RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘Adam Andrzejewski, CEO of OpenTheBooks.com, as published at Forbes.’

Illinois is broke and continues to flirt with junk bond status. But the state’s financial woes aren’t stopping 63,000 government employees from bringing home six-figure salaries and higher.

Whenever we open the books, Illinois is consistently one of the worst offenders. Recently, we found auto pound supervisors in Chicago making $144,453; nurses at state corrections earning up to $254,781; junior college presidents making $465,420; university doctors earning $1.6 million; and 84 small-town “managers” out-earning every U.S. governor.

Using our interactive mapping tool, quickly review (by ZIP code) the 63,000 Illinois public employees who earn more than $100,000 and cost taxpayers $10 billion. Just click a pin and scroll down to see the results rendered in the chart beneath the map.

Here are a few examples of what you’ll uncover:

20,295 teachers and school administrators – including superintendents Joyce Carmine ($398,229) at Park Forest School District 63, Troy Paraday ($384,138) at Calumet City School District 155, and Jon Nebor ($377,409) at Indian Springs School District 109. Four of the top five salaries are in the south suburbs – not the affluent north shore.
10,676 rank-and-file workers and managers in Chicago – including $216,200 for embattled Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) and $400,000 for Ginger Evans, Commissioner of Aviation – including a $100,000 bonus. Timothy Walter, a deputy police chief, made $240,917 – that’s $146,860 in overtime on top of his $94,056 base salary. Ramona Perkins, a police communications operator, pulled down $121,318 in overtime while making $196,726!
9,567 college and university employees – including the southern Illinois junior college power couple Dale Chapman ($465,420) and Linda Terrill Chapman ($217,290). The pair combined for a $682,000 income at Lewis and Clark Community College. Fady Toufic Charbel ($1.58 million) and Konstantin Slavin ($1.04 million) are million-dollar doctors at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
8,640 State of Illinois employees – including $258,070 for Marian Frances Cook, a “contractual worker” at the newly created Dept. of Innovation and Technology. Further, there are the “barber” and “teacher of barbering” positions in the state prisons making $100,000+. Loreatha Coleman made $254,781 as a nurse at the Dept. of Corrections.
8,817 small town city and village employees – including 84 municipal managers out-earning every U.S. governor at $180,000. These managers include Lawrence Hileman (Glenview – $297,988); Michael Ellis (Grayslake – $264,486); Robert Kiely (Lake Forest – $255,247); Kevin Bowens (Libertyville – $254,428); and Richard Nahrstadt (Northbrook – $250,248).

In total, there is roughly $12 billion in cash compensation flowing to six-figure government workers when counting the 9,031 federal employees based in Illinois.

So, who are the biggest culprits in conferring six-figure salaries? We ranked the top 15 largest public pay and pension systems in Illinois:

President Trump has been feuding this week with Attorney General Jeff Sessions over matters related to last year’s campaign. But here’s an issue on which Messrs. Trump and Sessions should be able to find common ground: The Justice Department should stop defending Obama administration corruption.

I’m referring to the cases, still on file today, challenging or seeking to expose Internal Revenue Service policies that delayed applications for tax-exempt status from conservative groups. That’s viewpoint discrimination, a clear First Amendment violation.

The Obama Justice Department fought these cases intensely. It tried to get them thrown out of court before the plaintiffs had the chance to gather evidence. When that failed, Justice lawyers resisted discovery, to prevent disclosure of documents showing what the Obama administration was really doing.

That’s normal behavior for a defendant in a lawsuit. But since Jan. 20, the Justice Department has reported to Mr. Trump, who denounced each of the corrupt policies at issue in these cases.

So why is the department handling the cases as if it were still run by Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch ? Because many of the career lawyers who were put on these cases by Obama Justice Department officials continue working on them, with no supervision from this administration. Those lawyers are still doing now what they have always done: fighting as hard as they can to prevent disclosure of what the Obama IRS, and the rest of the Obama administration, was doing to the country.

In one of these cases I represent the plaintiff. Z Street is a pro-Israel nonprofit that educates on Zionism and how to oppose terror. It applied in 2009 for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code. For months, Z Street’s lawyers fielded duplicative IRS requests for information about its board of directors, but after long delays the IRS hadn’t made a decision on the application. In July 2010 Z Street asked why, and an IRS agent revealed that the applications of many organizations connected to Israel “are being sent to a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the [Obama] administration’s public policies.”

