Thursday: The End for Blago?

Keith Olbermann reported on Countdown tonite that Rod Blagojevich has requested time to address the Illinois State Senate on Thursday for a duration of "an hour to an hour and a half," during and after which he will take no questions.

He hasn't answered the charges in person (nor did Bill Clinton in his own hour of trial) or by representation of counsel (his attorney quit on him), opting instead to spend the first part of the week on an East Coast media blitz.

I didn't bother to watch any of it and am pleased to know that this saga appears set to end. After Blago gets done babbling, the guy prosecuting the impeachment case will sum up and put the matter in the hands of the senators for an up or down vote on conviction; Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn will stand ready to take the oath upon the governor's expected ouster.

Follow it all @ CNN. I gotta get my laundry done tomorrow and hope to have it finished by 9 AM, at which time the day's action should get going.

Follow 'em live

Blagojevich impeachment streaming vid @ http://cnn.com/live

I'm gonna try to get a live blog going in time for tomorrow --they're already in recess after 40 minutes for the party caucuses to meet separately, and the live blog that I found was crap. Looks like it'll be mostly procedure, pageantry and false starts today anyway.

Minnesota senate recount streaming vid: http://theuptake.org/

Manic Monday

Right, too much going on today --Norm Coleman's election contest of the Minnesota U.S. senate race result before a three-judge panel gets going today, and the Illinois State Senate takes up the matter of the impeachment of Gov. Rod Blagojevich that has landed in their chamber. Both proceedings commence at noon Central U.S. time.

I'll be monitoring the Minny action at The UpTake and urge anyone with even a casual interest in the subject to do the same --the folks at The 'Take do a tremendous job and are showing the way forward into the emerging medium of citizen journalism, what with their live streaming of video of the proceedings and always informative and entertaining discussion in their live blog.

Don't yet even know where I'm going to follow the Blago proceedings, but I'll keep y'all apprised. I'd imagine that today will be taken up with a lot of pageantry and that we won't be getting into the meat of it until Tuesday, but who knows.

Interesting post from Nate and resultant discussion over at FiveThirtyEight this morning on Russ Feingold's proposed Constitutional amendment to require quicky special elections to fill unexpired Senate terms --call it "The Roland Burris Amendment." Oy gefalt...

A trip back --and not a very long one

Plenty to say, and me at an utter loss.

I'll get to it later, but in the meantime, I've dug up what I put down a couple of days after Barack won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat on 16th March of 2004.

To be completely honest, I didn't think he had a chance to win, and in particular after getting his ass kicked, as I had predicted, when he challenged Bobby Rush for the latter's U.S. House seat four years before that.

I thought that the Senate nomination was a two-man fight between Machine-favored Dan Hynes and Blair Hull the rich guy from the North Shore whose embarrassing divorce records got unsealed in the latter days of the campaign, and I was planning to vote for Hynes --or against Hull, really-- until it looked like Barack could win the thing.

So anyway, here ya go. I called it "Election Recap: A Star Is Born" and sent it off to the host of a local sports-talk radio show with an interest in this sort of thing...

Mike--I wanted to get you some notes on the party primaries, which I don't imagine that you had a chance to digest with the trip out to Vegas on Tuesday as the polls were closing. The huge story here is that of Democratic senate candidate Barack Obama, who bulldozed his way to the nomination in surprising and sensational fashion.

Some numbers will put it into perspective, and let's start with a comparison of Obama's statewide vote tally as compared with the entire field that battled it out on the Republican side:

• Obama's total votes: 652,826
• GOP total votes for U.S. Senate nomination: 661,048

What it amounts to is a statewide vote total for all eight GOP candidates of only 8,222 more votes than Obama got. One could argue that the GOP turnout was kept down due to the electorate not being juiced up this time around, what with no presidential challenge --but the same is essentially true of the Democrats, given that Kerry came to Illinois with the necessary delegate count to ice the nomination and all major opposition within the party having dropped out of the race anyway.

