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Illinois Raids Welfare for Videogame Legislation
jcgam69 writes "Recent hearings revealed that the State of Illinois spent $1 million defending their unconstitutional video games legislation. The story gets even worse when you learn where the money came from. 'Some of the areas money was taken from included the public health department, the state's welfare agency and even the economic development department. A state representative who attended recent hearings on the issue said that Gov. Blagojevich's staff simply spread the legal bills around by sticking them to agencies which had funds left in their budgets--even if the agencies had nothing to do with the issue or the litigation.'"
Elwood: Illinois Nazis.
Jake: I hate Illinois Nazis.
F1RST P0ST!!!
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
C'mon, with idiocy like that rampant, is anyone really shocked by this?
On the other hand, I can see exactly why this was done, and why it might be ok. It is the taxpayer's money, and it's expectd to be used. They spent it very poorly yes, but it's there to be spent. If the public is upset about it, they need to make that known, by tossing those dips out of office. If they don't do that, then no bitching from you. Either change it or stfu.
God forbid the sacred vote buying fund be tapped to protect censorship.
Never trust strangers, authorities, or people named Milorad Blagojevich.
This shouldn't come as a big surprise. I expect a lot of government offices/officials snake money from areas that still have some cash to pay for other interests. It's one of the biggest reasons agencies tend to spend all their money...if they have some left over, there's a chance someone will decide they don't really need that budget money and shift it to some other agency.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Which would make you want to commit violence more, playing a video game or not getting a welfare check? Their priorities are completely messed up.
stuff |
They are far too busy thinking of the children to think of the children.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
That bites. The funds should come from the legislative budget, even if they have no funds left. The Legislature would be hard-pressed to pass more bills that could result in massive legal bills if their pay check was directly at risk.
Either that or create a discretionary fund that is 100% disclosed to voters at voting time, included in clear wording direct in the ballot.
Think of the children! No, seriously, think of the children who need government assistance to eat.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
If the legislation was important enough to enact, then it's important enough to defend.
If you thought the legislation exceeded the scope of government, then you think paying to defend it is bad too. No wonder non-binding legislation is catching on, as it makes both sides happy, or... is that unhappy.
Ever since the demise of the American union from a salient revolutionary forum into an overwrought political machine, Illinois and its princely city Chicago have been irrelevant in national politics. It really could of been a different world if greed and corruption had not become the bread and butter of union bosses, Chicago's mayors and eventually most of the Illinois government.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
depressing. It shows you how your money, not the governments, yours, gets wasted every day by a bunch of un-accountable megalomaniacs. And its true of both parties.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Normally you try to spend all of your budget in a given year so that the "powers that be" don't cut next year's budget because you obviously didn't need all that money. This is the first I've heard where (apparently) they took already-allocated money back to pay for their stupidity. That sucks even more because you can't even count on the money you already have - you never know when the higher-ups will just change their mind and give it to someone else.
The games in question are almost always rated M for mature and most chains require ID to buy them anyway. So Illonois spent $1,000,000 trying to protect 17 year old children from exposed breasts. There is far more titilation (pun intended) to be had in a no-age-limit Maxim/Stuff/etc. magazine than in nearly all of these video games. Heck the kids could just go to the art museum for far more nudity, and read Genesis and Leviticus for rape/murder/genocide/incest.
n/t
My Babylon
While this is probably not a proper thing for the government to do (and in my opinion it is despicable), stay real. This is only a million bucks. This is hardly a standout example of government waste.
I constantly hear stories about how politicians took money from place A and spent it on place B. I suspect this varies between states, but can someone explain to me how this works? As far as I know, there's no special bank account where money is deposited for each organization: the budget is set by law - so if the law says "$50 goes here and $100 goes here" I don't see how it is possible to take it from any one of those buckets without passing another law that overrides it. Can someone please explain this?
Elwood: Slashdot Godwins.
Jake: I hate Slashdot Godwins.
