Musing's musings

Blagojevich removed

The Illinois Senate has just unanimously removed Rod Blagojevich as the governor of Illinois.

They'll be voting next to determine whether or not he will be barred from ever holding public office in Illinois again.

Update 16:55. A motion to bar Blagojevich from holding office has been made and seconded, and the vote is now being taken. Thus far, we're at 24 yeas, so it looks like this one will pass as well.

Update 16:57. There are now more than 40 yea votes, which is the constitutional threshold. Blagojevich will be ineligible to hold public office ever again in Illinois.

Update 16:58. The vote to disqualify Blagojevich from future public office was unanimous. The chief justice has just pronounced the judgement of disqualification against Blagojevich.

Update 18:25. Pat Quinn was sworn in as the 41st governor of Illinois at 5:40 p.m. And I love that they've already updated the state website. I wonder how long it will take to get all those signs extolling the former governor's munificence in bringing us "open-road tolling" taken down or changed along all the miles and miles of tollway, and at the airports and state welcome centers.

Change we shouldn't believe in

I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone tried to make a little political hay out of the political mess that is Illinois politics right now. And Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold fired the opening salvo today at Big Orange, announcing his intention to sponsor a bill to amend the federal Constitution to require that all vacancies in the Senate be filled by special election, just as they are for vacancies in the House. Markos seconded the idea, and I see that the editorial board of the Washington Post actually beat both of them to the punch.

Well, since they're all for democracy and power to the people, this Democrat votes "Nay."

I think the Seventeenth Amendment as it now stands is perfectly adequate to our needs. If the Blagojevich mess requires any kind of constitutional remediation, I would argue that what needs amending is the state Constitution, not the federal one. If we'd had a recall provision in our state Constitution, Rod Blagojevich would almost certainly not have been in a position to attempt to barter an appointment to fill President Obama's vacant Senate seat for his personal gain--he'd have been tossed out on his ear at least a couple of years ago.

As it now reads, the Seventeenth Amendment leaves it up to the individual states to decide how they want to proceed when a Senate seat falls vacant for some reason. The amendment sets the default as an election, by requiring the state's executive to issue writs of election to fill the vacancy. But it then gives the states the option to opt out, by allowing the various state legislatures the opportunity to pass laws allowing that state's governor to fill such vacancies by appointment "until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct." I think the fact that only four states (Oregon, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma--though there's an exception in the last-named state, such that if the vacancy occurs after March 1 of any even-numbered year and the term expires the following year, no special election is held; rather, the governor is required to appoint the candidate elected in the regular general election to fill the unexpired term) do not fill vacancies by appointment suggests that this is not an issue of particularly grave concern to the populace to begin with--and I would be enormously surprised if it were terribly high on anyone's list of things they would like to see the 111th Congress take up this early in its term as opposed to, say, economic stimulus packages, a new federal budget, or ending the war in Iraq.

I'll give the speech a B+, maybe an A-

I took my lunch hour a little early today (as I suspect many did on my campus) to hear the inaugural address live. Now that I'm home, I'm watching it again, thanks to the miracle of TiVo, and chasing it down with a bottle of Korbel (which has the added benefit of dulling the pain from whatever's going wrong with my teeth right now).

My initial reaction was that I'd hoped for something truly inspiring, and that wasn't what I got. However, as rhetoric goes, it wasn't half bad. Nowhere near as wonky as Clinton, nowhere near as fractured or fictitious as Bush--but also not quite up to the gold standard of a Kennedy or a Franklin Roosevelt or a Lincoln.

I liked that he acknowledged the need for all of us to work on solving the nation's problems. I also liked that he began the address with "my fellow citizens" instead of the more common "my fellow Americans," since, as a commenter at the Great Orange Satan remarked to me earlier today, anybody can be an American, but you have to make a conscious choice to be a citizen.

One thing that distressed me, however, was the speech's focus on the past and the present--but with little time spent on the future, apart from one of the closing sections. For example, early on, President Obama (God, I love writing that!) said:

At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.

So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.

Good as far as it goes, but--and this is perhaps a Catholic thing, since we conclude many of our prayers with a phrase that runs something like "thus it was in the beginning, so it is now, and thus it shall be forever, world without end." Obama's enumeration stopped at the second iteration, and left out that third--and I would have liked to see him use that device at that point, to emphasize that there will be those who come after us who must do as we do now, and as our ancestors have done before us.

I also liked the fact that he challenged, gently, the failures of the previous administration--and suggested a few of the ways in which he might go about fixing or addressing those failures. I liked especially the repeated invocation of our common bond as citizens of this nation, and also the invocation of our duties that go hand-in-hand with our privileges. Those have been forgotten for too long, in my estimation, and the chief forgetter thereof was, of course the previous president and his administration.

