Progress Illinois

Yesterday's "Tuesday Commentary" on WTTW's Chicago Tonight went toTribune columnist Dawn Turner Trice, who voiced her hope that Chicago police will "step up" in the face of the city's rising violence without resorting to brutality. She also took aim at Mayor Richard Daley's ridiculous statement last week that fear of unfair media coverage has made officers timid, calling this suggestion "nothing short of shameful." Watch it:

Also of note, in a Sun-Times op-ed last Sunday, Chicago activist and journalist Jamie Kalven (full disclosure: he's my father) responded to Daley's remarks:

It is a first principle of our democracy that public officials in whom we vest substantial power must be subject to public scrutiny. This principle applies every bit as much to the police officer on the street as to the high government official.

We give the police great powers -- to arrest and detain, to use force, and, under certain circumstances, to kill -- and we allow them considerable discretion in performing their duties. Public scrutiny is the necessary antidote to abuses of those powers.

For Daley to suggest that officers must be sheltered from core democratic principles in order to show up for work is a diservice to both the police and the communities they serve.

This week, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law released a report detailing how "eight years after the 2000 election ... the problems caused by poor ballot design have not been fully and effectively addressed on a national level":

Year in and year out, we see the same mistakes in ballot design, with the same results: tens, and sometimes hundreds, of thousands of voters disenfranchised by confusing ballot design and instructions, sometimes raising serious questions about whether the intended choice of the voters was certified as the winner.

The report incorporates several examples of poor ballot design and offers suggested improvements. One of these case studies features the ballot used in downstate Hamilton County, IL in 2002. Here are the instructions:

And here's the ballot itself (click for full version):

The report explains the problem:

The races at the top of the first and second columns line up exactly. Reading left-to-right, many voters mistakenly marked the arrow to the right of a candidate’s name instead of the arrows to the left. Although the ballot instructions direct voters to complete the arrows to the left of their choices, there are few visual cues on the page. The small amount of space between columns makes it hard for voters to tell which arrow corresponds with the candidate for whom they’d like to vote.

Indeed, you can see how someone intending to vote for Republican comptroller candidate Tom Ramsdell might end up voting for Democratic State Senate candidate Larry Woolard. Or how someone wanting to vote for Blagojevich could instead punch the ballot for Ramsdell. Or how someone trying to vote for Dick Durbin could vote for Jesse White.

And indeed, the Brennan Center found that the number of residual votes for the U.S. senate and governor's races were significantly higher in Hamilton County than elsewhere in the state.

After reading the report, I called the Hamilton County clerk to see if they were still using the problematic ballots.

Continue reading »

Here are some final clips from the "Organizing for Change" panel at Netroots Nation last Saturday.

In this first one, Obama deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand talks about building a "progressive movement":

Hildebrand also emphasized that, while the campaign is going to need additional volunteers in battleground states, those Obama supporters living in "safe states" -- Illinois, for instance -- should "understand the electoral priorities that exist in their own state and take care of those as well":

Finally, Hildebrand admits he was initially a skeptic of the community-based field model implemented by Jeremy Bird prior to the South Carolina primary:

Change to Win has come up with a pretty clever way to emphasize the labor in Labor Day this year.  They're asking progressive bloggers from across the country to pledge to write about workers' rights on September 1:

Take Back Labor Day has a simple objective. The corporate media has turned Labor Day — a holiday that is supposed to commemorate the struggles and sacrifices of the workers who fought and bled to get us the 8-hour work day, the weekend, and many, many other things we take for granted today — into a day to drink beer and eat hot dogs. They’ve taken the labor out of Labor Day.

So some folks here at Netroots Nation started asking what if bloggers across America all blogged on Labor Day about work and workers’ rights? What if we used our own media to tell our own stories — the stories that you don’t hear on the nightly news?

So that’s what we’re going to do. On Labor Day (September 1), we’re going to be telling those stories here at CtW Connect. And I want to encourage you to join this effort and tell your own stories too.

To join, just go to TakeBackLaborDay.org and pledge to blog about what Labor Day means to you.

 Count us in.

