From Operation Homefront…
Watch this Brief Video — Help Us Support Illinois Military Families
Each year, thousands of Illinoisans bid goodbye to their families, friends and loved ones to deploy all over the world and defend our country.
These are the brave men and women of our Armed Forces.
But what about their families? What about the husbands, wives and children who are left behind?
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Assistance from a Grateful Nation”
-By Dan Proft
Almost as alarming as the rate at which children drop out of high school is the rate at which young teachers drop out of the profession. According to the National Education Association (NEA), nearly half of all teachers leave the profession within their first five years.
The union says low wages and poor working conditions cause this scandalous turnover rate. But that cannot be universally true for the thousands who enter the teaching profession because they truly want to instill a love of learning in the hearts and minds of a generation, only to abandon the job in disgust a few years later.
Although some young people may find they are simply not cut out for teaching as part of the routine trial-and-error that occurs in any industry, it seems unlikely this could explain a 50 percent attrition rate in a profession that—the NEA’s special pleading notwithstanding—provides above-average wages, excellent benefits, and secure employment. No, something else is at work here.
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‘Atlas Shrugged’ Offers Timely Message for Teaching Profession”
-By Dan Proft
If Governor Pat Quinn had been CEO of the White Star Line in April of 1912 I suspect his reaction to the Titanic’s sinking would have been to report that he had successfully transported 705 people from England to New York City. Never mind the 1,517 who didn’t make it.
This is Captain Quinn’s approach to stewarding the business climate in Illinois. When major employers begin making noise about leaving, Quinn secures for them a spot on one of the state’s few remaining lifeboats and declares them another satisfied customer.
So Caterpillar is staying in Peoria and Motorola Mobility is staying in Libertyville and undoubtedly enough tax relief will be provided for Sears to remain in Hoffman Estates.
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Captain Quinn Navigates Illinois’ Economy”
(Chicago, Illinois) – This morning on WLS-AM 890’s “Don Wade & Roma Morning Show” Jill Winling, wife of SFC Christopher Winling, learned live on the air that her family was the winner of the “Warm Welcome Home” contest sponsored by WLS, Galaxie Home Remodeling and Operation Homefront-Illinois. (Listen to the interview here.)
“We are proud to participate in the ‘Warm Welcome Home’ contest in support of Illinois’ military families and we’re thankful to enjoy the generosity of good corporate citizens and WLS partners like Galaxie Home Remodeling,” said Michael Damsky, President & General Manager of WLS-AM/FM.
SFC Winling is currently serving in Afghanistan, his third deployment. In a previous deployment to Iraq, SFC Winling was injured when the vehicle hit an IED. He awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star for his service. There are plans for SFC Winling to deploy again in 2013 after he returns home from Afghanistan later this year. The Winlings live in Lake Villa and are the proud parents of 3-year old twins (one boy, one girl).
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SFC Christopher Winling & Family Win “Warm Welcome Home” $50k Remodeling Contest”
-By Dan Proft
Snow in Chicago in April. Some might view this as simply the unpredictability of Chicago weather. Others might attribute it to climate change. I, however, believe this to be a prophecy foretold: Rahm Emanuel has been elected Mayor of Chicago and Hell is freezing over.
Welcome tea partiers. To paraphrase our President, you are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
This year we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration and the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan, two Illinois sons who forever changed the world and our understanding of it with their simple but unyielding commitment to the idea that liberty is the birthright of every human being.
The leadership emanating from Illinois more recently hasn’t been quite to that standard. This is also the year we take note of House Speaker Mike Madigan’s 40th year of driving business and jobs out of Illinois. And this year is the 14th anniversary of Barack Obama’s first “present” vote in the Illinois State Senate.
But I have hope for change.
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Remarks from the 2011 Chicago Tea Party Tax Day Rally”
-By Dan Proft
Last week, we emailed you to provide a brief introduction of Operation Homefront-Illinois, a vital organization formed immediately after 9/11 to provide emergency assistance to Illinois’ military families with a spouse deployed and wounded warriors who have returned home from service.
There are many ways we’re serving military families here in Illinois — including a new program we were pleased to launch with Galaxie Home Remodeling and WLS 890-AM.
This spring, WLS 890AM and Galaxie Home Remodeling are teaming up with Operation Homefront-Illinois for Warm Welcome Home – a program to thank a military family by remodeling their home! It’s our way of saying thank you to just one of the many families who sacrifice for our country.
