Stories by Mark Glennon, Wirepoints on Madison - St. Clair Record

You will get crumbs and you will shut up about it. That might as well be the openly stated policy of Illinois’ Democratic establishment toward employers and toward any of the few lawmakers who stick up for employers.

Anything political said or written maliciously that exposes somebody to “contempt, ridicule or obloquy” would be criminalized, along with lots of other speech, under a new bill pending in the Illinois General Assembly.

What’s to be done in a state that has added no net new jobs in 20 years and has the highest unemployment rate in the nation?

This has been a tough year for Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing. Aside from increasingly harsh criticism like that above, ESG funds have suffered unprecedented withdrawals, their performance for investors has lagged the broader market and most elected officials who support it fared poorly in the recent election.

When it comes, it will indeed be a “revelatory storm” – a grand epiphany that will cause future generations to ask how ours could have been so thoroughly duped.

Elections are time to zoom out and step back -– to reflect on where the sum of the details says we have gone, where we are headed and what we want from the election. So, forget for a moment our usual links to supporting information or to any of our 2,068 original columns presenting that information.

Militant radicals are chomping at the bit for the constitutional right Amendment 1 will give them: the right to include their vision of a national, Marxist workers' revolution in their contract demands.

The ruling is only "a taste of what's to come," Mark Glennon, of Wirepoints, writes. "Courts will have to give meaning to countless items in the 700-page SAFE-T Act and we can expect it to be ... in favor of defendants."

Supporters of Illinois’ SAFE-T Act often ridicule the act’s critics who claim the law is retroactive and will result, on January 1 in release from jail of many detainees arrested prior to that date.

Truth is easy to hide in politics today. The number of crises and governmental failures in America and Illinois are simply overwhelming — far beyond what most voters can be expected to see. In Illinois, that blindness is worsened by a shrinking media unwilling to question.

Crime is perhaps the top issue for Illinois voters this year and the extraordinarily divisive SAFE-T Act is central to it.

Chicago seems intent on replacing Martha’s Vineyard in national headlines about hypocrisy over treatment of border crossers. Bougie, liberal Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts is being widely ridiculed for promptly shipping out some 50 Venezuelan immigrants flown in from Florida. But that’s nothing compared to Chicago, which has boasted of being America’s “most immigrant-friendly city.”

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker on Wednesday issued an emergency proclamation declaring a disaster in every Illinois county “to ensure all state resources are available to support asylum seekers arriving nearly daily to Chicago from the State of Texas,” as stated in his press release.

Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general along with a number of individuals are parties to a federal lawsuit that has already produced evidence that “an army of federal bureaucrats” have been coercing social media platforms to censor free speech. Multiple federal agencies, their evidence shows, colluded with social media giants Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to censor speech, which led to the suppression of truthful information on several matters of critical national importance, including COVID-19.

Americans overwhelmingly say they oppose allowing government offices that oversee elections to accept funding for their operations from partisan, private individuals and groups – Democrats, Republicans and independents alike. It’s a problem exposed in the 2020 election on which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife funded an astonishing $419 million in grants to county and municipal voting offices across America for essentially just that to support Democratic voter turnout. “Local election administration” grants are what supporters called it, but “Zucker Bucks” is what it’s more commonly called.

Still deeper into the hole they go. We finally got a response from Gov. JB Pritzker on what he knows about the Jenny Thornley matter, which we are following closely. As reported by The Center Square on Friday, Pritzker said he knows “Nothing other than what I read in the newspaper about it.” He added, “The truth is, if somebody committed workman’s comp fraud, they should be held accountable.” That’s all he said.

Yes, by all reported accounts, the speech was well received by those who attended, as was his speech last month to a New Hampshire Democrats’ convention. It was also as caustic, divisive and dishonest as you will hear in a political speech, bristling with hypocrisy, claims that failures were successes and just plain absurdities. If Pritzker’s goal was to stake out a position as the most hateful toward the half of Americans who are right of center, he couldn’t have done any better.

When Gov. JB Pritzker took office, Illinois “was facing unprecedented challenges because we had a Republican governor who decided to hold the state budget hostage.” That’s what Pritzker told New Hampshire Democrats in his recent presidential teaser speech in New Hampshire and he said the same thing in his keynote address Saturday to Florida Democrats.

Zero media coverage on this, but on Friday before Memorial Day Gov. JB Pritzker signed yet another COVID Disaster Proclamation, his 28th since the pandemic began over two years ago. Pursuant to those proclamations, he has signed over 112 emergency orders.

Gov. JB Pritzker on Friday signed a new bill providing property tax relief for senior, veteran and disabled homeowners. What nobody said is that those reductions for some mean increases for others. It’s just a matter of shuffling the property tax burden.