News From A Parallel World

Went to the home of some friends on Sunday, late afternoon. The occasion was a farewell party for a woman who expects to be leaving her body in the relatively near future.

A rainy, dark day, still winter, the sun discarded early on, but inside the house they were skipping the time of day and the rain. Stories got told, some pretty funny shit, and laughter, and tears, too, because nobody was denying anything.

The guest of honor was enveloped in companionship and love.

These are hard times for a lot of us, a dysfunctional economy, a superficial culture, and you can see the madness in the eyes of strangers, and there is a fear rising.

We can make it. I don’t know how, exactly, but so long as there are people like these hanging around, reminding us that we’ve got some powerful, sweet attributes, then we don’t have to go mad, and we can stand up even when we’re afraid.

Thomas Grossi is 64 years old, a decorated Viet Nam veteran. Last October, two weeks away from an early release on a thirty month incarceration, he was pulled out of a halfway house and sent back to prison to serve the remaining year on his original sentence.

In 2006, Grossi was convicted by a federal jury of making his west Oakland warehouse available for growing marijuana, assertively for medicinal purposes. He was sent to prison in July of 2007, a thirty-month sentence, and was eligible for early release after he enrolled in a program of counseling and substance abuse treatment.

In the spring of 2008, he was transferred to a halfway house. In October, 2008, a bare two weeks away from custodial release, he was ordered back to prison to serve the remaining one year on the original sentence. Why? Because he ate two slices of poppy seed cake.

I am not making this up.

As a condition of his halfway house deal, and of his pending early release, Grossi had signed a lot of forms, agreeing, among other things, to stay off drugs. He was periodically tested, and he was always tested following return from a weekend pass.

Last October, Grossi tested positive for morphine, a substance he has never used. The reason for this false positive? He’d ingested poppy seeds in a cake. Really.

Seems that this effect is known to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, in the fine print among the documents Grossi signed was a warning about poppy seeds. The Bureau believes one warning, no matter how buried, is sufficient. No retesting is permitted.

Director Robert McFadden denied Grossi’s appeal –– which was supported by sworn affidavit by a local realtor, the person who had offered him the offending dessert –– saying “You were provided due process.” McFadden did not mention that “due process” in the case of Bureau of Prisons hearings and appeals includes a prohibition against legal counsel in the proceedings.

Since Grossi is not known to have ever used morphine, since he knew that he would be tested upon returning from his weekend visit home, and since he was two weeks away from freedom, ordinary common sense would suggest that McFadden is too stupid for the job and ought to seek work as a commentator for F*X News.

The person who shared a little cake with her friend, one Mary Smartt [and you can keep your comments to yourself, okay?], said, “Here’s somebody who’s doing all the right things... and he inadvertently takes something, not a drug, and they throw him back in prison...”

There have been court cases on the issue. Twelve years ago, a Florida woman was awarded almost a million smackers when an insurance company withdrew its job offer when she failed a drug test after muching on a poppy seed bagel. In 1990, a St Louis cop got his job back, with pay, after the department drug-tested a fellow officer who ate some poppy seed bagels and discovered the cop might’ve been telling the truth.

The Bureau of Prisons, denying his appeal, reminded him that he could always seek court intervention. But by then it’s a little late. “You’re not able to intervene until the harm’s been done,” said Grossi’s attorney, David Michael. “By the time you get a court to consider it, you’re already six to eight months into a sentence that may have been wrong to begin with.”

Of course, underlying this twisted situation is the legal prohibition against marijuana. We’ve got this weed which affords users a nice buzz, if not a spiritual door-opener, without any significant harmful effects.

So why is this stuff illegal? The prisons are already overcrowded and we incarcerate more people per capita than virtually any other nation on earth. A large percentage of these criminals are potheads. Why? Your friendly neighbor, your orthodontist, your golf partner, your accountant’s mother, and the judge who presided over your child’s hearing on curfew violation, they all smoke it.

Is it a matter of moral stricture? In America? Land of the twelve-pack, botox, ‘American Idol’, and designer jeans? Land of George Bush?

It can’t be revenue, at least not to the government or to the people. Legalizing and taxing it would reduce the load on the courts and jails, lower the cost of criminal justice, and bring a flood of cash into federal coffers. Probably, you could fund an entire health care system with it.

There’s a nasty edge right below the surface. Pot isn’t legal because illegal pot is a huge cash empire for the growers and dealers and a source of funds for all the cop operations on the other side. It’s essentially the same thing with insurance industry ownership of health care. We can’t have universal care because the gatekeepers wouldn’t get their very lucrative piece of the action. How things work in 2009 America, land of the free.

Thomas Grossi is just another guy caught under the wheels. The Soviet Union died of institutional corruption and constipation, economic, political, and moral. Ours is on the same path.

