Poltics trumps governing in State's stopgap budget

While mortified citizens called for more government oversight in light of the Burr Oak Cemetery Crime Scene, lawmakers in Springfield finally passed a stop-gap budget that allowed the State government to continue to (dis) function. Blago is gone, but one wonders when we will see the courage to govern.

Both the Illinois House and Senate passed bills that circumvent a revenue raising income tax hike by borrowing (obviously needed, but also obviously a perceived political death wish for lawmakers) $3.5 billion from state pensions and putting off billions more in unpaid bills to state vendors until next year.

The spending plan will also include significant cuts to state spending (at Gov. Quinn's discretion), including to third party social service providers. It's unclear exactly how large a cut they will see to their FY 2009 funding levels, but the Tribune publishes one estimate:

The Illinois Budget battle is a a case study of what is going on around the country. As Newsweek columnist Robert Samuelson writes:

"We face an unprecedented collision between Americans' desire for more government services and there almost unwillingness to be taxed."

www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/07/13/the_consequences_of_big_government.html

The National Health Care Debate is front-and-center in this debate, with several other twists I will blog later about later this week. Do we want more government services....even if we have to pay for them? The issue here for you as Illinois citizens is do you want your government to govern -- even if it means telling you tough news, like an income tax hike. Or do we elect them to play politics -- saying, not doing, what we want to hear.

By the way, what do you think about the Senate (roll call?) vote. Sen. Ricky Hendon calls the vote after Senate President John Cullerton's comments.

Inside Baseball: Senate Judiciary Confirmation Hearing's All-Star Gamesmanship

Inside Baseball -- The expression "inside baseball" is sometimes used as a metaphor for details or minutia of a subject so detailed that they generally are not well known by outsiders. An example may be a film critic's review of a movie using insider jargon, information, or understanding of which regular movie goers would have little knowledge. Citing the director's previous themes expressed in his/her movies in relation to the one being reviewed because of the director's fascination with X-school of film making, etc., would be considered an example of "inside baseball".

Another example could be seen when looking in on the coverage of the Senate Confirmation Hearings of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, nominated to be the next Supreme Court Justice. Judge Sotomayor would be just the third woman on the High Court, and first Latino -- or Latina. Coverage was dominated by the Judge's famous, or imfamous "Wise Latina," quote. Or her childhood. Little was talked about Constitutional interpretation. I guess that type of Inside Baseball Stuff is appropirate on the night of Major League Baseball's Mid-Summer Classic.

CBS 2 School gives this interesting take:

Busch Stadium in St. Louis will host the 80th Mid-Summer classic. The major league baseball All-Star game is one of the few of its kind that fans actually watch enthusiastically. At stake is home field advantage for this year’s World Series. More importantly baseball’s greats, as determined by the fans, will compete against each other in America’s game. There is no other game like it.

The first all-star game was played in old Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1933. Babe Ruth dazzled the 49,000 paid customers by hitting a home run in the 3rd to lead the American League to its first victory.

To date, the National League leads the series with 40 wins. The American League has won 37 and there have been 2 ties. The longest game occurred last year with the American League winning in 15 innings. The game took 4 hours and 50 minutes to play.

A total of 668 runs have been scored; the National League has scored 333 and the American League 335.

In 1945 the game was not played due to World War 2. Between 1959 and 1962 there were two all-star games played each year.

Derek Jeter leads all Mid-Summer classic players with a batting average of .475. Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Stan Musial each played in 24 games. Roger Clemens leads all pitchers with 10 appearances.

The All-Star game is one of our rites of summer. (Inside Baseball Stuff)

Yet there is another game this week with all-star proportions. This week the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to fill David Souter’s Supreme Court vacancy will be considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee. It is the closest thing our government has to an all-star game.

