Certainly I'm not surprised that Burris is going to be our Senator, and I'm not that unhappy about it. Hopefully Burris will be a good senator, and do what he needs to do to hold the seat. He has handled himself with dignity and good humor as he went through this process. And, he had to have some of the necessary ambition to take the appointment in the first place.

How this will affect the criminal case against Blagojevich, I'm not sure. But everyone seems convinced that he did not sell the senate seat to Burris - Burris said he didn't have the money. So if he didn't sell the seat, he can't very well be accused of selling the seat, can he?

Sure there are other things in the criminal complaint, and maybe that will be enough to bring down Blago, but the Illinois Senate best be very fair with how they handle the trial. Any hint that the trial is the same kind of kangaroo court that came out of the Illinois House, and these bodies will be losing credibility for a long time to come. Illinois is now under national scrutiny, not least because it is Obama's home state and all this is going on in his home town.

I still say that Reid, Durbin, and the others mishandled this at first. OK, we all make mistakes. But this one went to a core Democrat value - the right to due process, the presumption of innocence, and the right to privacy. How the Dems could have just chucked away all those principles to go after Blago with such venom is still a mystery to me. I still believe that there are things going on not being reported by the mainstream media.

You give me a fraction of the money that some of these high priced pundits are making, and I'd give a good stab at figuring it out. No wonder newspapers are failing left and right. They aren't telling us anything interesting. And that is because they are corporate and don't want to rat out their corporate buddies. If newspapers would go after the truth and report it, people would buy them. That's the problem. And this Illinois mess is a good example as to how the newspaper people are missing the real story. At least that's what I think. (And we're very good consumers of newspapers).