Right Wing Nut House

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

I rise today in defense of my home state, my beloved Illinois, where top soil is so rich you can make soup from its deep, black loam and where agriculture was first elevated to a science to become the wonder of the civilized world.

We grow a lot of things in this state; corn, soy beans, hogs, cattle, dairy products, - all in numbers that are the envy of the rest of the world. Our higher education system is second to none in turning out both scholars and people who love to party. ( I would suggest you avoid Macomb, the home of Western Illinois University, on a Saturday night unless indulging in Bacchanalia is your thing.)

Besides that, Illinois features some truly remarkable points of interest. The two story outhouse in Gays, IL is a family favorite as is the captured leg of Santa Anna housed in the state capitol of Springfield. And who would want to miss visiting the largest Catsup bottle in the world located in the bustling tourist hub of Collinsville?

Why, my own little town of Streator has a statue of one of the angels of World War II, the Coffee Pot Lady. During the war, Streator saw about 1.2 million servicemen pass through town (we were a major hub for the old Sante Fe line) and faithfully doling out coffee and sandwiches as the trains stopped for fuel and water were dozens of women who made the long trip for the soldiers seem a little less impersonal and frightening.

I highlight all these natural and man made wonders located in Illinois because it seems that my home state is taking quite a beating in the national press and on blogs of late and I figured someone had to stand four square behind the natural beauty, the slow, deliberate pace of existence, and the emphasis placed on what is really important in life here in the Land of Lincoln; God, guns, and goofy politicians.

Indeed, it is sickening to have commentators who know nothing of Illinois or her people spouting off about the corruption in state and local government here. To all who are not from this state who have found the Blagojevich scandal a perfect opportunity to feel morally superior to us Illinoisans and write vicious, ignorant screeds about our “culture of corruption,” I say butt out!

Just what do you think you know about it, huh? And who do you think you are? If anybody is going to throw bricks at our politicians, it’s us. And we don’t need any help, thanks. We’ve been doing it for 190 years and by God we’ve got it down to a science and don’t need outsiders horning in on our fun. Our rope necktie parties are for locals only - no Cheeseheads or Hawkeyes allowed.

It cuts to me the quick that all these silly, snarky bloggers feel it necessary to disrespect the politicians in my state. Besides that, they are pikers when it comes to revealing the true nature of our political culture. Only native Illinoisans can come up with descriptions of our political heroes like “They are a carefully nurtured nest of nefarious nabobs who see politics as a cross between a slot machine and a gold mine.”

Out of staters don’t even come close and their attempts at describing what they can only dimly understand usually fall flat. For us Illinoisians, it is a matter of DNA; we are born with the ability to appreciate and become outraged over the rank dishonesty, the grasping, conniving, plotting, brazenly evil nature of our politics. It’s so much in our blood that I heard tell the Red Cross has considered keeping donations from Illinoisans in state so as not to infect such political paradises as Minnesota and Kansas. They also fear mixing blood from here with that of people from states like New Jersey or Louisiana. The monster that would create, once let loose upon the country, might doom us all.

Columnists, pundits, and TV talking heads can’t decide whether to opine as if auditioning for The Last Comic Standing by trying to outdo one another with unfunny jokes about the scandal or scream about political corruption being endemic to the way Illinois politicians do business. Endemic?  Tell that to a Chicago pol and he’s liable to give you a wary look, wondering why you think he needs a high colonic and perhaps contemplate how he can make a “pay to play” scheme go by getting a kickback from the enema bag manufacturer.

Besides, the idea of someone from New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, getting into a high dudgeon over corruption in politics is laughable. And that goes for just about anyone else anywhere in the US except maybe Montana where the ratio of guns to crooked pols is no accident. They take clean government very seriously in Big Sky Country. They also are not so politically correct as to have forgotten what good uses a little tar and some feathers can be put to.

For you New Yorkers, I might ask if Tamany Hall rings a bell - a city machine so corrupt that cockroaches were denied membership for being too clean. And all you Pennsylvanians who are on your high horse about Chicago political shenanigans, I direct your attention to your current governor, the Majority Leader of your Assembly, and how many other pols caught up in scandal just this year.

Alaskans have so much to be proud of what with their senior senator, his family, their lone congressman, and half the Republican party on the hook for taking favors from an oil company supplier. Let’s not forget New Jersey and its parade of criminal Newark mayors not to mention governors who resign in disgrace for showing favoritism to their boyfriends.

As for all you good government goofs in Minnesota, I’ve got just two words for you; Al Franken.

Reading a couple of articles about corruption in this state in Wikpedia is hardly the same as having grown up with it. To those of us native to Illinois who have spent our lives watching the comings and goings of governors, legislators, aldermen, lawyers, judges, businessmen, and Chicago city workers as they walk in and out of the jail in Pontiac, scandals like Blagobust are more than mere entertainment. They are reminders to all that “There but for the grace of God and a federal phone tap go I.”

So quit your yapping about stuff you really know little about. Whatever corruption scandals you’ve had in your own state cannot possibly prepare you to think, write, or spout about the Olympian nature of Illinois political stink. Our pols are greedier, more inventive in their criminality, more brazen in their disrespect of the law, and more breathtaking in their deeds of derring-do as they try to stay one step ahead of the prosecutor and two steps ahead of that former business partner they’ve cheated out of ill gotten gains.

Ed “Fast Eddie” Vrdolyak, the infamous alderman and political thorn in the side of former Chicago Mayor, the late Harold Washington, was quoted as saying that he “talks to everyone as if they’re wearing a wire - even my wife.” Vrdolyak was the target of numerous investigations through the years but prosecutors could never catch him.

In his later years, after losing his clout, Eddie “retired” to private law practice and was considered a wise head in Chicago politics, nurturing many young up and comers, showing them the ropes until he was finally caught in a bribery-kickback scheme involving the sale of a medical school building to a Vrdolyak crony. Those charges may very well stick because Eddie forgot his own ironclad rule; his partner in crime wore a wire to several meetings where the illegal scheme was discussed.

The moral of the story is that not only could an Ed Vrdolyak only exist in Illinois but that only an Illinois pol could go down with such ironic juxtaposition attending his demise. That combination of Greek tragedy and Vaudeville comedy is why the rest of the country is so ill-equipped to comment on our troubles with politicians.

So I’d appreciate it if you just left us alone to wallow in our own muck, thank you.

You’ve probably heard by now that at a press conference with Prime Minister Maliki in Iraq yesterday, an Iraqi journalist reporting for an Iraqi TV station based in Egypt threw two shoes at George Bush, narrowly missing the president:

“This is a gift from the Iraqis. This is the farewell kiss, you dog,” the journalist shouted (in Arabic), Steven Lee Myers of The New York Times reported in a pool report to the White House press corps.

Myers reported that the man threw the second shoe and added: “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.”

The president showed a lot more class than liberal bloggers about the incident:

Welcome to Baghdad. An Iraqi reporter set off pandemonium Sunday by hurling two shoes at President Bush during a news conference that was the centerpiece of his secret goodbye visit.

