A poll taken for Rasmussen Reports earlier this month found that Governor Pat Quinn's unfavorable rating was 55 percent.

That's pretty darned bad, and perhaps the worst among the nation's governors. But Quinn has nothing on Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan.

A new Capitol Fax/We Ask America poll found Madigan's unfavorable rating to be an almost mind-boggling 65 percent.

As I write this, hundreds of Americans are gathered in Clark County, Nevada, in support of cattle rancher Cliven Bundy in his fight to save his family's ranch from an aggressive takeover by the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM), an agency within the Department of the Interior.

The mainstream media's shocking lack of coverage of this story provides all the evidence Americans need to unambiguously indict it for the propaganda machine it has become. Massive resources are provided for weeks of endless speculation on a missing plane originating in Malaysia, but practically no coverage of well over 200 federal agents surrounding the Bundy ranch - fully armed and including trained snipers - high-tech surveillance, and a declared no-fly zone over this area of Nevada.

Any coverage by the corporate media has been glaringly slanted in favor of the government's position in this takeover, claiming that Bundy owes $1 million in grazing fees for his cattle that graze on federal land. The cattle of Bundy's family have been grazing on this same land since the 1800s.

What the media isn't mentioning is that Bundy's cattle grazing on a small section of nearly 600,000 acres of barren desert land was never an issue until the early 1990s. Coincidentally, that is when Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) initiated a study to designate huge swaths of land in a six-state area for solar-energy development to accommodate a Chinese corporation that wants to build at least one solar plant that includes Bundy's property.

Instead, the media mentions a highly questionable threatened tortoise that purportedly faces extinction due to trampling by Bundy's cattle. Noticeably absent from reports is the BLM's own extermination of large numbers of the very same tortoise it claims to be trying to protect.

A long time ago I asked Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan why he never golfed at his golf-outing fundraisers.

Madigan explained that he was a terrible golfer. (He's since improved, I'm told.) If people saw him embarrassing himself on the golf course, they might take a dimmer view of him as a leader.

He has applied this lesson to just about everything he does. He examines every angle before he acts. He hates mistakes and almost never acts impetuously.

For example, Madigan and his staff gather a few times a week to read through every bill and every amendment to those bills to look for flaws and hidden agendas or to discuss strategies. He always wants to be as prepared as possible.

As a result, he rarely fails.

But something else has been happening over the past year or so.

Madigan has become a media hound.

Two worries are obviously driving driving much of Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan's personal legislative agenda this year: low Democratic turnout in an off-year election for an unpopular governor and Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner's millions in campaign spending.

"If you're an African American on the South Side, what motivates you to vote for [Governor] Pat Quinn when you wake up election morning?" was the blunt assessment of one longtime Madigan associate last week.

For example, Madigan signaled last week that despite his past reluctance to raise the minimum wage and his longtime alliance with the Illinois Retail Merchants Association (which is leading the charge against it), he's not opposed. Calling the idea a matter of "fairness" and "equity," Madigan told reporters last week: "I think you'll find the opposition to raising the minimum wage comes from people that have done pretty well in America, and for some strange reason they don't want others in America to participate in prosperity."

Asked if he was referring to Rauner, Madigan asked: "Who?"

I believe that when we pass from this life, we will face accountability for both our actions and inactions. I also believe that accountability directly corresponds to the degree of responsibility each of us has to the Creator first, family second, and our neighbors third.

I don't pretend to know people's relationships with God. But most of us have a pretty good sense of what we are obliged to with family, friends, and associates. It gets murkier when we consider our responsibility to community because community can be defined by myriad levels of relationships from cursory to expansive.

Each of us has a far greater responsibility to family members than to neighbors than to folks in our county than to state residents than to Americans as a whole than to global inhabitants. My guess is that we will be held more accountable for actions or inactions that harm our family members compared to those that impact our fellow citizens at large. But we will still be held to answer for whatever harm is caused by our government's destructive actions at home and abroad - especially for our own indifference to it.

It turns out that Governor Pat Quinn and the two Democratic legislative leaders met privately for at least several days to negotiate details of the governor's budget address.

The highly unusual move means that most if not all aspects of Quinn's budget proposals last week have already been agreed to by the Democrats who run the Illinois Statehouse.

House Speaker Michael Madigan tipped his hand after the governor's address during Jak Tichenor's invaluable Illinois Lawmakers public-television program when he twice insisted that the governor's property-tax proposal was actually his idea.

The governor proposed eliminating the state's property-tax credit, which is currently worth 5 percent of property taxes paid, and replacing it with an automatic $500 tax refund.

