As happy as I am for my junior U.S. Senator and my Congressman, as of Friday I have neither:
Rep. Rahm Emanuel will resign his House seat Friday.
Emanuel, set to serve as chief of staff to President-elect Barack Obama, sent a letter to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich Monday indicating that he planned to step down at the end of the week.
Yay! Another election! Approximately everyone in the Congressional district is running, too.
The best governor we have right now shall never surrender:
Gov. Rod Blagojevich said today he "has done nothing wrong" and will not resign in the face of federal corruption charges.
"I will fight. I will fight. I will fight until I take my last breath," he said. "And I'm not going to quit a job that people hired me to do because of false accusations and a political lynch mob."
Blagojevich, however, did not get into the specifics of the political corruption charges he faces, saying he's "not going to talk about this case in 30-second sound bites ... on the TV news."
The governor went on to quote from the poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling....
Stunning. His approval rating is within the margin of error of zero, and he thinks he's still serving the people of Illinois? Is he deluded or just stupid?
Har:
Just how much money do you think it would take to persuade Blagojevich to get the bleep out of the way?
I'm serious. Big corporations do it all the time. They've got a screw-up executive in the way, and they need to make a change. To save time and trouble, they pay him to get lost. It could be worth a try.
Would a year's salary do the trick? Probably not, but he'd have to give it serious thought.
In all seriousness, I've often wondered how my life might be simpler were I sociopathic. The best governor we have right now suggests that the unexamined life might not be so bad after all—at least, until the inevitable move to Duluth.
Note to Blagojevich: Even Nixon resigned.
Sheesh.
I've given up for the evening attempting to configure a recalcitrant firewall. To cheer up, I turn to Paul Krugman, who reminds us that a 0% Fed rate means we're in trouble:
ZIRP!
That's zero interest rate policy. And it has arrived. America has turned Japanese.
This is the thing I’ve been afraid of ever since I realized that Japan really was in the dreaded, possibly mythical liquidity trap. ...
Seriously, we are in very deep trouble. Getting out of this will require a lot of creativity, and maybe some luck too.
At least I think I've figured out where I mis-configured the firewall....
Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan has started impeachment proceedings against Governor Blagojevich:
Madigan, a veteran Southwest Side Chicago lawmaker and head of the Democratic Party of Illinois, announced the move against the state's first Democratic governor in more than a quarter century at a news conference at the State Capitol.
"It is my intention to appoint a special committee to begin immediately an investigation into the governor's conduct in office and to undertake the preparatory work that is a prerequisite to an impeachment proceeding in the Illinois House," Madigan said.
Yes, you read that right. His own party chair is heading up the impeachment. And he still won't resign. I mean, how does he think this is going to turn out?
People with a sense of history may find Nixon aide Dean's advice to the incoming president interesting:
Because of my own personal experience with Watergate, the mother of modern presidential scandals, not to mention being a student of scandals that followed, I speak as someone who learned the hard way by making mistakes and then watched as others made their own similar and unnecessary blunders.
...[I]n the interest of the nation presidents (which would include presidents-elect) must openly and aggressively confront any and all scandals that affect them. The more innocent they are the more aggressively they should address the problem to end it before it grows.
The best governor we have right now is so bad that convicted felons Dan Rostenkowski and George Ryan both felt moved to say something. And no one laughed at them.
Wow. That says something.
The AP calls his approval rating "shockingly low," missing the obvious point that it's shockingly high. Who, really, are those 8%? And 8% of what, one has to wonder?
Holy {bleep}:
Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan filed a motion with the Illinois Supreme Court today aimed at removing Gov. Rod Blagojevich from office.
Such a motion is untested in the state's history. The case could determine whether the governor is fit to serve.
Madigan will hold a news conference at 11:15 a.m at the state office complex in downtown Chicago.
More details to come.
Unprecedented. And (full disclosure) even though I've already contributed to Madigan's own campaign, I'm not sure this is the kind of precedent we really want.
On the other hand, what in all of Christendom will convince Blagojevich he needs to resign? Maybe he really has left the realm of the sane.