* Last week, I wondered aloud why Rasmussen Reports didn’t bother to match the two Democratic gubernatorial candidates against Republican frontrunner Jim Ryan. Well, RR has now conducted another poll, and the results aren’t encouraging for Gov. Quinn’s backers…
The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Illinois voters finds former state Attorney General Jim Ryan leading incumbent Democratic Governor Pat Quinn 46% to 39%. Nine percent (9%) of Illinois voters like some other candidate, and six percent (6%) are undecided.
Ryan’s is within two points of Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes, who hopes to wrest the Democratic nomination from Quinn. In that match-up, Hynes attracts 42% of the vote while Ryan gets 40%. Seven percent (7%) opt for another candidate. Eleven percent (11%) are undecided.
Quinn and Hynes both polled ahead of the other major Republican contenders last week, although Hynes polled marginally better than Quinn.
Good point from Rasmussen…
It’s important to note that at this stage, the close contest between Quinn and Hynes may be depressing the Democratic vote in match-ups with the Republicans. Once the party selects a gubernatorial candidate in its February 2 primary, supporters of the losing candidate can be expected to begin moving into the winner’s column.
That theory bears fruit in the crosstabs, which I’ll discuss with subscribers tomorrow.
Ryan carries male voters over both Quinn and Hynes. He has a nine-point advantage among female voters against Quinn but loses women by 10 points to Hynes.
Voters not affiliated with either party strongly prefer the Republican over either of the Democrats. […]
In a generic Illinois gubernatorial ballot match-up in October, a Democratic candidate held a 43% to 37% edge over a Republican.
Ryan is viewed more favorably than any other GOP candidate and his favorables are in roughly the same territory as the two Democrats.
“Stu Levine gave me a lot of money over my entire career,” said Ryan, who also was DuPage County State’s Attorney for three terms. “I thought he did it because he believed in me. He did a lot for me, I didn’t do anything for him except to be his friend.” […]
Ryan went on to say he is anticipating a barrage of attacks in the final weeks of the campaign about Levine from others in the seven-candidate primary race.
“I’m not going to cower,” he said. “If people think I’m going to back down because of that, they are wrong.” […]
Ryan also talked his health Monday. The 63-year-old battled non-Hodgkin’s large cell lymphoma cancer three times, most recently during his first campaign for governor eight years ago.
“I think I’m healthy or I wouldn’t do this,” Ryan said. “If that changes, you will know because I will probably won’t stay in the race.”
* Democratic lt. governor candidate Scott Lee Cohen has said he’ll spend as much as $3 million to win the office. He begins his first TV ad buy today, solely on cable. The campaign claims the ad cost $10,000 to make, start to finish, so he apparently hasn’t cut the big check yet. Have a look…
* Are the Quinn and Obama administrations getting ahead of themselves on this prison sale thing? It sure looks that way.
One of the things lost in this entire debate is that Congress will have to approve the move of Guantanamo detainees to US soil before they can be transferred to the Thomson prison. And that legislation isn’t assured…
Durbin hasn’t yet polled colleagues to find out what objections they might have, he said. But as the health-care bill has shown, getting controversial legislation through the Senate — even with Democrats holding a sizeable majority — has been difficult. And, Durbin said, getting the needed changes to close Guantanamo Bay will almost certainly require 60 votes.
“My concern is that it has become a national Republican issue, that they’re going to oppose Thomson, with rare exception,” Durbin said Thursday.
Political boosters of the Illinois budget bailout masquerading as a national security program can’t wait to roll out the jihadi welcome mat
No inflammatory partisan rhetoric there. Move along. Nothing to see. Everything is just fine.
By the way, if this prison move really was a “budget bailout” then I might feel better about it. Right now, the cash is barely a drop in the bucket.
* The next question that should be asked is whether the feds will still want to buy Thomson even if the Gitmo prisoner move is nixed or delayed indefinitely by Congress.
