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.

Rope-a-dopey Obama feds have tiger by tail

Not the first time, needless to say, but this one’s a doozy.

The objection made by many people opposed to establishing a right of the transgendered to use the bathroom or shower of their choice is not so much about the occasional transgendered person using a facility.

It is that by making someone’s gender choice unquestionable, you are actually saying that anyone, at any time, can use the facilities of the other gender, and if challenged, can simply claim to be transgendered.

So any middle aged man who wants to shower with the girls’ soccer team at the local community college will now have a federal right to do so.

And if anyone asks him to leave, they will be violating his legal rights. (Some have argued that social norms will keep people in line in bathrooms; but it seems hardly worth commenting on the uselessness of social norms when the underlying policy is meant to destroy social norms.)

Gender choice out of bounds for discussion. (Just live with it, young ladies taking shower.) 

The bloke makes the claim, no one dare stop him. (DOJ is on his case in the flash of a towel ping, ACLU providing the court case.)

Social norms? Forget about them! Right now!

Zuckerberg’s Facebook a playpen for lefties?

Facebook “curates” its “trending” items, guiding the news absorbed by “roughly 1.6 billion users worldwide, of whom 167 million are in the United States.”

In effect, these curators exercise gate keeping powers which amount to political news-making powers that are transmitted to Facebook’s audience. Even the New York Times published an article this week with a headline saying that the social press “finds new roll as news and entertainment curator.”

Source: Where There’s Smoke of BiasThere Could Be Fire For Zuckerberg’s Facebook – The New York Sun

Those Illinois redistricting blues . . .

. . . are being challenged by non-aligned citizens, as we know. 

The Ruling Party is opposed to this. It kept such a proposal off one ballot and wants to do it in another, each time deploying an ad hoc group represented by the party’s lawyer, while denying its own involvement.

Constitutional issues are arguable in the matter, but the party has a very big stake here. Drawing electoral district boundaries is a monopoly they have gotten used to.

The system seems blatantly undemocratic — hermetically sealed office-holders deciding whom if anyone they will run against. As such it was raised as an issue at a town hall meeting described in my Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters.

A softball question had just been answered at the mid-July, 2013 meeting at the Oak Park Library. Then . . .

A Certified Public Accountant shifted tone considerably, urging [Sen. Don] Harmon to “do something about corruption in our very corrupt state.” He specified “gerrymandering” and complained, “The way it’s set up, candidates know they will win,” continuing at length in this vein.

“Each of us is vulnerable in a primary,” Harmon said. When an opponent surfaces, he might have added. Lilly, appointed in 2010, had run unopposed in primary and general elections in 2012 and would do so again in 2014. Harmon had run unopposed in the general every year but one since he was elected in 2002.

He was to be opposed in the 2014 primary, by a Galewood man with public-employee-union background, whom he defeated handily. He was unopposed in the general, though briefly threatened by a last-minute Republican opponent who thought better of it after a week and withdrew for “personal reasons.”

A candidate needs money to answer nominating-petition challenges, which led to the withdrawal for lack of funds of a credible [primary] candidate seeking to oppose Congressman Danny Davis in 2014, for instance.

Rep. Camille Lilly wound up this meeting with a request.

She closed, telling the questioner, “Give us a call.” This while giving no telephone number or email address or even street address, which for what it’s worth was a few blocks inside Austin, one of the city’s highest-crime-rate neighborhoods.

This location was symptomatic of her low-profile, virtually nonexistent approach to representing mostly white, well-policed Oak Park, not to mention other communities in a long meandering (gerrymandered?) line moving northwest as far as Franklin Park, eight miles from her office.

The long meandering line (her district) was stark evidence of the state’s 2010 redistricting by the Ruling Party to make sure black and other Democrat office-holders are elected with at most token opposition. In another of these meetings, Harmon explained such redistricting as a civil-rights imperative, citing federal law in the matter.

He was apparently referring to the requirement to “remedy a violation” of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. If there was such a violation in Illinois districts in 2010, nobody talked about it. But for the senator, it provided respectability to Ruling Party redistricting.

Illinois Blues is available in paperback and non-Kindle ebook and as a Kindle book.

 

Tough call for Sen. Harmon . . .

. . . as he himself explains.

But it could have been much tougher.

I mean, he could have voted with the Republicans against the new school-funding bill, which passed (easily) on party lines a week ago.

Sure. And I’m the Easter bunny, as TV news man Len O’Connor used to say at the close of one of his “biting commentaries.”

Anyhow, the state funding of public schools arises in my Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters.

It was at a four-legislator forum at Oak Park’s Percy Julian middle school, on a balmy night in October, 2013.

The legislators were there at the invitation of the parent teacher organization, introduced by the district superintendent and questioned by parent members of the district’s Committee for Legislative Action, Intervention and Monitoring (CLAIM).

An interesting evening all in  all, with Harmon on hand plus Sen. Kimberly Lightford and Reps. LaShawn Ford and Camille Lilly.

School funding came up well into the meeting, when a CLAIM member . . .

. . . raised the long-standing hot-button issue of state funding of public schools in general, setting up a haves-vs.-have-nots give and take.

Lightford complained that the formula for allocating school funding — $4 billion in 2013 — was based on forty-to-fifty-year-old poverty figures. She was to co-sponsor a bill two years later that sought to alter that formula, taking from the wealthier districts and giving to the poorer ones. Nothing had come of it when this book was published. [Yes, but . . . ]

“Is it fair?” she asked, that Oak Park gets as much as it does, “considering its lower-than-average poverty rate?” State aid (to Oak Park schools) “may be” less, she said. Which was sufficiently ambiguous for the occasion. Then she launched into numbing detail about the process of deciding how funds are apportioned.

Harmon ignored her allegation of unfairness — no need to ruffle feathers — but agreed that the formula is “complicated.” He took note also of the long-standing teacher pension subsidy for non-Chicago school districts — featuring highly publicized retirement bonanzas for suburban administrators — as further complicating the matter.

Which it does, according to the Illinois Policy Institute, who had said in May, 2012, that for many years “these fat pensions had a massive, and now dire, impact on state education finances.”

Lilly observed that she would “like to put on the table a corporate round table,” meaning God knew what, and He was excluded from this gathering in a public school. In any case, as often happened in these forums, no one asked.

Illinois Blues is available at Amazon as Kindle and at Lulu.com as paperback or non-Kindle ebook.