Bush was cool under fire and prevented an even bigger incident by waving off his lead Secret Service agent, who was prepared to extract him from the room.

Video shows the president’s lead agent rushing to the podium, but the president immediately and subtly motions to him that it’s OK. The agent backs off.

The president successfully ducked both throws. Photos show him with his head down near the top of the podium.  The embarrassing incident marred a visit meant to show off the improved conditions since the troop “surge” dramatically reduced casualties to U.S. troops.

Lefties are beside themselves, using the incident as an excuse to spout inanities about Bush, the war, and America. Matthew Yglesias’s response is fairly typical:

Some people got very upset when I said I thought throwing pie at Tom Friedman was funny, but I’m having trouble coming up with appropriately humorless language with which to express my fake outrage at this incident.

A website has been set up to allow patriotic lefties to sign a petition to free the journalist who tossed the shoes. Others are urging that liberals send their old shoes to the Bush Library.

Now tossing your shoe at someone is a very grave insult in the Arab world, akin to tossing rotten fruit at a politician here - perhaps even worse. But lefties who are chortling over the incident are typically missing the point - as is the Bush deranged Iraqi journalist.

The liberals who are taking such pleasure in seeing the president embarrassed  are not realizing that this is an insult to the United States and her people. In other words, the jokes on you, dummies. When abroad, whether you like him or not, agree with him or not - even if you are still deranged enough not to accept him as “your” president - George Bush represents the government and hence, the people of the United States. Liberal views of him as a leader matter not in the slightest. The shoe toss was as much an insult directed at the left as it was Bush. The fact that they don’t realize this only makes their cluelessness all the more entertaining.

The rest of the Arab world sees the shoe toss as an insult to the US government with George Bush being its most visible manifestation. The government of the United States - last I looked - was a government of, by, and for the people. In other words, the government is us. And any insults directed at the government are insults hurled at each and every American regardless of party affiliation, ideology, or, in the case of liberals, intelligence or the lack thereof.

As for the Iraqi journalist, would he have been so brave if, instead of Prime Minister Maliki standing up there, horrified at the insult to his guest, it was Saddam Hussein? Somehow, I think the prospect of being taken out and shot would have stayed the journalist’s hand - or shoes as it were. The point being, Saddam has gone missing courtesy of the US Army and President George Bush. The journalist may face charges (try throwing a shoe at someone in America and you can be charged with assault) but will probably be released in the end so that he can practice his America hating craft safely and without fear of being arrested in the middle of the night and shot.

All of this has gone straight over the heads of our liberal friends who are chuckling over the insult they believe is Bush’s alone.

But hey! I won’t ever call them unpatriotic.

David Axelrod is largely - and rightly - credited with successfully crafting Barack Obama’s campaign message machine and using it to great effect during the campaign.

But before he elected a president,  David Axelrod advised campaigns for a host of politicians including Chicago’s mayor Richard Daley. In fact, he considers himself an expert in “urban politics” - which translated means big city Democratic machine politics.

It is important to note that Republicans have their own “machines” - mostly in the south where “courthouse politics” employs many of the same patronage, kickback, and even “pay to play” schemes you routinely find in Democratic-run big cities. No party has a corner on corruption - which made the Democrat’s “outrage” in 2006 at the “Republican culture of corruption” so laughable.

But Axelrod just elected Mr. Clean as president. And it is important to get a handle on what a man who will be a close advisor to President Obama in the White House thinks of Patrick Fitzgerald’s corruption investigations.

Fitzy has taken down a host of pols in Chicago including aldermen, politically connected businessmen like Tony Rezko, and even 2 of Mayor Daley’s closest aides in city hall.

That last scandal involved serious violations of a court ruling that was supposed to clean up the city’s corrupt patronage system. Chicago mayors (and other big city pols) have used patronage as a means of controlling the Democratic party for decades. But a lawsuit against the practice in Chicago resulted in a ruling that most city jobs had to involve a fair hiring procedure where only the most qualified candidates would get government jobs.

Then in 2005, the Chicago Sun Times broke a fairly routine scandal involving the use of (or, in this case, the non-use) of city trucks - contracts to politically connected (and sometimes mobbed up) trucking firms that paid millions of dollars for little or no work. The city was entertained for weeks with stories of bribes being paid by city employees to steer truck contracts to specific firms, ghost payrolling, lolligagging truckers drawing taxpayer monies for going golfing, and other examples of extraordinary venality on the part of city politicians.

Once Fitzy got involved, the investigation expanded to include the entire patronage system in Chicago. And what prosecutors found was simply astonishing; 30 city pols who routinely violated the patronage law by doctoring documents to show interviews with candidates that never happened, resume tampering, and other fraudulent actions all to get loyal campaign workers city jobs. Fitzy’s investigation eventually reached deep into Daley’s office as two of his closest aides - including his patronage chief Robert Sorich - were convicted in the case.

Here’s how it worked:

In February 2005 a grand jury indicted Sorich for devising a scheme to “provide financial benefits, in the form of city jobs and promotions, in exchange for campaign work.” As part of this scheme, it charged, Sorich and other officials “corrupted the city’s personnel process” by awarding “jobs and promotions” to preselected candidates “through sham and rigged interviews.”

At the Sorich trial Kozicki, then in the buildings department, testified that as managing deputy commissioner he had altered 19-year-old Andrew Ryan’s interview rating to ensure that Ryan scored high enough to get a building inspector’s job for which other applicants were more qualified. Andrew Ryan is the son of Tom Ryan, secretary-treasurer of Carpenters Local 13, a union that was a major financial contributor to Daley’s 2003 reelection campaign.

And Axelrod? Here’s what the new Senior Advisor to the President had to say about it: back in 2006:

As Axelrod has said, a too-zealous prosecutor can look at normal political behavior and suspect impropriety. In a 2006 Vanity Fair interview, the Obama aide complained about Fitzgerald’s scrutiny of Chicago politics.

“He goes after fleas and elephants with the same bazooka,” Axelrod said. “At some point there’s a line … where you begin criminalizing politics in its most innocent form.”

When you practice the art of politics amidst such sleaze and corruption, egregious lawbreaking can, I suppose, seem “innocent.” But what does that reveal about the moral compass of people like Axelrod? When the rest of us are shocked and appalled at the routine and arrogant criminal conduct carried out by powerful people like Daley and Blagojevich, who obviously believe the rules followed by ordinary folk do not apply to them, do we really want moral pygmies like Axelrod anywhere near the seat of national government?

Indeed, Obama himself - now caught in the lie that he had no knowledge that any of his aides were meeting with Blagojevich’s people about his senate seat - has shown a curious lethargy about the entire Blagojevich scandal, especially because he’s known since a week after the election that Blago was shopping his seat to the highest bidder (See Jim Lindgren’s timeline of the scandal that shows how Obama first, made it known he wanted his good friend Valerie Jarrett to get the appointment and within 24 hrs of a phonecon involving Blago and one of his advisors - probably Emanuel - he yanked her name from consideration and gave her a job in the White House.)

