Illinois: The Land of Self Reliance

JB Pritzker's gubernatorial win and retention of mostly Democrats in the Illinois General Assembly, as well as the 2018 victory of Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, is a signal to all the liberal think-tanks to come out of hiding and start reporting on the devastation left in the wake of the Rauner administration.

First, according to USA Today in a story posted way back in November of 2018, Illinois notoriously took three of the top 15 rankings for the worst cities for black Americans, Springfield ranking 11th.

I only noticed it because it was featured in an article by sj-r.com about the Springfield Mayoral race between incumbent Jim Langfelder and challenger Frank Edwards discussing the problems of race and economic inequality.

This evening as I was preparing a diatribe on the subject I stumbled upon yet another scathing criticism of Illinois, this time, about babies.

News channel 20 (WICS/WRSP) revealed that the report came from a non-profit called ZERO to THREE. Here is the link to the Illinois page on that site. Before you click, take a deep breath because there is lots of data.

Hillary Clinton said "it takes a village." Everyone scoffed. She lost. Mother is supposed to be home to nurture the children 24-7. Dear old Dad comes home at the end of a hard day's work and dolls out allowances and pays the bills.Then Mother gets on her knees and then bends over and such, right? Isn't that why our laws are written the way they have been since the birth of the nation?

Life isn't supposed to be more complicated than that! If it is, it because of what, sinners? I thought you were pro-life? Life doesn't just end at birth, fellas.

Dealing with race in Springfield? When I was in history class at Grant Middle School, I cringed when I learned about slavery because I wondered how my black classmates felt hearing about it. It must have filled them with immense hatred and fear.

I've come to regard the history lessons themselves, of slavery and Jim Crow, as acts of intimidation and terror, because I have met and become friends with people from Africa who never experienced what happened to African Americans, and they seem to thrive in their family businesses without a moment's thought of what white people think of them,

Ashland Incident poised to bring down Illinois

The subterranean infrastructure of Illinois politics is about to get another exposure.

The dirty dealings that got former Governor George Ryan Convicted and then former Governor Rod Blagojevich Impeached, is about to be exposed again through it's lack of action regarding the murder of Steve Watkins in Ashland, Illinois over nine months ago.

According to DIMFI.com, the Cass County State's Attorney passed the case off to the Illinois State’s Attorney’s Appellate Prosecutor’s Office, which is said by some people to be a place where cases go to die.

Where they thinking Steve Watkins had no next-of-kin?

The Appellate Prosecutor's office is currently occupied by an individual who, while a Sangamon County Assistant State's Attorney, charged someone with murder who was then incarcerated, but not prosecuted. The state supreme court let the suspect go on for being incarcerated for too long.

This case will grow to include questions about the higher-ups who employed those responsible for investigating and prosecuting this case. The relentless vine of justice climbs higher every day. Every day, Mark Thoma updates the status of the Steve Watkins case from 3 to 6 P.M. on WMAY AM 970

Still wondering about the future.

I still like to read the State Journal Register because they have career journalists on hand who work full time to get their stories and photos. For a while I even had the notion of applying for work there. But the tide is going out for good on the old media, thanks to the Internet.

I wonder how many generations it will take before subscriptions to actual hard-copy newspapers fall into the red zone of being cost-prohibitive? Would online advertising be sufficient to support the structure that remains after the printing presses have ceased forever?

Remember radio? Radio is still a good hands-free form of entertainment, but AM is dominated by right-wing conservatism, a philosophy which proved its worth over the last eight years in the political spotlight, and evidenced by the presidential election of 2008. Unpopular.

As for FM radio, it depends on the artist and not the genre.

Genre radio is old hat. The Internet has exposed us to the reality of music. That there are really good songs, not really good types of songs. We as an audience can no longer accept being pigeonholed into arbitrary categories of Rock, Pop, Country, Jazz, Lite-Jazz, Classical, Heavy Metal, Blues or Big Band.

I occasionally listen to Amy Winehouse, Bjork, Tom Waits, Dethklok, Muddy Waters, Pete Seeger, Ozzie, Tchaikovsky, Sly and the Family Stone, etc. No radio station will be able to keep me as an audience for very long.

Local Broadcast television is not doing too well either. The local news anchors most of the time are repeating the national news when they can't find local stories. Most of the remote news crews were once Union and are now gone.