Confirmation hearings bring all three branches of government into play. Barack Obama, the chief executive nominates. The Senate, representing the legislative branch, confirms under the authority of its “advice and consent” power found in Article Two of the U.S. Constitution. The end result is a full court made up of 9 Supreme Court justices whose charge is to interpret our laws.

If confirmed, Sonia Sotomayor will be our 111th Supreme Court justice. If successful, she will be confirmed by the 111th Congress.

Throughout our history 30 nominations have failed; 8 withdrawn, 12 rejected, 4 postponed and 6 received no action.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, responsible for the first round of enquiry, is filled with a Who’s Who of today’s U.S. Senate. The only personality missing, and we will miss him, is Joe Biden who has opted for a higher calling.

Democrats fill 12 of the 19 seats. Short-tempered Patrick Leahy Chairs the Committee. This will be his first confirmation hearing to grandstand. It will be noteworthy to watch the recently-switched-to-Democrat Arlen Specter, one-time Republican Chair, sitting at the end of the table next to the Party’s most recent addition Al Franken.

Republicans will try to steal some of the attention at this mid-summer classic. This game is never dull. With 60 Democratic Senators able to block any filibuster attempt, the 111th Justice will be Sonia Sotomayor.

You can count on it.

The Politico's Glenn Thrush gives us this program, if you will, of what to watch during the confirmation hearings:

Sonia Sotomayor still speaks with her elderly mom, who’s retired in Florida, “every day.”

She’s a “doting” aunt to three of her brother’s children and an “attentive godmother to five more.”

And did you know she was a “fearless and effective prosecutor” and anti-child-pornography crusader widely credited “with saving baseball”?

These biographical gems come from the official, 200-plus-page White House playbook distributed to Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats tasked with defending President Barack Obama’s SCOTUS nominee during this week’s confirmation hearings.

We want to make it the boringest hearings ever,” said a senior Democratic Senate aide.

Republicans, for their part, concede they are too outnumbered in the Senate (60 Democrats to 40 Republicans) and the Judiciary Committee (12 to 7) to stop the nomination.

But they’ll try — and here are six things to watch as they do:

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/24864.html#ixzz0LGrdInim&C

We will learn about Judical Activism and Strict Constructionalism during the fall. But what about Judicial Empathy? More Senators stated, without questioning, a concern of a new emerging empathy standard. More Inside Baseball stuff.

“President Obama won the election, and I will respect that,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C). “But when he was here, he set in motion a standard that was more about running for president.”

At the Sotomayor hearing, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said, “Unfortunately, a very important person has decided it's time for a change, time for a new kind of judge, one who will apply a different standard of judging, including employment

of his or her empathy for one of the parties to the dispute. That person is President Obama. ... President Obama is simply outside the mainstream in his statements about how judges should decide cases.”

Of course, Republican worries about the “Obama standard” only go so far. It was also Graham who told Sotomayor, “Unless you have a complete meltdown, you’re going to get confirmed.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/24864.html#ixzz0LGsXLBVZ&C

Comparative Politics of Protest: China lacks Rule of Law 20 years after Tiananmen Square

Earlier this summer, before the heat was turned on the non-democratic Islamic Republic of Iran, the Chinese government kept tabs on ceremonies aimed at at recognizing the 20th anniversary the student-led Tiananmen Square of 1989.

What can the Chinese Case Study of protest tell us as we try to predict the future in Iran? And what does it tell us about the lack of Rule of Law in authoritarian -- even if supposedly democratically elected -- regimes?

Here are a couple of pieces of interest out of China. Can you draw comparisons to events in Iran?

From Newsweek's June 15 issue:

China's Ghost Writer

In designing the "bird's nest" Olympic stadium, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei helped create an architectural icon for China. Yet now he's living under police surveillance. His crime? Running a blog that lists the names of kids who died in poorly built schools in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In the crackdown ahead of last week's Tiananmen Square anniversary, China's censors deleted Ai's blog without explanation. "The state tried so hard to make [the victims] vanish," says Ai. He began his list in March, frustrated by government inaction. By May he'd gathered 5,010 names and enough publicity to prod the government to compile its own tally of the dead. But Ai says, "You cannot just give us numbers." Now the blog has been wiped from servers, and Ai could face arrest, though he says he's "ready" for that. And while Beijing may have squashed one digital irritant, with Internet use doubling annually, the virtual realm could prove too vast and fast for China to control.

