Dozens of Coptic Christians protest outside King Tut exhibit

Crossposted on Marathon Pundit.

Yesterday, in my second Egyptian post of the day, I made the point that protesting outside the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs exhibit about the plight of jailed Egyptian blogger Alaa was definitely fair game, since the government of Egypt is collecting about half the gate receipts from this lucrative show.

As I was typing that post, a group of Coptic Christians were outside Chicago's Field Museum drawing the attention of the plight of the members of their faith in Egypt.

According to the Chicago Tribune, many of the picketers came from three Chicago area Coptic churches: St. Mark in Burr Ridge, St. Mary in Palatine, and St. George in Monee.

From the Chicago Tribune, free registration may be required:

Discrimination and human rights abuses against Coptic Christians remain widespread in Egypt, according to a report released this month by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Copts face societal intolerance, and Egyptian authorities have been accused of being lax in protecting their rights.

No Christians serve as governors, presidents or deans of public universities, and very few Christians hold positions in the upper ranks of the security services and the armed forces, Coptic community leaders said. A 14th Century law bars Christians not only from building new churches, they said, but also from performing necessary maintenance on structures without government approval.

Recent violence in Coptic churches in Egypt has renewed fears of escalating religious strife. In April, a Muslim man was accused of knife attacks at three Coptic Christian churches in Alexandria that left one man dead and about a dozen others wounded. The incident unleashed three days of rioting on the same weekend Christians were observing Orthodox Palm Sunday.

Anissa Essam Hassouna, an official with the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs and part of the Egyptian delegation visiting Chicago, said Thursday that the government has "neglected" the issue of how Copts are treated in Egypt but "is trying to do better."

Well, Egypt has to do a lot better. Besides the mistreatment of the Copts, last month Egyptian blogger Alaa was jailed while attending a peaceful protest. He's still incarcerated.

People shelling out at least $31 per ticket to see the King Tut exhibit (again, about half goes back to Egypt) deserve to learn about Alaa.

Related posts: Egypt, King Tut, and blogger Alaa

Alaa in prison: Pajamas Media Blog Week in Review #4 follow-up

Abusive comments will be deleted.

UPDATE May 29: TigerHawk found one of the few MSM articles to cover Alaa's plight. Along with Sandmonkey, TH has been aggressively following this story.

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The Enclave at Galewood Crossings

I always thought Galewood started at Austin and went west to Harlem but I'd let developers claim the name to rebuild on this industrial wasteland. via Arlene Jones at Austin Weekly,

Last month at Ald. Emma Mitts’ town hall meeting, I learned that a new development is coming two blocks from my house. "The Enclave at Galewood Crossings" will be developed at Laramie and the railroad tracks (I always thought I lived in Austin, or at least North Austin. My post office says my zip code is Belmont-Cragin, but I digress).

It will be a development with a mixture of 240 condos, townhouses and single family homes. It will even have its own dog park! The cost of those homes will range from $200,000 to $450,000. Some quick calculations show that someone will have to earn at least $50,000 a year to afford to live there.

She's doing a conference call with readers on Sunday too. That's interesting...

I will host a conference call this Sunday May 28 at 9 p.m. Call 605/772-3200 (this is long distance so use your cell) and enter this Access code: 806598#. I can host up to 96 people and you can give me your opinion with others on the line to hear you. You can talk to me about this column or any other subjects that I’ve written about.

And finally,

Also, join me at Wallace’s Catfish Corner this Friday, May 26, along with Mayoral Candidate Bill "Dock" Walls to talk about issues affecting your life here in the city of Chicago.

So besides getting a new Gated Community the West Side is getting pretty techno saavy and creative.

Now, the City just needs to figure out what to do with this sacrifice to the Sugar tariff and pray we don't lose the one I grew up next too.

cross posted at Bill Baar's West Side

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Keno Dooms Lottery Deal

CapitolFax today draws out the comments of Lottery industry expert Kip Peterson, from WBEZ's "848" show. You can listen to the May 24th show here, just go about 23 minutes in.

