* Hawthorne Race Course canceled its race card yesterday. It’s just another in a long string of woes faced by the state’s racing industry. And check this out…

Maywood Park, a harness track in the western suburbs, is threatening to close if a bill doesn’t pass by June. Sportsman’s Park, which stood next to Hawthorne for decades, closed in 2002. Rumor has it that a waste management company covets Hawthorne’s 119 acres for an incinerator and recycling plant, which would join the oil refinery and the sewage treatment plant in fouling the air of the near western suburbs.

* SIU President Glenn Poshard testified in a legislative committee last week about his university’s budget woes…

“Today, SIU’s operational support from the state of Illinois is now what it was at the close of the 20th century,” Poshard said in his testimony.

Yikes.

* The Belleville News-Democrat editorialized today on the state’s pension problems…

If a private business allowed its pension to be underfunded so badly, the responsible parties probably would be in jail.

Yeah. Like those guys ever go to jail. The big financial concerns tanked the world’s economy and nobody’s even been indicted, let alone jailed.

What happens when a private company screws up its pension fund? The federal Pension Pension Benefits Guarantee Corporation takes over. And it’s now in trouble…

State and local government pensions aren’t the only ones in trouble.

Corporate pensions, too, are woefully underfunded, and the federal agency that insures them against losses is facing a dangerous deficit that taxpayers may end up covering. One government watchdog agency says the federal insurance funds are at “high risk” of failure. Moreover, the Obama administration’s proposal to fix this is meeting stiff resistance from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business interests.

The little-known federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. insures roughly 27,500 corporate defined-benefit pensions, covering 44 million U.S. workers. These plans, popular in the public sector but increasingly rare in the private economy, promise workers fixed monthly retirement income, often equivalent to a final year’s salary or an average salary over the last few years of work.

Maybe the states should just get a change in US law and turn over their pensions to the federal government.

* I had no idea…

[State Sen. John Sullivan] said about a decade ago river otters were reintroduced in Western Illinois, but now they have migrated to ponds and are eliminating the fish population.

After contacting the Department of Natural resources, Sullivan said they were on board with a bill that would create a trapping season for river otters to help curb the population growth in ponds.

“It’s estimated in Western Illinois the river otter population is over 10,000, and in a few years it will be 30,000. They don’t have any natural predators,” Sullivan said.

* Do people really talk like this in the real world? Weird, man…

Newsradio 620 in Milwaukee has a shocking story about the dirty underground efforts by the Chicago political machine loyal to Rahm Emanuel and President Obama that is apparently applying its dark arts again, this time assisting the leftist, fleebagging Wisconsin State Senators in their efforts to thwart the democratic process in the Badger State.

Aside from the bizarre hyperbole, what’s the big crime? Well, a Wisconsin Republican claims that some folks connected with Obama’s past campaign are now helping with the recall of 8 GOP state Senators. Even if true, what does it prove? Lots of people worked for Obama two years ago, and they need to keep making money. Hacks gotta eat, too.