Todd Stroger: "Read my lips - no new taxes"

Of course, that is because there's no way in hell anyone would let him raise taxes again this year. So what is a profligate spender to do? Ah yes - the county must continue to live beyond its means, which means borrowing almost a billion dollars this year. Maybe we can borrow a billion dollars every year. What could possibly go wrong?

Here's the comedy goldmine:

Critics said they couldn't fully evaluate Stroger's proposal because the budget he released was riddled with errors.

"Every year, President Stroger issues his budget, and it's a mess," said Commissioner Forrest Claypool (D-Chicago). "It's full of errors. It's incomplete.

"They don't even know what their own financial picture is, and I think the strongest evidence of that is that they are suggesting they have to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars even though they've got $300 to $400 million of new tax revenue coming in the door."

Copies of the budget were not released to the media by late Tuesday afternoon. Chief Financial Officer Donna Dunnings said inaccurate figures in the budget resulted from computer errors.

"We had a printer's issue," she said. "There are some numbers that need to be adjusted."

Lousy printer's issues - always changing numbers. Don't you hate it when you create a Word doc, then print it, and when you look at the printed page, the words and numbers are different than the actual file?

I would like to have a discussion with Stroger's high-school teachers. They obviously never made him show his work.

"The budget is chock-full of errors," he said. "It's the exact same thing that happened last year. It's like the Keystone Kops are in charge of the budget in Cook County. ... [Stroger's] running an inept government."

Stroger spokesman James Ramos acknowledged "there were a couple of errors," but added, "whether they were reprinted or not, I'm not sure."

Hey that's great.