What constitutes corruption?

At what point is a government official guilty of criminal behavior, rather than just stupidity or laziness?

To me, it is apparent that many people have no problem considering “laziness” and “criminality” to be the same, although what I really suspect is that some people are willing to use the criminal justice system to benefit their partisan political beliefs.

THERE ARE SOME Republicans who would love it if they could somehow declare the Democratic Party to be a criminal enterprise, and that somehow anyone not agreeing in full with their beliefs is somehow worthy of a few years of incarceration.

I also have no doubt there are some Democrats who are nitwit enough to think just the opposite situation should be true.

Then, there may very well be those people whose knowledge (or lack thereof) about the workings of government make them distrust it to the point where they want to automatically believe that somehow, it all has to be a scam.

I have always found such an attitude to be a sad commentary about our own society that we have otherwise rational people who want to start locking political people up for what amounts to no rational reason.

THIS KIND OF attitude is going to arouse the suspicions of all those people who are ever so eager to have Rod Blagojevich sent to prison.

The man was not popular amongst his government colleagues during his six years as Illinois governor in large part because he tried to treat those colleagues as though they were cretins who somehow ought to be irrelevant to the process.

So when federal prosecutors came up with a case they think severe enough to warrant a criminal trial some time during 2010, political people were more than willing to pile on – to the point that they become so obsessed with the “I” word that Blagojevich got a last laugh on his now-former colleagues by saddling the people of Illinois with Roland Burris as a U.S. senator.

A part of me has also wondered for years how much of the ill will that is still felt toward former Gov. George Ryan is due to the fact that on issues ranging from the death penalty to U.S./Cuba relations to government spending (remember “Illinois First”), he was willing to ignore the desires and beliefs of the conservative ideologue portion of the Republican Party that theoretically should have been among his allies.
THAT DISGUST WAS so intense that it caused people to overstate the role that Ryan personally had in the deaths of the six Willis children in a 1994 automobile accident, and still causes them to become irate at the recently-expressed thought by his attorneys that he might be entitled to a portion of his pension earned from serving in government for more than three decades.

I couldn’t help but notice the Chicago Tribune this week ran a significant story detailing about a potential “threat” to the upcoming Blagojevich trial – one that might seriously put a crimp in the ability of federal prosecutors to imply that Blagojevich’s egomaniacal behavior as governor is worthy of being labeled criminal.

The Supreme Court (in D.C., not Springpatch) is considering cases that could require more detailed explanations of what constitutes “honest services fraud,” which in some ways amounts to a political equivalent of the RICO statute so often used to fight organized crime.

“Honest service fraud” charges often amount to saying that a government official’s bad behavior hurt the public so badly that the result ought to be criminal. Behavior by politicians involving contributions, gifts and donations often don’t literally qualify as bribery.

SO PROSECUTORS USE the more vaguely worded statute to justify a trial. Some legal minds (including Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia – it’s not often that I agree with him) have gone so far to say that prosecutors are misusing such vague statutes to bolster their own criminal prosecution records.

Now I’m not about to predict how the Supreme Court of the United States is going to come down on this issue, although a part of me would get a laugh if the efforts of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago to prosecute Blagojevich gets hampered (if not outright fowled up) by having to more clearly define why the former governor’s activity ought to be illegal.

And I know there are people in this state who would want to riot if the high court ruled in such a manner that Ryan were suddenly given a legitimate issue upon which to try to appeal his criminal convictions.

Not that the issue is connected to just these two former governors. Ultimately, covering a trial involving government corruption involves having to define what constitutes a bribe – because rarely is the matter so clearly defined.

I STILL REMEMBER a case from the summer of 1997 when I was a reporter-type in Springfield and officials with Management Services of Illinois were on trial in U.S. District Court in central Illinois for the contract they had with the Illinois Department of Public Aid.

Prosecutors said the private company’s work was worth little to the state, particularly the millions the agency received. They also cited the fact that MSI’s executives were friendly with Public Aid officials to the point of offering up gifts ranging from steaks and lobsters to trips to gambling casinos.

There was nothing resembling a direct connection between any single gift and any single payment on the state contract. Yet a jury went along with prosecutors and came back with convictions on many (but not all) of the charges. There is a part of me that thought then, and still thinks today whenever I recall the case, that what these officials were guilty of was little more than being too generous with their gifts.

In short, they acted a little too stupidly in public. Which may also be the very act that Blagojevich is guilty of, nothing more.

