How did Blagojevich do business?

[question everything]

How did Blagojevich do business?
In new book, former governor offers his take on effort to fill Obama's Senate seat and his surprising 1st choice
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September 1, 2009

BY NATASHA KORECKI Staff Reporter
Chicago Sun Times

The ex-governor who famously called the U.S. Senate seat " golden" says the perception out there is all wrong. In his new 264-page book, The Governor, Rod Blagojevich claims that just before his Dec. 9 arrest, he was on the brink of appointing the daughter of his political enemy to President Obama's vacant post as a swap for pushing through a legislative windfall to taxpayers.

In an account that is at once biographical and self-justifying, the ousted governor also says Rahm Emanuel asked him to appoint a "place holder" who would keep Emanuel's congressional post warm for two years. In an exchange first reported by the Chicago Sun-Times last year, Blagojevich said Emanuel, who signed on as Obama's chief of staff, wanted to return to his 5th Congressional District post because he believed he was in line for the House speaker position. It turned out Blagojevich didn't have the authority to make that appointment.

The Sun-Times obtained an advanced copy of the account published by Phoenix Books, which hits the stands a week from today. In it, Blagojevich chronicles his rise and fall in politics as well as the support, then betrayal, by a slew of friends and former aides. "Take Tony Rezko out of my life, and I really believe I wouldn't be where I am right now," Blagojevich wrote of his former adviser and fund-raiser. Blagojevich said the day before his arrest, he called his chief of staff, John Harris, and told him to get the ball rolling on the appointment of Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan to the Senate seat. He hoped to strike a deal with her politically powerful father who would have to agree to advance a legislative package that would expand health care, create 500,000 new jobs and put a hold on foreclosures. " Fitzgerald was a hundred percent wrong. I never intended to sell the Senate seat," Blagojevich wrote. "He didn't stop a crime spree. He instead stopped the embryonic stages of a routine and lawful political deal."

(snip)

Several former staffers, who did not want to be named, said while Lisa Madigan ranked on Blagojevich's list, an arrangement never got off the ground. The morning the ex-governor said he called Harris about Madigan is the same day Blagojevich met with U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) about the Senate seat. But Blagojevich wrote that some of the highest reaches of the Democratic party had lobbied against Jackson, believing he couldn't win a statewide election.

(snip)

Lisa Madigan, who opted not to run for higher office this year even as she was poised to be a political front-runner, has said she was never approached by Blagojevich. "The attorney general has not read it nor does she intend to read it," spokeswoman Robyn Ziegler said of the book. Blagojevich goes on to say that any contention that he solicited campaign cash in exchange for the Senate seat is false. The reverse happened, he said, without naming names. "If anyone should have been charged with a crime for this, it should have been them and not me," he wrote.

(snip)

http://www.suntimes.com/news/1746211,CST-NWS-blago01good.article#

[Spazito]

1. Pathetic but not surprising....

It sure doesn't sound like a book worth spending a plug nickel on,imo.

[FrenchieCat]

2. The agenda behind this book must not be crystal clear.....

to some.....i.e., rewriting history to cover one's ass.

[question everything]

3. Or his legal expenses? (nt)

[PVnRT]

4. No, Blago, if you remove Tony Rezko

You'd still have gotten busted for the other slimy shit you've done.

[question everything]

5. And I cannot believe that his book, apparently, has climbed to the top

of Amazon.