QUOTE OF THE DAY
SJR: Audit finds state lax in reviewing eligibility for children’s health insurance program
The state is still lax in determining the eligibility of children enrolled in Illinois’ EXPANDED ALL KIDS health insurance program, a new state audit reports.
Among other things, the audit determined that state agencies did not conduct annual reviews of some recipients to determine if they are still eligible for benefits, even though they are supposed to undergo annual reviews.
Agencies also did not verify incomes as required to ensure recipients are still eligible. The audit found some recipients receiving benefits beyond their 19th birthdays, while nearly 300 recipients had more than one identification number.
Chicago Tribune: Pat Quinn’s minimum wage gimmick
To commemorate the state of affairs in the Illinois governor’s race, tonight’s dinner will be saltine crackers dunked in tap water. Sad trombone, please.
Don’t feel sorry for me. I have cabernet on standby.
If you must pull a violin bow, do it for Gov. Pat Quinn — who is demonstrating his solidarity with low-income workers by living on the minimum wage this week. It’s the latest fad among liberal-leaning politicians — tweeting pictures of their cafeteria-style pasta dinners, as if we care.
The Guardian: YA dystopias teach children to submit to the free market, not fight authority
A “progressive parent” friend of mine was recently expressing enthusiasm over the fact that his children had taken to reading Young Adult dystopian novels. They were dying to see the new feature film adaptation of the book The Giver, after having ploughed through the quartet of bestselling books by Lois Lowry. They had absorbed the blockbuster film adaptations of Divergent and The Hunger Games and had hungrily consumed the associated merchandise . They’d also made hundreds of new friends from all over the world who “shared” the same passion for dystopian teen icons Katniss, Tris and Jonas through the tens of thousands of Twitter fan accounts.
My friend thought teenage dystopian fiction to be a great improvement on the Harry Potter cult that had been filling children’s heads with right-wing dreams of public schools and supernatural powers. He felt that YA dystopias were a good way of teaching kids to “question authority” – these books, after all, had protagonists who exposed the lies of their societies, they were standing up against those in power. Dystopian YA was, he claimed, a great left-wing educational tool. My friend could not have been more wrong.
Pantagraph: Transparency policy shows city’s dedication to open government
The city of Bloomington and Mayor Tari Renner deserve a round of applause for their work to make city documents more visible and easier to access for the general public.
Last week, the City Council approved, on a near unanimous vote, an expansion of the city’s website transparency policy that adds to the number of documents posted on the site (www.cityblm.org) and requires they remain posted for five years.
As reported, the ordinance was based on an online transparency checklist used by the Illinois Policy Institute to rank Illinois communities in their disclosure of public information to taxpayers.
Chicago Sun Times: Majority supports plan to give IG power to investigate aldermen
Faisal Khan has managed to accomplish what once appeared to be the politically impossible in Chicago: uniting aldermen behind a plan to let the city’s inspector general investigate City Council members and their employees, an influential alderman said Tuesday.
Ald. Ameya Pawar (47th) said he has lined up more than 30 votes for his plan to abolish Khan’s $354,000-a-year Office of Legislative Inspector General and transfer the power to investigate aldermen and their staff members to city Inspector General Joe Ferguson.
Pawar said he expects to move quickly on the ordinance to fill a void created by Khan’s public feud with aldermen and Mayor Rahm Emanuel and by the fact that the Council’s handpicked inspector general has now exhausted his budget with four months to go in the year.
NBC Chicago: Emanuel to Sign Minimum Wage Executive Order
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to sign an executive order that requires city contractors and subcontractors to pay employees a $13-an-hour minimum wage.
Emanuel’s office said he’ll sign the order Wednesday morning. Officials said it will apply to city contractors advertised after Oct. 1 and will affect about 1,000 contracted employees.
Employees would include landscapers, maintenance workers, security officers and custodial workers.
Wall Street Journal: Food-Stamp Use Starting to Fall
After soaring in the years since the recession, use of food stamps, one of the federal government’s biggest social-welfare programs, is beginning to decline.
There were 46.2 million Americans on food stamps in May, the latest data available, down 1.6 million from a record 47.8 million in December 2012. Some 14.8% of the U.S. population is on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, down from 15.3% last August, U.S. Department of Agriculture data show.
Food-stamp use remains high, historically speaking. The share of Americans on the benefit—which lets them buy basics like cereal and meat and treats like cookies, but not tobacco, alcohol or pet food—is above the 8% to 11% that prevailed before the financial crisis.
Reuters: UPDATE 1-Detroit, creditors lay groundwork for fight over bankruptcy plan
Detroit claimed on Wednesday that its plan to adjust its debt and exit bankruptcy is feasible and fair to creditors, but a bond insurance company contended the plan calls for “historic levels of discrimination” among creditors.
Bruce Bennett, a Jones Day attorney representing Detroit, wrapped up his three-hour opening statement by disputing arguments from creditors who claim the city’s plan to adjust its $18 billion in debt is inadequate and should be scrapped.
