Meet Ald. Brian Hopkins The Gentry Liberal of the Liberal Gentry

"It (softball fields) really ties up the park for hours a day all summer long," Hopkins said. "You don't even want to be on the running track because you'll be hit by a fly ball."

Gentry Liberalism - "Gentry liberalism combines four basic elements: faith in postindustrial “creative” financial capitalism, cultural liberalism, Gore-ite environmentalism and the backing of the nation’s arguably best-organized political force, public employee unions. Obama rose to power on the back of all these forces and, until now, has governed as their tribune."

To the doctrines of Gentry Liberalism I would add the concept of the smart city - that high-density living in the core, rather than suburban sprawl, is the optimal design for the modern urbanopolis.

Chicago was a city of villages, called neighborhoods occupied by African Americans, Lithuanians, Croatians, Serbs, Poles, Italians, Irish and Germans.  The city center, the Loop, was where you might go to work, take the bus, or L home to your neighborhood - West Lawn, Clearing, Englewood, or Hegewisch.

Real estate, banks, TIFs, University of Chicago social scientists, Northwestern journalists and Shakman exempted public grifters, as well operators of gyms, bike fascists and empty nesters bought into city center living.  The south Loop, west of the Loop and Goose Island became choice real estate, once Richie Daley was convinced to knock down the Jets.  HUD sprinkled FHA tenants out into Englewood, Gresham, Lawndale, Austin and the immediate suburbs to cut off white flight.

This Progressive, affluent and self-concerned coalition changed the Chicago landscape, language and lifestyle.  Neighborhoods became communities.  The Fort Dearborn Massacre became a battle and the verbal "shootings" were padded with the modifiers gang-related and police - to ensure media purity of language and litigation surety.  Fried boneless chicken breast is not a Chicago Value. Bike lanes replaced everything, Divvy stations took up parking spaces and fruit flavored IPAs replaced beer.

A few weeks ago two of the more idiotic members of City government put their dainty toes in the waters to see how a private army of real estate cops would fly.  One of these worthies is Alderman Brian Hopkins!  Along with Proco Joe Moreno, Hopkins shares the Wicker Park community, as hipster-doofi barons.  Proco Joe, at the prodding of Rahm Emanuel, made a national joke of himself ( always a good litmus test for a Progressive - see Jan Schakowsky and Mike Quigley) when he thundered against fried boneless chicken.

Well, Brian Hopkins is plunging into similar notoriety with his indictment of 16" Chicago, Clincher softball ( God, I hope it is that and not the dweeb-happy 'play with gloves' variety) being played in Chicago Parks.

Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd) told the Chicago Park District board last week that he would prefer a "grassy meadow" over the ball fields at Lake Shore Park, 808 N. Lake Shore Drive, citing concerns from neighbors who say its adult softball league has outgrown the quaint park surrounded by luxury high-rises.

I would prefer a greasy cheeseburger smothered in grilled onions basket with cheesefries over a new bike lane any day, but that ain't about to happen.

Parks are for people not some hipster doofus with a sinecure. The mission of the Chicago Park District is to:

• Enhance the quality of life in Chicago by becoming the leading provider of recreation and leisure opportunities
• Provide safe, inviting and beautifully maintained parks and facilities
• Create a customer-focused and responsive park system that prioritizes the needs of children and families 

Looks like Brian fails the sniff test on all three infinitives; undaunted the Progressive crank is undeterred:

"It ( people playing a team sport) really ties up the park for hours a day all summer long," Hopkins said. "You don't even want to be on the running track because you'll be hit by a fly ball." HIKE THAT SKIRT!
The park has two diamonds that are primarily used by an adult coed league run by Chicago Sport & Social Club. Hopkins said the diamonds "are not really in an ideal place" for the league, which has some "pretty good players" who often hit the ball out of the park.
"One ball hit the side of a CTA bus not too long ago," he said. "It's an accident waiting to happen." ( emphases, sarcasm, sexist irony and parenthetical notes my own)

Think of the Buses, People!!!!!!!!!

