Editorial writers, crusading columnists, and reformers say it all the time: Illinois is one of only a small handful of states that does not regulate campaign contributions.

That's technically true, but you might be surprised at how little some other states actually regulate those contributions.

Governor Pat Quinn's independent reform commission has recommended that Illinois adopt the same basic contribution limits for individuals and political action committees as the federal government. But if contribution limits are supposed to get the influence of money out of politics, they've failed miserably in Washington, DC, where money has become an obsession and that obsession rules all.

According to a March analysis by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), some states have few campaign-contribution restrictions. Still others have much more stringent caps than proposed by the governor's reform commission.

For instance, neighboring Iowa has no limit on individual contributions to candidates and doesn't cap state-party contributions, political-action-committee (PAC) contributions, or labor-union contributions to candidates. However, Iowa does prohibit direct contributions by corporations. Here is a rundown of some other states:

• Texas, Pennsylvania, and North Dakota prohibit direct corporate and union contributions to candidates, but have no limits on any other contributions.
• Indiana restricts contributions by corporations and unions to $5,000 per year for statewide candidates and $2,000 per year for all other candidates. Individual, PAC, and state-party contributions are not limited, however. Mississippi and Alabama have similar restrictions.
• Ohio limits individual and PAC contributions to a somewhat odd $11,395.56 per candidate, per election, while capping state-party contributions to $642,709.58 for statewide candidates, $128,200.05 for state-Senate candidates, and $63,815.14 for state-House candidates. Corporate and labor-union contributions are prohibited.
• According to the NCSL report, 13 states have no caps whatsoever on individual contributions. Even more have no limits on state-party contributions, although some states, such as Kentucky, require that candidates other than gubernatorial candidates accept no more than half of their money from the state parties. Kansas is one of a small number of states that severely restricts state-party contributions during primaries, but imposes no limit on general-election spending.
• California's contribution limits are much higher than the proposed federal-style limits here in Illinois, perhaps reflecting its large number of big media markets and the fact that limits are indexed to inflation. California caps individual, union, and corporate contributions at $25,900 for gubernatorial candidates, $6,500 for other statewide candidates, and $3,900 for legislative candidates. PAC contributions are roughly double those limits. But last month, California's Fair Political Practices Commission reported that candidates have still managed to raise almost $1.1 billion since the caps took effect in January of 2001. That total did not include independent expenditures, which would be a lot more money.
• Florida, another large state with multiple TV markets, has a $500 across-the-board limit on campaign contributions from all sources. But recent local reporting has shown how easy it is for special interests to get around those caps via "electioneering communications organizations." One example was an alleged scheme by Anheuser-Busch to bankroll favored candidates via a police union fund.
• The state of New York uses a mathematical formula to limit individual, PAC, and union gubernatorial-campaign contributions. New York also has a $100,000 limit on family-member contributions to legislative candidates. State-party contributions to candidates are prohibited in primaries, and unlimited in general elections. Corporations are limited to $5,000 per year in aggregate.
• Michigan prohibits all corporate and union campaign contributions and has very low caps for all other contributions. Statewide-candidate contributions are limited to $3,400 for individuals and many PACs per election cycle. Senate-candidate contributions are capped at $1,000, and House contributions are limited to just $500. "Independent" campaign committees have much higher caps.

As you can plainly see, the range of limits is far broader than we are ever told. This issue is not as black and white as it's usually portrayed. I actually favor contribution caps, but they should either be extremely low with lots of safeguards (unlike Florida) to really stamp out the money, or high enough that every check doesn't become an obsession. Illinois Senate Republican Leader Christine Radogno has proposed a $10,000 cap on individuals and PACs. That seems reasonable to me.

Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax (a daily political newsletter) and TheCapitolFaxBlog.com.

The Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence & Analysis issued a "Domestic Extremism Lexicon" reference aid this week. On the heels of its most recent such reference aid, which named American military veterans returning from Iraq as possible extremists domestic terrorists, the DHS's attempt at inclusiveness seems to know no bounds. It is worth emphasizing that the document specifically identifies "non-Islamic extremism" as a threat to the United States. So now if you are pro-environment, pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, pro-black, pro-Jew, pro-white, anti-16th Amendment, anti-tax and, even pro-animal rights you might very well be a domestic terrorist. The document even names "alternative media" in its lexicon of domestic terrorism.

While the DHS has since rescinded the product and claimed it was not authorized, the proverbial horse is out of the barn, to borrow a recently used phrase from the president. Can there be any more evidence that the Department of Homeland Security, authorized by the unconstitutional USA PATRIOT Act (which was not read by the very legislators who voted for its passing), should be dismantled and moved to the dustbin of history? The "reference aid" provides an eerie insight into the agenda of a continually overreaching and apparently overconfident federal bureaucracy that continues to perpetuate the myth that we the people serve the government. The DHS document is the origin of a "thought police" handbook for the feds and illustrates the intent of the department to label Americans as terrorists if they have thoughts, publish opinions, and pursue actions that are contrary to the Nanny State and promote non-subservience to the government.

The document attempts to paint any of the various special-interest or special-issue factions as violent and criminal. For instance if you are vehemently opposed to illegal immigration, you may be plotting violent or criminal acts ... and thus you might be a domestic terrorist.

Below are some excerpts from the "lexicon," a copy of which can be found here.

(Note: "U//FOUO" means "Unclassified, For Official Use Only.")

"This product provides definitions for key terms and phrases that often appear in DHS analysis that addresses the nature and scope of the threat that domestic, non-Islamic extremism poses to the United States.

"• alternative media (U//FOUO): a term used to describe various information sources that provide a forum for interpretations of events and issues that differ radically from those presented in mass media products and outlets.

