The legislature doesn't dictate everything. So we will look at their outline and make changes that we think are better.....There will be some changes, and we want to make sure we put education and public health, job creation, public safety, those are core priorities and we're going to do the best we can for those, human services and health care... Gov Pat Quinn, quoted in today's story about his plans to amendatorily veto the budget

Sounds like warmed-over "Rewrite to Do Right" from the Blagojevich era:

If they don’t approve a specific bill, I may take other bills and put the same rewrite in it. We’ll take several bites at the apple before we take 'no' for an answer

UPDATE:  John Williams and I discussed this post on WGN AM 720 this afternoon:

EZ and JW on BURKE

MP3 link

Here's the document upon which Ald. Ed Burke (14th) relies when asserting his ongoing right to a full contingent of bodyguards:

Nov. 14, 1986
In the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, County Department Chancery Division

Edward R. Vrdolyak, Alderman of the 10th Ward of the City of Chicago and Edward M. Burke, Alderman of the 14th Ward of the City of Chicago and Chicago City Council Finance Committee Chairman, Plaintiffs, and Robert J. McSweeney, Plaintiff-intervenor

vs.

Fred Rice Jr., Acting superintendent of the Chicago Police Department; Harold M. Washington, Mayor of the City of Chicago; and The City of Chicago, a municipal corporation, Defendants

No. 83 CH 08158

STIPULATION

Plaintiff Edward M. Burke, by his attorney Joseph E. Tighe, and  defendants City of Chicago and Chicago Police Department, by their attorney Richard K. Means, stipulate and agree that, subject to further directive of the mayor of the City of Chicago, which may be inconsistent with this stipulation, defendant Chicago Police Department, its officers and agents, shall, during such time as plaintiff Edward M. Burke continues to serve as Chairman of the Finance Committee of the City Council of the City of Chicago, maintain and preserve the bodyguard protection previously afforded to Burke and stipulate further that the Chicago Police Department shall not during such time as Burke continues to serve as Chairman of the Finance Committee take steps to reduce, alter, impair or otherwise eliminate any of the bodyguard protection presently enjoyed by plaintiff. Burke, including, but not limited to, limiting or impairing the full extent of the right enjoyed by Burke pursuant to interim injunction orders   heretofore entered in this cause in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois.
   The parties further stipulate and agree that the pending case 83 CH 8158 shall be dismissed without prejudice by agreement and that all injunction orders previously entered in that case shall cease to have force and effect,  except inasmuch as said orders may serve to define the rights to bodyguard protection previously enjoyed by Burke.
 The signatories to this stipulation represent that they have the authority to bind their clients by this agreement. This stipulation shall not be filed with the  clerk of the court except upon and in connection with a claim of breach of the stipulation, and the signatories hereto and their respective   clients will maintain duplicate originals of this stipulation.

How airtight is this? WTTW-Ch. 11 reporter Elizabeth Brackett last night put the question to Judson Miner, who was corporation counsel at the time (and Richard Means' boss):

 Brackett: If this court order is still in effect, could the corporation counsel today ask that it be dismissed?

 Miner: Oh, of course. Simple. Go in and point out to the court that--- I assume that the starting point would be it doesn’t apply, but, should a court conclude that it might apply absent some action by the city, we’re here to take the appropriate action to limit the security detail to what’s appropriate.

Tribune photo 2011 by Jose M. Osorio

A roundup of state and local news-review and weekly political chat shows. Descriptions provided by the broadcast outlets in most cases: Chicago Newsroom (CAN-TV) Host Ken Davis is joined by Chicago Magazine associate digital editor and blogger, Whet Moser, In These Times senior editor, Salim Muwakkil and Chicago Tribune columnist, Eric Zorn. They discuss the "flash mob" phenomenon and recent official admissions that the drug war is a failure:

 Paul Green Podcast

(mp3 link) WGN-AM 720: Roosevelt University political scientist   Paul Green makes his weekly visit to the Showcase Studio to talk politics with Greg Jarrett.Topics: The massive Cook County debt and who will remain in the GOP race until next summer.

Then Sunday at 7 p.m. he will perform his new CD of short, autobiographical tales, "The Gift," at the Haymarket Brewery, 737 W. Randolph. Admission is free.

