3 Comments - Anonymous - Friday, Jan 28, 05 @ 12:05 pm: Thanks Rich, Go get some soup in ya, and get 40 winks. - Anonymous - Friday, Jan 28, 05 @ 9:01 pm: C’mon. A month after it hit headlines down south but the very same morning the Trib reports it, the guv overturns his own bureaucrats and gives a paralyzed, laid off state employee back his job and his wheelchair and you’re home with the sniffles. Meow, Meow. - Anonymous - Saturday, Jan 29, 05 @ 11:16 am: Here’s a funny one. Maybe headline should be Multilingual IL GOPers offer “LaHood” as the Franco-Italian translation of “Ryan”. Tinfoil helmet comandos your marching orders appear below! LaHood looks good for governor January 29, 2005 BY THOMAS ROESER Whenever an ocean liner approaches a harbor, it calls for a seasoned pilot who knows the eddies and secret channels to come and steer the ship into port. In the House of Representatives (where I served as a staffer years ago with another unknown named Don Rumsfeld), when passage of legislation runs into trouble, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert calls on a sage master of parliamentary procedure to guide the craft to passage. That pilot is usually Ray LaHood, a beetle-browed 59-year-old Lebanese Catholic, pro-life five-term member from Peoria. LaHood can be warm and ingratiating but also abrasive with the gavel. The other night during inauguration festivities, he had the gavel at the Illinois State Society and tried to get the crowd to calm down. Most of the crowd was circulating around Illinois’ rock-star senator, Barack Obama, and Obama wasn’t about to dissuade them. ‘’Sen. Obama,'’ LaHood rasped in a voice that silenced the group, ‘’if you want people to listen to you when you are up here, you should probably listen while other people are trying to speak.'’ Obama, chastened, shut up. These days Ray LaHood is taking time away from his 18th District, where he won with 70 percent of the vote in November, to explore a run for governor. His experience in monitoring the House for his old boss Bob Michel has won him acclaim under Hastert with gilt-edged committee assignments: appropriations, budget and intelligence. But he’s a rebel, one of only three GOP members to balk at signing Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America (because it put tax cuts ahead of budget balancing), and the first to attack Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (purportedly for insulting Hastert, but also for not supporting public works goodies for Illinois that the delegation had approved). LaHood declared publicly he was looking around for someone to run against Fitzgerald (that someone was Andy McKenna, the multimillionaire paper company executive who is now state GOP chairman). Later, LaHood warned publicly that Rep. Phil Crane was in trouble because he wasn’t working hard enough. (LaHood was right; Crane lost to Melissa Bean). I’m an odd one because I like both Fitzgerald and LaHood. LaHood would be a powerful candidate for governor, but let me give him (as he did Crane) a bit of advice. On my WLS-AM radio show last week, LaHood was a winning guest, with his rough-and-ready personality shining through. He courageously took a shot at the gay rights bill signed into law by the governor. I asked, “Would you have signed it as governor?” ‘’Not on your life,'’ LaHood said. ‘’For one thing, it doesn’t contain any provision for the churches,'’ such as his Roman Catholic Church, which views homosexuality as a disordered condition that should be treated with compassion but not sanctioned as sin. But LaHood showed not enough savvy about Chicago. He called Richard M. Daley the nation’s best mayor. That used to be the case, but LaHood didn’t seem to recognize the enormity of the scandals that will forever brand Daley. That same kind of blind spot permeates not just LaHood but Karl Rove, who doesn’t understand the breadth of the scandals here. LaHood calls himself a reformer, but when a caller asked if he supported the firing of Bob Kjellander, the GOP national committeeman who got a legal but old-school insider fee of $800,000 from his lobbying connections with the Blagojevich administration, LaHood hedged at the answer. All these things can be corrected as LaHood makes the circuit. But all things being equal he’s an excellent campaigner. Talking with him is like breathing pure oxygen after working in a salt mine. His social instincts are excellent, and his rebellious nature might just be what Illinois needs. Yes, he needs a crash course in Chicago. Knowing him, he’ll get on it pronto. We need a good pilot for this leaky ship of state. Gov. LaHood sounds good. Sorry, comments for this post are now closed.