Judicial appointments in Cook County are generally considered to be lifetime appointments; no judge has lost his or her job since 1990. But in 1990, we fired seven of them, almost as many as have been recalled in every other election combined. What happened?
When Charles Dickens toured America for the last time, he gave Chicago the cold shoulder, as well as his widowed Chicago sister-and-law. The local press attacked him as a Scrooge and a hypocrite, but the real story was a sad and complex one closer to Bleak House than A Christmas Carol.
A hot plate used for warmth in an unheated West Englewood apartment that lacked smoke detectors is believed to have caused the deaths of two young, unattended children on early Saturday morning.
OBJECTION!: In Illinois, it’s easy for bad judges to stick around for life. Time for a change.
Giant teddy bears, giant dolls, and other ways of expressing seventeen million dollars worth of Christmas goodies in terrifyingly nightmarish fashion.
This is not the first time the youngest Daley brother has tentatively lobbed his hat in the ring for elective office. His first flirtation goes back some 20 years, but he has always grabbed the hat back.
John Boehner’s Plan B to avert the fiscal cliff got nixed by his own party raising the question of what, if anything, he could get the members he leads to agree to. He could also try to swing some Democrats his way—but that would violate the edict established by his predecessor, Dennis Hastert, which Boehner has made, at his peril, even stronger.
Are fewer people being killed in America because there’s less violence, or because we’re better at saving the wounded? It’s really, really hard to say, because we’re much better at measuring death than life.
In the wake of unimaginable tragedy, we often think that it’s beyond explanation. But what if we could use reason not just to explain it, but to attack its underlying causes? Research into psychopathy at the University of Wisconsin—the result of unprecedented access to the state’s incarcerated population—is giving us insight into the psychopathic mind, and early but promising strategies to deal with it, and perhaps heal it.
The state has long had trouble deciding to pay its share of employee pension costs. In the 1990s, representatives of the pension system filed a complaint about it, and were told: the constitution guarantees that the state has to pay the pensions. It doesn’t guarantee that it has to fund them.