Seriously, check out the controversy section on his Wikipedia Article. The dude got tons of soft cash from companies as campaign contributions. Makes you wonder why he feels the need to rob the poor to pay for his failed ideas...
The problem is (as an Illinois native) elected officials in Illinois have a history of using their current elected position to campaign for the next one. A good example of this is the Secretary of State - the first thing the guy elected Secretary of State does is plaster "John Doe, Secretary of State" on EVERYTHING in the state. Tollway signs. DMV. Courthouses. Whatever. You can't go into a state building in Illinois without knowing who the secretary of state is.
And Blagojevich is a just plain corrupt governor. Sometimes I wonder if there really is a conspiracy between the two parties - the only reason Blagojevich got reelected, even though most people BELIEVE he's corrupt, is that the Republicans somehow managed to field a candidate that was SO BAD that corrupt Blagojevich was actually the better choice! I wish I had been paying more attention, as *I* could have gotten elected governor running against those two.
Anyway, this is just Blagojevich campaigning for Senate or President, using state dollars. You can see the campaign commercial already: 'When Blagojevich was governor of Illinois, he worked to protect vulnerable children from violent video games....'
paintball
It's hard to say this is bad. Anti-videogame laws are unconstitutional and generally stupid.
Welfare payments trap people in poverty and support criminal activity, drug use, single parenthood (a.k.a. growing up without a father), irresponsibility, dependence, and the inability to develop capabilities or skills.
Money wasted failing to accomplish anything versus money spent succeeding in harming people. Better if they just throw bundles of cash on a bonfire (or let the tax payers who earned it keep it).
IANAL or work in auditing, but the Governor could get his state into a lot of trouble spending money that was earmarked for that federal program, methinks. I'd hope that during their next federal audit (which happens every year here) they get to the bottom of it and punish just the people responsible, while not impacting the needy families with fines or cuts to the state's grant.
If anyone needs me, I'll be in the Angry Dome.
Anything that keeps welfare money out of the hands of those who refuse to get themselves jobs and require someone to hold their hand through life is a good thing.
Starting around 1990-1991, I watched a generation of management at my Fortune 500 client sites slide into retirement and their replacements take over. Retirement changes weren't new, but this is when I noticed that the new guys almost universally had a lot less class and compassion than the old crowd. It got worse over the years, and lack of class and compassion was compounded by sheer congenital stupidity, and then there was the mob that took over the federal government in 2000.
Recently, I've concluded the boomers are a generation of fuckups, and the younger they are the stupider they get. I'm a late boomer, too. If I'd been born a little rich kid, I just know I'd be blowing a fortune on shrinks and another one on a truck-load of Euros.
I find this incredibly interesting the class warfare going on in Illinois. Video games are an item that falls into the discretionary spending category. You have extra money and you get the new game for your kid. The people who buy these games, at least for the most part, have the money to cover the necessities in life and then some. So in order to protect these reasonably well off people you are going to take money away from the downtrodden and underprivileged? "We need to protect all of these suburban kids from what they see in their video games. But where do we get the money for the fight? Oh, those poor kids don't need to eat this month..." God bless the yuppies
Yes, a million bucks isn't necessarily a lot in terms of a government expenditure, but why is that? Perhaps because so many projects are "porked" out, overpriced, and generally using incomprehensible amounts of money that a million simply doesn't seem big bucks in comparison?
There are a lot of good things that could have been done with a million bucks. More if it wasn't nibbled down in bits and bites before it got to its destination. Just because we're used to larger wasteful expenditure on the behalf of government doesn't mean that we shouldn't be pissed off when they're wasting a "measly million" on something so stupid as defending unconstitutional legislation.
Look, I hate stupid, anti-speech laws as much as the next guy, but taking money from the pockets of welfare mothers with more gold in their mouths than I wear on my wrist makes me cry no tears. I mean, it's funny that they're taking it from welfare, but it's hardly a uniquely fucked up action on the part of the state. Plus, think of it this way:
The government takes money that YOU ACTUALLY WORKED FOR to pay welfare queens.