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From the June 3, Huffington Post:

Tiananmen Square: Foreign Reporters Barred By China On Eve Of Anniversary

BEIJING — A massive police presense ringed China's iconic Tiananmen Square on Thursday, the 20th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy activists, as the government continued an overwhelming drive to muzzle dissent and block commemorations.

An exiled protest leader _ famous for publicly haranguing one of China's top leaders 20 years ago _ was also blocked from returning home to confront officials over what he called the "June 4 massacre."

Foreign journalists were barred from the vast square as uniformed and plainclothes police stood guard across the vast plaza that was the epicenter of the student-led movement that was crushed by the military on the night of June 3-4, 1989.

Security officials checking passports also blocked foreign TV camera operators and photographers from entering covering the raising of China's national flag, which happens at dawn every day. Plain clothes officers aggressively confronted journalists on the streets surrounding the square, cursing and threatening violence against them.

The heavy security moves come after government censors shut down social networking and image-sharing Web sites such as Twitter and Flickr, blacked out CNN when it airs stories on Tiananmen. Dissidents were confined to their homes or forced to leave Beijing, part of sweeping efforts to prevent online debate or organized commemorations of the anniversary.

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And from the June 22 New York Times:

Despite Law, Job Conditions Worsen in China

A year and a half after a landmark labor law took effect in China, experts say conditions have actually deteriorated in southern China’s export-oriented factories, which produce many of America’s less expensive retail goods.

With China’s exports reeling and unemployment rising because of the global slowdown, there is growing evidence that factories are ignoring or evading the new law, and that the government is reluctant to enforce it.

Government critics say authorities fear that a crackdown on violators could lead to mass layoffs and even social unrest...

But workers are fighting back. Earlier this month, the government said Chinese courts were trying to cope with a soaring number of labor disputes, apparently from workers emboldened by the promise of the new contract labor law...

The law requires that all employees have a written contract that complies with minimum wage and safety requirements. It also strengthens the monopoly state-run labor union and makes it more difficult for companies to use temporary workers or to dismiss employees.

Western companies that outsource to China say they have stepped up their monitoring of supplier factories to ensure they comply with the law. But they acknowledge that ensuring compliance is challenging in China...

China’s huge and complicated labor market has long thrived on cheap labor and lax regulation. In recent years, labor rights advocates say they have seen incremental gains for workers. But they say there are growing signs of labor abuse...

[F]actory owners say that labor law enforcement has been weak and selective for years, and changing the rules now could lead to chaos, drive up prices and force many factories out of business...
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When considering China, what conditions are necessary to claim that rule of law is the effective?
China has the law, but it doesn't appear to have rule of law. What's preventing the effective establishment of rule of law?

When considering Iran, what needs to happen to make it a democracy? Healthy democracies live on more than just elections. Iran is proving this point.

More than a week after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected in an apparent landslide, his opponents still continue to protest the election results even as police and security forces try to halt the public displays. More than a dozen protestors have been killed and journalists have been arrested.

All of this exemplifies the complexities of the word democracy.

Iran has called itself an Islamic democracy ever since its revolution in 1979. It gave voting rights to women and even (until recently) to 15-year-olds, and voters directly-elected its legislature and president.

More at CBS 2 School:

//pod08.prospero.com/n/blogs/blog.aspx?webtag=WBBM_school

Twitter Revolution or 'Sit Down and Shut Up?'