The Obama team will vigorously deny they knew anything about Blago’s attempts to sell his senate seat but that just doesn’t pass the smell test. Given how careless Blagojevich was about the spread of such information, it is inconcievable that the president-elect, whose Chicago and Springfield connections are as good as anyone’s, wouldn’t have been aware of what was going on.

But why should they not come forward with the truth? They didn’t break any laws. The reason they won’t and can’t reveal their knowledge in this matter is because to do so would be to reveal a hole in their moral universe that shows that they considered Blago’s auction of the senate seat “innocent” and nothing more than routine political horse trading - routine for the culture of corruption in Chicago and Springfield. Obama was smart enough to see a train wreck coming and pulled his good friend Jarrett from consideration while still allowing Emanuel to have input into the selection process. In short, there were no illegalities but rather an incredible ineptitude in recognizing a moral problem with Blago’s criminality.

I am not sure what this portends for the next 4 years as far as the way the White House will operate. If you have a bunch of people who don’t know or can’t tell what’s moral or immoral as far as political actions are concerned, what kind of scandals will be breaking by this time next year?

The Blago Blow-Up is beginning to churn like the contents of one’s stomach following a helping of bad escargot. You begin to realize you just ate a heaping, steaming plate of snail flesh and begin to wonder if it will just give you gas or perhaps end up deposited unceremoniously on the floor — a stinking, putrid mass that slowly spreads across the linoleum.

In Rahm Emanuel’s case, I think it about time that we officially begin the “Emanuel Under the Bus Toss Watch.” Reports are circulating that Obama’s trusty aide and Chief of Staff-designate met with Blago’s people several times regarding the open senate seat.

Is it possible Emanuel met with Blago’s people without the president elect knowing? This is important because Obama looked us all in the eye yesterday and said he wasn’t aware of any contact between his staff and Blagojevich regarding the senate seat. Emanuel will probably say he never informed Obama about the meetings but that doesn’t pass the stink test. Obama wanted his best friend and confidante Valerie Jarrett in that seat and simple common sense tells us that his #1 aide would keep the boss informed of his progress.

Not only Obama’s denial of contact rings hollow at this point but how about his solemn promise to have his staff canvass his transition team in order to ferret out anyone who had contact with the Blago crew? If he knew Rahm was dealing with Blago on the senate seat, it means that entire excersise is political theater and no more.

And what of Emanuel, the man who promised us transparency and openness in this Hope and Change administration? Here’s an example of transparency, Chicago style:

Emanuel was uncharacteristically absent from Obama’s news conference this morning. He was spotted two hours later in the lobby of Chicago’s City Hall. He was there to listen to his two children performing in a concert with their school, Anshe Emet.

A Sun-Times reporter pressed him to comment about whether he was the emissary named in the criminal complaint.

“You’re wasting your time,” Emanuel said. “I’m not going to say a word to you. I’m going to do this with my children. Dont do that. I’m a father. I have two kids. I’m not going to do it.”

Asked, “Can’t you do both?” Emanuel replied, “I’m not as capable as you. I’m going to be a father. I’m allowed to be a father,” and he pushed the reporter’s digital recorder away.

Now that’s the Chicago Way of ditching reporters.

Eventually, we may get another bit of political theater; the spectacle of Emanuel going before the cameras and tearing up as he talks about how he only wanted to give Obama a Christmas present of Valerie Jarrett’s appointment by Blagojevich which is why he wanted it to be a surprise and never told the president-elect. Obama will be by his side, give him a big hug, and the press will forget the whole thing.

That’s one scenario. Another, more likely chain of events ends up with Emanuel’s exposure as a willing participant in what the feds may consider a bribery scheme to secure Jarrett’s appointment as senator. Obama would have no choice but to throw Rahmbo under the bus while questions would continue to be asked about his own knowledge of what was being discussed between his chief of staff and the governor’s people.

How bad is it for Mr. Transparency? Caught in a couple of lies before you’re even sworn in as president would not be good but is hardly impeachable. Bribery is going to be very hard to differentiate from political horse trading which is not illegal but sure gives the lie to Obama’s “Hope and Change” mantra. At the very least, the stink of this scandal will follow Obama into the White House.

He apparently tried to avoid it. Whether because he was unwilling to pay Blago’s price or recognized how exposed he was, this timeline by Jim Lindgren at Volokh shows that something strange happened between the time Obama let it be known that Jarrett was his choice to fill the senate vacancy and his announcement that he was appointing the Chicago machine pol to a White House position:

1. On the weekend of Nov. 8-9, Obama lets it be known that his choice for Senate is Valerie Jarrett. Aides tell WLS-TV in Chicago and CNN, which announces Obama’s choice on Sunday. Nov. 9.

2. On Monday, Nov. 10, Blagojevich holds an incredible 2-hour conference call with multiple consultants: “ROD BLAGOJEVICH, his wife, JOHN HARRIS, Governor General Counsel, and various Washington-D.C. based advisors, including Advisor B,” discussing his corrupt schemes. He follows this with two calls with Advisor A.

3. That very night, Monday, Nov. 10, at 7:56pm, CNN reported:

Two Democratic sources close to President-elect Barack Obama tell CNN that top adviser Valerie Jarrett will not be appointed to replace him in the U.S. Senate.

“While he (Obama) thinks she would be a good senator, he wants her in the White House,” one top Obama advisor told CNN Monday.

Over the weekend, Democratic sources had told CNN as well as Chicago television station WLS-TV that Jarrett was Obama’s choice to fill his Senate seat.

So what happened? The likeliest scenario is that one of the many participants in Blagojevich’s Monday phone calls either floated his plans to the Obama transition team to assess their response or tipped off the Obama camp about the reckless ideas that Blagojevich had planned.

In any event, within hours of Blagojevich substantially expanding his circle of confidants, the Obama camp withdrew Jarrett’s name from consideration and attributed that withdrawal to the President’s wanting Jarrett in the White House. And the Obama staffers went out of their way to depict this as Obama’s choice, rather than Jarrett’s, which would have been more common. The report claims Obama’s involvement in the decision and suggests a direct effort to undercut the idea that Obama was pressuring Blagojevich to appoint Jarrett.

I tend to believe that Obama saw a train wreck coming and yanked Jarrett away from trouble while trying to cover his own tracks with double talk about needing Jarrett in the White House. At the time, of course, he didn’t know about the wiretaps on Blago’s phone that could trip him up later.

As a Chicago pol, Obama has a well developed sense of potential exposure to the kind of cesspool politics played out in this entire affair. His instincts must have been on full alert once he was sure that Blago was shopping his seat to the highest bidder - no doubt informed of this by Emanuel who it is inferred through a phonecon between Blagojevich and his chief of staff John Harris (also arrested) was being threatened with the appointment of someone unpalatable (”Candidate #5″ - Jackson) unless Obama upped the ante.