After being forced into a state of limbo when the state refused to fully open the prison, the residents of Thomson might be once again left dangling on a string while the feds dither as well. In other words, they shouldn’t get their hopes up, despite the rhetoric from people like Ray LaHood…
The decision to house both federal inmates and no more than 100 detainees from Guantanamo Bay Detention Center at a largely unused prison in northwestern Illinois should be viewed as a “billion-dollar Christmas gift for the people” there, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood said Friday.
“There were people who had a hard time adapting to our first stoplight,” said Larry Stebbins, the mayor of Savanna, about five minutes up the road from Thomson. “It’s impossible for me to tell you what this is going to look like, but I do know that we need some kind of change.”
I lived briefly in Savanna, back in 1982 when unemployment hovered somewhere around 20 percent. I think I was able to get the only available part-time job in town - two hours a day cleaning up after the local butcher. That job was about as fun as it sounds. Not at all.
Savanna used to be a railroad boom town, but those days are long gone. The Savanna Army Depot was the one remaining economic engine, but that’s long gone. The nearest prosperity is either Galena to the north or the Quad Cities downriver. And the benefits from this prison may not be huge for the immediate area…
Even after Florence, Colo., landed the “supermax” prison 15 years ago, a ballyhooed building boom was confined to a Super 8 motel, credit unions and antiques shops.
Because the town didn’t have much available housing, most workers moved elsewhere, up to an hour away in Colorado Springs, said Dori Williams, city clerk.
Even so, if that’s all the Thomson-area folks get, they’ll probably still be overjoyed. What they have right now is nothing.
For years, reporters and pundits have said that Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan preferred Republican governors because Madigan wanted to be the state’s most powerful Democrat.
There is some truth to that. Madigan hasn’t played well at all with the two Democratic governors he’s served under as speaker. He battled constantly with Rod Blagojevich, and he’s made Pat Quinn squirm time and time again, including holding a news conference during which he repeatedly castigated Quinn for “flip-flopping.”
But there always was much more going on than just Madigan’s desire to be the absolute top dog. As we’ve seen time and time again over the decades, Madigan prefers to share the pain of governing with the other party in order to deflect blame from his own party. It’s one way he’s held on to power for so long. And it’s tough to do that without a Republican governor.
A Republican governor usually can bring Republican legislative votes on to a bill that wouldn’t be there otherwise. Every income tax hike that’s ever passed was done under a Republican governor. Some of the biggest ever goodies for Chicago were nabbed because a Republican governor helped the Democrats bring GOP legislators onto the roll calls.
That all ended when Rod Blagojevich became the first Democratic governor elected in 26 years. Since then, we’ve had almost seven solid years of grinding gridlock.
This past year, for instance, Madigan said over and over that he wouldn’t advance important legislation without significant Republican votes, including tax increases and reforms to the pension systems to balance the state’s outrageous $11 billion budget deficit. The Senate Democrats passed a tax hike all by themselves, but Madigan refused to touch the issue without Republican votes even though he had more than enough Democratic votes to pass a bill on his own.
Madigan is so politically cautious because he is so power-hungry. By sharing the pain in a bipartisan manner, voters can’t totally blame Madigan’s majority party. So it’s highly doubtful that Madigan ever will budge on a hugely unpopular but desperately needed tax hike without GOP votes. Voters don’t care much about the deficit, but they would care - a lot - about any drastic measures to erase that deficit.
And right now, anyway, there’s really not much benefit for the Republican Party to cooperate. Why should it “share the pain” by helping the Democrats solve a problem for which the Democrats are universally deemed responsible?
Perhaps the only way this will change is if a Republican governor is elected and decides that a tax hike is necessary. Then, some Republican legislators will feel an obligation to support their governor. A Republican governor also will have all the usual bags of goodies to cajole and pressure the party’s members.
We actually saw a little bit of that during the spring session when two former Republican governors, Jim Thompson and Jim Edgar, made calls to GOP members on the income tax hike plan. It didn’t work, mainly because neither of them has the power to do much of anything. But what we essentially witnessed back then was an admission that these major issues won’t be advanced in the House without a big-time Republican pulling strings behind the scenes.
