Legal Briefings Still Under Seal After Government Demands For Secrecy

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed two briefs on Friday challenging secret government demands for information known as National Security Letters (NSLs) with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The briefs – one filed on behalf of a telecom company and another for an internet company – remain under seal because the government continues to insist that even identifying the companies involved might endanger national security.
While the facts surrounding the specific companies and the NSLs they are challenging cannot be disclosed, their legal positions are already public: the NSL statute is a violation of the First Amendment as well as the constitutional separation of powers.

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Posted on March 3, 2014

By Steve Rhodes

Where has last night’s Kirk Dillard been? Trying to win the last election instead of this one by throwing too much red meat to his party’s right-wing even as he touts his long-ago job as Jim Edgar’s chief of staff. Dillard is clearly the most palatable of the GOP candidates and clearly the one who could most plausibly be a relatively decent governor if only he could get elected. He’s been our frontrunner from the start, despite the Rauner hype. Too bad Rauner’s money bought the media’s attention.

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Posted on February 28, 2014

By The Mental Health Movement

With the city poised to terminate hundreds of paying clients from its mental health clinics, mental health advocates will hold a town hall meeting to protest the move and hear testimony from experts and those affected.
Mental health policy experts, current and former clients of Chicago’s public mental health clinics and supporters will gather for a town hall meeting on Chicago’s mental health crisis on Thursday at 6 p.m. at UE Hall, 37 South Ashland Avenue.
They will highlight the most immediate threat to mental health services – the city’s failure to join any provider network, triggering the termination of services for current Medicaid patients as the state moves towards managed care. Testimony will also address the severe shortage of mental health services for Chicago’s most vulnerable, many of whom now have coverage through expanded Medicaid.

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Posted on February 27, 2014

At Least Bush Just Tortured

The Last Rulebender.
1. “Ultimately what we’ve learned is the difference between administrations is not necessarily what they do, but what they say to get to do it.”

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Posted on February 25, 2014

Scenes Observed By A Former Chicagoan With Ample Reason For Anonymity Upon Returning To The Tangled Mess Of Comatose Humanity Found Shivering And Rocking Back And Forth In The Vicinity Of The Southwest Shore Of ‘Lake Michigan’

“The record indisputably establishes that Chicago’s red squad for at least a decade engaged in a campaign of guerrilla warfare against substantial sectors of the city’s population. What unifies and explains the operation of the security section is an institutionalized aggression, unique in the annals of any American city.”
– Frank Donner, Chapter Four, “Chicago: The National Capital of Police Repression,” Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America
Windyshitty.
Friends still in jail, charged with “terrorism” for considering the possibility of trying to defend people from police brutality. The judge wonders out loud whether “it’s really necessary that we even define terrorism.” He laughs at the defense’s motion to subpoena the creature called mayor, enemy of the man on the street, the fuck who ordered my friends disappeared. Last week an apocalyptic arctic hurricane froze the city and the heartless fuck went on a tropical vacation. In the past, Chicago’s leaders were judged by how well they took care of people when the blizzards came, but it was way the fuck below zero and the psycho absentee mayor this city elected is sunbathing on the opposite side of the planet. Cook County froze at least 14 homeless people to death so far this winter. My friends sleep behind cell walls coated by an inch of ice.

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Posted on February 24, 2014

By The American Civil Liberties Union

Law enforcement is taking advantage of outdated privacy laws to track Americans like never before. New technologies can record your every movement, revealing detailed information about how you choose to live your life. Without the right protections in place, the government can gain access to this information – and to your private life – with disturbing ease.

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Posted on February 21, 2014

By Charles Ornstein/ProPublica

Flipping through the New York Times magazine a few Sundays ago, former hospital executive Paul Levy was taken aback by a full-page ad for the da Vinci robot.
It wasn’t that Levy hadn’t seen advertising before for the robot, which is used for minimally invasive surgeries. It was that the ad prominently featured a dozen members of the surgery team at the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System.
“We believe in da Vinci surgery because our patients benefit,” read the ad’s headline.

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Posted on February 18, 2014

In Their Own Words

“After 18 months of bargaining, the faculty at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is headed for a two-day strike on Tuesday and Wednesday,” the Illinois Federation of Teachers says.
“UIC professors did not want it to come to this, but the trustees’ proposals continue to short-change both faculty and students.
“UIC’s administration continues to hike tuition to the point it has amassed hundreds of millions in profits each year and more than a billion dollars in reserves, yet refuses to pay professors what they’re worth.”
1. Lenny Davis.

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Posted on February 17, 2014

By Charles Ornstein/ProPublica

Well before enrollment began in Obamacare’s new insurance exchanges, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Rhode Island dominated the state’s individual insurance market, with a 95 percent market share in 2011.
Fast forward two years and little has changed. In the first four months of enrollment in Health Source RI, the Blue Cross plan has seen its market share grow, as hard as that is to believe – to nearly 97 percent.
A similar situation is playing out in California. In 2011, Wellpoint’s Anthem Blue Cross had a 37 percent market share, followed by 20 percent for Kaiser Permanente and about the same for Blue Shield of California, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, which crunched the figures.
In the first three months of enrollment under the Affordable Care Act, the same three insurers remained in the lead: Anthem captured 31 percent of the market, Kaiser had about 19 percent, and Blue Shield increased its share from about 20 percent to nearly 30 percent.

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Posted on February 14, 2014

By Charles Ornstein/ProPublica

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said Wednesday that 3.3 million consumers have selected health plans in the first four months of sign-ups under the Affordable Care Act, but its report left out many details key to understanding how the rollout is really going.
Missing from the report are details about how many of the consumers who signed up actually paid for their first month’s premium, a requirement to actually be insured. The document also does not say which insurance plans consumers chose, a metric needed to determine how the insurance market is shaping up. And it offers no details about how many of those signing up for coverage were previously uninsured, the key goal of the law.

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Posted on February 13, 2014