* Gov. Rauner said again today that Speaker Madigan wants school funding held up to “create a crisis to force a bailout of the Chicago Public Schools and the City of Chicago.” He said Madigan also wants that crisis in order to force a tax hike after the election.

“He wants no reforms, he wants a tax hike after the general election,” Rauner said while speaking at the Bloomington Regional Alternative School.

Rauner said his signing the K-12 funding bill last year “upset the Speaker,” which is why Madigan included K-12 funding in an omnibus approp bill this year.

And Rauner warned: “One way or another we’re going to get the legislature back in town.”

* Asked about the suburban and Downstate superintendents who yesterday criticized the governor for wanting to put “more money into this worst-in-the-nation K-12 funding system in the same way,” Rauner said, “The vast bulk of the money that they’re advocating for goes to Chicago, not to school districts around the state.”

When asked, specifically, why superintendents in Peoria and other districts are pushing a different funding plan, Rauner said, “Because they get a little bit more. Chicago gets a lot more, unfairly more. Peoria gets a little bit more.”

Madigan, Rauner said, is being hypocritical because he has “killed” funding reform “for years.”

* Rauner also defended the comment he made yesterday about how some Chicago schools resembled crumbling prisons.

“I’ve been in dozens” of city public schools, he said. “In too many of them, I cry. Tears come into my eyes. No student, no child of Illinois should have to go to school in some of those facilities. They have metal on the windows. They’re dark, they’re depressing, they’re crumbling, they have metal detectors at every door and they have police officers and security officers everywhere. Our children deserve better than that. No child should have to go to school in those kind of conditions, and I’m outraged by it. And I will always be outraged by it and I’m fighting against it.”

Good points. However, as a commenter points out, fixing those problems isn’t gonna be cheap. And the city probably can’t do it alone. It takes money, and the governor isn’t offering any more.

* But here’s today’s quotable. Rauner was asked about Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s comment yesterday that the governor sounded like he was auditioning to be Donald Trump’s running mate…

“I think politicians sometimes, when they’re not confident in their own policy positions, just throw a lot of mud. There’s a lot of mud being thrown by the mayor and others.”

Projecting much?

* Listen to the raw audio…