After the monster is finally dispatched in the dramatic climax of the conventional exemplar of Hollywood’s scary movie genre, when the nerves of the mass audience begin to relax, pulse rates slowdown, and theater-goers are expecting the final credits to arrive any moment on the screen, it has become traditional for directors to have a little fun by confounding expectations, setting aside all considerations of plausibility, and having the recently slain monster come right back to life and attack (and be dispatched) all over again.

One of the most impressive riffs on this by-now only too familiar trope is performed by Jon Voight, playing a murderous hunter in Anaconda (1997). Voight’s Paul Sarone comes a cropper, winding up in the coils of the giant anaconda. He is squeezed until his bones audibly break, and then ingested while the audience gets a view right down the alimentary passage of the giant reptile. We think we’ve seen the last of the heartless and relentless Sarone, but no, moments later, the snake regurgitates the villain, all covered with digestive juices, who—in one of trash cinema’s moments of genius, proceeds to wink at a truly horrified Jennifer Lopez.

2:14 (Spanish-subtitled) video

It appears that, in the same unappetizing style of curtain call made well known by Jon Voight, the health care bill may be coming back.

New York Times:

President Obama will put forward comprehensive health care legislation intended to bridge differences between Senate and House Democrats ahead of a summit meeting with Republicans next week, senior administration officials and Congressional aides said Thursday.

Democratic officials said the president’s proposal was being written so that it could be attached to a budget bill as a way of averting a Republican filibuster in the Senate. The procedure, known as budget reconciliation, would let Democrats advance the bill with a simple majority rather than a 60-vote supermajority.

Congressional Democrats, however, have not yet seen the proposal or signed on.

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I don’t agree one bit with Ezra Klein’s claim of the public option being popular in the country, but here you see what the democrat party left is telling itself as it winks (from its current moribund position) at a horrified American voting public.

What you’re seeing here are the weird politics of the public option at play. It’s popular in the country. It’s wildly popular among the base. It’s the subject of obsessive interest in the media. There is little downside to supporting it publicly, huge downside to opposing it, and no one is allowed to ignore the issue, or even take a few days to see where the votes are.

But it’s divisive on the Hill. Bringing it back energizes all the narratives that Democrats fear most: That they’re cutting secret deals without Republicans in the room, that they’re building an extremist bill, that health-care reform is a government takeover. And this is all happening without 60 votes in the Senate or even certainty of simple majorities in the Congress. Democrats have spent the last month in a state of agonized confusion, and just as matters were clarifying, now this battle threatens to start up again.

No one I’ve spoken to—even when they support the public option—thinks that its reemergence is good news for health-care reform. It won’t be present in the package that the White House will unveil Monday. Everyone seems to be hoping this bubble will be short-lived.

But it might not be. The media is talking about it, liberals are organizing around it, none of the major actors feels politically capable of playing executioner, and Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson don’t have the power to do the job on their own. As of now, the strategy only has 20 or so supporters, and it’ll need at least another 20 or 25 to really be viable. But if it gets there, White House and Senate leadership are going to have some hard calls to make.

So, there you are. The democrat party base sees no downside, in ramming through a health care bill opposed by 58% of the American public via an unprecedented ultra-partisan maneuver around the conventional rules and procedures of the United States Senate.

It remains to be seen whether the parliamentarian of the Senate will permit the de facto elimination of the filibuster, and it is probably not altogether certain that Reid can muster even the 51 votes he would need to take that ultra-radical step.

If the democrats have the hubris to do all this, well, we will see just how well they like being in the minority in a Republican-controlled Senate with no filibuster. The first thing we should do is to repeal Obamacare, and kill the monster of socialism permanently and for the last time.

Evan Bayh is retiring rather than face a fight for reelection. California’s Barbara Boxer appears to be in serious trouble in recent polls.

Peter Wehner, at Commentary, discusses the wave of fear and acrimony sweeping over the democrat party as their control of the Senate appears may actually be going to swept away in an unprecedented mid-term electoral bloodbath.

