Mark Shelden's blog

Not sure if any other local communities have had enterprising folks start something like this, but there is now a website called  Rantoul Journal featuring various items about Rantoul.  It will be interesting to see how it goes.  The community events page alone makes it valuable.

In a small indicator that people still haven't gotten it, the Senate Elections committee passed the bill  sponsored by Mike Frerichs requiring early voting on campuses of public universities.  No link yet to the News-Gazette website

"I think if there were more money in the state treasury, I would love to help out.  But I don't think that's a sufficient reason to not do something that would improve voter turnout among young people," said Frerichs.  Just remarkable.  We're broke, but if it's a good idea by golly, I'll force someone else to foot the bill.

Frerichs then points to the Champaign County voters guide that as an example of a good thing that we were able to do in the past that I guess he points out wasn't necessary, but which helps turnout.

The problem with Frerichs's point is that it buttresses my argument.  We've not done a voter guide the last two elections precisely because we are broke.  We had to cut our budget.  The voter guide was an obvious place to save.  Of course, the voter guide went to every household in the County and was not isolated to just particular areas so it would be hardly analagous anyway.

SB 2925, sponsored by Mike Frerichs,  requires every county to set up early voting sites on college campuses.  For Champaign County that would mean setting up early voting at Parkland College and the University of Illinois.

It’s hard to find a justification for this law beyond purely partisan motivations.  Does anyone really believe that a student at the University of Illinois has a more difficult time getting to a polling place than a working mother or father who may work as far as an hour away from their polling place?  Is there a single student at the University of Illinois who has a difficult time getting to a polling place on election day? 

Those of you who have voted at our office prior to the election are aware that our early voting center requires 12 ballot boxes to be set up to cast votes as well .  To replicate those items at at an early voting center is going to cost $75,000 alone.  Staffing and the technical issues of getting our voter registration information to the two sites will drive costs up even higher.

This question has come up in the past.  No doubt, a number of voters, be they on campus, in southwest Champaign, Mahomet, Rantoul, or Homer would like to see expanded opportunities to cast early voting ballots closer to their homes.  I’ve told everyone the same thing.  If those opportunities are expanded in one area, then in fairness they must be expanded to other areas.

With up front costs nearing $100,000 to implement and ongoing costs of $20,000 to $40,000 this bill flies in the face of the fiscal problems of the State of Illinois and Champaign County.  Ironically, state reimbursements for election judges and early voting judges have been reduced already.

Hopefully, this bill, which has already moved out of the Senate Assignments Committee, will be killed by Senators who can recognize it for its unfairness to the vast majority of  voters and its outrageous fiscal impact.

If you were one of the people who believed Steve Beckett when he claimed that the County did nothing wrong and had no culpability regarding mold at the nursing home, you'll be shocked at the settlement of the case.  Anyone who looked at this case objectively won't be.

The County won an award from Otto Baum in the amount of $400,000, which amounts to $150,000 when their retainer is taken into account.  The actual costs for the mold remediation were $1.5 million.  The legal costs for the mold remediation I believe will amount to more than $500,000.  With the PKD settlement, we have recovered no more than our legal costs, and I'm guessing even less.  Of course, the opportunity costs for the money aren't calculated in any of those figures.

The arbitration judgement points out numerous problems with the actions of the county and PKD.  A still unresolved mystery is how PKD was able to settle their side of this debacle so easily and quickly in January 2007.

The judgement is attached below.  I'll do a more full blown examination at a later time.  But it exposes a number of misstatements, myths, and fabrications. 

This settlement has been five years in coming.  It could have happened much sooner and at less cost.  Unfortunately, for the County, it was worth dropping a  half million dollars in legal fees to perpetuate the lie that they did nothing wrong.  The County screwed up.  Badly.  And taxpayers are paying the bill.

By last I mean in the classic Lombardi definition of anything except first place.  Witness Art Turner.  During my relatively short time working in Springfield, I never heard anyone say a bad word about Turner.  He waited his time as others picked off the plum high paying jobs like Cook County Recorder or Chicago City Clerk. 

