Steve Warmbir: February 2009 Archives

It didn't get a great deal of attention, but on Monday the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of Mayor Daley's patronage chief, Robert Sorich, and two other men charged in a scheme to award city jobs or overtime to political workers.

This is good news for federal prosecutors here and good news for the citizens of Chicago.

It means the legal tactics that the prosecutor used to put the men in prison passes muster.

And the defense that what the men did wasn't really crime?

Well, it didn't work on the highest court in the land.

Judge Antonin Scalia offered a strong dissent, saying the court should have taken up the issue. The legal tactics in the Sorich case could be used, in theory, against "a salaried employee's phoning in sick to go to a ball game."

Such a comparison denigrates what really happened in the Sorich case.

Sorich and his colleagues oversaw a system that rigged city of Chicago hiring tests and interviews, a process that routinely gave city jobs to political workers who benefitted the mayor and his allies.

So hundreds of Average Joes waited in line to take a test or be interviewed, and the fix was in before they even walked in the door.

Hard-working city employees didn't get the promotions they deserved. Political hacks took them instead.

We feel some sympathy to the argument that Sorich and his colleagues weren't the big fish in the pond. They weren't the queen bees, only the worker bees.

That's true, to some extent, but it doesn't excuse what they did.

The U.S. Supreme Court's action on Monday leaves open the possibility that a day of reckoning for the higher-ups is still possible.

Just before the David Letterman interview starts, here's another interesting nugget from the transcript of the interview.

The former governor is asked how the investigation of him started.

He explains that the feds started looking into a friend of his. He's referring to Tony Rezko but doesn't mention his name.

Then Blagojevich adds this shot.

"This friend is the friend who is very close to Barack Obama as well."

Our former governor has been cracking wise on the David Letterman show, comparing his profane language, caught on tape secretly by the feds, to Christian Bale's obscene tirade that's getting a lot of air time Tuesday.

Bale is best known for playing Batman, but he lost it during the filming of "Terminator 4." You can listen to Bale's on-set spewings here, but be warned that it's quite intense and filled with obscenities.

During the interview to air tonight, Letterman plays one of the secretly made recordings of the governor -- one which appears to capture him trying to shake down a contribution in return for favorable legislation, one of the four previously played for state lawmakers.

"I was afraid you were going to have some of those other tapes where I sounded like Christian Bale..." Blagojevich cracks, and the audience laughs, according to a transcript of the interview

It sounds like a funny line from our former governor. He's on Letterman for about 30 minutes, but why would he want to compare himself to Bale?

Many people, for instance, have questioned our former governor's sanity -- or at least stability.

And on the tape, Bale sounds none too stable himself.

The former governor was recorded trying to get people fired who had disrupted his schemes.

And Bale is recorded threatening to get an employee on the film set fired who had disrupted his concentration.

The governor has been criminally charged.

And Bale has had his own brush with the law.

Come to think of it, given the similariites, maybe the comparison was even better than our former governor first realized.

Might there be a role for Bale in "Blago: The Movie"?

Well, he's certainly got the cussing down.