Your Web Site
To better understand the determined fury of State Sen. James Meeks—his fiery rhetoric on education funding and proposals to spark city-suburban confrontations—we must look back to spring 2006, when Meeks himself got a schooling he can't forget. He was frustrated. The "tax-swap" idea he favored—increasing income taxes and cutting property taxes to reduce school-funding disparities between rich and poor districts—was going nowhere in Springfield. His fellow Democrat, Gov. Rod Blagojevich, was adamantly refusing to consider a hike in income taxes, even one theoretically neutral. So Meeks announced he would run for governor that fall as an independent. "We had petitions printed up and ready to go," Meeks said in an interview Wednesday. "Our party was called People First." This was bad news for Blagojevich. His re-election hopes... [read full story]
