The Chicago Tribune describes Cook County’s government aptly in this brutal editorial about County Board President Todd Stroger, whom President Obama helped elect in 2006. The first sentence refers to Stroger’s unusual nomination by the Cook County Democratic Party:

Democratic committeemen slated him for board president in 2006 because he would sustain county government’s two key missions: the employment of patronage workers in the thousands, and the awarding of insider contracts in the millions. His brazen, needless raising of the sales tax has yielded still more of the revenue flow that keeps this Chicago machine fortress standing erect.