Hopkins ends his appeal with that grand old Progressive chestnut -The Children, "If you want to use the field to teach your kid to kick a soccer ball, throw a Frisbee, lay a blanket down for a picnic, you can’t,"

Send your kid with other kids to the prairie like normal people. You picnic in a Chicago mini-park?  Vote this clown down.

These clowns really are too much, but not nearly as "too much" as the voting Chicagoan who goes along with our protected morons.

Chicago - Urban Center Progressive Playland

Meet Poe Witry -Chicagoan.


We are sitting on geological shifting plates - the New Madrid Fault down around Cairo, Illinois and another over in Indiana the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone*. Yep, it is a dandy. Slabs of rock right under our feet and infrastructure -quakes and seismic shocks.

They are as nothing compared to political and economic earth rattlers about to happen right here in the City of Big Shoulders - Soon to be City of Slim Hips. For years, smart sizing and diet concerns of Progressives have become policy. Policy is what replaced politics. Politics was glad-handing and quid pro quo battering for votes that was the igneous rock upon which urban, county and state government was built. The City that Works, remember that?

The Urban Gentry largely childless, secular, affluent and educated scorns the bootless and unhorsed breeders who send their kids to Catholic schools and retain the values of the parish as well as citizenship over Progressive doctrines- they always have and they always will, whether it is on the davenports of Hull House, or on camera at WTTW, the Gentry Liberal can not stand neighbors. Neighbors live in parishes and neighborhoods.

Thanks to Michael Shakman and his community of judges, lawyers, journalists and academics, politics became a dinosaur with the compliance of short-sighted politicians and Progressive architects. Added to Shakman decrees, unique to Cook County, are more ordinances and policies heaped upon public safety agencies - Police and Fire. Cops wear more handcuffs than criminals.

Crime is now merely "bothersome." Violent crime is merely an "opportunity," begotten by poverty. Life is a Lab!

More bothersome are the people who stand in the way of transforming Chicago from a City into an Urban Center - neighborhood residents.

Rarely does the media refer to blocks of people living together in a particular area as neighbors - rather, they are community members. Communities need to be organized into cadres of marchers and concerned activists for doctrinally approved Progressive Agendas. Communities allow real estate manipulation and easy access to programs and the treasure they store from government programs.

These programs get put in place by a City Council of aldermen who vote the will of the Progressively approved doctrinal mandates. E.g. Community Policing, Urban Translating and Gang Meet-'N-Greets trump law enforcement. City Workers must live in the City, for now. Rahm will lift the residency mandates for all city workers in a few years.

Rahm Emanuel will part the Resident Sea like Moses, but only after the supine City Council votes in the Garbage Collection Grid. Smart Size! Say good by to the truck drivers and crewmen on big blue vehicles of Streets and Sanitation and hello to the Green and Gold Garbage Packers of Waste Management! Now, all of those family men and women formerly subject to the Ward Pharaohs shall be freed . . .of their City Jobs.

The Mount Greenwood, Morgan Park, Edison Park, Garfield Ridge, Auburn-Gresham, Hegewisch and the Brighton/McKinley Park helots can go to ZION or Braidwood, Custer Park, or Posen.

Chicago is planned to be an Urban Center with biker/walker-friendly easements and paths, medicinal marijuana boutiques Hula-Green park scapes, many cafes & bistros, health centers, open-air markets, abortuaries of course, and slick residences for the affluent, the childless the multidegree'd and most importantly the very secular. Chicago will be a monohue center -one color - white. No one love es the BLUES like rich white folks!

The darling progressive cities like Portland are white demographically speaking. They celebrate diversity, but damned if they will live with diversity.

To be sure the odd black chap or woman, urban out-fitted of course - will have a condo, or townhouse somewhere in the urban center; ditto the Latino earner sans chicos y chicas. Denzels and Domingas will be embraced, but Turners and Ignazios not so much. Likewise, Catholic-non-sectarians ( Unitarians who do not go to church), from the better secondary schools, who no longer use the diminutive given names like Bobby, Tommy and Dinny well into late middle age, or the more colorful breeder apellations of Headsy,Slurp, and North-eye, will not disturb the welkin of a Bistro with tales of Mount Carmel or St. Rita derring-do.