With all that is going on in Iran, especially being covered by blogs and social networks it's time to get the Political Warrior back up and running. Starting this summer and through the school year check this blog for current event posts related to the content of AP American Government and Politics and Comparative Government and Politics.

Here's my collection of various accounts of the world watching events in Iran following the declared re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12:

Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right blog, for which he made a name during last fall's US election, has posted a number of interesting items about the Iranian election.

"The Ayatollah's Flawed Logic"
"Iranian Leadership Split On Response"
"Karroubi's Unlucky 7's?"
"Unconvincing (to me) Use of Benford's Law to Demonstrate Election Fraud in Iran"
"Ahmadinejad's Rural Votes"
"If He Did It"
"Recount in Iran?"
"Polling Predicted Intimidation -- and Not Necessarily Ahmadinejad's Victory"
"Iran Does Have Some Fishy Numbers"
"Iranian Election Results by Province"
"Statistical Report Purporting to Show Rigged Iranian Election Is Flawed"
"Polling and Voting in Iran's Friday Election"

The Ayatollah's Flawed Logic

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8108938.stm

As reported by the BBC:

Responding to allegations of electoral fraud, the ayatollah insisted the Islamic Republic would not cheat.

"There is 11 million votes difference," the ayatollah said. "How one can rig 11 million votes?"

This particular argument is not unique to the Ayatollah. It has also been used by some Western observers such as Flynt Leverett (emphasis mine):

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Still many people, including in Washington, have expressed skepticism as to the validity of the results.

Leverett: I am a little surprised by the margin, too. But that makes me more comfortable about the overall validity of the election. Look at the irregularities Mousavi is citing now: that they ran out of ballot paper in some polling precincts, that they did not keep some polls open long enough. There is no way such things could change the overall outcome which is clearly in favor of Ahmadinejad. If you compare this to the flaws of the presidential election in Florida in 2000, it seems very insignificant.

Leverett and Ayatollah are arguing from an ironically Western conception of how to rig an election. In the United States, it is actually rather difficult to steal an election: because of our federalist system, elections are monitored and voting totals are reported by hundreds or thousands of individual officials at the state, county, and precinct levels. There is therefore a rather substantial marginal cost to stealing additional votes: you have to recruit some number of additional people into the conspiracy, and hope they don't rat you out or leave some kind of paper trail that makes obvious your intention. It is probably not that difficult to find a few corrupt (but competent) stooges who will help you out, but for each additional vote that you want to steal, you have to go lower down the food pyramid, soliciting the help of people who are less loyal and might undermine your plan.
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Do you Twitter? If you do U may be a better international news correspondent than those working for ABC or the BBC.

From the Brookings Institute:

When Parisians stormed the Bastille in 1789, political communications centered primarily on newspapers and face-to-face conversations. News-gathering was localized, and it took weeks for political developments to spread around the world.

Now, political protest has shifted to the Internet. The role of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter in recent Iranian street demonstrations shows the power of digital technologies. Because of their decentralized nature, these tools empower grass-roots activists and help them bypass government authorities.

www.brookings.edu/opinions/2009/0622_technology_west.aspx

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If you are a Tweet, here's where you can follow events in Iran:

Follow Iran Demonstrations on Twitter

This is a teaching tool, as if you follow this now, you'll be ahead of the AP game come next Spring. At the same time, if the old chart of Iranian government is no longer legitimate to the Iranian people, we may be watching much more than a curricular change:

This comes in an unsigned analysis from Al Jazeera.

Get out your Iranian government organization chart (or look at the one from the BBC) and find where the men discussed here are positioned. I think that will help explain much about how the political system in Iran is working right now.

Supreme leader under pressure

Iranians have taken to the streets in the wake of the country's disputed elections, but behind the public face of the election protests lies a deeper power struggle.

In the corridors of power, analysts see a battle between Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the reformist former president.

Khamenei had publicly endorsed Mahmoud Ahmadeinejad, the incumbent president, whose resounding election victory over Mir Hossein Mousavi, his main rival, prompted a wave of protests and allegations of voter fraud.

