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" From the February 2010 &amp;quot;People Who Matter&amp;quot; issue It&amp;#039;s an ill wind that blows no good, even in Chicago in November. Take Skittles Blagojevich, a small white dog \u2014 could be a bichon frise, maybe a Maltese \u2014 who joined the family shortly after Governor Rod&amp;#039;s arrest on December 9, 2008, when it was alleged that he was auctioning off Barack Obama&amp;#039;s Senate seat. Whatever Skittles allegedly was doing on or before that date, he or she \u2014 I didn&amp;#039;t look; who am I, Woodward and Bernstein? \u2014 landed soft on his or her paws as the newest member of the former first family of Illinois, obtained to distract and console Rod and Patti&amp;#039;s two young daughters, Amy and Annie, when their home was hemmed in daily by satellite trucks and Dad was crowned Blago, clown king of political corruption. Skittles was there when the indictment was handed down last April, charging Blago with sixteen felonies, including making false statements to federal agents, racketeering, conspiracy, and attempted extortion. Skittles was there when Mrs. Blago went to Costa Rica and ate a dead tarantula on I&amp;#039;m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, because the judge in Blago&amp;#039;s case, fearing Blago might not return for the trial, refused to allow him out of the country to appear on the show. And Skittles is here now, at Revere Park, walking the sidelines while Annie&amp;#039;s Saturday-morning soccer team plays to yet another scoreless tie under a high autumn sky. They could be any family anywhere, a fiction they&amp;#039;re trying to maintain under dire circumstances. Nobody has a steady job, Blago&amp;#039;s staring at a prison stretch as long as twenty years, and however corrupt he may have been as governor, he apparently botched the part about putting a pile of money aside, just in case. Hence the tarantula, which turns out to have been the dignified choice.  &amp;quot;We had all kinds of offers to do reality shows,&amp;quot; says Blagojevich. &amp;quot;This bullshit where they come in the house \u2014 Keeping Up With the Kardashians \u2014 I won&amp;#039;t do that shit.&amp;quot; He looks fantastic, Blago. He ran six and a half miles this morning, he says. In his powder-blue shorts and black long-sleeved jacket zippered to his neck, he could easily pass for ten years younger than his age, which is allegedly fifty-three. Here, he&amp;#039;s just another dad cheering on his six-year-old, although he&amp;#039;s the only dad I can see whose whorled forelocks cover the entirety of his forehead. &amp;quot;The two biggest sellers this Halloween in the Chicago area were Michael Jackson&amp;#039;s jacket and wigs of my hair,&amp;quot; he says as we head to the parking lot. Rod, Patti, and Amy are good to go for brunch, but Annie heads straight for the monkey bars on the fenced-off playground, and Skittles, shivering a little, sniffs the gravel. &amp;quot;Where the fuck is Woodward and Bernstein? It&amp;#039;s shocking that this could happen in America. Because I&amp;#039;m telling you, I am innocent of every single allegation. Every one. I&amp;#039;ve been falsely accused, I&amp;#039;ve been lied about, I&amp;#039;ve been maliciously treated. Worse than that, my family and my children have to suffer. And larger than that, the people of Illinois had their governor stolen from them based on false accusations that were made knowingly.&amp;quot; So you&amp;#039;re saying ... &amp;quot;He falsely accuses me, falsely says things that the four hundred hours of taped conversations would show, and after he does it \u2014 by taking snippets of conversation out of context \u2014 he goes into court and gets a protective order that prevents those tapes from being heard by the public and prevents me from telling you what&amp;#039;s on those tapes. Now how&amp;#039;s that America?&amp;quot; But if the ... &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s the truth of this. That is the truth of what&amp;#039;s happened here. And to think that this could happen in America is shocking to me. As the son of an immigrant, whose father fled Communism, as I write in my book, I&amp;#039;ve lived the American dream. Now there&amp;#039;s an American nightmare going on \u2014 these malicious prosecutions that are basically undermining the very principles and the liberties that we Americans expect.