* Let’s circle back to yesterday’s press conference where Democrats blasted the governor and his former deputy chief of staff Darlene Senger…

In an email dated December 13, 2017 to Governor Bruce Rauner’s top staffers, Republican candidate for comptroller Darlene Senger wrote, “We can maybe tie this back to Duckworth.” […]

Mendoza also called out the Rauner administration over the lack of any response to the email.

“There wasn’t a single member of the governor’s leadership team who responded back saying something along the lines of ‘that is so highly inappropriate, like stop right there,’ Mendoza said.

The Rauner administration said there was no need to respond because Senger’s statement was a single, random suggestion.

They may not have responded because this stuff is FOIA-able, so getting into an online back-and-forth isn’t ever advisable. Also, Senger had her detractors on staff. They may not have wanted to engage.

* Notice, though, that there are no quotation marks in the excerpt’s last sentence. I tried to get the Rauner administration to tell me exactly what was said, but couldn’t. They referred me back to yesterday’s statement, which didn’t mention the reason nobody responded to Senger.

The reporter told me that the line about “no need to respond” was from a background conversation.

* The Pritzker campaign sent me this earlier today, but I didn’t want to run it until after I’d tracked everyone down…

So the Rauner administration suggested blaming the tragic deaths of 13 Veterans and spouses on one of our state’s greatest heroes, but it’s ok because they only did it once?

Ouch.

* Onward. From the SJ-R…

Thumbs down: To former Deputy Governor Darlene Singer for putting politics first as the severity of repeated Legionnaires disease outbreak at the Illinois Veterans Home in Quincy became a public issue.

On Dec. 12, WBEZ 91.5 Chicago published the first story in an investigation that raised serious questions about how the administration of Gov. Bruce Rauner responded to the outbreak and notified those affected and the public about what became a public health epidemic. The next day, Senger suggested tying the outbreak to U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who ran the agency that oversees the Quincy home from 2006-2009. The first outbreak at the Quincy home was in 2015.

We know in politics there is always a desire to blame somebody when something has gone wrong. And if more could have been done to prevent the three consecutive years of outbreaks from happening, someone should be held accountable.

But to make placing blame the priority — instead of fixing the problem and helping the residents at Quincy — is unconscionable. Veterans who fought for our country don’t need to be politicized. The residents of that facility need a healthy, safe place to life.

* And one more from the Pritzker campaign…

Bruce Rauner lied again. The word ‘immediate’ can have many definitions — ‘occurring or accomplished without delay; instant’ or ‘following or preceding without a lapse of time’ — but none describe Rauner’s response to the Legionnaires’ crisis.

RAUNER’S LIE:

Yesterday, the Rauner campaign claimed “Governor Rauner took immediate action to address the problems at Quincy.”

THE TRUTH:

Rauner proposed his Quincy plan three years after the first deadly outbreak and almost six months after widespread media and legislative investigations began.

A disease expert told WBEZ: “I think it’s really inexcusable…It takes you six days from seeing an epidemic to tell people that you’re seeing an epidemic? That’s six days that you’ve allowed that disease to spread in a manner that probably wouldn’t have happened if you would have known earlier because people would have been taking action. People would have been asking questions. If you know there is an epidemic, you need to tell people immediately.”

“There’s nothing ‘immediate’ about waiting six days to notify the public about a Legionnaires’ outbreak that took 12 lives in 2015 and another in 2017,” said Pritzker campaign spokesman Jason Rubin. “This was and continues to be an unconscionable failure.”

* They also sent a media coverage roundup. They got a lot of pretty strong stories yesterday. TV stations WIFR, WGEM, KHQA, WFLD, WBBM, WMAQ, WLS, WGN, WICS/WRSP, WPSD, WQAD, WHOI/WEEK and WAND all aired pieces with video of the event. It was plastered across the front page of today’s Sun-Times (story is here) and the Tribune gave it a lot of space as well. The campaign also sent clips from radio stations WLS AM, WBBM Newsradio and WMAY.

It was, in other words, a solid hit.