It happened at the June 28 session at Carleton Hotel, a Business & Civic Council production:

State Sen. Don Harmon’s optimism at the Business and Civic Council’s Carleton Hotel session on June 28 has been noted. More can be said. He protested “sky [is] falling” rhetoric about Illinois’ pension problem and praised the legislature for having “cut government to the bone.”

“We can afford” pension payments, he said. “We never missed a payment; we never will.” Here as throughout, he addressed pensioners’ worries but not fiscal problems facing the state as borrower and spender. “It’s a budget issue,” he said, to further calm pensioners’ worries. Indeed, the budget just passed, a “pretty good” one, “pays the pension fully” for the coming year.

He joked at one point. Legislators “kind of solved the pension problem with the 2010 reform” tightening benefits for new hires. “‘Tain’t funny, McGee,” Fibber’s wife Molly used…