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He can’t please anybody

President Barack Obama is expected Tuesday to inform the world that the United States is sending another 30,000 troops (that figure comes from the Associated Press) to Afghanistan in an attempt to bolster the military forces already there in the war against extremist elements of Islam.

Which means shortly thereafter, we’re going to hear all the pundits from all the different factions lambasting Obama for his foolish/halfhearted/immoral act. Take your pick which term you want to use.

THEY’RE ALL GOING to be spewed out at various times.

In theory, Obama is giving the military what it wants in terms of trying to put together an effort that could “win” the war that has been taking place there for some nine years now. This conflict has easily become the longest war the U.S. military has ever been involved with.

Yet Obama was the man who was chosen as president in part because of a significant faction of voters who believed that he would do everything possible to get U.S. forces out of the Middle East (as in Afghanistan and Iraq).

There will be people who say that if we wanted an increased effort, we might as well have put Sarah Palin in the role of being the woman who took John McCain’s pulse every morning.

NOW I VOTED for Obama in the ’08 elections and by and large, I don’t regret it. I also am one of those people who thought it admirable that Obama could claim during the presidential campaign season that he had always been opposed to the United States getting involved in full-scale war when it comes to the Middle East.

Yet all I can say is that if there really are people who are disillusioned with Obama now because of his actions that will become official Tuesday night, I’d have to say they are incredibly naïve.

I never operated under the thought that a vote for Obama was a vote for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. military forces.

Personally, I believe that even if Obama takes every possible chance to get troops out bit by bit, there still will be a military presence in the area come January 2013 – the scheduled end of his first term.

MAYBE IF HE gets two full terms, he can say troops will be out by the end of his presidency. Then again, considering the ongoing tensions of the Middle East with conflicts whose underlying reasons go back thousands of years, maybe he can’t.

I don’t know how this situation will turn out, other than to say there is so much potential for things to go wrong no matter what actions are taken by U.S. officials.

So when I sit back and listen to the various commentators spew their rhetoric (be honest, the conservatives aren’t going to support this added military effort because they don’t want history to record that Obama settled the war that was started by George W. Bush), I’m going to have to try hard to restrain myself from chuckling.

So much of the trash talk from all sides will be pure nonsense.

IT WILL BE pure partisan politics, which is the element that I always have thought gets in the way of the ability of government officials to accomplish much of anything for the public good.

The truth is that this is an inherited mess, and there’s a good chance the Obama administration will not be capable of coming to a swift resolution. If they could, then perhaps Obama would be worthy of that Nobel Prize he received earlier this year.

Wait and see is all we can do.

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Holidays not happy for all

One of the things I have learned from two-plus decades as a reporter-type person is that there are no guarantees when it comes to life.

People can go at any time, at any age, for just about any reason, and there doesn’t have to be any excuse for it.

IT’S NOT LIKE death takes a holiday during the holidays. All too often, people can die on or in proximity to a holiday to the point where that date gets “ruined,” so to speak, for the surviving family members.

That point got reinforced to me earlier this week when I wrote for a newspaper an obituary of a 37-year-old man whose funeral services will be held Friday and Saturday. Some might think it sad that Thanksgiving, a time when we’re supposed to be grateful for what we have, is when one family will always remember their loss.

Actually, it is more than one family, since the death of the son of Juan Andrade, head of the United States Hispanic Leadership Institute, is far from the only one to occur in recent days.

Joaquin Andrade is far from the only person on Friday on this planet who is the focus of activity at a funeral home. But I can sympathize with the Andrade family, as my own family managed to get hit with a Thanksgiving holiday death just a few years ago.

SO I TOO can understand how this particular day, when some people want us to think that the focus of the world is on commerce and shopping, might be less than a happy occasion.

It was just a few years ago that my eldest cousin, Gary, suffered an accident on the Saturday following Thanksgiving while doing repairs to his home – an accident that wound up putting him into a coma for a couple of days before dying.

As it turns out, parts of my cousin live on, as his next of kin approved the use of organs from his body for transplant into people who needed the parts in order to continue living themselves.

But even in that aspect there is a bit of sadness from my family’s perspective, as my mother is a woman who suffers from kidney troubles and who in recent years has been waiting for a replacement. My aunt kept in mind that her sister could use the kidney, and the medical and legal procedures were initiated to see about transplant.

THERE WAS A period of a few hours when I thought my brother and I were on the verge of rushing our mother to Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood so she could undergo the surgery for transplant.

Ultimately, my cousin’s kidney was not a close-enough match to my mother for the surgery to be possible. My cousin from California wound up having his kidney inserted into someone from the Chicago area, and I’m sure that person and his/her family are thankful.

