The Better Govenment Association's Patrick Rehkamp reports: (emphasis added)

By the time [Wayne] Watson left his job as chancellor of City Colleges of Chicago in 2009, he had accrued around 500 unused sick days over his three-decade career with the community college system.

While many public and private employers have a "use-it-or-lose-it" policy on sick time, City Colleges converted Watson?s unused days into cash ? a whopping $500,000 that's being paid to him in five annual increments, the Better Government Association has learned.

Watson, who now serves as president of Chicago State University, may be the largest recipient of sick-day payouts at City Colleges in recent years. What's more, the combination of his City Colleges sick-day payout, current salary from Chicago State and annual pension means Watson takes in nearly $500,000 annually in government payments.

But he?s far from the only recipient of this taxpayer-funded largesse.

The college system owes about 140 former union and nonunion employees a collective $4.2 million in unused sick time, according to records provided by City Colleges to the BGA.
...

Meanwhile, at least 15 other former City Colleges administrators were owed $100,000 or more in sick-time payouts over the past decade or so, records show.

For example, Charles Guengerich, former president of Wilbur Wright College on the Northwest Side, is slated to receive $309,061 in sick time. Martin Faber, former executive director of business services at Richard J. Daley College on the Southwest Side, is expected to receive $216,973.

City Colleges has about 120,000 students at seven main campuses, and an annual budget of more than $650 million.

The graduation rate -- which charts students getting a two-year degree within three years -- was 8 percent this past year, [City Colleges Vice Chancellor Laurent] Pernot said.

205 years ago on this date in 1807, London's Pall Mall became the first street lit by gaslight.

Also on this date, 80 years ago in 1932, the Japanese Navy bombed Shanghai, China, in response to protests over Japanese military action in Manchuria; the Japanese later occupied Manchuria.

January 28 ...

In 1521 the Diet of Worms began, at which Protestant reformer Luther was declared an outlaw by the Roman Catholic Church. In 1547 England's King Henry VIII died at age 55. He was succeeded by his 9 year-old son, Edward VI. In 1561 the Edict of Orleans suspended the persecution of French Huguenots. In 1807 London's Pall Mall became the first street lit by gaslight. In 1851 Northwestern University was chartered. In 1855 the inventor of the first practical adding and listing machine, William Seward Burroughs, was born in Auburn, NY. In 1871 France surrendered in the Franco-Prussian War. In 1878 the first telephone switchboard was installed in New Haven, CT; the phone company that owned the switchboard had 21 subscribers. In 1887 Artur Rubinstein was born in Lodz, Poland. In 1912 abstract painter Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, WY. In 1916 Louis D. Brandeis was appointed to the US Supreme Court by President Wilson; he was the Court's first Jewish member. In 1918 Leon Trotsky became leader of the Russian Communists. In 1932 the Japanese Navy bombed Shanghai, China, in response to protests over Japanese military action in Manchuria; the Japanese later occupied Manchuria. In 1935 Iceland became the first country to legalize abortion on medical-social grounds. In 1939 poet William Butler Yeats died in Menton, France. In 1958 Brooklyn Dodger's catcher Roy Campanella suffered a broken neck in an early morning auto accident on Long Island. In 1980 comedian Jimmy Durante died in New York City. In 1986 the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, killing all seven crew members: Flight Commander Francis R. "Dick" Scobee; Pilot Michael J. Smith; Ronald E. McNair; Ellison S. Onizuka; Judith A. Resnik; Gregory B. Jarvis; and schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. In 2004 NFL Hall of Famer Elroy "Crazy Legs" Hirsch died of natural causes at age 80.

What, no fainting?

From an actual photo in the New York Times:

From the Illinois Policy Institute:

Almost a year after Illinois' record income tax increase, the state's unemployment woes contrast starkly with the slow but positive national economic recovery. Unemployment rates in 46 states dropped since January 2011, and some dramatically. Illinois' unemployment rate, on the other hand, was 9.8 percent in December, up from 9 percent in January 2011. Simply put, Illinois placed more people on the unemployment rolls than any other state in the country.

On a related note, I was watching IL Gov. Pat Quinn on MSNBC's Morning Joe program this morning and noted that Gov. Quinn talked of the state's 'investment in educational spending' being an important part of recovery. However, an examination of education spending in Illinois reveals that huge portions of overall spending, and majority portions of new education spending are going not to classroom spending, but to funding for teacher pensions.

How is that 'investment spending'?

In a seven-minute PBS report on the political stalemate that exists between President Obama and the US Congress, PBS congressional reporter Kwame Holman never once referenced the fact that the US Senate, under Democratic Party control since 2007, has not passed a budget since April 2009, a period of more than 1,000 days.