Then his chance came.  He jumped into a crowded field for Lieutenant Governor.  Even with his nemesis Ricky Hendon in the race, Turner's chances looked pretty good.  Then, a multimillionaire swoops in with lots of cash to edge him out.  Certainly, without Cohen in this race, Turner wins handily.

If you're like me, you'd think that Turner would be the easy pick by the Democratic establishment.  But apparently, you and I would be wrong.  At this time Democratic leaders are looking for a way to get Turner out of the way and find someone else for the ticket that helps their electoral chances.

It would certainly be making lemonade out of lemons for the Dems.  Quite frankly, both parties would probably like the chance to pick their LG candidate after their Gov nominee is selected for the various issues of balance.  So the Democrats are getting what either political party would like.

Which begs the question as to whether the smartest man in Springfield, Mike Madigan, saw this coming.   There is nothing that Madigan cherishes more than his majority in the House.  Over the years we've seen him make seemingly odd political decisions that in retrospect look smarter when considering his House electoral chances.

When Madigan pulled out the stops for Glenn Poshard it raised eyebrows.  But it's not unlikely that the moderate Poshard's presence on the ticket helped some of his downstate target candidates who didn't have to campaign with Carol Mosely Braun as their standard bearer.

In 2002 he backed the little known Mike Kelleher for Lieutenant Governor, undoubtedly looking for a way to give some downstate balance to his Chicago heavy statewide ticket.

Now it's 2010 and perhaps Madigan has another balancing act up his sleeve.  Whatever the pick is, if it's not Art Turner people should be left to wonder whether Madigan didn't sit on the Cohen revelations before the election knowing that he could turn those revelations to his advantage after the election.

I met Adam Andrzejewski at the Champaign County Republican Lincoln Day Dinner last year.  He was a nice guy, but I never thought he had much of a chance in his race for Governor.  He ran relatively quietly under the radar for most of the election, polling generally in low single digits.

Then, he did something rather brilliant.  He convinced a number of non-Illinois conservative leaders that he was THE tea party candidate for Illinois and created a little bit of a national boomlet.  Red State, Gateway, Instapundit, and Geraghty all touted Adam as the Tea Party candidate. It culminated the day before the election when Rush Limbaugh called him the next Scott Brown. 

Andrzejewski was certainly A tea party candidate, but the suggestion that somehow he was THE ONLY one with a grip on those people who would associate themselves with the tea party movement was ill informed.  And no one should take his 14% total as reflecting the state of the tea party movement in Illinois.  In declining degrees, I'd say that Proft, Brady, and McKenna could all comfortably wrap themselves around the less taxes, less spending, less regulation efforts of tea party activists.

It's interesting that Limbaugh would call the never-elected Andrzejewski the next Scott Brown.  Brown held three different elected positions.  Chris Christie served as US District Attorney.  Bob McDonnell served as AG in Virginia as well as a number of other positions.

I think it will take a lot more than some nifty reform slogans for candidates to sway Republican primary voters.  At least some degree of public service will still carry signficant weight, and will probably always be required.

At the same time, Andrzejewski's national momentum strategy was brilliant and was executed to perfection. 

Andrzejewski represents a lot of what is encouraging about the future of the Republican Party.  I hope he remains involved.

Please let me know your thoughts on election day.

Just as a reminder, Obama received contributions from these corporations in his last State Senate run.

Anheuser Busch Companies     
RGMA Inc    
UDV North America INC    
URS Corp    
Walgreens    
Ariel Capital Management    
AstraZeneca    
Attorneys' Title Guaranty Fund Inc.    
Bank of America    
Central Illinois Light Company    
Coca-Cola Bottling Co    
CSX Transportation    
Household International Inc.    
Motorola    
Safeway Inc.

And his credibility on campaign finance is limited in my eyes after he broke his promise on public financing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIEiQbQAx4g

And don't take this post as any indication of my opinion on the Citizens United decision.

