While the judge in the Bears case ruled in favor of big government, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Alexander P. White made one of the most spectacular rulings in recent Illinois history by overturning a liquor tax passed by the General Assembly in 1999.

The legislation, which funded Gov. Ryan’s pork-ridden Illinois FIRST program, was rammed through the General Assembly before most members even had the chance to read the bill. Also, the state constitution requires that legislation deal with a single subject, but the liquor tax law didn’t. The Tribune’s Douglas Holt and Ray Long write:

White noted that the law’s title says the liquor funds are to be used for public infrastructure improvements, but then the bill itself says the funds could be tapped to pay everything from judges’ salaries to school aid, mental health grants, community programs, vehicles and equipment.

Even before the licenses for bribes scandal, there were a lot of problems with Gov. Ryan, who made it clear from the very beginning of his 1998 campaign for governor that he was trading pork for political favors. That’s not to mention Ryan-led GOP efforts to shut the Libertarian Party of Illinois‘ candidate out of the process by cracking down really hard on ballot access efforts.

Ryan had the guts to put a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois, but it’s hard to think of anyone who wouldn’t have, considering how many people on death row were shown to be innocent. He also has tried to encourage trade with Cuba. But that’s where his good points end. He is worse than a big-government Democrat, because there are lots of Republicans who oppose his policies but voted for him just out of habit.

A Republican candidate for the GOP nomination for Alabama’s fifth congressional district wants to put a 1 percent tax on science fiction to fund NASA.

Aside from the obvious constitutional problems, it would seem like a stupid way to about the matter. People who consume science fiction are precisely the people likely to support space exploration. By taxing science fiction, less of it will be produced, less will be consumed, and the push to explore space will be decreased in the end. The whole measure is self-defeating.

Anyhow, it’s far from clear that investing in NASA is the best way of going about encouraging space exploration. NASA, for all its good intentions, is a cold-war relic that is just about as effective as any other government agency — that is to say, not very effective at all.

But you know what? I have a distinct feeling this kook won’t get the nomination.

Why won’t the United States do the same? If the United States is investing all this money into Afghanistan anyway, why should there be any concern over prisoners of war — er, detainees — not being tried in Afghanistan? Karzai would probably let the U.S. military run the trials itself.

The important principle to uphold is that no person should be imprisoned without cause, without a just trial. It’s in the Constitution. But that never stopped Dubya.

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous oil prices or by drilling end them … of course, it’s nowhere near as simple as that.

First, there’s the unfortunate fact that oil prices are global and drilling in Alaska wouldn’t do much to affect the worldwide market for oil. As I’ve argued before, in spite of the occasionally successful OPEC hikes in prices, no cartel can keep prices artificially low for long. There is simply too much incentive for a partner in the cartel to jump ship and make those big profits for a short while.

But second, there is the larger problem: the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve is public. As William L. Anderson of the Ludwig von Mises Institute writes:

Thus, we are left with the reality that the political process — which amounts to power by the group that either shouts the loudest or has the most votes in Congress (or both) — will decide whether or not consumers will be able to use the oil located under the Arctic tundra. For all sorts of reasons, people should be alarmed that an important question like this is decided, not by individual buyers and sellers in the marketplace, but rather by what amounts to mob rule.

The only way to determine the true value of the land and whether it should be drilled is to sell it to private groups. With market-oriented regulations encouraging them to value the wildlife against the possible profits of oil, only a private group — responding to market signals — could best deal with the many complicated issues involved.

But Dubya, in another sop to big-government lovers, supports it. Mental-health parity, which I’ve written about previously, would force insurers to cover mental illnesses to the same extent they cover physical illnesses.

Many states already have laws on the book which say that if an insurer offers mental-health coverage, they have to offer the same coverage as they do for physical illnesses. Guess what happened? Lots of insurance companies stopped offering mental-health coverage altogether. No big surprise.

In this case, you have consumers who clearly prefer less mental-health coverage in exchange for either a lower premium or more physical coverage. To regulate this is to deny consumers their right to choose their own health-care coverage. But worse than that, yet another mandate will just raise the cost of buying insurance in the first place, denying many people even the choice of what kind of coverage to buy.

