"This is a sad day for Illinois government" says US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald

Listen to a live broadcast about the arrest of Gov. Blogojevich (IL) with Patrick Fitzgerald, US attorney from Chicago (held on 12/09/08)

This is from Chicago Public Radio and will include continuing coverage. In Illinois, the governor must actually step down or be impeached to remove him from power. This is an interesting political issue now because with Barack Obama's election as president, Illinois has an open senate seat which is filled by gubernatorial appointment. Technically, Blogojevich could appoint himself to the job, even as he awaits his trial. 

The Chicago Tribune held back on running a story to assist the FBI and the US Attorney's office. Fitzgerald tells reporters not to judge those mentioned in the wiretaps if they are being discussed by others, but nonetheless, the list of groups and individuals brought up in along with indictment is interesting. Hear it live from local public radio (see link above.)

Read the indictment of Gov. Blogojevich for yourself.

NowPublic

Tags: Illinois | corruption | scandal | World | rod blogojevich

Changing my blogging for awhile

I'm doing lots of research these days, and I find I'm using Tumblr to keep my notes, and not going to the blog so often, so I am switching currentbuzz.org from the old blogger site (all the posts will still be available) to my tumblr site. The tumblr site is iPhone, or any smartphone ready. Let me know what you think.
barbara i

Seen some memorable screens this election day? Post them for posterity

Capture and view screen grabs from this election madness because "The ink is never dry on the Web. Especially during lively news days, like Election Day, when news site home pages change constantly. That's why we are capturing screen grabs throughout the day. You can contribute you own screen grabs of sites you see and Election Day photo gallery here."

The Softside of Election Day in the USA

The New York Times features an evolving and animated tag cloud for politicos. You can view what everybody is feeling, what McCain supporters feel, or what Obama supporters feel. It is sort of nebulous now (11 a.m. CST) but I bet it will heat up as the polls close.

NowPublic

Tags: Culture | Tag Cloud | relaxing | election 08 | word pictures

Obama's lead bigger when cellphones included in the polling.

clipped from blog.wired.com Political polls that include cell phone users show Obama leading McCain by an average of 10 points, versus just over five points in land-line-only surveys, notes a Sunday survey put together by Nate Silver, founder of the electoral projections site FiveThirtyEight. The survey confirms a trend that the Pew Research Center noted late this September, although the differences between the surveys with and without cell phones was not statistically significant at that point.

Change for your fonts. Obamabats.

Check this out. Beyond dingbats, to Obamabats. Download them for yourself. It includes a nice jpg, too.

Would you post this photo: an ethics discussion

The photo of McCain is awful. He looks like a zombie. The discussion about the picture includes the photographer's story of how he shot the photo and the subsequent editing process. The comments are fairly interesting too. This is an area of ethics that bloggers and citizen journalists need to think about, whether they anticipate it or not. You can see the photo by going to the reuters link.

clipped from blogs.reuters.com The third and final debate between the 2008 U.S. presidential nominees had just ended. Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama and Republican nominee Senator John McCain had just shaken hands moments before and turned away from each other, when Senator McCain suddenly lunged forward with his hands out in front of him and stuck out his tongue.