I risk getting repetitive here, but I am having trouble seeing a qualitative difference between Blago and the rest of the political class in this country. He was just more crass and chronologically compressed about his pattern of activity.

This is exactly how patronage always goes, but polite people space it out, and don't suffer wiretaps all over. The grave mistake is to see him as some isolated singularity, rather than at the silly end of the grim continuum.

The focus needs to be put back on the systemic crash and the labor conflict therein. This mess has (conveniently) upended the calculus of the Kool Kids, permitting them to circle around and tut-tut another hayseed from the Midwest, while pretending that their sordid class of activities are somehow different.

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Hongpong.com

I've heard several news commentators allude to the fact that Obama dropped the dime on Blago. They also say that Fitzgerald would have liked to investigate longer to get a tighter case.
It does make perfect sense. Get this mess mostly out of the way before inauguration, so it's an old story when Obama actually begins to govern.
If so, I like the pragmatism and ruthlessness of the decision.

Additionally there seems to be the prospect that this will really sting Rahm Emanuel, who after all was the successor in Blago's Congressional seat.

I believe Emanuel would be an effective thrasher for Obama up on Capitol Hill, but he is also a pretty hardcore Zionist who isn't exactly torn up over the way things are going down in the West Bank.

(There are some stories around about him being tight with the Mossad and even investigated for foreign intelligence connections along those lines back when he was a White House fixer in the 1990s... Further weird angles being the prospect Clinton warned Monica Lewinsky that a foreign intelligence service had penetrated the White House's communications system, could have likely been the Mossad via those darn telecom contractors like Comverse Infosys and Amdocs. Murky murky...)

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Hongpong.com