Please click here to learn more about this great new program to help Chicago-area military families.
Military families from across the family are being nominated for and applying for this program.
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OH-IL Providing $50,000 Home Remodeling as a “Warm Welcome Home” to Chicago-area Military Family”
-By Dan Proft
With two wars in progress, and additional global unrest putting our military on alert — it’s important to remember the sacrifices of the men and women who defend our freedom … and the families they leave behind here on the homefront.
That’s exactly why Operation Homefront was founded.
OH was developed to support the families of deployed service members immediately following 9/11. The organization currently provides services to military families across the nation with 23 chapters serving 32 states — including right here in Illinois.
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Protecting Illinois’ Heroes While They Protect Us”
-By Dan Proft
In political terms 2010 may have been the year of the Tea Party movement, but in policy terms it was the year of school choice. And with courageous reformers at the helm of several states, 2011 could be even better.
Last year, school choice moved beyond the think tanks and policy journals and squarely into popular culture.
The first annual National School Choice Week in late January was a fitting recognition that the issue has been successfully entered the zeitgeist even as education remains mainly (and appropriately) a state and local issue.
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My Latest for School Reform News: 2011 Looks Good for Reformers”
-By Dan Proft
Let me understand this, Illinois is sending jobs to Wisconsin and in exchange we receive more liberal Democrat politicians? That’s a trade only the Cubs would make. Similarly, it might be another 103 years before a business again locates in Illinois.
No one can say Wisconsin Senate Democrats aren’t willing to go the distance for their financiers. They went all the way to Rockford seeing as Illinois is a sanctuary state for public sector union shills.
What choice did they have? It isn’t right that one party should just ram through legislation without bi-partisan support unless, of course, you are Chicago Democrats in Washington ramming through Obamacare or Chicago Democrats in Springfield ramming through the largest tax increase in Illinois history.
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The Battle of Madison is only the Beginning”
-By Dan Proft
First Keith Olbermann was taken off the air and now Rahm Emanuel has been taken off the ballot. It has been like an infusion of vegetables into the diet of a body politic suffering from left-wing induced acidosis.
In the Rahm case, it is up to the seven members of the Illinois State Supreme Court to maintain our newfound homeostasis.
The state’s high court should end Rahm’s fraudulent candidacy.
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Poetic Justice for Rahm”
-By Dan Proft
During the Illinois General Assembly’s lame duck session, Democrat leaders have moved to abolish the death penalty at the same time as signing the economic death warrant for state’s economy.
In Illinois, it is law-abiding, working families who have been condemned.
Despite lllinois’ leading exports being its residents and businesses, the General Assembly has proposed raising the state income and corporate income taxes by 75% each. If this tax monster passes, at least two things are certain: one, Illinois businesses would pay the highest corporate income taxes in the free world; two, Illinois would see the largest mass exodus of productive people since the Israelites fled Egypt.
The data points about Illinois’ economic death spiral have been repeated so often as to have been stripped of their shock value. Bottom line: Illinois is a bigger default risk than Bernie Madoff and has created fewer jobs in the last decade than record stores.
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Illinois: Death by Taxes”
-By Dan Proft
“Experience,” Oscar Wilde observed, “is simply the name we give our mistakes.” I was reminded of Wilde’s maxim while watching the recent Cathleen Black drama play out in New York City.
Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, tapped by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to be the city’s public schools chancellor, has no experience in education apart from serving on the board of a charter school. Thus, according to United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew, Black has “no qualifications to be the chancellor of the New York City school system.”
Education establishment figures such as Mulgrew are the same people who think University of Chicago economist Gary Becker shouldn’t be allowed to teach an Intro to Economics course in a public school without a teaching certificate. His Nobel Prize in the field just isn’t good enough.
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The Case Against ‘Experience’”
A new year is upon us but it is the same old tax-and-spend, borrow-and-spend policies being promulgated in Springfield. Proft and State Rep. Lou Lang join Eddie Arruza on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight to discuss the governor’s plan to borrow $15 billion.
Video: Dan Proft on WTTW Channel 11 on Illinois Budget Mess”
-By Dan Proft
Why am I always the last to know?
Apparently earlier this week the American people were taken hostage.
Thankfully President Samuel L. Jackson intervened to negotiate our release.