And speaking of Jackson, this bit of news dug out by the Chicago Tribune is very bad for him. Jesse The Younger’s Campaign finance surrogate had a meeting with Blago’s representative back in October where he offered $1 million in campaign contributions for the senate seat. Jackson had a press conference where he said he had no knowledge of this offer and yet, just last Saturday - three days before Blago’s arrest - he held a fundraiser for Blagojevich where the express purpose was to help him secure the senate seat.

As Gov. Rod Blagojevich was trying to pick Illinois’ next U.S. senator, businessmen with ties to both the governor and U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. discussed raising at least $1 million for Blagojevich’s campaign as a way to encourage him to pick Jackson for the job, the Tribune has learned.

Blagojevich made an appearance at an Oct. 31 luncheon meeting at the India House restaurant in Schaumburg sponsored by Oak Brook businessman Raghuveer Nayak, a major Blagojevich supporter who also has fundraising and business ties to the Jackson family, according to several attendees and public records.

Two businessmen who attended the meeting and spoke to the Tribune on the condition of anonymity said that Nayak and Blagojevich aide Rajinder Bedi privately told many of the more than two dozen attendees the fundraising effort was aimed at supporting Jackson’s bid for the Senate.

Among the attendees was a Blagojevich fundraiser already under scrutiny by federal investigators, Joliet pharmacist Harish Bhatt.

That meeting led to a Blagojevich fundraiser Saturday in Elmhurst, co-sponsored by Nayak and attended by Jesse Jackson Jr.’s brother, Jonathan, as well as Blagojevich, according to several people who were there. Nayak and Jonathan Jackson go back years and the two even went into business together years ago as part of a land purchase on the South Side.

Blagojevich and the congressman met to discuss the Senate seat on Monday, one day before federal prosecutors arrested Blagojevich and charged him with trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. As part of the charges, prosecutors alleged that Blagojevich was considering awarding the seat to a politician identified as “Senate Candidate 5″ because emissaries for that candidate were promising to raise as much as $1.5 million for Blagojevich’s campaign fund.

Not only does this put Jackson totally out of the running for the senate seat but it is obvious he has not been forthcoming about what he knows with regards to Blago’s attempt to sell the senate seat. The fact that his own brother attended the fundraiser guarantees he knew about it and also knew what price he had to pay in order to get the appointment. This makes the statements he made at his press conference “inoperative” as they say in Chicago.

And what of Obama’s statements? Will they be identified as “misstatements” or perhaps there will be claims that Obama “misspoke?” And what of Emanuel? His reluctance to talk to the press is understandable in light of the fact that there is no good explanation for how he could have spoken to Blago’s people and not told Obama.

The right thing to do would be for Obama, Emanuel, Jarrett, and anyone else who had contact with Blago’s people to stand before the press and tell us what they know - “full hangout route” as they said during Watergate. More likely is the “limited hang-out route” where some minor things will be admitted and other, more serious allegations denied.

That’s the “Washington Way.”

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

Those of us who have followed Illinois politics for any length of time are tempted to give the Rod Blagojevich arrest and pending indictment a quick shrug, a knowing smile, and a cynical sigh of know-it-all arrogance. “We’ve seen this before in Illinois, nothing new here, just move along” is the condenscending response to questions from out of staters that usually suffice when some Illinois politico is caught with his fingers in the taxpayer’s cookie jar.

But the Blagojevich True Crime Drama is not criminality as usual in Illinois politics. The malfeasance of Governor Rod Blagojevich is so outrageous, so brazen, so breathtaking in its scope and character that even  jaded journalistic hacks whose beat has been the statehouse for years are shocked. In the long history of official Illinois corruption, the Blagojevich schemes to personally enrich himself, enrich his cronies, and use the power of his office to further his nefarious designs are unprecedented.

“I want to make money” the governor was heard admitting on tape. Evidently, the opportunities that presented themselves for Blagojevich to clean up were too tempting to pass up. Here’s a partial list of the charges via the Chicago Tribune:

Prosecutors alleged Blagojevich sought appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services, secretary of the Energy Department or gain an ambassadorship in the new Obama administration, or get a lucrative job with a union in exchange for appointing a union-preferred candidate. An Obama spokesman had no immediate comment.

Blagojevich also was alleged to be using a favors list, made up largely of individuals and firms that have state contracts or received taxpayer benefits, from which to conduct a $2.5 million fundraising drive before year’s end when a new tougher law on campaign donations, prompted by the governor’s voracious fundraising, would take effect.

Even Blagojevich’s recently announced $1.8 billion plan for new interchanges and “green lanes” on the Illinois Tollway was subject to corruption, prosecutors alleged. The criminal complaint alleges Blagojevich expected an unnamed highway concrete contractor to raise a half-million dollars for his campaign fund in exchange for state money for the tollway project. “If they don’t perform, (expletive) ‘em,” Blagojevich said, according to the complaint.

Blagojevich and Harris also allegedly conspired to demand the firing of Chicago Tribune editorial board members responsible for editorials critical of Blagojevich in exchange for state help with the sale of Wrigley Field, the Chicago Cubs baseball stadium owned by Tribune Co.

In addition, federal prosecutors alleged Blagojevich and Harris, along with others, obtained and sought to gain financial benefits for the governor, members of his family and his campaign fund in exchange for appointments to state boards and commissions, state jobs and state contracts.

The big news, of course, is the governor’s attempt to sell the senate seat of Barack Obama. Incredibly, it appears that he tried to get the best deal by shopping the seat to as many as 7 potential candidates - including, indirectly, Barack Obama.

Blogger Joseph Cannon of Cannonfire details the offer to an unamed high level Obama advisor (evidence suggests it is newly-designated chief of staff Rahm Emanuel). Blagojevich was pushing what Cannon calls “a wacky scheme” where the governor would take over control of a not for profit group - a 501(c)(4) - set up by Warren Buffet and Bill Gates (who would act at the behest of Obama) in exchange for appointing Obama’s choice for the senate seat - his long time friend and advisor Valerie Jarrett.

This is directly from the criminal complaint: (PDF) that details several conversations caught on a federal wiretap:

The advisor asked ROD BLAGOJEVICH if the 501(c)(4) is a real effort or just a vehicle to help ROD BLAGOJEVICH. ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that it is a real effort but also a place for ROD BLAGOJEVICH to go when he is no longer Governor. The advisor said he likes the Change to Win idea better, and notes that it is more likely to happen because it is one step removed from the President-elect.

“Change to Win” is a labor NGO that the governor was interested in heading up. In order to get that job, Blagojevich had to approach the head of the powerful Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Andy Stern. The governor was willing to name a candidate who would be little more than a union toady in order to secure that position. And he was asking “Advisor B” (Emanuel) to make it happen.

according to Advisor B from the President-elect’s perspective, there would be fewer “fingerprints” on the President-elect’s involvement with Change to Win because Change to Win already has an existing stream of revenue and, therefore, “you won’t have stories in four years that they bought you off.”

