A poll taken last week has Republican congressional candidate Jason Plummer leading his new Democratic challenger by 11 points.

The poll, taken July 9 by We Ask America, found Plummer ahead of Democrat Bill Enyart 45-34. The automated poll of 1,510 likely voters had a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.

Plummer is significantly below 50 percent, and 23 percent of voters are undecided, so he doesn't have this one in the bag yet. Enyart was appointed to the ballot late last month, so he has barely had any time at all to make an impression on the voters of the 12th Congressional District.

Several Downstate Illinois legislators were furious last week that Governor Pat Quinn decided to go ahead and close some state facilities, including prisons, in their districts.

They weren't just upset about the lost jobs, however. Some also claim that Quinn brazenly broke a deal on the closures. "If the governor proceeds with this, he has gone back on his word," Representative Mike Bost (R-Murphysboro) told a crowd gathered to protest the planned closures last week. Bost and others indicated that the trade was made over revenue issues, but he didn't get more specific.

Bost did not return a phone call, but he was almost surely referring to the cigarette-tax increase.

At least for now, it doesn't appear that rank-and-file legislators will have to spend much time in Springfield this summer, even though they failed to finish their work on public-pension reform last week.

Aides to Governor Pat Quinn claim that they've learned from the mistakes of their predecessor, Rod Blagojevich, and won't drag legislators back to the Statehouse for a grueling overtime session to find a solution to the pension problem, which has already overwhelmed the state budget. Blagojevich convened numerous overtime sessions, and they were all divisive political circuses. Plus, forcing legislators back to Springfield to just sit around and wait for the leaders to come to an agreement means they'll have plenty of time on their hands to bad-mouth the governor to reporters, who won't have much to do, either.

An often tense and confrontational meeting over gaming expansion last week ended with Governor Pat Quinn not explicitly saying "no" to adding slot machines at horse-racing tracks. That might be the beginning of a reversal for Quinn, who has adamantly opposed allowing tracks to have more gambling options.

For more than a year, Quinn has opposed allowing slots at tracks as part of a deal to give Chicago, the suburbs, and Downstate new casinos. But with the racetracks out of the picture, the bill just can't pass. So, there's been a push on for months to get Quinn to change his mind.