Explaining his philosophy when it comes to engaging hostiles, the President said, “I think it’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage-takers, unless the hostage gets harmed. In this case, the hostage was the American people and I was not willing to see them get harmed.”
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America Held Hostage”
-By Dan Proft
You wanted tax relief.
You wanted an end to runaway spending, including an end to reckless borrowing to finance the status quo.
You wanted the public sector to live in the same financial world you do; a world where one must be able to look at two numbers and decide which one is greater than the other.
You wanted an end to the ruling class mentality that sets out different laws for those who make them than for those who live under them.
You wanted elected officials who are responsive and who put your interests ahead of the special interests.
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Message from Springfield: We Heard You Loud and Clear, Illinois”
-By Dan Proft
I recently attended a speech by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in which he inadvertently provided some advice for the Illinois Republican Party.
Blair recounted a conversation he had with a fellow MP after his Labour Party had lost their fourth national election in a row in 1992. In the wake of that defeat, his frustrated colleague lamented to Blair, “What the heck is wrong with the voters of England?”
This anecdote is better told with an upbeat British accent but Blair’s point was that the better question at the time was, “What the heck is wrong with the Labour Party?” Five years later, Blair led a new, centrist Labour Party that won a landslide victory and maintained power for the ensuing decade.
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Answers for ILGOP Start with Asking the Right Question”
-By Dan Proft, for the Illinois Policy Institute
Amid the contentious debate as to how we improve public education in America, there is one reality to which all parties subscribe: there is no substitute for a quality teacher in the classroom.
The scholarship on teacher quality is clear. It is the most important school-related factor in student achievement. Some studies suggest the difference between having a good teacher and having a bad one can exceed one grade-level equivalent in annual achievement growth.
Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Success Academy charter school in New York City, has said a great teacher is like a great artist and should be recognized as such.
So why are the teachers’ unions fighting that recognition?
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Unions’ Preferred Rating for Teachers: NR”
-By Dan Proft, for the Illinois Policy Institute
I do not think government functionaries should set private sector salaries or that U.S. policymakers should be adorned with the appellation properly reserved for Russian autocrats.
But, if I did not believe in free markets and free minds, NBA Commissioner David Stern would be my choice for “Pay Czar.”
Stern is in the midst of a negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) for the four hundred some odd millionaires in the NBA. Stern’s position is that the league needs to reduce player salaries by one third (some $750 million) and consider contraction, which would close down a franchise or two in order for the NBA to be a self-sustaining business model.
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My Nominee for Pay Czar: David Stern”
-By Dan Proft
In two revealing interviews over the weekend, we learned that President Obama and his tiny dancer who would be Chicago Mayor are challenged by the same marketing problem: the public’s perception of them belies who they really are.
In his sit down with the New York Times, the President laments that in his first two years he let himself look too much like “the same old tax-and-spend Democrat”.
He’s not, you know. Sure, you can focus on all of Obama’s taxing-and-spending if you are one of those people obsessed with looking at what people do instead of blindly accepting what people say. Fortunately for him, the President is not such a person.
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Obama & Rahm Set the Record Straight”
-By Dan Proft, for The Heartland Institute
NBC dedicated a week of programming at the end of September to spotlighting the good, the bad, and the ugly of K-12 education in America under the rubric “Education Nation.”
Part of NBC’s “curriculum” included an interview with President Obama by Today Show host Matt Lauer. The president inadvertently offered an insight into why calling America the “education nation” is like calling a diminutive person “stretch.”
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Obama Failed the ‘Education Nation’ Test”
-By Dan Proft
According to the Kübler-Ross model, there are five distinct stages to the grieving process. Given President Obama’s economic policies, it is likely you have experienced the majority of them in the last two years.
This contribution to the understanding of the human psyche has inspired my own.
I present the five stages to the process of Chicago Democrat governance, applicable at both the state and federal levels.
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Recovering from the Five Stages of Chicago Democrat Governance”
From Dan Proft…
Those on the receiving end of the tea party movement this election cycle are hopeful it is but a fleeting temper tantrum.
However, as President Obama learned, hope may be a campaign slogan but it is not a strategy.
In fact, there are at least four reasons why the tea party movement will have a positive, lasting and transformative impact on our politics.
First, the tea party has accomplished something the Republican Party has always struggled to do which is to unite social and economic conservatives around common enemies and a common agenda.
