Rod Blagojevich officially facing federal corruption charges

[NorthSideSox72]

I seriously think he suffers from MPD. He is just all over the place. Worse than a 6 year old after 2 bags of cotton candy. I feel so bad for his daughters.

Talking to a couple psychologists in the family, the common diagnosis is Narcissism. Apaprently, one can be clinically narcissistic. He is completely oblivious to any reality which doesn't make him loved by everyone.

 

 

[Soxy]

Talking to a couple psychologists in the family, the common diagnosis is Narcissism. Apaprently, one can be clinically narcissistic. He is completely oblivious to any reality which doesn't make him loved by everyone.

It's a personality disorder--Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Typical characteristics: exaggerated sense of self-importance, exploitative attitude, lack of empathy, excessive need for attention and admiration, a strong sense of entitlement, arrogance, and difficulty in accepting personal criticism.

[NorthSideSox72]

It's a personality disorder--Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Typical characteristics: exaggerated sense of self-importance, exploitative attitude, lack of empathy, excessive need for attention and admiration, a strong sense of entitlement, arrogance, and difficulty in accepting personal criticism.

Sounds about right for Blago.

 

[lostfan]

Sounds about right for Blago.

By "about right" I'm sure you mean "100% accurate".

[Harry Chappas]

It's a personality disorder--Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Typical characteristics: exaggerated sense of self-importance, exploitative attitude, lack of empathy, excessive need for attention and admiration, a strong sense of entitlement, arrogance, and difficulty in accepting personal criticism.

 

Sounds like Steff.

 

That press conference last night was truly something special. I saw Lisa Lisa Madigan on Chris Matthews MSNBC, she really could use a stylist. She looked like something out of Little House on the Prarie last night. I like her persona though.

[NorthSideSox72]

Sounds like Steff.

May God have mercy on your soul.

 

*steps away from Jenks Heat*

 

[Harry Chappas]

May God have mercy on your soul.

 

*steps away from Jenks Heat*

 

i used green? He says as sheepishly as possible.

[Kyyle23]

The planted kid during the little town meeting in front of Blago's house was pretty shameful.

[shipps]

The planted kid during the little town meeting in front of Blago's house was pretty shameful.

 

that was hilarious. "Hey can we still shoot some hoops this summer?" LOL What kid calls it shooting hoops anymore?

[NorthSideSox72]

The planted kid during the little town meeting in front of Blago's house was pretty shameful.

That is the "Say it ain't So" kid I was referring to. Hilarious.

 

Also, the "WE LOVE YOU TOO!!!" shout from the crowd.

 

[mr_genius]

The planted kid during the little town meeting in front of Blago's house was pretty shameful.

 

That was the best part. Classic move.

[The Critic]

I'm putting this in the Blago thread and the wrestling thread because it deserves to be in both:

 

http://www.lordsofpain.net/news/tna/613.html

 

TNA Offers Rod Blagojevich A Job With The Main Event Mafia

By Michael Bluth

Jan 30, 2009 - 6:13:55 PM

 

TNA sent out the following press release this afternoon touting their latest publicity stunt:

 

Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich offered job as Chairman of TNA Wrestling’s Main Event Mafia

 

TNA Wrestling is offering the newly created position of Chairman for its Main Event Mafia faction - and the opportunity to openly sell chairs, steel chairs - to ousted Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich.

 

TNA officials confirmed today that Blagojevich, who was impeached by the Illinois House of Representatives on January 29, is being offered the “Chairman” job within its Main Event Mafia faction, an elite unit which includes U.S. Olympic Gold Medal winner Kurt Angle, former World Heavyweight Champions Kevin Nash, Booker T., and Scott Steiner, and reigning TNA Wrestling World Heavyweight Champion Sting.

 

Blagojevich was arrested on criminal charges on December 9, 2008, for conspiring to sell the senate seat vacated by then-President Elect Barack Obama to the highest bidder, but Angle truly believes in the U.S. justice system.

 

“He’s innocent until proven guilty,” Angle said. “As the leader of the Main Event Mafia, I am a huge fan of the Illinois style of politics. As such, Governor Blagojevich is welcome to join me and the entire Main Event Mafia at any and all TNA events in the future, and certainly is welcome to sell his seat with us should he choose not to accept our generous offer.”

 

Blagojevich is a former amateur boxer, so Angle is convinced Blagojevich, “easily will be able to handle the transition to pro wrestling,” Angle said.

 

The Illinois House of Representatives voted in favor of impeachment by an astounding margin of 114-1. Only 60 votes were needed to push the impeachment forward. The single dissenting vote came from Democratic State Representative Milton Patterson, who represents the Southwest side of Chicago.

[BigSqwert]

Pretty interesting take on the impeachment.

 

LINK

 

A Far From Unimpeachable Impeachment

Blagojevich's ouster was not a railroading, but it looked like one.

 

by Jonathan Rauch

 

Saturday, Feb. 7, 2009

 

Suppose, at least for the time it takes to read the next several paragraphs, that the ousting of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was a political railroading. Suppose the intention, whether out of malice or opportunism or both, was to overturn the 2006 election. What, actually, would that have looked like? And how different would it have looked from what happened last week?