[Associated Press, February 13, 2009:]    ”Blackwater said Friday it will no longer operate under the name that came to be known worldwide as a caustic moniker for private security, dropping the tarnished brand for a disarming and simple identity: Xe, which is pronounced like the letter "z."”

In other news, Barry Lamar Bonds announced that he was changing his name to Barack LaMar and hoped for a try-out with the Chicago White Sox.

In seclusion at his bungalow in Crawford, Texas, George W. Bush was said to be working on his own name change but hadn’t been able to think of one yet.

Well, a cesspool by any name smells as sweet...

More from the AP story:

    ”It's a rare surrender for a company that cherished a brand name inspired by the dark-water swamps of northeastern North Carolina, one that survived another rebranding effort about a year ago, following a deadly shooting in Baghdad's Nisoor Square. The decision to give it up underscores how badly the Moyock-based company's brand was damaged by that incident and other security work in Iraq.

    ”Blackwater acknowledged last year in an interview with the The Associated Press the damage to its reputation had persuaded the company to focus on lines of business other than private security contracting.

    ”The issue came to a head last month, when the State Department said it would not rehire Blackwater to protect its diplomats in Iraq after its current contract with the company expires in May. The company has one other major security contract, details of which are classified.

    ”The company is also replacing its bear paw logo with a sleeker black-and-white graphic based on letters that make up the company's new name. In a note to employees, president Gary Jackson said the name change reflects the company's new focus, and he indicated Xe would not actively pursue new security business.

    ”"This company will continue to provide personnel protective services for high-threat environments when needed by the U.S. government, but its primary mission will be operating our training facilities around the world," Jackson said. It has expanded other businesses such as aviation support, recently building a fleet of 76 aircraft that it has deployed to such hotspots as West Africa and Afghanistan. The company got its start in training and continues to build up that business. Last year, some 25,000 civilians, law enforcement and military personnel attended a Blackwater class.

    ”Late last year, prosecutors charged five of the company's contractors -- but not Blackwater itself -- with manslaughter and weapons violations. In January, Iraqi officials said they would not give the company a license to operate. The State Department responded by informing Blackwater it would not renew a contract that comprises a third of the company's nearly $1 billion in annual revenue.

    ”"It would hurt us," company CEO Erik Prince said in an interview before losing the State Department deal. "It would not be a mortal blow, but it would hurt us." Blackwater has rebranded before, introducing a new name -- Blackwater Worldwide -- and slight changes to its logo about a year ago. But Friday's announcement cuts ties entirely with a name created in 1997 when Prince and some of his former Navy SEAL colleagues launched the company.”

Look, what else do you do when your BRAND is “damaged”? At least the fuckers didn’t sell ‘naming rights’ to CitiGroup.

The AP article was, of course, quite modest in its description of Blackwater’s/Xe’s history, perhaps due to the influence of the company’s public relations hacks, the same folks who ran Hillary Clinton’s campaign before Mark Penn was fired.

Blackwater/Xe has been pre-eminently the one to call when your corporation and its executives needed professional killers. In fact, until it got too embarassing, they enjoyed criminal immunity in war zones, extended by the generosity of the Bush administration.

What Blackwater/Xe represents is so dangerous, even with a late-arriving interest among a few members of Congress, that its very existence threatens the nation. That is because its operatives, armed with advanced weaponry and trained in killing, are a private enterprise, virtually unregulated, outside of the reach of a democratic system.

Dictatorships, notably of the fascist variety, employ private armies. Private armies enforce the power of private corporations and businesses to crush latent dissent. Throughout South America, there are instances where there is no discernible difference between such armies and death squads.

In the United States, we have witnessed the growth of secret arrangements between government and corporate empire. The telephone companies worked with the Bush administration to implement a widespread program of illegal surveillance targeting American citizens, then got immunity for it from a corrupt Congress. Notably, Barack Obama supported this retroactive immunity.

If you were expecting the new President to overturn these disastrous, undemocratic policies, don’t hold your breath. In the past week, Justice Department lawyers told a California judge that they would continue the Bush position of insisting that a lawsuit –– brought by victims of kidnapping and torture –– could not be tried because the evidence the victims needed could not be seen, even by the judge and even if the judge were granted a security clearance.

The lawsuit is one brought against the Boeing subsidiary which furnished the private planes used in the kidnapping and flights to torture chambers in Saudi Arabia and other places which regard horrendous infliction of pain as enlightened penology.

Private corporations, in league with criminal governmental figures, are breaking the law with impunity. Boeing, AT&T, Halliburton, Blackwater... it’s a long list.

How sad for us all if it turns out that ‘change we can believe in’ turns out to be nothing better than re-branding.

Now, dear readers, we venture into virgin territory, those charges brought against Rod Blagojevich by his accusers which have curiously melted away in favor of the seemingly more sensational ‘sale of the Senate seat’ and the apparent manipulations surrounding the Tribune and its editorial board.

