pathological influence over us and others. Some Muslims in the U.S. seem to have only two things to worry about — halal meat (the meat of certain animals slaughtered in the way prescribed by Islamic decrees) and the veil, or hijab (the woman’s complete hair covering). While halal meat can be found in some ethnic food stores, the hijab is visible almost …

Caterina and Gonzalez: Resetting underwater mortgages

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 06:04:45 -0500

Business groups with an ax to grind against the Obama administration, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business, like to push the idea that “uncertainty” over government actions is the monkey on the economy’s back. As small-business owners who work in the housing sector, we don’t buy that analysis. The source of our continuing economic problems is not some vague cloud of “uncertainty.” It is, quite the opposite, the very real certainty that if we don’t do more, and soon, to hit the reset button for the housing sector, the economic recovery will …

Reeder: A guarantee that Illinois should not provide

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 06:26:21 -0500

Mix pension financing, constitutional law and politics and you’ll either have a recipe to cure insomnia — or the most important but under-discussed issue facing Illinois today. Illinois lawmakers are on the brink of making a mistake that could lock taxpayers in for hundreds of billions of dollars in new costs. It’s called a “pension guarantee.” Public-employee unions are lobbying hard for it so the state can be forced, by a lawsuit if necessary, to pay its full share of funding its five pension plans each year. In exchange for a small rise in employees’ retirement contributions, the unions want …