Downstate Updates #1
Target still sucks, Aurora got scammed, and republicans want a new state
Each weekend we feel like it, we’ll round up exemplary journalism about the state and make it substantially worse with our own commentary.
Target is still Red Walmart
The Belleville News-Democrat reports that Target slightly outperformed expectations in the first quarter of 2026, according to a recent earnings report. This may come as a surprise to longtime shoppers who have recently come to expect aisles and floors cluttered with items they wouldn’t have wanted either way, and that’s before you factor in the corporation’s garbage political activity.
The good news is, now that Target’s become a deteriorating mess with a bad reputation, it might consider giving itself a large donation.
Aurora gave a scammer $1M of its own payroll money
Fox 2 Now reports that city officials are scrambling after an Aurora city employee quickly gave up sensitive banking information allowing a scammer to take nearly $1.1 million from city payroll accounts by impersonating a bank employee.
This story is extra frustrating for anyone who has ever called city hall with a legitimate urgent problem. If you ever have to call to ask permission to build a fence in a utility easement and they say no, it might be worth trying, “Okay, well give me a quick million dollars and I’ll quit bugging you.”
WTF is “New Illinois?!”
AXIOS Chicago is covering growing momentum among Illinois counties voting to support a state split that would theoretically create a place called “New Illinois,” basically consisting of the current state, minus Chicago and Cook County.
Financial and political experts seem to disagree about the likelihood of a successful split or the viability of either remaining state if one took place. Currently, Illinois is informally divided into three groups: urban democrats who control Cook County, rural republicans who control farming and much commerce, and suburban democrats who aren’t welcome anywhere on Thanksgiving.
Bears down
Analysts believe the Chicago Bears may be nearing a move from Illinois to Indiana after failing to gain support to build a new stadium in the Chicago area. While state lawmakers are racing to pass a “megaprojects bill” in an effort to keep the team, NBC 5 Chicago reports that some of those lawmakers resent the team for “pitting states against states.”
I’m no franchise tycoon, but if I wanted to rally political support for a potentially disastrous megaproject right now, I would just name the new field “The Google AI Data Center.”
Required Reading: On the rise and fall of the Broadview Six prosecution
Eric Columbus, the extremely qualified senior editor at Lawfare, wrote at length about what happened in courtrooms after high-profile critics of the Trump administration (including social media favorite Kat Abughazaleh) were indicted by a grand jury following a protest outside ICE’s holding facility near Chicago.
The article discusses the weaponization of “Section 111” by the Trump admin in an effort to silence and harass opponents, the eventual revelation of how the grand jury indictment was obtained in the first place, and why prosecutors suddenly scrambled to drop the case entirely.
In response to Todd Blanche’s designation of Chicago as “a kind of ground zero” in an escalating assault on law enforcement, Columbus writes, “In fact, it looks like Chicago became—as would Minneapolis soon afterwards—more like ‘a kind of ground zero’ for a government assault on the rule of law.”
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