Readers with long memories will remember Zimmerman as "Fat Jack," the Elmhurst Press columnist who got off the couch to challenge me in the Chicago Marathon in 1998. He later gave up the column and now works full time in marketing for the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

He will also be performing "The Gift" at Uncommon Ground 1401 West Devon Ave. on, Monday, July 11th ($10 cover charge).

We don't capitalize words like Radio or Television or Motion Pictures anymore, do we? Once, of course, we did. Now, we know better. However, regarding the internet, we are still behind the curve, behind the Brits, lost in capitalization land. The Guardian and the BBC websites got it right, long ago. We need to play catch up. Now....from 7 Reasons to Lowercase 'Internet' by Dan Bloom

He's right. The argument for capitalization as I understand it rests on the idea that there is only one internet/Internet. But, as I observed in a 2009 post, A non-capital idea: Lower-case the internet,  there is only one sky, one universe, one cosmos, one atmosphere and one electromagnetic spectrum and we don't capitalize those.

It's because of this kind of thing that we read Wimbledon Wants an End to Players’ Grunts -- Official blames the noise on “an education problem among the younger players” in Slate.

I wish I could tell Walt Teichen not to worry, that common sense will surely prevail in the sad, scary story of his son.

But I would be lying. His son is a sex offender, and when it comes to sex offenders, hysteria and superstition trump common sense every time.

In December 2008, Kevin Teichen (pictured), then 27, had sex with two 16-year-old girls in a Downers Grove motel room. The girls were willing participants, and Teichen, who suffers from Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, has the judgment and social skills of a 10-year-old.
 
But the girls were under the legal age of consent, and authorities contended Kevin knew right from wrong when he had sex with them. So he ended up pleading guilty but mentally ill to aggravated criminal sexual abuse and received a five-year prison sentence.

Flash ahead to today: Kevin is scheduled to be paroled from Taylorville Correctional Center on July 23. His parents, Walt, 60, and Kathy, 58, want him to move back into their Elmhurst home where they can supervise his transition to freedom.

Unfortunately, there is a part-time preschool program operating in a church around the corner from the Teichen residence. It's roughly 400 feet from lot line to lot line, and the rigid, one-size-fits-all legal restrictions in Illinois prohibit sex offenders from living within 500 feet of schools, parks, day-care centers and other places where children gather.

Nothing in the record suggests Kevin is a pedophile with a deviant interest in the 2- to 5-year-old clientele of a preschool or that he has any predatory tendencies.

But even if he were a pedophile, the vast weight of research on residential restrictions — now in roughly 30 states and expanding, in places, to quarter-mile buffer zones — suggests this geographic limitation would do nothing to protect children.

"There was no significant relationship between reoffending and proximity to schools or day cares," concluded an academic study of such restrictions published last year in Criminal Justice and Behavior, the journal of The American Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology. "The belief that keeping sex offenders far from schools and other child-friendly locations will protect children from sexual abuse appears to be a well-intentioned but flawed premise."

That premise will keep Kevin locked up past his parole date. The Illinois Department of Corrections refuses to allow sex offenders without legal places to live to enter supervised release (parole) programs, and a DOC spokeswoman said roughly 1,000 such inmates a year are "violated at the door," as the expression goes, and reincarcerated until their full sentences are up.

Some of you, I know, are saying, "So what? Sex offenders are the lowest of the low and the longer they're locked up, the better."

From a release  about a new Harris Poll:

When asked if the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing citizenship to any person born in the United States is a good or bad law, two thirds of American adults (66%) say it's a good law with 40% saying it's very good and only a quarter (27%) call it a bad law. This approval is seen across all political groups and philosophies, although to varying degrees--Conservatives are least likely to call this a good law, as a small majority do (53%) while Liberals are most likely to call it a good law, with 84% saying so and fully 60% saying it is a very good law.

Despite this support for the Constitution, when the question is framed slightly differently and maternity tourism is explained, a different response is seen. When Americans were told that some pregnant foreigners arrange trips to the United States specifically timed so that they give birth during their stay, making any child born an automatic U.S. citizen, two thirds of U.S. adults say the Constitution should be changed to no longer allow for this (67%) with over two in five saying it definitely should be changed (45%). This perspective is shared across all political parties and philosophies:

Four in five Republicans (79%) say the Constitution should be changed to no longer allow for this, as do seven in ten Independents (70%) and 54% of Democrats.

