April 14, 2009 - Fifteen minutes from now, former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich will appear in court before U.S. District Judge James Zagel. It will be his first court appearance since he was indicted earlier this month on 16 felony charges. Blago says he will plead "not guilty" to the counts, which include racketeering conspiracy and extortion conspiracy. Blago's arraignment is set for 11:00 am at the Dirksen Federal Building in downtown Chicago. (Source)
Meanwhile, the son of racist extortionist "Reverend" Jesse Jackson is up to his neck in accusations and getting a lot of his own unfavorable press this week. For months there has been speculation that Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL) might be guilty of pay-for-play antics in an alleged attempt to buy his way into Barack Obama's vacated U.S. Senate seat.
On April 13, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a story that seems to disspell any doubt that Junior Jackson is allegedly (there, the legal crap is out of the way) guilty as hell.
Former Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s camp was told last year that U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) would raise up to $5 million in campaign cash for the ex-governor if he was appointed to President Obama’s U.S. Senate seat, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned. The overture came from at least two members of the local Indian community who approached the Blagojevich fund-raising team last fall, sources say.
Bad news for JJ, Jr. Questions arise, of course. One question: Where the hell would he get that kind of money? The answer: Daddy. The good reverend, you see, is rich. He got his money, in large part, by underhanded means. For example:
Last year [2000], Jackson billed the charities he controls $614,000 for "travel expenses." When asked to explain this extraordinary figure, he says that he often spends more than 200 days per year traveling on charitable business. Yet even if we make the charitable assumption that this figure doesn't include any direct padding of Jackson's self-reported $430,000 annual income, this still works out to nearly $3,000 per day. (Source: Rocky Mountain News via Skeptictank)
When he's not using charities as a personal ATM, Rev. Jackson is likely to be plotting his next extortion scheme. One of those schemes was the magnificently successful squeezing of brewer Anheuser-Busch.
Jackson, whose attempt to boycott Anheuser-Busch failed in 1982, was invoked by black employees of a company beer distributorship in Chicago, who believed they were being discriminated against. In what many observers saw as a blatant (and successful) attempt to buy racial peace from Jackson, Anheuser-Busch awarded the lucrative distributorship (with revenues of between $30 million and $40 million a year) to Jackson's sons. (Source: National Review Online)
So, the money is there. The Jacksons are quite wealthy. What's five million bucks to put your son in the U.S. Congress? I'm not saying that Jesse Senior offered up the five million dollars that was allegedly offered to Blagojevich. I'm just saying that if that was the case, the money was easily obtainable.
Back to the April 13 Sun-Times story:
Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. denies allowing anyone to make pay-to-play offers for President Obama's U.S. Senate seat to then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich on his behalf. (Brian Jackson/Sun-Times) Besides the $5 million to be raised by Jackson, the proposal also included another $1 million for Blagojevich’s campaign fund that would come from Indian donors, sources say.
The Sun-Times report is damning. Jackson Junior keeps saying that he has done nothing wrong. That might be true. But why, then, are so many people, such as "at least two members of the local Indian community" and others, coming forward to say that Junior is guilty as hell?
