McHenry County Blog

The irony in this part of his interview with Governor Pat Quinn is that Neil Steinberg and maybe even the Governor do not know the pension problem is directly attributable to stealing money allocted to pensions in years past to increase State Aid to Education.

Neil Steinberg adds to the pressure to address the public pension mess Monday morning in a column featuring an interview with Illinois Governor Pat Quinn.

There is one part that I found interesting, accurate as far as it goes, but missing the main point.

“The folks who put us in this mess are from both parties,” Quinn said.

He’s got that right.

“Every governor and every session of the legislature, the choice at the end of the year came down to: ‘Do we pay this pensions thing or spend a little bit more money on other things?”

Correct again.

“They always picked now over requiring pension payments. So it got worse and worse.”

The Governor again speaks truth.

But not the whole truth.

Each year I remember the Governor’s budget would allocate so much for education.

It would be broken down into State Aid to Education, university subsidies and pension payments for those employed in higher and lower education.

Each year, the teachers unions–I’m talking the Illinois Education Association and the Illinois Federation of Teachers–would come in and argue that the pension money would be better spent “NOW,” to put it in the Governor’s word, on State Aid to Education.

Tomorrow would take care of itself was the implicit message.

Since those still employed as teachers or professors or support personnel were so much more influential than the retired folks, the money was allocated by General Assembly after General Assembly for current expenditures, rather than future pension payments.

Hard to criticize the political sense of the judgment at the time, because most of the representatives and senators voting for the budgets wouldn’t be around to pay the piper, so to speak.

But doing so had more than political advantages for incumbent legislators running for re-election.

Sending extra money to local schools had the unintended effect of increasing the pension burden on state taxpayers.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, higher teacher salaries meant higher teacher pensions.

Having said pointed that out, I remember thinking time and time again that I might be around to have to figure out how to pay for extravagant programs.

That was before I voted, “No.”

Maybe someone can find someone who voted against more budgets than I over the 16 years I served in the General Assembly, but I doubt it.

At this point, it would be appropriate to remind readers that I receive a legislative pension, but one that was not hopped up by having a post-GA job at a higher salary than I received as a state representative. Because of the 3% annual so-called “cost of living” increase–which is a flat rate not based on inflation–my pension is substantially higher than my final salary in the Illinois House of Representatives in 2000.

I remember voting for only two pension bills. One was in the second year of my first term that affected the General Assembly pension system. I remember asking the legendary C.L. McCormick from Vienna what it was all about. He told me not to worry about it and I voted in favor.

That was the favorable last pension vote I remember until a McHenry County Judge called me in the 1990′s about supporting a bill that would put his bifurcated judicial service on an equal footing with those who had only served as a judge. He had been an Associate Judge after serving as Assistant State’s Attorney, gone into private practice and returned to the bench to finish his career.

Two Chicago Sun-Times reporters called newly appointed United States Roland Burris a “liar” yesterday.

The angriest was Mark Brown.

“The problem is that if he couldn’t tell the whole truth previously, why should anyone believe he’s telling the truth now.

“I don’t,” Brown wrote.

The second was Neil Steinberg.

“Roland Burris lied on his job application. He lied, under oath, about Rod Blagojevich hitting him up for money before he was tapped to fill Barack Obama’s seat,” Steinberg said in his column.

“Any middle manager caught doing the same would be out on his ear.”

Two Chicago Sun-Times reporters called newly appointed United States Roland Burris a “liar” yesterday.

The angriest was Mark Brown.

“The problem is that if he couldn’t tell the whole truth previously, why should anyone believe he’s telling the truth now.

“I don’t,” Brown wrote.

The second was Neil Steinberg.

“Roland Burris lied on his job application. He lied, under oath, about Rod Blagojevich hitting him up for money before he was tapped to fill Barack Obama’s seat,” Steinberg said in his column.

“Any middle manager caught doing the same would be out on his ear.”

Maybe I’m missing something.

Maybe 18-year old Cary-Grove High School student Allen Lee is so important that his actions deserve to be foisted by the Chicago Tribune on the brains of readers all over the metropolitan area.

Again and again and again.

Allen Lee’s essay has been featured on the front page of the Chicago Tribune THREE days this past week.

Does that strike anyone but me as overkill?

Or is the Tribune’s attempt to attract a younger readership?

Not to be outdone, two Chicago Sun-Times columnists weighed in with ridicule Sunday.

