Blago Guilty

This afternoon a federal jury in Chicago found former governor Rod Blagojevich guilty on seventeen counts of corruption–wire fraud, bribery, extortion conspiracy–that related among other things to his effort to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat after the 2008 presidential election. An earlier trial resulted in a hung jury on all counts but one.
So Blagojevich will be the fourth former governor of Illinois to go to jail since 1973. It is quite remarkable that President Obama has been able to avoid any significant association with the political culture from which he emerged.