A Thick and Soupy Plot ... the Saga of Roland Burris Continues...

-
"Scandal Mushrooms" says a headline in today's Chicago Sun-Times. What sounds like a recipe for salmonella-infested fungi is instead the story about how Rod Blagojevich (when still governor) got Roland Burris' son a job prior to the elder Burris' appointment to the senate.

(Sounds like Blagojevich served as an excellent employment agency for the Roland Burrises.)

Roland Burris II (the senator's "mini-me") was facing foreclosure on his own home last summer when he was appointed (and I am not making this up) to a $75,000 job at the Illinois Housing Development Authority.

His home was in foreclosure because he apparently owed (again, I'm not making this up) more than $30,000 to the IRS.

Let's see if we can sum this up neatly...

A governor arrested for trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat then appoints a man who has not only raised money to purchase the seat hosted "fundraisers" for Blago, but whose son owes his job to the high-rolling ex-gov. And owes a bit of back taxes to the feds as well. And as the owner of a foreclosed home, is now working in some capacity at the state's Housing Development Authority.

It is a thick and heavy soup of scandal being served up right now in Illinois!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The October Rose

-
Image
‘Tis the season to bring love and joy into the world – and here’s one of the loveliest stories of the year… It’s a story that begins in October 2008, when the economy is in a state of collapse; the culture is in crisis, and faith in humanity – at least, my faith in humanity – is at an all-time low. It is precisely at this time that my next-door neighbor, Annie Jennings, comes home from high school bearing an orange rose. She presents this flower to her mother, Ellen, with the announcement that she is one of the “Sweet 16,” a member of Libertyville High School’s Homecoming Court. Annie is not quite 18 years old, a high school senior with stick-straight, sandy blond hair, glasses and a big smile. We hire her to feed our cat whenever we head out of town and we leave knowing our cat is in very good hands. So when I learn of her selection as a member of the homecoming court, I am intrigued. This is the girl who watches my cat, after all. Ellen is curious about what it means to...
Read more

"Good-bye to all that..."

-
Harry Patch died last week in England. It was the expected outcome for a man of 111. But it is a notable death because with Harry Patch goes the last living memory of trench warfare experienced nearly a century ago during The Great War - known now as World War 1. This story on CNN.com is a wonderful summary of Patch's life. He was a plumber before and after his stint in the trenches. He saw some of the worst warfare man has ever experienced: "He fought and was seriously wounded in Ypres, Belgium, in 1917 at the Battle of Passchendaele, in which 70,000 of his fellow soldiers died -- including three of his close friends." That's a placid little sentence to describe the slaughter of 70,000 men. A horror Patch refused to talk about until he turned 100 years old. Here's a YouTube video that shows some photos and film footage from the Battle of Passchendaele: You can hear the survivor's voice in this video shot at Passchendaele about two years ag...
Read more

On the failure of "the invisible hand" to influence our financial sector

-
In Alan Greenspan's book, The Age of Turbulence , one of the issues he explores is the failure of economic populism in Latin America. Here are his thoughts: " The dictionary defines 'populism' as a political philosophy that supports the rights and power of the people, usually in opposition to a privileged elite. I see economic populism as a response by an impoverished populace to a failing society, one characterized by an economic elite who are perceived as oppressors. Under economic populism, the government accedes to the demands of the people, with little regard for either individual rights or the economic realities of how the wealth of a nation is increased or even sustained." So in Greenspan's view as a self-described Libertarian Republican, economic populism comes to life in "failing societies" that have significant income inequality and are dominated by an economic elite. And in Greenspan's mind, it is not the government that can make t...
Read more