Mark Brown might have discerned the motivation:

He’s got a 4.2 GPA and probably doesn’t think he’s going to get much benefit from these last few weeks of school. So, he got an assignment he didn’t lie, and he acted out.

Can you remember how irrelevant the last few weeks of high school were?

And were you going into the Marines or onto college?

Brown also hits on the racism angle (as does Neil Steinberg) that I touched on yesterday in “Walking Over Allen Lee“:

Unless somebody is holding back some important fact, this young man is getting a raw deal. He doesn’t belong in the criminal justice system. And the main reason he was treated this way is that people are on edge because another young Asian-American student killed 32 people two weeks earlier in Virginia. (emphasis added)

Brown is not kind to McHenry County State’s Attorney Lou Bianchi:

Maybe you are from the better safe than sorry school of thought.

If so, you have a champion in McHenry County State’s Attorney Louis Bianchi, who told me Friday,

“If all of us hadn’t acted, we would be subject to criticism for not acting. We’ll never know if we saved lives in this situation.”

Oh, that’s cute. Well, then, Lou, maybe you should try to figure it out, because if lieves were truly in danger, then you haven’t really saved anybody yet with your disorderly conduct charge, which only served to muddy up the reputation of an 18-year old who was back out on the street a few hours later.

Neil Steinberg lists six reasons for Allen Lee’s arrest:

1. Lee’s essay contained disturbing, violent images.
2. There was a massacre at Virginia Tech two weeks ago.
3. Lee is Asian, like the Virginia Tech gunman.
4. Lee’s teacher is inexperienced.
5. Her superiors suffer from the advanced form of stupidity particular to school district administrators.
6. Bumbling “where’s-the-bullet-Andy?” police work by the suburban cops.

Nothing more need be said. Lee, the supposed culprit, is actually the only one who has a valid excuse, bring 18 and green in judgment. The charges against him of course will be dropped, as soon as anyone with a brain gets involved.

Maybe I’m missing something.

Maybe 18-year old Cary-Grove High School student Allen Lee is so important that his actions deserve to be foisted by the Chicago Tribune on the brains of readers all over the metropolitan area.

Again and again and again.

Allen Lee’s essay has been featured on the front page of the Chicago Tribune THREE days this past week.

Does that strike anyone but me as overkill?

Or is the Tribune’s attempt to attract a younger readership?

Not to be outdone, two Chicago Sun-Times columnists weighed in with ridicule Sunday.

Mark Brown might have discerned the motivation:

He’s got a 4.2 GPA and probably doesn’t think he’s going to get much benefit from these last few weeks of school. So, he got an assignment he didn’t lie, and he acted out.

Can you remember how irrelevant the last few weeks of high school were?

And were you going into the Marines or onto college?

Brown also hits on the racism angle (as does Neil Steinberg) that I touched on yesterday in “Walking Over Allen Lee“:

Unless somebody is holding back some important fact, this young man is getting a raw deal. He doesn’t belong in the criminal justice system. And the main reason he was treated this way is that people are on edge because another young Asian-American student killed 32 people two weeks earlier in Virginia. (emphasis added)

Brown is not kind to McHenry County State’s Attorney Lou Bianchi:

Maybe you are from the better safe than sorry school of thought.

If so, you have a champion in McHenry County State’s Attorney Louis Bianchi, who told me Friday,

“If all of us hadn’t acted, we would be subject to criticism for not acting. We’ll never know if we saved lives in this situation.”

Oh, that’s cute. Well, then, Lou, maybe you should try to figure it out, because if lieves were truly in danger, then you haven’t really saved anybody yet with your disorderly conduct charge, which only served to muddy up the reputation of an 18-year old who was back out on the street a few hours later.

Neil Steinberg lists six reasons for Allen Lee’s arrest:

1. Lee’s essay contained disturbing, violent images.
2. There was a massacre at Virginia Tech two weeks ago.
3. Lee is Asian, like the Virginia Tech gunman.
4. Lee’s teacher is inexperienced.
5. Her superiors suffer from the advanced form of stupidity particular to school district administrators.
6. Bumbling “where’s-the-bullet-Andy?” police work by the suburban cops.

Nothing more need be said. Lee, the supposed culprit, is actually the only one who has a valid excuse, bring 18 and green in judgment. The charges against him of course will be dropped, as soon as anyone with a brain gets involved.

