The day I began working at the first Happy Joe's Pizza & Ice Cream Parlor down in the East Village of Davenport, Joe Whitty sat me down in his office and imparted wisdom that affected the rest of my life.

Governor JB Pritzker has lately won plaudits from some conservative opinion-makers for making the right moves on corruption. But I am going to register an objection in a bit.

One of the provisions of the sweeping state pension-reform law passed in 2010 has always stuck in the craw of first-responders.

Police and (especially) firefighter unions fought the local government lobby for decades to increase survivor benefits, and then they watched many of those hard-fought wins get wiped away when the General Assembly decided it had to lower pension benefits for new hires to avoid a fiscal catastrophe.

At about the same time last week, Chicago-based investigators with the FBI and the IRS swooped into Democratic State Senator Marty Sandoval's district office, Statehouse office, and home residence, removing boxes of documents and seizing computers.