April 19, 2014

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Rogerthat

Reason: Peoria Mayor Sends Police to Track Down Twitter Parodist

Politicians can be a thin-skinned bunch. You’d think they’d let insults roll off their backs given how much power they have over the lives and livelihoods of others. But if you have all that power, why bother letting insults roll of your back when you can use that power to disproportionately punish people?

Jim Ardis, mayor of Peoria, Illinois, ordered police to track down whoever was responsible for a parody Twitter account mocking him.

As a result, police raided a West Bluff home, seized property, and detained three people for questioning. The Twitter account, @PeoriaMayor, has been suspended. According to the Journal Star, the account had all of 50 posts and an equal number of followers. The Twitter profile apparently did not initially indicate that it was a parody account, but added that label in early March.

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Daily Caller: Illinois lawmakers pushing $100 million Obama library subsidy

The Illinois House is set to vote on whether to allocate $100 million in state funds to Barack Obama’s presidential library, if it’s built in Chicago.

The proposal, which passed a committee vote on Thursday, has the backing of House speaker Michael Madigan, a Democrat.

“The state of Illinois will spend over $1 billion in construction this year alone, so $100 million is not out of line,” said Madigan, according to the Chicago Tribune. “It’s clearly a good investment for the future.”
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Crain’s: Good riddance to sales tax dodge

It looks like game over for some exurban communities that set themselves up as sales tax havens for companies looking to dodge the higher tax rates of Chicago-area municipalities.

As my colleague Greg Hinz reported yesterday, the city of Kankakee on April 15 disclosed that companies are backing away from arrangements under which they lightened their sales tax burden by routing transactions through mail drops in the town. The filing says the number of firms reporting sales in Kankakee under such arrangements dropped to seven last month from 25 in December.

Names that disappeared from Kankakee’s list between December and March include computer makers Dell and Hewlett-Packard Co., and giant drug distributor AmerisourceBergen Corp.

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USA Today: Let public charter schools succeed

In Illinois you can almost imagine the spittle on their lips as furious lawmakers take aim at charter schools. Some want to do away with a commission that considers appeals when charters get spurned by local school boards. Others want to bury charters in paperwork or ban student recruiting, guaranteeing they can never operate.

What’s playing out in the Illinois legislature is part of a national movement to thwart charters. What is lost in these conflicts, however, is an irreducible truth. Every attack against successful charter schools is an attack on parents who want a different public school option because their neighborhood school has failed them and they have no options.

The message of the pushback movement, which is partly fueled by turf-jealous school boards and administrators, is this: Our schools should be the only schools. Charter schools — despite being public schools — should be banned.

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Daily Herald: Unemployment rates fall in 21 U.S. states; IL lags

More than two-thirds of the states reported job gains in March, as hiring has improved for much of the country during what has been a sluggish but sustained 4 1/2-year recovery.

The Labor Department said Friday that unemployment rates dropped in 21 states, rose in 17 and were unchanged in the remaining 12. Meanwhile, hiring increased in 34 states and fell in 16.

The unemployment rate varies from as low as 2.6 percent in North Dakota to as much as 8.7 percent in Rhode Island. South Carolina has experienced the sharpest rate decline over 12 months to 5.5 percent from 8 percent.

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Civic Federation: Governor Quinn’s FY2015 Budget Includes Interfund Borrowing to Close Budget Gap

Although the budget recommended by Governor Pat Quinn for FY2015 proposes extending current income tax rates to avoid a massive revenue cliff, it also relies on borrowing $650 million to close a budget gap and pay down a portion of the State’s backlog of unpaid bills.

Despite the additional income tax revenues, total General Funds revenues from State taxes and fees combined with federal resources do not cover all the expenditures proposed by the Governor. As shown in this table, the Governor’s recommended FY2015 budget shows revenues totaling $37.9 billion compared to recommended expenditures of $38.1 billion, creating an operating deficit of $169 million without the borrowing plan.

The budget proposes borrowing $650 million from the State’s special funds to eliminate the budget gap and using the remaining $481 million to pay down the State’s backlog of unpaid bills, which would still total $5.0 billion at the end of FY2015. Without the borrowed funds, the State’s backlog of bills would not be reduced from $5.3 billion at the end of FY2014 and would likely grow by the operating deficit of $169 million.

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WSJ: None Dare Blame ObamaCare

The White House and its media phalanx are claiming the Census Bureau fracas is nothing more than a search for a conspiracy where none exists. Yet revising its health insurance survey design will make it harder to measure ObamaCare’s performance over time, and now we’ve learned that the choice to do so is even worse than we first wrote.

The White House is right that the new questions have been in the works since the Bush Administration, and the Current Population Survey (CPS) revisions are said to produce better estimates of how many people lack coverage. The problem is that resetting the insurance CPS in this year of major insurance disruption means that the old data series can’t be compared to the new one going forward. It’s a statistical break that prevents researchers from identifying before-and-after trends with precision and validity.

It would have been less disruptive to either delay the update or else to run the old and new CPS in parallel for a few years. As we wrote Wednesday, the second option would preserve the value of three decades of old information, while still producing more accurate statistics going forward.

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CARTOON OF THE DAY

sebelius