The news that Democratic Senator Evan Bayh is retiring is another stunning blow for a Democratic party that is already reeling. This development — because of who Bayh is (perceived as a moderate/centrist); because of the state he represents (a traditionally Red one but won by Barack Obama in 2008); and because of his political situation (it was assumed he was in a comfortable position to win re-election) — will have significant ramifications. It will accelerate almost every bad trend for Democrats (more retirements, fewer entries into national races, more intra-party acrimony, and more panic).

The last time we saw a double-digit shift in Senate seats in a single election was when a former movie actor by the name of Ronald Reagan was elected president (Republicans won a dozen seats back in 1980). A shift of those dimensions in a non-presidential election year would be basically unheard of. But as Jen points out, a pickup of 10 GOP seats — and recontrol of the Senate — is no longer out of the question. America’s political tectonic plates are shifting in a fairly dramatic and rapid fashion; and the resulting dislocation will batter and crush many Democratic candidates, perhaps on a scale we have not witnessed before in our lifetime, at least in a midterm election.

Such an outcome can still be averted — but as many of us have been predicting for a while now, the news for Democrats is continuing to get worse rather than better. Evan Bayh’s retirement is a body blow for the president and his party. It will cause more than a few knees in the Obama White House to buckle. It is beginning to dawn on them just what awaits them.

A democrat senate staffer sent Josh Marshall an email describing the impact on the majority party in Congress of the Massachusetts special election result.

The worst is that I can’t help but feel like the main emotion people in the caucus are feeling is relief at this turn of events. Now they have a ready excuse for not getting anything done. While I always thought we had the better ideas but the weaker messaging, it feels like somewhere along the line Members internalized a belief that we actually have weaker ideas. They’re afraid to actually implement them and face the judgement of the voters. That’s the scariest dynamic and what makes me think this will all come crashing down around us in November.

Of course, theirs are the weaker ideas.

The health care bill was always unaffordable, and always represented an entitlement giveaway certain to increase demand for services dramatically, resulting inevitably in rationed services making health care less available to most Americans in the future.

How mysterious that Americans are not absolutely delighted by the opportunity to bankrupt the country by a process allowing most of us to pay more and get less.

Zennie62 says Max Baucus wasn’t drunk. Zennie also thinks the health care bill is a good idea.

What do you think? Let’s have a real bipartishan approach to the question.

5:38 video

Obama skipped church on Christmas (I guess Reverend Wright was not GD’ing America anywhere nearby), but President Obama took up the slack personally, criticizing the Senate’s rules and procedures allowing minorities to resist passage of controversial measures.

Charles Hurt:

Increasingly unloved and ridiculed from both sides, a new and embittered President Obama is emerging this Christmas season as he begins a badly needed vacation in Hawaii.

In an interview on the eve of yesterday’s health-care ram-through, Obama expressed his deep frustration over the legislative process.

The president accused Republicans of abuse for employing the very rules that make the Senate the “world’s greatest deliberative body.”

“If this pattern continues, you’re going to see an inability on the part of America to deal with big problems in a very competitive world, and other countries are going to start running circles around us,” Obama warned.

What he is saying is that other governments around the world—those tyrannical states that do not share our respect for the minority—are better forms of government, better equipped to compete in this modern world.

This is a frightening new side of Barack Obama.

Surprise! Harry Reid’s amendment contains some tricky little provisions performing an end-run around the requirement of a two-thirds majority being needed to modify the Rules of the Senate.

Erik Erikson, at Red State, breaks the news that we don’t get to repeal Socialism.

Upon examination of Senator Harry Reid’s amendment to the health care legislation, Senators discovered section 3403. That section changes the rules of the United States Senate.

To change the rules of the United States Senate, there must be sixty-seven votes.

Section 3403 of Senator Harry Reid’s amendment requires that “it shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.” The good news is that this only applies to one section of the Obamacare legislation. The bad news is that it applies to regulations imposed on doctors and patients by the Independent Medicare Advisory Boards a/k/a the Death Panels.

