Last Tuesday was a public-relations nightmare for Governor Rod Blagojevich, but he did manage to avert a complete PR meltdown with a last-minute deal. A few months after freezing wages of nonunion state workers and deducting 4 percent from their checks to pay for their pension contributions, a month after vetoing pay raises for legislators and judges, two weeks after he unilaterally slashed the operations budgets of two statewide constitutional officers, and the same day that Latino legislators slammed him for breaking his promise about not cutting funds for social programs, the Chicago Tribune reported that the governor had given pay raises to some of his employees.