Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was sentenced this week to 14 years in prison, but the real sentence is the one taxpayers will serve many years after. He mastered the art of pairing populist rhetoric with expensive new programs directed toward his core constituencies.

To pursue his highly visible programs and agendas, Blagojevich needed money. He found it by diverting billions from the state’s pension system. By taking “holidays” from required pension system contributions and by nearly doubling Illinois’s debt, he burdened future generations to support favored groups in the present.

Perhaps worst of all, as CEO of Illinois, Blagojevich institutionalized a culture of deficit spending. He accomplished this so effectively that Blagojevich’s successor, Gov. Pat Quinn, and today’s lawmakers feel comfortable perpetuating the ruinous habits of spending and borrowing more than the state can afford. Fiscal ineptitude is the new norm.

The Illinois Policy Institute has a new report out that details Blagojevich’s lasting effect on Illinois’ fiscal condition. Read it at www.illinoispolicy.org/blago. Here’s the “top ten” list:

No. 1: Disregarded obligations to state pensioners

Policy: Blagojevich diverted billions of dollars from the pension funds of future government retirees to pay for his own spending priorities.
Problem: Blagojevich ballooned existing spending programs, ignoring his responsibility to ensure the health of the state’s pension systems. Retirees and taxpayers are on the hook for his political expediency.
Program cost: Excess of $3 billion for future taxpayers

No. 2: A culture of deficits

Policy: Grow spending to appease Blagojevich’s core constituencies.
Problem: While Blagojevich was creating and expanding unaffordable programs, the state’s financial position deteriorated year after year.
Program cost: Worst rating of net assets in the nation.

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In 2010, Governor Quinn signed into law a landmark budget reform law called “Budgeting for Results”.  The goal was quite simple, that spending should be tied to measurable goals of the state and that funding should change according to what best achieves those goals.  It was designed to promote transparency and accountability in the many agencies and programs of the state forcing them to measure the effectiveness of their programs with an eye of weeding out those programs that achieve little to nothing for the taxpayer.

That was the stated goal at least.  Now that the first report has been issued by the Budget for Results Commission, we see that it wasn’t about spending reform at all.  It’s about yet another attempt to justify increased mandated and structural spending at a time when Illinois has already passed a 67% income tax hike and is still operating a deficit.

Here is what the commission says about their goal:

Budgeting for Results changes the way the State allocates resources across government agencies. Rather than setting budgets agency by agency based on historic funding levels, BFR allocates resources based on state-wide goals.

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Measurement is crucial to accountability and transparency. Reliable data and analysis are essential to inform funding decisions and make sure taxpayers see the impact of their tax dollars.

It all sounds good, so far.  In fact, it sounds downright reasonable.  Government has to do things and spending should be calibrated to do those things as efficiently as possible.

So what was the very first recommendation of this august panel to deal with a state that has a chronic and uncontrolled spending problem?

Recommendation 1:

Establish a seventh Result to acknowledge the importance of ensuring that all Illinois residents have access to quality, affordable health care, and to recognize medical assistance distinct from the human service goals. Separating costs will provide greater transparency to spending on Medicaid and spending on other human service activities. The newest Result area recommended is:

All Illinois residents have access to quality affordable health care.

You read that right.

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Question: When is hate not hateful? Answer: When it is committed by a leftwing investigator for the Illinois Department of Human Rights.

Last week, the Illinois Executive Ethics Commission tried to sneak in a pre-holiday disclosure: Alvin Forbes, Sr., an Illinois Department of Human Rights employee, was caught using his state-owned computer to send anti-Tea Party emails last November and given a verbal reprimand. A reprimand? Not a termination of employment for violating state ethics laws against political activity?

So what was the point of this phony wrist slap? Was it a coincidence that the Commission chose to post this news on its website a week prior to Labor Day – the kick-off to the all-important 2011-2012 political season – hoping few would notice? Strategically, they were correct; with the exception of a few news outlets, this story has gone unreported.

In November 2010, Forbes emailed a propaganda-filled diatribe targeting Glenn Beck and Gov. Sarah Palin, carping about a dastardly plan to “take down President Obama and the government.” Excuse me, Mr. Forbes, but the freedom to oppose a political philosophy you disagree with – that’s called democracy.  Maybe you’ve heard of it?