Capitolfax omits a couple of facts brought up in that interview that will doom the Governor's proposal.

First, according to Peterson, the only way to make the Lottery deal profitable enough to draw an offer that large is to legalize keno. That was an idea that the General Assembly has already soundly rejected.

Secondly, there are reportedly only three companies in the world with the capacity to run the lottery. One is John Wyma client GTECH. The mere mention of GTECH in conjunction with this proposal is enough to ensure not only no Republican votes, but no targeted Democrats can vote for it either.

Peterson also rebuts Becky Carroll, who points out in her arguments that Great Britain has privatized its lottery. The difference, says Peterson, is that the Britain deal is a seven-year license to run the lottery, not an outright transfer of ownership. The risk is much smaller on both sides of the table.

Peterson says the best way for Illinois to get the most money out of it's lottery system is to follow in the footsteps of Georgia and turn the lottery into a quasi-private agency (similar to the Post Office) still under state control. Of course, the big stumbling block with that idea is that Illinois doesn't get $10 billion upfront, so the Governor has no way to buy Senator Meeks off.

UPDATE: YDD has learned that the lobbyist for the second lottery competitor, Scientific Games, is Blagojevich insider Milan Petrovic. For more on GTECH, I recommend reading this Fortune Magazine profile: "Rare is the company that has faced as many allegations of baldly sleazy conduct as Gtech". Heartwarming, isn't it?

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Privatizing the Lottery

Lew Caldwell was a 12-year (1967-79) independent black state representative from Chicago. He received his degree in social work from Northwestern University.

We stayed in the same cheap ($14.50 a night in the 1970’s) and now demolished hotel—the Hotel Governor—right next to the infamous Hotel St. Nicholas, where shoe boxes of former Secretary of State Paul Powell’s money was found.

That’s probably how we got to know each other.

I eventually learned that Lew had written a novel called “The Policy King.”

It was about Chicago politics.

A group of citizens decided to try to legalize policy.

When Lew told me about it, I had never heard of policy. It was a daily numbers game. Runners sold policy slips with numbers on them. If you had the correct number, you won the day’s prize.

Does that sound like today’s daily lottery or what?

The hero of the book wanted to legalize numbers and, basically, franchise their sale to individuals. The example used was the early insurance industry, which Lew said did not have a good reputation in the early days when salesmen went door-to-door.

The citizens group went to the mayor’s office and made the pitch.

The mayor’s reply was that, when they had some political power, they should come back and see him.

The group then organized and beat the local alderman.

He loaned me the only copy of the book he had, which I avidly read.

When the lottery decided to start a daily game, he introduced a bill to carry out the plan in Lew’s book.

Why not empower individuals, giving them an ability to make an honest living?

You’ll find this hard to believe, but we got House Bill 841 passed the House 173-0 in 1977.

Naturally, the idea died in the Senate.

We couldn’t have private citizens competing with the state and local stores, could we?

Also posted at McHenry County Blog.

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Simple math Blagojevich

The Governor's scheme to get Rev. James Meeks out of the race should simply be laughed at from a financial perspective. $10 billion up front for a 99 year lease (assuming someone will pay that), some interest, and POOF, it's ALL GONE BY 2025!!! And in just four years, the state is right back to where it started regarding lottery revenue for education. Then what after 2025? Especially at a time all those pensions are coming due that are not being funded right now. Great, so the kids they are spending more money on now can pay a lot more in taxes when they get out of school making it even harder for them to get started in life and support their families. This makes absolutely no sense at all, unless you are running for re-election.

The state gets about $500 million more for the first four years, then the state is back to around $650 million per year until 2025, and then practically nothing after 2025. Blagojevich is willing to give up almost all revenue after 2025 for about $2 billion more over 4 years up front.

Oh, and the company most likely to "lease" the lottery is GTECH Corp., that already has a large chunk of the contract to run the Illinois Lottery. And who represents GTECH? Why it's Blagojevich's former Chief of Staff when he was a Congressman, John Wyma. More campaign donations to Democrats for years and years to come (like 99) I suspect.

