Sorry gang for the lack of posting. Just another one of those days where I just didn’t really feel like repeating myself over and over and over…. Hopefully, After the weekend, I might feel a bit more in the mood to blog about politics.
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Picking up on the scandal of the year, today the Chicago House of Representives voted today to impeach Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
The Story via Chi-Town Tribune:
In a historic vote, the Illinois House has impeached Gov. Rod Blagojevich, directing the Senate to put the state’s 40th chief executive on trial with the goal of removing him from office.
The vote by the House was 114-1 and marks the first time in the state’s 190-year history that a governor has been impeached, despite Illinois’ longstanding reputation for political corruption.
Rep. Milt Patterson (D-Chicago) was the lone vote against impeaching the governor. Patterson, from Chicago’s Southwest Side, said after the roll call that he didn’t feel it was his job to vote to impeach the governor. He declined comment on whether he approved of the job Blagojevich is doing.
A Blagojevich spokesman said the governor will not resign. A 2 p.m. news conference with the governor is scheduled for the James R. Thompson Center in downtown Chicago.
The actions of the House–approving an article of impeachment maintaining Blagojevich had committed abuses of power–represents the equivalent of an indictment.
The impeachment resolution covering Blagojevich’s actions “show a public servant who has betrayed his oath of office, who has betrayed the public trust, who is not fit to govern the state of Illinois,” said Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie, the Chicago Democrat who headed a special panel that recommended Blagojevich’s impeachment a day earlier.
This now paves the way for the for the Senate of Chicago to start the process of starting an impeachment trial. I would tend to believe that the President-Elects camp just wants this little problem to simply go away. But it looks like the Governor is not going to resign and this process will be dragged out. Which makes me wonder, what would Al Capone do in a situation like this? 😉
Related to this story comes this little nugget of information via Chi-Town Sun-Times:
A potentially troublesome new detail emerged about Roland Burris’ controversial U.S. Senate appointment Thursday after a state House panel voted unanimously to recommend Gov. Blagojevich be impeached.
For the first time, Burris indicated that he asked Blagojevich’s former chief of staff and college classmate, Lon Monk, to relay his interest in the Senate seat to the governor last July or September.
“If you’re close to the governor, you know, let him know I’m certainly interested in the seat,” Burris said he told Monk.
That testimony appears to differ from an affidavit Burris submitted to the impeachment panel this week in which he stated he spoke to no “representatives” of the governor about the Senate post prior to Dec. 26.
Federal prosecutors, who identified Monk as “Lobbyist 1” in their criminal complaint against Blagojevich, indicated they tapped Monk’s phone in November as Blagojevich moved to fill President-elect Barack Obama’s Senate seat.
Um, I believe when Barack Obama said, Hope and….Um, Change, this is NOT what he had in mind. 😮
I think it is safe to assume that this little soap opera is NOT going away anytime soon. Should be interesting to say the least. 😀
Others: Chicago Breaking News, BBC, The Gun Toting Liberal, Fox News, WBBM-TV, Sister Toldjah, TIME.com, Democracy in America, KFVS-TV, Scared Monkeys, Balloon Juice, Fausta’s Blog, Michelle Malkin, RBO, D-Day, The Huffington Post, Real Clear Politics, Progress Illinois, The Reaction, Chicago Breaking News, Progress Illinois, ArchPundit, Michelle Malkin, Washington Wire, Taylor Marsh, Crooks and Liars, The Capitol Fax Blog, Hot Air and FiveThirtyEight.com (Via Memeorandum)