The current topsy-turvy political landscape was on full display in the Illinois House and the Senate last week as the chamber debated and passed a bill to slightly narrow the scope of the Illinois Health Care Right of Conscience Act.

It has been a foregone conclusion since the official US Census numbers were released in August that the first state legislative-redistricting plan passed back in May would be ruled unconstitutional. And the inevitable happened last week when a federal court tossed out the General Assembly’s spring plan.

Catholic priest and Chicago community activist Michael Pfleger has now twice called on Governor JB Pritzker to declare a “state of emergency” over his city’s notorious gun-violence problems.

The Illinois House Redistricting Committee held its first hearing last week on new congressional and judicial subcircuit district maps at the Michael Bilandic Building in Chicago. Another half-dozen hearings were scheduled for the following seven days to redraw the maps, which have to be reconfigured after each decennial census.

$300MM Annually 26,000 Students 24 Candidates, 19 Questions

On Tuesday, November 2, Scott County Iowa voters have the responsibility of electing the school board directors in the districts in which they live. In the Bettendorf, Davenport, North Scott, and Pleasant Valley districts there are challengers running against incumbents. And there are two write-in candidates declared in the Davenport district. Most candidates run on their electability driven by their professional experience and/or vested interest in the district's governance because they have school-age children inside the system. While these are important attributes for said leadership, a grasp of the monumental issues facing our public school institutions is also a measure of one's qualifications to serve.

The COVID Narrative is Facing Increasing Worldwide Challenge

The bridge too far in the COVID narrative for medical and science professionals worldwide has finally arrived: denying natural immunity's important role as an integral part of herd immunity to bring this COVID-19 pandemic to heel.

Time for a Mid-”Pandemic” Correction

An important rule of medicine is that when you’ve properly treated the patient and they are still not improving, then you may have the wrong diagnosis. Furthermore, dogmatically persisting in the wrong diagnosis ultimately results in injury or death to the patient.  We are now nearly two years into the “pandemic” and all we have heard from our leaders is the monotonous drumbeat – social distance, wear masks, get vaccinated. In the beginning, they said that masks were dangerous and COVID-19 testing was key to ending the pandemic. Now, municipalities seek to muzzle us all and testing is becoming difficult to find.

At the end of August, after the Illinois Senate had been unable to find a consensus on the massive climate/energy bill, and punted the issue to the House, I asked Senate President Don Harmon during a press conference why he hadn’t addressed Governor JB Pritzker’s list of problems, legal and otherwise, with the Senate’s proposal. “I don’t know if the governor’s team understood how fundamental some of those provisions were to getting the agreement among all stakeholders,” Harmon replied. That seemed to me to be quite an extraordinary statement about the governor and his team.

After well over a year of successfully fending off every legal challenge to his executive powers during the pandemic, it now appears that Governor JB Pritzker might have reached the limits of his authority.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Paul Schimpf has mostly followed Ronald Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment and avoided speaking ill of his Republican opponents. Until now. When a relative unknown named Jesse Sullivan jumped into the race earlier this month with a nearly $11 million out-of-state-funded campaign war-chest, state Senator Darren Bailey and businessperson Gary Rabine both called him a member of the San Francisco/Silicon Valley “élite” because that’s where his business was located and where much of his campaign money came from.

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