• CNSNews: Tell me this wouldn’t disqualify a Republican.
• Breitbart: But at least she’s focused on the top priority of any Secretary of State: the weather.
• Trib: Seniors who lived through the Great Depression say this one ain’t one.

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Stemmer stands by its earlier analysis. The Senate can’t legally deny Burris’ appointment on the say-so of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that Blagojevich committed a crime, especially since Fitzgerald has yet to release any support for his accusation. Stemmer believes Blagojevich is largely innocent and a fall guy for Obama. When Fitzgerald started getting incriminating stuff on the Office of the President Elect® he broke up the wiretap before a crime was committed.

Remember, this is the same prosecutor that pursued Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Bush’s entire White House for four years over the Valerie Plame “outing” nonsense, persisting long after it became clear that (a) there was no crime; and (b) that it was Richard Armitage—not Cheney, Rove, or Libby—who had actually committed said non-crime.

The Fitzgerald we see now went through the trouble and cost of securing a tap on the governor’s phone only to suddenly call it off and arrest Blagojevich right before the new President takes office. His first statements assured us that Obama was in no way suspected of involvement. Does this sound like the assumption of innocence he gave Dick Cheney?

Members of the press dutifully accept that Fitzgerald is an impartial, thorough prosecutor. If so, they should explain why, in a case as fishy as this, he cleared Obama without delay, yet in the “case” against Bush and his staff, he wasted years and millions of taxpayer during a war, all the while knowing that the people he was investigating were innocent.

In happier times.

In the part of the wiretap we know about, Blago said Obama wanted [Senate Candidate 1] for the Senate seat but wasn’t willing to give anything in return “except appreciation.”  The Associated Press claims that Candidate 1 was “certainly” Valerie Jarrett, a friend and advisor of Obama’s. Jarrett removed herself from consideration shortly after Blago’s rant but before the wiretap was leaked—only to be immediately appointed to a lesser job in Obama’s cabinet.

It seems for all the world that Obama’s people were starting to get recorded on the wiretap, at which point someone in Fitzgerald’s office leaked to Obama’s people that the phone was bugged, causing Obama’s people to scurry away.  

Another burning question the press isn’t asking: why isn’t Fitzgerald declaring how imperative it is to find who leaked the wiretap to the press?  You’d think in an investigation so weighty as to force the arrest of a sitting governor that this would deserve more mention, seeing as it’s, ya’ know, massively illegal.

The real reason the senate will back down and seat Burris is that he threatens to distract congress from the “important work” of rushing its non-specific $1T pork spending bill into law. For this we owe Blagojevich thanks. After spending a billion dollars to get Obama elected, slating a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to reward his supporters during a big recession seems a far greater crime than saying “fuck” repeatedly on the phone.

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Most people are conservative when it comes to their own area of professional expertise, which might explain why liberals always appoint, say, lawyers to "manage," say, the medical profession.

Sally Pipes: Obama will ration your healthcare.

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The Minnesota Canvassing Board claims this vote is "clearly for Franken."

John Lott shows picture after picture proving that Minnesota “recount” is rife with vote theft.

Cheney on  Biden: ”If he wants to diminish the office of the vice president, that’s obviously his call. President-elect Obama will decide what he wants in a vice president and apparently, from the way they’re talking about it, he does not expect him to have as consequential a role as I have had during my time.”

Politico: We’re finished. Unfunded government obligations now exceed the total wealth in the country.

The New Deal cost an estimated $32 billion in its day, which would be about $500 billion in today’s dollars. The Marshall Plan cost about $12.7 billion, which is the equivalent of a paltry $115.3 billion. The Louisiana Purchase? The French got $15 million, which would be worth about $217 billion today. 

If you take those three items, add in the adjusted costs of the Race to the Moon, the savings and loan crisis, the Korean War, the Iraq war, the Vietnam War and assistance for NASA, you still get to just $3.92 trillion—not even half of the taxpayers’ exposure today. 

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• NRO on “climate change”: For eight years, the United States has been the object of criticism, much of it harsh and unfair, for its unwillingness to be afflicted with sweeping emissions limits and the punitive economic consequences that will go along with them. And now, the very same international parties that censured the United States for looking to its own interests have themselves become the agents of delay.
• One more reason teacher’s unions should be illegal.
• Obama: “Don’t waste your question.”

