-By Larry Snow
Illinois teachers qualify for a full 75 percent pension after working only 27 years. Most adults work for 27 years before they turn age 50.
Democrats want retail and construction workers to think that the majority of Illinois teachers are seriously paying into their pensions. The truth is, ordinary workers are made to do this for them, big time.
First, teachers have no Social Security taken out of their paychecks. Ordinary workers get hit with a 6.2 percent deduction for Social Security. It’s a deduction they have to pay federal and state income taxes on. Democrats gave teachers a huge loophole of not paying income taxes on any of their pension deductions. This enormous no-tax handout to teachers amounts to billions of dollars each year.
Over 51,000 of the total 132,502 teachers in Illinois contribute nothing from their K-12 paychecks into their pensions. Illinois law says it is to be 9.4 percent.
About an additional 32,000 teachers pay little into their pensions. It is 1.81 percent to be precise for these 31,956 teachers. Paying less than 2 percent is little unless you want to bamboozle ordinary working people into thinking the opposite…
Read the rest at ChampionNews.net.
Let’s say your job is as a traveling salesman or a construction worker and you work at different locations throughout the year. Wouldn’t it be nice to get your own free chauffeur service to get back and forth to work? That way you could just drive yourself to one location a day and then have your chauffeur take you back and forth to your work site. Nice, huh? Well, apparently that is what’s going on in Chicago for city worker union members and taxpayer’s are paying $18 million a year for this union perk.
For his first controversy, Mayor Elect Rahm Emanuel has floated the trial balloon of all trial balloons. He wants to fire half the city’s alderman and replace them with… no one. That’s right, he wants to eliminate half of the city’s aldermen. How’s that for chutzpah?
As his last year in office winds down, Mayor Richard Daley is hailed as one of the country’s most successful big city mayors. Yet the 2010 census reveals that the city lost 200,000 citizens, the city’s budget is millions in the red, and businesses are abandoning the city with alarming frequency. How this equates to success is anyone’s guess.
The Wilmette Beacon 
Municipal elections are here again. Throughout Cook County folks are running for village trustee, alderman, library board member, village president… all sorts of local offices are up for grabs.
It has been revealed that 
Chicago blogger 
Illinois Congressman Peter Roskam (R, 6th District) has really climbed the ladder of leadership since the 2010 elections. He went from Congressman in the minority party in DC to the Chief Deputy Whip of the majority Republican Party riding the GOP wave that overtook the Hill last November.
Claiming that “It is impossible to create a perfect system, one that is free of all mistakes,” Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn signed a bill that would eliminate the death penalty in Illinois, despite a campaign promise that he would keep it.
Newsradio 620 in Milwaukee has a 
Rahm Emanuel hasn’t even officially set his first foot in the Mayor’s Office and he’s already had his first political misstep: He hired a transition team member that has ethics problems.
This is why Illinois politics is called “the combine.” It’s because all too often there doesn’t seem to be a whit of a difference between Republicans and Democrats — not always, but all too often. They even donate to each other’s campaigns. 
Alderman Pat Levar of Chicago’s 45th Ward served six terms on the city council but announced last November that his health was bad enough that he didn’t want to run for his seat again and would retire. This announcement started a mad scramble for someone to fill his seat.