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The culture of corruption is a well-known fixture in Chicago and Illinois politics where it doesn’t matter what you know, it matters who you know.  We have one governor on his way to jail and the one before him currently serving time for corruption.  You would think the current governor, Pat Quinn, who bills himself as a reformer would change things. You would be wrong.

One way Quinn has continued the culture of corruption is by stacking state boards and commissions, many paying lucrative salaries for little to no work, with political allies.  For instance, pro-choice activist Terry Cosgrove was appointed to the Human Rights Commission and has been a lifelong friend of the Democratic Party of Illinois and Quinn.

Quinn, however, has a new twist on board appointments.  Many of these bodies are restricted by state law from having too many members of one party on them.  This modest requirement is an attempt to ensure decisions are made on the merits instead of on the politics.  Governor Quinn has gotten around this requirement by having Democrats label themselves as “Independents” when it comes to board appointments in an apparent end-run around the law and what likely is illegal behavior.

How prevalent is this problem?  Here is a list of boards and commissions I examined to see if Quinn was following the law.

• Capital Development Board – 4 Democrats maximum, 6 Democrats serving and no Republicans
• Housing Development Authority – 5 Democrats maximum, 7 Democrats serving
• Board of Education – 5 Democrats maximum, 7 Democrats serving
• Board of Higher Education – 7 Democrats maximum, 14 Democrats serving and no Republicans
• University of Illinois Board of Trustees – 5 Democrats maximum, 6 Democrats serving
• Southern Illinois University Board of Trustees – 4 Democrats maximum, 5 Democrats serving
• Human Rights Commission – 7 Democrats maximum, 9 Democrats serving
• Health Facilities and Services Planning Board - 5 Democrats maximum, 6 Democrats serving
• Educational Labor Relations Board – 3 Democrats maximum, 4 Democrats serving
• Medical Disciplinary Board – 5 Democrats maximum, 6 Democrats serving
• Judical Inquiry Board – 4 Democrats maximum, 5 Democrats serving

These are boards with real power that either spend a good deal of taxpayer dollars or wield great sway over the voters.  You can view the official party affiliation at the state website appointments.illinois.gov.  To verify true party affiliation, I checked state voting records.  Under state law, if you vote in a primary for a party, you are a member of that party.  That is how I discovered many “independents” on these boards are really lifelong Democrats, many giving a good deal of money to Democrats for office.

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Illinois taxpayers are given the option to donate money to charity each year when they file their state tax returns.

Now, America’s most indebted state is raiding those funds to pay for wasteful spending that the Democratic governor and legislature refuse to cut.

As Chicago’s local NBC affiliate reported recently, it’s a form of theft made possible by a law that then-Gov. Rob Blagojevich passed in 2003 allowing “unused” money to be swept into the state’s general fund.

Illinois Tax Return. Source: NBC Chicago

A spokesperson for Blagojevich’s successor, Gov. Pat Quinn, claims the charity money was used to pay for Medicaid expenses, and that without those funds, the state would have lost critical federal funding.

Even some Democrats, including former gubernatorial candidate Dawn Clark-Netsch, find such excuses unacceptable. They are outraged at behavior that would likely result in criminal prosecutions, were it to be done by a private company or individual.

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Three days ago, Dan Riehl shared news about powerful Illinois Democrats and members of the Illinois State Police circling their wagons to protect one of their own after a St. Patrick’s Day incident at a Carlinville, Ill., tavern.

Today, some much-anticipated details about events that lead to Ken Snider resigning from his posts as chair of the Macoupin County (Ill.) Democrat Party and president of the local school board (a.k.a., “SniderGate”) surfaced in an article and an accompanying editorial published in the Macoupin County Enquirer-Democrat weekly newspaper.

Mum’s the Word

The article, appearing under the headline, Investigation into Snider’s resignations stonewalled, recapped some of the basic aspects of the controversy before offering the paragraphs below under the subhead, “Mum’s the Word”:

Although the newspaper has questioned many eyewitnesses in an effort to obtain the details of the incident, no one would go on record as to what took place. Sources contacted have repeatedly said they are afraid to come forward with any facts concerning the alleged altercation between Snider and a Blackburn College student.

The newspaper sent its reporter Daniel Winningham to BC last Tuesday to learn more about the incident. Winningham visited the campus around noon and asked several students if they had heard of the incident and whether they had any knowledge of the incident, which occurred at the Anchor Inn.