Now, while I can't exactly break into raptures about the qualities of President Obama's rhetoric, I will say that I liked the down-to-earth, no-nonsense, reality-based qualities in his address today. Too many people have given way to an unwarranted enthusiasm, which leads them to believe that Obama can solve every problem, fix every crisis, and that whatever he does is automatically good because it is he that does it. Obama is not the Messiah, he is a man. He is a president, and there are limits on his power--just as there were on the forty-three men who have stood in his place before him.

How's about a little travelin' music?

It seems appropriate to mark this day with some musique d'occasion. This isn't a random list by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a few tunes that occurred to me as possibly being appropriate as we send the Worst. President. Ever. into the dustbin of history and welcome the dawning of a new epoch in our nation's life. Feel free to add your suggestions in the comments.

1. "I Made My Excuses and Left," Pet Shop Boys, Fundamental
2. "Ship of Fools," Erasure, The Innocents
3. "Non più andrai," Mozart, Le Nozze di Figaro
4. "Yahoo!" Erasure, The Innocents
5. "Why Should I Grieve?" Francis Pilkington
6. "Why Say Anything Nice?" Barenaked Ladies, Barenaked Ladies are Men!
7. "Goddamned," Jay Brannan, Goddamned
8. "Resign," The Click Five, Greetings from Imrie House
9. "2000 Miles," Erasure, Wild
10. "You're Crashing, But You're No Wave," Fall Out Boy, Infinity on High
11. "Bed of Lies," Matchbox Twenty, Mad Season
12. "Love to Hate You," Erasure, Chorus
13. "Lies," The Click Five, Greetings from Imrie House
14. "Good Riddance," Green Day, Nimrod (the album title is also apposite)
15. "Kiss You Off," Scissor Sisters, Ta-Dah!
16. "Say Goodnight," The Click Five, Greetings from Imrie House
17. "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen," Mozart, Die Zauberflöte
18. "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)," R.E.M., Eponymous
19. "Wind of Change," Scorpions, Crazy World
20. "FCC Song," Eric Idle
21. "Goodbye," Night Ranger, Seven Wishes
22. "Miserere," Gregorio Allegri
23. "Justorum animae," William Byrd
24. "Remembrance Day," Bryan Adams, Into the Fire
25. "Turn! Turn! Turn!," The Byrds, Turn! Turn! Turn!
26. "Siderum Rector," William Byrd
27. "Trumpet Voluntary," Jeremiah Clarke
28. "Pomp and Circumstance Marches, March No. 1," Sir Edward Elgar
29. "Breathe," Erasure, Nightbird
30. "Comfort ye, my people," Handel, The Messiah
31. "Laudate, Dominum," Mozart, Vesperae Solennes de Confessore
32. "Gloria in excelsis Deo," Vivaldi, Gloria
33. "For the Beauty of the Earth," John Rutter
34. "Here I Am, Lord," John Michael Talbot, Table of Plenty
35. "Joy to the World," Handel
36. "Do Not Fear to Hope," Gary Daigle and Rory Cooney, Change Our Hearts
37. "Let Justice Roll Like a River," Marty Haugen, Wondrous Love
38. "Glory and Praise to Our God," St. Louis Jesuits, A Dwelling Place
39. "As Water to the Thirsty," David Haas, As Water to the Thirsty
40. "Keep on Hoping," Jason Mraz, Geekin' Out Across the World
41. "The King Shall Rejoice," Handel, Coronation Anthems
42. "La Réjouissance," Handel, Music for the Royal Fireworks
43. "Life is Wonderful," Jason Mraz, Mr. A-Z
44. "And We Danced," The Hooters, Nervous Night
45. "The Times They Are A-Changin'," The Byrds, Turn! Turn! Turn!
46. "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)," Simon and Garfunkel
47. "I Am a Rock," Simon and Garfunkel
48. "Never Surrender," Corey Hart
49. "They Who Do Justice," David Haas, Creating God
50. "La Vie en rose," Edith Piaf
51. Choral finale, Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, Ludwig van Beethoven
52. "Dona nobis pacem," traditional

Our long national nightmare is over...

...But our long national reawakening is just beginning, and will require vigilance from all of us.

On Election Day in 2000, I had to go into Chicago to meet with a client who wanted to discuss a new website design. After the meeting, I went to dinner with my collaborator on the project, an old friend. Consequently, it was quite late when I was driving back home, and election results were coming in thick and fast on NPR. I was guardedly hopeful when I heard that Florida had been called for Gore, and then anxious when that prediction was rescinded several hours later. I remember going to bed very late that night, and leaving my beside radio on, listening whenever I woke up to the election discussions.

