When it comes to property taxes, sticker shock is typical in Illinois. From small-business owners in Chicago to suburban dwellers in middle-of-the-pack school districts, long-time Illinoisans are often bewildered as to why they pay the second-highest property taxes in the nation, at an average of more than 2 percent of a home’s value.

And the nonpartisan Tax Foundation said Chicago’s record-setting property-tax hike will likely vault Illinois to the top of the table, making the Land of Lincoln home to the highest property taxes in the U.S.

But an average only tells so much of the story.

House bill 4224 would freeze taxes as part of Gov. Rauner’s “turnaround agenda.” Dems foot-dragging as usual.

The anti-racist deconstructed . . .

. . . by one of the best in the business:

There is no racist like an antiracist: That is because he is obsessed by race, whose actual existence as often as not he denies. He looks at the world through race-tinted spectacles, interprets every event or social phenomenon as a manifestation of racism either implicit or explicit, and in general has the soul of a born inquisitor.

Read on . . .

The EPA’s Secret Staff – WSJ

Woe is us. Tree-huggers called the shots.

The Energy & Environment Legal Institute has obtained government emails that show the EPA secretly worked with environmental lobbyists to craft its Clean Power Plan regulating greenhouse gases. The emails show this secret alliance designed a standard that would be impossible or economically ruinous for existing coal plants to meet—in order to force their closure.

The New York Times first reported that in 2014 environmentalists Dan Lashof, David Doniger and David Hawkins—all with roots at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)—drafted a “blueprint” that “influenced” the greenhouse gas rules. That wasn’t the half of it.

Some of our green friends are verrrrry sneaky.

Taking the Wood to Politicized Science | Power Line

A lady with her mind made up:

Very soon the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is going to select a new president, and the leading (perhaps only) candidate appears to be Dr. Marcia McNutt, who is currently editor-in-chief of Science magazine. The problem with Dr. McNutt is that she consistently turns a blind eye to qualified dissenting scientists on a wide variety of subjects, often summarily rejecting their submissions without even the pretense of review.

She’s hot for consensus, she is.

Rube Goldberg’s Fed? – The New York Sun

Long-ago cartoonist-of-the-absurd Rube Goldberg worked up a perpetual-motion machine “powered by Niagara Falls, which seems to run perpetually until the machine itself wears out,” recalls today’s New York Sun (which ran Rube G’s cartoons a long time ago), concluding that such a wearing-out “could yet be the fate of the Fed,” our Rube Goldbergian money machine.

To Avoid Getting Towed, Man Sends Police Off On Fake Burglary Call

Today’s candidate for winner of the week.

And the judge will allow bail if he’s electronically monitored — after he drove off with his Lincoln while cops about to tow it were answering phony 911 call he had just made. A truly upstanding citizen.