Rod Blagojevich Trial to Start in 2010

If 2009 was a personal and legal roller coaster for former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, next year doesn’t promise to be much smoother with his criminal trial looming in the summer.

Blagojevich’s legal team has turned on its head the usual defense strategy in big corruption cases to say or reveal little before trial, letting him embark on media blitzes in part to promote his book. There’s no reason to think that aggressive approach won’t be evident at a trial that could last months.

“The man has said it a thousand times, and that’s why he’s out there. If you’re not guilty, you don’t shy away,” said Sam Adam Jr., one of Blagojevich’s lawyers. “And he’s going to take the stand at his trial, and he’s going to answer his accusers.”

The strategy carries obvious risks: The former governor’s denials could be used against him at trial by prosecutors armed with extensive undercover recordings and the testimony of former Blagojevich insiders.

“That might hurt his ability to testify without being submitted” to an attack on his sincerity on cross-examination by the government, said Dean Polales, a former veteran federal prosecutor.

Blagojevich’s lawyers are likely to counter by trying to show that the former governor acted in good faith in the often rough-and-tumble world of politics and government and didn’t seek to enrich himself.

“I would say they probably would not say this is politics as usual in front of a Chicago jury,” said Polales, now in private practice. “But they will say he acted in good faith and that he was serving legitimate political interests.”

Read More at Chicago Tribune

John McCain Gets Mad On Senate Floor

John McCain Is mad. During Senate debate Saturday over cuts to Medicare home health care spending, Sen. McCain got very worked up. On at least two separate occasions, Sen. Max Baucus objected to McCain. The Senator from Arizona did not take it too well and was visibly upset. For his part, Baucus seemed to be smirking at McCain’s reactions.

When isn’t John McCain pissed about something nowadays?

Huffington Post

Baucus Nominated Girlfriend for U.S. Attorney

Sen. Max Baucus, one of the most powerful members of Congress and a key figure in the health overhaul debate, recommended his girlfriend to serve as the U.S. attorney for his home state of Montana, a Baucus spokesman said Saturday.

The disclosure was first made late Friday by Sen. Baucus’s office and came as other media outlets prepared to publish stories on the issue.

Baucus spokesman Tyler Matsdorf said the senator and his girlfriend, Melodee Hanes, began their relationship in mid-2008 after the senator separated from his wife. At the time, Ms. Hanes was serving as the senator’s state office director.

Mr. Matsdorf said the relationship was “in no way” the cause of Sen. Baucus’s recent divorce.

Mr. Matsdorf said Ms. Hanes “began the process of resigning her Senate employment” after she and the senator “realized that their relationship was developing beyond a purely professional nature.” She left the Senate payroll early this year.

As part of the transition, Ms. Hanes, who has extensive experience as a prosecutor, applied for the U.S. attorney post. Ultimately, she was one of three finalists recommended for the job by a third party attorney who was given the job of reviewing candidates for the job. Sen. Baucus recommended her to the Obama administration, “with no ranking or preference,” for the post, along with two other individuals, the spokesman said.

She later withdrew, however. “While her personal relationship with Senator Baucus should in no way be either a qualifier or a disqualifier for the position, during the nomination process and after much reflection, both Senator Baucus and Ms. Hanes agreed that she should withdraw her name from consideration because they wanted to live together in Washington, D.C.,” Mr. Matsdorf said.

Ms. Hanes now works at the Justice Department, and “was awarded the position based solely on her merit,” the spokesman said.

The episode is sure to be an embarrassment for Democrats and will likely prove distracting for Mr. Baucus, as the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee tries to navigate the sweeping health bill through the Senate.

The disclosure is the latest example of a scandal in which a lawmaker’s personal life and public obligations have intersected, following on the heels of revelations involving South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and Nevada’s Sen. John Ensign.

Wall Street Journal

Obama Says He Concentrating on Jobs

President Barack Obama says he’s concentrating on jobs even as he works on plans to strengthen the whole economy. In his weekly radio and Internet address.

Sarah Palin Pokes Fun at Herself

Sarah Palin took on the Washington press, her former running mate, and herself with political one-liners at the Gridiron Club winter meeting.

Referring to her foreign policy comment about seeing Russia from Alaska, the former vice presidential candidate got laughs when she said that coming down from her Washington hotel room, she “could see the Russian Embassy.”

Palin also joked that before settling on “Going Rogue,” she originally thought of titling her book “How To Look Like a Million Bucks For Only $150,000,” in a reference to campaign spending on her wardrobe.

There was also a barb for Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign staff, which has criticized her. Palin’s been on a book tour and told the audience the view is “much better from inside the bus than under it.”

As for her media hosts, she said she was glad to appear before a group of intellectuals, “or as I like to call it, a death panel.”

WGME

Senator Speaks on Gays

Sen. Chris Buttars is tired of gays stuffing it down his throat all the time and putting it in his kids face.

Quote: President Nixon

“By the time you get dressed, drive out there, play 18 holes and come home, you’ve blown seven hours. There are better things you can do with your time,” President Nixon on Golf

Climategate, Leaked UK Emails

If temperatures were not already warm enough, the email leak from the University of East Anglia (UK) will make sure that the United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen next week will be held in great weather.