From my end, I remember these next few days as the anniversary of when I lost my eldest cousin AND got to see my mother worked up into an emotional frenzy, only to see her get nothing in the end.

To this day, my mother still awaits the day when a matching kidney will be found, and endures the hassle of dialysis treatments three times a week in order to keep herself alive.

NOW I KNOW some people will argue that I should be thankful my mother was still alive, and that I was able to enjoy a Thanksgiving Day dinner this week with her and my brother.

They’d be right. I should feel good that my mother can generate the physical strength to keep going, and also make plans about how she’d like to do things up a little bigger than usual for Christmas this year.

I also realize the timing of my mother’s situation was a complete fluke.

Nobody deliberately did anything that made it coincide with Thanksgiving, which means that it would be wrong to think that someone is responsible for the thoughts of my cousin and my mother that are going to pop into my head every year for the rest of my life – which could end tomorrow or could last another forty or so years.

NOBODY KNOWS FOR sure.

But one will have to excuse me if I can’t get all worked up on Friday over the thought of rushing out to a shopping mall to fight my way through the crowds to check out all the sales promoted in the advertising fliers that cluttered up my Thanksgiving Day newspapers.

For me, this is the day that I speculate in my mind about the fleeting quality of life. The idea of engaging in commerce seems so trivial, particularly since I have just under a month to do my holiday shopping (unless I don’t make it to the holidays, in which case it doesn’t matter.

One other point I should make is that my cousin’s memory does live on through the Internet. My aunt helped create a foundation (at http://www.garyagarcia.org) in my cousin’s memory that provides comfort for those people who lose a loved one – particularly if young children are involved in the mourning process. Which at least creates some meaningful purpose out of sadness.

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Does it matter any longer?

The Washington Post is miffed that Sen. Roland Burris, D-Ill., didn't get a more harsh penalty than the letter of admonition that the Senate's leadership sent him last week concerning the circumstances under which he got the ability to complete the Senate term to which Barack Obama was elected in 2004.

Personally, I have a hard time getting worked up over the circumstances because Burris is leaving after next year. I still feel that those people who wanted a special election to be held this year to find a replacement, just so we could then have another real election next year, were being ridiculous.

I HAD PREDICTED Burris would face censure by the Senate for the circumstances (it was clear to anyone thinking logically that nothing illegal happened, certainly nothing that would warrant charges of perjury). It turns out even I overstated the issue.

I still say the real mistake was made by the Illinois General Assembly back when they were obsessed with punishing Rod Blagojevich for his alleged misdeeds (many of which amount to treating the state Legislature as though it was irrelevant). They should have focused their attention on taking away the governor's ability to pick Obama's replacement.

Instead, they worried about imposing punishment following his indictment and got their impeachment. We, the people of Illinois, got Roland, Roland, Roland in return. Now, it is time for us to move past this whole mess and focus our attention on finding the person who will represent Illinois in the U.S. Senate for the next six years. Wasting much more time and attention on Burris' circumstances is little more than pathetic.

But for those of you who want to read the Post's hissy fit can find it at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/26/AR2009112602064.html.

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A decade too late?

The Chicago White Sox acquired a pair of players this week who, five years after they retire, will have some baseball types talking seriously about whether they belong in the Hall of Fame.

If by chance these deals had been done, say, a decade ago, we'd have people talking about how the White Sox were going all-out to ensure they will be contenders in 2010, and how they'd likely be the favorites to win the American League championship next season.

BUT INSTEAD OF making these deals in 1999, we're seeing them come along in 2009. Let's be honest, Omar Vizquel and Andruw Jones aren't what they used to be on the playing field.

Which means that the amount of money they're able to command on the free agent market isn't the big bucks of the top stars. Assuming that both men have top-notch seasons and play well and receive every incentive bonus possible, they will each be paid less than $1.5 million (less than the major league average salary these days). Which is why they were available to the White Sox, who signed them both up.

There are those people who will argue that Vizquel is one of the best shortstops to ever play Major League Baseball, particularly when it comes to shortstops from Venezuela. Considering that the White Sox have had some of those shortstops during their history, that is something of a statement.

And as for Jones, he is definitely the best ballplayer to ever come out of Curacao -- and one of the top ballplayers of this era.

YET BOTH ARE past their prime, which is why Vizquel will get to finish his career on the South Side (becoming yet another aging Cleveland Indian who gets one last stretch of a major league season in Chicago). Should we start thinking of Cleveland as yet another extension of the White Sox' minor league system, producing ballplayers for our city's team at a point when they might have a season or so left?