They are interesting, I think, not only because their contents differ materially from the ones we’ve considered so far but because they originate from events much earlier in time.

Remember that part of Blagojevich’s wiretapped amusement, as well as his anger, when he pointed out that in going past the legislature to fund the Tribune deal and retain Wrigley Field he was doing exactly what the Tribune’s editorial writers had been attacking him for while calling for his impeachment.

The Tribune was not the only source of propulsion for removing Blagojevich from office. This goal was an open secret among legislative leaders –– of both parties –– for more than a year.

The question is, why? What was it about this particular governor which galvanized damned-near everybody? Why would the legislators of his own party scheme to remove him?

It’s simple. Blagojevich was running state government in ways which did not genuflect before the solons, the high priests. He did not honor the sanctity of the system.

Legislatures are comprised of a bunch of politicos and hustlers, those with further ambition, those promoting their financial futures, some who just enjoy the show or like seeing their names in the paper. They disagree about minor items such as budgetary priorities and whose goose is going to get thoroughly greased, but in one concern they are as one: they want to be re-elected.

In order to get re-elected, these pols have got to do what Blagojevich is accused of doing, namely they’ve got sell something to buyers with cash. And they can’t do it if they can’t control the politics of the state. If there is a governor who, as the Tribune kept screaming about, “goes around the legislature,” he is threatening their ability to command those big campaign contributions because he’s undermining their control of government programs.

That, my friends, is the Great Sin this governor committed.

Let’s look at one example. As you might suspect, insurance companies are powerful in Illinois; they are pretty much everywhere now, a syndicate which extorts protection money from everyone for nearly everything, by law in many cases. They and their hookers in the Congress of the United States are the reason we do not have a decent, universal health care system.

In Illinois, in early 2007, the Governor proposed “Illinois Covered”, which would expand health care coverage for children whose families could not afford private health insurance but who did not qualify for Medicare. He proposed to fund it by raising the business tax.

The legislators lauded the goal. They were all in favor of health care for kids who needed it. But the funding was impermissible. It would injure small businesses, they said, and the tax would just be passed on to others anyway, and besides, it would be a disincentive to businesses to come to Illinois. Interesting. Of course, if they could just pass the tax on to their hapless customers, then it would hardly be much of a disincentive to aspirant business relocators. No matter. In politics, all you need is a cover story.

The Illinois House voted on the bill on May 10, 2007, defeating it 107-0. Twenty months later, the vote to impeach would be 117-1.

On November 7, 2007, the Illinois Department of Health Care and Family Service (DHSF), an agency under the direction of the Governor, adopted an “Emergency Rule” and filed a simultaneous “Permanent Rule” which immediately implemented a portion of the failed Blagojevich legislation.

The “Emergency Rule” attempted to do these two things:

1. Preserve health care benefits for parents/caretakers with annual incomes between 133% and 185% of the Federal Poverty Level. These were people in danger of losing coverage when Bush refused to extend the SCHIP coverage federally. And

2. Expand eligibility for health care coverage to 400% of the FPL. This would mean an income less than $80,000.00 for a family of four. In other words, implementation of this policy would make care available to everyone in the state.

Understand, please: it is not that details could not be arranged with the insurance thugs on matters such as administration of the program. Those boys will insist on their fees. But by going around the legislature, Blagojevich was depriving politicians of the clout they needed to raise vast sums, and that is something you will do only at your peril.

Six days after the emergency rule was announced, a legislative committee bearing the acronym JCAR, which reviews administrative rules before they go into effect, voted 9-2 to suspend it, declaring that no emergency existed, which was certainly true if you were a member of a legislator’s family and got health care for free.

The state DHSF “continued to implement and enroll applicants... under its expanded FamilyCare program,” according to the impeachment brief. And Blagojevich was to blame because, get this: “The statute on which DHSF relied to implement this...rule... provides that medical assistance may be provided to individuals ‘to whom a plan for coverage has been submitted to the Governor by (DHSF) and approved by him.’ The Governor, therefore, was required by law to approve the actions of DHSF.”

I know, I know, it makes no sense no matter how many times you read it. And then, to top it off, Blagojevich was actually present at meetings at which people from DHSF were also in attendance and where expansion of FamilyCare was discussed! Yup, both thumbs in the cookie jar.

But consider two more items. One: Blagojevich was acting on legal counsel which informed him that JCAR “does not have the authority to suspend the Emergency Rule... (and its role was) merely advisory –– it does not have the constitutional authority to suspend the regulation.”

And two: Blagojevich made it plain where he stood, saying “I’m going to continue to do what I think is right, and that’s one of the good things about being governor... (I) can do things like this.” And, “Where is it written that a handful of legislators –– 12 of them –– can tell the executive branch what it’s going to do when it comes to administering the executive branch?”

The answer to the latter question now appears to be that it’s written in the power of a legislature to impeach, convict, and remove a governor for any reason, or even no reason at all.

