Illinois Senate President John Cullerton has received a lot of bad press, sharp condemnation from Republicans, and even some quiet criticism from his own members over the past month.

But Cullerton made no apologies during an interview last week for the way his caucus sought to hold the state's public-works bill hostage by tacking on $430 million in additional budget items. The move was rejected by both parties in the House, by Senate Republicans, and even, in the end, by Governor Pat Quinn, who had pushed for additional spending all year. The General Assembly had to return to town last week so the Senate could officially back down from the spending and send a "clean" bill to the governor's desk.

The Senate President told me numerous times over the past several months that he believed he could convince House Speaker Michael Madigan - a fellow Democrat - to go along with his budget plans. In the end, however, Madigan stuck to a budget pact he'd made months earlier with House Republican Leader Tom Cross and beat back the Senate Democrats' plan. So what went wrong?

In early June, as a prelude to an expansive study of the Fortune 500 due later this summer, Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) published an analysis of "the current corporate tax debate." Anarchists oppose taxes on principle as an exalted form of theft, but the fact that the most profitable firms in the country aren't paying up raises other important questions.

Arguing that the "tax code has ... become overburdened with loopholes, shelters, and special tax breaks," CTJ's study demonstrates that 12 of America's largest companies currently pay, in effect, a tax rate of negative 1.5 percent. That means that some corporations - among them Boeing - are in fact making money through the tax system as it is currently operating.

Governor Terry Branstad and legislative leaders were "a few inches away" Monday from agreeing to a state budget, but were "miles apart" on their competing property-tax plans, according to a key Democratic leader.

The Iowa legislature this week entered its seventh week of overtime, with less than three weeks remaining to come to resolution and avoid a state-government shutdown.

Iowa Senate Appropriations Chair Bob Dvorsky (D-Coralville) announced a key development Monday morning in reaching a budget deal that could bring adjournment to the 2011 legislative session. Senate Democrats agreed to spend less than $6 billion in the budget year that begins July 1, which is nearly $400 million less than they originally proposed.

I am aware of how difficult it is to accept certain truths of our times. Doing so requires letting go of deeply held norms that provide us with perceived security. Refusing gives each of us plausible deniability as truant citizens when it comes to our individual civic duty to remain vigilant. Unfortunately, freedom does not protect itself.

Americans refuse to admit that our governance is not what we think, that there is a terrible underlying fraud afoot, and that we are manipulated on a daily basis by powerful forces working in tandem to keep us uninformed: the two political parties - Democrats and Republicans - and the mainstream media.

All the mainstream news is choreographed to keep us in one camp or the other, and by doing so, the illusion is maintained that we are politically participating on an informed basis. When critics of the two parties' ideologies, policies, etc. surface, the media is able to squelch it by declaring such critics as kooks and extremists as a means of marginalizing the data and keeping it from us.

All year long, the mainstream media systematically deliver sanitized but highly divisive information specifically designed to drive our opinions in one narrow political direction or another, depending upon which broadcasters you patronize, whether watching, listening, or reading.

It is the proverbial easy button. It keeps us anesthetized to the slow creep of authority over our daily lives, to the dual legal system fraudulently operating under our very noses, and to the abdication of the U.S. Constitution in favor of United Nations dictates and global governance via such organizations as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the G20.