A recent Wall Street Journal story reported that Andy Goss, a former Army interrogator seeking the GOP nomination for a Congressional seat from Arizona, is proposing to cut congressional pay by 40 percent (salary is currently $174,000) and use the dollars saved to build a barracks on Capitol Hill. Four of the 19 members of the Illinois delegation go Goss one better: they sleep in their offices. All four are Chicago Democrats…
How Sam Adam Jr.’s plan for helping his client beat the rap: Let him blather.
How lovely for Carrie Zalewski and Lynne Sered. Governor Pat Quinn recently appointed the two women to plum jobs on state boards that pay six-figure annual salaries. Each woman appears to have solid credentials. But—in the kind of coincidence that seems to happen all too often in Illinois—each woman also has a powerful connection…
Many stories about Alexi Giannoulias, the candidate for the U.S. Senate seat once held by Barack Obama, mention that the two are basketball-playing buddies. Not recently: They haven’t played since Obama won the White House. In a phone interview, Alexi attributed this to the President’s busy schedule, but reports suggest that Obama’s advisers want their man…
ROD’S MAN DAN: Long before he became his party’s odd man out, he worked for Blago
THE LONG FALL: Christopher Kelly operated in the top circle of the Blagojevich administration, using his tough-guy style and disdain for rules to raise piles of money for the governor. Then the feds got on Kelly’s trail. Last September, he swallowed a deadly mixture of pills and poison. “Tell them they won,” he said with his dying breath
RELATED STORY: The Life and Death of Christopher Kelly
The sprawling, front-page story on Wednesday’s Chicago Tribune gave center stage to House Speaker and state Democratic Party head Michael Madigan, in the paper’s continuing, depressing coverage of clouted admissions to the U of I. This time, his daughter, Attorney General Lisa Madigan, took a key supporting role…
At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, President Obama drew applause when he mocked the conspiracy theory that he was born in Kenya. “It’s been quite a year since I’ve spoken here last—lots of ups, lots of downs—except for my approval ratings, which have just gone down. But that’s politics. Beside[s], I happen to know that my approval ratings are still very high in the country of my birth…
Editorial boards and earnest columnists have exhorted readers to sign those petitions for Forrest Claypool—the one man, in their words, standing between fair property tax bills and Joseph Berrios, a machine pol who won the Democratic nomination for assessor in February.
The signatures are flowing in, and the 52-year-old Cook County commissioner will almost certainly claim a spot on the November…
