Chicago Daily Observer

After the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s now-notorious sermons gained a significant amount of national media attention, Illinois Senator Barack Obama felt compelled to explain his relationship with Wright in a major speech on race relations in America. Now that the governor of Illinois has been implicated in the schemes of Obama’s friend Tony Rezko, it might be time for Obama to explain his relationship with Rezko in a major speech on the endemic political corruption that afflicts his home state of Illinois.

Rezko’s trial has lifted the veil on Illinois’s infernally corrupt political establishment, and a government witness named Stuart Levine has taken the part of a meth-snorting, double-dealing Virgil, guiding the public through it. Levine is a broken man, testifying for the government in order to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison. Over seven days of direct examination, he has described an astonishingly broad network of fraud, ... Read More...

Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s (D-Ill.) name has cropped up quite a few times in the ongoing trial of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) benefactor Tony Rezko. Yet in their latest coverage, both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times left out Blagojevich’s party affiliation. The Sun-Times, however, did take note of the Republican party affiliation of another politico caught up in the maelstrom, William Cellini.

The caption for a photo montage accompanying the April 3 article “Levine: Blagojevich knew”, reads, “Clockwise from left: Gov. Rod Blagojevich; Tony Rezko; Stuart Levine;Chicago businessman-turned-Hollywood producer Tom Rosenberg; longtime Illinois Republican Party power William Cellini.”

Tribune staffers Bob Secter and Jeff Coen also covered the development in a story filed shortly after midnight Eastern time on April 3.

This isn’t the first time Secter and Coen left out the (D) after Blagojevich’s name. As NewsBusters contributor and MRC News Analysis intern Lyndsi Thomas noted on ... Read More...

The City’s accumulated unfunded liability in the police and firefighters’ pension funds has been a thorn in the tax side of Evanston for nearly a year – since the City changed actuaries and the new actuary estimated the liability to be about $140 million, which was about $40 million greater than the former actuary had estimated.

After the former actuary agreed last month that the $140 million number was “within the ball park,” City Council decided to fund this year’s required contribution through property taxes and approved the budget for the present year with a 7-percent increase in the City’s portion of the property tax.

The police and firefighters pension funds are mandated by the state but funded locally. Increases in pension benefits approved by the state legislature in the past decade have increased local pension-funding liabilities at least four times.

At $140 million, Evanston’s accumulated unfunded liability for both ... Read More...