Something has to change.  That would be my response to IP's questioning of the NG endorsement.  Two facts are evident right now in Illinois.  First, we are spending far beyond our means.  Second, we have an economic climate that is dismal, and is sending jobs (and revenues) out of state.

The two answers to these problems are to reduce spending or to raise taxes.  Not surprisingly, the Democrats are generally united behind a tax hike.  Surprisingly, a few Republicans are as well.  While potentially attractive in the short term to institutions like the University of Illinois, in the long term it will mean even fewer jobs and even less revenue.

Too few Republicans are getting behind the idea of reducing spending.  Yes, there will be some short term pain, much like there was when Jim Edgar did the same thing in 1991.  But in the long term, spending reductions today will result in more revenue.  Hopefully this year will be the year that we actually see belt tightening measures taken rather than merely tapping the taxpayers. 

In response to a poster in another post, I'd point out that the deficit is not $11 billion.  Not even close.  Deficits are defined as the difference between what a government takes in and what they spend in a single year.  That number is probably closer to $4 billion.  The rest of the so called deficit is actually accumulated debt.  Yes, it has to be paid off.  But remember that raising taxes to cover the accumulated debt will leave the government with lots of extra money to spend, even after they've chased more jobs out of the state.

A suggestion is being made that even if Scott Brown wins the special Senate election in Massachusets on January 19th that he won't be seated for at least a month.  We've had experiences with special elections in Illinois as well.  In 2008 I recall being at a State Board of Elections meeting discussing the seating of the replacement for Denny Hastert. 

Discussion then moved to the request from the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives for unofficial election  results of the March 8 special election. Member Brady indicated that he spoke with the Clerk’s office and it is their practice to evaluate unofficial results. If it is clear from the unofficial results who the victor is they would act immediately and seat the member.

The House Clerk had submitted a letter requesting a pre-Canvass certification of results which I've attached below.

By unanimous vote the Board decided to submit to the House Clerk the unofficial results of the election.  The vote was not without ramifications according to Foster's wikipedia site.

Although it was initially thought that Foster would not be sworn in until April due to the need to count absentee ballots before the first election would be certified, he took the oath of office on March 11. On his first day in office, he cast the deciding vote to keep from tabling an ethics bill that would create an independent outside panel to investigate ethics complaints against House members.

I have no doubt that a call from our post partisan President will expedite the seating in a similar manner should Brown win.

I tend to not criticize too much for improper use of words, because I've had my share of missteps, despite Fr. Peter's admonition to always keep my dictionary nearby.  But when it comes from a person who is ripping into someone else for being uneducated, it's hard to pass up.

When I heard that McCain campaign manager said that Sarah Palin was "very calm-nonplussed" when hearing of her selection as VP nominee, I got a chuckle.  .  Nonplussed means confused, although Schmidt isn't the first one to get this wrong.  Upon googling I find almost no one seems to have picked up on his mistake and the interviewer seems to have taken the slip up in stride.  The only hit I can find is from the Democratic Underground...so hats off to the grammar police there. 

Of course, our English language is constantly changing and over time nonplussed may actually end up meaning what it doesn't mean and we'll be stuck with an utterly confusing word like cleave or sanction.

Nearly three years ago I wrote about one of the more bizarre legal cases I've seen (98-CH-235).  The gist of the issue was that a poorly crafted legal description of a parcel created an opening for someone (Ketchens) to lay claim to another family's (McNeil) driveway.  It was abundantly clear to anyone viewing the parcel that the driveway was part of the parcel belonging to the McNeils.  In fact, there was no actual deed for the parcel in question.  It was essentially in limbo, other than the obvious adverse possession of it by the McNeil's and every owner of the McNeil's house back to 1905.

Ketchens ploy was based solely upon quit claim deeds.  Quit claim deeds should never be the basis for a property transfer.  For example, I could legally do a quit claim deed to the Urbana City Building, foregoing all rights to it.  Within a quit claim deed there is no necessity to have or assert a property interest. 

The McNeil's lost at the circuit court level, but prevailed this week at the appellate court.  The court's opinion is attached below.