Section 3403 of Senator Reid’s legislation also states, “Notwithstanding rule XV of the Standing Rules of the Senate, a committee amendment described in subparagraph (A) may include matter not within the jurisdiction of the Committee on Finance if that matter is relevant to a proposal contained in the bill submitted under subsection©(3).” In short, it sets up a rule to ignore another Senate rule.

Mark Steyn observes:

You can’t even dignify this squalid racket as bribery: If I try to buy a cop, I have to use my own money. But, when Harry Reid buys a senator, he uses my money, too. It doesn’t “border on immoral”: It drives straight through the frontier post and heads for the dark heartland of immoral.

Michelle Malkin has a two-part democrat bribe list.

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Dana Milbank describes how partisan things got on the Senate floor.

At 4 p.m. Sunday afternoon—nine hours before the 1 a.m. vote that would effectively clinch the legislation’s passage—Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) went to the Senate floor to propose a prayer. “What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can’t make the vote tonight,” he said. “That’s what they ought to pray.”

It was difficult to escape the conclusion that Coburn was referring to the 92-year-old, wheelchair-bound Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) who has been in and out of hospitals and lay at home ailing. It would not be easy for Byrd to get out of bed in the wee hours with deep snow on the ground and ice on the roads—but without his vote, Democrats wouldn’t have the 60 they needed. ...

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) had just delivered an overwrought jeremiad comparing the Republicans to Nazis on Kristallnacht, lynch mobs of the South, and bloodthirsty crowds of the French Revolution.

“Too many colleagues are embarked on a desperate, no-holds-barred mission of propaganda, obstruction and fear,” he said. “History cautions us of the excesses to which these malignant, vindictive passions can ultimately lead. Tumbrils have rolled through taunting crowds. Broken glass has sparkled in darkened streets. Strange fruit has hung from southern trees.” Assuming the role of Old Testament prophet, Whitehouse promised a “day of judgment” and a “day of reckoning” for Republicans. ...

[Senator Coburn] who led the effort last week to stall proceedings by forcing an hours-long reading of legislative language, ... lobbed a grenade onto the floor when he said that, because of the legislation, Medicare recipients are “going to die sooner.”

On Saturday, Coburn likened the current situation to the period preceding the Civil War. “The crisis of confidence in this country is now at an apex that has not seen in over 150 years, and that lack of confidence undermines the ability of legitimate governance,” he said. “There’s a lot of people out there today who…will say, ‘I give up on my government,’ and rightly so.”

Publius, at Big Government, sums it up.

We’ll be blunt. The ‘health care reform’ legislation under consideration in the Senate is the most corrupt piece of legislation in our nation’s history. ...

Exhibit A is the outright bribe extracted by Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Corn Huckster State) from Sen. Harry Reid. As a result of Nelson’s performance in his role of Hamlet in the health care deliberations, we will have two health care systems in this country; one for Nebraska and one for the other 49 states.

In its quixotic attempt to ensure everyone has health insurance, the Reid legislation greatly expands Medicaid eligibility. Because Medicaid is a program whose costs are split between the federal and state governments, this expansion in eligibility raise costs dramatically for states. States will be forced to either raise taxes or cut other services to accommodate the forced increase in Medicaid spending.

Unless that state is Nebraska.

And then quoting the bill:

The legislation would maintain and put into effect a number of procedures that might be difficult to sustain over a long period of time. Under current law and under the proposal, payment rates for physicians’ services in Medicare would be reduced by about 21 percent in 2010 and then decline further in subsequent years.

(Hey, American Medical Association, how’s that endorsement of this bill working for you?)

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Prominent liberal blogger Matt Yglesias is finding that American democracy isn’t working out his way these days, and announces that it’s time to change the rules.

The smarter elements in Washington DC are starting to pick up on the fact that it’s not tactical errors on the part of the president that make it hard to get things done, it’s the fact that the country has become ungovernable. ...