Strange for a report on how President Obama plans to 'criticize congressional inaction as a key part of his re-election strategy.'

What's equally strange is that the report did manage to include a portion of an interview with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who claimed that the most recently completed year for Congress, the first for the 112th, "has been the most obstructive year of Congress that I can imagine, and I have been in a lot of Congresses." Contrasting the 112th with the 111th Congress, Sen. Reid also said, "We had the most productive Congress in the history of the country. Some say only the most productive in the last 75 years, but a very productive Congress the last Congress."

Yet no mention from PBS (nor Sen. Reid) that the Democratic-controlled Senate only passed one budget during that "most productive Congress in the history of the country." The 111th Congress, like all others before it, lasted two years. Yet the Democratic-controlled Senate only passed one budget during this two-year period.

Why no mention of this fact? Did PBS forget about this important tidbit in this report on the 'Do-Nothing Congress'?

Here's the NewsHour's summary of the report:

"In nearly every appearance these days, President Obama has urged Congress to act. In fact, criticizing congressional inaction has become a key part of his re-election strategy. Congressional correspondent Kwame Holman reports on the president's attempt to capitalize on political gridlock in Washington."

Watch Obama vs. Congress: Good Re-election Strategy for President? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

A transcript of the report can also be found here.

45 years ago on this date in 1967, America's first manned Apollo spacecraft (Apollo 1) ended in tragedy when astronauts Roger Chaffee, Virgil "Gus" Grissom, and Edward White were killed when a flash fire during a test swept through the Command Module; White was the first US astronaut to walk in space.

January 27 ...

In 1756 composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria. In 1823 President James Monroe appointed the US's first ambassadors to South America. In 1832 mathematician and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) was born in Daresbury, England. In 1880 Thomas Edison received a patent for his electric incandescent lamp. In 1888 the National Geographic Society was founded in Washington, DC. In 1900 Admiral Hyman G. Rickover was born in Makow, Russia. His family moved to the US when he was six. In 1901 opera composer Giuseppe Verdi died in Milan, Italy, at age 87. In 1921 actress Donna Reed was born in Denison, IA, proving again that there is a God. In 1924 the body of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was placed in a mausoleum in Red Square, Moscow. In 1927 United Independent Broadcasters Inc. started a radio network of 16 stations. The company later became Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). In 1943 some 50 bombers struck Wilhelmshaven in the first all-American air raid against Germany during World War II. In 1944 Leningrad was liberated from Germany after 880 days and 600,000 killed. In 1945 the Soviet Army liberated the concentration camp at Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland. In 1959 NASA selected 110 candidates for the first US space flight. In 1967 America's first manned Apollo spacecraft (Apollo 1) ended in tragedy when astronauts Roger Chaffee, Virgil "Gus" Grissom, and Edward White were killed when a flash fire during a test swept through the Command Module; White was the first US astronaut to walk in space. In 1968 Otis Redding released his hit Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay. In 1973 the Vietnam peace accords were signed in Paris. In 1978 the Illinois State Supreme Court ruled that Nazis could display the Swastika in a march in Skokie, IL; this fueled the desire of those who wished to throw bottles and rocks at the marchers' empty heads. In 1981 President Reagan greeted the 52 former American hostages released by Iran. In 2004 John Kerry won the New Hampshire Democratic primary with 39% of the vote. Howard Dean had 26%, Wesley Clark had 12%, John Edwards had 12%, and Joe Lieberman had 9%. In 2009 writer John Updike died at age 76 in Danvers, MA.

This is what the mainstream media has become.

Apparently, a diabetic having a meal is worthy of an ABC News headline.

They need to be laughed at.

There is nothing quite so foolish in my satirical book When Lobsters Take Flight. Maybe I should have thought less highly of the media when I wrote the pieces in the book...

These two videos are for ABC News:


(inspiration from one of Iowahawk's readers)

CNBC.com's Jim Cox writes: (emphasis added)

Earnings season so far may look respectable, but a disturbing trend lurks below the surface: Companies for the most part are barely beating analyst expectations that already had been lowered substantially.
...

So far, about one-fifth of the S&P 500 has reported earnings, with 58 percent beating expectations, 30 percent missing and 12 percent matching, according to Thomson Reuters data. The numbers were even thinner for banks, with just 48 percent beating estimates.

Should the remaining 400 companies in the index meet estimates, that would equate to a 5.9 percent profit gain from the same period in 2010.

But the bar had been lowered in a big way heading into earnings.

Analysts who once expected profit growth of 14.6 percent had cut their estimates all the way down to 6.8 percent by the time Alcoa ... the traditional kick-off company for the quarterly profit reports, released its numbers on Jan. 9.

