Bravery and the Truth in Illinois...No, it's not what you think

1) Truth: An angle you probably haven't heard about this impeachment of Blagojevich. I'll try to be brief. Blago was on tape, showing his endless corruption skills. Many hours of tape. MANY different names were mentioned on the tape. As impeachment gathered momentum, the Democratic party (which dominates this state, hardly any Repubs to be found), was all for moving ahead on impeachment. Repubs, too. The Impeachment trial was set to begin reviewing the evidence (the audio tapes of Blago). Then the Dems who control the house and Senate, however, suddenly decided to accelerate the impeachment hearings! The reason? Well, they did NOT want all the evidence to be shown so publicly, because many of THEIR names are mentioned by Blago in the tapes! He was doing crooked deals with everybody in the state. And the entire state is a cesspool of this kind of thing. So they had to impeach him, but they didn't want TOO much of the evidence to get out.

Funny thing was, the Repubs were saying, "wait...let's have a FULL trial. Let's see ALL the evidence. Why are we rushing this? Why did you Dems suddenly accelerate the pace of the impeachment trial? This is not right. The people of Illinois deserve to see ALL of the evidence." Of course, they rushed the impeachment trial, only spending something like 45 minutes playing the tapes in the impeachment trial (out of an approximate 300 HOURS of tape)! Dems were just trying to get this over as quickly as possible.

Let's hope more of the tape comes out in the criminal trial.

2) Bravery: I was listening to the live Roll-Call-Vote on the radio as the 59 IL Senators cast their votes "yes" or "no" for impeachment. A Senator's name was called, and then he/she said yes/no. First 20 votes were Yes. The next 10 were yes. One guy chose instead to vote "ABSOLUTELY"! It was funny. Somewhere around the 30th or 35th votes, there were 2 Senators who cast "non votes"! They just chose to vote "silent"! At this point I thought, "how could these pathetic Senators not have the balls to at least cast a definitive vote in the most-watched vote in the recent history of the IL Senate? I mean, the guy was ON TAPE trying to SELL our US SENATE SEAT! And they can't decide which way to vote?"

The rest of the votes came in "yes". They officially declared, "that's 57 votes for yes and zero no votes". They didn't mention those who abstained. Then there was some paper shuffling, some pseudo-official talk, some procedural stuff...and then after 5 or 10 minutes of that, our Chief Justice of the IL Supreme Court stepped in to confirm with the Senate that they have voted to Impeach the governor. He said, "Senators, you have voted to Impeach the governor. Can we can get a confirmation voice vote on that?" and at that time, the official vote-tally was CHANGED! And at some point between the procedural paper-shuffling, and the Chief Justice's request for voice confirmation, the two who had voted "silent" CHANGED their votes to "Yes"!!

HOW VERY BRAVE OF YOU TWO SENATORS!!

I couldn't find the names of those 2 Senators anywhere, after it was over. But....
I was SO impressed that they had the guts to wait until the other votes were shown to be unanimously in favor of impeachment, before they finally decided which way to vote. Now THAT is what I call Bravery!

[Interestingly, they also banned Blago from being able to serve in any IL state office ever again! And the security detail, the cops that stood outside his house, just immediately left his house the very minute the impeachment vote passed! Blago had "testified" earlier in the day, speechifying for 45 minutes, and then he BOLTED onto the State-Owned airplane to fly home to Chicago one last time on the State's dime, while the Senate was voting. He then gave a pathetic press conference at his house, saying the "fix was in", and went inside to be with his family. BUT...then the ego-maniac came BACK outside to talk to the press AGAIN, pleading with them, "if I wanna say some more, will you guys cover me? Huh? Will ya?" It's a great audio clip! The reporters said, "sure". Then, of all people, our oozingly-corrupt Mayor Richard Daley issued a statement saying he's "glad we can now clean up IL state politics". He conveniently left out "City of Chicago" politics in his statement. No, he wants that to stay just as it is; A 100% pure pool of Daley-run corruption, which drains into a saturated sleaze-river that eventually runs like vomit-hued white-water rapids, and finally cascades like a Mafia-owned Niagra Falls over the entire city of Chicago, creating as it hits the ground, a thick, disgusting, smelly, sewer-mist, which each Chicagoan must taste with every breath he or she draws, fighting gasps and wet-heaves as the sewer-mist, with ever-increasing density, relentlessly moves on, enveloping every block of our otherwise lovely city, never escaping into the upper atmosphere like most gases, never ceasing its expansion in all the years since Eliot Ness became the first and last person to suck a small bit of it away, swells to the point where it rivals now in its total mass, the gas-weight of a brown-dwarf star, with which it shares its color.]