Oil began leaking from the 30-inch line Monday, moving from Talmadge Creek into the Kalamazoo River, which flows from near the city of Battle Creek into Lake Michigan. The pipeline normally carries 190,000 barrels of oil per day from Griffith, Indiana, to Sarnia, Ontario. The leak was stopped Tuesday.
Near Marshall Michigan. The Kalamazoo River enters Lake Michigan at Saugatuck.
We haven't really talked much about the summer psycho-drama that was the Rod Blagojevich trial. Which seems appropriate, since it failed to live up to the blockbuster status that Illinois Republicans hoped for. After all, linking Blagojevich with Democratic candidates was the linchpin in their campaign strategy.
Regardless, how long do you think the jury will take? Predict a verdict and tell us what you think in comments.
A coalition of anti-war organizations, officials, and candidates are trying to draw attention to two votes likely to occur today in Congress. One is on yet another "supplemental" appropriation for war, this time $$33 billion for Afghanistan. The other is H. Con. Res. 301, which calls for the U.S. to militarily get out of Pakistan.
I wrote over a year ago on the unending increase in war spending and a better plan for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nothing since has dissuaded me from believing that our apparently-unlimited checkbook for war wouldn't be much better spent here in the U.S. How can we possibly tolerate the fiscal crises of American states and cities, the breakdown and shutdown of needed services, the layoff of critical employees, while pouring billions upon billions into the sand and rock of Central Asia? The outing of Pakistan intelligence's relationship with the Taliban, the wikileaks, and the revelations that billions in oil money has simply disappeared only reinforce that the combined war effort, besides being a drag on the economy, is insane entanglement in the stickiest of webs.
Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul are spearheading the 301 resolution, which, among the Illinois Democratic delegation and would-be Democratic delegation, has at this posting drawn only the support of David Gill.
It's increasingly difficult to reconcile any Democratic claim of commitment to progressive principles with continued support for costly, unsustainable war that prevents real domestic progress. In an election year, these are uphill votes, but this is opportunity for progressives to let their representatives know where their district is at.
Supports a REAL national health plan (IMPROVED MEDICARE FOR ALL), delivered by single payer.
Supports withdrawal from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan NOW.
Supports labor and reinvigorating the union movement.
Supports public funding for federal campaigns.
Is pro-choice.
Supports real immigration reform that does not criminalize the 12 million immigrants living here now, including a humane pathway to citizenship and working with the international community to boost the economies of these immigrants' home countries to give them more incentive to stay home -- rewriting NAFTA and CAFTA would be a good place to begin in this effort.
Lake Effect News, the local news page for the Northside Lakefront, run by the former editor for several Lerner newspapers on the same beat, Lorraine Swanson, writes a story on the latest D2 (campaign finance) filings for several Chicago Aldermanic campaigns starting from the 46th Ward and heading north and west.
A taste:
(Berny) Stone, the Chicago City Council's oldest alderman, showed $8,033 in campaign cash as of July 1. During the same reporting cycle in 2006, available cash in Stone's campaign fund was double that amount at $16,499.
Contributions to the Bernard L. Stone Campaign Committee during the 2007 election cycle surged to $309,045, when Stone won a contentious runoff. In 2008, Stone lost the coveted democratic ward committeeman post to State Sen. Ira Silverstein (8th District).
Silverstein has said that he is mulling a run for the ward alderman in 2011. Silverstein reported $47,552.00 in available campaign funds on July 1.
In 1964, the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater, who appealed to activists, but was a weak general election candidate. In the long run, the Goldwater movement infused the GOP with energy that helped the party in later election cycles.
What if the Republicans approach the 2012 elections the way they approached the 1964 election? Instead of nominating a strong candidate for the general election the GOP goes with someone like Ron Paul, Michelle Bachmann or Sarah Palin.
What if Obama decided to be the VP nominee in 2012 and had his delegates nominate Hillary Rodham Clinton?
We are getting about 800 visits a week. It gets better after the summer and around elections.
Update: Last week of July 2007 1,700 visits - July 2008 1,300 visits - July 2009 1,200 visits
For some reason the week of June 23 we jumped from 800 visits a week to 1200. But I think the lack of posting is having a definite effect on the visit numbers. See comment below for more history.End update
We have $2,500 in the bank. We probably should give some of that away. Post suggestions in the comments.
I have to thank radio host Jim Leach for his facebook page. Thanks to his page I'm now aware that the Republican candidate for Secretary of State is an off-the-wall tea party, talk radio bot well outside the mainstream of Illinois politics. Jim posted a status update last week commending candidate Robert S. Enriquez for engaging voters on Facebook.
I think it's great when candidates personally post on their facebook page so I checked it out and replied with this comment on Jim Leach's page.