That anxiety has really never left me since then. It is my considered opinion, both as an observer of politics and as an historian, that George W. Bush is indeed the worst president this nation has ever had the misfortune to have to endure--and God grant we'll never see a worse one. Our network of alliances has unravelled, our international reputation is in tatters (and our economy along with it), the world is a far less stable and secure place than it was on that long, long night eight years and some months ago--all because of the man who will fly off into what I can only hope will be the obscurity he so richly deserves tomorrow afternoon.

I remember being anxious, rather than joyful, as I was preparing to go abroad to France on my first research trip in January 2005, to gather data for what would eventually become my M.A. project. Bush had just been re-elected, the useless, pointless, and unnecessary war in Iraq had been going on for nearly two years, and so had the nonsense about "Freedom Fries." I wondered what my reception would be when I had to show my American passport. Luckily for me, the French aren't nearly as shallow and stupid (or at least those I had to deal with weren't) than many of my fellow Americans, because despite having to demonstrate my connection with the Bush régime by flashing that passport, my hosts were invariably polite and helpful. Indeed, the only time politics came up at all was on my final night in Paris, when I went out for a lovely meal at a small Italian restaurant near my hotel. It being January, I was virtually the only customer, so I had the owner and the staff more or less all to myself. The owner was thrilled to discover that I spoke at least a bit of Italian in addition to French, and was most attentive. When I mentioned that it was my last night in Paris, he asked if I was looking forward to going home, to which I replied, "All except for having to deal with that idiot in the White House." He smiled, and left me to my dessert and digestif.

Does not compute

Republicans are fond of billing themselves as the party of "personal responsibility." But what they seem to mean by that is that everybody else should take personal responsibility for Republicans' failures--because Lord knows they're not likely to do it themselves.

Here's a case in point. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com quotes "Ace of Spades" (link is in the linked post; damned if I'll send 'em any more traffic) on a recent interview given by Republican darling Sarah Palin:

I don't like this interview. I was trying to figure out why. I think I know. Even though it's interesting to know about Palin's reaction to her mistreatment by the media, I think we are now getting well oversaturated on such personal stuff. It's too much the Heroine's Tale, which is nice and all, but we're ultimately looking for a leader, not someone with a tale of hardship. (Emphasis added)

To which Nate comments, "I think we can acknowledge that Palin had a rough go of things with the media."

OK, fair point. But I will argue that the main reason Sarah Palin had a "rough go of things with the media" was not mistreatment by the media, but rather the fact that she's dumber than the proverbial box of rocks and utterly unprepared for political office--and no amount of winking and expensive clothing could cover that salient fact up.

The Republicans would crucify any reporter who dared ask Hillary Clinton (or Barack Obama, or any Democratic politician) the kind of idiotic softball questions that were routinely handed to Sarah Palin--who still managed to come off looking galactically clueless. Consequently, she was kept under wraps for most of the rest of the campaign cycle, appearing only at closed events with tightly controlled audiences who could be guaranteed to applaud at all the "right" lines and also not to notice that the woman can't string two coherent sentences together on a regular basis or that she has a distressingly casual relationship with the truth.

As Nate points out, that was also largely a failure of the McCain campaign in having no coherent media strategy, other than to complain about it all the time. Indeed, there was so much carping and griping and pissing and moaning from the Republican camp about the media coverage of the campaign that it would have served them right if the media had treated them more severely than it did the Democrats. As I was just remarking to one of my colleagues this afternoon, there's an old saying in America: "The toes you step on today may be connected to the ass you have to kiss tomorrow." That's a lesson that John McCain and the Republican Party appear not to have learned too well.

Same thing with the Republicans' analysis (if that's the right word to use for what they've been doing) of why they lost the election. It's not that their ideas are decades out of date, bear no rational relationship to reality, have been tried and routinely failed, or that they picked the worst possible candidate to represent them, and then let him pick the worst possible running mate. No, it's that they weren't sufficiently slavishly devoted to their tired, worn-out, ineffective, and out-of-touch ideas. Oh, and voter fraud (at least according to Norm Coleman).

