A package of four bills currently making their way through the Illinois House would place more oversight on the testing sites. One would require testing sites to collect insurance information from patients so that the government isn’t being fraudulently billed for tests. It would also require that state insurance plans fully cover all COVID-19 tests.

Gov. JB Pritzker doles out $1.5 million a year to subsidize the salaries of 15 employees in his administration in addition to the $1.6 million taxpayers pay.

The number of residential beds and foster homes for children in the state’s care is an ongoing concern. “During the past administration, DCFS lost hundreds of residential beds and thousands of foster homes and rebuilding that network is a much lengthier process than destroying it,” Director Marc Smith said.

“(T)he governor’s people say that legislative leaders wouldn’t consider the quarantine language change proposal. Members were already being inundated with angry, even threatening contacts from constituents and outsiders who’d been ginned up by disinformation outlets to what we thought at the time was the max over the Right of Conscience Act fix. Tossing more fuel on the fire wasn’t something that enough Democratic legislators wanted to do, even though doing both at once could’ve saved a whole lot of grief down the road.”

The reason so much waste was able to make its way into the package was due to a policy that only Illinois politicians could tolerate. The concept of earmarking, or allocating funds for specific projects for your district, was banned by the U.S. Congress in 2011. Recently, it was reinstituted. However, in Illinois, there is no requirement to report earmarks, so the $4 billion of “Leadership Additions” and “Governor’s Office Additions” are difficult to track.

An email from the chancellor said the flyers were left on and around campus ”inside plastic bags filled with small rocks.”

“I’m thinking shootings are down due more to the snowy weather in the city, rather than an increase in civility,” said veteran traffic and spot news reporter Kris Habermehl. “Feuds and bad blood continue unabated on social media, which oftentimes lead to expressway hits.”

“Proponents in both parties contend that the first round of buyouts has saved the state $1.4 billion in pension debt. That is a lot of money in total, but not much in the context of the overall $130 billion pension hole. An analyst for Fitch rating service, Eric Kim, summed it up by saying the buyouts ‘chip away at a much larger problem’ by using debt to fight debt.”