In March the Illinois Supreme Court unanimously overturned that state’s draconian Eavesdropping Act, finding that it “criminalizes a wide range of innocent conduct” and “burdens substantially more speech than is necessary to serve a legitimate state interest in protecting conversational privacy.” Last week the Illinois General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a new eavesdropping law that purports to meet the court’s constitutional concerns. Whether it actually does is a matter of dispute.

The bill, which awaits Gov. Pat Quinn’s signature, allows people to record conversations when all parties have consented or when none has a “reasonable expectation” of privacy. That’s an improvement over the old law, which made it a felony to record any conversation without all-party consent, including public interactions with police officers. But because it may be difficult to determine in advance which conversations will be deemed private, the new version of the eavesdropping ban could still have a chilling effect on recordings of public officials.

The ACLU of Illinois, which challenged the old law, objects to a provision in the new one that broadens the circumstances in which police may record private conversations without a warrant. But the ACLU likes the other changes made by the bill:

Your editorial “Illinois’s Pension Absurdity” (Nov. 29) takes issue with the holding of an Illinois state trial court saying that Illinois does not have the power to modify vested pension obligations because of prohibitions arising from the state’s (and conceivably federal) constitution’s impairment of contracts clause. In questioning the Illinois lower court decision you cite a 1934 U.S. Supreme Court decision that held that the impairment of contracts clause is not absolute but can be disregarded in certain emergency situations. In drawing this conclusion from the Supreme Court’s decision, the editorial ignores countless subsequent decisions by other courts that have drawn a distinction between a state’s power to modify private contract obligations and the power of a state to disavow its own contract obligations. If that distinction were not to apply, any state would be free to enter into contractual arrangements and, if compliance becomes economically burdensome, simply disavow its contractual obligation.

In the past the Journal has justifiably bemoaned the ad hoc departures by federal authorities from established legal principles in the service of modifying various types of contractual creditor-debtor arrangements sometimes outside of established bankruptcy procedures. These occurrences have served to render the binding effect of law problematic. To favor the disregard of the impairment of contracts clause when the government itself is the debtor would go one step further in undermining the rule of law that underpins our constitutional system.

The ride-sharing service Uber Technologies was valued at $41 billion last week thanks to a recent investment surge, but the good news faded fast. On Monday Uber was banned in New Dehli after a woman accused a driver of rape. The company has also suffered a string of press run-ins that have left many wondering what’s going on at the Silicon Valley startup.

For instance, last month Uber threw a wasp nest into a crowded room when it was reported that Senior Vice President of Business Emil Michael had suggested in a private conversation at a media dinner that Uber could hire opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics in the press.

On top of that, an Uber employee reportedly tracked a journalist’s location using an internal system known as “God View” mode, greeting her at the company’s New York headquarters by saying, “There you are. I was tracking you.” Uber CEO Travis Kalanick quickly disavowed these tactics, calling the comments “terrible,” but the stings continue. Around the same time investor Peter Thiel said in a CNN Money interview that Uber is “the most ethically challenged company” in the valley.

In Tinley Park, Mayor Ed Zabrocki hails the work done by village commissioners, who he says volunteer their time to the town without receiving pay.

But some prominent commissioners do receive something from Tinley Park: extensive business at the expense of local competitors. A Tribune analysis of spending records shows that one influential commission chairman, Ed & Joe’s Restaurant and Pizzeria owner Michael Clark, has sold thousands of dollars worth of pies and other food to the village for various functions.

For years, the restaurant also regularly supplied food to the village for monthly MainStreet Commission meetings Clark chaired. Even after Clark came under scrutiny during an ethics investigation, Ed & Joe’s continues to sell pizza to the village for the commission.

In case you missed it, the U.S. economy is picking up speed.

Last summer the Chicago City Council briefly considered an ordinance that would require gas stations in the city to sell a blend of fuel called E15, which has the potential to damage your car engine.

It can be dangerous to put important life decisions on a clock. Medicare has proven that it is even worse to make decisions solely by the clock.

It costs more for a hospital to admit a patient for surgery than to suture a cut finger and send the patient home, so it is intuitive that Medicare should, and does, reimburse more for inpatient stays than for outpatient care. It also makes sense to safeguard the taxpayer against improper billing of (inexpensive) outpatient care as (expensive) inpatient treatment. Medicare Recovery Audit Contractors (RACs) are firms hired to detect and correct improper Medicare claims. Hospitals that bill for an inpatient status when outpatient status would suffice are liable to be audited, and will forfeit the inpatient reimbursement.

Unfortunately, patients do not naturally divide cleanly into “inpatients” and “outpatients.” Instead, they present a continuum of conditions and symptoms that evolve in complex ways. As a result, auditing admission decisions is complicated and messy. In an attempt to simplify and streamline the audit process, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a proposed regulation known as the ‘Two Midnight” rule: RACs should automatically consider a person an “inpatient” if the hospital stay spans two midnights; all other hospital visits billed as inpatient are subject to audits.

Chicago officials are celebrating the 100th playground built or rehabbed in the city this year.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and other elected and park officials attended a ribbon-cutting on Sunday for a new playground at Sycamore Park in the city’s Hyde Park neighborhood. The playground was last updated in 1991.

