* Amanda Vinicky…

Gov. J.B. Pritzker in March sunk $35 million into his campaign fund – not a huge expense given his personal fortune but assumed as a sign that he’s gearing up to campaign for a second term.

But the Chicago Democrat Thursday said he hasn’t decided whether he’s running.

Even so, Pritzker said the Republicans who’ve already lined up to run against him aren’t fit for the office.

“Many of them have fought against the [COVID-19] mitigations, have sued on the side of Donald Trump and all of his lies. These are folks who really shouldn’t run the state of Illinois because they don’t seem to care about the working families of Illinois — they haven’t over the last year as a result of their failure to push mitigations forward, to stand up for those mitigations. A couple of ‘em not wearing masks and telling other people not to,” Pritzker said. “I just think that they’re not qualified to be governor as a result of how they reacted to the pandemic.”

Republicans who have thus far declared their candidacy for governor are State Sen. Darren Bailey of Xenia; suburban business owner Gary Rabine, the founder of exterior facilities management company Rabine Group; and former state Sen. and ex-Marine Paul Schimpf of Waterloo.

Bailey and Rabine held mask-less indoor campaign events during the height of the pandemic, and Bailey sued the governor in a failed attempt to void Pritzker’s executive orders mandating COVID mitigations.

Other names are floated by political prognosticators as potential contenders include Congressmen Rodney Davis and Adam Kinzinger.

* Sun-Times…

Republicans in the General Assembly have repeatedly called on Pritzker to veto the maps Democrats passed last week. The GOP considers the proposed boundaries unfair, and object to the maps being drawn by Democratic lawmakers, rather than an independent commission.

During his 2018 campaign, Pritzker had vowed to reject any new maps drawn by politicians.

On Thursday, Pritzker told the Sun-Times what’s most important to him is “fairness.”

“That starts with the Voting Rights Act of Illinois, the Voting Rights Act in the United States, the Supreme Court decisions that have been made around making sure that we have majority minority districts, and then looking at the overall diversity of the state to see whether there are plurality districts that minorities might be representing in the future,” Pritzker said.

“So, we’ll look at the population trends, things like that, so that we continue to have representation, with a diverse set of people in our legislature — and then of course in the Supreme Court and the [Cook County] Board of Review. And ultimately, I guess later, the same thing will be true of a congressional map when it gets submitted.”

It’s more than what the governor said on the matter at his post legislative session news conference earlier this week when asked about the maps.

But it still doesn’t answer the question of whether Pritzker will OK the Democrats’ version of fairness or heed Republicans calls for him to reject it.

No way is he issuing a total veto of this map.

* CBS 2…

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said Thursday that he feels good about the direction in which the state is heading, on many levels.

He sat down Thursday with CBS 2 Political Investigator Dana Kozlov, and they covered as much ground as they could in 15 minutes.

One of the first topics Kozlov brought up was the state’s – and specifically an Illinois House resolution demanding that Pritzker reopen unemployment offices.

Pritzker: “You’ll see IDES reopening over the next month or two.”

Kozlov: “Month or two, but noting more firm than that?”

Pritzker: “No. They’re still working out the security concerns at all of our offices.”

What was left out of the excerpt above…

Well, let me start by saying that I want people to be able to get the service that they need from our Department of Employment Security, and so we’re going to open as soon as we possibly can. As you know we’ve had a significant challenge with security, for people who work in those offices. They’ve been there, but the threats that have been leveled are continuing. We’ve had ISP pursuing the people who are threatening. But I will also say that many of our government offices have been closed over the course of the pandemic. We’ve been gradually reopening all of those. So you’ll see IBS reopening over the next month or two.

I’ll have more later this morning because some stories haven’t been posted as I write this. I’ll also get to these goofy “Pritzker won’t say if he’ll run again” clickbait stories later today. For now, I’ll just caution you to not buy into the silliness.