Pearson on Giannoulias/Hannity; Houlihan Commentary

The other day, via Capitol Fax, I found this hit job on Alexi Giannoulias done by Fox News.



While watching it, I was shocked to find Rick Pearson, the respectable Tribune political reporter on the piece. Well, it turns out that Pearson wasn't in on the whole hit job thing. Pearson told Steve Cochran of WGN Radio about the incident.

Pretty shallow, but pretty typical for folks like Hannity and his producers. Especially since Alan Colmes left, the show is a complete right-wing hack job.

Man goes unconscious at Lollapalooza and ends up dying.

Cook County Assessor James Houlihan announced he will not seek re-election.

Houlihan claims that he will continue to fight for property tax reform and school funding reform. (In Illinois, property taxes make up the majority of school funding leading to large disparities between rich and poor school districts.) If he is really serious about doing this, he has to have a large bully pulpit. This may have to include starting a political action committee. (Not something I should be advocating in the state of Illinois...) However, to fight people like Daley and Speaker Madigan one has to have a war chest of funds available. This can easily be accomplished through a grassroots state tour effort. Sure in Greenup, Rock Island, and Cairo the soon to be ex-Cook County Assessor might not be a big draw, but if anything in this state is going to change it is going to have to be a hard fight from the ground up. Mr. Houlihan supported a Constitutional Convention vote last year. Several special interest groups and unions did not support the "con-con." A con-con would have drafted a new state constitution. In the end, while I applaud Houlihan for modernizing the Assessor's office and coming up with independent, creative solutions to fix the state budget, I have to say that if he is serious about reform in Illinois, he has to speak up and he has to start speaking up now.

News Aggregated by Aaron Lowe
Commentary by Aaron Lowe