I saw an interview with an officer from the area in which this happened. He said granny was tased because the officer was desperately trying to keep the lady from walking out into traffic. No, the lady was attempting to walk back to her truck to get inside. You know, using that same space on the shoulder next to her car that officer had her use when he told her to get out of the car in the first place.
Sorry, folks. This woman wasn’t in danger. The officer wasn’t in danger. I was under the impression that police officers went though training to keep them from using force in this sort of situation. I’ve seen videos of officers remains cool when dealing with far crankier and far more abusive drivers.
The following appeared in my inbox earlier today. My thoughts at the end:
“Thank you Mr. Chairman,
“I rise today in opposition to H.R. 626.
“Ladies and gentlemen what we do here in the United States House and United States Congress really sets a precedent. Not only for the people we employ as a federal government, but also who small businesses and large businesses around our country employ: the standards that we set, the expectations that we have in terms of benefits.
“And I like everyone else enjoy federal benefits. My employees here as a member of Congress enjoy our great benefits plan.
“Unfortunately, back home in central Illinois, my constituents there are not employed by the federal government. By and large they are employed by the private sector. And unfortunately, for them, this is a time for them not looking to expand their benefit programs, not going to their employers asking for more, but they’re thankful for the paycheck they’ve got.
“It seems to me a little disingenuous by those in support of this legislation that at a time we’re talking about stimulating the economy, we’re talking about feeling the pain of the American people, that we know that truth, that our constituents are having to do the opposite; they are having to cut back, they are having to do with less. And this bill and this measure seems to do the opposite.
“Expanding four weeks of pay of paid federal leave, will not only add a cost to the federal government by the Congressional Budgets Office’s own figures of $1 billion in costs over the next five years, but it will undoubtedly set a precedent for the private sector. And unfortunately, the private sector, they cannot print the money or tax the American people to pay for their benefits.
“The unemployment rate in my state in Illinois is just over 9 percent as of April. This includes over 24 thousand jobs laid off by my home town employer, Caterpillar. When I go back this weekend, I will not be able to tell those individuals who are now unemployed, not only do they not have a job, that my colleagues in this body, that our employees who have not felt the economic impact of a downturn, are not only getting to keep their job, but also have added benefits at the expense of them as taxpayers.
“I don’t know how we can honestly vote for more benefits, more pay and more costs to the federal budget at the expense of taxpayers and those people who are cutting back and losing their jobs.
“I urge a no vote. I yield back the rest of my time.”
Congressman Schock makes some valid points. People who do not work for the government don’t like having to pay taxes to that public servants can enjoy benefits that they do not get. I know I do not.
But is it true that all private employees do without this kind of benefit? I image there are some plans that do, I can’t imagine many do, and I can imagine those that do want to rid themselves of that cost.
But I really take issue with this statement: “And unfortunately, for them, this is a time for them not looking to expand their benefit programs, not going to their employers asking for more, but they’re thankful for the paycheck they’ve got. “
What’s he’s saying is that because the lousy economy has his constituents too frightened to ask for this benefit, don’t give it to federal employees. Besides the fact that the statement demonstrates a poor attitude about people who work for a living, it’s not completely accurate. Workers have felt afraid to ask for more for decades now. I’ve got a feeling that once the Employee Free Choice Act gets approved we WILL see more workers demanding more from their employers.
Schock says that it’s “unfortunate” (his words) don’t feel free in this economy to ask for me. Yet he doesn’t support EFCA, which would make it easier for workers to ask for more, once they’re in a union.
Federal employees would be eligible for four weeks of paid leave when they become parents, under a bill approved by the House on Thursday night, June 4.
The measure, which attracted the backing of 24 Republicans and passed 258-154, carves the four paid weeks out of the 12 weeks of unpaid leave that are available to all workers under the Family and Medical Leave Act. The paid leave is provided after birth, adoption or the placement of a foster child.
And my advice to Congressman Schock is to NOT mention a frightened-into-submission private workforce as a reason to not give benefits to public employees.
The announcement came today. The Journal Star’s new Website will “go live” at about 8 p.m. Tuesday:
The new Web site should generally run faster than the current site. It features a brighter, cleaner look along with a new logo. It should also be easier for users to navigate. Depending on your Internet service provider, it could take up to 24 hours for the new format to be fully viewed on home computers.
