Day: January 16, 2015

Pat Quinn’s revenge

It’s all these last-minute exec orders, seven of them, including got-back-at-you items to show Rauner who used to be boss.

In one fell swoop, Gov. Bruce Rauner reversed seven 11th-hour executive orders signed by outgoing Gov. Pat Quinn, declaring they were not in the best interest of Illinois residents.

That includes an executive order that called for Rauner to release all of his tax information as well as one that increased the minimum wage for state contracts from $8.25 an hour to $10 an hour. Both of the issues were sticking points in a bruising campaign between the two men in 2014.

It’s (almost) enough to make you feel sorry for the party that made him its standard-bearer. Not quite.

Thank God for abortion?

​Loyola U.-Chicago lays an egg:

One day before the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Loyola University Chicago will host a journalist who once thanked God for abortion on television.​

​Woe is us. Thing is, top- or middle-level Romantic Catholic leaders ​just want abortion to go away, not so much in real life as in public discourse. It’s an embarrassment, interferes with the business they want to conduct. They just aren’t interested.

Rauner focuses on hiring transparency in executive order

Big deal here, way to flush out the hacks, such as the Sec Trans whom  Sen. Don Harmon paraded before an Oak Park audience in the fall of 2013 so as to give Oak Parkers the skinny on Dept. of Trans. plans for Eisenhower X-way and CTA”s Blue Line.

She was shown the door a few months later when discovered to be hiring relatives. Yay Harmon.

Rauner said his order is rooted in the Illinois Department of Transportation hiring scandal during the Quinn administration. An investigation found that IDOT had become a safe haven for many politically hired state employees seeking to quietly slip into jobs protected from politically motivated firings.

Nothing like transparency, which is often claimed, rarely demonstrated.