* It’s December, so our annual charity fundraiser for Lutheran Social Services will begin next week, as will the Golden Horseshoe Awards. And, as always in December, every Friday ends with Christmas holiday music…
* Fran Spielman interviewed retiring Majority Leader Greg Harris, and Harris talked about the hostility he endured from his supposed allies during the push to pass a marriage equality bill…
In May 2013, Harris made the difficult and highly emotional decision to call off the House vote that would have sent the bill to then-Gov. Pat Quinn’s desk amid opposition from Catholic leaders and conservative African American ministers.
“Was that a horrible day on the House floor when I was ready to call it, then realized some of my votes were not gonna be there? Oh, yeah. Hell, it was. That was like a horrible day to be booed. There were people saying, ‘Call the bill. You’ve got to put it up there. You’ve got to make a record,’” said Harris, who choked back tears on that fateful day.
“I thought … to put up peoples’ rights for a vote and have them lose and lock votes in that might be with you on a future roll call would have been a huge mistake. It could have set us back years and years. So, we regrouped. We organized in every community. And in November, it passed. Illinois was the last state that was able to pass marriage equality legislatively.” […]
He’s not interested in Pyrrhic victories. He’s not satisfied to introduce a bill, put out a news release and watch the legislation go down in flames.
* I probably shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s amazing how organized this is. WTTW…
A joint task force this week recovered thousands of pieces of stolen retail items, including men’s and women’s clothing, electronics, high-end food items and beauty supplies, totaling more than $1 million in value from multiple Chicago storage containers this week, law enforcement officials announced Friday.
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul said members of an Organized Retail Crime Task Force and the Chicago Police Department executed search warrants at eight storage units in two Chicago locations Wednesday night, where they recovered “four semitrailers of merchandise” that had been stolen from major national retailers.
“The actual operation of these organized schemes is a lot more sophisticated than might be reflected in the commonly seen smash-and-grab group thefts,” Raoul said Friday during a press conference in Chicago. “Our goal is to disrupt the criminal enterprises that engage in the overall scheme and send a message to these criminal operations that we will identify them and end the destruction they cause to our communities.”
Though officials were light on some specifics, the seizure apparently stemmed from an unrelated gun arrest. CPD Chief of Detectives Brendan Deenihan said an officer arrested that suspect and discovered stolen items in their car. From there, a Chicago retail crime team was notified, as well as the AG’s task force and the items were eventually recovered.
* Some pics…
BREAKING
In a significant development related to my Organized Retail Crime Task Force, hundreds of thousands of dollars of stolen merchandise has been recovered from several storage units.
It took eight or nine hours to get all of the goods out of the storage units, Raoul said. Pictures of the recovered merchandise don’t do justice to how much was there.
“Fifteen people spending hours unloading stuff, it’s a lot of items that were recovered,” he said.
Raoul launched his task force earlier this fall, and the recovery announced Friday was its first major bust. The task force aims to bring law enforcement officials from multiple jurisdictions and levels together with retailers and internet marketplace operators to reduce such crimes. Though retailers have long dealt with theft, these coordinated, larger incidents have escalated recently.
Nationally, dollars lost to organized retail crime topped $700,000 per $1 billion in sales in 2020, up nearly 60% since 2015, according to a recent National Retail Federation report. In Illinois, shops lost $3.7 billion to $4 billion worth of merchandise to theft last year, according to the Illinois Retail Merchants Association.
The bust comes as a number of smash and gran thefts continue at high-end retailers in the Chicago area.
On Thursday, Chicago police said nine people hit a Neiman Marcus store in the 700-block of North Michigan Avenue. […]
Friday morning, three suspects in a silver sedan approached a store in the Roosevelt Collection in the 1100-block of South Delano Court at about 5:55 a.m., police said. The suspects opened the door of a business and took merchandise and cash boxed before fleeingin the sedan, police said.
On Monday, thieves swarmed the Burberry store just down the street on Michigan Avenue, making off with several expensive designer purses.
* Hospitalizations are up 30 percent compared to Wednesday of last week. ICU usage is up 39 percent, ventilator usage is up 47 percent. Last Wednesday the positivity rates were 3.3 and 4.1 percent respectively, so we’re looking at 42 and 37 percent increases there. Cases are way up and the death rate is also increasing…
The Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) today reported 42,559 new confirmed and probable cases of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Illinois, including 182 additional deaths since November 26, 2021.
Currently, IDPH is reporting a total of 1,835,076 cases, including 26,535 deaths, in 102 counties in Illinois. The age of cases ranges from younger than one to older than 100 years. Since Friday, November 26, 2021, laboratories have reported 902,840 specimens for a total of 39,650,009. As of last night, 2,582 individuals in Illinois were reported to be in the hospital with COVID-19. Of those, 534 patients were in the ICU and 221 patients with COVID-19 were on ventilators.
