Jan 29 2009
Blago’s Defense Speech
1215 PM Eastern: Governor Blagojevich is stating his case to the Illinois Senate and the people of Illinois. He may have some powerful ammunition in his hip pocket. Right now is claim is he deserves is day in court first. I happen to agree with him. There is no PROOF of anything, simply a criminal complaint. If we punish people based on criminal complaints alone we are headed for the end of America and her freedoms from government harassment and domination.
Blago also notes no one has had the opportunity to challenge the charges. The man is right.Â
If something comes up of interest I will post on it.
1222 PM Eastern: Blago is making a good case. In child health care he is asking two good questions: (1) how could he be impeached for covering people who lost health care support due to federal changes? (2) The payments for these people are being reviewed by a judge and could be determined to be legal, so how could he be guilty of something that has not even been deemed illegal?
So far he is making logical and reasonableness points. While these may be technically right, he needs to take shots at those sitting in judgement and pop out some big news if he wants to win the PR wars. We shall see.
1230 PM Eastern: It seems one of the charges against Blagojevich is actually because he acted on a recommendation by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel. Blago has a point – if he acted on the recommendation of Emmanuel, which was echoed by many other states in terms of acquiring low cost drugs from Canada, and is being impeached for it, how is it Emmanuel, the genius behind this ‘illegal’ act, is not also implicated? This is interesting, if Blago is impeached on this charge it will set an interesting stage to go after other liberal pols who conspired with Blago on this impeachable offense!
1245 PM Eastern: I have not followed the impeachment or its terms at all, but it seems to me the impeachment case is incredibly weak, built of assumptions and exaggeration – no proof, no legal determinations. It is a hastily packaged political lynch mob using lame excuses to shove Blago off the stage so they can run away from the mess.
Spineless politicians running as an angry mob is not demonstrating leadership. Blagojevich CANNOT be punished simply on unchallenged charges and trumped up issues. No laws broken, no charges proved in court, no chance to face the charges and make his case. We could be watching the end of freedom in America, freedom now lost to zealous prosecutors aided by political machines and bought and paid for news media.
They really should not throw him out – yet. They need proof of something. Anything!
1247 Eastern: Blago made his best point. The charges against him consist of a theme about ‘the ends don’t justify the means’. As Blago noted, the ‘end’ of gaining political distance from the governor does not make the ‘means’ of this BS impeachment. They need to allow Blago to provide evidence. They need to have hard evidence of wrong doing. We cannot allow ends of political expediency to rationalize and immoral impeachment.
1253 Eastern: Well, that was powerful and he did not drop any bombs on anybody else. Sadly, this has become one of those critical turning points in history that initially goes unappreciated or misunderstood. The senate really shouldn’t remove him yet.
AJ
Just a quick note, Emmanuelle was the title of a series of soft core bad movies. Emanuel is the last name of Rahm, nothing soft about him at all. All elbows and shinkickers. His old man was pretty cool though. No offense, perhaps your laptop makes freudian slips.
Thanks Flownover!
I live in Indiana, and I know some people from Illinois and they all think the man is a crook. That kind of makes you wonder how he won in the first place.
Impeachment is a political trial with only political rules – it doesn’t have to consider any of the normal rules of evidence or, sadly, any constitutional protections. Consider this – there is no appeal, which means however the vote goes, it stands, no matter how flawed. Even the Supreme Court does not have jurisdiction to override.
This kind of thing happened long before Stalin made the practice infamous – the English Parliament used to regularly conduct political trials in the bad old days, and the sentence was always known before the show began. (“Sentence first, trial afterwards!!!” as the Red Queen knew) This was one of the things our founding fathers were trying to get away from, and this current spectacle is why “trials” like this are always a bad idea.
Blago has become inconvenient to the Democrats running the country, and he needs to be “disapeared” as quickly as possible.
That’s all that’s important. Don’t think that can happen in America? Welcome to our Brave, New World.
elect a man twice then convict him without evidence or even a trial, just a vote. 59 people overrode the vote of the whole state. interesting what Dems think is justice.