BlagoGate, Day 3

Yet more evidence contradicts Obama's claim that he had no contact with (allegedly) corrupt Gov. Rod F---ing Blagojevich, and it looks like Tony Rezko's rolling over for the feds, too. Meanwhile, my capitalist greedhead friends at Club For Growth have determined that Blago is right: A Senate seat is a "f---ing valuable thing." A lifetime value of about $6.2 million, to be exact.

John Fund comments on Obama's silence about the blatant corruption of "the Chicago Way":

What remains to be seen is whether this episode will put an end to what Chicago Tribune political columnist John Kass calls the national media's "almost willful" fantasy that Mr. Obama and Chicago's political culture have little to do with each other.

UPDATE I: Sabato's Crystal Ball:

Of Illinois' immediate past eight governors, Blagojevich would be the fourth sent to prison. That is a stunning statistic, and it reminds us of how bad a culture of corruption is once it takes hold. States such as Oregon and Virginia have developed governmental cultures that are clean--voters and the political class alike reject corruption as antithetical to what they are. Citizens and politicians in other states, e.g. New Jersey and Illinois, seem to accept a certain amount of corruption as the cost of doing business. That is corrosive, and eventually leads to such a toxic environment that it is plausible a governor could attempt to sell a seat in the U.S. Senate, seek to have a journalist fired using threats that equal little more than petty extortion, and engaged in such simple and obvious graft that the entire nation stands in a stunned gaze.
Who is to blame for acts of corruption? The guilty officials, of course, are the people we must hold culpable. Yet, the citizenry also bears its share of the rap once a culture of corruption develops because they have tolerated it. The public shouldn't accept corruption under any guise--the people possess the means to turn dirty pols out of office and they have a responsibility to do so.

It's the crooked voters!

UPDATE II: Obama denies everything:

"I have never spoken to the governor on this subject," Obama said, adding that he has asked his staff to collect the facts about their contact with Blagojevich on the matter.
"This Senate seat does not belong to any politician to trade," Obama said. "It belongs to the people of Illinois."

And it's a f---ing valuable thing!

UPDATE III: A good roundup at Dr. Melissa's.

UPDATE IV: Survey says: Blago less popular than syphilis. And maybe he's bonkers, too.

UPDATE V: Ace of Spades:

Bear in mind, of course, Sarah Palin was a moron for taking on the less-spectacularly corrupt Alaskan political machine. See, if she had been as brilliant as Obama, she wouldn't have needed to respond with crude measures like fighting corruption and defeating corrupt politicians; she could have employed nuance and smarts to finesse around it, and even profit from it.
Whew. We really dodged a bullet there.

Jeffrey Lord on the Camelot precedent.

UPDATE VI: John Cole and Ben Smith cage match (which I learned of because Cole linked me). I'm agnostic on the issue of whether it is "censorship" for Obamabots to give the heave-ho to questions about Blago on Change.gov. Eventually, however, there is a limit to what busy beavers on the Internet can do. This is all part of a P.R. battle, with Democrats trying to convince the world that the putrid corruption of Chicago politics, as personified by Blago, cannot possibly taint the sainted Obama. Good luck with that.

UPDATE VII: Dept. of Obvious Headlines:

UNION LINKED TO CORRUPTION SCANDAL

UPDATE VIII: Michelle Malkin is having entirely too much fun with Patty F---ing Blagojevich.

UPDATE IX: What's a scandal without a timeline?

PREVIOUSLY:
12/10: The Obama memory hole
12/10: BlagoGate, Day 2
12/9: 'Tainted'
12/9: Monetize this!
12/9: FBI arrests Obama ally