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.

The state's secretary of the Department of Human Services met with a group representing child-care providers last Monday and gave them some bad news. Prepare for $100 million in cuts to child-care programs, Michelle Saddler told the group.

According to a participant in the meeting, Secretary Saddler said the state could freeze intake of new clients, "dramatically" increase parental co-pays, cut rates to providers, and eliminate child care for parents who are in school or employment-related training. The meeting resulted in an urgent alert by Illinois Action for Children imploring supporters to immediately call the governor's office.

The $100-million cut would be for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends June 30. That cut would equal about a third of the child-care program's remaining budget, which comes from both state and federal revenue sources.

An out-of-state education-reform group raised a whopping $2.8 million in the days leading up to historic state caps on campaign contributions.

All of the money raised by Stand for Children's Illinois PAC came in five- or six-figure contributions from some very major Chicago-area business types. Members of the famed billionaire Pritzker family kicked in a total of $250,000 on December 29, two days before the end of the old campaign-finance system, which allowed for unlimited contributions to groups such as Stand for Children's PAC.

The official U.S. Census numbers were released not long ago. The statistics revealed that Illinois will lose one U.S. congressional seat when the new district maps are drawn.

It's impossible to know exactly what will happen with the new maps since block-level Census numbers aren't yet available. That very specific, hyper-local data is plugged into computer programs so mapmakers can draw the new congressional and legislative boundaries. The data should arrive in late March or early April.

Once that happens, the Democrats will go to work.

Ten years ago, when the governor's office and the Illinois Senate were controlled by Republicans and the House was run by the Democrats, the powers that be compromised by allowing incumbent congressmen to draw their own district maps.

That was a huge mistake. The incumbents did what incumbents do: They protected themselves to the point where the districts were gerrymandered worse than they've been in a century. The zig-zagging district running from Rock Island to Decatur made Illinois a laughingstock - as if we needed any more of that.