Was Rahm Emanuel (read Cannon’s reasoning on why the evidence points to the chief of staff) making a counter offer to the governor’s bribe? It’s an interesting question and one that the press may wish to ask the new chief of staff.

In addition to the Obama team, Blagojevich was trying to sell the senate seat to as many as 6 different candidates. One candidate’s representative - “Candidate #5 in the complaint - allegedly offered Blagojevich a substantial bribe for the office. The governor liked that idea and told an aide that if Obama “didn’t give him anything” he would choose Candidate #5.

Who is “Candidate #5?” Speculation is zeroing in on Jesse Jackson, Jr. From the actual complaint via Marc Ambinder:

Blagojevich said that he might be able to cut a deal with Senate Candidate 5 that provided
Blagojevich with something “tangible up front.” Noting that he was going to meet with Senate
Candidate 5 in the next few days, Blagojevich told Fundraiser A to reach out to an intermediary (Individual D), from whom Blagojevich is attempting to obtain campaign contributions and whi Blagojevich believes is close to Senate Candidate 5. Blagojevich told Fundraiser A to tell Individual D that Senate Candidate 5 was a very realistic candidate but Blagojevich was getting a lot of pressure not to appoint Senate Candidate 5, according to the affidavit.

The only candidate for the senate seat to meet with Obama in the time period mentioned was Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr.

It should be noted that there is absolutely no evidence that Jackson had any knowledge of these representations to Obama made on his behalf by a fundraiser nor is there any evidence that an “intermediary” informed him of the “negotiations.

If you read all 72 pages of the indictment, you just can’t help being struck by the money grubbing nature of the governor and his mania for money. He had schemes within schemes to extract cash from supporters, cronies, and companies who wished to do business with the state.

His “pay to play” program was particularly lucrative. This was a scheme where Blagojevich friend and campaign financier Antoin “Tony” Rezko pressured companies doing business with the state to contribute to the Blagojevich re-election campaign in exchange for lucrative state contracts. Rezko was convicted of 18 counts of fraud in connection with the scheme and the governor’s name was prominently mentioned during his trial. Others involved in this scheme include Stuart Levine, a GOP mover and shaker in the state.

At least you can say we here in Illinois are bi-partisan when it comes to corruption.

While the selling of the senate seat and pay to play complaints got the most headlines, perhaps the most incredible of all the charges alleged against Blagojevich is his attempted shakedown of the Chicago Tribune.

The Trib not only owns the Chicago Tribune but also the Chicago Cubs baseball team. Owner Sam Zell (who has just filed for bankruptcy) is trying to sell the team and, more importantly, one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in Chicago; Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs.

But the sale of Wrigley field will involve massive taxes - something on the order of $100 million dollars in capital gains. Zell had a approached the Illinois Finance Authority (IFA) in order to strike a deal where, according to the criminal complaint, the IFA would take title to Wrigley Field thus saving Zell a lot of cash.

Enter Blagojevich who told his chief of staff John Harris (also arrested today) to make it clear to Zell that no help from the IFA would be forthcoming unless some members of the Chicago Tribune editorial board were fired.

In a November 4 phone call with Harris, Blagojevich told his aide “”our recommendation is fire all those [expletive] people, get ‘em the [expletive] out of there and get us some editorial support.”

Harris reported back on November 11 that Zell “got the message and is very sensitive to the issue.” Later, Harris told Blagojevich that there were “certain corporate reorganizations and budget cuts coming and, reading between the lines, he’s (Zell) going after that section.”

No firings have taken place yet and it is doubtful that Zell will make a move now that this deal is in the open. I suppose he saw it as a cost of doing business and $100 million is a lot of cash. But the thought that he would buckle to the whims of this strutting peacock of a politician who wanted journalists who were only doing the job they were being paid to do axed because they were telling the truth about his corruption stinks of rank cowardice.

No doubt over the next few days many aspects of this story will be fleshed out. We will almost certainly be treated to some fancy footwork by the Obama team as they seek to avoid the appearance that anyone connected with the new president came within a country mile of Blagojevich. That may be difficult to do what with the taped conversation between the governor and “Advisor B” and unanswered questions about whether Obama actually discussed the appointment of a new senator with the governor or not.

Obama said in his statement he had no contact with Blagojevich. Unfortunately for the new president, his top aide David Axelrod told Fox News on November 23 that Obama had indeed talked with Blagojevich about the senate seat. The transition has since released a statement saying that Axelrod “misspoke” on November 23.

And I have a bridge over the Chicago River you can have for a song if you believe that one.

The chances are very good that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is far from finished. Meanwhile, the Democratic party in Illinois may be in for a very rough ride as their leader ponders his future - or lack of one - and his associates lawyer up in anticipation of legal trouble.

My latest at PJ Media is about the Blagojevich arrest and details “the most breathtaking corruption in the history of Illinois politics.”

A sample:

In any other state, this would be simply unbelievable, or perhaps considered a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence to have such breathtaking and brazen corruption reveal itself at the highest levels of state government.

The “pay-to-play” charges have been out in the public for more than two years. This was a scheme where Blagojevich friend and campaign financier Antoin “Tony” Rezko pressured companies doing business with the state to contribute to the Blagojevich re-election campaign in exchange for lucrative state contracts. Rezko was convicted of 18 counts of fraud in connection with the scheme and the governor’s name was prominently mentioned during his trial.

This probably will not involve Barack Obama. The next president gave Blago a wide berth and evidently went so far as to pull Valerie Jarrett, his close personal friend, out of the running for his replacement when it became clear that Blagojevich was trying to sell the seat to the highest bidder.

But it is instructive to note that this is the political culture that nurtured and raised Barack Obama. To think that it hasn’t tainted him is just plain idiocy. There are plenty of examples of Obama using his clout to help a friend or crony not to mention steer government business to campaign contributors. Obama lived, breathed, ate, and slept Illinois politics for more than a decade. And that’s something to keep in mind as his Administration rolls along.

Conservatives are rightly up in arms over the trillion dollar (and climbing) taxpayer funded bailout packages being thrown around Washington these last weeks. Beyond that, many are livid at the ridiculous notion being advanced by lefties that the free market “failed” and that government takeovers (if not in fact then certainly in effect) of the financial industry, banks, insurance companies, and now The Big Three will somehow solve this crisis, stemming the flow of lost jobs and re-opening the credit markets thus getting the economy growing again.

I have come to the conclusion that anyone who says anything definitive about the “root causes” of this crisis is a loon. There are as many theories about what caused the sub prime collapse, the mortgage security mess, and the subsequent contraction of financial institutions as there are economists. Both right and left have their favorite theories (”de-regulation” on the left and “government interference” on the right) none of which will probably be proved true in the end. Once historians sink their teeth into what caused the crisis a decade or more from now, I fully expect many factors to have been at play - some of which are probably not even dreamed of at this point by any of the “experts” who so confidently rail against capitalism or Democratic interference in the mortgage industry.

