Cheri Bustos

Who even talks about the Illuminati but right-wing nut cases these days... and people on lunatic fringe websites? Illinois Republicans... meet your candidate in the 17th district-- Rockford, down along the Iowa border past Dubuque and Davenport to Burlington and over to Peoria, Kewanee and Galesburg, and as far south as Carlson and Swan lakes.

When I say the question of impeachment is vexing Democrats, I don’t mean the millions of Democratic voters and small donors. They overwhelmingly want to see Trump impeached. I would venture to guess they want to see Trump in a cage. But I’m not venturing a guess about impeachment.

Matt Cartwright deserves reelectionOver the weekend, Politico ran an essay about how Republicans will try to make up for expected losses in the 2018 midterms by targeting Democrats in Trump districts. Reporter Elena Schneider kicked off her piece by focusing on progressive champion Matt Cartwright.

I thought that Denny Heck and Cheri Bustos, respectively, the chair and vic-chair of the DCCC recruitment committee, had the worst idea ever when they tried to recruit corrupt conservative party boy Patrick Murphy to run for the open Miami seat that is being abandoned by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

After it leaked out that Mark Foley (R-FL) was screwing underage boy pages, he resigned from Congress. That was September 29, 2006, just in time for the 2006 midterms. Rahm Emanuel was the devious head of the DCCC who timed it out perfectly-- even though boys were molested by Foley in between the time Emanuel found out what he was doing and the fatal Emanuel-inspired leak.

Last week DCCC Chair and Steve Israel puppet Ben Ray Luján appointed Illinois Blue Dog Cheri Bustos DCCC vice-chair for recruitment. Wednesday she voted, once again, to force President Obama to start building the Keystone XL Pipeline on Republican terms, terms that are extremely disadvantageous to Americans.

Illinois has more than its share of conservative Democrats in Congress with a tendency to back Republican legislative priorities and to show more sympathy for the desires of Big Business campaign donors than for ordinary working families. According to ProgressivePunch, the 4 Illinois Democrats with the most right-wing voting records-- from bad to worse-- are

Here we go again-- because losing once is never enough for a discredited strategyThe demise of the furthest right faction of Republican wing of the Democrat Party, the anti-Choice, gay-hating, gun-loving, Austerity champions know as the Blue Dogs, has been widely exaggerated.

Who's worse to be hanging with, Pete Peterson or Rahm?In 2010, the Democratic-controlled Illinois legislature gerrymandered the state-- in the same anti-democratic way that Republican-controlled legislatures did in states like North Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan-- to create more congressional seats for its own party. One of those seats, IL-17, was expressly designed to defeat freshman Republican Bobby Schilling.

Cheri BabyWhen the Democratic-led Illinois state legislature redistricted the congressional districts, Bobby Schilling looked like a marked man. The legislature cut out red area in Quincy, Decatur and Springfield and replaced them with blue areas of Rockford and Peoria. Schilling, who acknowledges Glenn Beck as his "leader," had first won his 17th district seat in 2010 beating Democratic freshman Phil Hare 53-43%.