Free Republic

Just a point: little over a month ago, the director of the Abraham Presidential Library & Museum (excellent, excellent place to visit, I encourage everyone to see it) was arrested for shoplifting(!). Blagojevich FIRED the guy two days later - without due process, without a trial, without giving a closing statement, without being allowed to “defend himself”, etc. The impeachment process is NOT - repeat NOT - a criminal trial, and what’s being done to Blago is exactly what he did to that director - he’s being fired. Blago will get his day in court to prove his innocence. Don’t fall for his shuck and jive act in the national media.

More Pay-to-Play...

From the Illinois insider political newsletter The CapitolFax Blog

" * 12:11 pm - A quick check of campaign finance records shows Burris’ consulting company has contributed about $11K to Blagojevich’s campaign fund. The consulting company has benefitted from a bunch of state contracts since then, many of which doing PR work on behalf of IDOT minority contracting efforts.

Blagojevich privately credits Burris with playing a major role in the governor’s 2002 Democratic primary win. Burris took the African-American vote away from Paul Vallas, who was always quite popular in the black community. Blagojevich finished behind Burris and Vallas in Chicago (he barely won his own congressional district), so Burris’ spoiler role was crucial to Blagojevich’s win."

Obamarama isn’t rich? I guess his big senator’s salary and the royalties on his bestselling book and his wife’s $200k+ job doesn’t stretch as far as it used to.

Hmmm, I’m de-lurking to just point out that there are several synods of Lutherans; the ELCA is the most liberal, but there are many Lutherans who completely reject their stance (Missouri Synod, Wisconsin Synod, WELS, etc.) Its unfortunate that the bozos in the ELCA tend to make the news on issues like this, thus smearing all Lutherans in the process.

Quick background on this "ethics" test. (I know, because I have several friends who've had to take this). The test development company contributed heavily to Gov. Blago's campaign. It is a 10 question test, each question comes with a long reading section detailing a possible ethics violation (interestingly enough, in the first version of this test, the ones committing ethics violations in the examples were all Republicans; only later after complaints did they change it to use non-partisan examples).

It is not necessary to actually read the examples, as the questions are so poorly written that the correct answer is glaringly obvious, something along the lines of: "You are offered a bribe. Do you (a) Take the bribe (b)Take half the bribe, give the other half to your supervisor (c)Take the bribe, but later confess to someone (d)Not take the bribe." There isn't a FReeper on this board who couldn't read all 10 questions without reading the examples and pass.

This "test" is nothing more than a PR stunt, and a payoff to a campaign contributor. I'm not a fan of lefty professors more than the next guy, but in this case, I can assure you, they didn't cheat. What's ending up happening is because workers are being dinged for taking too short of a time, they're logging on to the test site, going to the first question, and then hanging out for 10-15 minutes before answering the stupidly easy question and then going on to the next one. Way to promote govt. efficency there.