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Thursday, December 11

Help! Help! HELP! No wait: Fire! FIRE!

Four years. Four years of the Chicago Mob in the White House. Oh God, I'm a good American. I don't deserve this.

Why did that stupid idiot McCain get involved with that fiend Randy Scheunemann, making it impossible for any knowledgeable person to vote for him? In the first 100 days of his administration a McCain president would have put together a tough policy toward Russia, which means that on the 101st day we would have been at war with Russia.

Of course Scheunemann didn't make that announcement in the United States. He announced the plan in Georgia. No I don't have the link to the newspaper interview. I ate it.

Don't look at me that way. What was I supposed to tell you? Don't vote for McCain so Barack Obama and the entire Chicago mob plus every fiend from the Clinton administrations that was pried out of the State Department, the CIA, the World Bank and the Pentagon can come back -- plus Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Soros? Plus the return of the Russian mobs to Washington dinners? Plus the wife heading up State?

This wasn't a presidential election, this was the plot of Jurassic Park, only with the dinosaurs cornering the last of the humans on the island.

Oh why did we have to choose between a pit of snakes and a pit of spiders? Is this our punishment for going off the Gold Standard? God save us all.

Okay, I'll calm down enough to show you what got me hysterical so we can move to the South Pole together. I'm just not calm enough to add all the links that John Batchelor provided to his post, shown below, so you'll have to go to his site to pick them up if you want them:

Rahm Wobbles, Tony Whines
"He asks me for the Fifth CD thing..."

Blagojeviching may have swept in another suspect today when Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel misspoke at a reporter's questions. A Chicago Sun-Times gumshoe caught up with Emanuel in order to ask about the Blago tape.

Is Rahm Emanuel the "Obama adviser" mentioned by Blago on the tape? -- when Blago was characterizing a conversation he had already had with an "Obama adviser" about naming Obama crony Valerie Jarret to the seat?

Blago is recorded saying on the phone, "He ([nnamed Obama adviser] asks me for the Fifth CD thing. I want it to be in his head..."

Mr. Emanuel is most recently the congressman from the 5th CD of Illinois in the heart of Cook County. The reporter's questions were logical. Mr. Emanuel was not cooperative. The non-cooperation took place in the lobby of Mayor Daley's City Hall, where Mr. Emanuel aimed to attend a concert given by his children and their school.

The quotes in the exchange, recorded by a digital MP3 machine, are guaranteed to call attention to Mr. Emanuel as unprepared and in need of a time out:

"You're wasting your time. I'm not going to say a word to you. I'm going to do this with my children. Don't do that. I'm a father. I have two kids. I'm not going to do it."

At this point we are told that Mr. Emanuel "pushed the reporter's digital recorder away." Yes. A scene from an opera. The suspect caught in the headlights. Does a President-Elect's chief of staff refuse to answer questions? Yes. Does he plead fatherhood as the excuse? Yes. But does this chief of staff escape a mob of reporters at his next availability all repeating the same question: Are you the Obama advisor? And what does it mean "the Fifth CD thing?"

And how do you explain that Mr. Obama says that none of his staff spoke to Blago about "any deals related to this seat?" Did you speak to Blago? About Valerie Jarret? And so forth. The opera builds to a duet and then an aria. Rahm wobbles in his place.

This only gets better as Blago refuses to go away. The detail emerged today that CNN reported on air on Monday night December 8, the night before the Blago arrest, that Valerie Jarret had withdrawn her name from consideration. Peculiar timing.

Did the Obama team get a heads-up of the arrest and tape and so move to get Ms. Jarret out of the line of fire? It didn't work. Because now the Blago remark about "the Fifth CD thing" and Valerie Jarret combined with the bizarre panicky moment by Mr. Emanuel at City Hall in this news cycle must lead to a complete reexamination of every conversation in the Obama transition team about the Senate seat.

The President-Elect can only plead innocence, ignorance, frustration, confusion, exasperation. While still in Chicago, Mr. Obama cannot get away from Chicago's unusual conduct of government; and now Chicago is going with him to Washington in the form of all those grand juries and FBI questions and transcripts to come.

And what does anyone guess Blago and Emanuel were talking about, if they were talking, when mentioning the Fifth CD and the Senate seat? Trade? Barter? Help? Names? Fatherhood? The imagination overheats. Deep breath.

Tony "...not one breath of fresh air..."

Meanwhile Blagojeviching makes it unlikely to impossible that Tony Rezko will ever again enjoy the simple joys of fatherhood such as Mr. Emanuel now finds incompatible with public service and candor. Tony has remained since June in solitary confinement at the Federal Loop jail of the Metropolitan Correction Center as he awaits sentencing for his multiple corruption convictions.

The delay is because Tony has been talking in detail to the Feds about his life of crime as a fixer for Blago and others. A small piece of the indictment of Blago points to a bribery scheme with Mercy Hospital in 2003 that involved Tony Rezko and the general genius of pay-for-play. Speculation by wags is that eventually much more of Tony's years of fixing bribes and pay-offs for Blago will be part of the prosecution.

Patrick "Untouchable" Fitzgerald moved to arrest Blago on Tuesday because of what he called a "crime spree," however the indictment shows that Fitzgerald has already assembled years of crimes by Blago and pals.

Now we are told that Tony is unhappy in his solitary cell, and we are told this by one of his two teenage sons, Adam. "Our main concern is he has not had one breath if fresh air since June," says Adam, "and he's not seen one ray of sunlight."

At first I thought this was sad, and then I remembered that sons like Adam do not invent complaints about their father's fate. They pass on what the father wants passed on. Tony is using his sons (below from last June as Tony breathed his last fresh air in sunshine and then surrendered to jail) to whine for him.

Why and why now? Since Tony will never breathe free again, and sunshine in a Chicago snowy winter is relative, and he faces a decade or more in jail and that was just the first trial, this can all only mean that Tony is looking out for Tony just now.

Something has spooked him. Blagojeviching? Is there more on the recordings about Tony? Does Tony now have to say much more than before because it is no longer enough to give up the governor, he his busted already. What else does Tony have to trade? Another big politician? The imagination overheats. Deep breath.

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