Blagojevich, according to the items tucked back inside behind the splashier charges, was a guy who would find a way to get some things done, even when that meant pissing-off a bunch of hacks who believed that such things were their own prerogative. It’s there again and again, when he tried to ensure that the state would have enough flu vaccine, when he tried to enable residents to get their prescriptions filled more cheaply through foreign pharmacies, when he tried to cut some graft out of the state budget.

These were his real crimes, the ones the legislature had been boiling over for a couple of years, long before Fitzgerald rode into town. He didn’t merely disagree with the legislature; he fought it. He found ways to outmaneuver it.

Know what else the committee considered grounds for impeachment?

You are not ready for this.

They accused him of forcing the state of Illinois to waste 21 million dollars because he got himself arrested.

Talk about a fair trial. Reminds me quite a bit, actually, of the “show trials” the Soviets once held, where people were destroyed for the educational value of it.

Reminds me of somebody else, too. There’s a great movie, “All The King’s Men,” Broderick Crawford playing Huey Long. The remake with Sean Penn’s cool, too, but I liked the first one. Even though the film depicts a crooked Long building an empire on payoffs and blackmail, which is the point of view of the guy who wrote the book, Robert Penn Warren, it developed that Warren was a part of the Louisiana high society which hated Long, and therefore I read a few other books and the picture changed.

What Warren didn’t look at too much was the fact that Long took on the biggest thieves and thugs in the state, the Standard Oil Company. He’d put himself through law school, and he’d gone after them. In the governor’s chair, Long finally imposed a tax on them, using the proceeds to build a system of roads and schools which lifted Louisiana into the 20th century as a progressive force. All school children were guaranteed free books, something never seen there before.

The oil guys didn’t go down easily. They fought Long through their own bought judges and legislators, through their own long-standing corrupt system. But Long kept beating them. An impeachment trial failed to remove him, because the people of the state loved him and stood for him. Still, it was a narrow miss. Elected to the Senate, he had begun to explore the possibility of running for President in 1936, against both FDR and the Republican nominee, because he considered them too conservative and too bound to big money. He was assassinated.

No, Blagojevich isn’t Long. He’s not in Long’s league. But maybe he aspired to it. Let’s not forget that Illinois –– despite Obama –– has a history of corruption. These guys who went after Blagojevich are about as pure as the driven snow, after the snow has been driven off Lake Michigan and under their tires.

On the day before his arrest was hurriedly announced by the saintly Fitzgerald, Blagojevich stood with the fired workers at Republican Window & Door and said that the state of Illinois, by his executive order, would cease doing business with Bank of America until the bank, which had already scarfed-up billions of ‘bailout’ dollars, made the deal which would keep the business open.

Yeah, Blagojevich played hardball, just like the guys he took on, and in some respects he wasn’t very good at it, but show me another governor who’s stood up to those bastards. Go ahead, take your time.

So that’s it for now, enough about a gone governor. Other things are happening. But the record needed to be made somewhere in cyberspace, however small the voice. It’s not popular, but that’s what makes it useful. They hanged this guy, and they did it for reasons, and they lied about it.

When I was much younger, a mere pup, possessor of the sort of preternatural wisdom which in retrospect occasions much hilarity, I was acquainted with a fellow who had been a California State Assemblyman and had been run out of Sacramento for “misuse” of his state-leased vehicle.

I remember his name, but I’m not sure if I should use it here. He was not much older than I back then and therefore is probably still alive, so I’ll give him a fig leaf and call him KM. His career was short. And although time has a habit of warping events and memories are tricky things, I think I can recall with some accuracy the story he told me.

KM had been a star quarterback at U.C. Berkeley, a law school graduate. Bright, articulate, and full of ideals, he’d arrived at the state capitol loaded with ideas and eager to serve.

He hadn’t been there long when a committee on which he served had a contentious fight over a piece of legislation which KM supported; it passed narrowly. On the following day, he was visited in his offices by a well-dressed fellow he’d never seen before. The man brought with him an envelope which he placed on KM’s desk. The envelope contained a packet of hundred dollar bills.

KM informed the man that if he ever saw him again in his office he would call the police; he then threw the man and his envelope out the door.

Within 24 hours, KM later told me, “they were all talking about it on the floor” of the Assembly, and the talk was not meant to be complimentary. The lobbyist with the envelope had been astonished and had passed this astonishment on to others, and the general tenor of remarks among his colleagues had been that KM was foolish, naive, and not likely to last long.

Since he’d already been hit by a few linebackers, KM was not afraid of lobbyists. He might’ve done better, though, to worry about his fellow legislators.

People are on the take, you see. All kinds of people. Money is always available at the nexus of power on every level of a society, including ours, and state legislatures are especially awash in it. It greases the machinery. It produces careers. And anybody who makes trouble about it, especially anybody who is on the inside, attracts enemies.

