One of the main reasons the Democratic Party did so poorly across the nation last year and lost ground in Illinois was the defection of senior citizens to the Republican Party.

On Election Day 2006, national exit polling showed voters 65 and older split their ballots 49-49 between the two parties. In Illinois, however, senior citizens went with Democrat Rod Blagojevich over Republican Judy Baar Topinka by 10 points, 50-40.

Last year, national exit polling showed Republicans with a huge 59-38 margin over Democrats among seniors. In Illinois, the exit polls showed that Pat Quinn lost the senior-citizen vote to Republican Bill Brady by 17 points, 55-38. Quinn ended up beating Brady by less than 32,000 votes. Blagojevich won his last election by more than 10 times that amount: 367,000. The lost senior vote accounted for more than half the difference between those two margins.

So some Democrats may be forgiven for cringing last week after reading the headlines about how Senate President John Cullerton was floating the idea of taxing retirement income. Their party needs to woo that all-important and rapidly growing demographic back to the fold, not alienate it even more. Those stories probably didn't sit well at all with the oldsters. There's a reason why only five states tax all retirement income, and it ain't fiscal.

After decades of dominating every tiny aspect of life in his legislative chamber, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan now appears to want his members to grow up a little and do some things for themselves.

One of the first steps in that process to adulthood is handing more power to the House's five appropriations committees and the House Revenue Committee.

The appropriations committees have been toothless kittens for decades. They listen to a parade of agency directors outline their upcoming budget requests and press them about jobs for various constituencies, minority and otherwise. Occasionally, an appropriations chair will briefly have a seat at the bargaining table when the governor and the leaders sit down to talk turkey. But, for the most part, they've been cut out of the process. That's especially been the case the past two years, when the General Assembly has sent "lump sum" appropriations to the governor to avoid specifying cuts.

"Is it weird that I'm kind of glad to have Judy Baar Topinka back?" a Democratic friend of mine asked me the other day.

No, I replied. It's not weird. I'm glad she's back, as well. She's crazy, I said, but in a very sane way.

Topinka was elected state comptroller in November by a huge margin, while spending just $270,000. That's less than half of what it costs to run a decent state House campaign. Some cost many times that.

Billions of dollars worth of badly needed state construction projects on roads, bridges, schools, and transit were abruptly halted last week when a state appellate court tossed out Illinois' entire capital construction program and all its funding sources.

The state is appealing to the Illinois Supreme Court, but if the appellate-court ruling is upheld, it's probably not going to be easy to replace this thing.

About 21 House Republicans voted for the $31-billion capital plan's controversial funding mechanisms - video poker, vehicle fees, and tax hikes on candy and booze.

Except for video poker, those fee and tax hikes have gone almost completely unnoticed since the bill was passed in May of 2009. But with a brand-new and tremendously unpopular income-tax hike still burning white-hot in the public's gullet, and a whole bunch of "new conservatives" elected last November, re-approving the tax and fee hikes isn't going to be a simple matter.