…
“It has served us well, but, over time, it has grown rather cluttered. Because of that clutter, it can occasionally be difficult to navigate,” said Journal Star Managing Editor John Plevka. “We recognize that change can be jarring, but we believe at the end of the day, the new pjstar.com will serve our users more effectively and more efficiently.”
No word on whether there will be additional content, although they say the new site will have every thing the old one does. My biggest complaint about the current site hasn’t been the design or slow load times (well, occasionally). It’s been that they toss any article more than two weeks old behind a firewall they call their paid archives. In other words, you have to give the Journal Star money for OLD newspaper articles. A smarter business model is to require a nominal fee for access to the articles people want to read. Why not? People pay $1 for a single copy right now.
Print is dead, it just hasn’t fallen down yet. Take my advice, PJS, and start making the transition to online only news.
Heh. This post will give Subway Conductor something new to carp about.
It took a more than a couple days, but the anonymous gnomes who pen official opinions on the Journal Star’s award-winning (snicker) editorial page have finally editorialized about the stunning drop in violent crime from te same time last years.
As readers may recall, recently I chastised the Journal Star for failing to quote Peoria Mayor Jim Ardis even once in four articles on the issues, even though this news paper’s award-winning (snickering again) editorial page lambasted the mayor on multiple occasions for having made crime an issue when he ran for office, yet beins sensitive to what he felt was over sensationalized coverage of crime.
On Wednesday, the JSEB wrote that the drop in violent crime and murder was a good thing (how brave of them), but tucked this little comment into their piece:
In Peoria it’s too soon to draw that conclusion, even though these numbers are undeniably good news, eager as some pundits are to declare violent crime in the city a thing of the past.
Yeah … that would be me, I guess. Although I never declared violent crime a thing of the past.
Indeed, we’ve seen how quickly things can change, for better and worse. Last year’s murders came in bunches, with some months seeing as many as four killings, others none at all. The police chief and other city officials urged citizens not to panic, with assurances that if you weren’t looking for trouble in River City, you weren’t likely to find it.
Just as that was good advice then, so is a victory celebration premature now. Indeed, no sooner was Sunday’s Journal Star coming off the press with this story than a 55-year-old man was found shot in the head while sitting in his car near Club Apollo on the city’s South Side.
They are hedging their bets.
Mayor Jim Ardis also has made crime something of a bully-pulpit priority. There seems to be more neighborhood buy-in, and we hear anecdotally of some segments of the community being more cooperative with law enforcement efforts than they have been in the past.
To repeat:
When crime is up, the mayor deserved criticism because he made a bid deal about the issue when he was running for office.
When crime is down, the mayor deserves only a tiny bit of the credit, because crime “is well beyond the capacity of any one person to influence it significantly.”
In other words, ‘let’s not heap too much praise on politicians we don’t endorse, but let’s mock and ridicule politicians we don’t like if there’s an opportunity to do so.’ That’s standard operating procedure at 1 Propaganda Plaza.
Check this out: The spiffy new State Journal-Register Web site has an easy-to-access pagelisting all their house bloggers … followed by a list of “Sprngfieldish” bloggers.
Very cool.
My advice to the SJ-R: Constantly monitor this list of links. Bloggers come and go. In Peoria, this is especially true.
And I notice that Disarranging Mine is conspicuously absent from the SJ-R list.
$10 bucks says the soon-to-be-revamped PJStar site won’t do this at all. Which is their right, of course. And if they do, it would take a lot of testicular fortitude to link to a blogger who constantly insults their edit board and their corporate overlords.
Once again, HOINews came through for parents at District 150 schools. Last night, I caught their 10 p.m. newscast, and there were two — count ‘em, TWO — reports related to the quality of education at Peoria’s public schools. One was a follow-up to the station’s original report on how some school’s aren’t meeting state-mandated physical education requirements. The other was a report on how a principal who lost a no-confidence vote was pegged as a new vice principal at the newly reconstituted Manual High School. Kudos to the folks at HOI News. It’s sometimes hard to get any coverage at all on other stations.