"• decentralized terrorist movement (U//FOUO): a movement of groups or individuals who pursue shared ideological goals through tactics of leaderless resistance independent of any larger terrorist organization.

"• direct action (U//FOUO): lawful or unlawful acts of civil disobedience ranging from protests to property destruction or acts of violence."

Apparently, lawful acts of civil disobedience including protesting are going to make one a domestic terrorist in the eyes of the DHS. And if you are "leaderless" in your "resistance," you might be a terrorist. This only begs the question: "Resistance to what?" And of course, there are those damned alternative media outlets that provide a forum (gasp) for interpretations that differ from mass-media products.

The most chilling aspect of this affair is that the person responsible for issuing this document, Roger Mackin, has been shifted from the DHS to the cybersecurity section at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Everybody at the Illinois Statehouse always says they're for a major, multi-billion-dollar public-works construction plan. The problem has been that they could never agree on how to spend the money and how to pay for the massive beast.

House Speaker Michael Madigan has taken the blame for the failure of the "capital plan" during the past couple of years, and rightly so. He used every trick in the book to block it.

Then again, if Madigan hadn't killed Rod Blagojevich's extremely loosely written capital bills, Blagojevich would've probably tried to steal every last dime. To say that there were billions of dollars in almost completely undefined spending would not be an exaggeration.

With Blagojevich gone, everybody now wants to know where Madigan is on a capital bill. And, as usual, nobody really knows what he's thinking. But lots of folks believe the tea leaves look ominous. Things just aren't going well.

When it comes to the latest hot topics of the day, one will not learn anything new by watching the talking heads on cable news or the networks. Fortunately, technology has come a long way, and all one has to do is browse the Web for perspectives and information that will most certainly raise the bar on the water-cooler dialogue at the office.

To that end, you will find ready-to-go video clips about the following stories that you won't find anywhere else:

April 15 Tea Parties

The Quad Cities hosted two Tea Party protests on the infamous Income Tax Day. More than 500 people attended the Davenport protest, and more than 300 people assembled that afternoon in Moline. The Reader was at both events and has posted a nine-minute video segment that includes interviews with seven people, including an 11-year-old.

The mainstream media picked up on the Tea Parties as a simple way to continue polarizing the masses along strict left/right and us/them party lines. No single outlet could help itself. As a guest on Keith Olbermann's show on MSNBC, Janeane Garofalo described the protest attendees as the "Klan demographic" and "tea-bagging racists who hate having a black man in office." To which Olbermann rhetorically asked, "What happens if at one of these things somebody hurts somebody?" And Fox Noise talk-show host Sean Hannity picked up the banner of the downtrodden tax payer and promoted the Tea Parties as if he had some solidarity with any disenfranchised citizens other than staunch neo-conservatives just like him. It was appalling. The really sad part is that many Americans fell for the "party baiting" hook, line, and sinker, and the only loser in that game was the level of discourse in America.

The bias in the media was no more apparent than when the reporter from CNN accosted a man holding a sign and his two-year-old child. The man's sign was about how his two-year-old was already in debt, and the reporter berated him, demanding whether he knew he was entitled to a check for $400 under the new regime. She wouldn't let him answer her questions, and things got worse from there when she finally claimed, "It is clear this crowd is anti-CNN and anti-government." The clip went viral for a short period, then CNN forced YouTube to take it off the air over copyright issues. Fortunately, FoundingBloggers.com was on-site in Chicago and filmed the dialogue that happened after the CNN cameras were off, and a suburban small-business owner takes the reporter to task, pointing out that CNN failed to show signs such as "Republican's Suck Too. End the Fed."

The reporter keeps trying to pigeonhole the woman as part of a group, and finally the woman explains that both the Democrats and Republicans are to blame for all our ills and that they "all need to go." Too bad that didn't make it to CNN's broadcast. You can watch the clip that CNN had YouTube pull and the off-camera fun below here.

In Minnesota, the blogger "The Grace Kelly" posted this account on the decidedly liberal Daily Kos Web site: "At a protest, normally, one sees the very hardcore support. However, what I saw was widespread disillusionment. In the video, notice how people are blaming politicians on both sides. Note that even though we now have President Obama, there is still acknowledgment that the problems started in the President Bush administration. So unlike other reports, talking to people at the Minnesota tax tea party gave me hope that these people value 'fiscal responsibility' and are actually open to persuasion." You can watch her insightful interviews about fair tax and the Federal Reserve at our Web site.

The SHA (Swine Human Avian) Flu Virus

The front page of the Wall Street Journal on Monday read, "The federal government is releasing 12.5 million courses of its emergency stockpile of potentially effective antiviral drugs to states that need them." Since when does anyone "need" something that is "potentially effective," especially when the risks of the drugs may be higher than the virus? To the WSJ's credit, they refrained from referring to this latest scare as "swine flu," but they did give us unique insight into what the future may hold for you at your airport. Pictured was "Scanning for feverish passengers at an airport in South Korea," showing bio-scans of passengers by their body-heat index. One can imagine the abuse and fear such a vetting process could engender. But don't take my word for it; listen to Dr. Ron Paul, an 11-term congressman from Texas and an MD. He and a Georgia congressmen, Larry McDonald (also an MD), were the only two "no" votes back in 1976 when the government ramped up a similar "swine flu" pandemic scare and mass-vaccinated thousands of people, including military, by force, resulting in 25 deaths and hundreds becoming sick ... from the cure no less. You can watch Paul question why Homeland Security is getting involved in medicine at our Web site.

As always, your feedback about what you read in these pages and online is encouraged. Write us at letters@rcreader.com.