The waiting is finally over for some of the District of Columbia’s most ambitious school children and their parents. Democrats in Congress voted to kill the District’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides 1,700 disadvantaged kids with vouchers worth up to $7,500 per year to attend a private school.
Senator Dick Durbin, who heads the subcommittee that oversees funding, has been saying for the better part of a year that he’s open to supporting the program’s continuation if certain conditions were met. In retrospect, this looks like bad faith.

Earlier this year, Mr. …

Illinois State Senator Kirk Dillard, Republican gubernatorial candidate, today called on Governor Quinn to issue an immediate Executive Order banning state funds to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Recent news accounts show ACORN employees illegally misusing state tax dollars:
“Governor Quinn should issue an immediate Executive Order to ban state funds to ACORN until the Illinois Attorney General has conducted a full investigation on all ACORN practices.
“We should not be spending tax dollars to fund an organization like ACORN which continues to violate the public’s trust at …

More at WSJ

Senator Mike Johanns (R-NE) introduced an amendment to the HUD and Transportation appropriation bill to strip ACORN of all federal funding.  A week ago, Johanns wouldn’t have gotten the amendment to the floor.  Today, however, after three straight days of BigGovernment.com’s video exposés of ACORN offices in Washington DC, New York City, and Baltimore offering assistance to pimping, tax evasion, and trafficking in underage Salvadorean girls, Johanns not only got his vote — but he got an impressive bipartisan showing.  The Senate passed the Johanns amendment 83-7.
The seven Senators supporting …

So.  The senior (Democratic) Senator from Illinois is told by the (Democratic) Governor of Illinois that the latter is considering trading a vacant Illinois Senate seat to the (Democratic) Attorney General of Illinois – and daughter of the (Democratic) Illinois Speaker of the House – explicitly in exchange for political favors.  Several weeks later, the Governor is arrested and impeached on racketeering charges; and it has come out since then that the (Democratic) Senator placed in that seat promised favors and contributions in exchange for it.  It has also come …

A senior adviser to Sen. Roland Burris (D-Ill.) slammed Democratic leaders Thursday evening, saying “they have tried their best to discredit” the new senator in the wake of his appointment by then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
“To the extent those goals have not been met, the Democratic leadership can blame its own tainted motivations,” the statement said. “They have tried their best to discredit one of the few ‘clean’ politicians Illinois has ever known, in order to do exactly what Blagojevich warned against.”
Read More at The Politico

I have written a lot about Roland W. Burris—the petite man with the jumbo ego– since that day in late December when now impeached Gov. Blagojevich made dopes of Democratic leaders locally and nationally by appointing the hapless, shameless Burris to Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat.
Burris isn’t going anywhere. With  a group of African American ministers and the  Chicago City Council’s Black Caucus threatening white politicians who try to force out the U.S. Senate’s only black member, the flexible spines of Dick Durbin and Pat Quinn—at various times both called …