Despite a long Illinois tradition of supporting them, it's not exactly news that Republican members of the General Assembly no longer like voting for taxes of any kind. And that attitude created a couple of somewhat absurd positions last week.

Let's start with the "roll your own" bill. Legislation has been proposed to tax a growing practice of allowing people to use commercial machines to roll their own cigarettes in convenience stores and gas stations.

The stores sell their customers loose, bulk tobacco and then the customers dump the product into special rolling machines, which cost several thousand dollars each. The result is a per-carton sale price that is about half the price of a pre-rolled carton of brand-name cigarettes, mainly because the taxes on loose tobacco are much lower than on commercial cigarettes.

Iowa's influence in choosing presidential nominees generally diminishes after its first-in-the-nation caucuses. But this year could be different because of the lack of finality in choosing who the Republican nominee will be.

"I think we're in a different election cycle than we've ever seen before," said Republican National Committee member Kim Lehman of Johnston. "Historically, the nominee has already been chosen [by this stage in the process]. Clearly, we don't have a chosen nominee yet. That goes back to a trend that's happening where people are not allowing the political gurus to make the decision for the grassroots voters."

People in 10 states are casting their votes today - Super Tuesday, with 419 delegates up for grabs. But with the perceived GOP front-runner changing multiple times so far, political analysts don't expect Super Tuesday to clarify the GOP-nominee contest much.

"The race is far from over nationwide," said Steve Roberts, a former chair of the Republican Party of Iowa and a member of the Republican National Committee.

Four days after Super Tuesday, Iowa Republicans will gather for county conventions. They will vote Saturday on platforms and choose delegates who will go on to the April 21 district conventions and the June 16 state convention.

Faced with the temptation of handling thousands of dollars, an increasing number of city clerks in small-town Iowa have used taxpayer money to buy items including alcohol, laptop computers, gas grills, pumpkin pies, cat litter, and self-improvement books.

"To me, it's just very frustrating," said Carrie Kirchhoff, city clerk of the 433-resident town of Lewis in southwest Iowa. "It makes the rest of us clerks look bad that really try to do a good job for our cities. And then it gets the citizens all worked up, too. How do they go on in the same community and hold their head up? It's unreal."

The number of fraud cases in Iowa cities with populations of fewer than 700 has grown from seven cases from 2000 through 2005 to 32 cases from 2006 through 2011, said State Auditor David Vaudt.

When the public and private sector are combined, Iowa was fourth in the nation last year in a ranking of states most likely to have losses from major embezzlement cases, according to a study by Massachusetts-based risk-management company Marquet International.

A bill expected to be taken up the legislature's Government Oversight Committee aims to clamp down on the fraud through increased audits and oversight.

Back when Jim Edgar was governor, reporters covering his annual budget speech would always approach Senate President Pate Philip as he descended from the House Speaker's podium after the address to ask about his fellow Republican's proposals. Eventually, or even right away, we'd hear an emphatic "No!" from Pate and then we'd pronounce a good chunk of the budget dead on arrival.

Times were simpler back then than they were last week after Governor Pat Quinn finished his latest budget address. Quinn's proposal "benefited" from the lack of any major specifics on the big issues of the day: the exploding costs of Medicaid and pensions. The only things left to attack were program cuts and facility closures - and Republicans who did so risked being labeled as false budget hawks. Then there's the phony complaint that spending was actually rising. (Overall operating expenditures are falling, but total state spending is going up mainly because pension payments are rising by about a billion dollars next fiscal year.)