Bill Tweed Revisited

Chicago. Place of my birth, home of the Bears, pizza to die for, and Senate seats up for bid. What more could you ask for?

Rod Blagojevich, as most of you have heard by now, has been caught on tape saying he wanted "to make money'' on the Obama senate appointment. "I have got this thing and it's [bleeping] golden," . It’s good to be king I guess.

And now Jesse Jackson Jr. is coming forward as the infamous "Senate Candidate 5", whose aide approached Blagojevich with a 500K offer for the seat. More shocking however, is that apparently in the past few years he’s been working as an informant in other investigations into Blagojevich. Personally, I’d like that confirmed by the US Attorney’s office.

However Jackson did have a bone to pick with good old Rod. An anonymous Jackson aide said "Blagojevich went out of his way to say, 'You know I was considering your wife for the lottery job and the $25,000 you didn't give me? That's why she's not getting the job,"'. Yikes.

For some reason, to me, the most offensive of all was his attempts to shake down the Tribune Co., threatening to withold the sale of Wrigley Field unless the company fired some of the newspaper's editorial writers who have been less than kind to Blagojevich’s “management style”. Apparently Mr. Blagojevich believes Illinois to be his own little East Berlin.

Al Capone must be rolling over in his grave lamenting “why didn’t I think of that?!” Mario Puzo couldn’t have written it better.