Politicians come and go in Washington and Springfield, with Democrats on top sometimes and Republicans others. But one thing never seems to change: When it comes to federal spending, the Land of Lincoln always brings up the rear.

Pew Charitable Trusts is out with a new report on federal spending by state—click on the link to download the tables—and Illinois overall ranked no better than 46th or 48th on receiving federal dough, depending on how it’s counted, during the federal fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2013.

For instance, when measured by spending per resident, Illinois’ combined total of $8,188 in fiscal 2013 ranks 48th, ahead of only Utah’s $7,108 and Minnesota’s $8,174. When measured relative to gross state domestic product, we climb all the way to 46th, with federal spending making up 14.7 percent of the total economy here. In comparison, Wisconsin is at 17.1 percent, Indiana 17.6 percent, Ohio 18.1 percent and Michigan 21.9 percent. All of them, incidentally, have Republican governors who say they don’t like big federal intrusions into their turf.

Gov. Pat Quinn’s former campaign manager has decided to pursue overtures to become executive director of the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, setting the stage for a lame-duck maneuver that could rankle Mayor Rahm Emanuel and tie the hands of Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner.

Aides to the governor had insisted Friday that Lou Bertuca was not interested in replacing Kelly Kraft as head of the state agency that built U.S. Cellular Field and rebuilt Soldier Field.

They confirmed a report by Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed that Bertuca had been approached about the job by the governor’s appointees to the board. But, the sources insisted that Bertuca was not interested.

Winter 2015. Commuter A nips out of her garage in the suburbs, turns onto I-88 and then crawls along the tollway and the Eisenhower Expressway, eventually arriving at work in the Loop where parking costs about $290 a month.

Commuter B drives to her local Metra station, parks, then hops on the UP West Line into Chicago. Her monthly pass and local parking is about $245.

Conventional wisdom holds that Commuter B is doing the right thing taking public transit, reducing pollution and traffic.

Yale Law School Professor Stephen Carter – a prominent left of center legal scholar – has an excellent column highlighting an important lesson of the recent tragic death of Eric Garner at the hands of a New York City police officer. Unlike the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Missouri, where there was conflicting witness testimony, this killing was pretty obviously indefensible, and has been condemned by observers across the political spectrum. But, as Carter emphasizes, incidents like this are also a predictable consequence of the overextension of the regulatory state:

On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.

I wish this caution were only theoretical. It isn’t. Whatever your view on the refusal of a New York City grand jury to indict the police officer whose chokehold apparently led to the death of Eric Garner, it’s useful to remember the crime that Garner is alleged to have committed: He was selling individual cigarettes, or loosies, in violation of New York law…..

I’m very worried about the fact that in America we’ve now gone 24 years without the median household income rising — it was the same in 2013 as it was in 1989. That’s unprecedented in American history. The longest that’s ever happened before is when it took just under 20 years to recover,after the Great Depression. This long period of stagnation has coincided with the top 1% of the economy doing spectacularly. In the Great Depression, when median incomes were falling, the top 1% absolutely took it in the teeth. Income inequality shrank during that period because they were getting killed even worse.

Democratic capitalism depends on the vast majority of the citizenry believing in the system. I’m worried that because of this steep rise in inequality, the public’s belief in that system is going to fade away, and in its absence we may try something else or do radical things that over history haven’t worked out so well. The machine of democratic capitalism also relies on a great deal of .infrastructure. There’s physical infrastructure — roads, subways, the internet, etc. — there’s transactional infrastructure — voting systems, capital markets, and the laws and regulations governing business transactions — and finally there’s knowledge infrastructure — education and the accumulated knowledge that we use. If we are to come up with ways to make the democratic capitalism system work better, we need to ask the question; is the current stagnation and rising inequality a function of the infrastructure not being invested in properly, or is the infrastructure no longer fit for its purpose in more fundamental ways?

Tim, are there ways in which designing thinking can help answer this question?

Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner on Monday continued his doom-and-gloom tour highlighting the state’s budget mess as he prepares voters for what he says will be a painful two years sorting out Illinois’ finances, acknowledging he’ll need to use “short-term” fixes to get through the most pressing problems.

But as has become standard during the Republican’s transition into office, Rauner declined to detail any specific plans, including how he plans to deal with a multibillion-dollar budget hole that will be created Jan. 1 when the income tax rate drops from 5 percent to 3.75 percent. Instead, Rauner offered an apology for the bumpy road ahead.

“We don’t have the time to mess around. We are in deep, deep trouble financially,” Rauner told a meeting of the Illinois Farm Bureau at a downtown Chicago hotel. “The next 24 months are going to be rough. And I apologize. I ain’t going to be Mr. Popularity for a little while. That’s OK. Four years from now I think, though, everybody will appreciate what we did.”

State workers behind a challenge to an Illinois pension law declared unconstitutional plan to oppose the government’s attempt to have it speedily heard by the Illinois Supreme Court.

Attorney General Lisa Madigan asked the court last week to hasten its schedule for considering the case. She argues that the government needs a decision quickly because if it can’t implement the law, it would have to find a way to make up about $1 billion it was supposed to save in the first year.

But the Lee Enterprises Newspapers’ Springfield bureau reports attorneys for the victorious employees see no reason to pick up the pace.