It happened that KM’s marriage ran into some difficulty. His wife decided to go “back home” –– somewhere in the midwest, I think it was –– and planned to drive there. But she wanted to take some things with her, and the family’s only vehicle was a small sportscar.

KM had been driving a state-leased car, a universal practice which survives to this day. He mentioned his situation to a veteran Democratic legislator who suggested that KM’s wife borrow the state car for the drive; she’d pay for the gas and bring it straight back. You will not be surprised to learn that once KM’s wife left the state the local press had the story: KM was abusing the privilege of the car lease, cheating the taxpayers.

And that was the end of KM’s political career.

I relate this story not to defend KM, who indeed did something he ought not to have done, but to widen the context. The public disclosure of his ‘crime’, such as it was, managed not only to force him from office but to discredit any complaints he might make about institutional corruption in Sacramento.

One might well observe that if every politician in office were to be prosecuted for taking bribes, our prisons would be too full to house all of the pot smokers currently crowding them. Of course, we do not define campaign ‘contributions’ as bribes. When a pol gets an envelope stuffed with cash, it usually gets handed over to someone in charge of fund-raising. Lobbyists attend testimonial dinners where the beef is so expensive you’d think you were in Japan. Influence can be bought in a lot of ways: organizational support, media coverage, technical assistance.

See, the thing is actually an enormous gray area. Giving money to a political candidate is freedom of speech, the right to support someone or something you believe in. Nothing wrong in that. The pol, meanwhile, can easily rationalize it. He or she would’ve voted that way anyhow. If I wrote several checks (small, I grant you) to Barack Obama’s campaign, was I trying to bribe him? No question: I wanted something for it. Still do.

So how is that different, other than in size, from the huge sums flowing into the coffers from corporations or unions? These donors, too, want something for it. The big ones, it turns out, pretty much get what they pay for. Everybody knows how it works. The mainstream media know. The pols all know. The corporations and unions know. Anyone who wants to become an Ambassador knows. Bribery and extortion all over the place.

“The trick,” as former Governor Rod Blagojevich was overheard to say in one of his many wiretapped conversations with aides, “is how do you indirectly” negotiate one of those quid-pro-quos. “You gotta be careful how you express that,” he said at one point. At another: “I would do it in person. I would not do it on the phone.”

The trick, as the governor has by now learned, is that you do not do any of this stuff if you have attracted a lot of enemies. We are in an age of almost limitless surveillance, and he should have known that. There are different rules for those who piss off the wrong guys.

I’m reading the charges of the House Committee on which the Illinois legislature impeached and convicted Blagojevich, and I’m seeing nothing more amazing than business-as-usual. “Attempts to Trade Official Acts for Campaign Contributions” is one such section. Anyone recall the scene from ”Casablanca”where the cop is stunned to discover gambling at Rick’s?

The gist of this section, remarkably, describes the Governor’s efforts to step-up his fundraising before a new state law went into effect in 2009. The new law prohibited the governor from soliciting contributions from businesses which wanted state contracts.

Thing is, such contributions have continued to flow unimpeded into the campaigns of Illinois legislators. And when Blagojevich was hustling cash before the deadline it was not only legal but commonplace. In his case, however, captured on wiretaps, we’ve got his linking the signing of legislation redirecting funds from casinos to racetracks to the promise of funds from the racetrack guys and specifying that the money had to come in before January 1st.

The House committee then tied Blagojevich to Tony Rezko. You remember Tony. This is the guy who brought Barack Obama into a land deal which helped the future President financially.

Rezko, whose legal problems are well-known, is alleged to have been leaning on businesses and wealthy individuals in order to raise money for Blagojevich. But the facts, as they’ve been developed and as they are described in the House committee’s own recitation, show that Rezko was not operating on behalf of the eventual recipients but on his own; his conduct is consistent with that of a guy trying to buy himself favors with politicians by making himself useful as a fund-raiser.

There are several other matters itemized by the committee, each indicating some form of shakedown. The governor trying to squeeze money from high-rollers who would benefit from his signing legislation. Absent is any discussion of whether these same high-rollers managed to feed any cash to the campaign treasuries of the legislators who pushed the bills. In that eloquent silence, we are invited to buy the fantasy that this did not happen.

None of this morally acquits Blagojevich. I make no case for his purity of motive or honorable behavior. I simply ask: what made him so special? There are forty-nine other states with governors. Any bets out there on how many of them, albeit with more subtlety, do the same thing?

For these reasons, I am suspicious of the cover story. But it is still not clear to me what happened here. It’s possible that the Governor was caught inadvertently, either through another investigation where his name kept popping up, or by an informant, or by happenstance. Pols tend toward arrogance anyhow. They can get nailed by accident. But maybe something else.

The central role of Patrick Fitzgerald, as I’ve written earlier, does not reassure me.

