* OK, make sure you’re not eating when you read my Sun-Times column this morning. Please, put down that bagel. Set aside your croissant. You’ll thank me later. Ready? Begin…
I was thinking the other day about what sort of governor Pat Quinn ought to be now that the election is over, and for some odd reason I flashed back to an old buddy I haven’t seen in a decade.
Years ago, I had a little cabin in the Missouri woods. My neighbors would get together on weekend evenings around a campfire, drink beer and tell stories.
One of my neighbors was a factory worker who had been laid off from Boeing and eventually ended up working at a different factory for half the pay. He wasn’t ever bitter, though, and he’d do anything for anybody.
My friend also had a fascinating ability to mimic a hoot owl. He’d hoot for a few minutes and pretty soon all the trees surrounding the campfire would be filled with owls, hooting back at him, their eyes glowing from the reflection of the blaze.
It always gave me a spooky rush, and I begged him more times than I can remember to do it again. He never once failed.
One evening, my buddy showed up at the fire pit with a big bandage on his left cheek. I asked him what happened.
He said he had been out hunting with his dogs in a field not far from where we were sitting. He was slowly making his way through a stand of tall grass when suddenly a copperhead snake jumped up and bit him hard on his cheek.
Talk about a spooky rush. I didn’t know copperheads could even leap, and because we weren’t far from where my pal was attacked, I nervously scanned my surroundings before asking what he did next.
“You mean after I screamed?” he said with a laugh.
Yeah. After you screamed.
Well, he said, the snake wouldn’t let go of his cheek, even though he tried and tried to pry its head loose from his face. Nobody could help him because he was alone except for his dogs. So, he said, he grabbed that snake with one hand, pulled out his hunting knife with the other and cut the copperhead’s body off from its head.
Then he walked back to his car, with the copperhead’s fangs still embedded in his cheek, and drove himself to the nearest emergency room.
I almost fainted just listening to his tale. I bet I’ve probably lost a few readers by now as well. You don’t expect to see a crazy scary snake story when you pick up the Chicago Sun-Times.
But if I could force Quinn to model himself on anyone, it would be my long-ago friend.
Figuratively, of course. Quinn doesn’t have to learn to hoot like an owl, but the governor does need to do a far better job of attracting state legislators to his side whenever he speaks.
Quinn’s post-election boasts about his supposed “mandate” for a tax increase did nothing but shoo away the General Assembly’s hoot owls. It seems like he loses support every time he opens his mouth. The object is to pass your bills, not kill them.
And some of those Springfield bosses make angry, leaping copperheads look downright tame.
Quinn has a galling habit of flip-flopping whenever they bite him, which is the Statehouse equivalent of lying down to die.
Nobody ever helps him out when this happens because he annoyingly refuses to lay any groundwork and do any real planning before he acts.
So, he’s left alone to deal with his wounds, and it ain’t pretty.
Please, governor. Learn.
* In other news, the gaming expansion bill has hit a new roadblock. Black Caucus members won’t support it…
It’s never easy to expand gaming here, and that’s just one reason why. By the time you please everybody who can kill your bill, it’s too heavy to move. Or, in the local parlance, the Christmas Tree collapses under its own weight.
State revenue from gambling in the past fiscal year was the lowest in 10 years, the result of both the poor economy and Illinois’ indoor smoking ban, a new report said. […]
“However, the numbers continue to suggest that the biggest contributor to the drop in Illinois casino revenues is the indoor smoking ban,” the report concluded.
Since the ban took effect in January 2008, adjusted gross receipts at Illinois casinos dropped 28 percent. The report said both admissions and receipts took hits after the ban went into effect.
“Illinois riverboat totals are significantly worse than the riverboat totals of states surrounding Illinois,” the COGFA report says. “Therefore … it appears that the indoor smoking ban has continued to have a major negative impact on the riverboat industry.”
* Roundup…
* Disclosure Fight Looms in Springfield: Open-records advocates are preparing for a fight in Springfield next week over the lingering effort to make performance evaluations of public employees exempt from the state’s freedom-of-information law. State Representative Linda Chapa LaVia, Democrat of Aurora, is leading the effort to override Gov. Pat Quinn’s amendatory veto of a bill that would have exempted the evaluations. Mr. Quinn sent the legislation back to the House in July, narrowing the exempt list to law-enforcement personnel.
