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The study’s dire warning issued two years ago continues to apply: “The cost of rental housing varies across the state, but there is no place in Illinois where a minimum-wage worker can afford a two-bedroom apartment.”
How can Illinois Democrats, now campaigning for reelection, with a straight face talk about ethics in Washington when they have looked the other way for more than a year as a federal corruption probe ensnared top Democratic officials?
Johnson was found asleep behind the wheel of his police car in October after consuming “several large servings of rum” at a downtown restaurant with a member of his security detail, according to the Chicago Office of the Inspector General. Further investigations into the actions of the security staff and officers responding to the scene were pending.
A republication of our Wirepoints article.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Thursday offered a blunt response to White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany who called her a “derelict mayor” during a press briefing.
“The old phases aren’t going anywhere. All of Illinois is currently in Phase 4 of the original plan, dubbed the “Revitalization” phase. The tiers are new. The idea is to give the state a more exacting tool to deal with outbreaks — a scalpel versus a hacksaw.”
Although the Board of Review is not under the long-standing Shakman decree that bound Cook County to anti-patronage measures, “the constitutional principles upon which the litigation stands are applicable to those governmental agencies,” according to the report.
It’s typical for the governor to be in court as a defendant seeking validation of a policy or action. In this instance, no lawsuit has been filed, but a public school district and two private academies have informed the Illinois State Board of Education that Pritzker no longer has authority under emergency rule-making to require face masks in schools and that they will be developing their own safety rules. It was time to get ahead of the issue, Ann Spillane, Pritzker’s chief legal counsel, said.
In times of disasters that suddenly cut the business’ income, the property owner can have the company’s tax burden reduced. That was the case for many businesses forced to close their doors in March under Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s emergency order. “The government shut them down so the business can’t generate any money, making the property worth less,” said Ted Dabrowski, president of the nonprofit Wirepoints.
A decrease of more than 1,000 new unemployment claims from the previous week represented a 0.7 percentage point decrease to the state unemployment rate, which was 14.6 percent, according to the Illinois Department of Employment Security.
Widespread rainfall over 6 inches was reported, with some areas in Peoria seeing up to 8 inches.
“We cannot continue to function and serve the people without direct, unrestricted federal aid to our communities,” Tuesday’s letter to the Illinois delegation states. Signers include members of both political parties.
On the same day teachers expressed their concerns about returning to school, parent advocacy group Raise Your Hand published a survey of 1,300 CPS parents, the “vast majority” of whom want the district to “exercise extreme caution” before reopening schools.
These laws disproportionately affect Black Illinoisans because they make up an outsized proportion of those who are arrested or convicted of crimes as a comparison to their percentage of the total Illinois population.
Pritzker said that if the state is undercounted by one percent on the Census, it would cost the state more than $195 million a year for the next decade.
Imposing progressive taxes would drop Illinois from 36th to 48th in the nation for its business tax climate, a Tax Foundation analysis found in 2019.
Lightfoot said, “If the president was really committed to helping us deal with our violence, he would do some easy things. What he would push for is universal background checks, he would push for an assault weapons ban, he would push to make sure that people who are banned from getting on airplanes can’t get guns.”
She did not mention the Chicago-area already has an “assault weapons” ban, thanks to a Cook County prohibition. Moreover, Chicago and the entire state of Illinois already have a licensing process for would-be gun owners that includes a background check.
Mark Glennon, executive editor of the state budget watchdog group Wirepoints, said Illinois budgets are typically in the hole for $1 billion to $2 billion. Because of the COVID-19 crisis, the deficit for the new fiscal year will be $6 billion to $8 billion. The first thing Illinois needs to do is to start to cut spending, Glennon said.
Continued unemployment claims in Illinois remain virtually unchanged since mid-April. Other states are getting back to work.
“So it goes with taxes and governments (like the State of Illinois) that choose to ‘balance their budgets’ with borrowing proceeds.”
“When Moore, Coleman and other young people from Anna and surrounding towns organized a Black Lives Matter protest in Anna in early June, they didn’t know what to expect. Some 200 people showed up to march alongside them…(T)he protesters reclaimed Anna’s unofficial acronym, chanting instead, “‘Ain’t No Negativity Allowed.'”
“Dan Webb is an inside man. And the people of Cook County are waiting for the inside man’s report on Kim Foxx and Jussie Smollett, before votes are cast.”
“Since the municipality was established in 1837, it has been well known that if you have any city-related issue, from rats to looking for a job, you call your alderman. That said, I never called my alderman for anything. All I knew was aldermen sponsored park district baseball teams or got their sons-in-law jobs as governor, so I was surprised 12 years ago to find myself working for one.”
Has the cancel culture infected your kids’ school? A parent group may have a partial remedy.
As long as the mayor continues to ignore the city’s slide toward bankruptcy, she won’t “eliminate inequalities” or “expand economic opportunities” for Chicago’s minority communities. Broken cities have little to no chance of helping those most in need.
“The horrendous damage that’s being done to a generation of children (by closing schools) is incalculable,” said Paul Vallas, the CPS Chief Executive Officer from 1995 to 2001…Wirepoints recently published an article factually pointing out that children are spared the worst effects of the virus with only 4 of the 7,099 COVID-19 fatalities in Illinois being children under 4. They point out that the CDC reports that only 15 of the linked fatalities nationally have been children under 15 compared to 200 who died from the flu and pneumonia.
Approximately 90 percent of the facility’s intensive care unit beds are being used by coronavirus patients, but the unit is still operating at 150 percent capacity because of a surge in shooting victims in desperate need of medical help.
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