Unbelievably, Green Party candidate Rich Whitney somehow got lassoed into the case.  (I've heard that he and Ketchens knew each other in college).  Not only did Whitney end up losing the case, he wound up getting sanctions and an award of $20,500 which seems like a hefty penalty suggesting a fairly egregious error on his part.

Whitney's damage however is nothing compared to that of the McNeil's.  This case was simple in terms of who was right or wrong.  The McNeils very simply had someone steal their driveway with a phony legal ploy.  Thank goodness that the appellate court saw it their way and they can now get on with their life, albeit at great costs.  I don't know if title insurance might pick up these costs.  I sure hope so. 

I know that attorneys generally take cases without regard to rightness or wrongness of their client's position.  But it is nevertheless remarkable when a man who wants to be Governor takes a case in which his client is trying to perpetrate this kind of fraud.

I"m sure Prof. Don Wuebbles is a fine and distinguished academic.  However, even he was probably a little surprised this morning and found out that he was now a Nobel Laureate.

Somehow, the headline writer for the News-Gazette extended Wuebbles' work for the IPCC (Wuebbles doesn't show on a search of the IPCC website) into him being a Nobel Laureate based on their receipt of that award in 2007.  In fairness, the writer of the article doesn't come close to making that error and the online article's headline is different.

As a former collector of pennies for 1965 Nobel Peace Prize winner UNICEF, I'd like to also be known as a Nobel Laureate.

According to the State Board of Elections, and their attorney, the Illinois Attorney General, the answer is NO.

I’ve not posted for awhile on IP, doing most of my writing about election reform issues at my county clerk blog.  I’m coming out of hiding because a couple items within my recent reading meld nicely with the Climate Research Unit scandal.

First, I just ran across Huxley’s Law, from Julian Huxley, the first director of UNESCO and a somewhat notable biologist. 

Sooner or later, false thinking brings wrong conduct.

Second, I’ve just begun Paul Johnson’s Modern Times.  The first chapter discusses the theory of relativity and the efforts to prove it.  This quote from Einstein  was telling in light of the leaked e-mails from the CRU.

“If it were proved that this effect [the red shift] does not exist in nature, then the whole theory would have to be abandoned.”

The article linked above details some of the efforts to prove or substantiate Einstein’s theory.   Granted, I haven’t read the author’s book, but the article, and Johnson’s book, suggest that efforts of scientists to prove Einstein’s theory had a great deal more good faith and intellectual rigor than we are seeing in the area of man made global warming.  No efforts to squelch opponents or to demonize skeptics.

Finally of course, we’ve got another Clout List scandal brewing at the University of Illinois.  Prof. Michael Schlesinger has apparently threatened a New York Times writer with the “Big Cutoff” for not towing the AGW line in his writing.

The last refuge of lazy journalists is taking pot shots at politicians.  The Chicago Tribune does that in an article about running for office that appeared on line earlier this month.  Since I long ago stopped reading the paper of my youth, I never would have noticed it but for a link from Instapundit.  It’s remarkable that a newspaper, who should have an interest in good people running for office, decides to unnecessarily and unfairly increase the cynicism of the public about the process of running for office.

Here’s the premise of the Tribune article.  “The rules that govern petitions are complex and unforgiving.”

First, the requirements are hardly complex.  Second, they are hardly unforgiving.

If one takes the forms provided by the State Board of Elections and follows the rather simple instructions in their guide, or alternatively, the instructions provided by election officials like me (a whopping 2 pages), you’ll have no problem.  The Tribune suggests that you hire an attorney.  That’s absurd.  Thousands of candidates file for office without an attorney.  Those who get kicked off the ballot would have been better served by having a friend proof their work than by hiring an attorney.  While the Tribune suggests that process is unforgiving, the body of case law suggests that it is actually very forgiving.  Although, following the relatively simple instructions should prevent people from being thrown upon the mercy of electoral boards.