A few years ago, I asked Madigan why he didn’t just find somebody to run against Blagojevich in the 2006 Democratic primary. Madigan replied the last time he did that (when he was a point person against the anti-Machine Democrat Dan Walker) it led to 26 years of uninterrupted Republican rule, more than just implying that he’d rather have a “bad” Democrat as governor than a “good” Republican.
Some wonder whether Madigan will quietly lie down next fall if the governor’s race looks winnable by the GOP and if the Republicans nominate a candidate who can “do business.”
I was, however, recently reminded by one of Madigan’s guys that the new legislative district maps have to be drawn during the next governor’s term. Madigan will want total control of that process in order to hold on to power, and he’ll need a cooperative, partisan governor to guarantee his control.
In other words, if a Democrat wins the governor’s race next year and Madigan doesn’t radically alter his governing style by actually doing something constructive with his majority no matter what the Republicans say, this horrific gridlock will continue unabated for another four disastrous years.
Sneed has learned that a Cook County grand jury is probing allegations that state public aid recipients were forced to circulate Cook County Board presidential candidate Dorothy Brown’s nominating petitions under threat of losing their welfare benefits.
* The kicker: Several public aid recipients, who have been called before the grand jury twice, complained they feared they’d be dropped from the job-training program (which is administered by the state Human Services Department) if they didn’t circulate Brown’s petitions as part of their training.
* The firing squad: The recipients were receiving job training at Mother’s House, a South Side social service agency managed by Hassan Muhammad, who, until recently, was a field director of Dorothy Brown’s campaign. […]
When complaints were first disclosed by Fox News Chicago in October, Brown said she had no knowledge of the practice and did not condone what was going on.
Keep in mind that a grand jury investigation doesn’t automatically mean guilt, despite the saying that “In this town you’re innocent until investigated.” Also, keep in mind that Brown may not have known anything about this. Yes, the probe could be big political trouble, but don’t jump to too many conclusions just yet.
Stroger isn’t pleased that Madigan has withheld his backing, county insiders say. He took political revenge first by firing longtime Madigan loyalist Richard Bono, a $99,187 county Forest Preserve District maintenance superintendent who also collects a $30,353 city pension.
“They called [Bono] in and said he was out,” a top county source said. “No mention of a reason. No feds. No grabbing computers. He was just out, and that’s it.”
On Wednesday, Cook County medical examiner’s office worker David Foley was fired from his $110,354 executive officer post. During his employment at the medical examiner’s office, Foley bragged that he was Madigan’s “No. 1 precinct captain,” sources said.
* And the Sun-Times continues to look at whether Rahm Emanuel wanted Gov. Blagojevich to find a way to appoint a replacement, a move which would’ve been blatantly unconstitutional…
On the day last year that Emanuel was named White House chief of staff, John Harris, the top aide to then-Gov. Blagojevich, began researching whether Blagojevich had the authority to appoint someone to temporarily fill Emanuel’s Northwest Side congressional seat, according to records that show the Web browser history on Harris’ state government computer.
The records show that Harris, who was Blagojevich’s chief of staff, Googled this exact search term on his state computer on Nov. 6, 2008: “temporary appointment to fill vacancies in the house of representatives.”
The confirmation of Harris’ Google search — which, by the way, yielded 308,000 hits — lends credence to previous Sun-Times reports that Blagojevich’s office was working with Emanuel at that time on a strategy that would enable Emanuel to one day reclaim his old House seat and vie for the powerful post of speaker of the House.
The Constitution thus requires that all House vacancies be filled by special election.
There is no constitutional provision for the appointment of interim Representatives.
Back to the story…
Surfing the Net, the records show, another Web site Harris visited was www.kingmadigan.com — which depicts Blagojevich’s arch political enemy, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, as a greedy “king” decked out in a jewel-studded gold crown.
Back to the 