In the unlikely event that you have not heard about “Climategate”, here is what happened. Hackers broke into servers at the University’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), a key centre for the study of climate change and downloaded 13 years of private emails and documents. They posted them online on a blog called The Air Vent. The hackers explained: “We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”

Climate change supporters dismissed the revelations which emerged as bloggers trawled through 13 years of emails as a storm in a teacup. But sceptics regard them as a “smoking gun”, evidence that some climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support their hypothesis that climate change is real and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind.

Some of the emails are, at the very least, embarrassing. In one of them, from Professor Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, to an American colleague, the death of a sceptic is described as “cheering news”. In another he suggests that a “trick” was used to “hide the decline” in temperature. They even include fantasies of violence. An American wrote to Professor Jones: “Next time I see Pat Michaels [a climate sceptic] at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.”

The first point, on which everyone agrees, is that the action was illegal. Let the law take its course. However, this is irrelevant to the question debated. The debate is centred, or should be, on whether the science of Global Warming, alias Climate Change, has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that (1) there is a global warming of the planet and (2) it is caused by human activity.

My opinion is no, it hasn’t, as I have argued before in MercatorNet. It does not matter how many times the rhetoric about an overwhelming consensus is repeated. The consensus has been politically, not scientifically, generated. The statement of this consensus has the same value as, for example, that other famous statement that Iraq was piling up arms of mass destruction. It is part of a political campaign, not of an educational campaign.

The word campaign brings to mind the second point. The email hacking is obviously part of a campaign and the leak was timed to damage the meeting in Copenhagen. But again, the global warming case is also a campaign. The difference between the two is that one is sustained by the governments of some of the most powerful states in the world, the media and environmental groups, and has access to taxpayers’ money, while the other is sustained by a group of diehards using their own money.

The third and central point is that there is a hint of foul play that may have been exposed. The foul play, if it did happen, may have a tremendous effect in the lives of millions of peoples around the world and for generations to come. Isn’t it common sense to call for an investigation? Isn’t it even ethically demanded? The official reaction to such an enquiry is pitifully suspicious. It also lacks logic.

Somebody is accusing a group of people of tinkering with scientific data in order to produce a certain desired result, and of not wanting to make these data available because this could reveal the tinkering. In response, this group of people answers that there is nothing to discuss on the whole issue because their data have proven the truth of their results. This is basically the content of the official response to the alleged leak. Can the reader spot the gap in the logic?

Unwillingness to share data and methods of analysis by certain scientists supporting the man-made global warming interpretation has been mentioned before. Nigel Lawson provides examples with names, dates and the specific issues in his book An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming.

Finally, some of the official answers to the email leak argue that the implicated scientists have published their studies in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and this makes it virtually impossible to assert that they tinkered with their data.

I cannot help but smile at such an argument. Scientists, both authors and reviewers, as well as the editors of scientific journals, are human. They have their share in our common lot of error, taste for success, fear of peer pressure and interest in financial resources. A very recent case is an example of how scientific peer-review can be fooled. Jan Hendrik Schön, a physicist working at the Bell Labs in the USA, published a long string of articles during the 1990s and 2000s in Science (one of the two most prestigious scientific journals in the world) with results that he fabricated. He did it single-handed and it took years to expose him.

Science is difficult. It relies on a multitude of data, assumptions, simplifications and interpretations that try to make sense of the facts. Any cutting-edge science worthy of being considered for publication deals with opinion as much as with fact, precisely because it is trying to break new ground. Climate science is the epitome of this complexity, as it deals with the planet globally and the innumerable processes going on in the atmosphere, oceans and lithosphere in a mutual feed-back loop. Yes, there is a very substantial possibility that a great number of papers on the matter have substantial limitations that will be identified in the future. Some of them may even have intentional errors.

The genuineness of the leaked emails should be investigated. Let us see whether these angels of climate change are completely pure and whether some demons of denying have some goodness in them — as they may be actually interested in the truth of the case.

Javier Cuadros is a scientist and works in London, UK.

MERCATORNET

Senator Ensign’s Scandal

Most constituents weren’t really concerned or even shocked about Senator John Ensign’s extra-marital affair with Doug Hampton’s wife, Cynthia Hampton. But they do feel there’s a lot more to this story and $96,000 check that was given to Ensign’s former mistress.

Chuck Muth, a Republican turned Independent, has be calling for Ensign’s resignation even prior to the scandal breaking out. He says Doug Hampton’s allegations about the senator helping him find employment raise red flags that could land ensign in hot water.

“It wasn’t whether ensign helped Doug find work. The real question is whether there were violations with his involvement with Hampton on the lobbying side,” Muth added.

Muth insists Ensign has too much baggage and should resign because he’s an added burden to an already fractured and ailing GOP. Political analyst Mike Sahara says Ensign’s career is not entirely over, since the radio interview on Newsradio 840 KXNT did some damage control. And as a political heavy weight his name and presence could still help in next years elections.

“He’s the most senior elected official in the party. No he cant put it behind but has to address it and move forward,” said Sahara. Ensign is not stepping down, but only time will tell if he will be in fact able to redeem himself and be forgiven by his party and the voters.

“One of the things that people forget is, if I resign, we have a second Senate race,” Ensign said Monday

KTNV

« Previous Page