While the Quinn campaign's tax hike kerfuffle garnered more coverage last week, the contents of another Bloomberg story published on Friday were equally interesting. According to reporter Darrell Preston, the Quinn administration is telling overseas debt buyers that Illinois does plan to raise its income tax to 5 percent in January. And those rumors come as a big relief to the bond rating agencies, who have warned for months that the state will keep paying unnecessarily high interest rates on the bonds it issues unless lawmakers take forceful action to begin closing the $13 billion deficit. "They’re going to have to show they’re doing something," a money manager told Bloomberg, "or their bonds will fall off a cliff."

Meanwhile, the Quinn campaign launched its own "Brady Budget Clock," which tracks the "number of days since Sen. [Bill] Brady has been the Republican nominee for Governor, during which he has campaigned without any coherent plan to fix our state budget." As of this afternoon, it's at 150 days and counting ...