Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Oh please, not this tired ass meme about IL corruption again.

Every State without exception has a lengthy bipartisan list of miscreants. It's the human condition.

I make no brief for the Dems on this ignominious list, but the pretense that there is any moral superiority of the (R's) over the (D's), implicit in any post from you, is demonstratively ludicrous. And not just locally.

The national crime wave from Watergate to Iran-Contra to Plamegate to whatever the Trump shit show will be suffixed with?

Yep, Big fat (R's) for all of 'em.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Illinois

George Ryan (R) was the 39th Governor of Illinois, serving from 1999 to 2003. Before that he was Secretary of State from 1991 to 1999. In 2006 he was found guilty of fraud and racketeering charges for various acts that he committed in these two offices. He was sentenced to six and a half years in prison.[30]

Orville Hodge (R) was the Auditor of Public Accounts (predecessor to the Office of Comptroller) from 1952 to 1956. During his term in office, he embezzled $6.15 million of state funds, mainly by altering and forging checks that were paid on the state's account. Upon indictment, Hodge pleaded guilty to 54 bank fraud, embezzlement and forgery charges and was sentenced to a 12 to 15 year prison term.

William J. Scott (R) Attorney General convicted of tax fraud and sentenced to a year in prison.(1982)[34]

Dan Crane (R), a U.S. congressman from 1979 to 1985, was censured in the 1983 congressional page sex scandal for having sex with a young congressional page.[6] Crane was defeated for re-election in 1984 and returned to dentistry.

Hastert (R) was a congressman from 1987 to 2007. He was the longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House, from 1999 to 2007. In 2006, Hastert became embroiled in controversy over his championing of a $207-million federal earmark (inserted in the 2005 omnibus highway bill) for the Prairie Parkway, a proposed expressway running through his district.[9][9][10]

The Sunlight Foundation accused Hastert of failing to disclose that the construction of the highway would benefit a land investment that Hastert and his wife made in nearby land in 2004 and 2005.

Hastert received five-eighths of the proceeds of the sale of the land, turning a $1.8 million profit in under two years.[9][10][11] Hastert's ownership interest in the tract was not a public record because the land was held by a blind land trust, Little Rock Trust No. 225.[12] There were three partners in the trust: Hastert, Thomas Klatt, and Dallas Ingemunson. However, public documents only named Ingemunson, who was the Kendall County Republican Party chairman and Hastert's personal attorney and longtime friend.[11][12]

Hastert denied any wrongdoing.[9] In October 2006, Norman Ornstein and Scott Lilly wrote that the Prairie Parkway affair was "worse than FoleyGate" and called for the Speaker's resignation.[13] In 2015, Hastert pleaded guilty to structuring bank withdrawals to evade bank reporting requirements, a felony. In 2016 he was sentenced to 15 months in prison.

At his sentencing hearing, he admitted that he had molested several boys when he was a high school wrestling coach in the 1960s and 1970s, and that he had used the improperly withdrawn funds to buy the silence of one of the victims.[14][15]