LIVEBLOG DEADBLOG: Legislative Leaders Forum at Northwestern University

UPDATE 2: The Daily Northwestern now has their article online of the event. Found this tidbit:

Jones said the Chicago area's tax dollars end up benefitting lllinois' rural population, or "downstaters."

"We feed you guys," Jones joked, looking at Watson, who represents the more-rural 51st District.

Watson did not reply.

"That's what you get, I guess," Jones said.

From the comments, it's mentioned that Illinois Channel might have taped this. If so, that'd be cool to see.

UPDATE: Well, the liveblogging didn't quite go off as planned. Should have left work early, but oh well.

However, the Chicago Tribune has this Clout Street blog entry, which says about 125-150 students showed up. Not many quotations in the story, (Cross, for one, isn't even quoted). Here's the lede:

If the year-long tussle in Springfield over budget priorities, capital projects and transit funding proved frustrating for voters in 2007, the state's legislative leaders on Wednesday night gave little cause for optimism that 2008 will go any smoother.

House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago), in particular, said he did not see the "collective will" among lawmakers to make the tough fiscal and policy decisions and reach consensus over these matters.

I was wondering how Northwestern was able to get the four tops to have this forum, but a quick look at the student paper, The Daily Northwestern, reveals something that I didn't know:

Andrew Madigan, a co-president of Civic Awareness, said the idea for the forum started over the summer.

"Clearly there was a strong interest from all four legislative leaders to want to educate people and create civic awareness," said Madigan, whose father, Michael Madigan, is Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives and a participant in the forum. "There was also the idea about how unprecedented the idea was. I think it will be momentous because it hasn't occurred before."

Last year, the same group brought in Blagojevich to speak. The Daily Northwestern hasn't updated their site yet, so I'm not sure if they covered the forum tonight (I'm sure they did, since they had enough sense to preview it the day before).

Again, apologies for the handful of you who were looking forward to a liveblog of this event. I learned my lesson though: I-94 West + snow + Chicagoland traffic = 2x normal travel time.

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I'll be liveblogging the Legislative Leaders Forum at Northwestern University, starting around 7 p.m. today.

Unfortunately, between a bad laptop battery and other technical issues, I'm forced to use Twitter to do my updates. You can follow the liveblog here:

http://twitter.com/illinoizeyoshi
And here's an RSS feed, too.

The latest 20 updates will be here on this blog post, but for full updates, you will have to visit the Twitter page.

Anyone else going tonight? Any predictions? Post them in the comments.

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