Rafsanjani, on the other hand, has been a vocal critic of the president.

One of Iran's richest men, Rafsanjani, like Mousavi, is also one of the old guard of the 1979 Iranian revolution.

"It [the election dispute] represents the conflict between two schools of thought in Iran," Mahjoob Zweiri, a professor in Middle East politics at the University of Jordan, told Al Jazeera.

"The first one, which is represented by the supreme leader, says Iran should stay a revolutionary state, and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani wants the state to move on - to become a modern state, a pragmatic state..."

The supreme leader's decision-making powers are said to be absolute, but Iran's Assembly of Experts also wield considerable political clout.

Rafsanjani is chairman of the 86-member body, which appoints the supreme leader and monitors his performance.

It seems unlikely that Rafsanjani would move to oust Khamenei, but the assembly could - in theory, at least - remove the supreme leader from office, if his actions are deemed un-Islamic or if he is unable to carry out his sworn duties...

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Finally, throughout history it seems as through there is always a symbol of a rebellion. Twenty-years ago it was Tank Boy in Tiannamen Square (we'll blog about how the Chinese government dealt with dissent earlier this summer, later this week), now it is Neda, a young woman who was brutally killed....seen by the world on YouTube. Twenty-years ago, Tank Boy lived but hundreds of others died in China. But back to the brutality on Tehran streets.

You are warned that the video at the bottom of the link is graphic:

Her name is Neda, which means "voice" in Farsi, and her death has become the central rallying cry of the Iranian rebellion.

The fresh-faced teenage girl killed by what appears to be a single sniper shot on the streets of Tehran Saturday is now a potent symbol for Iran's pro-democracy protesters.

Her shocking and quick death in the arms of her howling father was captured on closeup video, posted to Facebook and came to life on computer screens across the globe.

"RIP Neda, the world cries seeing your last breath," was one of a flood of messages on Twitter.

"They killed Neda, but not her voice," read another. "Neda is everyone's sister, everyone's daughter, everyone's voice for freedom," said a third.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/06/21/2009-06-21_neda_young_girl_killed_in_iran.html#ixzz0JJMnYALb&D

www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/06/21/2009-06-21_neda_young_girl_killed_in_iran.html

Post here your thoughts on what will the end game for Iran protesters will be. Also, do you Twitter? What do you think of social network sites serving as news reporting agents? Welcome or Welcome Back to the Political Warrior.



But this is simply not the case in Iran. All votes are counted are reported by the Interior Ministry. There is no other source of information. There are no election monitors. Nor does the fraud alleged involve any sort of physical process (e.g. stuffing ballot boxes). It is simply a matter of changing numbers on a spreadsheet. Under these conditions, it is essentially no more difficult to steal a thousand votes than one, a million than a thousand, or 11 million than one million.

The only constraints, rather, are perceptual: certain vote totals might be more or less likely to trigger protests and unrest. It is probably easy to identify those voting margins that are most likely to trigger unrest: one would be to claim to have won the election (or secured enough votes to avoid a run-off) by exactly one vote; the other would be to claim to have won the election with 100 percent of the vote. In the former case, you would almost certainly wind up being subject to a recount, and any one report of irregularities could undermine your claim. In the latter, your claim would a laughable on its face, and every single Iranian who had voted against you would know that his vote had been stolen and would take to the streets.

It is less clear the margin of victory that minimizes the risk of unrest. But one can posit a curve that looks something like this:



I'd imagine there's a fairly broad sweet spot somewhere between about 55 percent of the vote and 75. Totals below 55 percent might trigger piecemeal scrutiny of irregularities and/or otherwise embolden your opponents, either of which could ultimately cost you the "victory". A claim to having won more than 75 percent of the vote would stretch credibility in an ethnically diverse country where there is clearly a lot of political disagreement; you'd have gotten too greedy. Ahmadinejad's claim to have won 63 percent of the vote falls somewhere in this sweet spot. That doesn't mean he stole the election -- but it also doesn't mean that he didn't.