The argument for "birthright citizenship," as it's called, is that it greatly reduces the possibility of a permanent class of "outsiders" who live here generation after generation as immigrants. We don't want second and third generation kids who are not fully American just because, say, their grandparents weren't naturalized.

But that argument presumes continuing residency in the United States, and I see no particular advantage except perhaps clerical to conferring citizenship on babies that happen to be born here but are then reared in another country.

In other words, I have the same uneasiness about "maternity tourism" as the respondents to this poll.

In the news:

The federal jury considering the fate of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich completed its sixth day of deliberations today without reaching a verdict.

Another forecast of mine bites the dust. I was pretty sure that the jurors would come back, refreshed and clear-eyed from their long weekend and finalize their verdict today. That they did not indicates to me that there's a fairly stout stalemate on the panel on at least one of the issues before them -- maybe all of them.

I wonder what the scholarship shows about these bankers'-hours deliberations vs. marathon deliberations -- if forcing jurors to deliberate 10 to 12 hours a day, 6 days a week changes the overall hours of deliberation prior to verdicts, and if putting jurors under that kind of strain changes the likelihood of acquittal.

UPDATE: Jury instructions (.pdf) as proposed. Not sure how the final might differ.

Chicago Newsroom CAN TV: Ken Davis is joined by Mick Dumke (Chicago Reader) and Kate Grossman (Chicago Sun-Times). They discuss how the Chicago Public Schools' decision to rescind a 4% pay increase for teachers was orchestrated, and Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy's recent statements on gun control and gangs. Connected to Chicago (mp3 link) (WLS-AM) Host Bill Cameron with Ray Long of the Chicago Tribune, Greg Hinz of Crain's Chicago Business and Lynn Sweet of Chicago Sun-Times. They discuss Governor Quinn backing down after threatening to withhold construction funds to get something he wanted in the budget. Why did back down? They also discuss Mayor Emanuel wanting to be a mayor on a national stage not just local. Is it unfair for the Chicago School Board to rescind the 4% wage increase that is in the Chicago Teachers Union?

Chicago Tonight: The Week in Review: Host Joel Weisman with Charles Thomas, ABC-7 News; Tom Corfman, Crain’s Chicago Business ; Kate Grossman, Chicago Sun-Times and Mike Adamle, NBC-5 News. Rahm Emanuel grades his first 30 days as mayor of Chicago. Summer construction crews will continue working now that Senate President John Cullerton agrees to drop social programs from the capital expenditure bill. Chicago teachers vow to re-open contract negotiations after the Chicago Public Schools board unanimously rejects a 4 percent teacher raise. The Blagojevich jury continues to deliberate. A perfect storm hits Metra staff during rush hour forcing multiple train cancellations. And in sports, we take a look at both the state of Wrigley Field and the Cubs.

Season one is in the books, and Maureen Ryan is wroth:

This hour was, in my opinion, the worst season finale of all time, because it was a terrible execution of a set of colossally stupid, misguided and condescending ideas...What a mess. What an avoidable, idiotic, ill-conceived mess....I do know one thing. 'The Killing' has killed off any interest I had in ever watching the show again. That is one fact I can state conclusively.

So is Alan Sepinwall:

This will be the last review I write of "The Killing," because this will be the last time I watch "The Killing." Because I have no interest in going forward with a show that treats its audience this way.  I, like many of you, had grown so frustrated with the thin characterization and plotting based entirely around red herring cliffhangers that I was largely sticking it out to find out who killed Rosie...This show DOES have a formula, one that's very easy to anticipate now. Because all you really have to understand about "The Killing" -- and what should have made me anticipate where the finale was going, only even I couldn't fathom that the creative team would so fundamentally misread their audience in that way --  is this: Every single thing this show tells you is a lie....I've been lied to by this show for the last time. Good luck to those of you who continue with it into the second season.

