Update 01SEP06: Your Chicago Reader has more details on this free -- FREE -- Great Performers of Illinois series taking place from Wednesday through Saturday.WILLIAMS: We always talk about what you're reading. As you know, there was a report that you just read the works of a French philosopher. (Bush laughs)If only my buddies had thought to distract Mrs. Winter with "I also read three Shakespeares."BUSH: The Stranger.
WILLIAMS: Tell us the back story of Camus.
BUSH: The back story of the the book?
WILLIAMS: What led you to...
BUSH: I was in Crawford and I said I was looking for a book to read and Laura said you oughtta try Camus, I also read three Shakespeares.
WILLIAMS: This is a change...
BUSH: Not really. Wait a minute.
WILLIAMS: A few months ago you were reading the life story of Joe DiMaggio by Richard Ben Cramer.
BUSH: Which was a good book.
WILLIAMS: You've been on a Teddy Roosevelt reading kick.
BUSH: Well, I'm reading about the battle of New Orleans right now. I’ve got an eclectic reading list.
WILLIAMS: And now Camus?
BUSH: Well, that was a couple of books ago. Let me look. The key for me is to keep expectations low.
Read this article in which the corrupt governing party attempts to portray Sen. Barack Obama as too inexperienced and as a tool of the opposition party. 
From the Comics Reporter:Jack Kirby, the sublimely talented comics artist and industry great whose career spanned and frequently drove the first 50 years of the American comic book's existence, not to mention a creator of pop culture as significant as anyone who lived in the 20th Century, was born 89 years ago today.Forget Elvis. Jack is the King.
It's a sign of just how hot an issue pork-barrel spending has become that the biggest game in political Washington this summer is trying to smoke out the senator who is blocking a bill to create a searchable database of federal contracts and grants.In essence, the anonymous objection means that a senator has anonymously said that he or she would filibuster the bill if it were brought to a vote on the Senate the floor. If the Bush administration and Sen. Frist were behind Sen. Obama's bill like they say, they would simply bring the bill to the floor and call the mystery senator's filibuster bluff.The bill has the support of the Bush administration and activists on widely divergent sides of the political spectrum. It also passed a Senate committee without any objections, so the unknown senator is annoying many people.
Sponsored by Sens. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, and Barack Obama, Illinois Democrat, the bill would require the administration to create a searchable Web site that would list the name and amount of any federal grant, contract or other award of money amounting to $25,000 or more.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, tried to win speedy passage just before the Senate left for its summer break, but at least one senator objected anonymously.
Now Porkbusters.org, a Web site dedicated to exposing wasteful government spending, is conducting a public campaign to smoke out the obstructor or obstructors, while blogs on both sides of the political spectrum have weighed in, demanding action on the bill.
"County Spokeswoman Chinta Strausberg?"County officials say last year saw a unique slowdown in county hiring and that this year's hiring patterns compare better with earlier years.
"We do not see this as an unusual spike in hiring," said county spokeswoman Chinta Strausberg. "It is not a significant increase in hiring." ***
Strausberg said more than half of those hired were added to the payroll by elected officials other than Stroger -- tops among them Sheriff Michael Sheahan, who was ordered to add jail guards, and Clerk of the Circuit Court Dorothy Brown, who said she was severely understaffed.