The Peoria Journal Star couldn’t find a way to mention Peoria Mayor Jim Ardis’ name even once when it devoted four stories Sunday to how the murder rate has dropped (details avaialable here).
As Mayor Jim Ardis’ Race Relations Commission begins its work, there are some black leaders in the community who are skeptical on how much the group can accomplish.
My two cents: Expect more of this bias the closer we get to municipal elections.
While I have yet to see an announcement on the Journal Star’s Website (perhaps I missed it), the Springfield’s GateHouse Media newspaper is keeping its readers informedof the coming changes, with a nice long story detailng what is coming:
The State Journal-Register’s Web site will look different when you log on Tuesday night. Sj-r.com will change from using a homegrown computer program for managing stories to one used by newspapers nationwide. Called Zope, the program will result in a cleaner, more up-to-date look for the Web site and allow reporters and editors to post from anywhere they have Internet access.
And:
The site will be able to handle large numbers of visits at one time. In the past, big breaking news has led to traffic bottlenecks that slowed visitors’ access to the site.
The site will better present the many video and photo galleries the site offers daily.
The new system will allow easier story updating and will better present some of the features we have.
Thanks for the transparency, Springfielders. No doubt the new sites in Springfield and Peoria will resemble what’s used in Galesburg.
Remember how the Peoria Journal Star quoted a bunch of politicians and political scientists complaining that the bloggers are obsessed with dredging up old quotes to make people look bad, thus providing a disincentive to participate in the process. Well, I wouldn’t include The Daily Show with Jon Stewart among the digital media, but they’ve got the right idea:
So here’s Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of coalition forces in Iraq four years ago, describing the situation in a TV interview in September 2003: “We’re not in a quagmire,” he’s saying confidently. “The progress is unbelievable.”
So what about that progress, general? Because here’s Sanchez, now retired, talking about Iraq in a video clip from last October: “There has been a glaring, unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders. . . . There’s no question that America is living a nightmare with no end in sight.”
The before-and-after videos didn’t air on CNN or MSNBC or ABC. Instead, the revealing sound bites ran back to back on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.” The satiric Comedy Central program regularly unearths telling footage ignored or overlooked by the real news guys.
The trouble with the “real news guys” is that they deeply into a symbiotic relationship with the politicians they are supposed to be watching over on our behalf. Media organizations — and individual members of the media — have their own agendas, whether they reveal them or not. Sometimes they need to NOT piss off the people they are covering, so punches are pulled. Sometimes, they are so busy feeding the monster with sound and words, they can’t see the whole story.
But Comedy Central’s only real goal is get a laugh, at anyone’s expense. But I’m not going to discount the legitimate role satire and ridicule play in politics. Sometimes we’re laughing through the pain.
Good on Stewart and his show for getting it right. Letting the public know they are being lied to is not being negative. It’s as essential role of journalism.
I was at One World the other day at what I incorrectly thought was an off-the-record lunch. I picked up the latest issue of Numero, No. 26. I have to say this little magazine/entertainment guide is beginning to grow on me. Maybe that’s because they interviewed me for their article on how blogging is becoming an important part of the 5th Estate. The article was short (which is understandable, considering the magazine’s format). As far as the photographs … I’ll just say that photographer Dennis Slape (also the managing editor) didn’t have a lot to work with. I looked like I just woke up from the nap I took behind a dumpster. Jonathan Ahl looked as dapper he usually does.
So, we’re slipping though the magazine when ONE of my dining companions (I won’t mention his name, but his initials are C.J.S.) starting whining about how they didn’t interview HIM. I’m tellin’ ya, this guy is insecure. I had to promise that the NEXT time someone in the media interviews me about blogging or the state of Peoria politics, that I would mention HIS name as a good source for information.
I was chatting with one of the parents who unsuccessfully tried to convince District 150 to NOT gouge 45 minutes of instructional time from primary schools. His assessment mirrored my own: HOI News has presented the best coverage, hand’s down, of the whole controversy.
And this was before today’s story about how at least one school’s plans to try to count recess as physical education is contrary to a state law requiring actual physical education classes (which means recess doesn’t count). This particular newscast also included a report on how the number of guns being brought into schools might be higher than the media is being led to believe.
