Call It A Comeback
Fox News Chicago and the Better Government Association team up on an investigation of Joe Berrios and his county employees golfing with property tax lawyers instead of finishing their appeal work.
Those delayed tax bills cost our schools and local governments more when they have to borrow money to meet operating costs.
Kent Redfield is spot on here:
Kent Redfield,an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois Springfield and director of the Sunshine Project, a nonprofit campaign contribution database connected to the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, said it would be more useful to Brady’s campaign to frame it as an issue with Quinn’s managerial skills than his ethics. “It’s much easier to make the case that Quinn is incompetent [than corrupt.] … That Quinn’s a nice person but he isn’t up to the job is an easier sell.”.
So at this point in the campaign, Quinn’s strategy appears to be confuse the Brady campaign with crazy behavior so they cannot decide whether to paint him as incompetent or corrupt. Pure genius.
At this point in an election having to choose between the narrative of incompetent or corrupt is exactly where you want to be.
Also, see the Daily Show clip below and come up with your own Team Stupid and Team Evil skits for Quinn.
And to be sure, the e-mails are pretty penny ante stuff. Definitely a violation, but hardly a serious one and Stermer reported himself. The question is how you can be so stupid to fire the IG while all of this is happening.
Without pointing out so much that he’s just that
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What’s fascinating about this is the total rubes following Fox around buying this BS. It’s pretty obvious Roger Ailes thinks his viewers are just there for him to manipulate all the while Murdock and crew hobnob with teh muslim.
Tougher than the last. Rod looks like a buffoon. Nothing new. Jon said he was either a seriously wronged man or a sociopath.
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Parental Advisory Language
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwaNRWMN-F4[/youtube]
The whole thing is ugly, but let me point out my favorite part in the absurdity. Some assclown yells “I bet he voted for Obama!”.
No fucking shit he probably voted for Obama. Manhattan voted for Obama with 82 percent of the vote and the guy is an African American–part of a group that voted over 92 percent for Obama. You think he might have voted for Obama? If that’s a problem for you geniuses you might think about going somewhere where the overwhelming majority of people didn’t vote for Obama which is far away from Ground Zero.
The second best part is where they call him a coward. After he wdes through an incredibly hostile crowd.
Then they insist that they aren’t racist after this and accuse CNN of spinning it as if they are racist because of the outburst. Of course, there’s no other fucking way to spin a bunch of white goons screaming and crowding a black guy before even asking what the fuck he thinks. Then someone starts yelling about how Muhammed is a pig. What relevance this has to a guy who isn’t a Muslim is completely fucking unknown other than he’s a scary brown dude.
This is nothing more than an ugly fucking mob of dumb asses who apparently have never had a Muslim friend. Which in 2010, I”m baffled how people still exist in such a state when they live anywhere, but a small town. Then again, if scary brown people make you pee your pants, what the fuck are you going to do?
It’s hard to tell if Scott Lee Cohen deserves the Blagojevich award for reality denial or Rod Blagojevich deserves the SLC award for the same:
“I’m not ruling myself out as coming back because I will be vindicated in this case,” the 53-year-old Democrat said on “Fox News Sunday” today. “We’re significantly closer to vindication now.”
He can’t run for an state office of any sort so this would mean a run for Congress, Senate, or President. Now, I’m pretty sure he’s going to end up in a prison for a fairly long time given what we know about the jury now. It might take another trial or two, but he’s going to prison.
Anyone who thinks he’s plea bargain is about as deluded as Rod Blagojevich.
The Clown show is going to the Daily Show tonight so we’ll see if Jon tears him apart after a fairly softball interview last time. Admittedly, part of the issue was that Blagojevich went for small details which Stewart wasn’t ready for, but my sense is Stewart doesn’t like to be caught off guard and won’t let it happen a second time. You can suggest questions here.
He’s been a class act while on the Cubs and will be missed.
No more Cubs blogging until I can express without multiple curses how bad they are this year.
As the news is better understood, it is certainly understood that the government could have presented the case better, but besides a lone holdout, Rod Blagojevich would have been convicted of at least a couple of the more serious charges and perhaps more.
Of particular concern, several jurors said Wednesday, was the lone holdout on numerous counts that would have convicted Blagojevich of trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President Barack Obama. John Grover, 52, a juror from Joliet, said he grew so frustrated after three days of deliberating on the same charge that he yelled at the woman who refused to join the other 11 in agreeing to convict.
