Perhaps the greatest short film of all time

It is an ode to motherhood. The rap artist is Mr. T. And the decade is the 1980s.

The film is here. Thanks to EF for the link.

This is a gorgeous election day. We should hold elections in June.

Every election day should have 70 degree weather. Our spring elections should be moved to early June.

The power of a citizen. . . . don't underestimate it.

Here's a nugget from this recent article on Barack Obama's speech in Kewanee, Illinois in the Star Courier:

Obama urged the people in the audience to get involved, and said 10 letters from constituents can have more influence on a politician than a $1,000 contribution.

"If bad legislation is being passed, a lot of times it's because nobody's paying attention," he said.

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Write your Member of Congress (especially if you live in a Red district), and ask them to vote against the Bankruptcy bill.

What a class act -- Weber and the Illini

This quote says it all for me (found here in the Sun-Times):

"Tremendous,'' Weber said of the season as a whole. "What else can you say? It goes down in history. If you're not happy with this, I feel sorry for you because life ain't getting any better.''

--

That's great. There's no moping. There's joy. Getting to the national championship game and battling it out to the end is fantastic. Go Illini.

Tom DeLay getting hammered. Join in and help

So Tom "The Hammer" DeLay, U.S. House Majority Leader and a real a-hole (according to the people who work around him. . .I've never met the guy) is perhaps the most unethical Member of Congress currently serving. He's the guy that might get indicted for campaign finance violations, and the reason why the Ethics Committee changed their rules to let him continue to serve in leadership *even if* he gets indicted. Dirty deeds. He's also the guy behind the Texas remap that flipped four D Members of Congress to the Rs.

So it's a good thing that some progressives are taking him on.

Check out http://www.dailydelay.blogspot.com for more on this.

The Illini are all class - and they kept the Chief at home

Add one more reason why the Illini are a classy team: Chief Illiniwek stayed in Champaign. Thanks to MDS at CerebralFan for the tip. Remember all those stories about how this magical season is distracted by the protests from Chief Illiniwek? Oh that's right: there aren't any. Someone in Urbana had the good sense to leave the white dude jumping around in a fake Indian costume at halftime back where he belongs - back home with the rest of the stuff we have outgrown. We might smile at how people actually believed it was OK to dance around in an Indian suit back then and hold no ill will towards those days, but when the country pays attention, we drop that headdress like a hot potato and compete with more dignity. And somehow, that leaves the symbol of the state's flagship public University just right. We pay our respects to the tribe that gave our state our name without any clownish antics, just a nod to our origins. We ought to let the halftime dance at home fade into memory as well.

UPDATE: Chris Rhodes of the joincrossblog calls into question my alumni status (97 LAS, by the way) because he correctly notes here that Chief Illiniwek does not appear at *any* away games. That's in part because some campuses won't permit him (the University of Minnesota comes to mind). If Cheif Illiniwek isn't welcome elsewhere as a relic of 1950s-era thinking, perhaps we should let our home games catch up to the rest of the world. Elite programs don't have controversial mascots.

One other interesting wrinkle: the House Republicans have been using the "Keep the Chief" issue very well in Champaign County for years -- well done, Chapin Rose -- but I wonder how well it plays in the rest of the state.

Gov gets credit for stopping some rogue pharmacists

I give Governor Blagojevich credit for his emergency rules on Friday requiring pharmacists to dispense all drugs, including morning after pills and birth control pills, that a doctor prescribes, regardless of the pharmacist's beliefs. I also give credit to the pro-choice advocates that pushed this issue over the last few weeks. I'm sure Blagojevich is earning some points with the influential pro-choice crowd around the country. You sure can't imagine any Republican issuing these rules. One sort of funny thing . . . he attended a service in Logan Square tonight according to CLTV and the presiding Bishop directly called out Rod to rescind the rules according to Church teaching. Afterwards Rod was giving a quick press conference and seemed to be straining to avoid the word dialogue. He said 'the bishop expressed his views. That is great. And I am looking forward to. . . uhm. . . listening to them. It was a special night.' Wouldn't it be nice if the next Pope came to see birth control as promoting a culture of life? The anti-birth control pill plank is really the weakest link in the pro-life / anti-choice argument. It is hard not to come off as an ideologue uninterested in reducing abortions if one opposes birth control.