Yeah, not so many tears for the whore with 6 kids now, are there?
I think the heart of the debate about violence in video games comes when you contrast TFA with this.
Really, is there anything left to discuss about the issue?
This is retarded... How many billions of dollars does the American government spend on their military and state dinners and bombing middle eastern nations and weapons to blow up said middle eastern nations and all that other bollocks? But when it comes to defending their own stupid laws oh no the money has to come out of the poor peoples pockets.
And to all those saying that people on welfare need to get a job, have you ever been on welfare? In my country our welfare pays a bit more and I still wouldn't be able to feed myself if I were on welfare. You can be damn sure they are trying to get a job but who is going to hire someone who is so poor they can't even dress properly? No one defends the poor because they can't offer you anything in return.
Just my 2cents
That'd be why nobody cares about government corruption or stupidity as news anymore. We're so used to it that we just don't think much of it. Most of the voting population thinks that is just how government is and that there is nothing we can do about it. No doubt why fewer and fewer people vote.
If only people could be motivated to revolt before our government, and civilization, collapses. The scary thing to me is that the American population has no will to survive. We'd rather watch a spectacle and whine about what is fair or not instead of making any effort to address any real problems. I hear more about stem cells, immigration, and the war in Iraq than about any issue that really matters. Even with the stuff we hear about it's all smoke and mirrors and nothing substantial. There is no intelligent plan even being considered to deal with stem cell research, immigration, or the war - all we get is sensationalism. We'd rather bicker over non-issues and make a show over who is being the least politically correct than to come together as a nation.
I think democracies are doomed to implode without strong leaders, good education, and a common vision of self. I don't think we currently have any of those in the United States or are likely to get them anytime soon.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Do any real state health departments cover city parks? I'd think that even a well-funded health department would have its hands full between hospitals, restaurants, and grocery stores...
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Only if they lower college prices. I'll bet a year's worth of welfare payments for one adult wouldn't even cover a year's worth of DeVry Institute courses.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
0 offtopic before I posted, so blow me.
My Babylon
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/cont/node/2422
Obama - For whom the bells have tolled
May 3, 2007 - 7:56pm.
"Chi-Town, we have a problem."
At least, that would be the message to Barack's campaign handlers, if they were willing to listen. And unfortunately for Barack, that "if" is just a tad too big for his britches.
While his rise into national prominence was a delicate thing of beauty, those of us from Illinois scratched our collective heads, wondering why this semi-hack from our state house was flying like a swan, when the reality is that he lucked into office because of extreme, consistent, and religious based failures by Illinois Reich Wing commissars who run our GOP - more often than not, into the ground, if not into prison.
For all his failed memory lapses contained in his book, at least he reportedly wrote most of it. That is good. Kudos for that. As I try to get one of several (5) I have written published, I admire his success (at the same time that I would kill for 10 private minutes with his agent), the many errors and misrememberances are not a problem. But are they a symptom? Only time will tell.
No, we need not feed his publisher's pockets to find more obvious omens of Barack's ultimate future in this election cycle. It can be broken down into four pretty telling points, and two very disgusting ones.
Let's start with Barack himself. He has several serious problems, the kind that will derail a national campaign by erosion, collapse, and painful agony. In that respect, his campaign resembles Hillary's - because hers suffers from the same problem.
Barack's first problem is called "Rezko". A professional, political whore who buys pols in Chicago, Cook County, and Illinois when it suits his purposes, his close, constant rubbing of elbows with Barack is actually far worse than anything Harry Truman did with his Pendergast connections. Harry's wife's White House deep freeze freezer hardly qualifies as graft.
which revealed that "the governor raided funds throughout state government to pay for the litigation. Some of the areas money was taken from included the public health department, the state's welfare agency and even the economic development department." Interesting. They raid from all the areas that need money to help people in order to help people. Affects on People: No Health Care - Stressed over the bills. No Welfare - Stressed and afraid of the bills. No Economic Development - No jobs. Overall effect = violence and troubled youths And they say games are a menace to society.