The Other Fitz

Yglesias reminded me that it was Sen. Fitzgerald (usually considered a flop of a Senator) who picked Patrick Fitzgerald as the US Attorney. And because Sen. Fitzgerald wasn't popular with his own party, and ended up not running - and sort of didn't care - he ended up picking a really good prosecutor instead of using the power to get a patronage pick. That's another reason why IL has so many public figures fall - because there's a good non-partisian US Attorney on the job.