AP Review Simulcast here

From 9-11 pm the "Cram For the Exam" Review Show will be heard on 560 AM WIND. I'll be listening and simulcasting questions. Some other students are are already posting answers and questions that you can join at CBS 2 School, or follow along here with me in the comments section.

Listen to the live stream at http://560wind.townhall.com/ by clicking the "Listen Live" link. They can call 312-642-5600 with questions on the evening of May 3rd.



http://560wind.townhall.com/

Comparative Rules of the Road

The AP exam for Comparative Government and Politics

Monday afternoon, 4 May 2009

The exam begins with a 45-minute session for reading and answering 55 multiple-choice questions. (Remember, choose the best answer from among the 5 choices offered.) This is same format (just 5 less Qs) as the US Test .

The second session is 100 minutes long. During that time, you will write answers to 8 "Free Response Questions." (As oppossed to 4 FRQs in US)

• Five definitions and descriptions in the "Short-Answer Concepts" section


• One "Conceptual Analysis" question (which will ask about one of the course's "big ideas")


• Two "Country Context" questions, which are most likely to require comparisons

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Follow these test mechanics to avoid the rough road that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his Labour Party suffered this week in the local (devolved) elections that took place on Thursday.



The Economist reports:

LOCAL elections in England and Wales, such as those that took place on May 1st (2008), are generally such complicated affairs, with contradictory trends visible in different parts of the country, that they manage to offer both solace and chagrin to all the main political parties. Not this time. The Labour Party, and its leader, Gordon Brown, have been comprehensibly humbled. The prime minister's day grew even worse when it became clear that Labour had lost its biggest prize: the mayoralty of London.


Results from the 159 local authorities that held elections (local polls are staggered so that not everyone votes at the same time) show that Labour scored its worst performance in local elections for 40 years. Labour polled just 24% of the total, a full 20 points behind the opposition Conservatives and a point behind the Liberal Democrats. It did badly even in some regions where it has traditionally been invulnerable, such as industrial bits of Wales, losing more council seats than even the most pessimistic predictions envisaged. The Conservatives, meanwhile, made some symbolic gains in hitherto hostile territory in the north of England. David Cameron, the Tory leader, described the result as “a big moment”. A “bad” and “disappointing” night, said Mr Brown.

http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11294983
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Last July, when he had more uplifting words, Brown gave a speech on civil liberties in the UK which helps to answer Ken Wedding's Q #45:

Since Madison, Americans have attributed the preservation of their liberties in large part to the separation of powers in the U.S. regime. What has preserved the liberties of British citizens in a system that lacks separation of powers?

Take your own shots at answering the sample FRQs, but for this one, I'll take a shot:

Mr. Wolak said:

With a system of government based on Common Law, British gradualism has grown to expand civil liberties of its citizens through laws like the UK's National Human Rights Act and its membership in the EU's Convention on Human Rights. All British law must be read against these instruments which preserve the liberties of citizens.

British PM Gordon Brown spoke (in a happier moment) about the British history of protecting citizen rights.

"From the starting point at the time of the Magna Carta, to the Civil Wars and the revolutions of the 17th Century, through the liberalism of Victorian Britain and the widening and deepening of democracy and fundamental rights throughout the last century, there has been a British tradition if liberty -- what one writer has called Britain's 'Gift to the World'."

Common Law tradition, national acts, modern EU membership and a history as the world's longest-lasting democracy have preserved civil liberties in the UK, despite the lack of a written constitution with a separation of powers.

Good Morning....Simulcasting C-Span Review

On C-SPAN right now, 8 AM, my friends Andy Conneen and his buddy Dan Larsen are talking about your high-stakes test. I'm lisenting in and will drop knowledge here: