The federal criminal complaint against the seven people arrested in Chicago last week for federal bribery conspiracy is 42 pages long. Former state Senator Rickey Hendon is mentioned 21 times in those 42 pages, although never by name.

It's pretty clear from the complaint that the U.S. attorney has been looking at Hendon (D-Chicago) for at least the past four years.

In July 2008, the Chicago Tribune published a major exposé on state grants steered to local groups by Hendon. The Tribune claimed that half of the 48 grant recipients "were running dubious programs, or declined to show how they spent the money."

Conveniently, that very same month, the feds busted a Chicago police officer during a probe of gun-trafficking and public corruption. The cop quickly offered to cooperate to reduce his sentence. It doesn't take too much reading between the lines to see that the corrupt cop might have been given the task of helping the feds nab Rickey Hendon.

One of the police officer's longtime friends was Dean Nichols. Nichols and Hendon are close friends.

Finally, a little bit of good news for Illinois Democrats.

In stark contrast to the glacially paced House Committee on Investigations, the panel charged with deciding indicted state Representative Derrick Smith's punishment looks like it will move forward much more quickly.

The investigations committee took two months to decide that there was enough evidence against Smith (D-Chicago) to warrant punishment. Smith was arrested and then indicted just before the March primary on charges that he accepted $7,000 in cash bribes. It was June before that committee took final action.

The two House leaders then appointed members to the Select Committee on Discipline, and that committee's first meeting was last week.

Only a handful of state House Democratic incumbents targeted for defeat by the Republicans were endorsed by the Illinois AFL-CIO last week, but the damage to the Democratic Party's chances this fall will likely be minimal.

At least for now, it doesn't appear that rank-and-file legislators will have to spend much time in Springfield this summer, even though they failed to finish their work on public-pension reform last week.

Aides to Governor Pat Quinn claim that they've learned from the mistakes of their predecessor, Rod Blagojevich, and won't drag legislators back to the Statehouse for a grueling overtime session to find a solution to the pension problem, which has already overwhelmed the state budget. Blagojevich convened numerous overtime sessions, and they were all divisive political circuses. Plus, forcing legislators back to Springfield to just sit around and wait for the leaders to come to an agreement means they'll have plenty of time on their hands to bad-mouth the governor to reporters, who won't have much to do, either.