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By Scott Ritter
$11.16
By Eliza Griswold
$20
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AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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He’s been airing his side of the story to the press; now it’s time for the Illinois Senate to actually decide Rod Blagojevich’s fate. On Monday, the impeached Illinois governor went on trial, and his prospects aren’t looking good.
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A confession: We’ve been avoiding the news about embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, whose impeachment trial begins Monday. There are too many storm clouds on the horizon to waste time on this man’s circus. But we couldn’t help but pause to marvel at the chutzpah of the governor, who dropped this bombshell on Sunday.
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nation.co.ke
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Without skipping a beat, once-troubled financial entities are continuing to spend big to lobby Congress as they pocket billions in TARP bailout money. The lobbying is defended by the bail-outted firms as a “transparent and effective way” to be heard on policy issues.
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The Economist
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The Illinois House has voted to impeach Gov. Rod Blagojevich on charges of corruption—like, for example, trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat to the highest bidder. The road to impeachment now leads to the Illinois state Senate, where a two-thirds majority is needed to boot Blagojevich.
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abc.go.com
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By G.W. Schulz, Center for Investigative Reporting —
The inaugural episode of ABC’s newest reality television series did exactly as producer Arnold Shapiro told viewers it would: unabashedly celebrated the Department of Homeland Security. It also failed in every conceivable way to critically examine the largest reorganization of the federal government since World War II.
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By Joe Conason — As the government contemplates spending very large sums of money, it is reassuring to know that somebody still worries about waste. Or it would be reassuring, if only that somebody were not Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader.
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By Marie Cocco — I am supposed to be typing out words that articulate a highly audible and terribly alarmed tsk tsk. Instead, I am laughing with unrestrained amusement at the farce that Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has engineered. Honestly, I haven’t had this much fun since New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s implosion.
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AP photo / Paul Beaty
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Despite clear indications that not everyone on Capitol Hill is ready to acknowledge him as a U.S. senator, Roland W. Burris headed to Washington from Illinois on Monday, announcing that he was, in fact, the rightful new occupant of the seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.
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AP photo / M. Spencer Green
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By Stanley Kutler — Some have argued that the Senate does not have the right to reject embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s pick to replace Barack Obama. However, history clearly disagrees.
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AP photo / M. Spencer Green
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Rod Blagojevich, the most recent Illinois governor to be mired in scandal, is finding himself at odds with his own party after Democratic leaders announced Tuesday that Blagojevich’s attempt to fill Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat will be blocked, much to the disappointment of Blagojevich and his appointee, Roland Burris.
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AP photo / Khalil Hamra
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By Chris Hedges — We fool ourselves into believing we are immune to the savagery and chaos of failed states. Take away the rigid social structure, let society continue to break down, and we become, like anyone else, brutes.
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chicagotribune.com
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The good news for embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich in this report is that a Chicago artist is using the governor’s likeness as inspiration for his latest painting.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The troubles of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich have endangered one of the Democratic Party’s safest U.S. Senate seats.
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Flickr / jburwen
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How many Illinois state House members voted Monday to begin impeachment proceedings against Gov. Rod Blagojevich? 113. How many Illinois state House members are there? 113. But in a twist, the governor retains the power to name Barack Obama’s successor, although the U.S. Senate has no intention of recognizing a Blagojevich appointee.
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AP photo / Kevin Wolf
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By Rep. Dennis Kucinich — Once they were as gods, but the deities of the American banking system are now in ruins, plunged from their pedestals into the maw of taxpayer largesse. There was a time when their power was real. Come with me to Cleveland 30 years ago today.
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By Eugene Robinson — Obama’s statements in the Blagojevich case have been cautious and precise. For most politicians, that would be good enough. For the man who inspired the nation with a promise of “change we can believe in,” it’s not.
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RJ Matson, Roll Call —
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There’s a revolution underway in Chinese culture as young women flock from villages to factory employment in the cities, leaving traditional values behind.
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AP file photo
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By Chris Hedges — The world is far more complex than our childish vision of good and evil. We as a nation and a culture have no monopoly on virtue. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when viewed from the receiving end, are state-sponsored acts of terrorism.
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After 40 years in the U.S. Senate, the Alaska Republican bid his Capitol Hill colleagues goodbye on Thursday and was given a standing ovation as he finished his speech.
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senate.gov
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Ted Stevens will not be returning to work in the Senate after surviving there longer than any Republican ever. The convicted felon lost his re-election battle with Democrat Mark Begich by a few thousand votes after leading on election night. The news came on Stevens’ 85th birthday.
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By Marie Cocco — It was nothing Bush did—no decision he made, no policy he pursued, no faith that he placed in ideological dogma—that he finds regrettable. Bush told a cable network, “I regret saying some things I shouldn’t have said” over the course of eight tumultuous years.
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AP photo / Al Grillo
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By G.W. Schulz, Center for Investigative Reporting —
When Sarah Palin brags about the self-reliance of her state, she doesn’t mention the mobile command communications vehicle, bought with federal dollars to help keep her home town of 7,028 safe from terrorism. Thanks in part to an anti-terrorism bonanza, Alaska is one of the greatest per-capita beneficiaries of federal funding among the 50 states.
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By Marie Cocco — For a steel sculpture of migrating salmon, amongst other goodies, Ted Stevens—one of the lions of the Senate—was willing to forfeit the kingdom.
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senate.gov
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Even as his conviction has politicos rethinking Senate filibuster math, Ted Stevens of Alaska says he’ll fight the verdict and continue campaigning for re-election. It’s not all bad news for the longest serving Senate Republican—and you really can’t make this up—the Senate doesn’t ban convicted felons.
