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Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias must think he's coated in Teflon if he believes the shot federal banking regulators took in closing his family's bank won't make a difference in his U.S. Senate race. And, what must state Democrats be thinking now that more of the party's dirty laundry is out in the open? Where's Scott Lee Cohen when you need him?

In a statement, the game Democrat and buddy of President Obama said over the weekend his campaign "goes forward with a renewed determination to turn Illinois' economy around and to fix what's broken in Washington, D.C." Uh-huh. At least Lexi won't have to do anymore explaining about the odd loans that were generated at Chicago's Broadway Bank, some of them on his watch before he was elected state treasurer. The bank, where Giannoulias was a senior loan officer, lost $75 million last year and the feds said his family had to raise at least $85 million to keep afloat.

But this is one candidate who can't say he wants to bring business practices to government. Let's see, the state is on the verge of bankruptcy and the business of the candidate at the top of the ticket just went belly up. What else can go wrong? How about Rod Blagojevich wanting the president to testify at his trial?

Only in Illinois.

The governor and lieutenant governor tickets for both parties appear to be set for the Nov. 2 election. That is if Gov. Pat Quinn doesn't change his mind again or Democratic state central committeemen stage a revolt. If so, things could really get interesting.

Lake Forest state Sen. Susan Garrett was the front-runner in the lite gov. sweepstakes, but then she went ahead this week and said she really didn't agree with Gov. Waffle's call for a hike in the state income tax. That put the kibosh on her chances and opened the door for Sheila Simon, daughter of the late and well-liked U.S. senator, Paul Simon.

While Quinn is all a twitter about his new running mate, really, what does Ms. Simon bring to the ticket? She's a woman, a downstater who lost in her run in 2007 to become mayor of Carbondale, home of the Southern Illinois University Salukis, where Simon is a law professor. The mother of two also plays the banjo in a band with the appropriate sobriquet for a downstate band, Loose Gravel.

Quinn must be paying attention to those polls which show him trailing Republican opponent state Sen. Bill Brady of Bloomington so he plucks a downstater to blunt that. Except the battleground in November will be the collar counties, where Garrett would have been a definite asset. Besides, Garrett has played well in the rough-and-tumble politics of Springfield and she's been elected in Republican-leaning Lake County enough times to qualify as a veteran pol.

Meanwhile, Illinois Republicans are licking their chops, hoping through some miracle November begins in two months. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele breezes into Chicago late next month for an "Illinois is Next" party featuring the GOP's entire statewide ticket.

That means the national party figures Illinois is in play to turn from blue to red. The tickets have been punched and the ride may be hairy over the next months.

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn has cobbled together a plan to put a dent in the $13 billion budget deficit this Third World state is facing. He wants to jack the income tax 1 percent and borrow lots of money. Is the International Monetary Fund available for a home equity loan?

The IMF may be the banker of last resort for Gov. Moneybags because Illinois has the lowest bond rating of every state in the union save for California. Mississippi has a better bond rating than Illinois. Uzbekistan may have a better bond rating than Illinois. What does that say about the stewardship of the Quinn, Blagojevich and Madigan triumvirate and their co-dependent Republicans these last few years? The Hound will tell you what it means: We're in a world of financial hurt, fellas.

Of course, the Democratic answer is raise taxes. The Hound wouldn't mind a tax increase if lawmakers and the governor would rein in their spending, something they haven't been able to do for years. This being an election year and with an electorate in a totally foul mood, which Lake County lawmakers will be brave enough to vote to raise taxes? There will be a few, but not in districts where there is competition.

As The Hound noted, getting a tax hike passed in the Legislature may be the easy part. Finding bankers to fund this financial sty called Illinois may be the tough part for Quinn the Waffler. If your household was this bad off, no bank would float you a loan. The first thing a bank would do to you would put you on a short-spending leash.
Lawmakers don't take kindly to any type of leash.

The Hound says we declare bankruptcy, change the state's name to Linconia, secede from the U.S. and apply for membership in the United Nations. That way IMF help is guaranteed.

The Hound could quote Yakov Smirnoff about "What a country!", but in fact what happened since Feb. 2 to the Illinois Democratic Party could only take place here in the not-so-great Land of Lincoln. Dem party bosses didn't learn from the Rod Blagojevich-Roland Burris-Pat Quinn debacle. So they got a refresher course from Scott Lee Cohen, the party's former lite governor candidate.