We sued to stop and expose this clear violation of Z Street’s First Amendment rights.

I got many e-mails this morning disputing criticism of Donald Trump regarding Attorney General Session. Here are two with which I tend to agree. Trump’s style may offend but he is not wrong. rsk

1.Wrong, WSJ Editorial Board. Sessions was wrong to recuse himself from a specious Russia collusion charge and allowed swamp rat Rosenstein to set up a get Trump posse by appointing a special prosecutor Mueller without an identification of a crime or crimes to be investigated and without parameters on the investigation — contrary to law. Mueller hires a partisan Democrat staff, proceeds to expand his investigation and allows leaks. So you have an open ended investigation that calls for the observation of Harvard Law Professor Dershowitz, quoting Stalin’s secret police chief Beria: “Show me the man and I will find the crime.” On top of that, Sessions has not pursued investigations of Hillary and the Democrats that are begging for investigation. These are travesties about which President Trump has every right to be disappointed in Sessions. Rosenstein and Mueller should be fired and investigations of Democrat malfeasance are needed. If Sessions needs to be fired, so be it. I might add that President Trump is the head of the Executive Branch and is empowered to make comments that Senator Graham and the WSJ find inappropriate. It is politics, not dispassionate proprietorial discretion, that is protecting Hillary and the Democrats. from Phil Byler

Attorney General Sessions absolutely should not have recused himself from the phony Russia collusion investigation. In his Senatorial office he met with some Russian officials who probably visited a dozen other Senators. Nothing was exchanged and Sessions forgot about it. As a result he has been unable to participate and criticize Comey and Mueller for leaking FBI information and for wasting taxpayer money in widening the scope of an investigations that is without evidence or merit. Furthermore, Hillary Clinton’s sale of uranium to Russia certainly deserves scrutiny as well as the pay to play schemes of the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary of State. Sessions has willfully ignored this scandal while the administration and the President he ostensibly serves are continually distracted and beleaguered by spurious allegations, leaks and targeted headlines. from Tessa Klein

Two words describe the Russian collusion accusations and investigation of President Trump: Sham and injustice. Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor, knows it. Rod Rosenstein, the Obama holdover Deputy Attorney General who appointed Mueller, knows it. Jeff Sessions, a decent man and attorney general who recused himself, knows it.

The Democrats know it. The left knows it. The mainstream media knows it. DC-owned and spine-free Republicans know it. Paul Ryan knows it.

Everybody knows it. But everyday Americans should really know this: the farce continues because powerful establishment interests are invested in destroying Donald Trump and his presidency.

That’s why the president should fire Mueller. It’s why Jeff Sessions needs to unrecuse himself. The president should shelve special prosecutions during his presidency. The law permits him to do so. Let U.S. district attorneys earn their keep.

Note “…Trump and his presidency,” not “Trump’s presidency,” because the witch-hunting and attempted railroading of the president is every bit as much about destroying the man. Trump leads a counterrevolution, a rising up of Heartland Americans — Americans everywhere with Heartland blood coursing through their veins. His leadership transcends office. He poses an existential threat to interests and people deeply invested in a worldview or ways that practically benefits them somehow. The presidency is a powerful means, to be sure, and denying its powers to Trump — somehow — is critical to reasserting the establishment’s control.

Yes, it’s that seedy. And, yes, it crosses the aisle, as they say in DC.

One’s tempted to say that the Putin-Trump collusion tinfoil hat gambit is the pinnacle of years of efforts to criminalize politics. You remember the Scooter Libby and Tom Delay railroads? But here, in the narrowest sense, there aren’t any politics to criminalize. Russian collusion is pure fiction, utter disinformation. The scheme here is to criminalize fiction; to give legal license to Mueller’s investigation based on fraudulent accusations.

There won’t be an impeachment of the president and/or prosecutions of anyone around him for colluding with the Russians. No such thing occurred. If impeachment and/or prosecutions happen, it will be for “gotcha” technicalities when under oath. That’s how the feds sandbagged Scooter Libby. Or because Mueller’s far-ranging investigations found other unrelated grounds to get Trump.

Mueller has license to fish — as in conducting a fishing expedition. Word is that Mueller will probe Trump’s business affairs and whatever else. The president is attempting to warn off Mueller. Leviathan government, with thousands of pages of obscure rules and laws to reference, can cite any of us at any time for violations of some law or regulation. This is one of the fruits of a century of “progressive” government: its tentacles reach everywhere and are strong enough to lay low any honest citizen.

