Illinois State Rep. Brad Halbrook (R-102nd) held a supporter Christmas party Thursday that featured Illinois State Rep. Darren Bailey (R-109th) who was just elected to a state senate seat, the 55th district. The party’s location was Yoder’s Kitchen, a popular banquet hall south of Champaign.

The Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee last week held a virtual hearing about the outbreak. Just 90-minutes before that hearing opened, the Illinois Department of Veterans’ Affairs released a report from the federal veterans affairs agency about problems inspectors witnessed in LaSalle.

“The ComEd scandal just might be the agent of change — finally — to oust the nation’s longest-serving speaker from at least one of those roles. Yet it hardly is the first time questionable transactions involving Madigan have come to light. And his overall governance record, assessed in the context of Illinois’ failing fiscal health, is abysmal. “

Pritzker said health care workers and residents of long-term care homes will be first to be vaccinated. “The goal here is to fortify the health care workforce by removing these most exposed workers from the cycle of quarantine, illness and infection, as well as protecting our most vulnerable residents.”

“You (Gov. Pritzker) should lead at this point and call us into special session to address many of these issues,” state Rep. Terri Bryant said. “I’ve said before, and I’ll repeat it again: Congress is meeting; other state legislators are meeting. We met safely in May with nobody contracting COVID-19, so we know it’s possible.”

According to parents, remote learning obstacles included bandwidth issues (54%), children missing the group interactions of in-person class (40%), and students being distracted by other things in their remote learning environment (39%).

Sheila Bushong, CFO of Hitchcock Design Group in Naperville, has received nine unemployment notifications for current or former employees who didn’t apply. “It lists their quarterly wages that have been reported to IDES,” she said. “Those quarterly wages are not reported to anyone else.” Perhaps more telling is that all nine of the employees targeted in Bushong’s company were also the highest earners.

Jim Dey: “Madigan has finessed tough situations before, mostly with relative ease owing to his skills as a masterful political tactician. But those challenges have never been so personal or so serious, putting him in an entirely different position.”

“When you look at something like COVID, the fact that there would be COVID in the home in and of itself is not an outrage,” said U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, whose congressional district includes the state veterans’ home. “It’s the fact that you know it takes a month to really fully come to grips with what’s going on and to take the federal government’s help…To see this thing rolling around as it did for a month and the casualties that mounted as a result of it is really sad.”

“It is devastating, it’s just devastating for the country, for the state of Illinois, for all of us who are very focused on trying to save people’s lives,” Pritzker said Thursday. “I look at it and I say, ‘How can people not follow the mitigations?’”

“I have been very clear about what my views are, you are going to hear in the next I think, 4 or 6 weeks from the members of the House of Representatives who ultimately will make the decision on whether the speaker will be leaving office,” Pritzker said.

“Schools themselves and the activities associated with schools are not the source of transmission,” said Dr. Susan Bleasdale, medical director of infection prevention and control at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She went so far as to suggest the outbreaks in particular might look worse in the data than in reality because it’s hard to prove transmission happened in the schools.