Catholic priest and Chicago community activist Michael Pfleger has now twice called on Governor JB Pritzker to declare a “state of emergency” over his city’s notorious gun-violence problems.

At the end of August, after the Illinois Senate had been unable to find a consensus on the massive climate/energy bill, and punted the issue to the House, I asked Senate President Don Harmon during a press conference why he hadn’t addressed Governor JB Pritzker’s list of problems, legal and otherwise, with the Senate’s proposal. “I don’t know if the governor’s team understood how fundamental some of those provisions were to getting the agreement among all stakeholders,” Harmon replied. That seemed to me to be quite an extraordinary statement about the governor and his team.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Paul Schimpf has mostly followed Ronald Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment and avoided speaking ill of his Republican opponents. Until now. When a relative unknown named Jesse Sullivan jumped into the race earlier this month with a nearly $11 million out-of-state-funded campaign war-chest, state Senator Darren Bailey and businessperson Gary Rabine both called him a member of the San Francisco/Silicon Valley “élite” because that’s where his business was located and where much of his campaign money came from.

While a huge cloud of coal ash exploded around Springfield’s coal-fired electric-power plant late in the afternoon, the state’s top three Democrats were huddled in a Statehouse conference room trying to find a way to slash electric power-plant carbon-emissions to zero by 2045. The irony was both unmistakable and irresistible.