from Friends of David Gill
“David Gill is an emergency room doctor in Bloomington, IL. He sees up close what happens to regular people every day when they don’t have good health insurance. We need someone like Dr. Gill to fight for us in Congress. Take a minute to watch this story he tells about a patient named Susan.”
“Dr. David Gill has never been on a public payroll or taken orders from a politician. He knows we need independent leaders in Congress who will fight for us. That’s why he doesn’t take one penny in his campaign from Wall Street or corporate political action committees. He just wants to work for us!”
“Republican insider Rodney Davis has spent 19 years on the taxpayer payroll taking orders from politicians like disgraced former Governor George Ryan and right-wing, Tea Party Congressman John Shimkus. Now, Rodney is running for Congress and he hopes we won’t pay any attention to his past as a campaign operative who helped come up with new schemes to launder money at the Illinois Republican Party.”
from the Chicago Teachers Union
The Chicago Teachers Union is currently on the front lines of a fight to defend public education. On one side the 30,000 members of the CTU have called for a contract that includes fair compensation, meaningful job security for qualified teachers, smaller class sizes and a better school day with Art, Music, World Language and appropriate staffing levels to help our neediest students.
On the other side, the Chicago Board of Education—which is managed by out of town reformers and Broad Foundation hires with little or no Chicago public school experience—has pushed to add two weeks to the school year and 85 minutes to the school day, eliminate pay increases for seniority, evaluate teachers based on student test scores, and slash many other rights.
Teachers, parents and community supporters in Chicago have fought valiantly—marching, filling auditoriums at hearings and parent meetings, even occupying a school and taking over a school board meeting. Most recently, 98 percent of our members voted to authorize a strike. But now we find ourselves facing new opponents—national education privatizers, backed by some of the nation’s wealthiest people. They are running radio ads, increasing press attacks, and mounting a PR campaign to discredit the CTU and the benefits of public education.
from PDA-IL
PDA IL joins the Chicago Teachers Union, Chicago Teachers Solidarity Campaign, Gray Panthers, Northern Illinois Jobs for Justice, Unite Here and National Nurses United among other labor unions and Hyde Park community activists to protest against the use of property taxes going to fund the building of a new luxury hotel in Hyde Park while schools face millions of dollars in cuts.
from the Grassroots Collaborative
Over 20 Bickerdike activists attend a training to learn about Tax Increment Financing (TIF) and how the inequality of TIF distribution is effecting our neighborhoods, schools, libraries, and parks.
August 7, 2012.
from The Real News Network
Gerald Friedman (University of Massachusetts, Amherst): A single-payer plan in Maryland would cover everyone, improve outcomes and make business more competitive
Parts Two and Three follow after the jump.
warmest summer on record for Chicago is probably going to revert back to 1921 in the next week, per Tom Skilling. We really have had a stunning turnaround in temperatures since August began. August is not a month I normally associate with cool temps, but with a high today in the mid-80s, and the 10 day forecast predicting highs in the 70s or low to mid-80s, it’s much, much cooler than the July from hell we just experienced. And we have been getting rain, just not enough of it to make up for baking our way through June and July with no rain in sight. Too late for farmers relying on corn crops, even if it had rained enough to make up our deficit, which it has not. Lawns are still pretty brown around here and I can’t remember the last time I saw someone – anyone – mowing grass.
But to realize we are at the mid-point of an August that has been downright mild, with a ten day forecast that’s also mild, made me start to wonder if the drought pattern is breaking, however late that might be happening for farmers. So I went looking for long-term forecasts and found this one from Accu Weather: above normal temps and below normal snowfall for this area for the upcoming winter. Not the best of conditions for the cornbelt to head into Spring with, following this summer. And it’s kind of reminding me forcibly of the winter of 2011-2012, or as we’ve taken to calling it around here “what winter?”
There’s a lot of discussion in the Accu Weather blog about El Ninos and what-not – stuff we’ve all learned to pay attention to, as it can affect the severity of winter in the Midwest. But I’m having a hard time thinking of a thing like an El Nino as a “long-term” factor in weather. Just now I am thinking that the real long term factor we need to be paying attention to is global warming, since experts are starting to note it has arrived, and that means we have to start questioning what “normal” is when we are talking about the weather.
Personally I suspect the new normal means we’ll be flirting with, and breaking, a lot of weather records we’d just as soon not break, on a consistent basis and for quite a while to come – probably for the rest of my life, possibly for the rest of my grandchildren’s lives.
from the Center for American Progress
The United States is the only developed nation that does not guarantee paid sick leave for workers when they are ill, or when they need to miss work in order to take care of a sick family member. Sarah Jane Glynn, a Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress, explains why there is a need for paid sick days, who benefits and why guaranteed paid sick days for workers is good for the economy.
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