Mueller intends to lay low a president, however. Trump enjoys massive grassroots followings that threaten the nation’s establishment as nothing has in recent memory.

Mueller is leading an inquisition. He’s the Grand Inquisitor. If permitted to continue his misbegotten enterprise, he will find something — anything — to hang around President Trump’s neck. He’ll protract his investigations if required. At minimum, ongoing investigations throw a monkey wrench into the president’s agenda. It helps cloud his initiatives and accomplishments publicly. It drives down his approval ratings. That gives cover to hostile and cowardly Republicans who oppose parts or all of Trump’s agenda.

The unspoken charge to Mueller is to get something on Trump. Coming up empty-handed is a nonstarter. Concluding after, say, a six-month investigation that accusations against the president and his family and associates of Russian collusion are baseless isn’t what Mueller’s establishment cohorts want. Range far, snag anything to use against Trump is the mandate. The establishment wants blood, and that’s what Mueller will aim to produce.

On Monday, in a Tweet, the president suggested:

Drain the Swamp should be changed to Drain the Sewer — it’s actually much worse than anyone ever thought, and it begins with the Fake News!

Trump is right and wrong. DC has become a sewer, but, it doesn’t begin with “Fake News.” It gives far too much credit to the MSM, which have become open propagandists for the left and Democratic Party. The latter two, in varying ways and degrees, are integral to the establishment.

Donald Trump is a naturally polarizing figure. His bread and butter is brazen attacks on those who challenge him. As a media figure and as a business promoter, that worked well. As president, however, Trump needs to pick his fights carefully and avoid needless political bloodletting. Changing people in his administration when he feels that things have gone wrong suggests that he picked the wrong people to begin with, especially in the first six months of his administration.

In some cases, like Comey, a holdover from the Obama administration, Trump should have cleaned house right at the beginning of his term of office, when people naturally understand Trump’s need to have his own people in key positions. When Trump gets rid of people who have been his supporters and who have interviewed for the job Trump gives them in his administration, it is a different matter.

Jeff Sessions was the first senator to endorse Trump in his run for the Republican nomination. Sessions is also a man who during his political career has stood up to the Establishment and done what he has believed to be the right thing even if it was not the most politically expedient. Sessions has a reputation among the Republican caucus in the Senate as a particularly honorable and decent man. He also gave up a safe Senate seat as a member of the majority party to serve on Trump’s team.

If President Trump fires Attorney General Sessions or if Trump continues to harass Sessions with dumb tweets, then the president runs the risk of alienating honest, genuine Senate conservatives who are immune to threats from Trump but who can give him headaches and problems he cannot imagine.

Almost everything Trump does, except for executive orders, must go through the Senate – legislation, appointments, and treaties. If Trump alienates conservative Republicans in the Senate, it is hard to see how he will be able to do anything during his term as president. Why should these senators trust Trump? Why should they believe he is really conservative, particularly if he taps Rudy Giuliani as the next attorney general, a decent man on the wrong side of nearly every social issue?

When every single Republican Senate vote is vital in repealing Obamacare, why in the world would President Trump risk offending those conservative senators whose support he desperately needs? While pressure from McConnell and Trump have doubtless switched some votes, every single vote in the Senate is necessary to beginning the repeal process.

When the investigation of Trump and his family bubbles into allegations that suggest the need for congressional investigation, why would Trump go out of his way to outrage conservative senators who will be on the very committees interrogating his family and his staff? Does Trump grasp that these senators could garner rave reviews from the mainstream media by asking tough questions in these hearings?

Trump behaves as if he were the head of a corporation called the federal government and everyone were his employee subject to firing at his wish. His influence over senators in conservative states, however, is limited. (The same is true of House members from safe districts, which is to say nearly every House member.)

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Obama, the humanitarian huckster-in-chief, weakened the United States by bullying America for eight years into accepting his crippling politically correct policies as altruistic when in fact they were designed for destruction. His legacy, the Leftist Democratic Party with its “resistance” movement, is the party of the Humanitarian Hoax attempting to destroy American democracy and replace it with socialism.