You can have a system in which a defeated minority still gets a share of governing authority and participates constructively in the victorious majority’s governing agenda, shaping policy around the margins in ways more to their liking. Or you can have a system in which a defeated minority rejects the majority’s governing agenda out of hand, seeks opening for attack, and hopes that failure on the part of the majority will bring them to power. But right now we have both simultaneously. It’s a system in which the minority benefits if the government fails, and the minority has the power to ensure failure. It’s insane, and it needs to be changed.

You can see just how badly they taught Civics at Dalton and at Harvard. Mr. Yglesias is clearly unaware that the basic role of the Senate as conceived by the framers was to obstruct the will of the majority and to prevent majorities tyrannizing over the minority.

In Federalist Paper 63, James Madison writes:

I shall not scruple to add, that such an institution may be sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions. As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind? What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next.

Don Troiani, Bunker Hill

From Gateway Pundit:

Senate Democrats will only deliberate 10 hours on Saturday before they vote to nationalize one-sixth of the US economy.

The bill will nationalize the nation’s health care industry, increase costs, ration care, tax cosmetic surgery, cut Medicare, charge a monthly abortion fee, and take away your freedom.

Please take time tomorrow and Saturday to call your US Senator.

HERE IS THE PHONE LIST.

Don’t let the democrats destroy our health care system.

Support for this disastrous bill is down to 40% with 52% opposing.

Minnesota’s new junior senator

Aided by a dishonest and partisan media, which scrupulously avoided investigating the facts and which faithfully reported the democrat party line, clown comedian and ultra-liberal Al Franken finally successfully stole last year’s close race for the senate seat from Minnesota when the Minnesota Supreme Court declined to interfere with an accomplished crime and instead declared him the winner.

The honorable exception in the major media was, as usual, the Wall Street Journal editorial page:

Mr. Franken trailed Mr. Coleman by 725 votes after the initial count on election night, and 215 after the first canvass. The Democrat’s strategy from the start was to manipulate the recount in a way that would discover votes that could add to his total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified be added to his count, while others be denied for Mr. Coleman.

But the team’s real goldmine were absentee ballots, thousands of which the Franken team claimed had been mistakenly rejected. While Mr. Coleman’s lawyers demanded a uniform standard for how counties should re-evaluate these rejected ballots, the Franken team ginned up an additional 1,350 absentees from Franken-leaning counties. By the time this treasure hunt ended, Mr. Franken was 312 votes up, and Mr. Coleman was left to file legal briefs.

What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge, and the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel’s findings, in essence found that Mr. Coleman hadn’t demonstrated a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election. And so they refused to reopen what had become a forbidding tangle of irregularities. Mr. Coleman didn’t lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact.

This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire’s team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn’t been counted, setting off a hunt for “new” Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she’d discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.

Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election.

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As Chris Cillizza explains, the key to Franken’s successful election theft was: (1) being the first to bring in highly-paid talented legal big guns to manipulate a post-election ballot review process in his favor, and (2) media allies representing an artificially contrived and completely partisan recount as decisive and meaningful. Franken keeping his repulsive and excruciatingly vulgar personality under wraps for the duration helped a lot, too.

How did Franken manage to wind up on top? ...

Marc Elias, a Democratic election attorney with Perkins Coie, was on the ground in Minnesota within days of the near-tie on election day. Elias spearheaded a series of legal victories in the early days of the recount that effectively defined the universe of votes that were counted and led to Franken going from behind on election night to ahead when they recount ended. By the time Ben Ginsberg, the Republicans’ election lawyer par excellence, got deeply involved, it was already too late. ...

When the statewide recount ended, Franken led by 225 votes. ... it’s hard to overstate how important the fact that Franken was (seemingly- JDZ) ahead was to setting public perception regarding the legal fight that ensued. Coleman was forced to be the aggressor legally, claiming that all sorts of ballots had been illegally counted (and not counted) while, through it all, the fact that Franken led by 225 votes hung over the proceedings. Voters tend to lose interest in politics quickly—particularly after an election as nasty and long as this race was—and that sort of fatigue played right into Franken’s hands. ...