“We think this is the city’s last best chance and we think it will work,” Bennett told Judge Steven Rhodes, who on Tuesday began a confirmation hearing on the Detroit plan that is scheduled to last for weeks.
Reason: Generation Independent
There was a moment at the 2013 Grammy Awards that captured how millennials are different than Gen Xers and baby boomers, and what it all means for the future of America. After the traditional parade of side-boob-flashing songstresses and tonsorially wackadoo manchildren allegedly flouting convention in utterly predictable ways, the hipster band fun. (whose name is uncapitalized and over-punctuated) was honored with a richly deserved statuette for the catchy generational anthem “We Are Young.”
The song broke big after being featured on the hit series Glee, itself a touchstone of the millennial generation, roughly defined as those born between the beginning of the 1980s and the early ’00s. Glee is set in the sort of high school unimaginable to Americans raised on older coming-of-age fare such as Happy Days,Rock and Roll High School, or even the ultra-G-rated Saved by the Bell. On Glee, even (especially!) the football players sing in a music club that features a paraplegic guitarist, a Down Syndrome cheerleader, and a lesbian Latina, an ensemble that would have been a punchline just a few decades ago. (As recently as 1983, U.S. Interior Secretary James Watt made headlines for joking that an advisory panel he appointed consisted of “a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple,” a comment that led to his resignation.)
The News Gazette: A padded payroll
While the public is contemplating the wholesale violations of merit hiring rules at the Illinois Department of Transportation, they ought to give some thought as well to the abuse of taxpayer dollars by individuals who helped perpetrate the fraudulent hiring.
One of the officials cited in the report by state Executive Inspector General Ricardo Meza was former Democratic state Rep. Gary Hannig, a longtime Illinois House member from Litchfield.
Our friends at For the Good of Illinois took a look into Hannig’s employment history and came up with some disappointing, but not shocking, numbers. In Illinois politics, nothing qualifies as shocking.
Chicago Tribune: Doctor gets 6 months in jail in Medicare kickback scheme
A longtime Little Village doctor was sentenced to 6 months in prison Wednesday for his role in an elaborate Medicare kickback scheme at a now-shuttered Chicago hospital.
Dr. Subir Maitra, 74, became the first defendant sentenced in the alleged scheme at Sacred Heart Hospital on the city’s West Side. FBI agents conducted a dramatic raid in April 2013, arresting the hospital’s CEO, administrators and several doctors.
The sentence handed down by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly was well below the approximately 2-year term sought by prosecutors. Maitra smiled as he left a courtroom that had been packed with family members and other supporters. He declined to comment to reporters.
The New Yorker: The Virtues of Uber’s Operation SLOG
Last week, Casey Newton, a writer at the Verge, published details about an unusual recruitment campaign launched by Uber, the car-hire service that since its founding, in 2009, has grown to have a valuation of just under twenty billion dollars. According to the report, Uber asked some of its drivers, who operate as independent contractors, to take rides using Lyft, a smaller competitor, and use their time in the car to try to persuade Lyft drivers to come work for Uber. The Uber recruiters could earn hundreds of dollars for each new driver they recruited. The Verge account contains lots of great details, including a document suggesting that Uber contractors appeal to Lyft drivers by mentioning that Uber has a “more polished clientele.” (An Uber spokeswoman pointed me to a blog post in which the company acknowledged that it uses drivers for recruitment.) The scheme was called Operation SLOG.
The revelation of Uber’s brazen campaign comes in the midst of a broader, high-profile debate about hiring in Silicon Valley. In 2010, the Department of Justice investigated several Silicon Valley companies, including Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe, for allegedly doing the opposite of what Uber has done: agreeing not to poach employees from one another. (“If you hire a single one of these people that means war,” Apple’s C.E.O. at the time, Steve Jobs, warnedthe Google co-founder Sergey Brin, according to court papers.) The Justice Department later settled with the companies, but engineers opened a class-action lawsuit against several of them, and earlier this year the parties agreed to a settlement of three hundred and twenty-four million dollars. Last month, Judge Lucy H. Koh of the United States District Court in San Jose rejected the settlement because she felt it didn’t fall “within the range of reasonableness.” The plaintiffs had cited damages of three billion dollars; in that context, Koh felt the settlement amount was too small.
Sun-Times: UNO charter schools now target of IRS audit over bonds
The United Neighborhood Organization’s charter-school network is facing possible new legal troubles, with an IRS audit of bonds issued for its Chicago schools.
The Internal Revenue Service audit involves nearly $37 million in bonds issued in 2011 for the UNO Charter School Network Inc., which has 16 campuses across the city that receive a total of about $50 million a year in funding from the Chicago Public Schools
The UNO charter network disclosed the IRS audit in a filing to bond investors Aug. 27.
CARTOON OF THE DAY