As for Jones, he's no longer the perennial all-star of the Atlanta Braves. He's another part-time player, although the writeups announcing the deal on Wednesday make it sound like he's got the potential to be one of the White Sox' big bats for '10.

So now, the White Sox have an aging infielder to act as an all-around backup and an aging outfielder/designated hitter.

On one level, it might be nice to have veteran ballplayers whose experience rubs off on the younger talent whom the White Sox are counting on to guide them through the next few seasons of the 2010s.

BUT IF THAT doesn't work out, then 2010 has the potential to be the year that aging athletes from the socially insensitive teams of Cleveland and Atlanta got to spend some time wearing black and white.

Perhaps that is what made them want to come to Chicago. Playing for a team named for uncolored sweat sox isn't quite as embarrassing as having to go through a season wearing a cap with that ridiculous Chief Wahoo, or hearing fans in the stands doing an "Indian" chant in a southern drawl.

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The only real change is that we have to quit pretending Oprah’s a Chicagoan

It amuses me to see the way some people have become so worked up over the fact that the Oprah Winfrey Show, as we have known it for the past three decades, will cease to exist.

For it’s not like Oprah is going to disappear from television, or from the public consciousness. In fact, she may very well become even more omnipresent in the future than she has been to date.

IT’S JUST THAT those of us Chicagoans who like to recite a name of internationally-known celebrities from our city have always gotten a kick out of including Winfrey’s name on the list – which also usually includes Michael Jordan (who also has left our fair city).

Heck, even Jim McMahon (the punky QB of ’85 Chicago Bears fame) has left the Chicago area, recently selling the suburban mansion in which he had lived since the days when he really was a star (and not just a former footballer).

Now, who are we going to claim as our city’s big star? Are we literally going to have to hope that Barack Obama makes a few more trips to Chicago to keep his South Side connections alive?

Or are we really going to have to start thinking of Richard M. Daley as our city’s big wig? That would be lame.

PERSONALLY, I DON’T think it detracts from Chicago’s positives that Oprah won’t really be a Chicagoan, because in my book, she hasn’t really been a part of the city’s daily routine for so long.

She may live in her condominium high in the sky above the Magnificent Mile during the months when her show is in production (and when commuting from elsewhere would be just too much of a pain in the butt). But she has that L.A.-area home she’d rather think of as her full-time address.

So the rumor mill speculation that she wants to shift herself full-time to living and working elsewhere isn’t that much of a shock.

Oprah, in my mind, was always the woman who was born elsewhere, worked in Baltimore before landing the first Chicago broadcast job, which she parlayed into the talk show that is an international phenomenon.

THE ONLY SHOCK in my mind is why she didn’t shift to a climate with more pleasant weather many years ago.

By now, those of us who care (and even many of us who don’t) know that she has no intention of signing a new syndication deal for her current show, which airs live on Channel 7 and turns up in the afternoon in most other broadcast markets.

I still remember when I lived and worked in Springfield, Ill., and Oprah was the lead-in program to the local newscast on the CBS affiliate based out of Champaign. Oprah was a significant factor in that station being the Number One ranked local newscast in the Champaign/Decatur/Springfield television market.

For the rest of the world, Oprah’s change is no change.

FOR IT WILL give her time to focus on developing a new cable television channel of her own – which means she will have total control over her production (not that she doesn’t pretty much control every facet already).

So for those of us who want to know the bottom line, it means that Oprah will become one of those features that people will be able to watch if they have cable television. Considering how prevalent cable programming is, I doubt that her viewership will become significantly smaller.

It will be a matter of people being able to watch the program whenever they want – either by catching it live or in reruns throughout the day on the cable station, or watching whatever snippets they choose to whenever they feel like going on the website.

As far as Chicagoans are concerned, the only real change will be that they don’t watch her on Channel 7 any longer (at least not after September 2011). Which means the management of WLS-TV may have a legitimate gripe. What are they going to come up with to fill that hour of time?

BUT SHOULD ANYONE get all that worked up just because Channel 7 has a dilemma to confront in just under two years?

If anything, the closest comparison to Winfrey might very well be Eppie Lederer. Remember Ann Landers, who spent some three decades as the advice columnist of the Chicago Sun-Times before deciding in 1987 to shift to the Chicago Tribune?

The rest of the country noticed no change. We in Chicago got used to reading Ann Landers’ advice in a different newspaper.

