Ryan: No reason to think he is indictment's mystery official

This whole thing is just getting hysterically funny. Or it would be, if the consequences for so many hadn't been so bad. The governor's people keep getting nibbled away from him by indictments from various fits of corruption. The most egregious was the license for bribes scandal, where significant portions of the bribes allegedly went into his campaign fund. People actually died from that one, because truckers who shouldn't have gotten licenses were out driving and killed a few people in accidents in Illinois, Wisconsin and (I believe) Kentucky.

They've obstructed investigations in other cases, and gotten caught.

And now it seems that they were selling contracts.

The question is, how can the people around this man have been so comprehensively corrupt ... and he didn't know about it? Over and over, both he and they have said that he didn't know. There's no reason not to believe them all. And yet ... you wonder how it's possible that all this was going on and he knew nothing? The sad thing, from a purely personal perspective, is that George Ryan has not been a bad governor. If nothing else, he suspended the death penalty when it was shown not to work in this state.

The problem for the Republicans is that this scandal is damaging their hopes possibly beyond repair. The Republican Jim Ryan (no relation) was already trailing former Congressman Rod Blagojevich in the polls. The additional problem for Jim Ryan is that as former attorney general of the state, he should have been investigating most of this. They generally all started out as state investigations, and got bounced up to federal for some reason. But from now through November, Blagojevich can flog Jim Ryan with the question "Why didn't you know? Why weren't you investigating all this?" And he doesn't really have any answers so far.