Oh, so county spokeswoman Chinta Strausberg, the third highest paid person brought on to Cook County's payroll during its purported hiring freeze, does not see this as "an unusual spike in hiring."TOP SALARIES
Since the beginning of December, 1,647 full- and part-time employees were added to the Cook County payroll. Not including physicians at county hospitals, those hired with the highest salaries are:
Position Salary Bruce Washington Director, Capital Planning $133,424 Salvador Godinez Director, Corrections $124,429 Chinta Strausberg Director, Communications $109,233 Rupert Graham Jr. Assistant superintendent, Highway Dept. $108,228 Susan Kortokrax Chief legal counsel, Treasurer $101,831 Lucio Guerrero Director of Appraisals $99,901 Sheila Ahranjani Pharmacy supervisor $91,549 Rayeon Lampkin Director, Radiology/Imaging $88,350 Julie Bracken Senior instructor, Oak Forest Hospital $86,596 Alexander Vroustouris Assistant state's attorney $86,413 Maria Moreno-Szafarczyk Assistant superintendent, Juvenile Center $85,428
Sadly, that also means you will probably out-bid me in the upcoming e-Bay auction to have your name and "approximate drawn likeness" in a Ware comic strip.Michael Corleone: My father is no different than any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or senator.Weller, who’s 49, and Sosa, who’s 38, are married and just had their first child. Weller is up for reelection in November. Sosa is still a leading member of Guatemala’s single-house, 158-member congress, and until earlier this year she sat on its foreign affairs committee, the counterpart to Weller’s committee. She’s the second most powerful person in her party, the Guatemalan Republican Front, or FRG, which was founded in 1989 by her father and is still led by him. It’s been plagued by accusations of corruption, money laundering, and helping drug traffickers, though no one’s accused her personally of any of those things.
Frank Smyth, author of this week’s cover story, is a freelance lifer, living in a basement in Washington, D.C., with his dog when he’s not reporting the world’s wars for whoever wants his stories. In 1991 he stayed in Iraq after the gulf war ended and was captured in the north as he covered the Kurdish rebellion. Two traveling companions were executed; Smyth was taken to Abu Ghraib and spent 18 days behind bars listening to the screams of prisoners who were being tortured before he was released.Who's being naive?
Then he went to Guatemala, to investigate the 1990 murder of anthropologist Myrna Mack. She’d been studying the living conditions of the million Guatemalans uprooted in the 80s by their government’s “scorched earth” counterinsurgency campaign. The chief homicide investigator implicated undercover military units and was gunned down himself.
Last year Smyth was working on a story about Guatemalan drug trafficking and wondered why Congressman Jerry Weller, vice chairman of the House’s western hemisphere subcommittee, wouldn’t talk to him. It turned out that Weller rarely speaks publicly to anybody about Guatemala. His Guatemalan wife, Zury Rios Sosa, sits in the national legislature; her father, Efrain Rios Montt, still powerful, was the country’s president during the bloodiest months of the scorched-earth campaign.
Rather, "The Plan" -- like most products of the Democratic Leadership Council -- is not strategically sound.1 The DLC prides itself as a centrist Democratic organization. But by repeatedly surrendering every position left of center, "The Plan" inevitably puts Democrats at a strategic disadvantage.Emanuel proposes whacking the 1.4-million-word tax code with its myriad loopholes and replacing it with a system that would mean a one-page tax form for the average family. You might not, and many Republicans certainly won't, sign on to all the details of his plan but it's a good place to start the debateAnd that's just how it will go. The DLCers surrender everything left of center before debate even begins and then the Republicans negotiate further and further right.
If you aren't a comics dork, you don't care that Journalista: The Comics Journal Weblog is relaunching, after a two-year absence, tomorrow."Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will themselves not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die."After a less than flattering mini-biography of Rahm Emanuel -- e.g., "Some say Mr. Emanuel learned to act tough to pre-empt the jeers he might otherwise have attracted as a schoolboy ballet dancer in Chicago." -- The Economist blesses "The Plan" by Emanuel and Bruce Reed:-- Daniel Burnham
[T]he Plan itself is solid and mostly sensible.In other words: Although "The Plan" would be a big improvement over the current Republican fiasco, it contains no blood-stirring surprises for those familiar with the DLC's history of half-measures.Probably the main reason wages have not risen much in recent years is that health-insurance premiums, which many American employers shoulder, have soared. The Plan lists ways to curb them.
Doctors, rather than being paid for every test and injection they provide—an arrangement that inevitably leads to over-doctoring—should be paid by results. Patients should be given better incentives to stay healthy: insurers, for example, should push them to take free physical exams to spot ailments early. Better use of information technology could supposedly save $162 billion a year. If the system is made more efficient, Mr Emanuel thinks coverage can be extended to all American children.