The mantra shall be, "If you (Faith families of breeders - Blacks, Hispanics and White Catholic ethnics)are not like us, leave.Quickly, once your labor is no longer necessary."

(From Mick Dumke at the Chicago Reader April 15, 2008)

ZIP WORKERS SIDE OF TOWN
60655 3,422 south ( My Hood -Morgan Park, Mount Greenwood)

60638 2,873 southwest ( Clearing & Midway)

60631 2,140 northwest

60652 1,853 southwest

60634 1,742 northwest

60643 1,660 south

60617 1,503 southeast

60628 1,289 south

60630 1,282 northwest

60620 1,248 south ( Over by Leo HS)

60619 1,210 south

60656 1,199 northwest

60646 1,183 northwest

The ground is shifting. What are you going to do about it? Harsh.

*

On March 13, 2009, a research group based out of Northwestern University and Purdue University, funded by the United States Geological Survey, reported in the journal Science and in other journals that the New Madrid system may be "shutting down" and that tectonic stress may now be accumulating elsewhere. Seth Stein, the leader of the research group, published these views in a book, Disaster Deferred, in 2008. Although some of these ideas have gained some amount of acceptance among researchers, they have not been accepted by the National Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council, which advises the USGS, or the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

In the November 5, 2009, issue of Nature, researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Missouri said that due to the lack of fault movement, the quakes along the faults may only be aftershocks of the 1811–1812 earthquakes.[Researchers say aftershocks on the San Andreas can continue for a period of up to about ten years, where fault movement averages up to 37 millimeters (1.5 in) a year across California.

Joel Kotkin Unmasks the Power Behind the Throne - "Gentry Progressives"

Demographer and journalist Joel Kotkin has studied Americans with a very clear and unjaundiced jeweler's eye for decades. He has studied and identified the power shifts in post-industrial America and long ago predicted the collapse of State economies under weight of policy programs, pensions and wages paid out to policy wizards shilling for agenda PACS, like Acorn, Planned Parenthood, Alien Rights, and Gay Marriage advocates, as well as public service unions especially SEIU.

Every pothole in Illinois and California was predicted by Joel Kotkin long before President Obama took office.

President Obama campaigned as a 'different sort of Democrat' and he surely is that - he is America's first Gentry President, according Kotkin.

This morning in Politico Joel Kotkin unmasks the Gentry Progressive - the wolf in Democrat clothing.

To be sure, Obama’s ground game relied on organized labor, particularly public-sector unions, African-Americans, Latinos and progressive activists. But these groups have not emerged stronger from his three years in office.

Instead, the major winners of the Obama years have been the big nonprofits, venture capitalists and, most obviously, the financial aristocracy. These have all benefited from the Ben Bernanke-Timothy Geithner — previously the Bernanke-Henry Paulson — policy of cheap money and near zero-interest rates, which have depressed the savings of the middle classes but served as a major boon to Wall Street. This has benefited mostly the wealthiest 1 percent, which owns some 40 percent of equities and 60 percent of financial securities.

This Wall Street-first approach makes Reaganite “trickle down” look like a populist torrent. Glimmers of reality are beginning to dawn on more perceptive progressive analysts, like Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, who accuses the Democrats under Obama of abandoning “the middle class in favor of the rich.” The Democrats, grouses the reliably partisan but perceptive Harold Meyerson, should be known as “Bankers R Us.”

Reaction from Tea Party libertarians, Old Timey Democrats like meself, and even the tasseled loafer GOP saw Marxists in the woodpile. They're there, in some small way, but largely the Gentry is all about Lakeview Greystone Urban Power elites: the degree stamped, well-off, childless, venal and secular power-network players. They get into Democratic politics via the backdoor -appointments for favors to come. They are lawyers, connected -professional bankers, fund managers, and agents of every venue that rakes in nickels.

