We've been changing so many things here in Illinois, we're making so many different interests unhappy, that I have to do fund raising now in places like California....[It] gives you more independence; gives you more strength... [Thucydides] said that power is in question only among equals. The weak will do the bidding of the strong while the strong will forever exact their wills." - Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich

Yet there was Blagojevich this week, boasting that he has ordered up $10 million in stem-cell research on his very own. He disguised the funding in such vague terms in the state budget that legislators didn't know it was there. Then he issued an executive order to trigger the funding for the research.

His actions, Blagojevich declared, were "morally right," leaving the impression that those who question government funding for such research are immoral. The end run, he said, was necessary because the General Assembly might have balked. "While we are forced to live in a democracy with several branches of government, sometimes in a democracy the process is frustratingly slow," the governor explained.