It is a fact that sometimes when cops bust a ‘major drug trafficker’, the real beneficiary of the arrest is the trafficker’s competition. Investigations and prosecutions may serve purposes beyond those on the surface. That doesn’t mean that the target is innocent; but when the target is someone whose conduct is quite ordinary in politics, and when the target has become a problem to powerful people, then we ought to consider whether there are motives not mentioned on television.

Interestingly, there are hints of ulterior motives in the Illinois House committee Report. We’ll take a look at them next.

In part two, we take a look at the elements which the Illinois House considered to be applicable in evaluating impeachable offenses, and on which the Senate voted unanimously to remove Rod Blagojevich from office –– and bar him from holding office in the state ever again.

Before we get to these, however, it is useful to look at what they considered to be the burden of proof, which turned out to be that they had no such burden. Nothing at all needed to be proved. It was, they said, simple a matter of personal judgment.

The Committee cited dicta from court decisions in Texas and Connecticut and a couple of other states to the effect that no standards existed and that, therefore, they needed none. The Committee did not rely on court precedent from its own state, however.

This omission is explicable when you see what the Illinois precedent was. In 1997, the legislature explored the legal standard for impeachment of a state Supreme Court justice named Heiple. They concluded that an impeachment required “clear and convincing evidence.”

But this legislature said that although it was relevant to use the words of various bodies from other states in other cases and in other circumstances as removing all limits on the discretion of members to vote for impeachment, Illinois precedent did not matter because “a member’s individual determination is not controlled by another member’s decision 11 years ago.”

Lawyers among this webLog’s subscribers will enjoy the spectacular dance routine this required. Try telling the California Supreme Court, for example, that it should apply not California precedent but that of, say Rhode Island. I can hear the horse laugh from here to Vermont.

Having set the table, the legislature began to chow down. In its bill of particulars, two types of offenses were described. The first category were those items charged in the U.S. Attorney’s criminal complaint. The second were matters which were not charged and, therefore, presumptively either not criminal by definition or beyond what Fitzgerald thinks he can prove.

The Illinois pols had no choice but to deny the “clear and convincing evidence” demanded by state precedent because if that was the standard Blagojevich could not be impeached and convicted.

That is so because they did not know, and could not know, whether such evidence existed. Fitzgerald, by agreement with the legislature, prohibited examination of testimony and exhibits which he himself declared excluded, and he excluded everybody and everything with the exception of a few recorded excerpts from the wiretaps, and an affidavit signed by Special Agent Daniel W. Cain in support of the arrest warrant.

It meant that the ‘category one’ offenses, which are two –– the alleged attempt to ‘sell’ Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder, and the alleged attempt to condition state financial aid to the Tribune Company on the firing of members of its editorial board, could not actually be proven because Fitzgerald was reserving all of the evidence, including the testimony of people who might actually have some knowledge of these allegations, to himself. The legislature was left with nothing but hearsay, which they tried to stretch as much as possible.

The wiretap excerpts cited by the legislature are instructive. What they seem to show is a governor talking about what he might be able to get in exchange for the Senate appointment. Blagojevich is quoted as saying that “if... they’re not going to offer anything of any value, then I might just take it.” In reference to the candidate believed to be Obama’s own choice: “...unless I get something real good... shit, I’ll just send myself, you know what I’m saying,” and “I’m going to keep this Senate option for me a real possibility, you know, and therefore I can drive a hard bargain...” and “(it’s) a fucking valuable thing, you don’t just give it away for nothing.”

I don’t know about you, but I am shocked! Shocked that there is gambling going on at Rick’s Place in Casablanca.

Perhaps the Illinois legislators have never been east of Chicago, but the rest of us know that a large financial contribution is the traditional method of securing an Ambassadorship, that tax bills are written in committees by lobbyists for wealthy corporations who paid for the campaigns of the committee members, and that the last time an American governor made an appointment to fill a vacant Senate seat where there was no consideration of just exactly what benefits such an appointment would bring in return was... well, never.

This is the pot calling the kettle Negro.

Worth noting, the legislature dismissed ameliorative excerpts such as: “(I’ll make the appointment) in good faith... but it’s not coming for free... it’s got to be good for the people of Illinois and good for me.”

Since the actual recordings are not available –– although Blagojevich has repeatedly called for their complete release –– we, and Illinois, were left with snippets, but those snippets contain clues to something a little less sinister than is widely reported. That is that the Governor, while looking for a way to gain either politically or personally, was mostly just jabbering.

This is clear because the excerpts are anything but. They’ve got Blagojevich muttering about (Senate candidate #1), believed to be Obama’s preference, that if he didn’t get anything for it, well, by God, he’d give the damned thing to... well, candidate #4 (Aff., 101(c)), or candidate #5 (Aff.,102), or candidate #6 (Aff., 105).