Franken’s problem throughout the race was, well, himself. ... When the race ended in a tie, Franken did something very smart; he stayed out of the spotlight. He was rarely seen or heard and when he did pop into public view it was during an occasional visit to Washington when he was huddling with potential colleagues and getting briefed on issues by potential staffers.

When, oh, when will the Republican Party learn to play politics professionally against thugs, thieves, and liars? Watching Norm Coleman get rolled was like watching the team from St. Fauntleroy’s Academy for Young Gentlemen take on the Bowery Boys Reformatory team on the football gridiron. No contest at all.

Coming soon to a city near you?

Congressional Republicans (1, 2) and democrats are raising serious questions about Barack Obama’s plans to release terrorist detainees from the US holding facility in Guantanamo Bay into the United States, pointing to already existing statutes barring entry to recipients of terrorist training and introducing further legislation to block the president’s plans.

Jennifer Rubin, at Commentary, thinks Obama has painted himself into a corner on this one, and is going to incur serious political costs whichever way he decides in the end to proceed.

So what does the president do now? To go back on his promise to close Guantanamo would mean incurring the wrath of not only the Left in the U.S., but of the fawning European leaders and public who praised his decision to shut the place down. And it would, of course, be a humiliating admission that his initial pronouncement — made even before Eric Holder visited Guantanamo — was ill-conceived. He can try to fudge the issue or delay, but ultimately he has to do one or the other: proceed to close Guantanamo and begin releasing the detainees, or admit error and adhere to the Bush policy of housing dangerous terrorists there. It is not “a false choice,” but a very real one. We’ll see which audience, American or European, he is willing to offend.

William A. Jacobsen and Mike Dorf explain the irony.

[I]ronically, Specter’s defection may give Republicans the ability to filibuster judicial nominees at the Judiciary Committee level, so the nominees never get out of committee.

Huh, you say. Here’s the explanation, from Professor Michael Dorf of Cornell Law School at his excellent blog, Dorf on Law, written two days ago before Souter’s retirement was in play:

Does Arlen Specter’s defection from R to D strengthen the President’s hand in Congress? Perhaps overall but not on judicial appointments because breaking (the equivalent of) a filibuster in the Senate Judiciary Committee requires the consent of at least one member of the minority. Before today, Specter was likely to be that one Republican. Now what?

The link in Dorf’s post is to Congress Matters, which has the Senate Judiciary Committee rule:

IV. BRINGING A MATTER TO A VOTE
The Chairman shall entertain a non-debatable motion to bring a matter before the Committee to a vote. If there is objection to bring the matter to a vote without further debate, a roll call vote of the Committee shall be taken, and debate shall be terminated if the motion to bring the matter to a vote without further debate passes with ten votes in the affirmative, one of which must be cast by the minority.

Now this is interesting. Specter could allow a nominee out of committee if Specter was a member of the Republican minority, but as part of the majority, he’s just another vote. Here are the other Republicans: Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley, Jon Kyl, Jeff Sessions, Lindsey Graham, John Cornyn, and Tom Coburn.

The weak link is Lindsey Graham, who was a member of the Gang of 14. If Graham says the course, the Republicans may not be able to stop runaway spending, military retrenchment, and an interrogation witch hunt. But Specter may have handed Republicans a gift.

And how fitting that Joe Biden arranged it all by convincing Specter to switch. Thanks, Joe. I’m sure your boss will appreciate your service as he ponders who he will nominate for the Supreme Court.

After only three months in office, David J. Rothkopf declares Obama all-time champion of Czar creation.

With yesterday’s naming of Border Czar Alan Bersin, the Obama administration has by any reasonable reckoning passed the Romanov Dynasty in the production of czars. The Romanovs ruled Russia from 1613 with the ascension of Michael I through the abdication of Czar Nicholas II in 1917. During that time, they produced 18 czars. While it is harder to exactly count the number of Obama administration czars, with yesterday’s appointment it seems fair to say it is now certainly in excess of 18.

