* A few days ago, the Chicago Tribune editorial board praised Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Mayor Rahm Emanuel while excoriating Gov. Pat Quinn…

Preckwinkle and Emanuel demand that their respective realms deliver not only for recipients of government spending, but also for the taxpayers who fund it. Both rookie executives plainly are sensitive to what they can, and cannot, ask of citizens battered by job losses, home foreclosures and aggressive taxation. Neither would define governance as the private sector serving the public sector. They talk instead of the public sector serving a private sector that, in return for supplying tax revenues, expects streamlining, value and competence.

Preckwinkle and Emanuel are in touch — with these demanding times, and with the challenges that face individuals and employers.

Then there’s Pat Quinn, a governor whose personal decency and love for his state are givens. Right there, the comparison to his fellow Democratic execs abruptly shifts into uncomfortable, unfavorable contrasts:

The rapid readiness for leadership that Preckwinkle and Emanuel exude is terrible fortune for Quinn. At a time when state government needs a tightly focused agenda and a leader with firm resolve — attributes for which Preckwinkle and Emanuel already are renowned — Quinn in Year Three of his governorship still is all reaction and appeasement. Watching Preckwinkle and Emanuel excel only reinforces a verdict we offered last autumn: Strength, constancy, innovation, iconoclasm, the courage to speak truth to power — by each of these leadership metrics, Quinn stands bent and pale.

* So, it may be interesting to see what Mother Tribune will have to say about this…

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle ran for the job as a reformer, but on Tuesday she found herself defending a decision to put two former southwest suburban state lawmakers on the county payroll.

Michael Carberry and John O’Sullivan served short stints last year as appointees to the Illinois House, but were out of office in January because they didn’t seek election last fall.

Now Carberry has landed as a nearly $100,000-a-year deputy director job in the county’s facilities management department. And O’Sullivan, the Worth Township Democratic committeeman, is making $85,000 a year as a regional superintendent at the Cook County Forest Preserve District.

Former County Board President Todd Stroger was criticized during his term for hiring the politically-connected. On election night last November, a victorious Preckwinkle told supporters she planned to “clean up county government by ending patronage.”

* The BGA helped do the probe, and the BGA’s director is quoted in the original Fox Chicago story…

Better Government Association Executive Director Andy Shaw said you’d have to be a pretty big believer in coincidences not to see the politics here.

“It sounds like a couple of guys went down to Springfield, did the bidding of the party to pass the tax hike, and as a result they’re awarded with jobs in Cook County,” Shaw said. “This sounds like business as usual and on its face it’s troubling.”

Even more troubling is the fact that O’Sullivan was fired by Cook County after the county’s inspector general found he had been falsifying his time card while working as a laborer at Stroger Hospital. O’Sullivan appealed the firing and got his job back. He said he was framed for not supporting Todd Stroger.

“Retaliation from that administration is what brought upon these bogus charges. Unproved on all the charges. And I received full back pay and benefits,” said O’Sullivan.

But Inspector General Pat Blanchard told us he stands by his finding that O’Sullivan was ripping off taxpayers. Preckwinkle said she never considered that allegation before awarding O’Sullivan with a plum county job.

Preckwinkle has a reputation for “being above politics.” Apparently, she’s not. That doesn’t make her corrupt or venal or anything. It makes her a (gasp!) politician. These things happen.

* Meanwhile, this is from the last part of the spring session and I simply forgot to post it. It’s a very good lesson for legislators in how not to deal with the media…