Overall, this sceme will hurt state education funding long-term without doing much of anything at all to stop the decline in quality of government schools. With competition and choice comes accountability and innovation. That concept is a better place to start finding solutions than this campaign gimmick is.

The biggest problem isn't money. The problem is the government monopoly largely controlled by Illinois' biggest campaign funders, the teacher's unions. Simply banning union (and corporation) campaign donations would go a lot further toward improving education quality than this plan by loosening the control the teacher's unions have over legislators. We'd start seeing good teachers being paid more instead of the good teachers subsidizing bad teachers when they all get the same pay raises regardless of performance. We might even be able to fire a few bad teachers, while the increased pay for good teachers would attract more good teachers.

Go ahead and start ripping into me for a perceived anti-union bias (I'm actually pretty neutral on unions that don't abuse their power), but don't try blaming Topinka's lack of any vision on me. I do give credit to Blagojevich and Meeks for stirring up the debate that even has inspired innovative ideas like using prostitution and drugs to fund schools.

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Big, bold plan to spend $6 billion on education has some cutting-edge parts

I think Senator Meeks and Governor Blagojevich deserve a lot of credit for putting forward a big-picture, innovative plan for education in Illinois. Everyone agrees that we need to improve education and most people agree that we need to invest more money into education. Finally, there's a big, bold plan out there (right at the top of www.illinois.gov) that would demonstrably improve education if implemented.

I think the most innovative part is a call for merit pay instead of seniority pay, with the full support of the teachers unions. (That is, the plan calls for the unions to work to craft a merit pay plan. I'm not suggesting the unions support the concept today.)

For some background on merit pay, check out Denver. They are probably running the most aggressive merit pay system in the nation. And the teachers unions crafted the plan.

Here's an interview in Education Sector (a neat independent think tank) with Brad Jupp, a labor organizer with the Denver Classroom Teacher Association and a lead negotiator and advocate for the merit pay system.

The whole interview is worth a read, but here are some of the best parts.

ES: What were some of the specific lessons you learned in the pay-for-performance pilot?

BJ: The most important lesson was that you can build pay systems around pragmatic judgments. By pragmatic judgments, I mean decisions that are not necessarily based on researched psychometric standards but reflect common sense and professional judgment to make effective decisions. In fact, almost all pay systems–including the single salary schedule in place in most schools today–are built around pragmatic judgments. We will never create a perfectly objective basis for compensation decisions, but if we rely on the common sense of professionals we can go a long way.

The second thing we learned, which is very important, was that differentiated pay did not destroy workplace morale; it created new challenges, but in our pilot schools, we never saw the plummet in morale predicted by opponents of alternative compensation schemes.

The third thing we learned was that, when teachers set goals and plan to meet them, students perform well whether teachers meet those goals or not. When teachers set high-quality objectives, objectives that have clear, measurable outcomes and well-articulated strategies to meet them, and those objectives are assessed routinely throughout the year–kids learn more. Learning became the cornerstone of the way we built the pay system.

A fourth thing that we learned was that we need to think hard about how to connect the stakes in a pay system to the behavior that we're trying to change. Policymakers often think of pay systems in very simple ways: "If I put a lot of money on the table, it's going to change people's behavior dramatically, so I'll put a lot of money on the table for the behavior I want." But you often don't need to do that, and you may, in fact, be making a big mistake.

We've found, for instance, that a $1,000 incentive to work in a high-poverty school with low-performing kids doesn't motivate teachers in schools with wealthier kids that perform well to move to that low performing school. On the other hand, it does motivate teachers to stay at that high-poverty school after they've been hired there. Maybe what you need to do is to put a small amount of money on the table, stabilize the workforce, and then build the workforce in these schools over time, rather then to assume that what you want the incentive to do is to steal teachers from the suburbs. Another example is that it doesn't take a whole lot of money–only about $330 in the compensation model that we have–to get people to commit to look at their objectives twice a year. But if there's no money, they don't do it. Sometimes smaller stakes make a big difference.