That “failed” free market just finished giving the United States the longest, the most sustained period of economic growth and prosperity in the history of western industrialized civilization. But there is also little doubt that someone, somewhere, should have applied the brakes to the mortgage security madness both at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and on Wall Street.

In the end, I believe that like 9/11, one key factor that will be highlighted when historians make their judgements may very well be a failure of imagination by government and the Big Banks to anticipate the consequences of some of the actions taken by the players involved. Yes there were doomsayers - just as there were Cassandras warning of a terrorist attack. In hindsight, it is too easy to say policymakers and regulators should have listened to them. This should be obvious but never is to those who see history as a linear progression of events rather than the confused, contradictory, babble it truly is.

So historically speaking, the “root causes” arguement means little at this point. But politically, it is everything. In the real world, Barack Obama and his team are formulating policy based on their perceptions of what happened and why. They are planning a response to the crisis based on their political understanding of events and their lifelong experiences that have shaped their worldview. They also feel constrained to act because the voters who just resoundingly elected them want the government to “do something about the problem.”

The soothing assurances we are getting from the Obama camp that a half a trillion dollar “stimulus package” and bailouts of the auto industry and other troubled concerns are all well and good. We should expect them to have confidence in their ability to turn things around and prevent an even worse downturn than the one we will surely have to endure regardless of what the new Administration does.

But are they right? And for my conservative friends, I have an even more difficult question.

Do you want Obama to be right? Do you want him to succeed?

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with this site knows that I am not in the business of cheerleading for liberals. But we are in a very bad spot and wishing Obama to fail - even if it means that success might mean his certain re-election - cannot be an option if you care about America.

If it is your desire to see us sink into a deep recession or even a depression because we know Obama’s policies won’t work, then you have no conception of what that will mean to millions of your fellow Americans not to mention the extraordinary damage it would do to entire industries.

Should we fight the bailouts, the stimulus package, and the rest of his program? Absolutely. In fact, stopping a lot of his ideas from becoming law may be our salvation. But to do so, we must have alternatives that we can offer rather than simply screaming “NO” at the top of our voices while openly cheering on the destruction of our economy. Bailouts are not the answer but what about steering some of that money away from business failures and offer loans to successful companies where we would have a reasonable expectation that the money would be paid back? Companies on the verge of bankruptcy are not going to be hiring anyone. Companies who are successful but suffering as a result of the tight credit would benefit both themselves and the nation if they used that money not to stay afloat but to hire on more workers and expand their businesses.

Rather than giving money to taxpayers outright, why not lower taxes permanently? Instead of enacting protectionist policies, why not approve the Columbian trade agreement? There are many conservative responses to this crisis that are not being pushed because we’re so busy screaming “socialism” that nothing else matters.

I think we should try and help Obama succeed. His success is America’s success at this point. We know that his policies carry enormous risk and the potential to make things worse by propping up failed businesses led by incompetents. Better to offer rational, reasonable alternatives that would accomplish the goal of restarting the economy and get people back to work - even if it means Obama gets the credit.

No, it is not likely that that this will happen and Obama will go on his merry way, throwing money that we don’t have and can’t pay back at businesses not likely to survive this downturn. But I for one will not hope that his policies meet with utter failure. The consequences of this would be too terrible for the country.

As President elect Barack Obama seeks to expand the size of government to previously unheard of proportions, conservatives find themselves in a very difficult position politically. The fact is, there is no way, in principle, conservatives can compete with Obama when offering government help to anyone and everyone with their hand out. To do so would be to betray basic princples of the conservative movement.

But the political problem faced by conservatives is that they are in a position only to say “no” to the Bush/ Obama bailouts - playing Grinch to the next president’s Santa Claus. The question of a conservative alternative to this madness - except to allow the market to do its dirty work and pick and choose which businesses deserve to live or die - has rarely been raised, largely because the cure involves more economic pain than Obama is promising.

The “solution” that applies the principles of big government liberalism is unacceptable because, at bottom, it alters the social contract between the people and their government, substituting dependency for freedom (not to mention utterly failing when tried previously during the Great Depression). The other way - also tried during the depression - is to allow the market to function as executioner while perhaps taking most of the rest of down a path to economic ruin that we would be a decade or more recovering from.

The fact is, conservatives have no viable response to the Obama bailout program. On the one hand, the next president offers to save jobs, save companies, and prime the non-existent Keynesian pump with hundreds of billions in federal dollars that will - he says - put people back to work. On the other hand, conservatives are telling the American worker that he will have to take a hit due to the incompetence and short sightedness of his managers and be patient while the market sorts out the winners and losers.

One kind of government is too big. The other kind is too small. Clearly, what we need is a government that is “just right” - or at least an expression of “limited” government where conservative principles are married with the needs of a 21st century society.

“Too big to fail” is being overused in this crisis. But there are other ways to avoid failure than simply handing out unthinkably large sums of money to managers who have performed incompetently and whose actions caused the crisis in the first place and where such handouts presuppose that government can then dictate how that company or industry does business.

What about intelligently structured bankruptcy, government facilitated mergers with healthier companies, and even in special cases, guaranteed loans where the chances of the taxpayer being burned is very low? The point being, when one way being pushed involves big government solutions and the other way offers a small government conservative alternative that doesn’t address the real needs of real people, what is needed on the part of conservatives is a little imagination where proposed solutions will keep many if not most employees working, save important companies, and address the worries of the American people (a side benefit of which could be a boost in consumer confidence that might get money circulating a litte more freely). Most importantly, there must be ways for government to assist business in this crisis without ending up having what amounts to ownership rights that would for all practical purposes nationalize entire industries.

The Wall Street Journal laid out some alternatives to the auto bailout plan while showing how the Democrat’s plan would basically nationalize the Big Three by forcing them to accept the government’s own business plan:

Yet amid all the hopeful talk about the brave, new green car world, the men from Detroit were studiously silent on whether they can sell these new cars at a profit any better than they can their current lineup. Yes, the restructuring plans, especially GM’s, have some stark numbers about downsizing — 30,000 blue collar jobs are on the chopping block at GM alone. And this is accompanied by gauzy predictions of matching Toyota’s labor costs by 2012. But it’s hard to see how that gets done without a bankruptcy judge to tear up the contracts and start over. Once the auto makers agree to let Barney Frank run their businesses, does anyone really believe organized labor will roll over and let them gut the United Auto Workers?

The core problem is that the companies can’t pay their creditors in fuel-economy standards. Two economists testified that the ultimate cost of this bailout would certainly be much, much higher than $34 billion. Mark Zandi of economy.com put the number at up to $125 billion — and he supports the bailout. NYU’s Edward Altman said the company proposals were “doomed to fail.” He proposed a prepackaged bankruptcy for GM and Chrysler, with the government providing the debtor-in-possession financing if necessary. His point, which ought to be sobering, was that outside of bankruptcy there is no way to make these taxpayer loans senior to existing secured debt — meaning the government might never get paid back if the companies go bankrupt later.

