Publisher's Note: The Reader is pleased to present our second Q&A with the Scott and Rock Island County Health Departments on controversies, contradictions, and conflicts that continue to plague the COVID-19 pandemic narrative. Questions were sent to both county health departments and simultaneously published in our June 2021 edition. And once again, to their huge credit, Scott and Rock Island health officials have fully engaged in this process, providing comprehensive responses for Quad Citians to consider.

You cannot on the one hand constantly harp about decades of Illinois credit-rating downgrades and then blithely dismiss the first bit of good Illinois rating news since George Ryan was governor. It’s okay to step away from the “Illinois is awful” screaming for a moment in the wake of last week’s upgrade of Illinois’ bond rating by Moody’s Investors Service. While not the end of our problems by any means, it signals yet another important fiscal turning-point.

Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry – purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure – has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

On November 19, 2020, the number of Illinois House Democrats who had publicly stated they would not vote to re-elect Speaker Michael Madigan grew from 12 to 17, meaning that Madigan at that point did not have enough votes to win. By December 1, two more House Democrats, including a member of Madigan’s own leadership team, had turned against him. “The 19” became a real force in Illinois politics.