The preliminary seven-day statewide positivity for cases as a percent of total test from November 26 – December 2, 2021 is 4.7%. The preliminary seven-day statewide test positivity from November 26 – December 2, 2021 is 5.6%.
A total of 17,508,319 vaccines have been administered in Illinois as of last midnight. The seven-day rolling average of vaccines administered daily is 54,387 doses. Since Friday, November 26, 2021, 380,710 doses were reported administered in Illinois. Of Illinois’ total population, approximately 69% has received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose and more than 61% of Illinois’ total population is fully vaccinated according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Approximately 36% of Illinois’ eligible adults have received a booster dose of vaccine.
All data are provisional and will change. Additional information and COVID-19 data can be found at https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19.html.
Vaccination is the key to ending this pandemic. To find a COVID-19 vaccination location near you, go to www.vaccines.gov.
Get your shots, people. And wear your masks indoors.
In 2018, the 6½ suburban counties around Chicago cast a total of 2.1 million votes; those in the 95 counties “downstate” cast 1.5 million.
Not sure why he didn’t include the city, where Bruce Rauner received 135,028 votes in the general election.
Whatever. The column prompted me to run the 2018 numbers. In the 2018 general election, Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will counties accounted for 64 percent of the total vote and Downstate made up 36 percent. In the 2018 Republican primary, those counties were 47 percent of the total vote, with Downstate voters comprising 53 percent of the electorate.
This is the basic hurdle that all statewide Republican hopefuls have to overcome. It ain’t easy to do both.
* With that in mind, check out what Sen. Bailey is promoting on social media…
Bailey, who with his wife, Cindy, founded a preschool-through-12th-grade Christian school in southern Illinois, also touched on education during the two-hour rally.
“Public education is under attack,” he said. “My friends, we need to get back to public education.”
Bailey also made a push for people to become election judges.
“Is there election fraud? Yes,” he said. “That’s why everyone of us should be election judges.”
Um, OK.
* Point and counterpoint…
* Now with video…
“Governor of Chicago” JB Pritzker is perfectly content to rule for the wealthy few. Growing up in Central Illinois, I always felt like our politicians never saw the rest of us outside of Chicago. I will be the governor for all Illinoisans.@GovPritzkerpic.twitter.com/51RM939ejL
I think the ideal GOP [gubernatorial] candidate would be a credible, law-and-order prosecutor (think Jim Thompson in the 1970s), because law and order will be a leading issue in 2022. Suburbanites are scared witless by the violence in the city.
Lacking such, or a consolidation of Sullivan, Schimpf, Rabine into one candidacy, Bailey wins the primary, at least as of right now. But in the November general election, Bailey would likely be the darling of downstate, while falling flat in the ’burbs, winning an enthusiastic 40 percent of the total vote.
So, a possible doofus at the top [for US Senate], with Bailey just below, could spell disaster for other races down the long ballot, because of depressed GOP turnout. For example, I have an interest in two, important Illinois Supreme Court races, located in mostly suburban districts. But voters do not go to the polls, or not, because of unknown Supreme Court candidates. Thus, these competitive races, found at the very bottom of the ticket, could be determined at the top of the ballot.
Illinois GOP leaders should get on their knees to top-drawer citizens who might be willing, out of a sense of noblesse oblige, to take on a likely losing U.S. Senate race, and hope that a candidate who can appeal in the suburbs will emerge from the gubernatorial primary.
One thing he’s ignoring is the national mood, which tends to drive turnout more than individual candidates. But his scenario could help undermine any expected GOP midterm wave.
“The real pandemic in Illinois … is the violence that we’re facing here on the streets of Chicago and now spreading all throughout the state,” state Sen. Darren Bailey, a farmer from downstate Xenia and one of four announced GOP candidates for governor, said during a recent stop in Woodlawn on Chicago’s South Side.
Confronting Democrats on crime is a strategy Republicans have employed for decades, notably when George H.W. Bush used the early release of Willie Horton, a Massachusetts murderer who went on to commit other crimes, to paint Michael Dukakis as soft on crime in the 1988 presidential campaign.
But rather than inciting fear to motivate voters as was the case then, Republicans say they are addressing real concerns over rising crime in the city and in the suburbs.
Itasca plan commissioners admitted they underestimated public interest in a proposed addiction treatment center when a crowd representing 16% of the town’s population packed their meeting Wednesday night.
More than 1,300 people jammed the gym and cafeteria at Peacock Junior High School, forcing commissioners to postpone the hearing so village officials can find a venue large enough for an energized opposition group.