Articles two days in a row on a national issue. First gun control and now abortion.

That’s got to be a new record for McHenry County Blog.

Don’t worry, it won’t happen often.

It’s just when I compared the rantings by Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg with what the Tribune’s Steve Chapman had to say Sunday, the interpretations were so great that I thought them worth noting.

Steinberg spends less space in his piece.

Comparing what Congress did to try to keep Terri Schiavo from being slowly starved to death and killed by dehydration, Steinberg says the Supreme Court has “popped up between the legs of the women of America and waved away any doctors who might want to perform certain late term abortions” which he says are “rare,” but “grisly.”

“…right-to-Lifers..(ha)ve lost trying to convince America to ban abortion, so instead they are nibbling away at the edges, on issues that give most decent folk pause, such as this procedure.”

I would not that such an incremental approach in the 1800’s was the way abortion was banned.

Chapman notes the problem that the decision presents abortion advocates:

It’s that it treats the fetus as more than a disposable inconvenience—as a living entity entitled to a measure of respect and protection. One you take that step, there is no telling where it might lead.

And let me share Chapman’s part describing the procedure itself:

The court cited one nurse’s account of this procedure:

The doctor, she said, “delivered the baby’s body and arms—everything but the hear.”

At that point, she said,

”The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out…The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out.”

The striking fact about the debate here is not that some people are appalled and revolted by what is done in these instances, but that some people are not. They don’t flinch from the violence visited on well-developer fetuses in the name of reproductive freedom. Any abortion, in their eyes, is a justifiable abortion.

Chapman then takes on the “health of the mother” bugaboo.

He hasn’t room to point out that the provision is not in Roe v. Wade, but in Doe v. Bolton, a companion decision handed down the same day. The exceptions for health is so broad that it includes, as the second, long ignored case states, not only physical risks,

“but all factors—physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age—relevant to )her) well-being.”

As Chapman points out,

”The exception cancels the rule.”

To abortion rights groups like Personal PAC, the group whose candidate Rosemary Kurtz took me out of the Illinois House, as Chapman says without citing any specific group,

”any limit on ‘the right to choose’ is intolerable…”

…even if it is barbaric.

Articles two days in a row on a national issue. First gun control and now abortion.

That’s got to be a new record for McHenry County Blog.

Don’t worry, it won’t happen often.

It’s just when I compared the rantings by Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg with what the Tribune’s Steve Chapman had to say Sunday, the interpretations were so great that I thought them worth noting.

Steinberg spends less space in his piece.

Comparing what Congress did to try to keep Terri Schiavo from being slowly starved to death and killed by dehydration, Steinberg says the Supreme Court has “popped up between the legs of the women of America and waved away any doctors who might want to perform certain late term abortions” which he says are “rare,” but “grisly.”

“…right-to-Lifers..(ha)ve lost trying to convince America to ban abortion, so instead they are nibbling away at the edges, on issues that give most decent folk pause, such as this procedure.”

I would not that such an incremental approach in the 1800’s was the way abortion was banned.

Chapman notes the problem that the decision presents abortion advocates:

It’s that it treats the fetus as more than a disposable inconvenience—as a living entity entitled to a measure of respect and protection. One you take that step, there is no telling where it might lead.

And let me share Chapman’s part describing the procedure itself:

The court cited one nurse’s account of this procedure:

The doctor, she said, “delivered the baby’s body and arms—everything but the hear.”

At that point, she said,

”The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out…The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out.”

The striking fact about the debate here is not that some people are appalled and revolted by what is done in these instances, but that some people are not. They don’t flinch from the violence visited on well-developer fetuses in the name of reproductive freedom. Any abortion, in their eyes, is a justifiable abortion.

Chapman then takes on the “health of the mother” bugaboo.

He hasn’t room to point out that the provision is not in Roe v. Wade, but in Doe v. Bolton, a companion decision handed down the same day. The exceptions for health is so broad that it includes, as the second, long ignored case states, not only physical risks,

“but all factors—physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age—relevant to )her) well-being.”

As Chapman points out,

”The exception cancels the rule.”

To abortion rights groups like Personal PAC, the group whose candidate Rosemary Kurtz took me out of the Illinois House, as Chapman says without citing any specific group,

”any limit on ‘the right to choose’ is intolerable…”

…even if it is barbaric.