links for 2008-12-16

Last week, in a press conference on Thursday, President-elect Obama announced that his staff would conduct an internal review of contacts with Blagojevich and his office. At the same press conference, Obama announced that this internal review would find no inappropriate dealings between his staff and Blagojevich. Since Obama announced the findings of the promised internal review at the same time he announced the internal review, it should come as no surprise that the internal review found just what Obama said it would.

If none of those contacts were "inappropriate" could releasing the details really "impede" the investigation? Such a public release would reveal the nature of some Blagojevich discussions about the Senate seat and would necessarily compromise the identities of the individuals involved in those discussions. Presumably, Fitzgerald is interviewing some of those people now and the less they know about these discussions, the better.
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How will waiting a week help?

The correspondent for Al Baghdadiya, an independent Iraqi television station, had previously been detained in November 2007 for two weeks by “a particular party” — his brother didn’t reveal whether American or Iraqi –- after videotaping the scene of an improvised explosive device that targeted an American Humvee. He was held again two months later for several hours by the American army without charges, his brother said. Other reports said he had been kidnapped by Shiite militants.

Muntader al-Zaidi was the head of the student union under Saddam Hussein and he earned a diploma as a mechanic from a technical institute before becoming a journalist. He worked at al-Qasim al-Mushterek newspaper, an Iraqi daily founded after the 2003 invasion, then he joined al-Diyar satellite channel, an Iraqi channel founded after the war. Two years later, he joined al-Baghdadiya satellite channel, another Iraqi channel, which is based in Cairo.
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Reportedly this moron is a Bathist – SH's party.

No one on President-elect Barack Obama's staff had "inappropriate discussions" with Gov. Rod Blagojevich about the vacant Senate seat in Illinois, according to a statement just released by the Obama-Biden transition office.

Transition Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer also says that while a "review of transition staff contacts" with Blagojevich has been completed, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has asked that it not be released until next week.

The Obama transition team released a statement on its communications with Blagojevich in relation to Obama's Senate seat.

There are two pieces of news:
(1) The Obama team has completed its review of communications with Blagojevich's office and affirms that the president-elect had no contact with the governor and that his staff had no "inappropriate discussions."

(2) They won't release the review, however, until Dec. 22 — at the U.S. Attorney's office's direction.
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Right…. A Christmas burial for Obama.

Obama, December 11: "I've asked my team to gather the facts of any contacts with the governor's office about this vacancy so that we can share them with you over the next few days."

It is now four days later. Just how much time does it take to assemble a list of who had contact with Blagojevich and his staff and when? How long does it take to put together, "A met with B on the day of C, and they discussed D; E met with F on the day of G, and they discussed H"?

Yes, Fitzgerald said Obama is not a target of the investigation. But when a relatively simple question is met with foot-dragging, one remembers that the truth is available immediately, but lies take time to coordinate.

A federal grand jury is investigating how a company that advised Jefferson County, Alabama, on bond deals that threaten to cause the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, did similar work in New Mexico after making contributions to Governor Bill Richardson’s political action committees.

The grand jury in Albuquerque is looking into Beverly Hills, California-based CDR Financial Products Inc., which received almost $1.5 million in fees from the New Mexico Finance Authority in 2004 after donating $100,000 to Richardson’s efforts to register Hispanic and American Indian voters and pay for expenses at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, people familiar with the matter said.

Whether or not Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich resigns today (and The Fix is loath to predict what "Pay-Rod" will do), Senate Democrats may well have a problem on their hands as they seek to decide how to fill the seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.

National Democrats, led by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, are advocating for the seat to be filled by appointment, a job that would probably fall to Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn (D), assuming Blagojevich either resigns or is impeached.

Top Democrats in the state — led by attorney general and 2010 gubernatorial front-runner Lisa Madigan — seem to favor a special election. Yesterday on NBC's "Meet the Press," Madigan said, "The best thing for the people of the state is to have a special election, have somebody put in that position legitimately by the people."