That idea was apparently just one of Madigan's demands in exchange for supporting the governor's proposal to make the "temporary" income-tax hike permanent, which was the centerpiece of Quinn's speech.

Jim LeachIn 2006, U.S. Representative Jim Leach of Iowa introduced a resolution urging President George W. Bush to appoint a "Special Envoy for Middle East Peace." The resolution said, in part, that "history has demonstrated that the Middle East region is likely to lurch from crisis to crisis without sustained diplomatic and economic engagement by the United States."

In an interview March 24, Leach amended that statement. "I would say not only without our engagement, [but] ... with or without our engagement."

That revision is a reflection of all that has happened in just the past few years: the continuing conflict between Israel and Palestine; developments regarding Iran's nuclear program; the Arab Spring; turmoil in Egypt; and the Syrian civil war - the last of which has grown more complicated given newly escalated tension between Russia and the West.

It also hints at a frustration Leach clearly has with American foreign policy in the region - and not merely the long, costly war with Iraq.

So when Leach presents his lecture "What is Old, New, & Unprecedented in America's Relationships with the Middle East" on April 10, he'll have a lot to talk to about. (The speech is the first public event of St. Ambrose University's new Middle East Institute.) But don't expect many answers.

It didn't take long for Republican gubernatorial nominee Bruce Rauner to drop the word "unions" from his vocabulary.

After bashing public-employee-union leaders for months as corrupt bosses who buy votes to control Springfield, Rauner and his campaign have assiduously avoided the use of the U word since his victory last Tuesday. Instead, he's switched to a line about how "our government is run by lobbyists, for special interests, and the career politicians in both parties let it happen."

Rauner's campaign manager said on primary night that his boss is "pro-union." Rauner himself insisted last week that he's not anti-union and never has been.

The candidate's record clearly shows otherwise, however. Rauner kicked off his campaign with a widely published op-ed in which he called for legislation to allow individual counties to approve their own "right to work" laws. Rauner has also repeatedly demanded that Illinois follow the lead of states such as Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin, all of which have all passed anti-union laws.

Once again, the U.S. government is attempting to police the world when it should be policing its own law-enforcement agencies. We've got a warship cruising the Black Sea, fighter jets patrolling the Baltic skies, and a guided-missile destroyer searching the South China Sea for the downed Malaysia Airlines flight. All the while, back home in the U.S., our constitutional rights are going to hell in a handbasket, with homeowners being threatened with eviction for attempting to live off the grid, old women jailed for feeding crows, and citizens armed with little more than a cell phone arrested for daring to record police activities.

Robin Speronis now finds herself threatened with eviction from her own Florida home for daring to live off the grid, independent of city utilities such as water and electricity. City officials insist the Cape Coral resident's chosen way of life violates the international property-maintenance code and city ordinances. Mary Musselman, also a Florida resident, is being held in jail without bond for "feeding wild animals." The 81-year-old Musselman, on probation after being charged with feeding bears near her home, was arrested after officers discovered her leaving bread out for crows. Meanwhile, Brandy Berning of Florida was forced to spend a night in jail after recording her conversation with an officer who pulled her over for a routine traffic stop.

Welcome to the farce that passes for law and order in America today, where crime is low, militarized police activity is on the rise, and Americans are being penalized for living off the grid, feeding wild animals, holding Bible studies in their backyard, growing vegetables in their front yard, collecting rainwater, and filming the police.

Way back in 1992, I did a story about Dan Rutherford's first run for the Illinois House of Representatives.

The House Democrats back then were quietly spreading rumors about Rutherford's private life, hoping that his conservative, rural district would refuse to support someone who they said seemed to be gay. It was a classic "barber shop" play: Go where people hang out and start spreading a rumor. Spread that rumor in enough places and lots of folks will hear it and spread it themselves.

I wrote all those years ago that the Democrats were deluding themselves. Those voters weren't just conservatives; they were dyed-in-the-wool Republicans. They'd take a Republican over a Democrat any day of the week, pretty much no matter what the grapevine was saying. All the Democrats were doing was embarrassing themselves, I wrote, and they ought to cut it out. Rutherford won, of course. The Democrats' tactic failed.

I remembered that story when the Sun-Times and the Tribune started publishing "exposés" about how gubernatorial candidate and state Treasurer Rutherford had a habit of staying in the same hotel room or apartment with his male travel aide on some government and political trips. These stories served little purpose outside of trying to gin up that very same rumor mill about the candidate. The pieces were almost adolescently prurient in nature.

As with the Democrats 22 years ago, the newspapers never should've done that and should've instead risen above such nonsense.

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