Demonstrators marched earlier Wednesday evening through downtown Itasca to pressure a Chicago nonprofit group to abandon plans to convert a hotel into a 200-bed drug and alcohol treatment center.
For months, resistance against the Haymarket Center proposal in the town of 8,700 has taken the form of yard signs, social media outrage, letter campaigns and matching blue T-shirts.
Founded almost 45 years ago, the nonprofit treatment provider is making its second attempt at opening a rehab facility in DuPage County to help meet what advocates say is a rising demand for services. Almost 100 people died from overdoses in DuPage last year. Nearly 2,000 residents from DuPage and other collar counties also were patients at Haymarket clinics from 2017 to 2018.
But Haymarket faced “not in my backyard” protests against a smaller-scale plan to operate a 16-bed satellite program in Wheaton.
More than a year after Wheaton’s city council denied their request, Haymarket leaders told Itasca officials they wanted to buy the Holiday Inn to house hundreds of patients with substance abuse disorders.
Haymarket is now meeting staunch opposition from Itasca residents who maintain their primary concerns have to do with tax revenue loss from a tax-exempt organization replacing the hotel and the potential burden placed on the village’s police and ambulance service.
More than two years after the Haymarket drug treatment center’s initial proposal to build a large rehab in Itasca was greeted with intense protest, the Village Board formally turned down the plan in a unanimous vote Tuesday.
The decision, which drew restrained applause from residents in the meeting room, came as little surprise following steady criticism from officials who say the town of 9,000 can’t afford the projected public safety costs from the 240-bed facility, meant to be housed in a former Holiday Inn hotel. […]
The story is likely not over just yet. Haymarket’s attorney said in an earlier presentation that a rejection would violate federal civil rights laws that protect people recovering from addiction, and president and CEO Dan Lustig suggested after the vote that a legal challenge might be coming.
“These types of issues might have to play (themselves) out in a court of law,” he said. “I think it’s really where important decisions like this really belong.”
We are writing to inform you that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois has initiated an investigation of the Village of Itasca for compliance with the requirements of Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (“ADA”).1 Among other things, the ADA prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities, including individuals with substance use disorder.
Pursuant to our authority under the ADA, the investigation is related to the zoning application of Haymarket DuPage LLC (“Haymarket DuPage”) filed with the Village of Itasca to use property to operate a treatment center for individuals with substance use and behavioral health disorders.
The Haymarket drug treatment center’s more-than-two-year attempt to open a rehab in Itasca took another turn Thursday when officials said U.S. Attorney John Lausch has launched an investigation into whether the village’s rejection of the center was in keeping with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Mayor Jeff Pruyn released a letter Lausch sent last week, in which he announced the probe and noted that the ADA protects people with disabilities — including substance use disorder — from discrimination. […]
Lausch asked village officials to produce a raft of documents within the next 30 days, including zoning bylaws, internal emails related to Haymarket and any relevant communications with the local fire protection district and school systems.
When asked for comment, Haymarket leaders released a brief statement and directed any other questions to the U.S. attorney’s office.
“We welcome an investigation,” Haymarket President and CEO Dan Lustig said.
The issue of ADA compliance was raised in a June 2020 letter to village attorneys from Access Living, a Chicago-based advocacy group for people with disabilities.
Two attorneys for the group said Haymarket should have been allowed to seek a special-use permit to operate as a health care facility..
Police and fire pension costs for DeKalb, Illinois, use up about 20% of general fund revenue, up from 10% in 2014, city manager Bill Nicklas said in an interview. The entire property tax levy for the city’s proposed 2022 budget will go toward the two pension funds and some more revenue from sales taxes may be tapped for the retirement system payments, he said.
“Of the options that are out there, consolidation seems to be a good place to begin,” Nicklas said.
But underscoring how difficult this shift is, the DeKalb Police Pension Fund doesn’t agree with city officials and is listed as one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
“I don’t think many of us trust the government of Illinois to handle our money given their history,” said Jim Kayes, president of the DeKalb Police Pension Fund board, in an interview.
Yeah, OK. The reason they’re paying such higher pension costs in DeKalb now is because they let their unfunded liability get to 53 percent.
Also, the above-mentioned lawsuit filed by a handful of local pension fiefdoms against the state’s massive consolidation law seems a bit off…
The lawsuit claims that the law takes away the plaintiffs’ local authority and “diminishes and impairs the pension benefits” to which they are entitled. Illinois’ constitution bans any reduction in worker retirement benefits. […]
The state said in a filing in reply that Illinois’s constitution protects the payments that retirees are entitled to, but that doesn’t extend to areas like choosing the entity that manages the retirement plan.