During the time slot used by local news broadcasts I'm watching PBS. I'm already searching blogs and YouTube for local video on my computer instead of watching television. The Internet provides weather reports too. I don't know what the local broadcasters have left to hold up against the Internet. I think they are in worse shape than newspapers. Popular shows can be watched at Hulu.com

Barack Obama said change is here. This change is bigger than just politics. We are about to usher in a whole new cultural structure, the likes of which we can't yet imagine. Biggest of the changes is perhaps that there may be no such thing as mass communication anymore. Sub-cultures will re-arrange under totally different flags.

Philosophies will shatter and pieces from different ideologies will combine into never before seen colors.

People will be different in unheard of ways, because they will have their own custom-designed preferences thanks to the Internet. Everyone will be a stranger to everyone else, so we will simply have to shed fear.

Senator Indicted for Corruption wins state Primary!

Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska was indicted for corruption. Still he managed to "win" his senatorial primary against six contenders. Coincidentally, John McCain has picked The governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as his Vice President.

May I stick my finger down my throat now?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/us/28alaska.html?bl&ex=1220068800&en=2f21b7221a4aa4eb&ei=5087%0A

The evolving perception of media power

Media Matters (mediamatters.org) has once again launched a campaign to squelch media pundit Chris Matthews of NBC’s cable network MSNBC for expressing his negative opinion about Senator Hillary Clinton while under the sheep’s clothing of objective journalism.

Broadcast television before Cable was so limited by time that they only had room for straight news. Through this limited capability, journalism was given its reputation.

Suddenly, cable television had so many channels that it didn’t know what to do with them so they invited experienced talent from talk radio. Talk radio talent was a good choice because now the cable news networks had to fill twenty four hours a day.

The old guard television news anchors held a firm grip on their reputations while they had a limited amount of time, but they soon faced competition from their inflammatory talk-radio-to-television-gatecrashers.

The public perception is that what was once considered straight news has now become stained by opinion journalism. The truth is that most information is biased. All news was only covered by one perspective, that which was allowed by the gatekeepers.

We live in an era now where we must understand that an opinion is an opinion, and we can sit back and say “Well, he has his opinion and that’s okay.” A few years ago, during the period between the invention of cable and the birth of the Internet, most of us would still have a problem with that statement.

Today, I have my own media outlet. In fact, I have at least eight. If there was a topic that interested me, I would look it up, find as many differing positions as I could on it, and decide for myself. If it’s interesting enough I might write about it?

So who gives a rat’s ass about Chris Matthews or what he’s saying about Hillary?

Any Political System Evenly Divided

Any political system that is evenly divided between opposing or competing parties is an well-manipulated political system.

Political Poll Fraud?

I don’t want to give out any phone numbers, but I have one from a someone who called me today from the Davlin for Mayor campaign, or so he said.

While I was working today at 2:17 p.m. my cell phone rang. I picked it up and someone said “Hello, I’m ___ working in support of Tim Davlin, Have you voted yet today?”

I said “Not yet,” and the signal started to break up. I heard him say “Well, let me put you down for….” then the signal cut off.

Put me down for what?

I kept wondering most of the afternoon. I wonder if the caller was just checking off people as supporters of Tim Davlin regardless of whether they really are or not? He had to put me down for something. It couldn’t have been that I didn’t vote yet that day, that question is irrelevant so early in the afternoon.

He never got a chance to ask me that, he just said he was going to put me down for something.

That for which I was to be written down, checked off, or whatever, is now a mark among many that represents some kind of statistic for Mayor Tim Davlin’s campaign. Whatever it was, its inaccurate and misrepresentative of me.

Wage Calculator

I've added a new interactive form to www.spfld.net. It colorfully calclulates your living expenses, and such things as how hard you work for car insurace. You'll find it at the top of the menu items on the page following the main splash page.

Called "Wage Calculator" It's a 177K Adobe PDF file that you can save after you make changes. I recommend that you fill it out, save it to your desktop, then email it to your Congressional Representative.

The inspiration behind creating this form was from watching a session of the U.S. Congress on C-SPAN. I heard several arguments that "Americans are not saving their money" and the use of such arcane terms as "Savings Rate" of Americans compared to other countries.

Just one of many arbitrary terms coined by Congress. Another rediculous term is the "Skills Gap" which is a comparison of multitasking between foreign countries and the United States. What they don't tell you is that multitasking and working harder is easier in those other countries because the workers have no rights and no choices.

Any congressmen who uses the term "Skills Gap" is in favor of complete elimination of rights for workers and should be permanently voted out of political office.

John Edwards - one down.

One down - too early to count the rest.