From the Tribune:

Originally posted: September 22, 2008
Delusional and loony remarks were made
Eric Zorn
    Cynthia Canary, director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, called {Gov. Rod] Blagojevich's comments "delusional" and "loony." ....from Governor warns Obama that he's falling into GOP's trap by siding against him.
Canary was referring to Blago's public warning to Sen. Barack Obama  Friday that Obama bought into  a "very clever ruse by the McCain campaign" when he weighed in on the ethics reform battle in Springfield. (My headline refers to this )
Last Wednesday, Obama phoned one of his political mentors, Senate President Emil Jones, and urged him to call his chamber back into session for a vote on legislation that Jones and Blagojevich have been trying to bottle up for nearly three years.
Jones agreed to call the Senate back into session, and this afternoon the senators voted 55-0 to join the House in resoundingly rejecting amendments that Blagojevich attempted to drape onto the original bill by using his amendatory veto power.
"Sometime in October, in battleground states, you'll be seeing TV ads that Republicans are putting up and the McCain campaign is putting up that will start accusing Sen. Obama of coming back to Illinois to help his old friends in the Illinois General Assembly," Blagojevich said.
To which the best answer -- aside from Cynthia Canary's crisp assessment -- is Scooby Doo's trademark  "hrruh?"
Jones is perhaps the oldest of Obama's "old friends" in the legislature, and until last week he appeared determined to allow the bill to die from neglect rather than calling it for a vote.
This was widely seen as a favor to Blagojevich -- the bill bans a type of fundraising that the governor practiced with considerable success; taking donations from business with big state contracts under his purview. From Ray Long:   
    A Tribune examination in April found Blagojevich received 235 contributions of exactly $25,000 and that most donors received something from the administration, ranging from appointments to contracts to favorable policy decisions
Indeed the headline summary of this story -- Obama successfully challenges Illinois Democratic bigwig and advances political ethics reform -- is so good for Obama that some cynics have suggested to me that Jones and Obama actually orchestrated the entire sequence of recent events to allow Obama to come off looking like a hero.
In that light, conservative op-ed columnist Dennis Byrne was a stooge last week when he blasted Obama in the Tribune for not making the phone call:
    [Cynthia Canary's] group and Obama worked together during those halcyon days when he actually supported reform in Illinois, so maybe he'll be receptive to a plea to intervene on behalf of Illinois folks who have been getting gouged for years by the likes of Jones. "A 30-second phone call to the Illinois Senate president could yield huge dividends to this state," she said....What Canary {is] asking Obama for {isn't} all that much. Maybe a 30-second phone call to back up his usual pap of, "Look, ah, I've, ah, always been for, ah, reform."
And I, too, was stooge when I noted here that Obama's general statement praising ethics reform in Springfield was "weak tea" that "reinforced the idea that, despite backing reform legislation during his career, he's not been out front in confronting ethically challenged Democrats in Chicago, Cook County and Illinois."
Blagojevich has said he believes the current, simple ethics bill doesn't go far enough. And, to be sure, some of the amendments he wanted to add were not bad ideas -- changing the way legislative pay raises are granted, for instance.
What's "delusional" and "loony" is the notion that the McCain campaign will try to score political points by arguing that Obama chose to settle for promoting partial ethics reform in Illinois rather endorsing an effort to kill ethics reform altogether by joining Blagojevich's dubious "all-or-nothing" effort.