Interesting guy. In one post he's angry about the "marginalization of Hispanics" in Illinois politics. In another he calls the cultural traditions of Middle Eastern countries "obtuse and barbaric." I wonder if he'll ever see the hypocritical contradiction in those two statements.
That's when things got fun. Robert Enriquez responded!One of the first rules for political candidates engaging in online discussion is that you don't get into a back and forth with random strangers. All you need to do is make your position clear and state your case. Anything beyond two replies to a question almost always goes downhill. Someone should have told Robert.
Instead, he engaged in the trademark behavior of what passes for debate on right-wing talk radio. He misrepresented my argument to avoid responding, changed the subject by attacking his opponent, and descended into a rant of random gripes against Democrats. Wow!
Good Afternoon to the Prairie State Blue community!
Bill Brady has built a 17 year political career working against the interests of working women.
And if you're a woman or have a daughter, a mother, a sister, a wife, an aunt-- or even just a friend or a neighbor or a co-worker who is a woman-- then you have a very real reason to help us stop Bill Brady.
Please take a minute to visit our new website, StopBillBrady.com, and watch the new video, highlighting Bill Brady's opposition to working women, his opposition to Equal Pay, his opposition to paid family medical leave, his opposition to paid maternity leave, his opposition to life-saving mammogram screenings and his opposition to a woman's right to choose, even in the case of rape.
Proposition 13 (officially titled the People's Initiative to Limit Property Taxation) was an amendment of the Constitution of California enacted in 1978, by means of the initiative process.... In addition to lowering property taxes, the initiative also contained language requiring a two-thirds majority in both legislative houses for future increases in all state tax rates or amounts of revenue collected, including income tax rates. It also requires a two-thirds vote majority in local elections for local governments wishing to raise special taxes.
California is a state in crisis. Negotiations to resolve its $26.3 billion budget deficit are weeks behind deadline, more than $470 million worth of IOUs are clogging government ledgers and its state bonds are trading at near junk status.
It's not that the article doesn't include anything critical of Kirk; it does. However, it also includes unethical journalism and sentences that would mislead people who are not already familiar with the story. And the unethical and misleading stuff all cuts in Kirk's favor.
I wrote a letter to the editor of the Pantagraph (included below). Lenora Sobota, opinion editor of The Pantagraph sent me the following response:
You need to take up your concerns with the Associated Press.
For some reason I thought the Pantagraph would be concerned about AP peddling a flawed article. Silly me.
Facts don't matter. Indeed sometimes being shown that your factual beliefs are wrong simply causes you to believe even stronger.
A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare - the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct - but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic.
In my view, in Chicago and to a lesser extent Illinois, Jesse Jackson was for many years, our progressive leader. His child born to a woman not his wife ended his belief that he could be effective in that role. And besides by then he had moved on into the national stage.
Continuing, in my view, David Orr assumed at times and in bits and pieces, and more Chicago, the role of progressive leader.
The person that had for the most, best and longest time filled the role of progressive leader, since the untimely demise of Harold Washington, was Jesse Jackson Jr.
How do we get a leader? A truly natural leader will self select them-self and create an organization around themself. Jackson Jr. was moving in that direction. He has not attempted, as far as I can see, to continue that process since the Tribune and other conservative media declared him incapable of assuming that role. For whatever reasons he is granting the other side the power to choose our leaders.
I suppose that Pat Quinn could assume the mantel of progressive leader of Illinois and by extension Chicago. While some might be put off that he would be doing it in a top-down fashion, what counts will be who rallies around his leadership rather than the means of creating that leadership. At least as far as I'm concerned.
It would be nice if the progressives of Illinois and Chicago could get together and make a leader for us. I don't see that happening.
(One of the better stimulus ideas out there, IMHO - promoted by BobB)
It's been a while since we had to have a real heart-to-heart, the Obama Administration and I, and last time it was because Rahm Emanuel had been a bit snippy toward those of us who are carrying the water for this Administration.
We need to have another one of those conversations today; this time the circumstances are a lot more positive-in fact, if the Administration follows my suggestions here, we have a real chance to put the Democrats on the road to victory, not just this November, but also in 2012.
What I'm proposing will create hundreds of thousands, if not millions of jobs, and it will stimulate millions more as we create a national source of discount electrical power that can be used by business and consumers alike.
Here's the best part: it's no "pie in the sky" promotion I'm offering here; we've already done the same thing before, it's been working out well for almost three quarters of a century...and even better than all that...my idea first pays for itself, and then...it actually makes the Federal Government a profit, forever after.
Apparently random acts of kindness are too much for conservatives. Acts of simple humanity are unbearable to them. Such the only conclusion one can draw from Terry Savage's column in the Chicago Sun Times where she rushes to monetize acts of kindness.
He quotes Savage and comments on it better than I could. Go read.
He's really right. To "them" everything must have a price and as he says, ironically, usually the price doesn't cover the environmental damage anyway.