The Leftist Democrat Party under Obama embraced a hypocritical anti-bullying campaign with religious fervor. Presenting himself as the agent of change to make schools safe from bullying Obama launched his anti-bullying campaign at the White House Conference on Bullying Prevention in 2011 saying:

“If there’s one goal of this conference, it’s to dispel the myth that bullying is just a harmless rite of passage or an inevitable part of growing up. It’s not. Bullying can have destructive consequences for our young people. And it’s not something we have to accept. As parents and students; teachers and communities, we can take steps that will help prevent bullying and create a climate in our schools in which all of our children can feel safe.”

Sounds great – an anti-bullying campaign designed to make schools a safe space for students. Who could object?

Obama’s popular anti-bullying campaign of kindness was expanded to engage the public and private sectors to combat bullying together. Private, non-profit, and federal commitments were made and millions of dollars were spent on the effort to stop bullying. The Humanitarian Hoax of bullying prevention was launched.

Instead of providing safety and protection for all students the bullying prevention campaign was the ideal vehicle for left-wing liberal indoctrination in the schools that promoted the Leftist intersectional agenda exclusively. Feelings were prioritized over facts and curriculums were overhauled to adhere to the Leftist tenets of political correctness, moral relativism, and historical revisionism. Student feelings were “protected” from averse ideas.

Jake Tapper, CNN’s chief Washington correspondent, recently slammed Linda Sarsour and other progressive leaders of the anti-Trump Women’s March for honoring a convicted cop killer — Assata Shakur.

In response, Sarsour proceeded to dismiss Tapper as a member of the “alt-right.”

Of all the possible ways to describe Tapper, “alt-right” is not one. Tapper is one of President Donald Trump’s most vocal critics. And he’s Jewish. Someone should tell Sarsour that this likely disqualifies him from membership in any white supremacist group. But Sarsour’s “resume,” Tapper’s condemnation of her, and their subsequent Twitter exchange all illustrate the extent to which Sarsour — and some of her progressive Left followers — are unhinged.

Shakur is a felon, and was convicted in 1977 for murdering a New Jersey police officer, assaulting another police officer, and committing a bank robbery. In 1979, she escaped prison and fled to Cuba. She remains on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorist” list to this day.

Sarsour’s idolizing of Shakur follows on the heels of her presentation at the 54th annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), where she called on Muslims to commit jihad against the American government.

“I hope that we, when we stand up to those who oppress our [Muslim] communities, that Allah accepts from us that as a form of jihad,” Sarsour said. “That we are struggling against tyrants and rulers, not only abroad in the Middle East or on the other side of the world, but here, in these United States of America.”

In an interview soon after with the Washington Post, Sarsour was quick to clarify that her speech at ISNA was advocating solely for peaceful, nonviolent dissent, and that her call for jihad only meant the use of words. In a later op-ed for the publication, Sarsour doubled down on her claim that she was only calling for “nonviolent” jihad.

“Yeah, and the swastika is just a Tibetan good luck charm,” as the late comedian Robin Williams so eloquently put it.

Sarsour began her ISNA presentation by thanking her “favorite person” in the room, Imam Siraj Wahaj, praising him as her “mentor, motivator and encourager.” Wahaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, has called for violent jihad, and for replacing the US government with an Islamic caliphate. Sarsour’s mentor has also denounced homosexuality as “a disease of this [American] society,” noting that the penalty for homosexuality under Islamic law is death.

But this doesn’t seem right. How can such a self-declared progressive like Sarsour have such a violent, homophobic bigot for a mentor? Maybe the history of ISNA can shed some light on this glaring contradiction.

Federal prosecutors have said that ISNA is part of the US Muslim Brotherhood network set up to funnel money to the terrorist group Hamas. ISNA conferences have long featured radical Islamists, antisemites, Holocaust-deniers and homophobes as keynote speakers.

WASHINGTON—Senate Republicans overcame a range of internal fissures in narrowly voting on Tuesday to begin debate on their health-care overhaul, but the party suffered a setback hours later when a proposal replacing major portions of the Affordable Care Act failed to attract enough votes to pass.

In a dramatic day at the Capitol, Vice President Mike Pence broke a 50-50 tie, allowing Senate Republicans to clear a procedural hurdle and setting up a days-long stretch of debate and amendment votes on the GOP effort to dismantle and replace much of former President Barack Obama’s 2010 Affordable Care Act.

The two GOP defections came from Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who joined all Senate Democrats in voting against proceeding to debate the legislation.

The vote, punctuated by an emotional last-minute appearance by Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), who was diagnosed recently with brain cancer, delivered a come-from-behind victory for President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), who persuaded Republicans skeptical of the GOP bill to band together long enough to begin debate.