President Biden on Thursday announced new testing protocols for international travelers and extended masking requirements through March as the U.S. prepares to fight the Omicron variant this winter.
* Gov. Pritzker was asked yesterday if he favored that extension…
We have an indoor mask requirement in the state of Illinois and so we’re not lifting that now. Especially not now. I’ve said all along that when I want it lifted is when we start seeing hospitalizations really plunge. We’re not seeing that, it’s going up, in fact, every day.
In light of the Omicron variant and increasing COVID-19 numbers, Governor JB Pritzker says Illinois’ mask mandate is staying in place for now.
“We have an indoor mask requirement in the state of Illinois and we’re not lifting that, especially not now,” Pritzker said.
As of Thursday, COVID metrics continued to surge across Illinois with over 11,500 cases reported in the last 24 hours. That’s an increase from just over 6,000 the day before.
According to a Chicago Tribune analysis, the surge is predominantly being felt by the unvaccinated.
Because of the vaccine, cases aren’t as important as hospitalizations, which are soaring among the unvaxxed, but that’s beside the point of this particular post.
The office of Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) asked the state health department on Nov. 1 to study how mask mandates affected COVID-19 numbers in the state, and the health department responded Nov. 3 that its analysis found they saved lives and reduced the spread of the coronavirus. But that analysis wasn’t made public until nonprofit news organizations obtained it through a public records request, The New York Times reports.
The Missouri Independent reported Wednesday that the health department’s analysis found lower infection and death rates in the four areas of Missouri with mask mandates — St. Louis, St. Louis County, Kansas City, and Jackson County — from the end of April until the end of October, the peak of the state’s Delta wave.
There are a number of variables that affect infection and death numbers, but “I think we can say with great confidence reviewing the public health literature and then looking at the results in your study that communities where masks were required had a lower positivity rate per 100,000 and experienced lower death rates,” state Health Department director Donald Kauerauf told Parson in a Nov. 3 email obtained by the Independent.
The Independent’s analysis found that the “masked” areas had 15.8 new COVID-19 cases a day for every 100,000 residents, versus 21.7 cases per 100,000 residents in the areas with no mask mandates, and less frequent deaths.
The study looked at the period from April to October, when the Delta variant was driving an increase in coronavirus infections worldwide.
During that time frame, there were 15.8 cases per day for every 100,000 residents, on average, in the areas that required masks, compared with 21.7 cases per 100,000 residents in unmasked communities, according to The Missouri Independent’s analysis of the data. Regions without mask requirements recorded one death per 100,000 residents every 3.5 days, compared with one death per 100,000 residents every five days where masks were required, The Missouri Independent said.
Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, has said he supports wearing masks to slow the spread of Covid-19, but he has repeatedly spoken out against mask requirements. In July, he said on Twitter that issuing mask mandates while a vaccine is available eroded public trust. “The vaccine is how we rid ourselves of COVID-19, not mask mandates that ignore common sense,” Mr. Parson wrote.
In a statement posted on Twitter on Thursday, Mr. Parson reiterated his opposition to mask mandates and said the requirements “infringe on our personal liberties.”
Attorney General Eric Schmitt has gone a step further, suing St. Louis, St. Louis County, Kansas City and Jackson County to block enforcement of their mask mandates.
“Jackson County has imposed an unlawful, arbitrary, and capricious mask mandate that is not supported by the data or the science,” the opening sentence to Schmitt’s lawsuit against Jackson County states.
Schmitt has also sued Columbia Public Schools for instituting mask mandates.
The state’s analysis backs up St. Louis’ push to keep its mask mandate, said Nick Dunne, spokesman for St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones.
“More than anything it confirms for us what our public health experts have been saying, that masks are an effective tool for reducing community transmission,” Dunne said.
Not supported by data or the science?
* Check out the Missouri death rate comparison between mask-mandated areas (in blue) and no mandate (in orange)…
The BMJ, a global health care publisher, released a massive review Thursday that analyzed 72 studies from around the world to evaluate how non-pharmaceutical health measures reduced cases of COVID-19. Researchers found measures like hand-washing, wearing masks and physical distancing significantly reduced incidences of COVID-19. […]
But public health prevention strategies have also been shown to be beneficial in fighting respiratory infections. Researchers found that wearing a mask could reduce COVID-19 incidence by 53 percent.
One experiment across 200 countries showed 45.7 percent fewer COVID-19 related deaths in countries where mask wearing was mandatory, according to the study. In the U.S., one study reported a 29 percent reduction in COVID-19 transmission in states where mask wearing was required.
I have often described the political process as a series of arbitrary deadlines that unnecessarily drives hysteria. See: remap, may 31… https://t.co/T2FfUIsEfq
