Scott Reeder: “The gap between being Public Official A and an inmate is not very long, he said. ‘It may take years; but in the course of a lifetime, it’s not very long at all. Once they have painted a bull’s-eye on your back, they are out to get you,’ Blagojevich said.”

“We’re not trying to take anything away from anybody else,” said Tony Leone, a Roman Cultural Society member who is spearheading the effort. “But we just think some of this revisionist history has gone too far, especially when they’re missing the point of why Columbus was embraced by Italian American immigrants.”

Eric Zorn: “(R)ight now, Madigan is a Nixonian albatross on his party… the idea that the imposition of graduated state income tax rates would put more money under Madigan’s control is animating opposition to the Democrats’ so-called Fair Tax amendment.”

“The vote on Pritzker’s graduated income tax is all about trust. Voters must decide if they can trust state government to hold the line on middle-income tax rates over time. It would be fair for voters to withhold their trust from a political leader, Pritzker, if he won’t do the right thing about his Madigan problem.”

“And I think if you give anybody the option of do you want state government in the middle of these funds and controlling, restricting and imposing guidelines in all of that or do you want to give it to your local mayor and city government so they can give out to the businesses quickly and easily, everybody is going to say ‘the local government,’” a spokesman said.

Illinois is among 19 states providing 20 weeks of extended benefits, the agency said in a news release.

It’s not just the large number who’ve filed and the ongoing problems that seem to plague the system for people to get those benefits, it’s also the more than 120,000 instances of unemployment fraud Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced Wednesday his administration found. Some are calling for answers.

The website WalletHub ranked Illinois fifth in the country for states that have recovered most in the job market since the pandemic began compared to last year.

A state law took effect in January 2018 that says townships can seek voter approval to absorb road districts into the rest of township government. “This was something that we had already thought about looking at,” the township supervisor said. “Obviously, the action that happened in January (an FBI raid) made us take a closer look.”

While Illinois will require a widely-available vaccine or coronavirus treatment to move into Phase Five of the “Restore Illinois” plan, Gov. J.B. Pritzker doesn’t believe that the theoretical vaccine would be mandatory for children to get in order to return to the classroom after it becomes available.

After a Logan County judge ruled Monday that the Illinois Department of Corrections must accept transfers from county jails, the state filed court documents aiming to reverse the temporary order.

An additional 24,712 Illinoisans filed for unemployment the week ending Aug. 1, bringing total job losses to 1,553,109 since COVID-19 and associated lockdown measures began shutting down the state’s economy, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Labor.

More than 10,500 parents have signed a petition asking Pritzker to reconsider labeling hockey a high-risk sport for COVID-19 transmission. Youth players already have strong face shield requirements, meaning many cannot breathe on other players like basketball and football players do.

“Some will argue that the Speaker is innocent until charges are filed and he’s proven guilty,” Sen. Heather Steans said. “But those are not the standards that should apply to his leadership role. Serving as Speaker is not a right; it’s a privilege…Speaker Madigan repeatedly has violated that trust.”

The money—$5,000 for renters and up to $15,000 for homeowners—is a way to stabilize people in their homes and forestall massive waves of eviction and foreclosure caused by the pandemic, an official administering the program said.

The petition calls for “Pritzker to be ordered to purge himself by rescinding the abovementioned executive orders instanter; and should he refuse, he be placed in temporary custody within the Clay County Jail until he purges himself by rescinding the above-mentioned executive orders.”

“To be sure, at some point, a right delayed becomes a right lost,” Judge Anderson wrote. “But the Court is not convinced that Plaintiffs (landlords) are at that point yet.”

“This is a brand new program that the federal government rushed to develop and then left each state to create its own separate system,” the governor said. “As a result, there were massive holes for illegal fraudsters to steal federal dollars from taxpayers across the country.”