Mr. Altman’s suggestion has a lot of things going for it. Instead of the politically driven “car czar” being mooted to oversee the bailout, you’d have a bankruptcy judge to make sure that the companies did, in fact, emerge as more viable businesses. The resulting restructuring would be far more likely to be driven by business considerations

What we’re talking about here is not “small” government but “limited government” - the idea that government can go this far and no farther consistent with Constitutional principles and conservative ideals. But we’ve been so busy railing against “big government” that other ways and means of dealing with this crisis have escaped our notice. In the process, we have become irrelvant in this, the most important debate in more than a generation that, at bottom, is one that deals with the size and scope of federal power and whether and how much it should be expanded at the expense of the states, private industry, and individual citizens.

In truth, Obama and the left don’t want to have this debate. That’s because they wish to use this economic crisis to remake American society - from the top down:

The thing about a crisis — and crisis doesn’t seem too strong a word for the economic mess right now — is that it creates a sense of urgency. Actions that once appeared optional suddenly seem essential. Moves that might have been made at a leisurely pace are desired instantly.

Therein lies the opportunity for President-elect Barack Obama. His plans for an activist government agenda are in many ways being given a boost by this crisis atmosphere and the nearly universal call for the government to do something fast to stimulate the economy.

This opportunity isn’t lost on the new president and his team. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s new chief of staff, told a Wall Street Journal conference of top corporate chief executives this week.

He elaborated: “Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.”

He ticked off some areas where he thought new doors were opening: energy, health, education, tax policy, regulatory reforms. The current atmosphere, he added, even makes bipartisanship easier: “The good news, I suppose, if you want to see a silver lining, is that the problems are big enough that they lend themselves to ideas from both parties for the solution.”

Note that Emanuel sees the GOP rolling over and playing ball with this radical restructuring of American society because conservative alternatives are not being pushed by the party leadership. Any “ideas” advanced by Republicans will involve fiddling with Democratic legislation at the margins, not offering viable, limited government alternatives.

William Kristol correctly identifies the problem but offers the wrong solution:

Now it’s true that the size of the government and the modern liberal agenda are connected. It’s also true that modern conservatism has to include a strong commitment to limited (though energetic) government and to constitutional (though not necessarily small or weak) government. Still, there’s a difference between a conservatism that is concerned with limited and constitutional government and one that focuses on simply opposing big government.

So: If you’re a small-government conservative, you’ll tend to oppose the bailouts, period. If you more or less accept big government, you’ll be open to the government’s stepping in to save the financial system, or the auto industry. But you’ll tend to favor those policies — universal tax cuts, offering everyone a chance to refinance his mortgage, relieving auto makers of burdensome regulations — that, consistent with conservative principles, don’t reward irresponsible behavior and don’t politicize markets.

The solution, as Scott Johnson eloquently points out, is not “big government conservatism” but “limited government” bounded by the Constitution:

Yet a debate framed in terms of big government versus small government is sterile without the notion of limited government. The proper understanding of limited government provides the judgment on the government programs on offer from the current and prospective administrations.

The gist of the column seems to be Bill’s is opposition to small-government conservatism. He urges conservatives opposing big government public works programs not to oppose them as irreconcilable with the proper ends of constitutional government, but rather to accept them as inevitable.

“Small government” conservatism is, as I have argued, intellectually satisfying but unrealistic and even politically counterproductive. If you are concerned with the philosphy of conservatism as a coherent set of principles that should be the ideal for a just and moral society in the abstract, then small government conservatism makes sense.

But if you seek to use conservative principles to govern a hugely diverse nation of 300 million people with clashing interests, differing needs, and even different ideas of what it means to be an American, then there should be a realization among conservatives that there is no “big” government or “small” government at all. Rather, it is using government to address the legitimate needs of the people consistent with the Constitution that matters in the end.

After all, there is nothing in the Constitution which states that government needs to be big or small. There are only limits placed on what government can do. Inherent in those limits may be the ideal of small government. But surely there is room for limited government while recognizing government’s legitimate responsibilities. For instance, the question of whether we must have drinking water that won’t kill us if we drink it is not addressed in the Constitution. And common sense should inform us that we can’t have 50 different standards for clean water. Ergo, assuring a supply of clean drinking water for its citizens is a legitimate function of the federal government.

We can argue the finer points of the Clean Water Act, including some regulations that are unnecessary and burdensome. But the basic notion that only the federal government can keep criminally irresponsible individuals and businesses from contaminating something so basic to life remains.

Is this “big” government? Or is it recognizing that in a nation of 300 million people who need clean water to stay alive that it must be the federal government’s responsibilty to oversee the process?

Readers here have engaged in spirited discussions in the comments about the nature of modern conservatism and its relevancy in a 21st century industrialized democracy. I believe that unless that debate includes ideas about the political relevancy of conservatism in a nation where “limited” government is preferrable to either “small” or “big” government, then conservatism itself will become an irrelevancy and the remaking of America by Obama and the liberals will become a foregone conclusion.

Yes, campaign promises are a dime a dozen and few people believe most of them.

But even for someone who promised the moon to so many, Barack Obama’s campaign promises are being quietly shelved or thrown under the bus at an unusual rate.

His tax policies are in ruins. And many of his prized ideas are now going to have to be financed through tax increases on every working American or their cost added to the ever ballooning deficit - the result of George Bush’s massive bailouts.

Then there’s his personnel choices which hardly give substance to his call for “change.” The establishmentarians he has hired on to run his national security and economcs shops fall laughably short of any promise for a “fresh breeze” to blow through Washington - more like a fetid wind of revolving door government.

Does this make Obama a failure? Not hardly. In a sense, it might have done more good than we realize at this time. Disabusing the new president of some of his more problematic notions of governance could very well moderate some of his policies and cause him to scale back some of his more grandiose plans on education ($4,000 tax credit in exchange for “community service”), the environment (1 million hybrids on the road by 2015), and most of all, the “middle class tax cut” which could add another half trillion to the deficit.

You could certainly blame some of Obama’s problems on the Bush deficits but not all. Much of Obama’s problem lies with his dishonest accounting of how he was going to pay for his programs to begin with. That, and a shortsightedness about the vagaries of the oil market will now doom almost all of his domestic initiatives to the ash heap.

With oil trading at below $50 bbl and OPEC apparently unwilling to cut production very much, the Obama team is quietly shelving one of the cornerstones of their economic program - a “windfall profits tax” on the oil companies.

Obama’s promise to give every American family a $1,000 “energy rebate” seems to have come a cropper of - what else - reality.

Obama and Biden will enact a windfall profits tax on excessive oil company profits to give American families an immediate $1,000 emergency energy rebate to help families pay rising bills. This relief would be a down payment on the Obama-Biden long-term plan to provide middle-class families with at least $1,000 per year in permanent tax relief.

How about his other tax raising proposal - the one he was going to foist upon the rich? That, too, has gone the way of the dinosaurs as his broken promise will now raise taxes on everybody because he plans to roll back the Bush tax cuts when they expire at the end of 2010.