Now, we in Chicago will eventually get used to watching Winfrey’s broadcast gabbing on a different channel, one that will take advantage of the changes in the way our society watches television programming.

THE DAY LIKELY will come when many of us will barely remember Winfrey’s Channel 7 connection, and will probably think it odd that we could once only see Oprah when it aired at 9 a.m. – instead of whenever we had time for her.

Those of us who find Oprah to be a little overbearing likely will continue to ignore her, to no avail – since her fans seem to outnumber us.

And those people who seriously believe that life as we Chicagoans have known it is scheduled to come to an end in two years, I’d say you and Mayor Daley (who thinks Oprah is inclined to leave Chicago because of a few negative naysayers over her show’s public celebration earlier this year on Michigan Avenue) need to take a valium and relax.

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Terrorism turns to partisan politics

Call it the campaign strategy for 2010 – any Democrat who doesn’t play along with the GOP attempt to scare Chicago with talk of terrorists hitting the Willis Tower or O’Hare International Airport is going to get attacked anyway.

Now I understand that campaigns are about criticism and trying to differentiate oneself from the opposition. I also realize they can get nasty pretty quick. People who are too sensitive ought not to be running for elective office.

YET THE TYPE of criticism that is coming from the proposal to put inmates from the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (the so-called terrorists who act in a perverted take on Islam) to the vacant state prison at Thomson, Ill., is so shallow as to be offensive.

What I’m referring to is a series of press releases I have been receiving in my e-mail in recent days in which GOP officials are using interchangeable rhetoric to dredge this issue up against anyone who dares to go through a political life with a “D” rather than an “R” after their name.

Some of these releases have come from the gubernatorial campaign of Andrew McKenna, while others have come in the name of the Illinois Republican Party.

The statements I have seen have been critical of Democratic Senate hopeful Alexi Giannoulias, and Reps. William Foster and Jerry Costello. None of them have been quite so quick as to state a stance on the issue of the inmate shift.

SO THE REPUBLICANS are going out of their way to criticize them for being quiet – claiming that a real candidate would have jumped the gun and shot his mouth off, just like they have.

But the thing about all these statements I have seen is that the rhetoric is nearly identical in each statement, which makes me think it is a party strategy that is being earmarked for use against all Democrats.

Which means that there probably are many more statements in circulation criticizing other Democrats, across Illinois and the nation, for this very same issue.

It bothers me to think that anyone has the gall to think that rational people would be swayed by someone who wants us to believe that thinking before opening one’s mouth is a negative trait.

NOW AS I wrote earlier this week, this issue involving the fate of the Guantanamo inmates is one that has become a partisan mess – Democrats generally are supportive because President Barack Obama has touted the idea, while Republicans don’t want Obama to get anything that might be considered a positive achievement.

So they’re trash-talking the idea, even though it makes sense and is a solution to a problem that has to be addressed.

It is sad to say that at least some Democrats are taking the rhetoric that moving such inmates to Illinois makes Chicago a bigger target on the international scene too seriously.

Rep. Melissa Bean, D-Ill., has made some statements in recent days that imply she has problems with the idea of the so-called terrorist suspects being brought to Illinois. She represents a district in the outer Chicago suburbs that once was considered a Republican stronghold, and is one that the GOP would like to have their candidate win back come the ’10 elections.

SO SHE WENT so far as to make the statements in line with the Republican rhetoric so that they can’t use the issue against her in their campaign leaflets and television spots once the general election cycle picks up next fall.

It is the same logic that caused then-Sen. Obama a few years ago to vote for construction of a wall along the U.S./Mexico border, even though the Democratic Party “position” was that such a wall was a waste of federal funds, in addition to being a generally stupid concept.

The Illinois GOP went so far as to issue a statement praising Bean for taking a GOP-like stance on the issue, which means they’re now trying to stir up resentment amongst Democrats against Bean.

Anything that helps weaken her, it could work. The fact that Obama was on the record as backing that border wall was one of the reasons that Latinos were more inclined in the Democratic presidential primary last year to support Hillary R. Clinton instead of the concept of Obama-mania.

IF NOT FOR the general disgust of Latino voters for the GOP these days, it probably would have hurt him in the general election too.

This tactic is more about Republicans trying cheaply to define an issue on their terms. I’d like to think the electorate is too sensible to fall for this.

Otherwise, my e-mail box is going to be overflowed with the same stupid statement sent over and over, with the only variable being the “fill in the blank” for the name of yet another political person to be criticized.

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