There's a lot more, including why teachers should embrace accountability measures, because then they'll get paid more (as they should).

I also love the call in the plan for longer school days and longer school years.

So, say what you want about the efficacy about licensing the lotto to come up with the money, but this is the best plan that's out there about how to improve education. I think it's a big step forward.

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Urbs in Horto (but please no mushroom compost)

Looking better then the Gov's Mansion.

From yesterday's NYT,

But even more than its soil-enriching, moisture-conserving utility, mulch is an organic metaphor, tying together the various pieces of Chicago's novel development strategy, praised by the Sierra Club and the Chamber of Commerce alike. By wrapping its arms and famous big shoulders around its Latin motto — Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden) — Chicago has become a global model for how a metropolis can pursue environmental goals to achieve economic success.
[***]
The generator of Chicago's mulch is Richard M. Daley, the unorthodox and popular Democratic mayor who took office in 1989 vowing to replant the urban forest of his youth that was lost to Dutch elm disease and other blights. At the time, the pledge raised the eyebrows of supporters and critics, who chalked up the mayor's love for trees to his birth on Arbor Day in 1942.

We've used mushroom compost but it really stinks.

I'm glad the City's taken down some of the trees in the Blvds too. Chicago got a little carried away there for a while and I worried truck drivers would have a hard time seeing the traffic.

Barbara and other Roti family members have been leasing trucks to the city of Chicago for decades. At least 17 companies in the city's scandal-plagued Hired Truck Program were owned by Roti relatives and associates -- including Barbara's father, wife, mother-in-law and daughter's in-laws. They were among 165 companies Daley fired in 2004, after the Sun-Times reported the city often paid for trucks that ended up doing nothing, leading to an ongoing federal investigation.

Compost all over the place. That's the price we have to pay for Urbs in Horto.

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Culture of Corruption Watch: Hastert, Jefferson, and Berwyn's Sonny Stillo

How can Hastert (R-Il) cry constitutional crisis over the FBI's raid on Rep. Jefferson's (D-La) Office yet everyone was silent when the FBI raided Berwyn's City Hall and confiscated every PC in the place in pursuit of Ald. Sonny Stillo (D)?

Update: LaShawn Barber on Hastert, Jefferson, and ABC.

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Blago's Flunks History Lesson

“In 1975, the State of Illinois created the lottery. The idea behind the game was to create a funding source for schools that would solve the inequities in school funding. However, over the years, lottery money was not used exclusively for schools. Instead, it was used for a variety of purposes, failing to fulfill the mission promised to the taxpayers over thirty years ago.”

That’s what Governor Rod Blagojevich’s press release said today.

It is, of course, a blatant falsehood.

I guess that’s what happens when you don’t have enough gray heads around the office.

Blagojevich’s staff may have never learned the RTA’s history, but the Governor has.

In the freshman orientation session at the Holiday Inn East in December of 1992, lottery sponsor State Rep. Zeke Giorgi delighted in taunting the newly elected legislators. He said he bet they thought the lottery was passed to finance education and everyone, but I, probably nodded his or her head “Yes.”

Then, Giorgi held up the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times with a headline saying something like, “Lottery Finances RTA.”

He even passed out copies to everyone present.

Now, maybe Blagojevich was in the hot tub, but, more likely, he attended the session.

He just doesn’t have as good a memory for lottery facts as he does for presidential succession.

McHenry County Blog may have the longest discussion of education around. It's right on top. The governor's press release has also been posted in full. There are hundreds of thought-provoking observations.

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Rep. LaHood sides with those who side against Israel

There's a law being considered that would prohibit aid to the Palestinian Authority while it is being governed by Hamas. The article, which excoriates Israel for a long list of supposed atrocities while declining to criticize poor, innocent Hamas [/end sarcasm] or even mention recent suicide bombings even once, heaps praise upon U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood (R.-18th) for opposing the bill.

