Category: IL in Fiscal Ruins
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Jim Webb: Someone worth following…
Prison spending is the fastest growing budget item for state’s behind Medicaid spending. Here is one man in Congress determined to change this… Jim Webb’s Criminal-Justice Crusade “…There are two types of people in America: those, like Webb, who think the criminal-justice system desperately needs to be fixed, and those who haven’t been paying attention.…
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When will MODERN TECHNOLOGY hit the IL state court system?
In this age of computers and digital recording devices, it is a public rip-off and massive inefficiency that transcripts of state court proceedings can only be obtained by paying outrageous prices to court reporters to transcript into pages of type courtroom events which could easily be recorded and made available to the public by other…
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As Expected: IL State Facility Shut-downs Averted!!!
Well, the IL General Assembly Fall Veto Session is finally over! IL legislators tonight completed Governor Pat Quinn’s job and by reallocating the money in the IL current state budget they worked out a deal to avoid Quinn’s threatened shut-down for seven state facilities and the proposed lay-offs of over 1900 state employees. They also…
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IL Budget News: STATE FACILITY CLOSURES & LAYOFFS May Be Avoided!
New plan forms to keep state facilities open, for now November 10, 2011 Illinois lawmakers reject Quinn’s closure plans The formal IL Fall Veto Session has ended. There will be another session extension on November 29, 2011, for consideration of other major issues still outstanding, but Quinn and legislators appear to be avoiding closing the…
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Illinois State Legislators Throwing Extra Money Away?
Surprise, surprise, a primary election is on the horizon this Spring for IL state legislators. Consequently, legislators are considering using money which they could use to stop closures of state facilities and prevent worker layoffs to instead hand out juicy tax breaks to business which is now trying to bully them. Once ignored, Ill. tax…
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First day of the end of IL Legislative Veto Session
IL legislators have begun tackling several major issues in this first day of the end of the regular fall veto session. They have such a long list to get through that some legislators are already discussion an extension of this veto session later this month. Whether that will happen depends on how much momentum they…
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If IL does not do this now, then when will it do so?
Illinois is one of the states with the most convictions being overturned because individuals are found to be wrongfully convicted. With IL prisons filled to the max and state prosecutors still pushing to incarcerate even low-level offenders, there are no protections in place to ensure that individuals are not wrongfully convicted. There are only a…
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Where the Closures of State Facilities presently stand…
There are only three days left in the IL General Assembly Veto Session for 2011. Legislators are working behind the scenes now to prepare for when they return on November 8, 2011. At least one issue; the gambling expansion, seems to be stymied. Although a bill has been drawn up to dumb down the proposed…
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IL Governor Pat Quinn emerging as the loser in IL Veto session
The State of IL has problems. The August 2011, headline below sums up the situation. IL is fiscally broken, and the governor and the legislature have placed themselves in the position of having only three days this week to fix the 2010 budget enough to advance to the next year’s budget. Illinois Statehouse News: Illinois…
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Mental Illiness & prison overcrowding: the two do not mix well…
All of us know someone who is mentally ill in some way or another. Fact is, most of our own personality “quirks” contain some echo of behavior which is a symptom of mental illness. When it is our behavior, our “quirks” we manage to rationalize and excuse it. When we are accosted on the street…