Kotkin presents the power behind the 'mount, shine, evaporate and fall' of the Obama moment in the sun:

To be sure, some parts of the old progressive coalition, such as African-Americans, whose prospects have declined markedly under Obama, will most likely remain loyal to the president. Many other working- and middle-class voters, including Latinos and young people, groups particularly hard hit, may not be ready to bolt en masse for the GOP. But their lessened enthusiasm to participate in either the campaign or to vote could threaten the White House next year.

These developments, as Marxists might put it, reflect the fundamental contradictions of gentry liberalism. Essentially, gentry liberalism reflects the coalescing interests among the financial, technological and academic upper strata. For these people, the Great Recession was brief and ended long ago. All depend heavily on high stock prices to maintain their wealth. Their interest in the overall U.S. economy — particularly the Main Street grass roots — has become ever more tenuous with their increasing ability to shift assets to East Asia and other developing country hot spots.

These prerogatives have been neatly protected under Obama. In the past, administrations let corporate scofflaws, like the savings and loan companies, collapse. Some were sent to jail. . . .
This may have also been good news for Manhattan and San Francisco real estate and luxury retail — Tiffany profits were up 25 percent in the past quarter. Silicon Valley venture capitalists, in particular, have been lavished with access to cheap government loans and incentives — as demonstrated by the recent revelations about solar manufacturer Solyndra — to promote their attempted expansion into the ballyhooed “green economy.”

The essential problem of gentryism, however, is that it fails to address the fundamental economic needs of the vast majority. It is also tied to policy prescriptions that either fail to spur broad-based growth or, in some cases, hinder it.

For one thing, by concentrating wealth at the top, the gentry approach has depressed entrepreneurialism among the vast middle and working classes. In contrast to past “recoveries,” the rate of new start-ups has slowed considerably. The health of existing small business remains feeble, notes the National Federation of Independent Business.

Other initiatives have slowed potential growth, particularly the threat of new draconian environmental regulations. Fossil-fuel development, for example, represents one of the best opportunities for new, high-wage employment for blue- and white-collar workers. In contrast, the massive expenditures of public money on “green jobs” has turned out to be less than effective in creating blue-collar employment.

Joel Kotkin was writing long before Obamas Gentry grabbed power. It is refreshing that people are now reading this prescient man. Click my post title for so much more.

Illinois Needs to get Wise to Gentry Liberalism - Avoid the California Rush to Ruin

Back in 2007 Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel coined the phrase Gentry Liberalism. The Main Stream Media has avoided this term; this condition that afflicts America.

Gentry Liberalism -Today's ascendant liberalism has a much different agenda. Call it "gentry liberalism." It's not driven by the lunch-pail concerns of those workers struggling to make it in an increasingly high-tech, information-based, outsourcing U.S. economy -- though it does pay lip service to them.

Rather, gentry liberalism reflects the interests and values of the affluent winners in the era of globalization and the beneficiaries of the "financialization" of the economy. Its strongholds are the tony neighborhoods and luxurious suburbs in and around New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco and West Los Angeles.

These are folks who have nothing to lose - jobs, income, health. Needless to say they feel great - about themselves, but the rest of us? Not so hot. We tend to be fatter, have many more children, remain married, cling to religion
, work and pay taxes. We are Helots and they are Progressive Olympians - not the athletes the folks on that big hill in Greece.

Gentry Liberalism loves Advocacy Politics ( Gay, Black, Hispanic ( whatever the Hell that is), Abortion Happy/Women & etc.) and Marxist PACS SEIU/ACORN & etc. You know - like every time Ralph Martire opens his yap? More taxes.

Gentry Liberalism means Taxes for Helots.

Illinois needs to get wise to Gentry Liberalism - Progressive Political Olympians.

We can start by getting wise to Kotkin and Seigel. Click my post title.

Obama's problems stem primarily from gentry liberalism's class contradictions. Focused on ultra-affluent greens, the media, Wall Street and the public sector, gentry liberalism generally gives short shrift to upward mobility, the basic aspiration of the middle class.