But that’s part of the plan, isn’t it? Mandate coverage for all kinds of things until it’s so expensive no one can afford it. Then some genius steps in says, “Gee, why can’t anyone afford health insurance. Maybe the government should pay for it!” There are many other complicating factors, including tax law, Medicare, Medicaid, government regulation of medicine, etc. But the simple point here is that parity may help some people who suffer from mental illnesses in the short run, but in the long run, will price many people out of insurance market entirely.

Part of the debate about parity, which has been going on for years, is about how much premiums would rise as a result of the legislation. Each side wants to twist the figures to its own benefit. I’m no statistician, so I can’t say which is right. But the people who support parity say, “It’s a small price to pay to make sure that people have access to mental-health coverage.” That misses the larger point, however, which is that by making sure that some people have access to a certain portion of a certain type of coverage, others are denied the flexibility they want in an insurance package.

It should be no suprise that more and more employers self-insure to escape these regulations. Of course, they are then scapegoated too, for exploiting so-called loopholes.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Dubya made a deal with Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) on this, in exchange for help on something else. Lord knows that he needs all the help he can get in a Democrat-led Senate.

How do we reconcile the following? First, Glen Kessler reports in an April 15 Washington Post story:

The Bush administration is poised to complete the biggest increase in government spending since the 1960s’ “Great Society,” the result of conducting the war on terrorism while substantially boosting the education and transportation budgets, according to a detailed analysis of government spending patterns.

Spending on government programs will increase by 22 percent from 1999 to 2003 in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to the analysis by The Washington Post and vetted by budget experts in both parties.

And yet two days later, he asks Congress to restrain spending. Or so reports Mike Allen in the Post:

President Bush threatened yesterday to veto congressional spending he opposes and said he wants to balance the budget by 2004, a year earlier than the White House had estimated was possible.

He said, “If we restrain spending, even though we’re at war, even though our economy is still clunking along, if we react responsibly we can return to a balanced budget — something I want — as early as 2004. But tough choices on Capitol Hill have to be made.”

I agree that tough choices have to be made? Why isn’t Dubya making any? On the other hand, I’ve got to give him credit for pushing to make the tax cuts permanent. It’s a shame that Republicans can only say the word “cut” if the word “tax” precedes it. Big budgets hurt liberty just as much as high taxes.
Will splitting the INS make things better? I doubt it, though that’s what appears will happen after a House vote to split the agency into two bureaus, one focusing on enforcement and one on services. I’m not sure how splitting the agency will help it cooperate in an effective fashion. It will probably make things worse because people from each agency will battle over turf.

It’s claimed that serving legal immigrants is getting in the way of keeping tabs on illegal immigrants. But illegal immigrants, by and large, aren’t the problem. There aren’t enough resources to enforce the current laws because there’ll never be enough resources to fight the one thing that attracts immigrants to America: the lure of freedom.

Instead of fighting a losing battle, the United States should make it easier for people to immigrate here legally. Then enforcement resources could be directed in a much more fruitful manner. Rather than trying to cover a southern border that stretches thousands of miles, the INS could focus their resources on making sure that the people who apply for entry into the United States have no history of violence or terrorist affiliation. That’s a smart approach to the problem, rather than making hardworking people wade across the Rio Grande for a chance of a better life.

Certainly, the Bears do, and so does the judge who ruled that the swindling of state taxpayers to rebuild Soldier Field to the McCaskey family’s liking should go ahead.

Apparently, the issue in the case was whether the deal was constitutional, since a deal on a public project is verboten if it primarily benefits a private party. Well, this seems like a no-brainer to me. The Bears franchise will more than double in value to $800 million. They get luxury boxes, concession profits and so on, all on the taxpayer’s dime. As an excellent investigative story in the Tribune last Sunday pointed out, the Bears aren’t even paying as much out of pocket as they’ve been letting on.

Ultimately, I don’t know whether this decision was right on the law, but it’s just another example of the kind of sports pork I can’t stand. The studies put out to show that communities benefit from stadium deals are a huge scam. Taxpayers fund fancy new stadiums and sports owners get the profits. This kind of subsidization of private business discourages sports owners from reforming some severely dysfunctional league economics.

