-By Warner Todd Huston
It’s Illinois, so naturally our accidental Governor had to figure out a way to make it easier for convicted felons to get a state job. After all, what would half of the state’s politicians do after they got out of prison? Live off the millions they stole from the government before their trial? Sheyeah, like that will last forever!
So, coming to the rescue is Illinois Governor Pat Quinn who may be about to issue an administrative order eliminating one particular little check box that appears on applications for state jobs. It is the box that demands that applicants inform the state whether or not they have been convicted of a crime or pleaded guilty to one.
Quinn is under the microscope of a group called the Worker’s Center for Racial Justice, a group pushing a campaign to urge the Illinois Governor to “ban the box,” and eliminate the self-reporting requirement on job applications. Quinn has promised that in the next few weeks he will acquiesce to the activist group’s demands.
The news comes from the far left, capitalism-hating magazine In These Times which quotes DeAngelo Bester, co-founder of the labor center, as saying that prospective convicted con applicants will have “the opportunity go in front of an employer and make their case” once the check box is eliminated.
One can certainly say that once a criminal has paid his debt to society that he should be allowed to get a job, certainly. But it only makes good sense to ascertain if a job applicant is a convict, especially when that prospective applicant wants to work for the common weal.
We have enough crooks pretending to serve we, the people, in the Land of Lincoln, we don’t need to have the past convictions of even more felons successfully hidden from the human resource officers in our state agencies.
(H/T MarathonPundit.blogspot.com)
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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, MrConservative.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.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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