In addition, the eight-way GOP demolition derby for the nomination to replace the retiring GOP Senator Peter Fitzgerald ought to have grabbed people's interest in the same way that the seven-way tilt on the other side had Democratic voters turning out. The fact that Tom Hynes, who got snuffed by Obama and finished a distant second with 23.7 percent of the Democratic vote, grabbed 59,138 more votes in a losing cause than GOP top man Jack Ryan lends further perspective and makes it plain that if the Republican Party intends to hold on to the Fitzgerald seat, it has a whole lot of work to do between now and November 2nd.

Let's look inside the Democratic vote and see just how and where Obama got it done, and let us begin in Chicago. In wards with high concentrations of Black voters, Obama destroyed the rest of the Democratic field. This isn't necessarily surprising, but it helps to remember that in a city of long-standing divisions along racial lines, Rich Daley is now winning re-election by capturing majorities in all 50 wards on the way to clobbering Black candidates --and this is in municipal elections in which wounds old and new have added immediacy.

It's also worth remembering that State Sen. Obama challenged Congressman Bobby Rush in the Democratic primary of 2000 in an attempt to wrest away the congressman's seat after Rush got battered by Daley in the 1999 mayoral election. Obama thought that he smelled blood in the water and that the voters would reject Cong. Rush, but he was rudely corrected by voters who stuck with Rush after he fought the good fight in taking it on the chin against Daley the previous spring. It's clear that Sen. Obama mended whatever fences were damaged in his losing effort (and indeed Cong. Rush joined Cong. Luis Gutierrez and Ald. Dick Mell in backing Blair Hull's candidacy over Obama's in this senate contest).

Not only did Obama enjoy a hammerlock on the Black vote in Chicago on Tuesday. A check of the city's ward map shows that most of Chicago was Obama country, and let's look at the vote totals in some selected North Side wards to see just how complete his domination was:

• Ward 43 (Lincoln Park): Obama 5,619 (71.6%), Hynes 1,140 (14.5%), Others 1,079 (13.8%)
• Ward 44 (Lake View): Obama 5,661 (70.8%), Hynes 1,104 (13.8%), Others 1232 (15.4%)
• Ward 48 (Edgewater): Obama 7,230 (76.5%), Hynes 676 (7.2%), Others 1,541 (16.3%)
• Ward 47 (Ed Kelly): Obama 6,604 (60.4%), Hynes 2,797 (25.6%), Others 1,533 (14.0%)
• Ward 33 (Dick Mell): Obama 2,657 (45.4%), Hynes 532 (9.1%), Others 2,667 (45.5%)
• Ward 50 (Bernie Stone): Obama 4,140 (54.1%), Hynes 1,131 (14.8%) Others 2,383 (31.1%)
• Ward 39 (Central northern border): Obama 3,085 (43.0%), Hynes 1,977 (27.6%), Others 2,109 (29.4%)
• Ward 45 (Northwestern border/Tom Lyons): Obama 3,351 (35.5%), Hynes 3,256 (34.5%), Others 2,840 (30.0%)
• Ward 41 (O'Hare): Obama 3,449 (35.5%), Hynes 3,282 (33.8%), Others 2,981 (30.7%)
• Ward 38 (Northwest/Cullerton): Obama 2,474 (36.2%), Hynes 2,019 (29.6%), Others 2,338 (34.2%)

The conclusions to be drawn are that Obama was a juggernaut along the Lakefront --no longer the "liberal" bastion of yore, at least south of Irving Park Road-- and he handled himself just fine in the "white ethnic" wards farther out from the lake.Also worth a look is his performance in the racially mixed 18th Ward on the far Southwest Side, which boasts a white alderman in the form of Thomas Murphy: Obama 10,888 (76.5%), Hynes 1,958 (13.8%), Others 1,381 (9.7%)

No less impressive --and perhaps even more so-- was Obama's performance in the collar counties:

• DuPage: Obama 35,770 (56.8%), Hynes 11,509 (18.3%), Others 15,681 (25.0%)
• Lake: Obama 29,636 (64.3%), Hynes 5,999 (13.0%), Others 10,469 (22.7%)
• Will: Obama 19,644 (49.5%), Hynes 9,528 (24.0%), Others 10,533 (26.5%)
• Kane: Obama 12,363 (56.2%), Hynes 3,749 (17.1%), Others 5,872 (26.7%)
• McHenry: Obama 8,297 (47.4%), Hynes 3,774 (21.6%), Others 5,418 (31.0%)
• DeKalb: Obama 2,996 (56.6%), Hynes 964 (18.2%), Others 1,329 (25.1%)

Impressive stuff, given that Democratic primary voters in the collar counties, whose numbers have been on the steady rise, had a clear "insider's choice" of state comptroller Dan Hynes --and roundly rejected him. What's clear is that Obama's support was broad, deep and across the board in Greater Chicago. In addition to winning Cook and the collar counties, Obama put up impressive wins in a handful of other Downstate counties:

• Kankakee: Obama 3,122 (47.2%), Hynes 1,809 (27.3%), Others 1,684 (25.5%)
• Champaign: Obama 7,350 (63.3%), Hynes 2,187 (18.8%), Others 2075 (17.9%)
• Sangamon (Springfield): Obama 5,546 (42.4%), Hynes 5,316 (40.7%), Others 2,209 (17.0%)
• McDonough (Macomb/WIU): Obama 966 (58.0%), Hynes 227 (13.6%), Others 472 (28.3%)
• Jackson (Carbondale/SIU & Paul Simon's hometown of Makanda): Obama 2,791 (42.6%), Hynes 2,298 (35.1%), Others 1,458 (22.3%)

This shows that Obama's appeal extends beyond the suburban ring to centers of government and education Downstate, and it's only good news for his general election prospects.

Blagojevich'd

Well, that didn't take long at all.

Illinois House votes 114-1 in favor of sending an impeachment case to their Senate counterparts, where a vote of guilty on any count by at least 40 of the body's 59 members at the conclusion of his trial would suffice to send Rod down in flames.

Y'gotta like the odds in favor a whole bunch, but there's not a lot of value in it. Stick to the spread on the actual votes as specific impeachment articles emerge from the House.

Let's take a quick detour back to the origins of this. Blago couldn't've pulled off this massive skein of corruption without plenty of help and friends in low places getting the green light, and with this in mind, I present to you this elegant little tale from The New Yorker. Money:

[Edward Hospital president and CEO Ms. Pamela] Davis taped all sorts of incriminating conversations, but she never quite got used to spycraft. “The wire is a little tiny square thing I put inside my bra. I thought it would fall out all the time,” she said. “Oh, the logistics of getting this stuff done! One morning, I had to meet one of the F.B.I. guys in my office at 6 A.M. so he could hook up a wire to tap my phone. He was under my desk, on the floor. It looks kinky! My administrative assistant pops her head in, and there’s this man under my desk, and she says, ‘Oh, my goodness,’ and leaves. And I go, ‘What am I supposed to tell her?’ He says, ‘I don’t know. That never happened to me before.’”

With that and other similarly pleasant notions in mind, I bid you a terrific weekend.

Blago: Bonnnggg...Bonnnggg...Bonnnggg...

Looks like the formal impeachment of Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D-IL) by the full House of Representatives of the Illinois General Assembly will come down today in the wake of Thursday's unanimous (21-0) recommendation by a House panel that they get on with the deed.

The House panel --interested as they are in the particulars associated with his (ahem) controversial appointment, by the man who defeated him in the Democratic primary race for governor six years ago, to the fill out the remainder of President-elect Barack Obama's term in the United States Senate-- heard suitably embarrassing testimony from Senator-designate and career mediocrity Roland Burris yesterday. It was a performance only in keeping with that given by his inquisitors.

Here's part one of a video feed, and here's the second part.

I've spent the last many years sparing myself the insufferable witness of downstate Republican legislators in action; yesterday's proceedings sufficed to remind me of the wisdom of that course. They're the ones on the right.

Coming soon!!!

Hiya kids --just wanted you to have a chance to get this bookmarked, in particular those from The 'Take.

Much, much more to follow soon --Barack, Blago, Burris, the lot. Don't want to upstage the doings in Minny in the meantime, so do stay tuned and check back.

Cheers,
--W