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Tea Party Transformation”
-By Dan Proft
One of the externalities resulting from the overregulation of human conduct is that our debates over the propriety of a questionable act center solely around whether it is legal.
In a free society good law necessarily means allowing bad taste, as long as the exercise of your bad taste does not interfere with the exercise of mine. However, just because you are allowed to do something does not mean you should do it.
I cite grown men confusing flip-flops for acceptable shoeware as one example. Another is my dad wearing his Bluetooth earpiece at the dinner table like he is preparing to dock the lunar shuttle.
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Ground Zero & Gettysburg: Legality vs. Morality”
-By Dan Prof
You know how I know I’ve been in Illinois politics too long?
The comedy troupe of Sam Adam Sr. and Jr. was starting to make some sense to me.
For example, during his post-verdict floor show, Sam Adam Sr. said that US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald thinks Illinois is a banana republic.
Isn’t it?
A banana republic is marked by a politically unstable government ruled by a small and corrupt elite who use the power of the state to collude with favored monopolies in order to line their pockets.
If the fruit fits…
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Dan Proft: Adam Antics Won’t Change Blago’s Fate”
From Dan Proft for the Heartland Institute…
Programming Note: Join Bruce Wolf and me every Saturday from 12noon-2pm on WLS-AM 890 (wlsam.com) for our perspicacious perspectives on the pressing issues of the day.
Teacher Quality Focus of ‘Rhee-form’ for DC Schools
Washington, DC public schools have an acute problem with juvenile delinquency.
Trouble is, the problem isn’t with the students but rather the supposed grown-ups in charge of the Washington Teachers Union (WTU).
Once thought to be an unlikely laboratory for school reform, the District’s success with school vouchers, begrudgingly recognized even by the Obama administration, its high incidence of children attending charter schools (35 percent) and its outspoken Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee have made Washington, DC a bellwether for K-12 reform.
But none of these gains have come without incident. And the latest battle between Rhee and the WTU over the firing of bad teachers is no exception.
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Teacher Quality Focus of ‘Rhee-form’ for DC Schools”
From Dan Proft…
Like most Americans, I recently spent a quiet Saturday evening pouring over the state-by-state nonfarm payroll employment numbers for the month of June generously provided by the gnomes at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In the course of my review I noted that Texas enjoyed the nation’s largest over-the-month increase in employment with 14,000 more Texans gainfully employed in June than there were in May.
This reminded me of a CNNMoney.com report I stumbled across a few weeks earlier listing the top 25 counties in America in terms of job growth over the last decade.
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Dan Proft: Channeling Texas”
The latest commentary from Dan Proft…
Illinoisans are getting a real education in what happens when politicians flout the laws.
I am not talking about the laws that govern public corruption and Rod Blagojevich’s various schemes to secure cash and prizes as parting gifts for his two terms as governor.
No, I am talking about the laws of economics that govern Illinois’ fiscal vitality and the politicians who have been violating those laws for generations.
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Dan Proft: The Trial of Illinois Politicians We Should be Having”
From Dan Proft, Urquhart Media…
(A Podcast of this commentary can be heard HERE)
I remember my grade school basketball coach telling me that “the graveyards are full of indispensable people.” It was his way of explaining that no individual is more important than the team.
A favorite refrain of my high school basketball coach was that “talent guarantees nothing” to remind us that we had to work for what we sought to achieve.
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Dan Proft: Highland Park H.S. Provides a Real Education with Girls Basketball Flap”
-By Dan Proft, originally posted by the Heartland Institute
Twenty-seven years have passed since A Nation at Risk, a seminal report on the state of education in America, famously concluded, “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
The report cautioned the nation’s “once unchallenged pre-eminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world” as a result of faltering public schools and the failure to prepare children to compete in an increasingly global economy.
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America’s Old K-12 Model Keeps Us ‘A Nation At Risk’”
From Dan Proft, Urquhart Media…
Who would have thought that pawn broker Scott Lee Cohen, the deposed Democrat Lt. Governor candidate, would have turned out to be a more competent lender than former Democrat golden boy Ali G?
I guess Cohen should have played basketball with the President.
The “Ali G” I refer to is Alexi Giannoulias. The nickname is ripped from the fictional interviewer created by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. Giannoulias’ comedic campaign for the U.S. Senate would normally be the stuff of fiction but this is Illinois.
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Dan Proft: It’s Curtains for Ali G”