The Blagosphere

Barack Obama. Blago wanted to sell Obama's vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder.

• Rahm Emanuel Obama's incoming chief of staff was the one Blago wanted to negotiate with—he hoped to get stuff from Rahm in exchange for picking Obama's preferred candidate. Also Rahm maybe alerted the feds!
• Tony Rezko This Chicago fundraiser and felon raised a fortune for Blago, and a smaller fortune for Obama back in the day. From Blago he got plum appointments for associates and friends, and lord knows what else.
• Sam Zell Blago was unhappy with the Chicago Tribune's coverage of how corrupt he was, so he told the owner of their parent company, Zell, to make them cut it out. Zell, who needed the state's help to unload the Chicago Cubs, allegedly agreed to look into it. Zell also connects us to Lee Abrams! Abrams is Zell's friend and Tribune Co's insane "Chief Innovation Officer." He will hopefully have a crazy memo about this soon.
• John McCormick This is the Tribune editor who was mean to Blago all the time. Supposedly Zell agreed to have him "restructured" out of his job in exchange for state help with Tribune's bankruptcy, but this didn't actually happen.
• Patrick Fitzgerald the dreamboat US Attorney who's bringing Blago down is known as a tenacious prosecutor, and he was already famous for his role investigating Plamegate, the weird old scandal in which Bush administration officials leaked the name of a covert CIA operative to journalists to damager her husband's credibility. That scandal, as we all remember, ended up with Times reporter and terrible hack Judy Miller going to jail rather than revealing to Fitzgerald that her source was Scooter Libby, even though Libby had already given her permission to reveal this.
• Jesse Jackson Jr. It's sill possible that "Senate Candidate 5" is Jesse Jackson, Jr. Even if he isn't, he's a family friend of the Obamas (specifically his childhood friend Michelle) who is seen by many as a front-runner for Obama's vacant seat. So Blago would obviously have been in contact with him regarding the seat, and what Blago wanted in exchange for giving it to him. Meanwhile Jackson's brother Yusef was an investor in a magazine called Radar with pervy billionaire friend-of-Clinton Ron Burkle!
• Also Jesse Jackson Sr was on The Oprah Winfrey Show, as was Kelly Preson, who was in Death Sentence with Kevin Bacon!

From Gawker

Addictions and Saints

My wife has an addiction. Latching on to her subconscious mind, her addiction makes it impossible for her to operate at months at a time without her fix. The horror of this addiction keeps friends and neighbors away. She refuses to go for treatment and I am at the end of my rope. I do not know how to combat the addiction of Christmas music but if I hear "Most Wonderful Time of the Year" again there may be a two toed dog in the house. Any noise would be an improvement over those damned fake jingling sleigh bells which are apparently mandatory on every Christmas song, especially the parody ones.

I crawled into my house last night later than usual after an evening of poker with friends. Everyone who plays poker has a bad beat story. After enough of them, you stop sharing with others and just meditate on the loss. I try to figure out if the move I made which was my demise was the right one. What are the odds, etc. i was mulling over how a two outer could have taken me three times in one game. I tried to figure out the odds (5% three times) and couldn't do it. Besides my poor math skills, the incessant drone from the Christmas station was driving me crazy. Then it came on. The worst song ever. "Little Drummer Boy."

Not only is the song poor. Barump-a-bump-bumm. But this is a boy who should not be praised nor honored and certainly not at Christmas. This kid had the nerve to show up at the Son of God's barn days after birth. The poor mother is laying in straw, surrounded by noisy, stinky animals, half the population of Bethlehem showing up with lame gifts, a bright star that makes it impossible to get a good night's sleep, and a husband who seems not to talk. Now, this little prick brings a drum. Not as a gift. He's going to play a song. On a drum. Only.

I have seen a "song" on a drum. I called it a drum solo and it was not lullaby-ish. In fact, it was loud. Now this kid starts his Barump-a-bump-bump-ing around the baby and cows and sheep and what not. Joe doesn't make a peep. Not a "get the hell out of here, can't you see my son, the Son of God, is sleeping?" or even a broken drum to speak of. They sit there and watch the freaking ox and lamb tapping along to the never ending barumping and pounding and it makes me nervous. I do not like it.

And Mary puts up with it. The whole time. That lady must be a saint.

Other reasons to hate the song:

1. That horrible Bing Crosby David Bowie thing.
2. The Trapp Family singers sang this on their retirement album. They did make the "ox and lamb kept time" into "the ox and ass kept time" which although equally ridiculous still has the word ass in it so church could be alittle more fun.
3. Richard M. Nixon's favorite carol. Enough said.