The Hollywood Liberal

The Road to Impeachment

The Illinois House has voted to impeach Gov. Rod Blagojevich on charges of corruption—like, for example, trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat to the highest bidder. The road to impeachment now leads to the Illinois state Senate, where a two-thirds majority is needed to boot Blagojevich.

ABC News:

The Illinois House of Representatives voted 114-1 on Friday to impeach Gov. Rod Blagojevich on corruption charges that include allegedly trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.

The article of impeachment—essentially an indictment—now goes to the state Senate for a trial. A two-thirds vote is required there to convict Blagojevich and remove him from office. The trial will be presided over by the chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court and could begin as early as Jan. 26.

In the state Senate trial, impeachment managers and Blagojevich will have the opportunity to present witnesses and evidence.

If convicted by the Illinois Senate, Blagojevich would be removed from office and Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn would become acting governor.

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Wizards of the Inauguration

While Barack Obama banned corporations and big donors from funding his inauguration so as to not trammel the public celebration, the big event’s multimillion-dollar bill is instead being footed by Wall Street executives and other financial employees acting as fundraisers. Abracadabra—no more special interests.

The Wall Street Journal:

President-elect Barack Obama has banned corporations and big donors from funding his Jan. 20 inauguration. But 90% of donations received so far have been raised by well-heeled fund-raisers, including Wall Street executives whose companies have received billions of dollars in federal bailout money.

A total of 207 fund-raisers have collected $24.8 million of the $27.3 million in contributions disclosed by Mr. Obama through Thursday, according to an analysis by nonpartisan campaign finance group Public Citizen commissioned by The Wall Street Journal.

Wall Street employees, as a group, have been the biggest single source of these private donations, according to the analysis. Much of their donations—$5.7 million total—has been channeled through financial-services executives who each have bundled together donations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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READ THE WHOLE ITEM

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• January 9, 2009 The Road to Impeachment
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• January 9, 2009 Smile

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After a unanimous vote by a special impeachment panel yesterday, the full Illinois state House of Representative voted 114-1 to impeach Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D). The impeachment trial will be held by the state Senate.

As MSNBC pointed out, “You don’t have to be guilty of committing a crime to be impeached. You just have to be accused of abusing your power or unable or unfit to serve.”

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Yesterday in an interview with the Associated Press’s Deb Reichmann, Vice President Cheney repeatedly insisted that no one anticipated the looming U.S. financial crisis. “I don’t think anybody saw it coming,” he said. He then compared the financial crisis to 9/11, another crisis that supposedly no one predicted:

CHENEY: No, obviously, I wouldn’t have predicted that. On the other hand I wouldn’t have predicted 9/11, the global war on terror, the need to simultaneous run military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq or the near collapse of the financial system on a global basis, not just the U.S. […]

CHENEY: Did you see it coming? (Laughter.)

REICHMANN: I wasn’t responsible for seeing it coming.

CHENEY: Now, what my point is that I don’t think anybody saw it coming.

Oddly enough, in today’s White House press briefing, Deputy Press Secretary Scott Stanzel insisted that the Bush administration “saw those [financial] problems on the horizon,” but it was Congress’s fault for taking “a long time…to act.” In reality, many economic experts — such as Nouriel Roubini, Dean Baker, and Paul Krugman — did predict the economic crisis; the Bush administration just wasn’t listening to them. In reality, administration officials often turned a “blind eye to the impending crisis.”

The same goes for 9/11. On August 6, 2001, the Bush administration received a President’s Daily Brief entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.” The memo warned:

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a —- service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.

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In 2001, the Federal Aviation Administration distributed a CD-ROM presentation to airlines and airports that cited the possibility of a suicide hijacking. In response to the threat warnings, the Bush administration did nothing.

In September, President Bush made similar comments to Cheney’s, citing the financial crisis in the same breath as “the bursting of the dot-com bubble, major corporate scandals, an unprecedented attack on our homeland, a global war on terror, a series of devastating natural disasters.”

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