Just 54 percent of companies have beaten on revenue, while 46 percent missed. The average earnings growth is 1 percent above forcasts, according to Thomson Reuters.
...

[United-ICAP senior technical analyst Walter] Zimmerman points to metrics such as leading economic indicators from the Organization for Economic and Community Development showing readings indicating trouble head.

"The big risk to the U.S. economy really is not earnings but the situation in Europe," he says. "Current earnings are looking at the rearview mirror, at an economic situation that no longer exists. With Europe sinking back into recession, present earnings are highly unlikely to be indicative of future results."

Investors, then, simply could choose to disregard earnings until more economic visibility becomes available.

"We're looking at earnings as indicators," Zimmerman says. "From an economic standpoint, that's not really relevant for the outlook from here."

Walter Russell Mead argues, "We need to get beyond the dysfunctional and outdated ideas of 20th-century liberalism."

Mead further writes:

... even as the red-blue division grows more entrenched and bitter, it is becoming less relevant. The blue model is breaking down so fast and so far that not even its supporters can ignore the disintegration and disaster it now presages. Liberal Democrats in states like Rhode Island and cities like Chicago are cutting pensions and benefits and laying off workers out of financial necessity rather than ideological zeal. The blue model can no longer pay its bills, and not even its friends can keep it alive.

Our real choice, however, is not between blue or pre-blue. We can't get back to the 1890s or 1920s any more than we can go back to the 1950s and 1960s. We may not yet be able to imagine what a post-blue future looks like, but that is what we will have to build. Until we remove the scales from our eyes and launch our discourse toward the future, our politics will remain sterile, and our economy will fail to provide the growth and higher living standards Americans continue to seek. That neither we nor the world can afford.
...

In any event, there is no going back to blue, and using public resources to try to prop up the old system is a waste of those resources and a hurtful diversion from the need to figure out what we need to do next. Europe's challenges are complicated mightily by an unfinished and perhaps impossible federal project (too large a subject to analyze here in depth). American society, for its part, must move beyond the increasingly dysfunctional and outdated ideas of 20th-century liberalism. If we don't, economic decline and social stagnation will undercut our prosperity, endanger our liberty and undermine our international power and domestic security. That is a future no true liberal could love.
...

As long as the Federal government can print money and find lenders to buy its bonds, it can bleed slowly. It can watch its fiscal position erode gradually, and only gradually become less effective and popular. But state and local governments increasingly need vast transfers of cash from the Federal government to keep their blue noses above the rising tide. The stock market declines after September 2008 wiped out huge chunks of the wealth that state pension systems needed to have even a hope of paying the pensions promised to government retirees under terms more generous than virtually any private employers now provide. California and New York are headed over the cliff without Federal bailouts, and others are following close behind. That is why a substantial share of the Obama Administration "stimulus" spending was targeted less at New Deal-era infrastructure projects than at simply keeping unsustainable state bureaucracies and systems afloat for a few months or years longer.
...

The collapse of a social model is a complicated, drawn out and often painful affair. The blue model has been declining for thirty years, and the final bell has not yet tolled. But toll it will, and as the remaining supports of the system erode, slow decline and decay is increasingly likely to give way to headlong crash. That may be happening now; the financial mess that came upon us in the fall of 2008 may be both symptom and accelerant (not cause) of the basic problem.

Read the whole piece.

January 26 ...

In 1788 the first European settlers in Australia, led by Captain Arthur Phillip, landed in what became known as Sydney. The group had first settled at Botany Bay eight days before. This day is celebrated as Australia Day. In 1802 Congress passed an act calling for a library to be established within the US Capitol. In 1837 Michigan became the 26th state. In 1841 Britain formally occupied Hong Kong, which the Chinese had ceded to the British. In 1861 Louisiana became the 6th state to secede from the Union. In 1870 the state of Virginia rejoined the Union. In 1880 Douglas MacArthur was born in Little Rock, AR. In 1932 William K. Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs, died; he also made gum. In 1942 the first American forces to arrive in Europe during World War II went ashore in Northern Ireland. In 1945 Soviet forces liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp. In 1964 The Beatles' hit, I Want To Hold Your Hand, went to No. 1 on the US charts. In 1978 Einstein's theory of relativity was officially reinstated in China. In 1986 the Chicago Bears beat the New England Patriots 46-10 in the NFL Championship Game; it was the team's ninth world championship. In 1993 Vaclav Havel became the first president of the new Czech Republic. In 2005 Condoleezza Rice was sworn in as US Secretary of State, becoming the first African American woman to hold the post.

This is really not good.

Pressure. Political involvement. Pressure. More pressure...