Shortly after 5:30 p.m., Carlinville police officers entered the newspaper office looking for a person named “Dave.” The police were told there is no “Dave” employed at the newspaper. The officer then made a call, and whoever the officer called could not remember the reporter’s name. A newspaper employee then asked if they meant Dan or Daniel. The officer said, “Ya, that’s who we need to talk to.” When Winningham talked to the officers, they told him that BC had accused him of harassing students, and he was to never step foot on the campus again.

It went on to describe how, it appears, officials at Blackburn College reached the conclusion that the reporter — by asking questions that were sure to make some Illinois Democrats, including Gov. Pat Quinn and Snider, uncomfortable — should be banned from campus.

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Now this is a bold move. Going onto the airwaves of a state that just raised their taxes and trying to lure away their businesses. Bold:

For me this tactic brings two questions to mind.

Why don’t more states do this? I mean if you’re the governor of a state with relatively low business taxes why wouldn’t you advertise in near by states with higher business taxes? Sounds like a good idea doesn’t it?

Then again will this really work? Is an ad on the radio going to convince responsible business owners to leave their current state and move to another? Probably not.

I suspect the more likely scenario is that the businesses that are going to relocate outside of a high tax state like Illinois have already made that decision. In that case perhaps the real goal of an ad like this is to direct those businesses into a state like Jersey. In other words something like this is probably going to be successful in directing the tax weary defectors to the desired safe haven rather than creating any new defectors.

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The experts charged with determining when recessions begin and end tell us that the latest of these unpleasant events ended a while ago. Technically, they are no doubt right. But that does not mean that the economic crisis we have been facing is over. I suspect that we have thus far only seen its first act. The drama to come may be far, far worse. To see why, one must recognize that economic downturns come in two different forms.

The economists who study recessions tend to think about them in turns of the business cycle – and rightly so, for in most cases it is the business cycle that produces the downturn. In the course of such a cycle, boom builds upon boom and bust upon bust. It is a bit like a game of crack the whip. Downturns occasioned by the business cycle are caused by overproduction. When businesses have more stock than they can sell, they stop producing and lay off workers. The workers laid off and no longer getting paychecks cut back on their consumption, and this in turn reduces the demand for goods and services and causes other businesses, which find their products and services no longer as much in demand, to curtail their efforts and lay off another set of workers. And so the recession grows, building on itself, until some businesses find that they have underproduced or underprovided for the services in demand. Then, the same process takes place in reverse with stepped-up production and a stepped-up provision of services requiring stepped-up employment, which occasions more consumption requiring another round of stepped-up production and provision of services and a further increase in employment and so forth – until production and provision once more overshoot demand. In the absence of perfect knowledge, human beings living in commercial societies are fated to suffer from an oscillation of this sort – between boom and bust.

When Barack Obama became President, his economic advisors appear to have been on automatic pilot and to have taken it for granted that this was the sort of recession that they were up against. And so they opted for a remedy that – if applied in the proper fashion, at the proper time, and  in the proper amount – might serve to hasten an economy’s recovery from a recession occasioned by the business cycle. That is, they sought to prime the pump – to increase consumption by artificial means, to borrow money from the future, put it in the pockets of certain citizens, and hope that they would spend it right away and thereby put others back to work.

Such was, at least, their pretense. In practice, of course, the so-called “stimulus bill” was a targeted measure – a massive pay-off designed to reward the public-sector employees and unionized workers involved in infrastructure construction who make up core constituencies within the Democratic Party and to do so at the expense of those whose taxes the Democrats intended in the future to raise. Obama’s advisors did not worry much about the manner in which the “stimulus” was to be applied, its timing, and amount, however. For they took it for granted that the expenditures would do no immediate damage to anyone and that the economy would bounce back quickly in any case, as it always does when the downturn is caused solely (or at least primarily) by the business cycle.

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Things are getting desperate out there for Democrats, who have nowhere to hide from their legacy of failure.  Illinois has already gone into bizarre territory with Governor Quinn’s “Vote for Me or the Puppy Gets It” ads. Just when things couldn’t get any bizarre, you have this bit of insanity wafting out of the West Side of Chicago.

