-By Warner Todd Huston
It must be nice to be School Board Member Michael Linder of Grayslake, Illinois. He seems awfully lucky to have landed a plum new job, paid for by the taxpayers of Lake County. Awfully lucky, indeed. In fact, he’s so lucky that one suspects an insider deal was made to get him that plum job.
Could it be? An insider political deal in Illinois?
As it happens, Linder was an elected member of the Grayslake School Board, District 46. But he suddenly found that he could no longer serve in that capacity. He resigned his term on November 10 of last year in the middle of a meeting. Then he up and left mumbling something about not wanting to be a lame duck.
So why this precipitous resignation? It appears that Linder engineered himself an engineering job with the district. Linder resigned because he was able to get the board to recommend him for an engineering consultant job that was opening up in the school district.
In a meeting this week, Linder expected to be handed the lucky job with little fanfare. He was not, however, placated… at least not yet.
The vote to give him the free job was postponed, likely because the board got cold feet on how bad this looked. I am sure board members are looking for a dark room in which to conduct the vote or a carpet under which to sweep the job offer.
Still, there seems to be little doubt that this insider deal is signed sealed and the check is in the mail, if you will. As the Daily Herald reports, “a lot” of candidates for the job were seen but “only one candidate was deemed qualified.”
Guess who that was?
Yup. Good ol’ Mr. Linder.
Illinois.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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