In other words, sorry Governor, but it’s hot air. Blagojevich wanted the same kind of political leverage he saw others exercise elsewhere and, damn it, he wasn’t getting it. Central to this frustration was Obama, who wouldn’t give him anything. Again and again, Blagojevich is quoted as saying about Obama, “...if they feel like they can do this and not fucking give me anything... then I’ll fucking go to (candidate 5),” and “they’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. Fuck them,” and so forth.

Garden variety scummy, wouldn’t you agree? It’s how a lot of politicians think and how a lot of them talk. It’s not rare. And, apart from the clumsiness of his methods, there’s nothing here which distinguishes Blagojevich from, let’s say, plenty of other governors you could name.

Politics. I don’t care how clean you are, or at least how clean you were when you got started, if you want to get to the governor’s chair, or nab a Senate seat, or something, you are going to become capable of making deals. If you do not make any deals, you will certainly lose. And because you have convinced yourself that you possess uncommon abilities, it becomes okay to cut those deals because otherwise the nation will be deprived of your leadership.

Why do you think the Democratic Party in Congress, whether in the majority or not, sells out working people, poor people, and those most in need? Because, with few exceptions, those folks are not what gets you re-elected.

Look, I’ve known Barbara Boxer for more than thirty years. I think she’s one of the best in the Senate. But I am quite certain that she has more than once voted against her own conscience for reasons of expediency, and I know that she takes some positions purely for the purpose of feeding her campaign coffers. That doesn’t make her a bad Senator or a bad person. It makes her a very successful Senator in a tough environment.

Or, as John Lennon said, “There’s room at the top, they are telling you still, but first you must learn to smile as you kill, if you want to be like the folks on the hill...”

What Blagojevich did, based on the actual record that the Illinois legislature had before it, is hardly distinguishable from what is no doubt common conduct, albeit at a lower level, among the same men and women who voted to impeach and convict him.

Let’s take a look now at the second charge, the other one contained in the Fitzgerald prosecution and to which, by his prohibition, no evidence or testimony could be meaningfully examined or challenged. It is that the Governor threatened to withhold from the Tribune Company about a hundred million bucks unless the newspaper bearing its name got rid of some editorial board members who’d been critical of him (and had been calling for his impeachment long before his arrest).

The Tribune story is a curious one. The legislature’s version, as the Committee wrote it, begins this way:

“Recently, the Tribune Company has been contemplating the sale of the Chicago Cubs baseball team and Wrigley Field to pay debt associated with the recent purchase of the Tribune Company by a new owner. In connection with these efforts, the Tribune Company had explored the possibility of obtaining financial assistance from the State of Illinois through the Illinois Finance Authority (IFA), assistance which was estimated to be worth $100-$150 million.”

The allegations against Blagojevich, with respect to the Tribune situation, are that he told the Tribune that he would not approve IFA funds unless it got rid of several members of its editorial board.

Background: the editorial board had been arguing for his impeachment long before the Fitzgerald story broke, and its position was based on what it claimed was Blagojevich’s “going around the legislature” on state matters.

More background: Blagojevich had attended a meeting with the prospective new owner of the Cubs who spoke of the financial need of tearing down Wrigley Field and building a new “Coors Field” type of stadium. This horrified Blagojevich, as it does me. If you’re tearing down Wrigley Field, you are close to tearing down the Washington Monument or the Golden Gate Bridge. The Governor decided to do something about it.

The Illinois legislature refused to advance any funds to secure Wrigley Field, but the Governor saw an alternative channel. He pushed the use of IFA funds.

The irony of this was not lost on Blagojevich, who noted that in order to help the Tribune while preserving Wrigley he would have to “go around” the legislature, exactly the behavior which the Tribune had cited in urging his impeachment. There ensued several conversations between the Governor and his aides in which he said, basically, how can they expect us to do this when they’ll use it against us? It is clear that he further communicated with the Tribune that he expected some editorial support down the road.

With that as the background, it is hardly surprising that Blagojevich, in what I concede was not his best moment, said that the Tribune ought to be told, “Maybe we can’t do this now. Fire those fuckers.”

As we know, the fuckers were not fired.

It is a bit unusual, I suppose, for a governor to threaten the media; usually, it’s the other way around.

There’s more, of course. In installment three we get to the fun stuff and run across a few clues in aid of our main question, which is: why THIS guy?

Anybody remember Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”? Some scary shit in that book, Carroll, as did Shakespeare, skewing the powerful under the cloak of fiction. First the verdict, then the trial, that’s how power operates when it feels the need. Evidently, it feels the need in Illinois.

Hey, I know it’s hard to keep up with the various crimes of the government. There’re so many, plus after eight years of that drunken imbecile Bush we’re all tuckered-out and want to just rest up, maybe let Barack handle it for a while.