In addition to Bersin, we have energy czar Carol Browner, urban czar Adolfo Carrion, Jr., infotech czar Vivek Kundra, faith-based czar Joshua DuBois, health reform czar Nancy-Ann DeParle, new TARP czar Herb Allison, stimulus accountability czar Earl Devaney, non-proliferation czar Gary Samore, terrorism czar John Brennan, regulatory czar Cass Sunstein, drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, and Guantanamo closure czar Daniel Fried. We also have a host of special envoys that fall into the czar category including AfPak special envoy Richard Holbrooke, Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell, special advisor for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia Dennis Ross, Sudan special envoy J. Scott Gration and climate special envoy Todd Stern. That’s 18.

This is a very conservative estimate, however. I will allow you to pick whom you would like out of the remaining candidates. For example you could count de facto car czar Steve Rattner even though the administration went out of its way to say they weren’t going to have a car czar… before he ultimately emerged as the car czar. You could count National Director of Intelligence Dennis Blair, often referred to as the intelligence czar, although you might not want to because his job has a different kind of status on the org chart. I’m not going to count Paul Volcker who was referred to as Obama’s economic czar because Obama is not making much use of Volcker (at least according to reports).

But you certainly might want to count people deemed by the media to be the “cyber security czar” or the “AIDs czar” or the “green jobs czar” even if there are reasons to quibble about the designation of one or two of them.

Why do all these imperial appointments matter?

They matter procedurally because “Czar” appointments do not require Senatorial confirmation and represent an end-run around the Constitutional “Advise and Consent” prerogative of the US Senate. Obama can make any number of rancid radicals into “czars” of this, that, or the other thing, delegating to them large executive branch powers and responsibilities, even in cases of individuals who would not be confirmable by a vote in the Senate.

Fox News:

Czardom does not sit well with Sen. Robert Byrd. Though slowed by age, the West Virginia Democrat remains vigorous in his defense of the powers ceded to the Congress by the Constitution. He said he believes czars are a slick way of governing without having to answer to Congress.

There is no constitutional requirement that czars undergo those pesky Senate confirmation hearings.

Former Rep. Ernest Istook said he doesn’t like the term czar either because it’s too Russian.

“We could just call somebody the big boss, el jefe, head honcho, the big cheese,” he said. “My father used to refer to people as the chief cook and bottle washer.”

Istook said he believes the Obama team is using the appointment of czars to reinvent how the executive branch operates.

The Chicago Tribune’s John Kass advises. Playing the race card was a brilliant stroke which instantly put the national democrat party on the defensive.

Since he was federally charged with trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder, Gov. Rod Blagojevich has been wrongly caricatured as some kind of hapless jester prancing on the edge of madness.

Jesters hold rattles with a likeness of their heads on the end of a stick, and they hop off into a corner, prattling to themselves. That’s what jesters do.

Jesters don’t pick up the race card in a nationally televised news conference and slam it into the face of every Democrat in the U.S. Senate, a palm heel strike to the tip of the nose, leaving all of them watery-eyed, their lips stinging.

Yet that’s what Blagojevich—aided by former Black Panther-turned-Daley-machine-functionary Bobby Rush—did at that stupendous news conference in Chicago on Tuesday. That’s when the governor appointed Democratic empty suit Roland Burris, an African-American, to fill the Senate seat vacated by Obama.

“Please don’t allow the allegations against me to taint this good and honest man,” said Blagojevich.

It was a brazen move, and a smart one, and though the race card was ugly, there was no passion in it. There was no lunacy involved.

“This is not about Roland, this is about Rod,” said savvy political consultant Thom Serafin when I called him while watching the circus of the politically bizarre. Serafin correctly predicted weeks ago that it would be Burris, shortly after Blagojevich was arrested and most other Senate hopefuls pulled out lest they be infected by the governor’s dilemma.

“This is Rod telling the political class that he’s still active, that he’s still around, that he’s still the governor,” Serafin said. “And how do they deny Roland Burris? They can’t.”

Read the whole thing.