President-elect Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, communicated with the office of Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois about potential candidates for Mr. Obama’s Senate seat and provided a list of names, according to two Obama associates briefed on the matter.
The Obama associates said the interactions concerned several people who might fill the seat. Such contacts are common among party officials when a political vacancy is to be filled. It was not clear whether the communication was via direct telephone calls.

The Chicago Tribune reported that communications between Mr. Emanuel and the governor, both Democrats, had been captured on court-approved wiretaps, but Obama associates gave conflicting accounts of the interactions.

Obama aides have said privately that Mr. Emanuel did not engage in any deal-making with Mr. Blagojevich, whom federal prosecutors charged last week with conspiring to turn a profit from the appointment.

Fortunately for Brown, none of the local officials he was browbeating had the guts to challenge his legal authority. Global warming is, after all, a popular cause for any politician to espouse, and Brown was already making noises about riding the issue into another stint as California's governor in 2010. Threatened with potentially endless litigation, the local officials backed down and allowed Brown to vet their land-use plans by whatever standard he deemed to impose.

Opposing federal intervention on behalf of felons is popular with those on the political right while opposing global warming endears Brown to the left. And after all, he is the man who, as governor three decades ago, espoused a political "canoe theory" in which one paddles on the right for a while and then paddles on the left to move ahead.
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Jerry Brown the master pol. But, he is afraid of Dianne Feinstein

Gov. Rod Blagojevich hasn't ruled out signing a bill creating a special election to fill President-elect Barack Obama's Senate seat, his spokesman said Monday, the first hint the embattled governor may loosen his grip on the seat.

Blagojevich was arrested last week on charges he tried to profit from his power to choose Obama's replacement and shook down businesses seeking state deals.

While Blagojevich hasn't seen a proposed special election bill he hasn't ruled out the possibility of signing such a bill, spokesman Lucio Guerrero said early Monday without elaborating.

The governor, meanwhile, remained defiant and returned to work Monday to sign a tax credit bill after earlier seeing off his wife, Patti, and the couple's two daughters.

Barack Obama had begun thinking about his Senate successor even before the presidential election, and dispatched Rahm Emanuel days after the vote to contact aides of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to begin talking up Mr. Obama's preferred candidates, associates of Mr. Emanuel said this weekend.

Mr. Emanuel, a congressman from Chicago, had been approached about being Mr. Obama's White House chief of staff the week before the election, though he hadn't yet officially decided to take the post. Nonetheless, the issue of Mr. Obama's Senate replacement was sensitive enough that senior Obama aides wanted to keep the matter within the circle of Illinois political figures, according to people familiar with campaign deliberations at the time.
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Why has Obama tried to stonewall this issue. What about the transparency?

Iraq faced mounting calls on Monday to release the journalist who hurled his shoes at George W. Bush, an action branded shameful by the government but hailed by many in the Arab world as an ideal parting gift to the unpopular US president.

Colleagues of Muntazer al-Zaidi, who works for independent Iraqi television station Al-Baghdadia, said he "detested America" and had been plotting such an attack for months against the man who ordered the invasion of his country.

"Throwing the shoes at Bush was the best goodbye kiss ever… it expresses how Iraqis and other Arabs hate Bush," wrote Musa Barhoumeh, editor of Jordan's independent Al-Gahd Arabic newspaper.
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The radical Muslims could not defeat President Bush. So, they throw shoes. How pathetic.

Conventional wisdom holds that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald ordered the FBI to arrest Rod Blagojevich before sunrise Tuesday in order to stop a crime from being committed. That would have been the sale of the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.

But the opposite is true: Members of Fitzgerald’s team are livid the scheme didn’t advance, at least for a little longer, according to some people close to Fitzgerald’s office. Why? Because had the plot unfolded, they might have had an opportunity most feds can only dream of: A chance to catch the sale of a Senate seat on tape, including the sellers and the buyers.
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Preventing the sale of the Senate seat was worth the early exposure.