Add the justices of the Illinois Supreme Court to the long list of politicians who have been bested by Governor Rod Blagojevich. The governor has a way of bringing out the worst in his fellow politicos, and the Supremes were no exception last week.

Last Tuesday was a public-relations nightmare for Governor Rod Blagojevich, but he did manage to avert a complete PR meltdown with a last-minute deal. A few months after freezing wages of nonunion state workers and deducting 4 percent from their checks to pay for their pension contributions, a month after vetoing pay raises for legislators and judges, two weeks after he unilaterally slashed the operations budgets of two statewide constitutional officers, and the same day that Latino legislators slammed him for breaking his promise about not cutting funds for social programs, the Chicago Tribune reported that the governor had given pay raises to some of his employees.

After months of publicly jabbing the General Assembly for its hidebound ways, Governor Rod Blagojevich is now aiming his sharp political elbows at his fellow constitutional officers, including his most likely re-election rival.

"We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals - and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship," Grover Norquist recently told the Denver Post. Norquist runs a group called Americans for Tax Reform, and his organization was scheduled to participate in a Chicago press conference last week that was called to attack Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich for his anti-business proposals.