Like many in Illinois with a job and money to lose, I am waiting for the hammer to fall. The state Senate’s failing “grand bargain” is a bad omen for those of us who have lived here a long time and know what it portends.
Illinois
School Teachers Angry, but It’s Not Rauner’s Fault
School teachers in Chicago are angry again. Lots of different things tick them off, especially after their union stirs them up and incites them to protest in ridiculous red shirts.
The release of an email from Bruce Rauner written years before he became governor that suggested Chicago teachers have a literacy problem escalated the war over money for the city’s debt-ridden, underperforming educational bureaucracy.
School Funding Cuts Are What You Wanted, Aren’t They?
Are you resigned to Illinois being a Democratic Party oligarchy, or do you still believe that our state’s feeble nod to representative government can survive? Regardless of where you stand, the blame for school funding cuts and other fiscal torments can only be laid in one place: at the feet of the people.
Greatest Accomplishment for Illinois Was This?
At the end of another abysmal 12 months Illinois can finally declare without a doubt what its greatest accomplishment was in 2015: talk. Lots and lots of talk.
This time there was a Republican at the helm.
Bruce Rauner has been sitting in the governor’s seat for a year.
Rauner is Right. Illinois Turnaround Starts Now.
Where best to start with everything happening in Illinois? Do we begin with more credit downgrades,1 two Republican ex-governors turning on Governor Bruce Rauner,2 or Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to scrape up $250,000 to fund a Chicago gun buyback program?
Slave to Lincoln’s State? Three Outrageous Examples
Every morning I face going to prison. While driving to work, two signs on each side of the highway threaten to take away my freedom for fourteen years for striking a highway worker. This doesn’t make me a slave exactly and hitting someone is certainly a serious matter, but it still feels like a threat to my liberty without the slightest hint of due process.
Madigan and Rauner on How Illinois Government Can Help
He probably didn’t realize it when he said it, but Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan’s widely circulated remark about what Illinois government should do for residents “who need the government to be helpful to them.”1,2 will go down in state history for summing up the very worst thing about what his decades in office have accomplished.