Keeping retirement weird. Kristen McQueary found a home at the Tribune.

Well, Kristen McQueary put her foot in it this time.

Her Tribune op-ed piece that called for a Hurricane Katrina to hit Chicago as a school reform solution and praising the privatization of New Orleans schools got a lot of well-deserved negative attention.

She wrote:

I find myself wishing for a storm in Chicago — an unpredictable, haughty, devastating swirl of fury. A dramatic levee break. Geysers bursting through manhole covers. A sleeping city, forced onto the rooftops.

Not a day passed before McQueary was forced to apologize, most likely by her suburban bosses at the Chicago Tribune.

I wrote what I did not out of lack of empathy, or racism, but out of long-standing frustration with Chicago’s poorly managed finances. It’s a theme on our editorial page — we see how wasteful spending and inefficient government hurt people, hurt economic growth and hurt job creation. In Chicago, and throughout Illinois, the people who need government the most are the ones who are left behind because of poor financial management. My last column was about the need to equalize the state’s school funding formula so that poor kids would not keep getting trapped by a system that funds education based on property wealth.

What complete crap.

“A sleeping city forced onto the rooftops” is the very definition of lacking empathy and racism.

I’ve known about Kristen McQueary for years. She may be new to those who just discovered her because of the Twitter storm that followed her op-ed.

She has been knocking around Illinois journalism for years, including reporting on Springfield for public radio.

I’ve known her mainly for her reporting on the Illinois pension issue and her union-bashing.

Chicago Tribune specialties.

To get a taste of where she stands, here is an excerpt from a discussion she had with the Tribune’s Eric Zorn.

From the early 2000s when I started paying closer attention to the state’s rising pension debt, I have been frustrated with the turtle pace of reform. Lawmakers in Springfield should have amended the pension clause of the Illinois Constitution years ago or passed a pension bill long before December 2013 to get the issue of constitutionality before the courts. In the meantime, lawmakers should have placed all new state workers into 401(k)-style plans.

Instead, they coasted. They skipped billions in required pension payments — and the public employee unions signed off on it — even when the math was clear that the funds were in trouble. During the last decade, a Democrat-majority General Assembly led taxpayers toward crisis, knowingly. When lawmakers finally started getting serious about the need for reform, our two Democratic leaders in Springfield, Thelma and Louise, had already driven the state to the edge of the cliff.

The fact is, states that do not have Illinois’ strict constitutional language that pensions cannot be “diminished or impaired” have mimicked the private sector and moved workers into defined contribution plans or a hybrid of defined contribution and defined benefit. Why? The plans are cheaper.

IMRF is funded at 97% and is very well run by experts. Kristen please do research before you speak. It’s not fair to the hard working Public employees who are members of IMRF.

Most of the studies that claim 401(k) plans are riskier and more costly for the employer are studies conducted by groups that want to protect defined benefit plans — and those studies often ignore the long-term savings.

The $111 billion in unfunded pension liabilities at the state level, not to mention unfunded pension liabilities throughout local governments that are squeezing taxpayers, make a rock solid argument against the system we have in place.

This was published back in May just before the Illinois Supreme Court ruled her argument and the pension theft law unconstitutional.

Even if the legislature were move to remove the pension protection clause from our constitution, it would do nothing to solve the unfunded pension liability.

We retirees would still need to be paid what is owed us.

McQueary appears to know little about this.

Read Eric Zorn’s exchanges with my friend Glen Brown on pensions from back in 2012.

Zorn is ignorant about pensions.

When Eric Zorn comes off smarter than you on the pension issue, the Illinois penision issue is not the beat you should be covering and writing about as a journalist.

Some friends and readers have been asking me how her outrageous column got past Bruce Dold or somebody in the editorial offices at the Chicago Trib.

As I said, McQueary has been hanging around Illinois journalism for years.

And then the Tribune hired her and put her on their editorial board.

They knew who and what they hired.

Kristen McQueary found a home at the Tribune.