The 25 Most Financially Corupt American Politicians

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Houston, We Have a Problem

Obama Worked to Distance Self From Blagojevich Early On

Like every other politician in Illinois, Gov. Rod Blagojevich waited for Barack Obama's call this summer. He told colleagues that he expected a speaking role at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, a nice bit of payback for being the first governor to endorse the senator from Illinois in his campaign for president. By showing off a connection to Obama in Denver, Blagojevich hoped to repair his own diminished reputation.
Obama's campaign made speaking offers to the Illinois treasurer, the comptroller, the attorney general and a Chicago city clerk. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.) was asked to introduce Obama on the convention's final night; Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (Ill.) was told he would speak on television during prime time. Finally, fed up and embarrassed that he still had heard nothing, Blagojevich joked to a crowd at the Illinois State Fair that, yes, he also had been asked to speak -- at 4 a.m., in a Denver area men's bathroom.
Long before federal prosecutors charged Blagojevich with bribery this week, Obama had worked to distance himself from his home-state governor. The two men have not talked for more than a year, colleagues said, save for a requisite handshake at a funeral or public event. Blagojevich rarely campaigned for Obama and never stumped with him. The governor arrived late at the Democratic convention and skipped Obama's victory-night celebration at Chicago's Grant Park.
Even though they often occupied the same political space -- two young lawyers in Chicago, two power brokers in Springfield, two ambitious men who coveted the presidency -- Obama and Blagojevich never warmed to each other, Illinois politicians said. They sometimes used each other to propel their own careers but privately acted like rivals. Blagojevich considered Obama naive and pretentious and dismissed his success as "good luck." Obama disparaged Blagojevich for what he viewed as his combativeness, his disorganization and his habit of arriving at official events half an hour late.
Under different circumstances, friends said, Obama might have derived some satisfaction from seeing Blagojevich handcuffed for allegedly trying to sell off Obama's vacated Senate seat to the highest bidder. But, only six weeks after Obama won the presidency by casting himself as a reformer, the Blagojevich scandal is a jarring reminder that Obama's political origins are in a city and state long tainted by corruption.
Blagojevich was elected in 2002 as a reform governor, but he has faced a series of investigations and charges of ethical irregularities ever since.
"Obama saw this coming, and he was very cautious about not having dealings with the governor for quite some time," said Abner Mikva, a former congressman and appeals court judge who was Obama's political mentor in Chicago. "The governor was perhaps the only American public officeholder who didn't speak at the convention, and that wasn't by accident. He's politically poisonous. You don't get through Chicago like Barack Obama did unless you know how to avoid people like that."

Meanwhile GOP members reach out to techniques which suggest a close relationship between Obama and Blagojevich. Obama should have condemned the indicted governor more forcefully. Obama is 'painted' by the scandal portraying all the politicians in Chicago to belong to the same 'political machine' aimed to declare Obama guilty by association. "Country first" means in Gods Own Party the considerable effort to put the Democratic POTUS in the worldwide light of caught criminals and derailed perverts.
The president-elect has released a new statement calling for the governor to resign. This of course begs the establishment press topic for the rest of the day: Was Obama's statement calling for the governor's resignation strong enough? Should Obama release a third statement demanding that Blagojevich be launched into space inside of a creepy Phantom Zone square like the one from Superman II?
Really, is there anything the President-elect can do to satisfy these people?
Also Pennsylvania's Democratic governor Rendell plays himself in the picture with the issue:

Let's check the recent historical record. When former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was accused of ethics violations and money laundering, and then was indicted on charges of conspiring to commit campaign finance fraud and consequently resigned from Congress in disgrace, President Bush publicly denounced and rejected DeLay -- a fellow Texan.
But President Bush didn't denounce DeLay at all. In fact...
Bush Expresses a Belief in DeLay's Innocence
(New York Times)
President Bush Shows Support to Embattled DeLay
(The News Hour)
President Says DeLay Is Not Guilty of Money Laundering
(The Washington Post 1)
Bush Declares DeLay Innocent
(The Washington Post 2)
Lott urges Bush to give DeLay 'aggressive support'
(The Washington Times)
Bush to Give DeLay a Lift to Show Support
(The Los Angeles Times)
Read that last headline again. Not only did President Bush not denounce and reject the corrupt Republican leader, but DeLay was literally rewarded with a free ride aboard Air Force One. Both men wantonly tainting each other aboard the presidential aircraft.
Contrastingly, Obama can't even live in the same state as Blagojevich without having to emphatically denounce the governor's crimes and stupidity. And even when he denounces and rejects Blagojevich, he's still defined as tainted.