But he concedes that a nation as individualistic as America will probably never accept a European-style national health service — and he should know, having worked on Hillary Clinton's doomed health project in the 1990s. He argues, however, that maybe, some day, every American might receive a voucher for basic health services from the insurer of his or her choice.
Mindful of the teachers' unions, he avoids the V-word when discussing education. But he has some sensible ideas. Subsidies for those who cannot afford to go to college are currently too complex; he would replace the five main schemes with a single $3,000-a-year tax credit. Teachers should be paid for performance, not just credentials. And schoolchildren should take shorter holidays. (The Democratic Leadership Council, a moderate Clintonian body, made the same proposal last month.)
Americans are not saving enough for retirement. *** Employees should automatically be enrolled in 401(K) pension schemes unless they object. The middle class should be exempt from capital-gains tax. And families with an income of less than $100,000 a year should surrender no more than 10% of it to the taxman.
Well, that sure ain't gonna slow Congressional spending.Republican congressional hopeful Peter Roskam, who’s always billed himself as a fiscal conservative, tried to walk a political tightrope Monday by embracing an oft-criticized budget tactic for securing federal funding for local projects. The 6th Congressional District GOP nominee said he’d support continuing the so-called practice of “earmarks” if elected to Congress[.]
Do we act like adults and return U.S. tax laws to the levels of the 90's -- when America suffered under the twin scurges of peace and prosperity -- or do we continue to borrow money and pass the Republican's record deficit down to this child and her children?You shouldn't have to sacrifice your family's future to pay for tax-cuts to the hyper-rich.
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An attack on one pseudonymous political blogger is an attack on every pseudonymous political blogger.
If you're in Springfield for the Fair, visit the Abraham Lincoln Museum -- and be sure to check out the exhibit recounting the time Honest Abe hid behind a crying baby.Gov. Rod Blagojevich lashed out at the Springfield press corps Friday, repeatedly calling them "sharks" while comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln.
The Chicago Democrat, making a rare appearance in the capital city to open the Illinois State Fair, defended his administration's handling of alleged corruption in state hiring.
But he would not take personal responsibility for the woes that have tainted his first term in office, instead blaming disgruntled state workers and the media for much of the problems he faces. ***
Rather, he said he's left the job of policing hiring to his inspector general's office and said that he would not take credit or blame for the hiring problems.
"Look, I'm modest. You want me to pat myself on the back? I'm not going to do that," he said.
Later, however, the governor compared himself to Lincoln during the Civil War, saying there have been "ups and downs" as he's attempted to reverse 26 years of Republican dominance in the governor's office.
"Not every military initiative from the Union Army was successful. It took awhile to kind of get that together and get it right. But the whole purpose of what they were trying to do was absolutely right, keeping the country together and then emancipating the slaves and providing freedom to millions and millions of people," Blagojevich said.
And that's just two Target stores. There is not yet word on how many tax-payer dollars the 40+ other Chicago big boxes have collected.Target has received $5.3 million in city funds to subsidize a store in McKinley Park and $4.6 million to subsidize a store on West Peterson Avenue, according to the Neighborhood Capital Budget Group. ***
Supporters of the ordinance claim big-box retailers are some of the nation's wealthiest corporations, can afford the wage hike and will be drawn to Chicago's huge market potential despite it.
The report is, in part, a response to Target Corp.'s claim that the minimum-wage ordinance makes the opening of new stores in Chicago cost-prohibitive.
Update: One local outcome of this race will be the Democratic Whip — you know him as Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin — receiving demands that Lieberman be removed from his party committee assignments if continues his run as an independent.
And folks can contact Sen. Durbin’s office here: http://tinyurl.com/m5pgp
Which is yet another reason America needs new management.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, 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. 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. But this would be difficult for an individual city or even state to do; it would require federal action.