But something dreadful is going on in Illinois, and it’s apparent that the media is checking out on it. Maybe the last few living journalists are also tuckered-out. With the exception of Eugene Robinson, and D.L. Hughley (thanks, JBD), all I’m seeing is a lynch mob chorus, led by the formerly-perfect Rachel Maddow, stringing-up the now-former governor on the basis of hearsay, wiretapped obscenities, and bad hair.

The actual bill of particulars, drafted by a special committee, adopted by the lower house on a 117-1 vote, and used to support the conviction and removal of Rod Blagojevich by the Illinois legislature, runs to 69 pages. I don’t believe that America’s ‘journalists’ have read it; certainly, few if any have read it with an open mind.

Blagojevich’s ‘guilt’ is, after all, an accepted fact. The authority for this comes from the actions of one Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois, and we all know that he is an incorruptible shining star, the white knight who nailed Scooter Libby for, well, playing some role or other in the ‘outing’ of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

According to mainstream media, Fitzgerald is an American hero, practically a saint. If he says Blagojevich committed crimes, formalities such as trial by jury and leftist ideas such as the presumption of innocence are, as former Attorney General Gonzalez once said of the Geneva Convention, quaint.

I shouldn’t take a bite of out Fitzgerald yet; I need to save my appetite for the Illinois legislature.

Let’s begin with Illinois House Resolution 1650, adopted on December 15, 2008, which created the Special Investigative Committee. The Committee then convened on the 16th and held ‘hearings’ on the 17th, 18th, 22nd, 29th, and on January 7th and 8th.

The Committee offered Governor Blagojevich seven days in which to gather witnesses and present exculpatory evidence.

Well, what could be more fair?

Reminds me of the time back in 1964, when the University of California administration believed that they could defuse the Free Speech Movement by referring the matter to a committee which didn’t actually exist. Fortunately, the Berkeley students were a lot smarter than the hacks being used to stuff the chairs in Illinois’ legislature.

Thing is, the House Committee wrote to Fitzgerald and stated what lines of inquiry it wished to pursue and which witnesses it wished to call; Fitzgerald responded requesting that they “refrain from conducting any inquiry into the subjects” relating to his investigation, and from “seeking information or testimony from the individuals” relevant to that investigation. He also said that he would share no materials – the lone exception, interestingly enough, being the wiretap excerpts – which he had gathered in the course of his investigation.

So Blagojevich was perfectly free to defend himself using any witnesses he was denied the chance to call and any documentary evidence he was not allowed to hear or see. Can’t get much more fair than that.

It gets better.

The Committee Report follows its bizarre opening about the Governor’s rights with a lengthy discussion of what might constitute sufficient grounds for impeaching and convicting a sitting governor. It turns out that, according to the Illinois House, nobody really knows. Citing out-of-context comments of Alexander Hamilton and Gerald R. Ford (seriously), pulling lines out of court dicta in Connecticut and Texas, the Committee makes the case that there are no guidelines, it’s a political and not a legal act, and that no attempt to define impeachable offenses can get anywhere. It would be “futile” to define what needed to be proven.

If I could cut and paste the damned pdf file, I’d give it to you word for word, that’s how great an example of pure rhetorical vacancy can be had when you have to justify the unjustifiable. The Committee concludes that it may impeach Blagojevich for any reason at all, or for none, if you had to be specific.

First the verdict, then the trial.

Now, to be fair about it, once Fitzpatrick shut the door on “conducting any inquiry into the subjects” of his investigation, what was left? If they were going to get rid of that bastard Blagojevich, they were going to have to do it without evidence.

Think for a moment about what you’ve heard in the public commentary about this case. You’ve heard that Fitzpatrick had accused the Governor of trying to sell Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat, as well as threatening the Chicago Tribune with withholding funds for Wrigley Field unless the newspaper shit-canned its editorial board. There’s some miscellany, but those two are the ones you’ve heard about.

The Illinois legislature could not conduct hearings, nor take any evidence, nor afford the accused a chance to call his own witnesses, because Fitzpatrick had sealed the documents (including, of course, the recordings) and sealed-off the witnesses.

The Committee wraps-up its review of the law by claiming that because an impeachment is “remedial” and not punitive, the courts actually have no jurisdiction over the matter. Therefore, there are no legal rights which may be adjudicated. Just fucking takes your breath away, doesn’t it?

Finally, because the impeachment is “remedial” and not punitive, it is not the rights of the accused which are pre-eminent but the ‘rights’ of the public, which has been wronged. Therefore, it is not necessary that any of the acts alleged constitute an impeachable offense; indeed, one does not have to believe that the alleged acts were even committed, provided that the legislator determines that the overall pattern of behavior is sufficient.

With this preamble, it scarcely matters what charges were alleged against Blagojevich and formed the rhetorical cover for his hanging, however the charges themselves are quite instructive. Although they were not intended to do so, these charges suggest that there may have been something else going on in Illinois, something relating to bare-knuckle politics and how government works, that the mainstream media don’t show much curiosity about.

Enough for now. More shortly.