Democrat State Senator Ricky Hendon, best known for once getting into a physical altercation with Barack Obama in Springfield, suggested that Republican Governor candidate Bill Brady wanted to execute homosexuals and that all civil rights for women should be ended.

Here is the exact quote:

“I’ve never served with such an idiotic, racist, sexist, homophobic person in my life,” Hendon said before introducing Gov. Quinn. “If you think that the minimum wage needs to be three dollars an hour, vote for Bill Brady. If you think that women have no rights whatsoever, except to have his children, vote for Bill Brady. If you think gay and lesbian people need to be locked up and shot in the head, vote for Bill Brady.”

Apparently, Bill Brady has become the Midwest’s Ghengis Khan leaping from bed to bed siring more children. The context of these remarks was his introduction of Pat Quinn during a Get Out the Vote rally on the West Side.

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Imagine this, your state has a budget deficit of $13 Billion dollars (despite having a constitutional clause that requires balanced budgets). The state is months late in payments to local schools. Medicaid providers aren’t getting paid to treat the poor so they stop seeing Medicaid patients. Social service providers are going out of business because they received state grants which the state isn’t paying on. What would you do to start to address this?

Here is what Illinois is doing, spending more money. As a case in point, the state has begun construction on a $580 MILLION dollar interchange between I-57 and I-294 in Chicago. What makes this a complete waste is that an exchange already exists only 3.5 miles away from the one planned. This map will help show how absurd this is.

To get to I-294 from I-57, you have to exit on I-80 and head 3.5 miles east to get to I-294. It’s not a bad jaunt, really. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and live downstate now. I make this trip dozens of times a year. Perhaps when the interstate was built it might have made sense to put a direct interchange between I-57 and I-294. The reality is, it’s maybe an additional 2 minutes of travel time. The bulk of the additional travel time isn’t the roads, it’s the toll booths which we can all be quite sure they will continue to exist once the interchange is put in.

They justify this over half BILLION dollar expenditure because they argue having that interchange will generate billions of economic growth in the area once it is in place. Take a look at that <a href=”http://www.parttimepundit.com”map again to see how absurd that is.

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New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is traveling to Springfield, Illinois today to do a fundraiser for Bill Brady, the Republican gubernatorial candidate. While he’s in town, Christie should drop by the capitol and give Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, a Democrat, a lesson on how to trim state labor costs.

While Governor Christie has sensibly challenged the public employee union status quo in the name of fighting deficits, Governor Quinn is cementing union perks in place even as the state’s fiscal condition deteriorates.

The recent announcement of a deal between Quinn and AFSCME to stop any public employee union member layoffs and facility closings through June 2012 is causing a minor uproar in the Prairie State. Illinois is facing a record $4.7 billion backlog in unpaid bills, and the union’s agreement to accept a measly $50 million in savings in return for the concessions doesn’t pass the smell test.

The fact that AFSCME endorsed Quinn just days earlier brings up unpleasant reminders of Illinois’s history of a “pay to play” state. According to reports, Quinn’s budget director David Vaught attended a union endorsement session, albeit on his personal time.

Labor costs make up one in four dollars spent from Illinois’s general funds, and walling off a major chunk of the state budget from any spending reforms makes balancing the books infinitely more difficult. Under the Quinn deal, changes to the collective bargaining agreement would be forbidden until one-third of the way through the next gubernatorial term. By then, Illinois could be bankrupt. The state needs more flexibility to deal with public sector unions, not less.

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The Chicago Sun-Times provides this glimpse into our nation’s future:

The state’s miserable bond rating has driven up borrowing costs for state government by more than $500 million since last year, a government watchdog group says.

The nonpartisan, Chicago-based Civic Federation analyzed the near-record borrowing that the state has undertaken since last September and looked at similar borrowing during the same period in other states that have higher bond ratings than Illinois.

The result was a staggering $551.3 million extra that state taxpayers are having to devote to support the state’s thirst for debt because of a series of rating downgrades, the group says in a report being released today.

“This is an actual quantification of what the cost of the state’s fiscal irresponsibility has been because of the Illinois General Assembly and governor’s failure to stabilize state finances and to allow our credit rating to drop so low we are now the lowest credit-rated state in the country, with California,” said Laurence Msall, the Civic Federation’s president.

