U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who sits on the Transportation Committee in Congress, said Illinois has been awarded many American Rescue Plan infrastructure grants; The jobs are there, but workers need to be able to get to the actual work site. She said public transportation is needed to enhance that job growth.

Former state and federal prosecutor Donna More: “Social justice vigilantes like Kim Foxx should resign and take their agenda to a different arena. Prosecutors should prosecute. Done with fairness and compassion, prosecuting based on facts in evidence is one way to ensure social equity. Of course, that idea is completely disregarded by the catch-and-release crowd inspired and funded by George Soros.”

But that’s not to say central Illinois has been immune to rising prices. Brinkoetter Realtors reports the average sales prices for a Macon County home climbed from $118,126 in 2019 to $135,914 in 2021.

The funds are a 10% increase and will serve 4,500 additional Illinois students, adding to the more than 112,00 students who receive it already.

The official tally from the U.S. Census shows the state lost around 18,000 people over the past 10 years. Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kathy Salvi, who faces incumbent U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth in the November election, said, “Honesty is always the best policy. You can play with statistics, numbers, as much as you want, but I’ll tell you, people are hurting.”

The student activist group Young Americans for Liberty is critical of the mandate. Said its chief of staff Sean Themea, “We should all have the right to choose whether or not to take the vaccine. That shouldn’t preclude somebody from getting an education.”

House Minority Leader Jim Durkin is optimistic the record-high 106 Republican candidates for the state House can make a dent in Democratic supermajorities, especially if candidates focus on economic conditions. “The cost of living, inflation,” he said. “Those are the things on people’s minds, and they’ve had enough.”

“Political wannabes will say anything they think will help get them elected. So, in that respect, it’s easy to understand why Alexi Giannoulias, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state, is emphasizing his support for legal abortion as a reason to support his candidacy for a public office that hands out vehicle license plates…Giannoulias is backing legislation that would bar the use of license-plate scanners to get information about women from other states coming to Illinois to get abortions.”

Among the Muslim respondents in Illinois, about 12% of them said they are self-employed or run their own business. They create about 6% of all jobs in Illinois despite making up about 3% of the population. Researchers also found that Muslims in Illinois were also highly politically active and civically engaged; 75% of the sample is registered to vote with an additional 16% expressing an intention to register.

“Our legislators are going soft on criminals to the point where they’ve made Chicago a hellhole, friends,” Bailey, who is challenging first-term Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, told an audience of several hundred people at the director’s lawn at the state fairgrounds. “Chicago, that once great city, well it didn’t become a hellhole just because of (Mayor) Lori Lightfoot and (Cook County State’s Attorney) Kim Foxx. Starting with J.B. Pritzker, our leaders are all in cahoots. They’re knee-deep in corruption.”

“Among the Audacious Project’s earliest grantees was the Bail Project, a radical group that posts bail for defendants—what it calls an ‘act of resistance against a system that criminalizes race and poverty’—including felons charged with gun crimes…Not surprisingly, the group has since expanded to promulgating the cashless bail system currently devastating America’s cities in the name of ‘social justice,’ starting with Illinois in 2021. ‘End cash bail,’ the group writes on its website, ‘freedom should be free.'”

Mark Goodwin, president of the Virginia-based company that lead construction, said the Mulligan project will deliver enough power for 14,000 homes and will provide approximately $7 million in tax revenue to local taxing bodies in Logan County over the next 30 years.

Illinois’s unemployment rate fell -0.1 percentage point to 4.4%, while nonfarm payrolls increased by +31,200 in July. The state’s unemployment rate was +0.9 percentage point higher than the national unemployment rate reported for July, which was 3.5%.

Union officials said the organizing effort is timely because of the burgeoning legal-pot industry, which is comprised of “increasingly large, multi-state firms.”