Not only does the writer describe Rachel Corrie as an innocent person slain while protecting Palestinian homes (she was a terrorist sympathizer who burned the American flag and got killed trying to stop a bulldozer from demolishing tunnels being used to smuggle weapons for terrorists), it also heaps praise upon Hamas:

Why this extreme reaction to the beaten down Palestinian people? Because the Palestinians exercised their democratic rights and elected representatives of Hamas. Hamas has been demonized by Israel and many in the U.S. media despite the fact that it took a pledge against violence more than 18 months ago and has lived up to that promise. They have not committed acts of violence despite violence directed at the Palestinian people by Israel. Israel has demanded Hamas recognize Israel's right to exist -- but Israel is a country without clear borders. What exactly would Hamas be recognizing?

The rest of this article is just as charming ... and inaccurate.

Were I being praised by someone who expressed views like this -- as is Ray LaHood in this case -- I would seriously reconsider whether my position was correct.

Consider this, Ray:

Hamas wants to destroy Israel. Hamas uses money to buy weapons that it uses to kill Israelis. Since Hamas runs the Palestinian government, any money that government gets can be used to further Hamas' goal of killing Israelis (I doubt these people hold the concept of separate fund balances to be sacred).

This bill would stop money from getting to Hamas. So, wouldn't this bill, therefore, make it harder for Hamas to commit terrorism? Of course it would. Call me crazy, but I think that's a good thing.

Cross posted on Peoria Pundit.

UPDATE:



Above: Rachel Corrie, the "idealistic college kid who probably had no business hanging around the occupied territory, but that doesn't make her a 'terrorist sympathizer.' " That's her, burning the American flag at a Hamas rally.

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City silence on PHA scandal is hypocritical

Last week, the Peoria City Council voted to send a letter to the federal government pointing out that current federal law doesn't give municipalities the power to regulate cable Internet service as it does cable television service. Obviously, the council believes in getting involved when cable subscribers experience a hiccough in service.

But when the Peoria Housing Authority partners with a predatory lender, and then shrugs its shoulders and says mistakes were made when they get caught by the city's newspaper of record, there is no one on the Peoria City Council willing to stand up for the poor, working class victims of the predatory loans.

Why is no member of the council asking for a letter to the PHA demanding a resolution to the crisis that leaves the victims unharmed? Why are there no calls being made from Peoria City Hall to law enforcement agencies and prosecutors? Why is there no debate about this apparent crime on the floor of the city council?

It's not the council's business, as has been suggested to me? Bull. It's as much the council's business as is the Internet service that was the subject of Council Member Patrick Nichting's successful (8-2) resolution last week.

But then I doubt that many of the victims of the PHA loan scandal live in the affluent 5th District.

The silence is hypocritical.

Cross posted to Peoria Pundit.

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PHA and the feds still doing exactly NOTHING to help predatory loan victims

Thank God Journal Star reporter Elaine Hopkins has started reporting on the Peoria Housing Authority predatory loan scandal again. She previously wrote one story about how the PHA brought in this crook to teach a course in home ownership, who then turned around and started selling these predatory loans, with the PHA telling poor working class families that they had to deal with this guy if they wanted to participate in its first-time homebuyer program.

Instead or returning Hopkins' call, PHA director Roger Johns got in touch with someone on the Journal Star's editorial board and gave them a lame "mistakes were made" excuse and same vague statement about how the agency would try to help. And the agency still isn't saying why they weren't making the payments toward these loans that they were supposed to. That leads me to think someone with access to these funds has been pocketing the cash.

Well, Hopkins actually attended a meeting and came back with a story about how the PHA attorney agrees that the situation was "sad," but how it was all a misunderstanding and how "hindsight is 20-20." No kidding, Sherlock. There is still no assurance from ANYONE in the PHA that their victims will be allowed to keep their homes.

Again, I ask: What is Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan going to do? Where does U.S. Rep Ray LaHood stand on this issue? How about Barack Obama and Dick Durbin, Illinois' two U.S. Senators? Perhaps I need to send copies of these articles to U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to get some sort of reaction.

The silence is deafening, suggesting the powers-that-be care more about Johns than it does about poor people who work hard and are trying to become valuable members of society.

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