To argue, as Obama defenders try to do, that this is not a tax increase is laughable. When you pay X amount in taxes one year and the following year you pay Y amount, with Y being a larger sum of money than X, most kindergartners - and maybe even some liberal economists - would call that a tax increase. And those tax cuts affected people in all income brackets - not just Obama’s idea of who is or who isn’t “rich.”

How about those 5,000,000 “green jobs” that were going to be funded by the oil tax revenue that was going to be invested in new technologies? Gone, along with the silly notion that taxing oil companies will create more oil or even bring down the price of the commodity. The market proved more efficient than anything or anyone in the US government in deciding how much people will pay for energy.

Do the math. Obama was expecting hundreds of billions of dollars from this tax to fund his social welfare schemes. He was expecting tens of billions more by increasing taxes on “the rich.” He either must shelve almost all of his program or raise taxes on everybody - substantially.

From Reuters:

President-elect Barack Obama is not planning to implement a windfall profit tax on oil companies because prices have dropped below $80 a barrel, an aide said on Tuesday.

“President-elect Obama announced the policy during the campaign because oil prices were above $80 per barrel,” an aide on Obama’s transition team said. “They are currently below that now and expected to stay below that.”

Oil prices have fallen from a record $147 a barrel in July to under $50 this week.

Obama, who signaled early in his campaign for the White House that he would take an active approach to oil markets as president, had planned to use the revenue from a windfall profits tax to fund a tax rebate for low- and middle-income families struggling with high energy prices.

But the aide said Obama’s presidential campaign had already taken the price drop into account six weeks ago. When Obama laid out his economic plan for the middle class in mid-October, revenue from a windfall profit tax was not included because of the price change, he said.

Oil companies steadfastly opposed a tax, saying it would stifle exploration and innovation.

Obama is whistling past the graveyard if he thinks he can fund the massive giveaway that polls show was the major reason for his electoral win. With trillion dollar deficits staring him in the face it would be fiscal madness to advance the kind of broad based rebate and handout that he so proudly pushed when running for president.

The dash of reality about revenue that this pullback represents calls into question some of  the primary goals of his Administration. Unless he is willing to push marginal tax rates much higher than he said during the campaign, it appears he will have to renege on that promised giveaway  of hundreds of billions of dollars.

There are few human beings on planet earth more annoying than Deepak Chopra, the touchy-feely, New Age Guru whose fetid, gooey, and completely banal nostrums regarding health and healing have reached a new low in the history of civilized thought.

He is, in short, a first class idiot.

To prove my point, Dorothy Rabinowitz writing in the Wall Street Journal caught this fakir blaming America for the attacks in Mumbai:

Soon enough, there was Deepak Chopra, healer, New Age philosopher and digestion guru, advocate of aromatherapy and regular enemas, holding forth on CNN on the meaning of the attacks.

How the ebullient Dr. Chopra had come to be chosen as an authority on terror remains something of a mystery, though the answer may have something to do with his emergence in the recent presidential campaign as a thinker of advanced political views. Also commending him, perhaps, is his well known capacity to cut through all sorts of complexities to make matters simple. No one can fail to grasp the wisdom of a man who has informed us that “If you have happy thoughts, then you make happy molecules.”

In his CNN interview, he was no less clear. What happened in Mumbai, he told the interviewer, was a product of the U.S. war on terrorism, that “our policies, our foreign policies” had alienated the Muslim population, that we had “gone after the wrong people” and inflamed moderates. And “that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay.”

All this was a bit too much, evidently, for CNN interviewer Jonathan Mann, who interrupted to note that there were other things going on — matters like the ongoing bitter Pakistan-India struggle over Kashmir — which had caused so much terror and so much violence. “That’s not Washington’s fault,” he pointed out.

Blogger Betsy Newmark has it about right:

It takes a seriously twisted world view to pivot immediately to finding a way to blame America for terrorists storming hotels and other soft targets to gun down people innocently going about their business. Rabinowitz ties this view to the handwringing over a report that the majority of people in the Middle East think that 9/11 was a put-up job done by the United States and Israel.

Reading Chopra’s writings at Huffington Post is a mind altering experiences; you are forced to alter your perception of how anyone could be so remarkably oblivious to their own idiocy.  It is impossible to reconcile in your mind the idea that anyone could take such a lightweight seriously.

For instance:

On November 7, 2008, at 9:45am , I, Deepak Chopra, took a vow of
non-violence in my thoughts, in my speech and in my actions. I, then,
also had an opportunity to ask the almost 500 people attending the plenary session for the Alliance for a New Humanityin Barcelona if they would join me in this commitment.

I first asked them to close their eyes, put their awareness in their hearts and ask themselves honestly and seriously if they were willing to take a vow.

I told them that a vow is a sacred commitment from which there is no going back. It is like a child that is born, who cannot return to the womb.

I told them if they were ready to take this vow, they should stand up.

People stood up, one by one at first, then in groups of twos and threes, and finally in tidal waves, until more than 450 people had stood up and taken the vow.

Following this, everybody agreed to have at least two people in their lives take the vow. The two in turn, would have two others join them in taking the vow. Our immediate goal now is to get 100 Million people across the world to take this vow. In the meantime, we will be setting up ways to measure and support the dramatic effects this tidal wave of shift in consciousness is going to create.

Ahem…their “immediate goal was to get 100 million people across the world to take this vow?” The “dramatic effects of this tidal wave?”This kind of simple minded, feel good sophistry is what Chopra excels in foisting on his legions of worshippers who mistake his syrupy treacle for serious thought.The idea that such a task is even possible would never cross the mind of anyone except a simple minded dolt.

Here’s what passes for political analysis from Chopra commenting on Obama’s election:

The most sober comment came from Obama himself, when he pointed out that his win wasn’t the change the country is seeking but only the chance for change. Happily, he’s wrong in several regards. We will see immediate change globally. The rest of the world breathed a sigh of relief at the end of the neocons’ attempt to create an American military empire.

In the end, the most moving comment came from Sen. John McCain in his concession speech. Like all the candidates who have stood for the Republican cause since the Reagan revolution, McCain couldn’t resist the temptation to employ “junk politics and immorality” in his campaign. But he went out honorably by saying that America “isn’t a country that hides from history.” That hasn’t been true for the past eight years. Let’s hope it’s gloriously true from now on.

So we’ve been “hiding from history” the last 8 years? What planet has this guy been visiting during the Bush Administration? More likely, he hasn’t a clue what history is and therefore believes that sticking ones head in the sand about terrorism and all the evil in the world passes for facing history square in the face.

Chopra delights in trivializing the momentus and obscuring the obvious. One need only read his “political” writings at Huffington Post to become lost in a sea of the most mind boggling shibboleths, inane platitudes, and nauseating screeds against Republicans you can find anywhere on the internet. No one bothers critiquing his thinking anymore because frankly, there is so little in the way of intellectual meat in his scribblings that any such effort isn’t worth the pixels that would be expended in trying to explain the depth of his stupidity.

Read the rest of Rabinowitz’s piece to get a good laugh.