By The Chicago GOP

Republican Party Leaders,
Late [Wednesday] afternoon we scored a significant victory in federal court over Chicago Democrats and the Chicago Board of Elections.
U.S. District Court Judge Milton Shadur ruled that we have a First Amendment right to prevent those who vote in Democratic primaries from being seated as Republican committeemen in Chicago, and to that extent our bylaws override state law.
The net effect is that 13 ward committeemen have been permanently removed from office.
This ruling has broader implications for the Party in Illinois.

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Posted on September 16, 2016

By The Society Of Professional Journalists

Forty journalism and open government groups today sent a letter to White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest in response to his recent New York Times letter to the editor calling for journalists to give President Obama credit for improvements in government transparency.
SPJ and other journalism and government accountability groups have contacted the White House multiple times over the past several years, asking the Obama administration to stop practices in federal agencies that obscure transparency and prevent important information from getting to the public. In the last letter, from August 2015, more than 50 organizations signed on to a letter at SPJ’s request.
“You highlight some of the ways the Obama administration has improved transparency in the White House,” the letter states. “Yet, the 50-plus groups repeatedly outlined to the administration various ways transparency has gotten worse, including:

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Posted on September 13, 2016

By Scott Klein/ProPublica

There is no more essential act in a democracy than voting. But making sure that the balloting is open to all – and efficiently administered – has been, at best, a low priority for many state legislatures, a victim of misplaced priorities and, at times, political gamesmanship.
Historically, newsrooms have focused on covering the outcome of Election Day, relegating voting snafus to be followed up later, if at all. Instead, we’re announcing Electionland, a project to cover voting access and other problems in real time.

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Posted on September 12, 2016

By Nika Knight/Common Dreams

Nearly 50 million children have been uprooted from their homes around the world, and 28 million of those are refugees fleeing violence and conflict – and “that is a conservative estimate,” according to a UNICEF report published Tuesday.
The total number of child refugees doubled between 2005 and 2015, the report says, and children now comprise half of all refugees despite accounting for less than a third of the global population.
The report, Uprooted: The Growing Crisis for Refugee and Migrant Children, presents “for the first time, comprehensive, global data about these children,” UNICEF writes.
A stunning 100,000 child refugees are traveling without their parents or families.

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Posted on September 9, 2016

By Alec MacGillis/ProPublica

For years, Democratic elected officials in Washington have been wary of going after Wall Street excesses too hard, lest the deep-pocketed financial industry throw all its resources to Republicans.
This has been especially true of one of the most notorious targets for financial reform: the favorable tax treatment of the outsized compensation earned by partners in private equity firms.
Democrats have long spoken out against this so-called “carried-interest loophole,” yet have often not pushed as hard as they could to change the law, which saves some of the very wealthiest people in finance billions of dollars in taxes each year.
All of this explains why the scenario presented by the 2016 election is so surreal. The Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, has vowed to close the loophole, saying it’s unfair that the highly compensated money managers who benefit from it “pay lower tax rates than nurses or . . . truckers.”
Clinton recently went even further than President Obama on the issue, saying she would close the loophole through executive action if Congress continued to resist a legislative fix, a step that Obama has shied away from taking.

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Posted on September 8, 2016

By Steve Balkin

Criminal violence seems to be falling in America long term, even in Chicago. But it is recently on the increase in Chicago and other places. Five strands of thought seem to permeate thinking about reducing this spike in criminal violence: (1) increase get-tough criminal justice system intervention, such as more police and longer prison sentences; (2) interrupt the “cradle to prison” pipeline by improving schools and implementing restorative justice programs; (3) gun restriction and control; (4) eliminate the racial bias of police, and; (5) bring more good jobs to lower income areas.
Often, policy-makers and activists focus on just one of the above as the solution towards reducing crime in general and for solving the problem of violent crime in particular.
There is a sixth way which I consider more broad-based and integrative, which is to drastically reconfigure the policy handles in the underlying frameworks in which criminal activity takes place: the legal basis for what activities are criminal and what are not; how police are trained; changing the mix of the law enforcement activity between civilians and police; how our education system works, and; a basic minimum income policy.
This reconfiguration deals with aspects of our crime control environment that need more emphasis. Most of these strategies are not expensive and the costs can be offset by increases in human capital or reduced costs in some other parts of the fiscal system (e.g., reduced prison and health care costs.) Many can be implemented at the municipal level. Some, like Nos. 1, 6 and 10 below, require help from the federal government.

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Posted on September 7, 2016

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation told a federal court Monday that the government is violating the U.S. Constitution when it fails to notify people that it has accessed or examined their private communications stored by Internet providers in the cloud.
EFF is supporting Microsoft in its lawsuit challenging portions of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that allow the Department of Justice to serve a warrant on the company to get access to customers’ e-mails and other information stored on remote servers – without telling users their data is being searched or seized.

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Posted on September 6, 2016

By Annelise Orleck/The Conversation

When it comes to their wages, McDonald’s workers around the world are not “Loving It” – and they haven’t been shy about expressing their discontent over the past four years.
But this Labor Day, America’s fast food workers can celebrate victories that have improved wages for some of them. And they can applaud a global labor movement of low-wage workers that they helped spark and continue to inspire.

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Posted on September 5, 2016

By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

Colin Kaepernick is a role model whether you like it or not. Many view Kaepernick’s choice of protest as disrespecting the flag, our armed forces and America itself, but the vitriol toward the football player represents the fears that children may grasp the power of civil disobedience. Students who idolize athletes like Kaepernick may also mimic him at school and sit during the pledge of allegiance in protest.
Children in our broken U.S. school system have many reasons to take a seat

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Posted on September 5, 2016

By Paul Hansen/Illinois Coin Laundry Association

The Illinois Coin Laundry Association (ILCLA) is strongly opposed to Mayor Emanuel’s plan to tax residents’ water, including those who use laundromats, at a rate of 29.5%.
The association believes that the plan is immoral because its highly regressive nature means that low-income residents will be disparately affected.

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Posted on September 2, 2016