Blagojevich will be on TV again (sort of); does he want to control image?

Rod Blagojevich will crop up back in our minds in a couple of weeks when a judge at the U.S. District Court in Chicago decides whether he ought to have his prison sentence reduced.

 

An embarrassing-enough day for ex-gov

But it doesn’t mean that Blagojevich will physically be in our presence.

SINCE BLAGOJEVICH IS being held in a federal correctional center in Colorado, he will remain there on Aug. 9 while legal activity takes place in the Chicago courtroom of Judge James Zagel.

It will be the modern-day miracle of television and a closed-circuit connection that will allow Blagojevich to express any thoughts he has about his legal predicament without actually having to be in the courtroom.

We may well get Blagojevich family or friends speaking in person on his behalf. But we won’t get to see in person the wrath that five years of federal prison life have brought down upon the governor who likely considered himself to be the ultimate “Elvis person.”

He will remain at the prison during his court hearing. Which strikes some as odd because they remember the Blago ego that would have naturally have made him want to be the center of all attention.

SO WHY WOULD Rod choose not to be transported to Chicago at the federal government’s expense?

The smart aleck in me wonders if Blagojevich enjoys the thought of a courtroom full of spectators with their attention focused on a television screen with his face filling it up.

It would be (sort of) like the old days. Back when our whole state paid attention to his every bizarre move and when some people actually took seriously the notion that he would someday be presidential timber.

 

The image Blagojevich would rather have; being one of the masses with fantasies of a Cubs World Series this season and dreaming of a chance to throw out the first pitch prior to a World Series game

Does Blagojevich fall asleep these days to dreams of how Hillary Clinton is offering him advice and support after she congratulates him on the crushing primary election defeat he administered to her in the 2016 primary election that exists only in his mind?

COULD IT JUST be that Blagojevich didn’t feel compelled to return to Chicago at this time because it would be under less-than-desirable conditions?

He’d be an inmate. He’d be in the brightly-colored jumpsuit meant to make him stand out in a crowd in a humiliating manner.

Heck, he’d be shackled. The resulting image would probably feed the fantasies of many a conservative ideologue whose life is so pathetic that they have nothing more to live for than the misery of other people.

And worse of all, we’d all wind up getting the answer to the question many of us have had since we learned of his regular use of hair dye to maintain a youthful look – How old does Rod Blagojevich look in reality?

COULD THE THOUGHT of being seen with all that grey hair (he will turn 60 come Dec. 10) be too much for him to bear? Does he want to maintain that vision of himself that we all became used to a decade ago with the primped-up hair?

Which may be the reason that one of the few details that has come out about Blagojevich’s time in prison is that he participates in a band of inmates who envision themselves as rock ‘n’ rollers.

 

Is this Blagojevich's biggest fear?

Literally calling themselves the “Jailhouse Rockers” in memory to the old Elvis tune. That image, he can handle. Which makes me suspect that Blagojevich’s worse nightmare is something similar to that of the late New York-area gangster Henry Hill.

Who in being portrayed by actor Ray Liotta at the end of the film “Goodfellas” told us, “I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.”

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What, really?!?

There are times I learn of happenings in the news that just astound me, not so much because I have some naïve faith in the proper behavior of people but because I’m amazed that anyone could possibly believe that such tacky behavior is in any way acceptable.

So that was pretty much my gut reaction to learning of the federal lawsuit filed Tuesday against the Chicago Public Schools on account of actions at one Northwest Side school where administrators seemed to have a hang-up about their teachers who became pregnant.

IT SEEMS THAT teachers at the Scammon Elementary School who became impregnated found themselves facing harassment in terms of lower performance evaluation ratings and demotions in terms of class assignments.

It seemed as though school officials, according to the lawsuit now pending in U.S. District Court, wanted to discourage those teachers enough that they would quit. In some cases, those teachers didn’t seem to take the hint, and wound up being fired from their jobs – even some who had been around long enough to have acquired tenure.

The lawsuit contends that since 2009, eight teachers lost their jobs under such circumstances. Two of them filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which found enough evidence to support claims that the Civil Rights Act was violated.

Which resulted in the lawsuit being filed this week – one that seeks financial compensation for the teachers who lost their jobs and court-ordered measures meant to prevent pregnant women from being harassed on the job in the future.

EVEN AS I write this commentary, I shake my head in disgust and amazement that anyone capable of getting a job within educational administration could think that any such behavior could in any be acceptable.

Let alone legal!