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It’s no secret that ethics means something a little different here in the Land of Lincoln. We’re home to where the last 3 of 6 governors have gone to jail. Our last governor was just convicted of a “Martha Stewart” offense and is awaiting retrial on his own corruption charges. Our current Governor, Pat Quinn, has been a self-styled outsider for decades and became an accidental governor after Blagojevich was impeached. The term “accidental governor” not only describes how he became Governor but in a large part it describes his governing style.

The one amazing transformation has been Quinn, the reformer,  becoming Quinn, the business-as-usual politician. While claiming the need for “shared sacrifice” and insisting on a tax increase, his top political staff received massive payraises (up to 20%). He formed a blue-ribbon ethics commission to reform state government, then largely ignored everything they told him. However, the latest incident is the most disturbing.

His chief-of-staff Jerry Stermer had sent several e-mails from his state e-mail account to coordinate campaign messaging for Pat Quinn during the primary. He had directed the budget director of the state to produce information to be distilled into talking points by the Governor’s campaign PR firm. To his credit, he then turned himself in to the Inspector General of the state for an ethics investigation. The ethics transgression here isn’t peanuts, but it’s certainly not a case of storied Chicago politics corruption. But then things got interesting.

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It is no secret that Illinois is going broke with over $6 BILLION in unpaid bills to social service providers, Medicaid doctors, mental health providers and schools. It is also no secret that the state has a $13 BILLION budget deficit that the Chicago Democrats who control the entire state failed to address. Next year’s budget deficit will be around $15 – $16 BILLION assuming the economy doesn’t do a double dip recession.

Just last week, Illinois overtook California as the riskiest state to insure against default on bond obligations. You would think cause a sense of urgency among the elected Democrats who control the state. You would be wrong.

Yesterday, we learned from the Associated Press that the Governor was busy doling out 20% raises to his top staff. While the rest of us worry about having jobs, see our hours cut and our pay stagnates, political cronies in the Quinn administration get fat raises.

This would typically be the kind of story the public sector unions would jump on. Not in Illinois because the Democrats and unions like SEIU and AFSCME are part of the same corrupt political class that has driven the state into a ditch. There is also another reason.

On July 1st this year, 40,000 or so AFSCME state employees happily collected a 7% percent “cost of living adjustment”. July 1st next year, they will get another 7%. In short, in 2 years, they will get a 14% raise. Even in good years, 7% is well over inflation. The timing of these raises were also very well coordinated.

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“As Speaker, I want every citizen of Illinois to know this is a people’s Legislature — we are here to serve the public, openly, honestly and with the highest standards. I am accountable only to you”, says Speaker Madigan’s own website.

Chicago Democrats have run Illinois into the ground. Since Rod Blagojevich became governor in 2003, Illinois state government has spent roughly $500 billion dollars (yes nearly half a trillion).  Yet, we are:

1. 48^th in job growth
2. 36^th in education
3. Leading the nation in youth violent crime
4. 3^rd in the nation in gambling revenue.

Last year, over 700 manufacturing companies left Illinois.  Over the last ten years, 750,000 people left the state, many of them high income earners.

Illinois does not quantify even basic financial information- such as the number of state programs.  In October, 2007, the Illinois Auditor General issued a report saying that, “Illinois does not have a comprehensive, consistent list of state programs”. Lacking basic data has led to a lack of legal spending control.  For example, the Illinois constitution requires a balanced budget, yet we face a $13 billion budget deficit.  For all we know, much of the money could have been stolen, as we are deficient in even fundamental fraud controls.  Last summer, the Auditor reported that “the state has a material deficiency” of fraud control on “all federal awards”.  The scope of this statement covered $17 billion in spending! Where did the money go?

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Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal editorial highlighted the baby steps Illinois is taking toward enacting public employee pension reform, noting that this could be the “start of a nationwide backlash against the scandal of runaway public pensions.”

State government employees in Illinois receive generous defined-benefit pension plans with compounded annual cost of living increases. As of August 2009, 536 Illinois public employee retirees earned a pension of more than $100,000. Former state employee (and now U.S. Senator) Roland Burris received a pension payment of $121,747 in 2009. You can look up the individual pension payments for state retirees at IllinoisOpenGov.org.

In response to the public’s growing frustration with Illinois’s habitual fiscal mismanagement, the General Assembly passed a pension reform bill that keeps the defined-benefit structure but institutes a benefit cap, requires an older retirement age, and prohibits double dipping. Governor Pat Quinn has yet to sign the bill, but he called for similar reforms in his March budget blueprint.

