Well, the governor’s race in Illinois just got interesting yesterday, for those of you who wonder why anyone would bother to live here. The interest arises from a glimpse into the Chicago Political Machine.

Illinois is a nutty state politically, thanks almost exclusively to Chicago. In fact, Illinois is basically 51% Chicago, 49% normal people, so there is this uneasy tension in which almost half of the state is forced to deal with idiot liberal politicians.

The Premise: Illinois’s present governor is the completely baffling Pat Quinn, a politican who is so comedically inept that he would bet on the Washington Generals, if you get our drift. If you don’t get our drift, he continually makes dumb calls that anyone will tell you are dumb. Quinn seems unable to pick the right side of any issue, and somehow triangulates away from either side. If Republicans want A, and Democrats want B, Quinn will somehow come up with a peach cobbler…maybe F or G.

Quinn is a Democrat out of Chicago, you see, and therefore a lot of Democrats in the State are in that 49% who hate Chicago. As a result, many Illinois Democrats cannot stand Quinn either. On a recent poll we just conducted in our own head, the Democratic preferences for the 2014 gubernatorial primary election looks like this:

1. Lisa Madigan
2. William Daley
3. Pol Pot
4. A can opener
5. Franzia wine-in-a-box
6. Pepe, a blind 16-year-old hairless chihuahua who cannot stop shaking his head and licks his paw until it bleeds
7. A pile of oily rags next to a blowtorch sitting on a crate of ammonium nitrate
8. Pat Quinn

The Challengers: Bill Daley, as a former Obama Chief of Staff, is expected to raise enormous amounts of money based on his last name and association with the President. Unfortunately, two things are going to hurt him in the primary: his last name and association with the President. Daley cannot get elected without Chicago helping him, and Chicagoans are fairly sick of the Daleys at this point (which is why they were happy to send him to Washington) and are also fed up with Chicago/Obama chum Rahm Emanuel, the current mayor.

Also, Lisa Madigan, the popular attorney general for Illinois. She was largely expected to defeat Quinn even if he also got all of Pepe’s votes: pretty much everyone assumes the primary won’t even be a contest, and that the Republicans would be the ones to watch in Illinois. To everyone’s surprise, Madigan announced yesterday that she will not seek a run for governor, and prefers her job as attorney general. This is why things got interesting.

The Machine: Lisa Madigan cited that her father will prove to be a conflict of interest to her gubernatorial aspirations. Her father is Mike Madigan, the crazy-powerful Illinois Speaker of the House and largely assumed head of the Chicago Machine.

Madigan has controlled Illinois politics for ages, deciding what legislation will go before the House and determining what gets funded. Nearly every politician obeys him or struggles to work around him. Although Madigan has survived numerous attempts to topple him from power, he faces a severe scandal right now in which, it is alleged, he used his political muscle to have a friend hired by Metra—the regional Chicago railway service. When the CEO of Metra opposed Madigan’s move to create and staff a high-paying job with taxpayer funds for a buddy, the CEO was promptly dismissed by the Metra chairman. A memo was leaked to the press that reveals, allegedly, the entire sordid racketeering affair. Impeachment is a real possibility for Mike Madigan.

Lisa Madigan feels this would be a bad time to run for governor, given how the Madigan name might be treated in the next year or so. For the first time, Mike Madigan might be able to be wounded politically, and politicians in both parties are licking their chops: Republicans to win flip Illinois to a reliably red state and Democrats to see who will head the Machine.

Obama: Journalists and pundits love to refer to President Obama’s Chicago-style politics and corruption. Sure, that makes sense—but remember that Barack Obama is not part of the Chicago Machine; he was and remains an outsider to it and had very little interaction with the major players. Michelle Obama, by contrast, was more closely involved with the Machine but even she, too, never held a solid politicial connection to Mike Madigan. Rather, the Czar has argued in the past, Obama is trying to create his own Machine to push out the existing one. His success—the Olympics, Illinois gun control, and the tanking Rahm Emanuel—is highly questionable.

From this, the Obama administration is likely going to push toward Bill Daley, ensuring he gets top fund-raising and key endorsements. While Quinn is ahead financially, Daley is already raising enormous amounts of money in only the last three weeks of official campaigning.

The Upshot: With Madigan out and Daley in, Quinn is highly likely to lose; however, with Madigan out, Daley will find he is not as popular around the state (especially Chicago) as he hopes. With popular Republicans jumping into the race on their side, Illinois’ gubernatorial future likely leans Republican.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.