I’m not saying that other news organizations are ignoring the whole mess. But HOI News has made itself the station to watch if you have kids in D150 and are concerned about how the district is being run. Kudos.
Conversely, WEEK’s coverage is considered to be the weakest. Sorry Mac and Mike.
I know I shouldn’t gloat … considering my own issues with domain expiration.
But still.
I’m sure the domain will start working …. tomorrow. In the evening.
UPDATE: It’s 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday. I’m still getting that placeholder page. The same thing happened to me. The site was unavailable for at least 18 hours for some of my readers.
Attention newspaper editors and reporters: When you are doing a story about political bloggers, it might — just might — be a good idea to pick up the phone and, you know, talk to a political blogger.
Sunday’s Journal Star includes an article about how technology is shaping politics. There’s even a segment on how blogs are making it harder for politicians to get away with saying goofy things. Because the article’s sources are pretty much limited to politicians and political scientists, the general tone of the piece is that bloggers are so darn unfair. And bloggers are biased. Well, openly biased, unlike newspapers with their unsigned editorials and pretense at objectivity.
I can name several people in public life right here in River City who do not trust the Journal Star because of inaccurate and misleading reporting on them, and then for continually repeating that inaccurate reporting when their name comes up in a different, unrelated story. And I’ve forgotten how many times the Journal Star editorial page has left out information that is contrary to the point it was trying to make.
It’s a tired old canard: The Internet can’t be trusted because it gets the facts wrong, but print can be trusted because it has editors. Folks, print has been getting it wrong all along. Which isn’t surprising, since human beings are involved. But so has the Internet. The media is plural. It’s a not a monolithic entity. But print and broadcast are closer to being the monolith, with all the mergers and takeovers. It’s easier, these days, to get a fair shake from the Blogosphere as a whole than from corporate media.
So can we please put to bed this stupid idea that biased and innacurate reporting started when Al Gore invented the Internet?
And by the way, 100,000 “hits” a month is NOTHING. I got 902,000 hits in April. I suspect that the Illinois GOP site actually gets something like 100,000 page views, which is more respectable. But not close to the 345,403 page views that Webalizer says I got in April.
But then, if the writer of this piece had bothered to speak to a political blogger about the effect of political blogs on politics, this little mistake might not have happened.
Billy Dennis is a former reporter and editor at small daily and weekly newspapers in Illinois and Missouri. He comments on media, news and politics. He also owns and operates The Blog Peoria Project, which promotes community-based citizen journalism in his hometown, Peoria IL.
July 11-12, the Peoria PlayHouse will be soaring at the Prairie Air Show with engaging activities to entertain even the littlest pilots! Check out each of the PlayHouse Passport locations to have a passport stamped and receive a prize at the PlayHouse tent! Enjoy a weekend of airplanes and PLAY!
The fourth annual State Farm Tournament of Champions is a 4-day event that will take place on Thanksgiving weekend of November 2009. The dates of the event are Wednesday, November 23rd through Saturday, November 28th and will be held at Washington Community High School. The arena will play host to four separate national high school and prep school basketball challenges.
@tweet1211 That he was the last president popular enough at end of second term to win a third. Perhaps Clinton, but probably not. in reply to tweet12113 hrs ago
So I am not to worked up over Manuel Zelaya getting ousted in Honduran. Seems to be that Zelaya was staging a populist coup of his own ... 3 hrs ago
Imagine, if you will, Ronald Reagan deciding in 1988 that the best thing for America would be a third term, regardless of Constitution ... 3 hrs ago
RT AhmadiNejad is a puppet; he is a beard. No honorable man would let himself be used like this. He is a pawn.He is worthless. #iranelection3 hrs ago
All sorts of site issues at http://blogpeoria.com ... admin pages white, 404 messages for individual posts. Lotsa fun. Oh well, off to work. 15 hrs ago
Check this out: The spiffy new State Journal-Register Web site has an 
While I have yet to see an announcement on the Journal Star’s Website (perhaps I missed it), the Springfield’s GateHouse Media newspaper is 
Billy Dennis is a former reporter and editor at small daily and weekly newspapers in Illinois and Missouri. He comments on media, news and politics. He also owns and operates 