Ten days ago, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced an initial $35 million ad buy in 31 House districts nationwide -- but none in Illinois. Today that changed, as the DCCC purchased $18 million worth of additional airtime, including $4 million spread over three congressional districts in the Prairie State. Here's the breakdown:

IL-10: $1.4 million (2,300 points)

IL-11: $1.6 million (4,600 points, multiple markets)

IL-14: $1.02 million (2,400 points, multiple markets)

(As Chris Cilliza explains: " An ad buy of 1,000 points means the average viewer will see the ad 10 times during a given week.")

The DCCC is clearly flexing its fundraising muscles at the moment -- they ended May with $46.5 million more cash-on-hand than their GOP counterpart. And that's great news for the three Democratic candidates in these districts: Rep. Bill Foster, Dan Seals, and Debbie Halvorson.

UPDATED: Reader TB asked me to clarify a few things about how these ad buys work. First of all, the DCCC has reserved this amount of advertising, but hasn't necessarily spent a dime yet. Depending on what happens as Election Day nears, they can increase these amounts or not spend as much as they reserved.

Second, the IL-11 and IL-14 buys were spread over multiple markets, so the point totals are actually going to be smaller in each individual market.

Finally, the buys are spread over several weeks -- not just one, as the explanation of the point system suggests.

That's right. Steve Shearer, campaign manager for 18th District GOP congressional candidate Aaron Schock, said that his man is the Obama of the race, while Democratic candidate Colleen Callahan is playing the Clinton role:

Shearer said Schock is like Obama in that he represents change and people are inspired by him. Callahan, he said, is showing she’s more of a Hillary Clinton supporter.

“This is a Hillary Clinton, throw-the-kitchen-sink blistering negative attack playbook that Sen. Obama has railed against as the broken part of politics right now. Is (Callahan) running because she has a vision for what this country should be or is she nitpicking on Aaron and constantly being nasty?”

What prompted Shearer to accuse Callahan of using the "throw-the-kitchen-sink blistering negative attack playbook"? On her blog, the Democratic candidate recently pointed out: "People want change, and aligning yourself with the current president is not change," referring to President Bush's scheduled appearance at a Schock fundraiser in late July.

So Callahan notes something pretty obvious -- that appearing arm-in-arm with Bush doesn't really communicate "change" -- and the Schock camp responds by called her a "nasty" nitpicker? Hmm.

And back to that Obama comparison, Peoria Pundit sums it up pretty well:

I’m fairly certain that Colleen Callahan would gladly surrender to Aaron Schock 100 percent of the votes from people who find some sort of similarity between he and Barack Obama, provided she gets all the votes of every single 18th District resident who finds some similarity between her and Hillary Clinton.

More from the "Organizing for Change" panel at Netroots Nation on Saturday. Here's Joy Cushman, Obama's deputy field director in Georgia, describing her path into organizing and providing some more detail about the thinking behind the Organizing Fellows program:

Following her talk, the panel played this video profile of an organizing fellow stationed in Ohio:

At the "Organizing For Change" panel yesterday, Obama deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand made some news by announcing tentative plans for a "massive" three-day voter registration drive to be held around Labor Day. Watch it:

We'll be posting more from Hildebrand's Netroots Nation appearance soon.

On Saturday, several members of the Obama campaign sat on a Netroots Nation panel named "Organizing for Change: An Inside Look at Obama For America's Grassroots Strategy." The discussion was moderated by new media director Joe Rospars and featured deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand, Ohio general election director Jeremy Bird, and Georgia deputy field director Joy Cushman.

Of all the panels I attended in Austin, this was one of the more newsworthy, as it's quite rare that you get to hear directly from the Obama organizers and field operatives -- the real backbone of the campaign and the key to Barack's primary success.

The video below shows Bird describing his experiences organizing for Obama in South Carolina, where he served as field director during the primary. I'll be posting additional video from the event in the coming days.

Here's the first part of Bird's presentation:

Here's the brief video shown during the event:

And back to Bird, who tells a fascinating story about a 37-year-old Obama volunteer in Florence, SC who decided to try to unseat a long-time mayoral incumbent using the campaign infrastructure left in place after the presidential primary. He won by a single vote:

During the "Future Leaders" panel at Netroots Nation yesterday, the candidates were asked whether their Republican opponents were starting to take Democratic positions. Seals pointed out that GOP Rep. Mark Kirk has actually been "moving further to the right":

Here's the YouTube video Seals referred to, in which Iraq War veteran Josh Lansdale tries to get Kirk to comment on Iraq: