With yet another poll showing plunging Downstate support for Governor Bruce Rauner in a Republican district and the intense Republican freakout over Donald Trump’s impending presidential nomination and its impact on independent suburban women, there appears to be a growing feeling among Democrats, particularly in the Illinois Senate, that they need to get out of the way to let the other party crash and burn.

The almost year-long state-government impasse is most definitely having an impact on Rauner’s poll numbers. Bernie Schoenburg reported in the State Journal-Register last week that a Public Policy Polling (PPP) poll of appointed Republican state Representative Sara Wojcicki Jimenez’s Springfield-area district had Rauner upside down, with 37 percent approving of the way the governor is doing his job and 54 percent disapproving. Rauner won that district 58-37 in 2014, according to Illinois Election Data’s numbers. Basically Rauner’s numbers have flipped almost entirely.

When Harriet Tubman died in in March of 1913, the U.S. $20 bill bore George Washington’s portrait and the inscription “This certifies that there have been deposited in the treasury of the United States of America $20 in gold coin payable to the bearer on demand.”

Later that year, Congress passed and President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act. The following year, the Federal Reserve issued a new $20 bill, adorned with the portrait of Grover Cleveland. In 1928, the first $20 bill bearing the visage of Andrew Jackson appeared. Even though the Federal Reserve had taken over the creation of “money” (loosely defined) from the U.S. Treasury, the note still promised that it could be redeemed for gold at the U.S. Treasury, or gold or “lawful money” at any Federal Reserve Bank.

Nearly 90 years later, as the Treasury announces that Tubman’s likeness will grace the next $20 bill, Federal Reserve Notes are just paper, no longer redeemable in gold and sustained only by the faith of buyers and sellers in a government nearly $20 trillion of its own debased dollars in actual debt – and even deeper in the hole when unfunded promises of future spending are taken into account.

Sadly, some important duties of journalism, such as applying evenhanded standards on human-rights abuses and financial corruption, have been so corrupted by the demands of government propaganda – and the careerism of too many writers – that I now become suspicious whenever the mainstream media trumpets some sensational story aimed at some “designated villain.”

Far too often, this sort of “journalism” is just a forerunner to the next “regime change” scheme, dirtying up or de-legitimizing a foreign leader before the inevitable advent of a “color revolution” organized by “democracy-promoting” NGOs often with money from the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy or some neo-liberal financier such as George Soros.

We are now seeing what looks like a new preparatory phase for the next round of “regime changes” with corruption allegations aimed at former Brazilian President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The new anti-Putin allegations – ballyhooed by the UK Guardian and other outlets – are particularly noteworthy because the so-called “Panama Papers” that supposedly implicate him in offshore financial dealings never mention his name.

Or as the Guardian writes: “Though the president’s name does not appear in any of the records, the data reveals a pattern – his friends have earned millions from deals that seemingly could not have been secured without his patronage. The documents suggest Putin’s family has benefited from this money – his friends’ fortunes appear his to spend.”

Note, if you will, the lack of specificity and the reliance on speculation: “a pattern,” “seemingly,” “suggest,” “appear.” Indeed, if Putin were not already a demonized figure in the Western media, such phrasing would never pass an editor’s computer screen. Indeed, the only point made in declarative phrasing is that “the president’s name does not appear in any of the records.”

A British media-watch publication, the Off-Guardian.org (which criticizes much of the work done at The Guardian), headlined its article on the Putin piece as “the Panama Papers cause Guardian to collapse into self-parody.”

But whatever the truth about Putin’s “corruption” or Lula’s, the journalistic point is that the notion of objectivity has long since been cast aside in favor of what’s useful as propaganda for Western interests.

Governor Bruce Rauner has hit a brick wall attempting to convince House Speaker Michael Madigan to come to the negotiating table to talk about ending the long governmental impasse and then working out a budget deal. So after holding numerous public appearances to demand a sit-down, Rauner shifted gears last week when the two Republican legislative leaders trotted out a new spending plan to provide $1.3 billion to fund human services and other programs.

The proposal would partly be funded with some pension reforms that Republicans claim will save $780 million. The reforms include some accounting changes and pushing off pension costs to local schools and to higher-education institutions for salaries above $180,000 a year. But there are relatively few employees making more than $180K a year, and the $780 million is about a third of the state’s annual “normal costs” for pensions, so it seems somewhat difficult to believe that these savings are actually as high as billed.

And even if the money is real, the $1.3-billion GOP proposal is significantly smaller than either appropriations bill passed by the legislature’s Democratic majorities. The Senate Democrats’ spending plan was pegged at about $3.8 billion, with half of that ($1.9 billion) going to social services.

Still, the bill could very well generate some interest among rank-and-file Democrats worried about the implosion of the state’s social safety net as a possible next step in the negotiating process. For instance, the legislation appropriates more than $10 million for the Adult Redeploy program, which diverts nonviolent offenders from prison terms. That money would come from the General Revenue Fund, but the legislation also uses money from special state funds to pay for programs popular with Democrats that aren’t currently being funded by the state, like homeless-youth services.