The Tribune points out that voters ought to be registered in order to sign the petitions.  I’m not sure if they are making this a criticism of the process or suggesting that it is unfair.  Yes, getting the signatures of actual registered voters who actually live in the district for which you are running is required.  That seems a pretty reasonable restriction and hardly evidence of a “daunting process” established to “discourage potential challengers”.

They then suggest “You wouldn't be the first candidate to file twice the required number of signatures -- only to see more than half of them disallowed.”  Well, that might be the case, although it would certainly be a rarity.  In fact, I’d question whether it has ever happened to a candidate who went door to door to households within his district.  As to being "disallowed" that suggests that the decision to allow the signatures is arbitrary, which it isn't.

Then the Tribune helpfully points out that a voter can’t sign for someone else.  Gee, really?  Once again, this isn’t part of some complex and unforgiving process.  It’s common sense.

Following their exaggerated assessment of the difficulties of the petition process, and their bemoaning of common sense restrictions upon it, the Tribune the proceeds to give inaccurate information.  “Those poll sheets also can help you make sure that John Q. Public Jr. signs under his name as he's registered -- and not as John Q. Public, J.Q. Public or Jack Public.”  The Tribune pretty clearly didn’t read the candidates’ guide put out by the State Board of Elections.  On page 48 it states.  “signing with a nickname will not invalidate the signature, provided the voter can be identified.”  I’ve literally reviewed thousands of signatures and never dismissed one for the reason given by the Tribune.

So if you want to run for office, the process is far from daunting.  Of course, once elected, you’ll have to deal with newspaper reporters.  Dealing with their half truths, innuendo, and inaccuracies will make the petition process seem like tiddlywinks in comparison. 

In a surprising move, Mayor Laurel Prussing has hired News-Gazette reporter Mike Monson as her new chief of staff. 

I've known Mike for nearly20 years now. I've found him to be one of the better informed and fair reporters I've seen.  The few times I've had to revisit a story with him because of an error or unintended slant, he's always treated my criticism with due respect.  I think he'll be able to push an agenda, while always being open to concerns from other parties.

It's a bold step by Prussing.  I like the tacit acknowledgement that running the affairs of city government is less about the possession of an urban planning or public administration degree and more about judgement, concern for the city, and strong interpersonal skills.  Mike has those.  While our off the record conversations would lead me to believe that he's taken a leftward path for the last decade, I also think that at his core he's a pragmatist.

Hopefully the News-Gazette will fill his big shoes with at least a warm body, although with the way things are going in print media, I wouldn't be surprised if they let the position lay vacant in a cost cutting move.

Voters will get a chance to decide whether the auditor is elected or appointed.

Judge Leonhard has issued an opinion and order in the Champaign Southwest MTD v. Champaign-Urbana MTD (05-CH-206) case.  Essentially, nothing changes.  Attachment below.

My reading here is that on the issue of Constitutionality, Judge Leonhard ruled that CSWMTD had no standing.  Whether that is appealable, I don't know.  I also don't know if the question could be brought by a citizen who would have standing or if that would be barred by laches.

On the question of whether the statutes allow overlapping districts, Judge Leonhard ruled that they did not have to be read to preclude that and that case law, Bartholf v. Woodward, specifically allows for this.  I attended the last hearing in this matter, and I got the sense then that this is where the judge was going.  I personally don't think that the law in this instance was intended to allow that.  The lawyers for both sides in this case took my position, but whether a trial court judge should fill in the gap for the legislature is certainly arguable.  Now, it appears that a panel of appellate justices will be asked to do that. 

The judge also made a ruling that the creation of the new district was valid and that the facts of the case did not support the CUMTD's assertion of bad faith on the part of the CSWMTD. 

Recently there's a lot of talk of a second stimulus. It makes me wonder if anyone can count.

Here are the google news searches for "second stimulus" back in the fourth quarter of last year.  Of course, the first stimulus was in May of last year (remember your stimulus check?) and the second stimulus was in February of this year.  So if Joe "everyone guessed wrong" Biden and the White House economic team push for another stimulus, it will be our third.