 

I think that Blagojevich is probably a crook, and so does everyone else, so the question may seem academic. But it's not. Overturning an election is fundamentally antidemocratic and, in a democracy, potentially dangerous. When it needs to be done, the proceedings need to be objectively distinguishable from a railroading. In other words, the rules must be scrupulously fair. Otherwise, the process for removing corrupt politicians becomes, itself, indistinguishable from political corruption.

 

Blagojevich was elected governor in 2002, then re-elected in 2006 with more than 1.6 million votes. The New York Times reports that he "was widely unpopular with lawmakers long before his arrest on federal corruption charges." If his enemies had decided to get him out of the way, what sorts of things might you expect to happen?

In the

s

cramble to remove Blagojevich, too many corner

s

were cut.

Well, a federal prosecutor, after wiretapping and arresting him, might announce the arrest at a dramatic, even flamboyant, press conference. He might reveal only very short snippets of the wiretaps, knowing that the full record would not be available to the defense, let alone the public, for months to come.

 

Instead of dryly reading the charges or letting the complaint speak for itself, he might use language more typical of a campaign ad or a Wall Street Journal editorial. "Governor Blagojevich has taken us to a truly new low." "The conduct would make Lincoln roll over in his grave." "The conduct we have before us is appalling."

 

There is nothing necessarily improper about a prosecutor's making a strong case to the public. But prosecutors rarely sound as strident as U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald did in Chicago on December 9. If a prosecutor wanted to garner spectacular national headlines and end a politician's career long before a trial could begin, that press conference is how it might sound.

 

What next? You might expect to see politicians trip over themselves to disown and condemn the governor, talking and behaving as if he had already been convicted. More, you might see many of his fellow Democrats cast about, quite explicitly, for a way to get him out of office before he could cause political damage to them or to a newly elected Democratic president who happens to hail from Illinois.

 

There was a legitimate reason to hurry in the Blagojevich case. The most notorious charge against him was that he intended to sell a vacant U.S. Senate seat. Allowing that to happen could spread the taint of corruption to Washington.

 

But then the governor obviates this problem by making a perfectly respectable Senate appointment. No corruption or impropriety at all. His appointee is duly seated. The governor himself is now under minute surveillance. He is probably less able to get away with extortion or racketeering than any politician in the country. He says he can get on with his job while preparing a criminal defense, and this, while debatable, may be true. Other public officials have defended themselves while serving.

 

Yet the effort to remove him immediately, despite having lost its most compelling rationale, only gathers momentum. That might be because Illinois politicians think that the governor is dysfunctional and fear that state business may grind to a halt. But it is equally consistent with an unseemly haste to pitch him overboard before the political winds change. In any case, at the first opportunity, the Illinois House votes to impeach. The state Senate will conduct a trial.

 

The governor now lets it be known that he wants to subpoena more than a dozen witnesses who are named in the U.S. attorney's complaint, including (uh-oh!) the new president's chief of staff. The Senate instead imposes a rule that (in The Times's words) "bars witnesses from being subpoenaed if federal prosecutors believe it might compromise their case." True, the impeachment prosecutors would have to abide by the same restriction. But that, of course, gives only cold comfort to a defendant whose witnesses are being vetted by the prosecution.

 

Was the purpose of the Senate trial to establish the truth? If so, one would presumably want to let the defense call whatever witnesses it needed, whether the U.S. attorney liked it or not. Or, on the other hand, was the trial's purpose to get rid of the governor by hook or by crook? In that case, one might want to work with the prosecutor to make sure that prison remained available as a backstop for impeachment.

 

The governor, protesting that the rules are stacked and the outcome is preordained, boycotts most of the trial, giving only a closing statement. His accusers characterize his boycott as suggestive of guilt -- even though the governor's removal is indeed, for all intents and purposes, a foregone conclusion. After all, the political establishment has made no secret of its desire to unseat him.

 

In a particularly cheeky bit of bootstrapping, the Senate prosecutor cites that very same political establishment's calls for the governor's resignation as grounds for convicting. "When every constitutional officer -- when the president of the United States! -- is calling for him to resign," says the prosecutor, in his final remarks, "does that not speak to the harm inflicted on this state, the stain on this state, from what the governor has done?" Well, no. But it does say something about the desire of the president and Illinois's politicians to get rid of him.

 

And so it comes to pass: On the basis of six minutes of wiretapped conversation -- six minutes out of what the Chicago Tribune reported were "thousands of hours of recordings made of the governor and his allies" -- the governor is convicted by the Senate and turned out of office. Everyone exhales. Illinois and the country turn the page.

 

Or do they?

 

The trouble with this story is not that the proceedings were demonstrably a railroading. It's that they did not look different enough from a railroading. If you wanted to frame an honest man, it might look much the same.

 

For a few reasons, I don't think Blagojevich is an honest man. The snippets of wiretap released so far by the prosecution, short and possibly cherry-picked though they are, do sound like extortion. His failure to offer any alternative interpretation, either to the Illinois Senate or the media, seems damning.