 Nina Shen Rastogi is more temperate:

When, exactly, is Holder supposed to have gone rogue and gotten involved in the attempt to frame Richmond? One Slatester noted that it had to have been sometime during this episode, since at the end of "Beau Soleil," the audience watches as Holder goes to the corner of Fifth and Jackson, spots the campaign poster, and realizes that Richmond is Orpheus. But if he's already trying to pin the murder on him, then why does he look so surprised?...[But this ending] leaves open the possibility that the mystery can, in fact, be wrapped up in a satisfying way. (I'm nothing if not a cockeyed optimist.) It may have been crude, but it was effective. I'll be checking back next season—though most likely from the safe remove of my DVR.

Meredith Blake opens up a can of harsh:

Creating a silly show riddled with plot holes is one thing, but canceling it before the killer’s identity is even revealed? That’s just bad form....I decided to make a list (I was inspired by Holder, I guess) of all the far-fetched occurrences and unlikely coincidences that have taken place across the course of the season and—guess what?—it’s pretty damn long...This is a crime drama, not a surrealist fantasy, so believability is part of the implicit bargain. The Killing also strains hard for realism. Sometimes it tries too hard to be gritty (All that rain! All that gum-chewing! All that stringy hair!), but at least it’s trying.  So you’d think that the same attention to detail and authenticity would have gone into the writing. But no.

Andy Greenwald is peevish:

We could have lived without resolution if there had been anything else at all worth living for. But the finale was just the last in a long, frustrating, and soggy line of cheap fake-outs, preposterous 180s, and colossal storytelling disappointments....The more serious detective work [in the finale] involves going to gas stations and asking the attendants if they remember refueling a black sedan. In the middle of the night. Two weeks ago. It’s just like that famous saying “Gas Station attendants never forget.” Oh wait — that’s elephants...What tripe! What gall! The Killing began with atmospheric promise then frittered that promise away like so many tendrils of (fake) weed smoke out of Holder’s betraying mouth. The murder victim was an empty cipher. Every suspect was a red herring. The characters were obnoxious, shrill, hammy, and — this is key — terrible at their jobs. (The only protagonist who experienced any sort of growth — and thus the only one to develop any sort of rapport with viewers — was Holder. And for the sake of a cheap twist, all that development was squandered last night....In reality, the only crime we’re concerned with is the one just perpetrated by AMC. Back in April, when the show was launching, the rain was falling, and hopes — including ours! — were as high as the space needle.

And Todd VanDerWerff piles on:

Up until those final five minutes, the season finale was  fine....then the bottom fell out and the show went right back to being one of the biggest wastes of promising elements that ever was....I've tried to keep an angry tone out of this review, even if the last few minutes of "Orpheus Descending" really struck me as the show's writers flipping off the audience....On a show in which the character development mostly failed and plot development was haphazard at best, hanging on to find out who killed Rosie was pretty much all I had left. And now that I have to wait until sometime in 2012 to find out even that, I can't imagine I'll even care.

My thoughts:

 To judge from my inbox, London is a perilous place.  In the last several years, I’ve received dozens of anguished emails from friends  reporting that they’ve been mugged while on vacation in that fabled city.

“All cash, cell phones and credit card were stolen off us,” said the most recent piteous missive. It arrived Thursday morning from the account of our neighbor Sarah.

“We've been to the embassy and the police here but they're not helping issues at all,”  her   note rambled on. “Our flight leaves tomorrow but we're having problems settling the hotel bills and the hotel manager won't let us leave until we settle the bills. Please, I really need your financial assistance. Please, let me know if you can help us out?”

The idea is that, because I am a nice and helpful person, I will wire a couple of grand over to London to Sarah, who will pay me back in full as soon as she arrives home. And by the time I discover that she’s actually still in Chicago, the crook who gained access to her email account  and flooded her contact list with frantic pleas will have collected the money and vanished into the fog.

This flim-flam is known as the  emergency scam or the stranded scam, and is a subset of the  of what the Federal Trade Commission calls impostor scams.   They  cracked the FTC’s top-10 list of online frauds last year and now rank slightly higher than the I-need-your-help-transferring-my-riches ruse that often involves deceased Nigerian potentates.

“We know impostor scams are one the rise,   but it’s hard to get a handle on the numbers” said  C. Steven Baker,  director of the FTC’s Midwest regional office.  An FTC  survey showed that 12 percent of the adult population loses money to scam artists every year, but 92 percent of  victims  don’t file reports with tracking agencies.

