Separated at birth. Ken doll (left). Illinois Policy Institute’s John Tillman (right).
The Illinois Policy Institute is a right-wing lobbying group which escapes campaign laws by calling itself a think tank.
This little scam allows them to avoid revealing who its funders are. Much like the Mackinac Center in Michigan.
You might remember the Mackinac Center as having connections to my stalkers in the Education Action Group that are thisclose.
IPI has the Illinois media totally bamboozled. Last week IPI’s talking head was once again sitting on a panel on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight where he was the other side of the story along with the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability’s Ralph Martire.
Martire is not an ideologue. He looks at the numbers and says what he sees.
John Tillman has his ideology and doesn’t want to be confused by the numbers. As Stephen Colbert would say, “Facts have a liberal bias.”
The Springfield Journal Register’s political columnist Bernard Schoenburg discloses that Tillman is having increasing difficulty in preserving his non-partisan facade.
JOHN TILLMAN, CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute, apparently can’t restrain himself from dreams of being a political consultant — a Republican political consultant.
That must be why Tillman decided to advise GOP members of the General Assembly on what he sees as a winning strategy.
But his views also raise questions about why members of the institute’s staff, which continues to bill itself as a “nonpartisan research organization” — though paid for by dollars that often come from places we don’t know — find themselves in front of TV cameras and are treated as above-it-all observers.
Tillman stressed to me, via email, that his memo was from him personally, that nonpartisan organizations can have a point of view, and that the institute does not participate in campaigns and thus hasn’t done anything to violate its nonpartisan status with the IRS.
Leaders of 501(c)3 organizations are not prohibited from “free expression on political matters … speaking for themselves, as individuals,” he said.
There is a joke here. In the Bizarro World of Illinois politics, the views of the Democratic Party Leadership and those of right-winger John Tillman on pensions are not that different.
When it comes to screwing the state’s elderly and retirees, there truly is bi-partisanship.
Fred Klonsky 