Mr. Trump said after the vote that his party had taken “a big step” that would “move forward to truly great health care.

Even with their surprise win on the procedural motion, which seemed a long shot just last week, Republicans were subdued Tuesday about their prospects of passing a sweeping overhaul of the ACA by week’s end.

“We knew this wasn’t going to be easy, and there’s a lot of work ahead of us,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, a member of the Senate GOP leadership.

On Tuesday night, the first of Senate leaders’ health-care options, a bill toppling and replacing major portions of the ACA, gained only 43 votes to 57 against. That measure included a much-debated proposal from Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) allowing insurers who offer one ACA-compliant health plan to also sell cheaper insurance options that don’t meet ACA rules.

Senate leaders had expected the measure to fail, as Senate rules made it ineligible to pass on a simple majority vote. But the defection of nine GOP Senators—enough to sink the bill even under a simple majority—underscored the lack of support within the party for the ACA replacement that leaders had cobbled together.

On Wednesday, the Senate is expected to take up a separate bill that would largely repeal the ACA with a two-year expiration date, to give lawmakers time to craft a replacement.

During a recent appearance at a forum in Aspen, Colorado, former CIA Director John Brennan said that if President Trump moves to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, executive branch officials should refuse to follow the president’s orders, effectively calling for mutiny against the president should the occasion arise.

“I think it’s the obligation of some executive branch officials to refuse to carry out” such orders, Brennan told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer at the Aspen Security Forum on Friday.

Brennan was joined by fellow swamper James Clapper, the former director of National Intelligence, who called the appointment of Mueller as special counsel “an inspired choice.”

Both men said they had full confidence in Mueller’s investigation of Russian election interference and possible collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.

“They don’t come any better,” said Brennan.

“Nobody better than Bob Mueller, who is a straight shooter and will not be intimidated by anything,” Clapper added.

Mueller has hired at least seven Democratic donors to work on his legal team, including one attorney who has reportedly donated $34,000 to Democrats.

“If he is fired by Mr. Trump or attempted to be fired by Mr. Trump,” Brennan continued, “I really hope our members of Congress — our elected representatives — are going to stand up and say ‘enough is enough’ and stop making apologies and excuses for things that are happening that really flout, I think, our system of laws and government.”

Blitzer reminded Brennan that, as president of the United States, Trump can tell Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to fire Mueller if he wants.

“If he’s fired, what would you want Congress to do?” Blitzer asked.

“First of all, I think it is the obligation of some executive branch officials to refuse to carry out some of these orders that — again — are inconsistent with what this country is all about,” Brennan answered.

He added, “I would just hope that this is not going to be a partisan issue. That Republicans and Democrats are going to see that the future of this country is at stake and there need to be some things done for the good of the future.” CONTINUE AT SITE

When an outlet like PJ Media points out that saying “speech is violence” justifies actual violence, it gets dismissed because, after all, it’s our speech that’s supposedly violent. We’re the ones who stand up for the First Amendment on a daily basis, and the Left doesn’t like that.

Of course, claiming “speech is violence” can be used to justify violence isn’t controversial. Anyone with half a brain knows that. At least now an outlet that’s generally on the Left, The Atlantic, is pointing out the idiocy of that line of thinking:

This is why the idea that speech is violence is so dangerous. It tells the members of a generation already beset by anxiety and depression that the world is a far more violent and threatening place than it really is. It tells them that words, ideas, and speakers can literally kill them. Even worse: At a time of rapidly rising political polarization in America, it helps a small subset of that generation justify political violence.

A few days after the riot that shut down Yiannopoulos’s talk at Berkeley, in which many people were punched, beaten, and pepper sprayed by masked protesters, the main campus newspaper ran five op-ed essays by students and recent alumni under the series title “Violence as self defense.” One excerpt: “Asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act.”

The implication of this expansive use of the word “violence” is that “we” are justified in punching and pepper-spraying “them,” even if all they did was say words. We’re just defending ourselves against their “violence.” But if this way of thinking leads to actual violence, and if that violence triggers counter-violence from the other side (as happened a few weeks later at Berkeley), then where does it end? In the country’s polarized democracy, telling young people that “words are violence” may in fact lead to a rise in real, physical violence.

Free speech, properly understood, is not violence. It is a cure for violence.

That last sentence is key. CONTINUE AT SITE