Like all of the budgets proposed by governors in the past few years, Pat Quinn's spending outline last week was an almost complete fantasy. It has pretty much zero chance of surviving intact and will have to be tossed out and substantially reworked before the session ends.

Unless the school interests can pull off a legislative miracle during an anti-incumbent election year, Quinn's proposed one-percentage-point tax increase to prevent $1.3 billion in school-funding cuts and pay another $1.5 billion in overdue bills to schools and universities is deader than a rock on a stump. House Speaker Michael Madigan made that pretty darned clear right after the speech.

Jerry Clarke is not easily ruffled. Not only has he seen it all in his years running campaigns in Illinois, but he's served several tours of duty in Iraq as a combat helicopter pilot.

But I thought Jerry might actually faint last week when I called him with an update on his candidate's latest piece of legislation. Clarke is running state Senator Bill Brady's gubernatorial campaign.

Brady's bill would undo a compromise worked out over two years to stop the practice of mass euthanasia of dogs and cats. The animals were often put into auto-exhaust gas chambers and killed en masse, sometimes allegedly by so-called "puppy mills" when the animals weren't sold. The gas chambers were deemed cruel because it could take as long as 30 minutes for the animals to die, and some even survived the ordeal.

One of the biggest doubts about state Senator Bill Brady's gubernatorial campaign - assuming he survives a potential recount of the Republican primary - is whether he can transform himself from a primary candidate into a serious general-election candidate.

Like most members of the state House and Senate, Brady has never once faced a real general-election opponent.

Brady, of Bloomington, focused almost solely on his Downstate base and barely campaigned at all in the suburbs during his Republican gubernatorial bid, so independent suburban women might as well be foreigners to him. Since Illinois is such a "blue" state, he'll have to convince thousands of Democratic-leaning voters to cross over for him.

Lawyers for Rod Blagojevich told reporters last week that there might be a delay in the former governor's criminal trial when a federal grand jury, as expected, hands down a new indictment. But they also stressed that they were working hard to keep the trial on track for its June start date.

As I write this, the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago is hoping to re-indict Blagojevich to make sure its criminal case isn't damaged by an upcoming U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the federal "honest services" statute. The brief statute has been used by federal prosecutors for years to prosecute politicians and corporate executives on a wide variety of charges, claiming they defrauded citizens, investors, etc. via "a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services."