Stroger's Friends and Family Plan

Is this revolution Cook County Style? From the Trib's Editorial today,

Stroger's proposed budget, rather than slaughtering needless herds of political hacks in the county bureaucracy, instead tilts toward cutting front line service workers. And his Stroger Friends and Family Plan, with top jobs awarded to his cronies, has betrayed voters who had trusted his campaign lip service to reform.
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As a result, board members are stepping forward to reshape his budget. Late Tuesday, 10 of the 17 commissioners completed an omnibus budget amendment that would cut administrative jobs from the county's budget while restoring money for health professionals, prosecutors, public defenders, sheriff's police officers and other service providers. The 10 co-sponsors are Forrest Claypool, Earlean Collins, Liz Gorman, Gregg Goslin, Joan Patricia Murphy, Tony Peraica, Quigley, Timothy Schneider, Robert Steele and Larry Suffredin.

The board members' initiative is partly a matter of tuning out an increasingly clumsy Todd Stroger, partly an acknowledgment that there aren't enough votes on the board for a tax increase. If those votes ever existed--we doubt it--Stroger's hiring and promotion of so many high-paid pals and relatives has made the mere notion of tax hikes that much more toxic. Are taxpayers supposed to give more money to an institution where nepotism and patronage are arrogantly celebrated as the boss' favorite sport?

And from the Sun Times,

"There's going to be lots of pressure on commissioners to backtrack," county Commissioner Forrest Claypool said. "It's important that commissioners stand firm."

But two -- Robert Steele and Joan Murphy -- didn't realize the cuts they were endorsing affected some of their own relatives, and Murphy said she might reconsider.

Some commissioners supporting the new proposal previously backed Stroger's plan, leading some to wonder what they're really going to support.

Sometimes the revolution has to devour it's own. Let's see if these late blooming Jacobins up to the task.

And one not asked to the barricades (also from the ST),

Commissioner John Daley, who indicated he wasn't invited to join those presenting new cuts, said "you have to cut at the top, middle and bottom" to make a real impact.

That's one complicated guillotine.