Thanks to the Associated Press, folks in Atlanta and Los Angeles will get to read tonight about Illinois' budget woes. This afternoon, the national news agency devoted a story to the state's backlog of unpaid bills, which will grow to $6 billion by the end of the fiscal year. "The situation, for us, has been almost normalized, and that's the scary part," said Ron Howell of the Quincy-based substance-abuse treatment center Recovery Resources. "If I'm not screaming on the edge of self-destruction, it's because this has numbed us."

 Read the full piece here.