 

Moreover, Fitzgerald has a sterling reputation. "He's absolutely the best," says Robert Luskin, a defense lawyer with Patton Boggs. Luskin faced off against Fitzgerald as counsel to former Bush administration aide Karl Rove in the Valerie Plame leak investigation.

 

But even the best prosecutors err or get carried away. Recall Attorney General John Ashcroft's dramatic announcement in 2002 that the government had captured "a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or 'dirty bomb,' in the United States." Later the government quietly dropped the claim. It finally obtained a conviction on ordinary criminal charges from a judge who handed down a pointedly short sentence after calling the government's case "light on facts."

 

In his closing appeal to the Illinois Senate, Blagojevich said some things that were true. "You guys are in politics," he told a roomful of politicians. "You guys know what we have to do to go out and win elections." Politicians make deals with their supporters all the time. Transactional politics is their job, and sometimes it isn't pretty, and sometimes the legal lines are hard to draw. If not scrupulous, efforts to nail criminal politicians can instead criminalize politics.

 

"Maybe one day it might happen to you," Blagojevich warned the state senators. He called his removal "a dangerous precedent that could have an impact on governors in Illinois and governors in other states."

 

He had a point. In the scramble to remove him, too many corners were cut. Not legal corners -- the law was faithfully executed -- but prudential ones. The press and the public were too quick to take a prosecutor's accusations at face value. The Illinois Legislature was too willing to act as an arm of the prosecution instead of an independent fact finder. And the political class was too cavalier about nullifying an election.

 

Whatever his wrongs, Blagojevich was right about this: The rules that removed him are not sufficiently distinguishable from a railroading, and they are wide open to abuse. We may find out, before long, that the door he was just shoved through swings both ways.

[Balta1701]

Is this a case where two wrongs truly do make a right?

[BigSqwert]

I think these lines sum up my biggest concerns about what we all just witnessed:

 

The trouble with this story is not that the proceedings were demonstrably a railroading. It's that they did not look different enough from a railroading. If you wanted to frame an honest man, it might look much the same.

[southsider2k5]

The interesting thing would be if somehow Blago beat the charges, then what would happen? At worst he would have the mother of all lawsuits. In reality, it would be interesting to see him challenge to get his job back.

[Balta1701]

The interesting thing would be if somehow Blago beat the charges, then what would happen? At worst he would have the mother of all lawsuits. In reality, it would be interesting to see him challenge to get his job back.

Who would he have the option to sue? The only candidate I can see is the federal government. From my reading of the Illinois state constitution, it appeared to me that there was no specific requirements laid out on the Illinois Legislature as to what was required before a person was impeached and removed from office. Without a "High crimes and misdemeanors" clause or at least something resembling that, the legislature appears to have the right to impeach any governor for any reason they want and then exclude him from service based on that.

[Texsox]

Most of the time, correct and slow beats almost correct and fast.

[Soxbadger]

Absent Blago appealing to the Supreme Court (which can review legislative action) he will basically be out of luck even if he wins his criminal case.

 

Also, civil and criminal burdens are different so Blago may not be found guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt" but perhaps the "preponderance of the evidence" suggests he is guilty.

 

Thats what happened to OJ and the murders. He was found guilty in civil, even though innocent in criminal.

 

I believe his best bet would have been to appeal to the Supreme Court on procedural/due process grounds during or right after the impeachment. The longer he sits, the less anyone is going to care.

[BigSqwert]

Who would he have the option to sue? The only candidate I can see is the federal government. From my reading of the Illinois state constitution, it appeared to me that there was no specific requirements laid out on the Illinois Legislature as to what was required before a person was impeached and removed from office. Without a "High crimes and misdemeanors" clause or at least something resembling that, the legislature appears to have the right to impeach any governor for any reason they want and then exclude him from service based on that.

That's my whole problem with this issue. It's completely undemocratic. The people voted someone in to office and the legislature can arbitrarily remove that person from office for any reason they want? What is this the U.S.S.R.?

[Soxbadger]

The only reason they did it was because Blago's rating was like 6%.

 

If he was more popular the reason they dont railroad him out is that they are worried in 2-4 years they wont be reelected.

[Balta1701]

That's my whole problem with this issue. It's completely undemocratic. The people voted someone in to office and the legislature can arbitrarily remove that person from office for any reason they want? What is this the U.S.S.R.?

In that case, the solution is to amend the illinois state constitution.

[BigSqwert]

In that case, the solution is to amend the illinois state constitution.

Agreed

[Texsox]

It seemed to me that the entire process happened way quicker than I ever imagined and with far less testimony or facts that what I would have expected. I get that Mark Fuhrman framed a guilty guy sort of feeling.

[lostfan]

The only reason they did it was because Blago's rating was like 6%.

 

If he was more popular the reason they dont railroad him out is that they are worried in 2-4 years they wont be reelected.

I was about to say this. They can do it when nobody wants to protest, because Blago sucks. If they would, they'd have to be retarded to do it, because the ones leading the charge wouldn't be re-elected.