By Cora Currier and Justin Elliott/ProPublica

The nomination of John Brennan to be CIA director has prompted intense debate on Capitol Hill and in the media about U.S. drone killings abroad. But the focus has been on the targeting of American citizens – a narrow issue that accounts for a miniscule proportion of the hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen in recent years.
Consider: while four American citizens are known to have been killed by drones in the past decade, the strikes have killed an estimated total of 2,600 to 4,700 people over the same period.
The focus on American citizens overshadows a far more common, and less understood, type of strike: those that do not target American citizens, al-Qaeda leaders, or, in fact, any other specific individual.
In these attacks, known as “signature strikes,” drone operators fire on people whose identities they do not know based on evidence of suspicious behavior or other “signatures.”
According to anonymously sourced media reports, such attacks on unidentified targets account for many, or even most, drone strikes.

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Posted on February 27, 2013

By Joaquin Sapien/ProPublica

President Obama has directed the Centers for Disease Control to research gun violence as part of his legislative package on gun control. The CDC hasn’t pursued this kind of research since 1996 when the National Rifle Association lobbied Congress to cut funding for it, arguing that the studies were politicized and being used to promote gun control.
We’ve interviewed Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who led the agency’s gun violence research in the nineties when he was the director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. We talked to Rosenberg about the work the agency was doing before funding was cut and how it’s relevant to today’s gun control debate. Here’s an edited transcript.

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Posted on February 26, 2013

Impact Would Be Deep, Wide, Ironic

“The White House on Sunday detailed how the deep spending cuts set to begin this week would affect programs in every state and the District, as President Obama launched a last-ditch effort to pressure congressional Republicans to compromise on a way to stop the across-the-board cuts,” the Washington Post reports.
Illinois, according to the White House, would lose $33.4 million in primary and secondary education funding; $6.4 million in clean air and water funding; and services to approximately 2,700 children enrolled in Head Start, among other cuts.
While that’s bad enough, a Beachwood analysis has found the White House left out a whole lotta stuff, including:
* Pat Quinn only allowed to describe Illinoisans as “good,” not “good and true.”
* CPS forced to use 1965 textbooks instead of 1982 textbooks.
* Chicago police chief Garry McCarthy only allowed to introduce one new strategy a week instead of three.

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Posted on February 25, 2013

By Kim Barker/ProPublica

A former Illinois congressional candidate and a government watchdog organization have teamed up to sue the Internal Revenue Service, claiming the agency should bar dark money groups from funding political ads.
The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday by David Gill, his campaign committee and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, is the first to challenge how the IRS regulates political spending by social welfare nonprofits, campaign-finance experts say.
As ProPublica has reported, these nonprofits, often called dark money groups because they don’t have to identify their donors, have increasingly become major players in politics since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in early 2010.

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Posted on February 21, 2013

By Voices for Illinois Children

Illinois has made significant strides in improving the lives of children and families over the past 25 years. But that progress is now at risk, jeopardizing the health, safety and well-being of our children and threatening efforts to build a more prosperous future for the state as a whole, according to a report released today by Voices for Illinois Children.
The Illinois Kids Count 2013 report – Moving Policy, Making Progress – focuses on achievements and challenges in early childhood education, health care coverage, access to child care services and seven other featured policy areas.
Unfortunately, over the past several years, the Great Recession [Ed. Note: Not a recession, but a Great Financial Scandal] and the state fiscal crisis have stalled progress, eroded gains or undermined achievements in many of these areas.

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Posted on February 14, 2013

By Steve Rhodes

News and notes from the race to replace Jesse Jackson Jr., including Thursday night’s 20-person debate moderated by Fox Chicago’s Mike Flannery at Governors State University.
1. Deleting old Facebook posts is never a good idea.

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Posted on February 8, 2013

By Cora Currier/ProPublica

In his second inaugural address, President Barack Obama declared that “a decade of war is now ending.”
White House press secretary Jay Carney later said there was “no question” that the U.S. conflict with al-Qaeda was “entering a new phase.”
That day in Yemen, a U.S. drone strike reportedly killed four suspected al-Qaeda militants.
It was one of several strikes there that week and followed a spate of them in Pakistan.
Outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said this weekend that drone strikes “ought to continue to be a tool we ought to use where necessary.”
Like the war in Afghanistan, these and hundreds of other drone strikes have occurred under the authority of a concise law passed one week after 9/11. It reads:

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Posted on February 7, 2013

By Illinois PIRG

Many of America’s wealthiest individuals and largest corporations use tax loopholes to shift profits made in America to offshore tax havens where they pay little to no taxes.
“Tax dodging is not a victimless offense,” says Anu Dathan, program associate for the Illinois PIRG Education Fund.
“When corporations skirt taxes, the public is stuck with the tab. And since offshore tax dodgers avoid both state and federal taxes, they hurt everyday taxpayers twice. Illinois should be using that money to benefit the public.”
In Illinois, $1.9 billion is lost from the corporate abuse of tax havens and $607 million from individuals.

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Posted on February 6, 2013

By Steve Rhodes

“My first encounter with the political machinery of the United Neighborhood Organization Charter Schools network came last spring when I was poking around in an Illinois House race on the Southwest Side,” Mark Brown writes for the Sun-Times.
“I was curious as to why a certain Misty Gillian of Auburn, Ind., had donated $1,500 to Silvana Tabares, a Democratic legislative candidate being backed by UNO CEO Juan Rangel and other charter school advocates.
“Was Gillian such a big believer in charter schools that she had taken an interest in Chicago inner-city Latino politics, I wondered?
“When I left a phone message for Gillian, however, I received a quick return call from her husband, who offered a more familiar if mundane explanation for his wife’s political activity.
“Kevin Gillian said his company, TFC Canopy, was the subcontractor that had supplied the shiny aluminum panels for the exterior of UNO ‘s sparkling new soccer-themed elementary school at 51st and Homan. It was in that capacity that he had been solicited for a campaign donation – and gladly complied, he said.”

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Posted on February 5, 2013