Scott Brown's shocking victory in Massachusetts--like earlier GOP triumphs in Virginia and New Jersey--can be explained best by class. Analysis by demographer Wendell Cox, among others, shows that Brown won his margin in largely middle- and working-class suburbs, where many backed Obama in 2008. He lost by almost 2-to-1 among poor voters and also among those earning over $85,000 a year. He also won a slight margin among union members--remarkable given the lockstep support of their organizations for Brown's Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley.

Geography played a role, of course, but class proved the divider. Coakley did well in the wealthiest suburbs largely north and northwest of Boston. But Brown's edge in the more middle- and working-class suburbs proved insurmountable.

Joel Kotkin's 'Gentry Liberalism' - Defined and Indentifiable Among the Yanks

Gentry -

In more modern American society, gentry is often used to refer loosely to the highly educated professional upper-middle class, this use of the terminology is inconsistent with the British use of the same term as the American use would include those without confirmed aristocratic roots (as is required under the British definition). This sense of the term is often pejoratively used in the term "gentrification", a term that could alternatively be called "bourgeois-ification". Attitudes stemming from the phenomenon of the historic American gentry help clarify the current use of the term in U.S. society, and it is still loosely applied to people from old-monied and landed families in the United States, though the term "gentry" is very rarely used in America for cultural and historical reasons.

- Read Yuppies, Trust-fund babies, like Billy Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Ted Kennedy, Friends of the Parks, Schakowsky Voters, most members of the Chicago Media, and people who never ever look at the balances in their checking accounts.

Gentry Liberals (Progressives) want Mass Transportation, because they rarely if ever need it; they want Public School Funding, because Catholic/Lutheran-Dutch,Baptist & Protestant/Jewish/Muslim schools are values based educations; they want SEIU/ACORN to do whatever the hell they please, because they promote whatever agenda the Gentry embrace.

America is involved in a Class War. Gentry ( anyone who plays ball with them) and the Helots.

I'm a Helot - a worker bee/blue collar value/pro-Real Labor/anti-abortion/Mom and Dad Marriage and Gays can have a happy life with each other/tax-paying American.

I go to the ATM, not to draw out cash, but to make sure that I have enough Buckos to cover bills and obligations. I used to have more nickels at the end of the pay cycle. Gas costs a lung; groceries a kidney; tuition . . . enough with the internal organs. My neighbors are getting laid off.

The Gentry are loud. They get attention. They are not cops, firefighters, nurses, school teachers, pipe fitters, electricians, accontants, clerks, plumbers, and carpenters. They sure as hell are not housewives - housewives do not lunch or join Friends of the Parks, or PETA, much less Planned Parenthood.

The Gentry join gyms, don't smoke, attend theatre, opera, the best restaurants, and the Progressive Political Grassroots - working stiffs go the above when they have two nickels to rub together. Helots do not hold Subscriptions to any of the above; they buy tickets. Helots are not subscribers; they do not have enough disposable income. The Gentry are Public Television and Radio.

Helots work, provide for their families, pay too many taxes and die.

Joel Kotkin has been writing about the American Gentry ( Liberal Progressive) for decades, but his recent Forbes article warning President Obama about America's swing to Socialism, while Europe is returning to grassroots capitalism, hit a nerve*.

http://www.joelkotkin.com/

Kotkin illustrates Gentry Liberalism:

You have to wonder what average Brits must make of the likes of Jonathon Porritt, the head of the government's Sustainable Development Commission--a member of the gentry in both attitude and lineage. The Eton-educated Porritt's recent pronouncements include such gems as a call to restrict the number of children per family to two to reduce Britain's population from 60 to 30 million. He also has scolded overweight people for causing climate change.

These do not seem like sure electoral winners. Today extreme green policies that were once merely odd or eccentric are becoming increasingly oppressive, leading to even more actions that disadvantage suburban lifestyles. Environmental activists' solution for the country's severe housing shortage--particularly in the London region--is to cram the working and middle classes into dense urban units resembling sardine cans and force even more suburbanites off the road.