As I pointed out in the Wall Street Journal editorial, what the legislature passed were the bare minimum reforms. They only apply to newly hired employees, not existing employees.

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Everyone knows that things in Springfield, Illinois are broken. Everyone knows that the government of the State of Illinois is inefficient and corrupt. That’s all true, however, to truly understand the problems in Springfield, we must look at the structure of the legislature.

By its design, the legislature in Springfield consolidates all power in the hands of four people: Tom Cross, Christine Radogno, Mike Madigan and John Cullerton. Those are the Republican and Democratic leaders in the House and Senate. Power is consolidated through the process by which bills see the light of day. In the Illinois legislature, there’s only one way for a bill to be heard and debated: the rules committee. Not surprisingly, each of those four folks are head of the rules committee for their side in the House and Senate. As such, the head of the two rules committees have carte blanche over what bills will and won’t see the light of day. So, if any legislator wants their bill to get a hearing in the House, Michael Madigan must approve. You can see how such a process could corrupt, and does.

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Lawmakers in New York and Illinois were quick to recognize that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s trial offered a new opportunity to secure billions of additional taxpayer funds.

Both states are reeling from the combined effect of economic slowdown and years of profligate spending on government, grown far beyond what the tax base will support.   Thanks to President Obama’s decision to transfer terrorists from GITMO to U.S. soil, both states, and the city of New York, are going to be paid almost $3 billion dollars to secure, transport, administer, house, and contend with the requirements associated with having these terrorists in the United States.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the four other terrorists and all Americans associated with the trial, will require rigorous, differentiated security measures: twenty-four hour a day surveillance, transportation, housing and judicial security.  Certainly, New York will be required to raise its threat level to better prepare and respond to the new threat of  sympathetic  jihadists using the trial, as a showpiece of their own, to make a violent, retaliatory public statement.

Federal security and law enforcement agencies, such as DHS, FBI and US Marshals  will be working round the clock to provide the appropriate security, but will be unable to do all of the work required. New York, state and city, law enforcement officers will be required to share the burden, and will expect compensation from the federal government to provide this level of support.  Heavily-unionized, public employees in both states, are about to receive the most coveted of all Labor Union prizes, unlimited overtime that extends for years.

Bringing KSM to trial will be hugely expensive and will essentially represent a federalization of much of the New York state and city law enforcement and public services for the 5+ years that the trial process is likely to run.

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Once again we see how clueless Democrats like Illinois Governor Pat Quinn and Senator Dick Durbin are on matters of national security. With Barack Obama’s decision to treat the terrorists at Guantanamo Bay as if they are common American criminals, as the president bestows constitutional rights upon them, and with his decision to spread these monsters out across the U.S.A, we see Quinn and Durbin idiotically asserting that terrorists equal “good paying jobs.”

These jobs might come from the sale to the federal government of the Thomson correctional facility in west central Illinois where Obama could send some 100 detainees in preparation of closing down the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba facilities. Obama is struggling to figure out what to do with these detainees after his hastily made, ill-informed decision last January to close down the terrorist detainment facility.

After the idea was announced both Quinn and Durbin found themselves all excited to welcome these monsters into their state and both imagined that the occasion means that Illinois gets jobs. Durbin is quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying that this is a dramatic opportunity.

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Earlier this year the federal government sent $3 billion tax dollars to the state of Illinois to provide financial support for education as part of the American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009, a.k.a. “the stimulus,”.  Not for building schools, mind you.  There is money for that elsewhere in the $787 billion spend-a-thon.  This is for good old-fashioned reading, writing and arithmetic.  Of course, there are many reasons this is antithetical to the temporary economic jump-start concept behind the stimulus, but that is not the point here.

The State of Illinois dutifully began doling out this newfound largess to boost funding for low income schools under the Title 1 program, and to fund special education under the IDEA Part A program.  One can see the rationalization to increase funding for schools in poor areas in a recession, but it’s a bit of a stretch to see how the economic downturn has increased demand for special education.  But, again, that is not the subject of this piece.

As the Obama Administration has ramped up its efforts to portray the stimulus as an unqualified success that has rescued us from certain doom, they have resorted to the kinds of shoddy claims that smack of political desperation.

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