Blag the Extorter

Just follow your nose. It's not like Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich didn't already exude the stink of corruption.

In April of this year, a Chicago Tribune investigation revealed that at least three of every four $25,000 donors to Boss Blag got something from the administration.... including jobs, contracts or favorable regulatory rulings.

A month later Illinois lawmakers passed an ethics reform bill targeted directly at Blagojevich and his record-setting efforts to collect campaign contributions from state contractors.

The effect of this legislation .... it kicked Boss Blag's arm-twisting into high gear.... "with the urgency of a salesman meeting his annual sales target," according to U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. The end of July The Tribune reported that in the month since lawmakers passed the ethics bill, the governor ramped up his efforts by collecting more than a quarter of a million dollars from those with business before the state.

Besides using his office in an effort to trample the Tribune's editorial voices of criticism, Boss Blag thumbed his nose at the state's attempts to reign him in .... toward the end of August he vetoed the ethics bill saying he wants it to be tougher and to include lawmakers as well as himself.

Undoubtedly Boss Blag knew he was being bugged and taped.... but he must have thought he was the windy city's Tony Soprano..... too smart for the Feds, using his "organization" to make crime pay, big time.

His big take would be the selling of the U.S. Senate seat vacated by president-elect Barack Obama. By Illinois law, as governor, Boss Blag is the only person who can name Obama's replacement.

Note to Illinois lawmakers: You couldn't see this situation developing? You were happy to just let this extortionist name your one of two U.S. Senators for Illinois?

Yesterday.... federal prosecutor Fitzgerald of Scooter Libby investigation fame made Boss Blag and his chief of graft, John Harris, do the perp walk, arresting them on corruption charges.

Yet......

Despite Fitzgerald saying that "the breadth of corruption laid out in these charges is staggering," hours after his arrest Boss Blag was out of jail on his own recognizance.... on a $4,500 bond.... chump change to Boss Blag. (ABC)

Today he's back in the governor's office and as of this writing still has the sole power to appoint Obama's replacement.

Even though according to the Tribune timeline, the "federal criminal investigation" of Boss Blag began in June of 2004, an investigation of what has been labeled as a political crime spree, he was, and still is, allowed to continue to abuse the considerable power of his office.

We need to hear much more.....

McClellan Purges WH Kool-Aid

For three years, until April of 2006, a power-trusting White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, drank the Karl Rove-brewed Kool-aid.

McClellan bellied up to the bar as front man to the White House press corps for the selling of the Bush administration's outrages..... the Iraq war, the evasion of responsibility for outing covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, and even the inept administration response to the hurricane Katrina disaster.

It was the perfect political storm.... the leveraging of McClellan's idealism to further the White House's deceptive political agenda.... "Trot out Scottie, he'll say it.... he even believes it. Ha, ha, ha."

Now, given the distance to decompress and reflect on those years, McClellan has purged himself all over the administration's master puppeteers.... Rove, Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and even his formerly idealized president Bush in his forthcoming book, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception."

In McClellan's memoir.... part confession, part apology....he describes a White House driven by unrelenting campaign-mode political propaganda, led by an incurious, self-deceiving, and finally off-the-track Bush.

Of course, because of the immediate, and predictable campaign to discredit the book by minions of the Bush administration, an under-siege "McClellan Defends Memoir." (WaPo)

Rove compared McClellan to (gasp) a "left-wing blogger," and Dan Bartlett, former counsel to the president said on the Today show... "He talks about wanting to change the tone in Washington, and yet uses inflammatory terms like 'propaganda machine,' and 'shading the truth.' "

In his defense, McClellan said it took him some time after leaving the White House to come to terms with his experience there. When the Iraq war started, "my beliefs were different" he said in a Today show interview. "I trusted the president's foreign policy team, and I believed the president when he talked about the great and gathering danger from Iraq. I believe the president believed it too. He had convinced himself.... I struggled to come to grips with how things went so badly off course."

As a Bush loyalist, McClellan wanted to believe.... but when he started stonewalling reporters because even he was confused as to the facts of the Plame case, and then lied to by Rove and Libby about their involvement.... he found himself unceremoniously dumped on the front lawn with vague promises from The Decider about sitting in rockin' chairs on his porch in Texas in the years to come while reflecting on the good ol' days.

But, a funny thing happened on the way to the rockin' chair.... McClellan found his moral compass.

And wrote a book about his miraged-wanderings in the ethical-desert of the Bush White House.

Bush: A Laugh a Minute

This week was a beaut....

Tuesday, Admiral William J. Fallon, commander of American forces in the Middle East whose outspoken public statements on the wisdom of diplomacy in dealing with Iran put him at odds with the Bush administration, announced his early retirement.... the White House mood being "Here's your hat and coat, what's the hurry?"

