Deja vu all over again: Illinois lawmakers order 7 to testify over Quinn's anti-violence program

Once more, an Illinois governor is near the center of a corruption investigation: 

Illinois legislators have voted to subpoena seven former state officials to answer questions about a troubled 2010 anti-violence program started by Gov. Pat Quinn.…

The individuals include Quinn's former chief of staff, Jack Lavin, and Barbara Shaw, former director of an agency that was responsible for the $55 million Neighborhood Recovery Initiative.

Ah, life in Illinois is always so predictable!

HT: Iowahawk –

ICYMI: Pat Quinn vying to become third straight IL governor in prison. 3-PEAT! 3-PEAT! 3-PEAT! http://t.co/eJkhdjL1D4
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) June 24, 2014

Why is AARP supporting ObamaCare?

The ostensibly non-profit lobbying group which markets itself as pro-senior citizens is madly campaigning in favor of ObamaCare. Funny thing, that. It's running counter to its constituents' best interests.

After all, by Obama's own admission, the bottom line beats the doctor's advice. Doctors cannot be trusted with your wallet, but career bureaucrats can. If you have an administration which believes that, because you're over, say, seventy-five, you shouldn't get treated directly for a serious condition, but, rather, learn to manage the pain. A hundred-year-old woman shouldn't get anything more than pain pills, because she's going to die, soon, anyway. Money from Medicare could and may already be siphoned off to serve the needs of "undocumented workers". Congress has already discussed "reapportioning" health care funds away from Medicare, after all.

So, why is AARP not crying to the heavens about Obama's policies against the elderly? Maybe it's because AARP is in no wise an actual advocacy group for those citizens who are older. The non-profit group has a markedly for-profit branch: supplemental insurance. The less the government offers those who paid into the program in the first place, the more supplemental insurers will be able to cover in their supplemental packages... and the more they can charge for their policies. It's about supply and demand. Medicare denies, senior citizens seek help elsewhere, AARP profits. For both the Obama administration and the AARP, your health care is all about the bottom line.

Tell me I'm wrong, and that AARP really does care about my parents.

Latest big Dem supporter served papers

According to FOXNews, Sir Robert Allen Stanford, the man suspected of having swindled buzillions of dollars from investors, thus making Bernie Madoff look a piker, has been found in Virginia and has been served. The Feds are ordering him to appear, to a'splain wha' hap' to $8 billion in certificates of deposit.

But the best part of the article is the third graf, where it says this:

The 58-year-old holds duel citizenship in Barbuda and Antigua (where he was knighted in 2006).

Note: he has duel citizenship. Do we have anybody else in this country who can challenge him, then? I mean, it would be quite another thing if he had dual citizenship, because then he'd have a second country to flee to. But, no! It would seem by this language he's going to be required to defend his position, either at fifteen paces or with the sword, instead of in court. And I didn't think we had such citizenships here, at least not since before Aaron Burr's day.

Nevertheless, it's nice to see the Feds are on the ball, at long last. Next, we get to see if the MSM mentions his close ties to and support for the Democratic Party's high Muckamucks. I'm betting it will be on the same day Roland Burris voluntarily steps down from the Senate because he truly recognizes it's the right thing to do. That will be a few months after they start cross-country skiing in hell.

Bye bye Blago

It's unanimous. Rod Blagojevvich is out of a job and barred from ever again holding public office. I would cheer, but the man was a symptom, rather than the problem. Now, to clean up the rest of the state's politics.

It's about freaking time!

For the record, I know everybody and his brother will be posting on the topic of G-Rod, today.

I'm unoriginal.

So sue me.

Anyway.

I love my home state of Illinois, but for years I've been embarrassed and frustrated by its politics. We who live downstate have little or no power to counter the massive forces of corruption from Chicago.

That's why it's nice to hear that the feds have taken Blagojevich into custody. He's the most frustrating and embarrassing element of IL politics, currently -- frustrating because his actions are quite obviously corrupt, and embarrassing because they're so obviously corrupt. It's bad enough to have a crook in office, as long as, for the most part, he's done little real harm to the people (hearken back to the days of Da Mare, Richard J. Daley). But this guy and his cronies have been both criminal and harmful... and the Blowdried One has been stupid and clumsy, to boot.

Of course, I should be grateful that Blago is such an idiot. He has probably made it very easy to remove him from office, and possibly opened the door to a thorough house-cleaning. But we have to live with the aftermath. Part of the aftermath is that there is no Republican party to pick up the pieces. The last batch of candidates for gov. from the right side of the aisle were mostly a bunch of wooden lumps, none of whom seemed able to demonstrate a lick of leadership in simple times... so we're supposed to expect them to handle a mess like this? We haven't had a real leader in the Illinois Republican party since Big Jim Thompson left office. Edgar was okay, but he just held the office, no great shakes. And then, of course, there was Ryan. [cue theme from "Jaws"]

So, we'll just get more Dems. Same old same old. Except we'll be getting more of the less-experienced Dems, and it's likely that, in the long run, they'll grow up to be more like Blowdriedovich than like Big Jim.

But wouldn't it be nice to think we really were heading for a happy future?

Durbin has a DREAM: America's nightmare

I hadn't been paying much attention to the latest shenanigans of IL's senior Senator, mostly because almost everything coming out of his mouth is an embarrassment to the state. Unfortunately, this little gem of a project he has going can't be ignored, no matter how little attention the MSM wants to pay to it.

Each day, the idea of another IL constitutional convention -- and the potential amendment setting up term limits and killing gerrymandering -- sounds better and better to me.

HT: Ace

Pot, meet Kettle

"Today's decision is yet another example that this Administration simply considers itself above the law. This case arose from the Administration's politicization of national security intelligence and its efforts to punish those who spoke out against its policies. Four years into the Iraq war, Americans are still living with the consequences of this White House's efforts to quell dissent. This commutation sends the clear signal that in this Administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice."

Hmmm. Hill, I think you may want to rethink your words on this particular issue, of cronyism trumping justice and administrations thinking themselves above the law. Especially with Charming Billy right there beside you.

Was Gonzales' office practicing "political profiling"?

All this noise over the off-season firing of eight prosecutors has me a bit perplexed. I don't know, but it seems to me a political appointment is like any other regular job -- the boss can fire you for no apparent reason (but he can't fire you for being a member of a select, protected group).

But more confoozling is the observation made by Paul Krugman (as cited by Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings -- HT: Tom Maguire, guesting at Instapundit)

"The bigger scandal, however, almost surely involves prosecutors still in office. The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn’t go along with the Bush administration’s politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance.

Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny."

Now, For some those numbers might seem a bit lopsided. But then, some don't live in Illinois, some haven't lived under the cloud of the Chicago system of doing things, which includes all manner of theft, graft, corruption, favors, and, well, downright dirty dealings. This system may have all but taken over Springfield, as well.

In Illinois, corruption seems to be standard operating procedure. But then, in IL, due heavily to jerrymandering and long-standing machinations, the vast majority of offices are still held by Dems. So, the probability is that the majority of those investigated in this state for being exceedingly naughty would, statistically, have to be Democrats.

Not that it's out of the question that Gonzales' office may well have been politically driven, but, well, as Cal Skinner so eloquently put it,

Some of us think [Patrick] Fitzgerald was assigned the Libby case merely to get him out of Chicago so the prosecutions of corruption would be delayed.

Often I think our state's government could have given Huey Long's a run for the filthy lucre.