From a Dec. 6 speech by Ed Gillespie at the Republican Party of Virginia’s annual meeting in Chantilly, Va.; the former Republican National Committee chairman was the GOP’s 2014 U.S. Senate candidate from the state:

We can see an influence economy starting to take shape. CEOs are becoming less concerned about inventing the right products, targeting the right markets and hiring the right people in hopes of making a respectable profit for investors—and more concerned about getting the right lobbyists, retaining the right lawyers and attending the right fundraisers in hopes of getting a hefty subsidy from taxpayers.

Making the right campaign contributions are becoming as important to a company as its research and development budget, and federal-compliance lawyers will soon outnumber patent lawyers.

It’s hard to conceive of a worse way to raise the minimum wage than the way that up-for-re-election Mayor Rahm Emanuel did Dec. 2 in Chicago.

In lieu of the misguided big-box ordinance floated several years ago—that shortsighted measure would have forced the likes of Wal-Mart to pay a higher wage for permission to open stores in Chicago—he has big-boxed the entire city.

The scope of the increases is startling, no matter your position on the issue. Starting July 1, Chicago’s minimum wage will rise to $10 an hour, 24 percent higher than the current $8.25, which remains in the suburbs and the rest of Illinois. Next year, the minimum in Chicago will be 38 percent higher than the $7.25 in Indiana and Wisconsin. The Chicago wage will continue to climb, reaching $13 an hour in 2019, a 58 percent increase over five years.

A Supreme Court challenge that poses a grave threat to President Obama’s health care law had its genesis precisely four years ago as a power-point presentation by a self-proclaimed pessimist from South Carolina.

The idea was picked up by an Ohio law professor, given a policy and public relations push by a Washington health economist and turned into a lawsuit by an Oklahoma attorney general. Three more lawsuits followed.

Nearly five years after the law was passed, their effort has reached the Supreme Court, which saved the president’s signature domestic policy achievement in 2012 but now could deal Obama a significant setback.

A city teetering on the brink of insolvency passes a minimum wage that would reach $13 by 2019, higher than the minimum elsewhere in a state that just elected a Republican governor. What could go wrong?

Ignoring the first rule of holes (when you’re in one, stop digging), the Chicago City Council, in a Tuesday emergency session called by Mayor and former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, voted 44-5 to raise the city’s minimum wage from the current statewide level of $8.25 an hour to $10 on July 1, with future increases bringing it to $13 by 2019. After that, it will be pegged to inflation.

What’s the emergency? Emanuel wanted to jump the gun on any minimum-wage bill that might come out of the state legislature in Springfield, particularly after the election of Republican Bruce Rauner as governor. Such legislation is said to bar cities from raising their minimums above the state’s. Rauner has said that any minimum-wage increases should be part of a package that promotes growth without reducing competitiveness.

A controversial bill that critics argued would greatly damage Illinois’ Freedom of Information Act died this week in the General Assembly after state lawmakers refused to advance it amid a growing public outcry opposing the measure.

The BGA participated in an intense lobbying and public awareness campaign to scuttle SB 2799, which included an anti-FOIA amendment that was sponsored by State Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie.

The amended SB 2799 ignited a firestorm of protests from the Illinois Attorney General, the Illinois Press Association, the Citizen Advocacy Center and other pro-disclosure groups. Moreover, local newspapers throughout the state also wrote editorials against passing SB 2799 including the Chicago Tribune, State Journal Register and The Times of Northwest Indiana.

Get out your veto pen, Gov. Quinn.

State lawmakers last week passed one of their specialty bills — another potential unfunded mandate, this one requiring counties across Illinois to raise juror pay.

Like such things, this is a worthy cause.

On Oct. 13, conservative gadfly and mayoral hopeful William Kelly filed paperwork with the Illinois State Board of Elections disclosing that he’d lent his campaign fund — Friends of William J. Kelly — the generous sum of $100,000.

It seemed futile and extravagant. No one gave Kelly any chance against incumbent Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his campaign was all but inert: The quarterly report he’d filed at the end of September listed no contributions of any kind and only $1,200 in expenses, paid to Kelly’s own company.

But, in accordance with state law, the loan was just large enough to lift the cap on outside donations in the mayor’s race.