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senate.gov
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Sen. Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, has been convicted on seven counts of lying about gifts he received while in office. Unless he steps down, the Republican Party will be running a convicted felon for the Senate in the Nov. 4 election.
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Wikimedia Commons / edited for effect
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By Chris Hedges — The old assumptions and paradigms about capitalism and free markets are dead. A new, virulent populism, still inchoate, is slowly and painfully rising to take their place. This populism will determine the future of the country. It is as likely to be right-wing as left-wing.
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By Marie Cocco — After the eye-popping fundraising revelations of the past couple of days, the need that’s far more pronounced is the imperative of acting quickly after November’s election to restore some common sense to the presidential campaign finance system—before we don’t have any system at all.
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By Amy Goodman — The candidates’ coffers are swelling with larger and larger bundles of cash, but don’t hold your breath waiting for the extended television discussions of this, because it’s the broadcasters who profit the most.
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engadget.com
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Alaska’s Sen. Ted Stevens (the Internet as a “series of tubes” guy) testified in his own defense at his corruption trial Friday, blaming the fact that he received $250,000 in free house renovations and gifts first on his wife, then family friends, and ultimately on the many responsibilities of a U.S. senator.
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dailykos.com
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First Dude Todd Palin has said he and some “buddies” built his lakefront home in Wasilla, Alaska, but an investigation by the Village Voice connects the home’s construction, if circumstantially, to the beneficiaries of a local boondoggle championed by his wife.
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By David Sirota — Is Henry Paulson a crony communist or a businessman? The answer could be the difference between economic disaster and recovery.
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starwoodhotels.com
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What’s $85 billion if you don’t get to spend it? Just days after taxpayers saved AIG from ruin, executives of the insurance giant spent $440,000 pampering themselves at the exclusive St. Regis resort in Monarch Beach, Calif.
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By David Sirota — The marriage of American capitalism and democracy has always been a Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee affair—stormy and erratic since its hasty wedding. But during the debate over a Wall Street bailout this week, we watched that matrimonial knot unwind into a tangled tale of terror.
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By Eugene Robinson — A new internal report confirms our fears about the politicization of the Justice Department. That same contempt for government can be found in the current financial crisis as well as the meteoric rise of the former mayor of Wasilla.
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Flickr / bobster1985
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So much for Sarah Palin the reformer: The Alaska governor took home more than $25,000 in gifts during her less than two years in office, including “honorific tributes, expensive artwork and free travel for a family member.” Bombshells like that are rocking the right wing, along with Palin’s embarrassing interviews, which have prompted conservative columnist Kathleen Parker to declare, “My cringe reflex is exhausted.”
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By Amy Goodman — The Democratic and Republican national conventions have passed, but controversy surrounds how they were funded and how they were run.
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pnt.gov
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Three reports from the Department of Interior’s inspector general found wide-ranging ethics violations between the department’s Minerals Management Service and the energy companies from which it is charged with collecting royalties. Allegations of financial improprieties, illegal gifts, and even the occasional sex- and drug-crazed indiscretion created what the author of the reports called “a culture of ethical failure” within the agency. Ouch.
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By Eugene Robinson — John McCain is no silver-tongued orator, as he proved in St. Paul, but it’s hard not to be stirred when he speaks of wanting only to serve a cause greater than himself—until you take a closer look and see that he’s running one of the most egocentric presidential campaigns in memory.
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John McCain, a lobbyist and fixture of Congress for more than 30 years, nominee of the incumbent party and self-proclaimed foot soldier in the Reagan revolution, tried to convince Americans Thursday night that only he could bring real reform to that wretched place called Washington. Updated
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AP photo / Lynne Sladky
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Jack Abramoff was given four years in prison by a federal judge Thursday—a sentence whittled down from a possible 11 years because he cooperated with investigators —for his part in the fraud and corruption scandal that jolted Washington and landed several other lobbyists and Capitol Hill players in trouble as well.
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AP photo / Anja Niedringhaus
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By Anna Badkhen — Many Iraqis struggle every day to find work, but a shortage of jobs, superimposed on a tradition of using personal connections to do business, has led to what Iraqis complain is an explosion in corruption and graft among their nation’s officials.
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The Beijing Olympics are proof that the rule of China’s Communist Party has been validated. Yet human rights abuses continue. What’s really going on? What kind of country is China becoming? Two new books help provide answers.
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AP photo / Jeff Chiu
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It’s just too bad that the only Americans apparently qualified to advise John McCain on how to deal with the world are those hopelessly corrupted by hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent payments from foreign countries, such as beleaguered Georgia. Good thing that guys like Randy Scheunemann (above, left), whose two-man lobbying firm took in a cool million from Georgia since 2004, have a superhuman ability to separate their analysis from any financial considerations.
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Investigative reporter Murray Waas has better Justice Department sources than just about anybody, so it’s no surprise he keeps breaking stories on the ongoing mess there. The latest: “The investigation into the firings of nine U.S. attorneys has been extended to encompass allegations that senior White House officials played a role in providing false and misleading information to Congress.”
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By William Pfaff — The Chinese authorities’ anxiety that the Olympic Games will be a success reflects their need to find international confirmation of their general political and economic policies of the past 20 years.
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Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, beset by accusations of corruption and bribery, announced Wednesday that he will resign after an internal Kadima Party election to choose a new leader on Sept. 17.
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treehugger.com
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Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska was indicted Tuesday on seven felony counts in a corruption scandal stemming from some mutual back-scratching he allegedly engaged in with oil service and construction company VECO. The charges against the Republican include secretly accepting renovations to his vacation home in exchange for official favors to VECO.
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Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery
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