Reading the accounts of the lawsuit filed in the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, along with the lawsuit itself made me feel like I was reading some decades-old account of actions that once might have been thought appropriate – but which we now realize are so pathetic that we wonder how we ever could have been that narrow-minded.

Then again, I’m sure there are behaviors we engage in that people 100 or so years from now will wonder, “How could they have ever been so clueless?”

SO CALL ME naïve. I’d like to think this is a lawsuit that will quickly be seen by Chicago Public Schools officials as an embarrassment, and one that they will want to work to resolve as quickly as possible.

And not just by throwing some money at the former teachers to get them to “Shut Up!” without having to admit any wrong-doing.

Particularly since it appears this is a matter that the Chicago Teachers Union had been aware of and had been trying unsuccessfully to get schools officials to address without having to get the courts involved.

Instead, it has wound up in the federal court system, where it will wind up being another blotch on our city’s reputation.

ALTHOUGH I SUSPECT there will be a few people who will want to dismiss these allegations in their minds as somehow being interference by the government in a local school’s administration. Instead of it being what it is – the courts attempting to protect people when the law is not being followed.

Acting assistant attorney General Vanita Gupta of the Civil Rights Division had to make a statement publicly about this lawsuit, saying, “No woman should have to make a choice between her job and having a family. Federal law requires employers to maintain a workplace free of discrimination on the basis of sex.”

Which is sad that it even has to be said publicly.

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Madigan backing Smith to be expected. I'm more upset by lack of a federal trial

I remember once having an Illinois House of Representatives of the Democratic persuasion try to dispute the notion that all of the House Dems were just lackies who voted the way Speaker Michael Madigan told them to.

SMITH: He's still around

This legislator told me that the only hard-and-fast commitment she had to make in exchange for Madigan’s support (including the periodic transfers of cash from Madigan’s campaign funds that keep many legislative campaigns alive) was to promise that she’d vote in support of measures to keep Madigan in his leadership post.

TO THE BEST of my knowledge, state Rep. Derrick Smith, D-Chicago, complied with that demand. He never did anything that would have challenged Madigan’s authority to be House speaker (without which Madigan would be just another schlub legislator from the Southwest Side).

So should it be any surprise that Madigan is backing Smith’s bid for re-election come the March 18 primary over other candidates. Madigan aides themselves admit that the speaker is supporting Smith because he’s the incumbent – and for no other reason.

Yet there are those who are acting “shocked, shocked to learn” that Smith can be endorsed by anybody for re-election.

Smith, after all, is the guy who got booted from the Illinois House two years ago when he was indicted by federal prosecutors on claims that the cash he took for his government activity amounts to bribes.

BUT IN WHAT was the quirk of the 2012 election cycle, Smith managed to get re-elected to a two-year term – one that will soon come to an end. Because the federal court system is one that takes time to work one’s way through, he has yet to be found guilty of anything.

So, he’s running for re-election to another two-year term in this year’s election cycle. The reality of our political set-up is that incumbents have a lot of advantages, no matter how inept or sleazy we may perceive them as being.

He’s going to keep getting re-elected until the very day that a “guilty” verdict is rendered. I don’t really like that idea, but I accept that it is reality.

MADIGAN: Merely playing politics

So I’m not so concerned about the fact that Smith probably will win the Democratic primary AND the general election in November.

THE REAL QUESTION is whether “the feds” can get their act together to obtain a conviction of some type against Smith.

Perhaps those of us who are all upset that Madigan would think to support Smith – instead of trying to pick a no-name and rise him from the muck to a position of authority in the Illinois House – ought to focus our attention on why it takes so long for a criminal case to actually come to trial.

For a case that is supposedly as obviously a “guilty” verdict as some political people would like us to believe, perhaps this should happened long ago.

For those who have already forgotten the specifics of this case, it involves a $7,000 payment he received after writing a letter supporting a day care operation that sought a $50,000 grant from state government.

I’M SURE HE’LL argue that he was just making a recommendation about something proposed for his West Side-based legislative district, just like any other legislator would do. This will become a case – when it finally goes to trial – that will become a matter of how much we actually trust anything Smith says.

Now I’m not writing this commentary in defense of Smith. It’s more a criticism of those people trying to score more cheap political points off of a pending indictment.

What's taking them so long?

I expect Madigan to keep supporting Smith so long as he fulfills Madigan’s interests.

What disgusts me is that Smith, if he really is as guilty as prosecutors want us to believe, isn’t in a prison cell already. And if he isn’t guilty, that a criminal charge has lingered over him for so long!

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