Well, as a Wisconsinite I'd be remiss in not pointing out that this is the Chicago Tribune. Chicago and Illinois are always gleeful about the various piles of excrement we land ourselves in here in Wisconsin.

That said, yeah, I also have to be honest. We're down about 1 billion dollars on that Foxconn thing. That's what we're out of pocket. The new governor, wisely, took what remained of our chips and left that table. You get mad, but you just have to chalk it up to a learning experience.

The Illinois people are right on this one by the way. Not even in Illinois would their leaders get away with a 5.5 billion dollar con. The people in Illinois are so used to dealing with corruption that they would have started asking questions and raising a fuss long before it got to that point. Our problem is that we're so accustomed to our corruption that we never raised a fuss until it was way too late.

All that said, in Wisconsin our leaders didn't get away with 5.5 billion dollar con either technically speaking. Scott Walker and his boys got us for about a billion, but they didn't get as much as they wanted. So fibs shouldn't gloat too much, because while I can't see anyone in Illinois getting away with a 5.5 billion dollar pure con, I could see someone getting away with maybe a billion. (It's just that they're far more wealthy than we are, so that billion doesn't hurt as much.)