I see the same theme running through the comments made by Republican members of Congress when they were discussing the bailouts of Wall Street investment firms and the Big Three automakers. When they were talking about their best buddies on Wall Street, the people who pushed to deregulate the financial sector and manipulated the markets in a Ponzi scheme that makes even Bernie Madoff's gargantuan house of cards look puny by comparison, the Republican message was something like "ZOMG! If we don't give them absolutely everything they want, no strings attached, no oversight, no transparency, and rightfuckingnow!, the world will come to an end!" Fast forward a few weeks to when the automakers came back to town for the second try, and asked for a loan package a minuscule fraction of what the Republicans had insisted we hand over to their fund-raising friends, and suddenly we were being told that time was not of the essence, that all manner of concessions would have to be made, and a government overseer would have to be appointed, and that the companies' bad management should not be rewarded. I guess the take-home message there was, yet again, IOKIYAR.

I could go on and on. (Larry Craig, Mark Foley, the Katrina débâcle, Enron, yada, yada, yada...) But if the Republicans really want to resuscitate their brand, I would respectfully suggest that they start acting like the party of personal responsibility, instead of being the party that just always talks about it.

Roland and Rod, sittin' in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g

OK, not really. And I apologize to all of my readers who may now find it difficult to get that image out of their heads. I sympathize, it's not one I want in my head, either.

But it looks as if we're going to be stuck with it for at least the next couple of years. And it looks as if I can add Roland Burris to the growing list of politicians I once had at least some respect for and who are now anathema to me.

Rod Blagojevich desperately wanted to change the subject away from all of his legal woes, and maintain a façade of normality while waiting for the General Assembly to get around to dropping the other shoe and impeaching him. Getting to appoint someone to fill Barack Obama's seat in the U.S. Senate allowed him to do that. But he couldn't appoint himself (or his wife), as he had been rumored to be considering. Neither could he appoint anybody who owed him favors, as that would just make his situation worse. Ditto for anybody he might be perceived as "getting rid of" by sending them off to Washington and out of Illinois for a couple of years. No self-respecting Democrat would take a phone call from him or accept an appointment from his hands.

And then along came Roland Burris. After wandering in the political wilderness of former politicians who've been down on their electoral luck for the last 13 years, Burris desperately wanted a chance to matter again. And he took the governor's phone call--and the appointment it offered.

Two men with monumental egos and equally monumental contempt for the wishes of the voters of Illinois, the wishes of the party of which they claim to be members in good standing, the wishes of the U.S. Senate, and yes, the wishes of our next president, who used to sit in that very seat in the Senate. A match made somewhere, but surely not in heaven.

Which of these two is not like the other?

Rod Blagojevich was arrested by the FBI and has had a criminal complaint lodged against him by the cognizant U.S. Attorney. Subsequent to both of those developments, the Illinois General Assembly has initiated impeachment proceedings against him. Doggedly proclaiming his innocence, despite a mountain of fairly immutable and unimpeachable evidence against him and contained within the aforementioned criminal complaint, Blagojevich continues to pretend that nothing is wrong and that he is entitled to all the perquisites and privileges of his position. He has repeatedly refused to step down, even temporarily, despite pressure for him to do so from politicians in both parties at all levels of the political hierarchy--from our president-elect on downward.

Bill Richardson, on the other hand, has neither been arrested nor charged with anything. A New Mexico grand jury is allegedly looking into allegations that there may have been an improper connection between contributions made by a California company to two political committees Richardson ran (neither of which was to benefit him personally, in distinct contrast to the Blagojevich mess) and the awarding of a state contract. Faced with that investigation, the merest suggestion that something might be amiss, Richardson graciously withdrew his name from consideration as Obama's secretary of commerce, despite some pressure from the transition team to stay the course.

That, Mr. Blagojevich, is what a public servant (as opposed to a politician or a political hack) does when there is even a suggestion of wrongdoing attached to his/her name. The contrast between Richardson's decision and yours is palpable. What a pity you wouldn't do the same favor for the voters of Illinois (and the Obama transition team). But of course your galactic-sized ego would never permit that.

One can only hope that the General Assembly will decide to impeach you post-haste, and that the Senate will convict with the same celerity. Unfortunately, I'm not holding my breath on either count, given the petty pace at which the GA has historically crept whenever there were serious or timely issues demanding their attention. On the other hand, the one good thing you've done for us is in managing to unite both Democrats and Republicans in the state legislature in a desire to do the same thing--get rid of you.

'Twere best done quickly.

Sleeping Around: 2008

Shamelessly stolen from Josh's place, this is my best recollection of places (other than home) where I spent the night last year:

1. Peosta, IA
2. Chicago, IL
3. Las Vegas, NV
4. Cedar City, UT
5. West Yellowstone, MT
6. Ogden, UT
7. Las Vegas, NV
8. Chicago, IL

One retreat, one professional conference, my annual summer vacation, and a Chicago theater weekend.