Even so, large-scale house production over the past decade has lagged behind demand and, as a result, the tidy single-family home with a nice back garden so beloved by the British public may soon be attainable only by the highly affluent--and, ironically, that includes much of the gentry. What an odd posture for a party supposedly built around working-class aspirations.

"New Labour has brought in 'New Urbanism,' and the results are not pretty," suggests University of Westminster social historian Mark Clapson, as he showed me some particularly tiny, surprisingly expensive new houses outside of London

Familiar? Vote accordingly.

* Click my post title for many articles on Gentry Liberalism

Revolt Against 'Gentry Liberalism' ( Progressives) Hits Illinois - Gov. Quinn is Its First Victim

Last week it became evident that Europe had had enough of the Left. America always seems to be a few years, if not decades behind Europe - fashion, food and funding programs. 'Socialism seems so Cool so Let's Get Us Some!'


Our Later-day Trotskyites and Malraux Guevara's soak the Obama Administration with their earnest presence. They should earnestly stay away from government at any level, but they Grassrooted out Government Truffles.

Illinois has SEIU funding these pie-dish deep thinkers at Progress Illinois and have succeeded in co-opting the Illinois Media. Taxes Mean Big Hearts! Mean People Hate Taxes!

Americans, as I mentioned last week continue to be Rubes. Innocents Abroad.

Its the Economy, Rubes! The wallet's empty!

Government is not meant to be a Cash Pantry for every 'community based' program.

The middle class is running out of money and SEIU/ACORN and State and Federal government is crying for more.

Urban Studies expert, Joel Kotkin has warned of this trend toward giving the store away in the name of politics.

Great Britain's Labor Party under Gordon Brown is a mess. President Obama's Administration is only weeks away from a similar situation.

However, Illinois seems to have taken the lead in the revolt against what Joel Kotkin calls Gentry Liberalism, another name for the Progressives.

Gentry liberalism--which reached its height in Britain earlier this decade and is currently peaking in the U.S.--melded traditional left-of-center constituencies, such as organized labor and ethnic minorities, with an expanding class of upper-class professionals from field like media, finance and technology.
. . .But today, this broad coalition lies in ruins. An urban expert at the London School of Economics, Tony Travers, suggests that New Labour's biggest loss is due to the erosion of middle-class suburban support. The party also appears to be shedding significant parts of its historic working-class base, particularly those constituents who aren't members of the public employee unions.

Even some longstanding ethnic minorities, most notably the highly entrepreneurial South Asians, also show signs of drifting away from Labour. The only Labour supporters left, then, are the liberal gentry, the government apparatus and the most aggrieved minorities.
. . .The shift reveals the weakening hold of gentry liberalism. At its core, gentry liberalism depends on massive profits in key sectors--largely finance and real estate--to maintain its affluence while servicing both its environmentally friendly priorities and redistributing wealth to the long-term poor.

This has also allowed for a massive expansion of both the scope and size of government. . . . This kind of approach has gained some proponents among the Obama crowd. Recent administration pronouncements endorse such things as "coercing" Americans from their cars, fighting suburban "sprawl" and even imposing restrictions on how much they can drive. It makes you wonder what future they have in mind for our recently bailed-out auto companies.

It's possible that America's middle-income voters will eventually be turned off by such policies, as is the case in Britain. President Obama's remarkable genius for political theater may insulate him now, but it won't for eternity. Over time, some of the Democrats' hard-won, suburban middle-class support could erode.

Yep. Here in Illinois our Gentry Liberalism Governor Pat Quinn is crying for more:

Rookie Gov. Pat Quinn, who supported both failed tax plans, said he would call legislative leaders together Monday to work on putting together a better budget than one that is "hopelessly out of balance."

Quinn said he was "a little disappointed" in the legislature but undaunted. Asked why Illinoisans shouldn't consider this a new embarrassment for Democrats, Quinn said, "Give us a couple more days."

