Author: Jim Bowman

Jim Bowman covered religion 1968-78 for the Chicago Daily News, since then has written books, articles, etc., mostly on corporate history but also on religion (Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968), and more recently on politics (Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters -- Lulu.com, Kindle). Longtime Oak Park, Illinois, resident, he lives now on Chicago's North Side, where four of his and Winnie's six children live close by.

Hatch Act alert, Hatch Act alert, after NYT man came to call . . .

Guess who’s asking about you, said State Dept. to Hillary campaign:

State Dept. Tipped Clinton Campaign Off About NYT Reporter Working Email Story

The Daily Callerreports:

The State Department tipped the Hillary Clinton campaign off last year that a New York Times reporter was asking questions about Clinton’s emails.

The revelation undermines the State Department’s claims that it has not worked to help Clinton during the ongoing email scandal.

“State just called to tell me that Mike Schmidt seems to have what appear to be summaries of some of the exchanges in the 300 emails the committee has,” Nick Merrill wrote in a March 14, 2015 email.

What’s a State Department for, anyhow?

Sen. Lightford, Sen. Harmon at Oak Park’s Julian School in election-season 2013, on early-childhood ed . . .

. . .  quizzed by CLAIM (Committee for Legislative Action, Intervention and Monitoring) parents, as recounted in Chapter 8, “Legislators go to school,” of Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters.

The first CLAIM questioner sailed a softball, asking the legislators how they had supported President Obama’s program for education, without specifying any part of that program, which I must admit, I would have been hard pressed to elucidate. Were they up to snuff on what was directed by that man in the White House?

The first to respond was Kimberly A. Lightford, a senator from nearby Maywood since 1998, Democrat like the others, longtime member and currently vice-chair of the Senate’s education committee — a qualifying factor in the circumstance, she being the only one of the four who represented no street or alley of Oak Park.

She was clearly a senate heavyweight — assistant majority leader and member of at least five other committees: Labor, Education, Executive, Financial Institutions, and Redistricting, plus chair of the Senate’s Black Caucus.

She was also a special friend of public schools, having led a successful push to lower compulsory schooling age from seven to six and striving to reduce it to age five. Some parents objected to the six, she said, but it’s a “perfect time” for early-childhood schooling, she said. She also happily noted that there had been “no deep-freeze” in public-school funding in that year.

Harmon said nothing to contradict her but injected a caution: “We all like early-childhood education, but it’s a fight every year because of budget pressures.” He was sitting at a table with three legislators whose comments and records demonstrated no great concern for budget pressures.

Rep. LaShawn Ford was next. . . .

More more more to come  . . .

Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters is available in paperback, epub and Amazon Kindle formats.