"Off topic? I can't imagine what that would be," cracked Governor Pat Quinn last week during a press conference. Just hours before, his lieutenant governor had announced that she would not be his 2014 running mate.

Quinn usually does a pretty good job during his press conferences of convincing reporters to wait to ask off-topic questions until all questions about the subject at hand have been asked. Last week was no exception.

Quinn was holding a presser with U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to discuss her conditional approval allowing Illinois to move forward with an online health-insurance exchange - a major step toward implementing the president's national health-care plan.

"You could get caught by stray bullets," Quinn jokingly warned the folks who had gathered with him to make the announcement. "You don't have to be part of the firing squad," he added with a laugh.

He knew what was coming. Earlier in the morning, the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute had released a poll showing that Quinn was badly trailing Lisa Madigan in a hypothetical primary matchup. By mid-morning, the late Senator Simon's daughter, Sheila, had announced that she wouldn't be running with Quinn again. Simon's aides said she didn't know about the poll from her father's think tank, but the irony wasn't lost on those of us who watch these things.

Americans have serious problems to sort out sooner than later. The problem with our problems is that they are so ill-defined by the mainstream media (TV, radio, print) upon which too many of us depend for our news diets. So the first order of business is to accept that the mainstream media is no longer a reliable source for relevant, need-to-know information. In fact, much news is deliberately manipulated, crafted, and often contrived to elicit a specific response from consumers, one designed to benefit the agenda(s) of an increasingly apparent goal - globalization.

Off the record, most top Illinois Republicans these days will tell you that they want a state bill legalizing gay marriage passed as soon as possible.

It's not that they're necessarily in favor of gay marriage. Many of them are publicly and privately opposed. Some of them do support it, even though they don't feel they can vote for it because it might destroy their careers in the next GOP primary.

The reason so many Republicans would like to see the bill passed is because they know - with the huge new Democratic majorities in both state legislative chambers - that it's eventually going to pass anyway, and they want to get this issue out of the way and behind them as soon as possible. The issue is trending hard against the GOP's historical opposition, and they want the thing off the table before it starts to hurt them.

Bill Daley called the other day. We estimated that it had been about three or four years since we had last spoken to each other, which is par for the course.

Going back to at least 2001, Daley - the brother and son of former Chicago mayors - has mulled a bid for governor. The last time was in 2009, when he publicly considered challenging Pat Quinn in the Democratic primary. And now he's talking about it again.

Before I returned Daley's call, I wanted to check around and see what might be different this time.