Federal budget hurts CTA more than Kruesi

CTA Director Frank Kuresi is getting pounded for being less than transparent with the possibility that there would not be enough money to keep all the Brown Line stations open during reconstruction. But let's not lose sight of the bigger picture. An extra $22 million would keep those stations open. And in a $530 million project, the feds are only kicking in $246 million. That's less than half. If this were a highway project, the feds would kick in 80 percent of the cost. That's why we keep building highways and then more housing out on farmland which requires more oil to drive ever-farther and that keeps the terrorists well-funded. The Brown Line runs on electricity, not oil. Our federal transportation budget should line up with our foreign policy goals to defund the terrorists by using less oil. So don't just blame the CTA for our current woes. Blame people who vote Republican! And for those federal Dems who favor highways over transit. By the way, this means we in the city should be zoning and building high-density, moderate-income housing to take full advantage of our transit instead of more big luxury homes with garages in very dense neighborhoods (thanks to a commenter for that reminder).

Pope John Paul was a world shaper

There are few men living who shaped the world more than Pope John Paul. And his relentless work to open up Communist nations to democracy should be remembered and thanked. I've read that the Polish Solidarity movement would have died stillborn were it not for Pope John Paul. That's amazing. He had more influence in shaping nations and empires than those Popes of the first millenium that would ride out in person to battle the armies of rival kingdoms.And he did it with his words, not with force.

Let's hope the next Pope devotes as much energy to freedom and democracy around the world as Pope John Paul has done.

And my prediction: an African Pope is next.

Same boats, shorter lines, more tax money. And no horses!

Facing a billion and change structural deficit in our state's 50-some billion dollar budget, Governor Blagojevich called for shorter lines and more places to gamble in our 10 licensed riverboat casinos. Nine are operating. Rosemont is fighting for the 10th license.

We're the only state with casinos that limit the number of slots and tables ('gaming positions' according to the Sun-Times account and the Governor's press release here). The proposal would be to double those positions. Apparently, there are lots of would-be gamblers waiting in line for the $5 blackjack table, and if there were more seats in the boats, then more suckers would hand their money over to the boat owners. At least there's a 70% marginal tax rate so the State gets a good chunk of the money -- but I'm sure those salaries and management expenses in the boats are fairly ridiculous, to show a smaller profit margin.

It's hard to get agitated over more seats in the same casino as an expansion of gambling. What's the difference if some senior citizen gets to throw their money away at a faster rate in the same casino instead of waiting in line to methodically drop one quarter at a time into a spinning, beeping machine? I guess there will be more money lost to the casino owners (and thus, more tax money for the schools), but it doesn't seem like a real expansion of gambling. A really crappy economic development strategy and a pretty solid way of impoverishing people who are bad at math, but not really an expansion of gambling. It's different than a new casino.

The accountablity and standards piece of the Gov's plan also sounds fairly solid (if not that big a deal -- see Rich Miller's piece on it here), but if he really wanted to 'rock the system', he'd try to challenge seniority-based teachers' contracts. Now *that* could help shake out some deadwood and get the burned out bureaucrats who are wasting our schoolkids' time out of the classrooms.

And one other *fantastic* part of the proposal: no new money for the horse racing industry. Those guys are unbelievably greedy. They currently get a direct grant from the state of something like $17 million every year -- just because the casinos create some competition for their tracks for gambling dollars. Well, boo hoo. Maybe we should start sending some money to every freaking restaurant in the State because casinos create competition for dining dollars as well. And maybe we should send money to every theatre company in the state because casinos create competition for entertainment dollars. If the horse racing guys get a dime out of this proposal, the Governor should veto it. (But knowing the Speaker, he's unlikely to call a gambling bill until the Governor makes a public commitment to accept the whole deal). So the game is on to ensure the horse racing guys, led by the Duchossois (Doo-sha-SCHAW . . . so very French) family, don't skim off any new school money.