Make my Day......GOV Blagojevich arrested.

[Darius871]

Yep, he did it all right... cojones

C-SPAN video:

http://www.c-span.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-R-13848

[MrFun]

Re: Now this is how you handle PR!

Originally posted by Naked Gents Rut
The Obama team finally released its report at 4:30 pm on the day before Christmas Eve, with Obama and Emanuel thousand of miles away and unavailable for comment until after the holidays. Well played, sir.

It's the twenty-first century. Geographical distance does not cut off communication between people.

[Darius871]

Originally posted by Darius871
C-SPAN video:

http://www.c-span.org/Watch/watch.as...aId=HP-R-13848

P.S. lol, skip to about 15:00 where they make abundantly clear that this is 100% about the race card. Well played sir!

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by Darius871
P.S. lol, skip to about 15:00 where they make abundantly clear that this is 100% about the race card. Well played sir!

I passed by a tv monitor at lunch, saw the news conference and said . I wouldn't say its 100% about the race card, but there's certainly a race card there. Reid & Co. are now in a conundrum.

Also Blogs knows that this appointment will be gone over with a fine-tooth comb. My bet: The appointment will be sparkling clean. Then the Governor will argue, "See? I'm an honest guy after all. "

Well played, indeed.

[Darius871]

Yeah I didn't think of that angle - the fact of a squeaky-clean appointment will cast a reasonable doubt on what his intent really was in those recordings. Oh, to be a fly on the wall when he talks to his crack legal team about strategies like this...

And my god Fitzgerald is a maroon! All he had to do was arrest Blago after money exchanges hands but before the official appointment, and then there would have been at least a chance of preventing this. How letting the mark tighten his own noose would have been a bad thing is beyond me...

[snoopy369]

Perhaps he realized that Blago was as deep in now as he ever was going to be? I wouldn't assume anything about Fitzgerald - he's proven to be pretty darn smart so far. Perhaps he's playing a deeper game than you know.

[Darius871]

Well, the only half-assed reason he publicly gave was to prevent from happening precisely what happened today. So far that plan's worked like gangbusters.

[Darius871]

Listening to it I didn't notice they managed to utter the word "lynch" not once, but twice! This guy's gonna give Clarence Thomas a run for his money...

The race card is played: Don't "hang or lynch" the black man chosen by Rod Blagojevich

Posted By: Toby Harnden at Dec 30, 2008 at 20:51:23

Taking to the podium at the end of a bizarre, shambolic press conference in which Governor Rod Blagojevich sought to appoint Roland Burris to the US Senate, Congressman Bobby Rush dared white Democratic senators to block a black man from joining their ranks.

He urged people "not to hang or lynch the appointee as you try to castigate the appointer" and, after saying repeatedly that Burris would be the only African-American in the Senate, said that he believed no senator would want "to go on record to deny one African-American from being seated in the US Senate".

Rush is a former Black Panther who trounced Barack Obama in the 2000 Democratic primary when the then state senator challenged him for his House of Representatives seat.

The grinning Burris was told by Blagojevich - who policed the press conference - that "you're the senator". He appeared clueless about the money he'd donated to the governor, which will only add to the taint of the appointment.

As he left the room, Blagojevich echoed Rush, saying: "Feel free to castigate the appointer but don't lynch the appointee."

Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, has already said that Burris "cannot be an effective representatives of the people of Illinois" and "will not be seated by the Democratic caucus". But the blatant injection of race into the equation will make life very uncomfortable indeed for Obama and his party.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/toby_ha...od_blagojevich

[Naked Gents Rut]

Well, ****. We were all thinking Emanuel would be the first to go down, but Richardson ended up being the one.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, tapped in December by President-elect Barack Obama to serve as secretary of Commerce, has withdrawn his name for the position, citing a pending investigation into a company that has done business with his state.

"Let me say unequivocally that I and my Administration have acted properly in all matters and that this investigation will bear out that fact," he said Sunday in a report by NBC News' Andrea Mitchell. "But I have concluded that the ongoing investigation also would have forced an untenable delay in the confirmation process."

A federal grand jury is investigating how a California company that contributed to Richardson's political activities won a New Mexico state contract worth more than $1 billion. Richardson said in a statement issued by the Obama transition office that the investigation could take weeks or months but expressed confidence it will show he and his administration acted properly.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28493919

Hopefully this is the only member of Obama's team that will be forced to quit due to corruption, but I suspect that won't be the case.

[Boris Godunov]

There's a big difference between A) preventing media speculation and B) simply defusing it by leaving the general public with little reason to pay attention to it. One is damned near impossible (absent transcripts etc.), while the latter can be accomplished with a few reassuring words through actual face-time that most people will accept without a second thought. Like I said before, even if there's little to gain besides image (or on a bad day nothing to gain), either way there's absolutely nothing to lose. You haven't explained to me what the actual harm would be.

I think David Axelrod could explain the potential harm in this. There's always a potential for blunders in such situations.

But I don't see any reason why an Emanuel presser in which he would say absolutely nothing would remotely "diffuse" any media situation, and can just as easily see that it would have fanned the flames of it.

The media wants access, as NGR said, and the have gotten it--from Obama himself. They could give a rat's ass about an Emanuel presser when they have Obama addressing the issue a half a dozen times in pressers.

Wasn't at least part of this big "change" in the way Washington works supposed to be somewhat more transparency and direct engagement with the public, instead of hiding under the sheets like Bush & Co. have made the norm for at least the last half-decade? That's at least partially what I voted for last month, but silly me for getting my hopes up...

What information have they withheld? The internal investigation was released as soon as they were allowed to do so, since Fitz asked them to delay releasing it because of his investigation. Obama has answered questions in press conferences, presumably as well as Emanuel would have been able to answer them. So what's the beef here?

[DinoDoc]

Well, ****. We were all thinking Emanuel would be the first to go down, but Richardson ended up being the one.

Are Obama's vetting team a buch of morons or did they seriously think that was going to prove to not be a distraction? I would have thought such a thing would have kept someone from even being nominated.

[Boris Godunov]

How do you know that the grand jury didn't convene until after he was selected?

[DinoDoc]

Grand Juries don't appear out of thin air Boris.

[Boris Godunov]

Grand Juries don't appear out of thin air Boris.

It's been weeks since Richardson was tapped, and this story leads me to believe the GJ was just seated. It's not as if they've issued indictments.

[Naked Gents Rut]

this story leads me to believe the GJ was just seated

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aL0GGUluJeT8&refer=us