Cohen says he's resigning from the ticket and going back to being whatever he was before: Pawnbroker, green entrepreneur, dead-beat dad, massage/spa customer. Which leaves Illinois Democrats a do-over to pick a new running mate for Quinn. The Hound figures it will be someone from outside Chicago, and not state Sen. Terry Link, D-Waukegan, who came in last in the lieutenant governor race on Feb. 2. Perhaps state Rep. Mike Boland of East Moline, or then again some nobody from Christian County with less hair than Quinn.

The Hound finds it surprising that party leaders or the two Democratic gubernatorial candidates didn't vet Mr. Cohen's candidacy. Guess that won't happen again because voters nor the mainstream Illinois media certainly didn't investigate the candidates. It's a tough job to look into a candidate's past, but some party functionary will be vetting candidates running for everything from lite gov. to precinct committeemen from now on.

But if Mr. Cohen had a shady past, what do you do with the candidate who won the party's nomination for U.S. Senate? His baggage is starting to rear its ugly side. He can talk about jobs all he wants, but he won't talk about his family's Chicago bank and loans that were made to certain individuals? The media big boys let one slip by them. The Hound believes they won't let another one off the hook.

Let's see, New York City has second thoughts about trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks, but it's OK to house similar terrorists in an Illinois prison. Guess the squeaky wheel got the grease this time around from the Obama administration.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg decided it would cost $200 million in extra security, tie up traffic, interfere with Big Apple commerce and depress real estate values during the duration of the trial. The Hound is just guessing here, but didn't Attorney General Eric Holder take all that into consideration when he said Sheikh Mohammed would be tried in a civilian court, rather than Guantanamo Bay, Cuba? Maybe that Massachusetts senatorial vote caused an Obamian flip-flop?

In the meantime, Illinois appears ripe to house terrorists from Gitmo. President Obama is including in his $3.8 trillion fiscal 2011 federal budget proposal $237 million to buy and upgrade the nearly vacant Thomson Correctional Center in northwest Illinois to house Gitmo detainees. The State of Illinois and the federal government are currently dickering over the purchase price of Thomson.

Maybe Illinoisans should start to squeak, just like the New Yawkers did.

Perhaps Republican congressional candidate Joe Walsh of Winnetka will get some political traction among his fellow tea-baggers for his brush-up with Joe Walsh the rock star. But the fact is, attorneys for Walsh (the Eagles' guitarist) took Walsh (the candidate) to pieces in a scathing and hilarious letter that nonetheless had serious and threatening undertones.

Walsh's campaign thought it was clever to plunder Walsh's James Gang tune "Walk Away" in music video "Lead the Way" http://walshforcongress.com/ that glorifies the candidate and features lines like "Pelosi and Bean wanna screw ya," with Bean referring to incumbent U.S. Rep. Melissa Bean, D- Barrington.

The News-Sun www.suburbanchicagonews.com/newssun/news/2013573,5_1_WA27_WALSH_S1-100127.article asked Joe Walsh the rock star's people what they thought of the tune, and the result was the letter to Walsh and his campaign from an Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles, law firm that threatened to sue the campaign for copyright and trademark violations if the music video does not disappear.

"Given that your name is Joe Walsh, I'd think you'd want to be extra careful about using Joe's music in case the public might think that Joe is endorsing your campaign or, God forbid, is you. Or maybe you intended that. But you shouldn't have," wrote attorney Peter Paterno.

"As a candidate for Congress, you probably have a passing familiarity with many of the laws of this great country of ours. It's possible, though, that laws governing intellectual property are a little too arcane and insufficiently populist for you to really have spent much time on," Paterno wrote. "We're writing because we think laws are important, and it might be beneficial to your potential future career as a congressman if you were more aware of them."

Note to Joe Walsh the candidate - a lawsuit from a former campaign manager over unpaid bills is one thing. Provoking a legendary rock star over intellectual property is another. The Hound suggests you stay in your league.

No early indications that Walsh the candidate is shaken, though. His Wednesday morning "Message from Joe Walsh," campaign e-mail was titled: "So, you want a revolution?" Paging the Beatles' attorneys...

Watching the returns the other night from Massachusetts reminded The Hound of the famous Adlai Stevenson quote after the 1952 election: "A funny thing happened to me on the way to the White House..." A funny thing happened on the way to health-care reform: Massachusetts voters.

Surprisingly, Democrats aren't in shock after what happened in the Bay State with Republican Scott Brown now a senator-elect for a seat held by the Kennedy clan for decades. In a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 3-1 margin, couldn't the party have scrapped up some voters for Democrat Martha Coakley? This wasn't just a defeat of a Democrat, this was a humiliation for the president. Heck, Coakley didn't even carry the Kennedy stomping grounds of Hyannisport. It was a Mass-acre.