“I gave her a piece of my mind,” Grover said. “If it wasn’t for that one lady, we’d have had him convicted on probably 80 percent of (the indictment).”
Grover considered going to the judge to tell him that the female juror was deliberating in bad faith, but he felt that would do no good.
The holdout is a retired state public health employee who lives in the west suburbs and had once served as director of teen counseling for the Chicago Urban League. During jury selection, she said she had read about the governor’s arrest but had no preconceived opinion about the case. She could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
“He was lucky,” Grover said of Blagojevich. “I hate to put it like that, but the amount of evidence that prosecution presented to us — there was so much of it. I don’t see how anybody could come to any other conclusion.”
A sane man would strike a plea bargain with the US Attorney. Rod Blagojevich will not.
One of my great frustrations with the end of the trial is the lambasting of the jury. Jurors in this kind of case are pretty much by definition not terribly well informed on current events. It doesn’t make them dumb, but they have other priorities to pay attention to in their lives. However, as is clear, even the lone holdout took all of this very seriously and they all seem very conscientious. They don’t deserve the scorn they are getting especially en masse. They did a job most of us treat as a bit of a joke and deserve our thanks.
Oh, and we’ll get the dumb bastard next trial.
From the Tribune it appears one juror was the hold up on selling the Senate Seat and the effort to extort money out Rahm Emmanuel through his brother Ari.
More to the point is one juror’s desription of the case by the Prosecution:
Sarnello, a sophomore at College of DuPage studying criminal justice, said the main problem with the prosecution’s case was that it appeared scattered.
“It confused people. They didn’t follow a timeline. They jumped around,” he said.
This is a key point to the racketeering and conspiracy charges. There has to be an ongoing criminal enterprise and one thing you have to do to have an audience understand such an argument is provide a clear timeline to them, where the distinct events occur along the timeline, and how it worked. One concern I’ve had since early on is that all, but they lying charge are all relatively contemporaneous despite the investigation starting in 2003/4.. By concentrating on the later acts that have better evidence with the wiretaps the Prosecution was concentrating upon the strongest evidence, but they hurt their timeline. What is probably needed is some testimony from the earlier efforts to demonstrate the ongoing enterprise. That may require Levine or Rezko on the stand to establish the early part of the conspiracy. If they primarily concentrate upon those issues in questioning, their lack of reliability is diminished in the later specific crimes.
Matsumoto said he was in favor of convicting the former governor on all counts, and was not the only juror who felt that way. “I believe they proved their case beyond a reasonable doubt. I’m very regretful,” Matusmoto said.
Still, other jurors remained unmoved by the tapes and other evidence and testimony during the trial. Some jurors said, “Oh, they were just talking,” Matsumoto said.
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Early Tuesday morning, the jury had agreed to two guilty counts. A charge related to an allegation of attempted extortion of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel fell by the wayside as jurors lost confidence in the government’s evidence on that charge, said another juror, Erik Sarnello, 21, a student who lives with his parents in suburban Itasca.
The government had alleged that Blagojevich held up a state grant to the Chicago Academy until Rahm Emanuel’s Hollywood-agent brother, Ari, would throw him a fundraiser.
From the start of deliberations, some jurors admitted they believed from the start of deliberations that Blagojevich was guilty. “Some people said they thought he was guilty, but the evidence is really not there,” he said.
Sarnello said he knew by day three of the 13-day deliberations that the jury was in for a long haul. That prompted him to give a speech in which he sought to persuade fellow jurors to agree with each other rather than than extending deliberations. At that point, Sarnello believed Blagojevich guilty on several counts.
“It was petty obvious to me that some of these people needed clear cut evidence. They wanted to see the videos,” Sarnello said.
While jurors always have their own judgment to rely upon I would say some holdouts were likely not following the judge’s directions and were looking for a different standard of what a crime is. That happens and the government is going to have to do a better job of creating a narrative from the sounds of it, but I think there are several counts that could be convictions with a different jury. Conspiracy, for example, is generally “just talking. “
Key point:
Sarnello addressed the question of why the jury Tuesday asked for a copy of the oath they took at the start of deliberations. Some jurors felt one of the jurors was not deliberating in good faith. “Some people felt that they were deliberating not under what the law told us to do,” he said.
“What they were looking at wasn’t what we were supposed to be looking at based on what the judge gave us as a set of rules,” Sarnello said.
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