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), house majority leader, called Fallon's departure "yet another example that independence and the frank, open airing of experts' views are not welcome in this administration." (NYTimes)

The Decider is in no mood to listen to those who would counsel diplomacy, after all, war is beautiful. On Thursday Bush told U. S. military and civilian personnel in Afghanistan by videoconference... "I must say, I'm a little envious.... I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you... in some ways romantic, you know, confronting danger." (Slate)

Spoken by someone who never put himself in danger, except to play "hot planes" with his guard unit... when he showed up.

While uttering this jaw-dropping inanity, Bush was flanked by Defense Secretary Robert Gates who also didn't experience combat.... serving in the Air Force at an ICBM base.... and Vice President Dick Cheney whose numerous deferments enabled him to avoid the "romance" of serving in any capacity. These are the boys playing soldier with the lives of others.

The Decider has just been full of himself lately, singing and dancing on the morass he'll leave behind. At the Gridiron Club dinner, attended by Washington's journalistic and political disgraces, Bush serenaded them, to the tune of "Green Green Grass of Home"....

"That old White House is behind me.... I spend my days clearing brush, clear my head of all the fuss, like that big fuss you made over Harriet and Brownie. Down the lane I look and here comes Scooter, finally free of the prosecutor. It's good to touch the brown, brown grass of home.... Down the lane I look, Dick Cheney is strolling with documents he'd been withholding, it's good to touch the brown brown grass of home." (WaPo)

And, everyone laughed and had such a good time.... while Hurricane Katrina victims still struggle, Scooter Libby got away with outing an undercover CIA agent and obscuring the White House lies that led us to war in Iraq, and Cheney was allowed to engineer the gutting of checks and balances that are the bedrock of good governance, to say nothing of the rending of citizens rights under the Constitution. Funny stuff.

Had enough?.... oh, but there's more. After repeatedly telling us "the fundamentals of our economy are strong" as home prices were dropping, mortgage loan defaults spiraling and financial markets imploding, The Decider finally fessed up yesterday admitting that the economy "is going through a tough time." (NYTimes)

As he spoke, investment bank Bear Stearns was being rescued by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and JP Morgan Chase because of crippling losses on mortgage-linked investments.

How bad is this "tough time".... as Balestra Capital hedge fund president James Melcher said: "If the Fed hadn't acted this morning and Bear did default on its obligations, then that could have triggered a very widespread panic and potentially a collapse of the financial system."

In reaction to the financial tsunami coming down on us all, stocks continued their steep tumble. A panicked Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, warned of worse to come and unexpectedly cut interest rates by three-quarters of a percent.

But not to worry.... surveying what the financial havoc and ruin of The Decider's "cut taxes and spend" voodoo economic policies, his monstrously costly war, and the administration's "look the other way" abdication of oversight and regulatory restraints have wrought.... Bush boasted that the "fix" was already on the way, referring to the tax rebates scheduled to be mailed over the next few months.

That "fix" is really too silly and facile to even talk about. It's not even a finger in the crumbling financial dike.

When the country elected Frat House Bush they reasoned he would be more fun to have a beer with.... still having fun?

Bush's Criminal Compassion

"Compassionate Conservative" is how candidate George W. Bush defined himself in 2000 and vowed that if made president "politics, after a time of tarnished ideals, can be higher and better"

We now know Bush isn't a conservative. Conservative "values" like fiscal responsibility, avoidance of nation building and tough enforcement of the law have been trampled under King George's buckled boot.

But, it's the compassion part of his self-description that is the most stunningly perverted. He has no compassion for our military.... kept at his almost lone insistence in the crossfire of tribal hatreds in Iraq.

Or, for border agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean who are in prison serving sentences of 11 and 12 years for wounding a fleeing drug runner who was given immunity to testify against them. Bush has rejected all pleas that he reduce their sentences or grant them pardons.

But, Bush has bestowed his selective compassion on convicted perjurer "Scooter" Libby by commuting his 30-month prison sentence.

Libby, Vice President Cheney's alter-ego chief of staff, was convicted of lying to a grand jury and federal agents and obstructing justice in the investigation of the leak of the name of a covert CIA operative whose husband tried to unmask the Big Lie of intelligence manipulation.... manipulated intelligence used by the White House as the battering ram of justification for the bloody, costly and unwinnable Iraq war.

And, even as egregious as Libby's commutation is, even more so was the way Bush did it.... without even a nod to precedence or evenhanded justice. It was "A Decision Made Largely Alone." (WaPo)

For this crony, Bush short-circuited the legal system. He didn't run the request for commuting Libby's sentence through the lawyers at the Justice Department, nor even ask the chief prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, for his input.

A disgusted Fitzgerald rejected Bush's action saying "Before the bar of justice all should be equal." It's now obvious, for King George's brand of justice, some are more equal than others.... and his "higher ideals" is shorthand for highhanded expediency in the pursuit of his agenda.

King George has made it abundantly clear, he's not just outside and above the law.... he is the law.