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Just the Facts: Our Disinformed Electorate

December 12, 2008 by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Brooks Jackson

We saw more aggressive fact-checking by journalists in this election than ever before. Unfortunately, as a post-election Annenberg Public Policy Center poll confirms, millions of voters were bamboozled anyway.
* More than half of U.S. adults (52 percent) said the claim that Sen. Barack Obama’s tax plan would raise taxes on most small businesses is truthful, when in fact only a small percentage would see any increase.
* More than two in five (42.3 percent) found truth in the claim that Sen. John McCain planned to "cut more than 800 billion dollars in Medicare payments and cut benefits," even though McCain made clear he had no intent to cut benefits.

The first falsehood was peddled to voters by McCain throughout his campaign, and the second was made in a pair of ads run heavily in the final weeks of the campaign by Obama.

These aren’t isolated examples. One in four (25.6 percent) of those who earned too little to have seen any tax increase under Obama's plan nevertheless believed that he intended to "increase your own federal income taxes," accepting McCain's repeated claims that "painful" tax hikes were being proposed on "families." Nearly two in five (39.8 percent) thought McCain had said he would keep troops in combat in Iraq for up to 100 years, though he’d actually spoken of a peacetime presence such as that in Japan or South Korea. Close to one in three (31 percent) believed widely disseminated claims that Obama would give Social Security or health care benefits to illegal immigrants, when in fact he would do neither.
We’re not surprised. As we wrote in "unSpun: finding facts in a world of disinformation," the same thing happened in 2004 when majorities of voters believed untrue things that had been fed to them by the Bush and Kerry campaigns.
One reason is obvious: Political ads run thousands of times and reach far more people than articles on FactCheck.org. On our best day, we were read by 462,678 visitors. By contrast, the Obama campaign aired two ads claiming that McCain planned to cut Medicare benefits a total of 17,614 times at a cost estimated to be more than $7 million – which is several times more than FactCheck.org's entire annual budget.
There are deeper reasons as well. We humans all have a basic disposition to embrace our side's arguments and reject or ignore those offered by an opponent. Our polling reflects that. After taking differences in age, race, gender and education into account, Republicans were still 4.4 times more likely than Democrats to believe that Obama would raise taxes on most small businesses, and Democrats were 3.2 times more likely than Republicans to believe that McCain would cut Medicare benefits. Simply put, partisanship trumps evidence.
This also helps explain why so many people accept the most preposterous claims circulated by chain e-mail messages and ignorant or irresponsible bloggers. Our poll found nearly one in five (19 percent) falsely think Obama is a Muslim, and even more (22 percent) find truth in the claim that he’s nearly half Arab. Republicans were 2.8 times more likely than Democrats to buy the Muslim claim, and just over twice as likely to swallow the half-Arab notion.
This is "group think" in action. We humans tend to marry, date, befriend and talk with people who already agree with us, and hence are less likely to say, "Wait a minute – that’s just not true."
Consultants also dupe us by exploiting our partisan preconceptions. People tend to believe Democrats are more likely than Republicans to raise taxes, so McCain was pushing on an open door when he repeatedly claimed Obama would raise taxes on ordinary voters, and not just the most affluent. By the same token, Obama found it easy to sell his bogus claim that McCain planned to cut Medicare benefits by 22 percent, because Republicans have a reputation as opponents of social programs.
Voters aren’t highly knowledgeable about government to begin with. Our poll shows that nearly one in three (31 percent) think Congress or the president, not the Supreme Court, have the final call on whether laws are constitutional. Nearly one in 10 (9.9 percent) think Republicans still control the House of Representatives, even though they’ve had two years to catch up on results of the 2006 elections.
And voters, once deceived, tend to stay that way despite all evidence. Nearly half in our poll (46 percent) agreed that Saddam Hussein played a role in the attacks of September 11, even though no solid evidence has ever emerged to support this notion.
None of this bodes well for the future, in our view. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on campaigns that systematically disinform the public can only make the task of governing harder for the eventual winner. But are we discouraged that our efforts didn’t prevent this? Not at all. If we hadn’t tried, it might have been worse.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson is director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. Brooks Jackson is director of the APPC project FactCheck.org. They are co-authors of "unSpun, finding facts in a world of disinformation."
The Annenberg post-election poll was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, which interviewed 3,008 adults in the continental United States by telephone from Nov. 5 through Nov. 18, 2008. The margin of sampling error for the complete set of weighted data is ±2.3 percent.