The whole thing’s pretty disgusting. The McCaskeys can take the Bears to the suburbs or to Caracas as far as I’m concerned. I like football, though I’ve never been to Soldier Field, but what about the millions of people who live in Illinois who don’t care about the Bears or don’t even watch football? Why should they pay to build a stadium that will make the Bears owners even richer than they already are?

Folks talk about Republicans being the friends of big business as over and against the little guy, but here we have a bipartisan deal struck to help out a wealthy family at the expense of the average taxpayer. In the end, both parties are susceptible to the influence of powerful chasing after pork. Which is why government shouldn’t dole it out in the first place, as a rule.

Republican gubernatorial nominee Jim Ryan said Gov. George “Safe Highways” Ryan should “seriously think about” resigning. This came on the heels of a poll by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch showing that 67 percent of Illinois voters want him to leave office.

This was a dumb move for several reasons. First, as I’ve argued before, a Gov. Ryan resignation would probably hurt the GOP’s image worse than his stubbornly staying in office. Second, Ryan didn’t even have the guts to actually call for the guv’s resignation. “I do honestly think the decision at this point is his, and he has to make it,” he said. “I think he should seriously think about it.”

Wow, Jim, way to take a stand. The third reason it’s a dumb move is because he looks like he’s doing it solely for political reasons and Blagojevich is scoring tons of points off him. To wit:

Democratic gubernatorial rival Rod Blagojevich questioned the timing, coming a day after the poll was published–and four years after Jim Ryan ran on the same ticket with Gov. Ryan and accepted his campaign contributions.

“And now he’s suggesting he should resign?” Blagojevich said. “I think that’s somewhat cynical and, frankly, disingenuous.”

By even mentioning the governor, Ryan makes him an issue and associates himself with him in the public mind. Of course, the Democrats will run ads in the fall making it seem like the two Ryans are blood brothers who spent their weekends together eating children. And O’Malley already ran those clever ads where Jim Ryan’s face morphed into George Ryan’s. But by speaking out now, and in a noncommittal way, Ryan’s only making things worse.

Blagojevich has his own skeletons, considering that his father-in-law Alderman Dick Mell puppeteers him the way Jim Henson controlled Kermit the Frog. But Ryan won’t ever get to make use of those negatives if he keeps things focused on his relationship with the governor.

As part of the April 20-22 weekend of protest activities in D.C., a few thousand people gathered to protest Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. I watched the event on C-SPAN and it spoked me out.

For much of the time, it went along without too many surprises and not a little cleverness. Chants like “Fund education, not occupation!” and “Stop the killing, stop the crime, Israel out of Palestine!” were the order of the day, as were the boilerplate speeches decrying Israeli occupation and treatment of Palestinians.

There were plenty of Palestinian flags and mock Israeli flags with swastikas in place of the star of David. {Shudder} But what spooked me most was when, later in the program, a couple of speakers actually cried out, “Long live the intifada!” And the crowd joined in on the chant!

From the long shots C-SPAN occasionally had of the audience, it looked like it was comprised mostly of Palestinians, but there was more than a fair share of non-Palestinians there too. Certainly, most of the people who went to Washington to protest that weekend were well-to-do, middle-class, white college kids. Why are they supporting the intifada?

These are folks so committed to peace that they oppose any force to wipe out anti-U.S. terrorist groups, and yet are vocally supporting the intifada, which is a campaign of terror on innocent Israeli civilians. Pundits talk about the Bush doctrine being shredded by his even-handedness in dealing with the Mideast situation, but this is hypocrisy if anything is.

I don’t take sides on the Israeli-Palestinian question, but no one should support the murder of innocent civilians, for any reason. Pro-Palestinian folks will just say it’s their response to Israel’s “state terrorism.” That may be. Perhaps Israel isn’t as discriminating in prosecuting its war on terror as it could be. I don’t know. But that does not justify the unquestionably evil murder of civilians whose only crime was to try and eat in a restaurant or shop at a mall.

Peace activists, of all people, should know better. Before they were just naïve — now they are hypocrites.