“Does anyone think Vallas can’t manage the city? Most people think he’s just about the only one out there who can do the job. Chicago doesn’t need a messiah or some foul mouthed pouty rhetorician. Chicago doesn’t need celebrity basketball friend. Chicago needs a manager if Chicago is to survive.”

The state remains the top producer of soybeans with an estimated yield of 64 bushels per acre, a 9% increase from 2020. Illinois farmers planted 11 million acres of corn last year and harvested 2.1 billion bushels, up 3% from the prior year. Illinois is the second leading producer of corn in the country, behind only Iowa.

The Senate President and House Speaker announced last week that this week’s session days are canceled because of increased COVID-19 cases statewide. That makes eight of the nine scheduled session days so far this year have been canceled.

“It really comes down to the job market in the state right now,” one analyst said. “Even when we’re looking at Chicago for instance, right now the job opportunities are actually showing a negative.”

A Cook County Juvenile Court judge held the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services’ top administrator in contempt of court Jan. 13 for failing to find housing for a 17-year-old boy, leaving the teen stuck since Sept. 10 in a psychiatric hospital. A Cook County public guardian said the boy spent Christmas, his birthday and New Year’s in the same hospital where he remained Jan. 13.

A common misconception is that the scholarship money is being diverted from public schools. The money for the program does not come out of Illinois’ education budget. Invest in Kids’ money comes exclusively from donors.

“When it becomes politically expedient for him to do so in the future, and because it is important, politically, that he appears to be in control of the spread of a virus that it is impossible to control the spread of, Governor Pritzker, acting through … the Illinois Department of Public Health, will impose a COVID-19 vaccine mandate on high school students and athletes in the near future even though there is no legitimate medical or public health reason for him to do so, and doing so will not have a rational basis in mitigating against the COVID-19 pandemic,” the

Illinois continues to see a natural increase in population as births outpace deaths, but by an increasingly narrow margin. It also is gaining residents from abroad. But so many people are moving out of Illinois to other states that the state’s total population is in decline.

Sources familiar with the decision say he will have State Rep. Avery Bourne as his running mate.

The state gas tax tax was doubled from 19 cents to 38 cents in 2019 as part of a $45 billion infrastructure plan. The gas tax automatically increases every July 1 at the rate of inflation, a mechanism that lets lawmakers escape unpopular votes to raise the tax. The hike drove Illinois gas taxes to No. 2 in the U.S. Only a few years ago, Illinois’s gas taxes were 10th highest.

Ilana Redstone, University of Illinois and faculty fellow at Heterodox Academy: “Universities are training students not to see validity in alternative worldviews…. While my experience in the classroom is primarily with students at the University of Illinois, there’s no reason to believe that Illinois undergraduates are somehow unique in this respect.”

The decision on the OSHA mandate by the Supreme Court will further undermine efforts to curb this grave public health crisis, the president of the AMA argues in an exclusive Crain’s op-ed.

“We quickly learned that COVID was going to take more than a medical modeling approach because, toward the end of 2020 and early 2021, it became a political and social problem as well,” Illinois State University mathematics professor Olcay Akman said. “So all of our efforts of modeling based on the virus’ behavior was no longer enough for projecting the course of the disease — we also needed to be aware of the politicization and the social and human behavior of the data.”

Since 2011, commute times in Illinois have increased by more than seven percent and that on average, every Illinois driver pays $609 per year in costs due to driving on roads in need of repair, the Democratic delegation said.

Illinois attorney general Kwame Raoul explained, “Part of our investigation and litigation, we uncovered and alleged that Navient, operating as Sallie Mae, made private predatory loans to students attending for-profit colleges. Raoul said 18,300 Illinoisans will be eligible for restitution in the case, and 5,200 will have student debt canceled, totaling $133 million.

Many parents in states like California or Illinois with mask mandates would likely be shocked how normal school protocols are in Texas, Florida, Utah, Iowa and other states.
Kids should be in school with normal protocols. They should be in class without masks, without plexiglass dividers, socializing while they eat lunch and participating in sports without face masks. Logic clearly tells us this, and this data overwhelmingly proves there is no health benefit to requiring kids to wear face masks in school.

Assistant Cook County State’s Attorney Amy Crawford said judges should look at the intent of the Safe Roads Amendment. She said that was to “tie the hands” of Illinois state lawmakers from “dipping into the cookie jar” of state transportation money every year to help balance the budget, while skimping on transportation. “The intent was not to create hundreds of other cookie jars for transportation funding in the various 218 odd home rule units (of local government) around the state.”

This is the third contempt of court order issued against Smith recently. In this case, the order involved a 17-year-old who has been locked in a psychiatric hospital more than four months after being ready to be released.