Victims and intended victims should file a report at ftc.gov (or call 877-FTC-HELP) and register the incident  with FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at  ic3.gov.

 Con artists have always exploited human weakness to separate their marks from their money.  But usually it’s greed, vanity, laziness or some other flaw.  Impostor scams, in contrast, exploit a virtue --  compassion – making them a particularly vile form of crime.

The worst of them is the grandparent scam,  in which the evildoers telephone elderly marks and claim either to be a grandchild in trouble with the law  or a police officer demanding bail for the arrested grandchild.

In February, police broke up an alleged grandparent-scam ring near Toronto, charging that a gang of seven  had placed 200 such calls a day since November and, with  about a 10 percent success rate, had  bilked $3 million from seniors in the U.S. and Canada.

“Western Union, its agents and their employees are not policing agencies,”  replied  Western Union spokeswoman Anna Alejo when I wrote to ask why it’s apparently so easy for scammers to pick up their loot. “While every effort is made to ensure that the correct individual receives a money transfer transaction, it is important to remember that fraudsters often have access to false identification that can be difficult to distinguish from a proper ID.”

 As far as my neighbor Sarah knows, no one in her circle fell for the “I’ve been mugged in London!” email, though she herself fell for the enabling scam – a warning that seemed to come from her email provider that directed her to an   official-looking dummy website where she “verified” her account by entering her address and password.

Thus armed, the scammers not only commandeered (and erased) her email account, they gained access to her Facebook page and engaged in real-time chats asking her friends to wire cash to Great Britain.

Lesson one: Never, ever, ever provide your log-on information in response to an email or a link embedded in an email, no matter how urgent or official it may sound.

Lesson two:  London is not that perilous. Odds are minuscule that your stranded friend or distressed grandchild needs money wired immediately.  But if you think there’s a chance the plea is genuine, take a few minutes to make a couple of calls or send a couple of emails to independent sources to verify the need.

Sarah told me her phone started going off almost instantly when the bogus email began arriving. In some cases , the friends who checked in were people she hadn’t talked to in years.

A happy ending for everyone but the crooks.

 Resources:

The Family Way -- (Snopes)

The "mugged in London" scam -- (personal computing consultant Martin Kadansky)

In 'phishing' scams, purported acquaintances claim to be stranded abroad (Washington Post)

Scam Alert: Desperate friend mugged, stranded in London. Not!

 I'm stuck in London and I need some cash (CyberWatch)

From the Federal Trade Commission:

Spotting an Impostor: Scammers Pose as Friends, Family and Government Agencies

Money Matters: Wiring Money

How to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission

Internet Crime Complaint Center (a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National White Collar Crime Center and the Bureau of Justice Assistance).

Illinois Attorney General consumer fraud hotline: 800-386-5438

A sad story of a Gmail account hijacking with an even sadder ending (On Your Side)

Detecting suspicious account activity & Advanced sign-in security  (Gmail blog)

Chicago-Naperville-Joliet  Metropolitan Statistical Area Identity Theft complaints per 100,000 population --   94.9    Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book --January – December 2010  (Federal Trade Commission)

Borrowed advice: "Passwords are like underwear. The longer the better, don't share them with friends, don't leave yours lying around, change them often."

[Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)] never spoke before the age of three, when, hearing his younger brother cry, he said "What ails wee Jock?"...from Bertrand Russell's   "An Outline of Philosophy," (1927).

Note: Google as a verb-- to capitalize? Or not to capitalize?

The law has been tied up in the courts since a Democrat filed a lawsuit accusing Republicans of violating the state open meetings law during the run-up to passage.The Wisconsin Supreme Court said the judge had no authority to interfere with the legislative process... from our story, Court upholds Wisconsin's polarizing union law

Really? What, then, is the remedy when a legislature goes rogue and stops obeying the laws meant to check and harness its power? Perhaps the rule-of-law conservatives who tarry on this blog can enlighten me.

UPDATE: Below are some passages from the dissents to the opinion:

The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.

To break the world record, you must text this phrase in less than  25.94 seconds.

Via Slate