While national Democrats paint the election as lost by Coakley's poor campaign style, exit polls tell the true tale of the tape: Fifty-two percent of Massachusetts voters surveyed as polls closed told pollsters they opposed health-care reform. This in a state that was the lone bastion of support for George McGovern during the Nixon landslide of 1972.

Despite this defeat, or because of it, congressional Democrats appear to be full-speed ahead to pass health-care reform with or without Sen.-elect Brown's 41st filabuster-making vote. If The Hound were a Democratic strategist, that's the worse thing they could do, putting entire states in jeopardy come November.

That includes Illinois. So get ready Land of Lincoln for the Beantown bounce in the second-bluest state in the nation. It's coming.

When the election is over in November, Gov. Pat Quinn has a future in the restaurant industry. And the way he's weaved and waffled since he's been placed in office, he should open a waffle house, except they already have Waffle Houses across the nation which serve tasty breakfasts, including yummy cheese grits.

The guv's latest move is changing his mind on the early release of prison inmates. He or his prisons chief whom the governor so elegantly threw under the bus the other day, need to rethink letting his mopes out early, especially into an economy where working folks can't get jobs, let alone ex-cons.

The governor let out 1,000 inmates just in time for the Christmas holiday. If he was hoping for primary votes from the former prisoners, he should be prepared for a backlash from ordinary citizens who don't taken kindly to putting these guys back on the streets. Especially if the governor's line is we have overcrowded prisons, but there's an empty one in Thomson ready for Guantanamo Bay detainees to check in.

Between the low-level releases and the meritorious good time provisions, it's time for the governor to revisit Criminology 301. And be prepared to defend his prison decisions and his waffling.
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What is it that attracts political wackos to Illinois? Is it the water? Is it we Midwestern folk tolerate just about any nutjob that comes along? Maybe we're just polite. That's it, we're polite Midwesterners. So how does that justify lunatic fringe candidate Andy Martin questioning the sexual orientation of Congressman Mark Kirk in a radio attack ad?

But The Hound believes Martin stepped over the line, even for a guy like Martin. After all, he accused then-presidential candidate George W. Bush in 1999 of having "a cocaine problem". This guy makes the term "loose cannon" much too benign.

Normally, The Hound would ignore such odd manifestations, except Martin has brought Raymond True of Libertyville, chairman of the Republican Assembly of Lake County, into the mix. Martin also maintains there's a "Republican Party homosexual club" and quotes True as saying "Kirk has surrounded himself with homosexuals."

True was quick to denounce Martin, noting, "Mr. Martin did not contact me in any way before making his announcement. The comments attributed to me are completely false. I request through the media that Andy Martin cease and desist from making any additional statements that are incorrectly attributed to me." Well, that's not going to happen from Mr. Martin, who once was known as Andrew Martin-Trigona.

The Hound checked with some geezers in the office to find out about Republican homosexual clubs in Lake County and they all replied it was news to them. They also scoffed at Kirk being gay. But, then they're geezers.

As for Kirk, the considered front-runner in the Feb. 2 U.S. Senate primary, now divorced after eight years of marriage, issued a statement that he's not gay. And, really, what does it matter? We're on the verge of a new decade where alternative lifestyles are accepted, as long as they're not being lived by hypocrites.

This isn't the first time Kirk has had to tolerate mudslinging in his political career. Those same geezers recalled during the congressman's first campaign he was subjected to much of the same type of stuff issued by the right-wing. Guess they're afraid in 2010 as they were in 2000.

From all the time and energy the president and Congress have spent on health-care reform, you would think Americans are clamoring for it. Outside of a few liberal lobbyists, The Hound never did get the idea the voters were that into health care. But our elected representatives, or at least the Democratic Party's 60 senators, seem to feel this is in our best interests.

And who is The Hound to argue with such an august body?

Yet, there's this nagging feeling that Americans just aren't into health-care reform. A recent Zogby Poll confirmed The Hound's speculation. According to an interactive survey of 3,024 likely voters conducted earlier this month, jobs or the economy were the top domestic priorities. Even among Democrats surveyed in the poll, which has a plus or minus of 1.8 percentage points, jobs ranked first with the economy second.

Overall, 31 percent surveyed said providing jobs for Americans should be the top priority, followed by the economy (26 percent) and national security (13 percent). Where did health care rank? At 10 percent.

Only Democrats, at 19 percent, thought it a high priority. And among crucial independents and those 18 to 30 years old, health care ranked 9 and 8 percent, respectively. From this snapshot in time, it looks to The Hound that the nation is being dragged into health care changes whether we like it or not.

The Hound can't wait to see which senators and representatives in Congress actually run for re-election next year on the platform that they helped pass health-care reform. Especially when the bill comes due.