Sign up now!
Click here to receive free updates on headline news from John T. Reed

View Cart

 Bookmark and Share

Featured Products

Succeeding
1 year Subscription to Real Estate Investor's Monthly
Distressed Real Estate Times
How to Get Started in Real Estate
How to Buy Real Estate for at Least 20% Below Market Value

Checkout
How to Order

Copyright by John T. Reed

The governor of Illinois was wiretapped saying that he wanted to get some substantial favor for naming a senator to replace Obama who resigned from the Senate because he was elected president.

1. I do not see what Blagojevich did that was illegal. Shooting your mouth off is not illegal. Talking about breaking the law is not illegal. To break the law, he must actually do something like what he talked about. Soliciting a bribe is illegal, but he does not seem to have done that in the recorded phone calls.

2. If he did not actually do something that was illegal, I do not see what the grounds are for impeaching him.

3. He is still the governor.

4. Under Illinois law, when a U.S. Senate seat becomes vacant during the term of the Senator in question (Obama), the governor appoints a person to serve in the seat for the remainder of the term—two years in this case.

5. Blagojevich appointed Roland Burris whose main qualification for the job appears to be that he is black.

6. At the press conference where Blagojevich announced the appointment of Burris, Congressman Bobby Rush dared white politicians to try to stop Burris from filling Obama’s seat predicting that they would not have the guts to do so because Burris is African-American. Rush sounded half drunk and looked like a homeless guy who had been cleaned up for the occasion. The phrase I spoke when I heard Rush’s comments about the Burris nomination was “extortionate thug.” At that moment, I did not recall who he was. Bobby Rush is the Congressman from the First District of Illinois. That is the blackest district in America according to Michael Barrone’s Almanac of American Politics. It is also the district that Barack Obama cynically selected as the one to move to from New York City apparently because he thought it offered his best chance to be elected Congressman—perhaps in part because of the scruffiness of the incumbent Congressman at the time: Bobby Rush. Rush is a co-founder of the Chicago Black Panther party, a convicted felon (illegal weapons possession), and an ex-convict. His son was fatally shot down on the street in the district which is better known as the South Side of Chicago. It is also the home of Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn, and Father Michael Pfleger. In 2000, Obama made his move for that Congressional seat. Rush defeated him and Obama never tried again, settling instead for an Illinois State Senate seat which he won by getting all of his Democrat primary opponents disqualified because of technical mistakes in their filing papers.

7. Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the U.S. Senate Democrats will not allow anyone appointed by Blagojevich to be seated in the Senate. There appears to be no legal basis for that threat.

8. It appears to me that the only legal avenue open to the Illinois State legislature is to hold a recall vote, if Illinois law permits such recalls.

9. The Illinois Lieutenant Governor said the citizens of Illinois believe in clean government. What planet did he just arrive from? Illinois has long had one of the most corrupt, if not THE most corrupt, governments in the nation. If this incident has shocked them into electing clean government for a change, good, but spare us from silly statements about the purity of Illinois politics.

10. The governor of Illinois can appoint anyone he wants as long as they are 30 years old, have been a U.S. citizen for at least nine years, and are residents of Illinois. I repeat: anyone. There are no other standards. Unless the Illinois state legislature can prove Burris paid a bribe to Blagojevich for the seat, they have no say in the matter. Blagojevich could have appointed a convicted felon like Bobby Rush, a homeless person, a 35-year-old Cambodian-American who just moved to Illinois, whomever. Blagojevich looks like enough of a punk to have appointed a Republican with an excellent chance of being reelected to take revenge against the Democrats in the legislature who have turned on him. The Illinois Democrats should be relieved that he did not and let it go.

11. Harry Reid needs to announce that the Democrat Senate counsel has advised him that they have no authority to stop Burris from being seated and welcome Burris to the Senate lest Burris vote against the Democrats out of spite when he becomes a Senator.

12. If Obama had any character whatsoever, when he first arrived in his target political neighborhood and state and started hanging around with the people listed above, he should have said, “Ooops! Too sleazy. I’m outta here.”

But he didn’t. Now he claims for the umpteenth time that he was able to lie down with these dogs but not get fleas.