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Magilla Blagrilla for sale.

The Feds gave him a heads-up, calling to tell him a car was on its way, but they arrested the Gov at home in front of the wife and kids, seemingly humiliating him in response to his taunts.

But is this really why? The news loves to characterize Patrick Fitzgerald as methodical, “thorough,” and leaving “no stone unturned” in pursuit of justice. Presumably they base this on his two-year investigation of the Bush Administration for the alleged “outing” of Valerie Plame, a CIA staffer. Not a great example.

Plame’s husband Joe Wilson had secured a minor assignment to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had attempted to import nuclear ingredients from Nigeria. He returned from Nigeria claiming Saddam was innocent. Journalist Robert Novak found this suspicious and wrote an article mentioning that Wilson’s wife Plame worked for the CIA and may have secured him the job. This ballooned into a “scandal.” The liberal media—always happy to report leaks that impede the war effort—screamed that someone high up in Bush’s cabinet leaked Plame’s identity in retaliation for Wilson debunking the Iraq nuclear threat.

As investigator, Fitgerald spent 45 months and $25.8 million of taxpayers’ money scrutinizing the Bush White House. In the end he issued a single indictment against vice president Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby—not for the outing Plame, but for perjury. Libby had incorrectly recalled something that someone else said at one of hundreds of meetings he had attended in earlier months.

The great irony is that by this time the investigators had already determined there was no original crime. The outting charge didn’t apply to Plame. Novak had, in his words, “learned Plame’s name from her husband’s entry in Who’s Who in America.” As he testified to Fitzgerald, Novak merely cross-checked the “who’s who” entry with two sources: a government official who was “not a political gunslinger” and a spokesperson from the CIA. 

Covert agent Valerie Plame appears alongside her husband in the highly classified Vanity Fair magazine.

So the classified information liberals held as irreparably damaging to national security was available to anyone with a computer and a phone. Plame was no Emma Peel. She was an office worker.

Even more shockingly, it was later revealed that Fitzgerald knew all the while he was grilling Scooter Libby who had actually “leaked” Plame’s status: Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. So Fitzgerald had pursued, investigated, and cross-examined as suspects the highest officials of the administration for a case that was already solved. When this started to become public knowledge, he grabbed the consolation prize of indicting Libby. It was all that was left of a frivolous investigation.

Fitzgerald is tenacious, but there’s nothing “thorough” about a costly search for facts that are already known—and known to be legal. It’s more accurate to call it a show trial, made worse because it undermined the administration ability to conduct the war. 

Which brings us back to Blagojevich. Fitzgerald might have been chomping at the bit to bring a crooked official to justice, but why not wait till more “perps” emerged to bid on the seat, and money actually changed hands? Compared to his persistent and patient efforts to snag Rove or Cheney, his bagging of Blagojevich seems truncated. Couldn’t the net be cast wider simply by waiting?

Senator Obama declared “I had no contact with the governor or his office and so I was not aware of what was happening.” Yet his chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel contradicted this, stating that Obama and Blagojevich had active discussions about Obama’s replacement. In wiretaps, Blagojevich complained Obama’s team was “not willing to give me anything except appreciation. Fuck them.”

Fitzgerald describes the possibility Obama's campaign is involved (kidding).

You’d think a prosecutor that spent years interrogating the Bush administration over a trumped-up charge would use a similar standard for Blagojevich and the incoming Obama administration. Instead, Fitzgerald brushed away all question: “the complaint makes no allegations about the President-elect whatsoever.”

Obama and David Axelrod helped organize the effort to get Blagojevich elected in the first place. But just as with ACORN vote fraud, Tony Rezko, and William Ayers, the pundits assume away any meaningful connection between Obama and the scandal-ridden Democrat party of Illinois. And maybe the connection doesn’t exist—but not because Fitzgerald says so. The Plame incident suggests he’s not above putting politics ahead of justice. We should therefore consider the remote possibility that Fitzgerald reeled the Governor in before other Democrats could bite, and the net that caught Blagojevich could snare the protected species swimming in the same lake.

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