items tagged with Pat Quinn

After more than a decade of extreme scandal and gross government mismanagement, far too many Illinoisans seem to be wallowing or even perversely reveling in our state’s embarrassing failures. Just try to point out a positive aspect of this state and you’ll be shouted down by all sides as a naive homer.

But accentuating the positive is just what Governor Pat Quinn tried to do last week, and, man, was he ever hammered for it.

Putting aside all the resulting uproar for a moment, the governor’s State of the State address was probably the best speech I’ve ever heard Quinn give, at least on a technical basis. It was well-written (his 2010 speech was horribly ad-libbed), well-delivered (he’s given some real snoozers), and, as far as a State of the State speech goes, it hit all the right high notes.

Child-care advocates thought they had avoided $400 million in threatened cuts to the state’s child-care-services budget after speaking with top officials in Governor Pat Quinn’s office earlier this month. And the governor’s budget office then told a Senate appropriations committee that no such cuts were being planned.

But when the governor last week unveiled his proposed budget for next fiscal year, he included a $350-million net cut in child-care spending, according to the House Democrats’ analysis of the proposal.

I was talking to my mom on the phone last week and just as I was about to hang up, she stopped me short and insisted that we talk about Governor Pat Quinn's big-time raises to his top staff.

If you've missed the story, Quinn gave out raises of as much as 20 percent to his senior staff while those same people were busily cutting everybody else's budgets and devising tax-increase strategies.

Unlike the state's mind-boggling $13-billion budget deficit, this is a very easy issue to understand for people who don't pay close attention to politics.

My mother does follow Illinois politics quite a bit, however, and she appears to be just as incensed about the immorality of handing out selective pay raises during one of the worst fiscal crises in history as she is about the abject political stupidity of Quinn's decision.

If you ever wondered whether Governor Pat Quinn would do whatever it takes to win re-election, all you need to do is look at his latest TV ad.

The spot is perhaps the most misleading TV advertisement of the season so far, but it packs quite a wallop. Quinn cannily "accuses" his Democratic primary opponent, Comptroller Dan Hynes, of having "signed off on every single state check."

"Now Hynes claims he'll cut the budget line by line, but as comptroller for 12 years he signed off on every single state check," the Quinn ad alleges.

The Quinn campaign claimed after the ad aired that they were trying to say that Hynes' statutory check-signing duties meant he ought to know what the budget is all about already and that Hynes shouldn't need to go over the budget line by line after he's elected to figure out where to cut waste and over-spending.

While the Quinn campaign's explanation for why they worded the attack ad the way they did is an interesting afterthought, if you watch the spot carefully you'll see that what it's really trying to say is Hynes is somehow responsible for the mess the state is in.

It's tough to find people who truly believe that Governor Pat Quinn will ultimately pull the trigger and give the go-ahead to draconian budget cuts in the coming fiscal year to force a tax hike. But his people insist it's coming, and the administrative planning does appear to be moving forward with all deliberate speed.

The governor has basically three choices.
Read More About Quinn’S Mettle To Be Revealed Soon...