House Democrats were able to send Quinn a measure backed by the governor that would impose first-ever campaign donation limits on politicians. But the plan was blasted by a variety of self-styled reform advocates, including Quinn's own Reform Commission, as loophole-ridden and designed to ensure that those now in power stay in power. Lawmakers also sent Quinn a bill to eliminate their cost-of-living increases, abolish a controversial board that recommended salary raises and required themselves to take four furlough days.

The reform votes on the final day of the legislature's spring session capped a frenetic week dominated by a debate over whether Springfield had done enough to clean up state government in the wake of Blagojevich's arrest, ouster and indictment on charges he sold government favors for personal and political gain.

House Speaker Michael Madigan had repeatedly said that lawmakers must prove to taxpayers the government could do a better job before asking for more money. But while he declared victory on high-profile ethics plans, he found that Democrats in his tightly controlled chamber were not fully on board with any plan to raise income taxes amid a sagging economy.

Even without the income-tax and sales-tax increases, lawmakers have already approved a host of fee and tax hikes, including higher license plate and driver's license fees and a boost in taxes on liquor, candy, tea-infused drinks at retail, and beauty aids and medicated retail products. Those increases, coupled with legalized video gambling and a proposal to sell lottery tickets on the Internet, would fund a massive public works program.

Facing an estimated $12 billion two-year deficit, lawmakers scrambled to find ways to help fund government operations. With no major revenue sources in sight and amid Republican demands for cuts before higher taxes, House lawmakers approved a short-term spending plan that would fund government for about six months. The Senate was expected to follow suit late Sunday.

Just a day after Senate Democrats approved a 67 percent increase in personal income taxes that also broadened the sales tax to some services, House Democrats said they lacked the votes to send it to Quinn. At the same time, the House overwhelmingly rejected a smaller two-year, 50 percent income-tax increase.

The failure of Democrats to adjourn the legislature on time would be considered the latest political embarrassment for their one-party rule of Springfield after Blagojevich became the first governor impeached and removed from office in state history. His successor, Quinn, watched as tensions increased among House members under Madigan and senators under President John Cullerton.

Quinn attempted to reinsert himself as his tax-raising efforts he had pushed collapsed. He warned that his signature on a $29 billion public works program was predicated on lawmakers enacting a balanced full-year budget and that investors would not purchase the bonds needed to finance the plan while uncertainty reigned over the state's fiscal problems.

But it was Cullerton's assertion of his power in a legislature long dominated by Madigan that prompted the collision of House and Senate Democrats.

Cullerton's decision to advance an income-tax plan from the Senate marked his independence from Madigan, his longtime friend, at a time when some Senate Democrats grumbled that Cullerton was little more than a political appendage of the House speaker. It also solidified Cullerton's standing among African-American Senate Democrats who had pushed him to call an increase in higher taxes in the chamber and not wait for Madigan.

"I think it's time we step up," Cullerton said as his Senate Democrats approved the larger tax-increase late Saturday.

But Sunday, House Democrats said they didn't have the votes for the tax-increase plan advanced by Cullerton. Then they rejected a smaller temporary two-year plan to increase income taxes by 50 percent to raise more than $4 billion. It would have boosted the 3 percent personal income-tax rate to 4.5 percent and increased the corporate-tax rate from 4.8 percent to 7.2 percent.

"If we don't raise taxes, we are looking at very deep problems in the state's human services and education programs," Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie (D-Chicago), Madigan's chief deputy, said in urging passage of the smaller tax increase.

Currie later led House passage of the makeshift budget bill. With all 118 House seats up for election next year, that would allow House Democrats fearful of casting a tax-increase vote before the election year to see if any opponents have filed against them.

With the need to fix the budget hole, Republicans in the House now have a seat at the bargaining table in the coming weeks and months.

"We don't want to run from the problem, but we are going to insist on fundamental change in the way state government operates budget-wise in the state of Illinois," said House Republican leader Tom Cross of Oswego.

The Revolt against Gentry Liberalism (Progressive) is on!

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-legislature01jun01,0,2960790.story