The state's finances are already over the cliff.

So what will lawmakers do to find revenue, promote jobs, save services for the needy?

I'll ask those questions tonight on "Chicago Tonight"@7P on Channel 11.

Please join me!
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I'm sitting at NBC in Washington D.C. covering the Kirk/Giannoulias debate but part of my heart is back home in Chicago where the marathon is filling the streets of the city.
I've run two Chicago Marathons---in 2000 and 2001---and each was an amazing, exhilarating, challenging experience.

The generosity of the spectators is what I remember most.

Why in the world would people come out to cheer a bunch of maniac runners crazy enough to try and finish 26.2 miles? I have no idea but what I learned was that without their encouraging words and cheers and enthusiasm, I might never have finished. It bouyed me as I began to flag. Sometimes it made me laugh out loud like when 4 guys in drag---high heels and flapper dresses---were informal cheerleaders on the sidelines.

The Marathon is a fantastic experience. The best part may well be the citizens who support it.

I had not seen Rod Botts or Mary Lavelle since I was 14 years old.

She was my freshman English teacher and he my sophomore English teacher at Palatine High School decades ago. Each has now retired to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And on Friday morning I drove from Chicago to see them after all these years.

I can't quite describe my excitement. Or my nervousness.

Mary Lavelle and Rod Botts sent me in directions I might not otherwise have gone.

I was a Rolling Meadows kid at a time when suburbs like Palatine referred to our town as "Rolling Ghettos". It was because we were, by and large, a blue collar population who lived in newly-built small frame houses, the kind that provided inspiration for Pete Seeger's song, "Little Boxes", about "houses made of ticky-tacky that all look the same." It was a description I was oblivious to, having moved with my parents from a dark basement apartment in Chicago to a far improved home.

As an incoming freshman, I was placed in "general" and not "honors" classes though I had been an A student in grammar school. It was Mary Lavelle who went into the Guidance Department and argued to change that. My counselor at the time was reluctant. I remember her asking me, "Are you sure you, a Rolling Meadows girl, feel up to that?"

In Rod Botts' honors English class, a whole world of literature was opened up me. That included the books the school board had banned. "There are some books I wish you could read," he told us with a smile, "but I'm not allowed to recommend them." After class, when we asked, he told us about J.D. Salinger's "Catcher In the Rye". All of us read it. All of us loved it. And every few years, I re-read it.

I was one of those kids who wanted to be smart but wasn't always sure I was. Sometimes it takes a teacher to help us believe we have what it takes. And to give us a path to a bigger world than the one we know.

Mary LaVelle and Rod Botts did that for me and for many others. There will never be enough words to thank them even though on Friday in Milwaukee, a bit teary-eyed, I tried.
30

View more news videos at: http://www.nbcchicago.com/video.

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Gloria Steinem came to Chicago Wednesday to stump for Democratic politicians and for her own Women's Media Center.

The feminist icon---whether you love her or hate her---remains brainy, unafraid of causing controversy, and utterly effective in communicating the gap that remains between women and their rights.

But superficial as this may sound, at 76 she looks fabulous. A friend of mine, watching the interview Steinem and I did last night on WTTW's Chicago Tonight, wanted me to ask Steinem how she manages to still be a babe. I didn't. But she gives life to the notion that if your brain is engaged, your skin somehow benefits.

"Everybody wants a scoop, Carol. Everyone wants to be first."

The last conversation I had with Dan Rostenkowski was on April 22nd of this year.
His voice was as big and bold as it ever was but punctuated by fits of coughing from time to time that made him put down the phone until it subsided.

"I'm dying," he had told me a few days earlier. But in this last conversation of ours, when I brought that fact up again, he thundered, " I don't want that to get out. It's my business." Then he paused and added, "I have lung cancer. I don't know how long I've got."
I called him Mr. Chairman during our conversation that ranged from politics to the state of the news media. He did not have a good opinion of my profession.
Mr. Chairman, I asked, what's the difference in politics between the way things are and the way they were?

"The 24 hour news cycle!" he boomed. "They don't care about accuracy. But then again, Carol, the whole world has changed... Legislators don't have the opportunity to let people absorb what the meaningful legislation they are proposing means."
Rostenkowski coughs again, and then says, "I watch all these talk shows....you people in your 4th estate aren't analyzing anything anymore....the competition is so great."

Democracy, he told me, is painful. It requires sacrifice, and is endlessly complex.
The complexity was something he reveled in as the powerful Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee 1981-94, a period of time in which he and a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, worked out revisions of the tax code.

But the politics of his time became more complex as well. And soon he was on the wrong end of a federal investigation that sent him to prison.
"I attended Oxford," he would later say ruefully. Not the university. The prison.

Did he believe, I asked him in our last conversation, that all the years he spent in politics and in Congress would be overwhelmed by the memory of that federal conviction?
"What do you think?" he roared.
I told him I believed there was much more to say about him than that. And about his larger-than-life legacy.
"I hope you're right," he said.
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Thomas' injudicious, controversial remark about Israel broke the back of the 89-year-old's career. She was forced to resign.
Like it or not, we mused, that one moment will end up defining an entire lifetime of work.

At that point, Mrs. Blagojevich turned around and snapped, "Now you know how my husband feels.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/marin/2370644,CST-EDT-carol09.article

Thomas' injudicious, controversial remark about Israel broke the back of the 89-year-old's career. She was forced to resign.
Like it or not, we mused, that one moment will end up defining an entire lifetime of work.

At that point, Mrs. Blagojevich turned around and snapped, "Now you know how my husband feels.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/marin/2370644,CST-EDT-carol09.article

But not Kevin Jones.
He had not a single one.

Unlike Blair Holt who had dreams and possibilities.
The lives of these two young men converged in a story you have not, until now, heard.

http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local-beat/violence-project-kevin-jones-95915719.html

View more news videos at: http://www.nbcchicago.com/video.