&amp;quot; When does the ... &amp;quot;When the full story&amp;#039;s heard, and my conversations on those telephones \u2014 hundreds of hours that were secretly recorded \u2014 are heard and people hear me motherfucking these phony politicians and how sickening they are, because the people are getting screwed, it&amp;#039;ll correct itself. Here&amp;#039;s a guy who believes in the power of the simple truth, and he doesn&amp;#039;t care who&amp;#039;s out to get him. He&amp;#039;s going to fight back, and he believes that the strength of the truth in America is still more powerful than all these people \u2014 and that&amp;#039;s what my story will be when I&amp;#039;m vindicated. Don&amp;#039;t pass judgment \u2014 just wait to see the result. You&amp;#039;ll see.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;ve seen Blago render various iterations of this screed on television \u2014 to Jimmy Kimmel and Jon Stewart and the ladies of The View \u2014 and I&amp;#039;ve read The Governor, the 264-page EP version of it, yet it&amp;#039;s still invigorating to see it done like this \u2014 a live performance, so to speak, delivered in the office of one of his lawyers, a young man whose attention is evenly divided between his computer and Blago&amp;#039;s soliloquy.  There is no question of sincerity here, no doubt in the depths of Rod Blagojevich&amp;#039;s soul that Rod Blagojevich is innocent and that he and the citizens of his state are the true victims of a foul, foul crime. The man whose criminal behavior is alleged in the seventy-five-page indictment is a veritable Snidely Whiplash, conniving to strip funding from a children&amp;#039;s hospital if he can&amp;#039;t shake down its CEO for fifty large. But this chipmunk-cheeked fellow sitting here, his voice cracking with hurt and hope and gritty pride, is right out of a Frank Capra movie.  You sound like an optimistic guy, I tell him when his gums finally stop beating. &amp;quot;I know what the truth is.&amp;quot; So did Galileo. &amp;quot;But we still talk about Galileo today, don&amp;#039;t we? And we do visit his grave at the church in Florence, don&amp;#039;t we?&amp;quot; Well ... &amp;quot;You know what&amp;#039;s interesting? How about this \u2014 I believe Galileo and Machiavelli are buried in the same church.&amp;quot; Really? &amp;quot;I believe so.&amp;quot; The young lawyer, Googling, confirms that Galileo is buried between Machiavelli and Michelangelo. Fascinating. &amp;quot;Isn&amp;#039;t it? Because a lot of what&amp;#039;s happened to me is Machiavellian, and yet my vision and the rightness of what I&amp;#039;ve done is kind of Galilean.&amp;quot;  Let us stipulate, for the sake of our own sanity, that he is not quite sane. This isn&amp;#039;t to say that Blagojevich is guilty as charged \u2014 or that the line between believing oneself to be a great leader and megalomania isn&amp;#039;t easily blurred. But Blago plays in a league of his own. In the course of a conversation, he is not only Galileo; he is Teddy Roosevelt and Robin Hood and Bobby Kennedy and Rocky Balboa. And Mordecai of the legend of Purim.  Purim? &amp;quot;The Book of Esther.&amp;quot; Purim? &amp;quot;Yeah. And I&amp;#039;m Mordecai. Falsely accused. I didn&amp;#039;t do those things. This whole story is epic. What helps me get up every morning is, I&amp;#039;m fighting the fight for something much larger than me. I&amp;#039;m fighting for what is at the basis of what our country is supposed to be, a place where you&amp;#039;re presumed innocent, where if in fact you did something wrong, the system plays out in such a way where the truth comes out, not people being forced to lie and being squeezed to lie. If you love your country as I do, this is a fight worth fighting.&amp;quot; Blago&amp;#039;s got the Purim story wrong, but that&amp;#039;s beside the point. The point is that he&amp;#039;s Rod Blagojevich, the Serbian-American kid who grew up in a five-room apartment, son of an immigrant steelworker father and an American-born mom who fed him books about epic heroes and watched Elvis movies with him. He is imperfect \u2014 he spent his time in law school at Pepperdine playing hide-the-gavel with California girls and he flunked the Illinois bar exam on his first try \u2014 but he is of the people, from the people, for the people, and, above all, a fighter. And having committed every verse of Kipling&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;If&amp;quot; to memory, for Blago mere innocence is not enough; he must be a legendary hero. This sort of hero requires an epic villain, naturally, and Blago&amp;#039;s is U. S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who headed the Blagojevich investigation and held a press conference after his arrest to trumpet that the governor was nailed &amp;quot;in the middle of ... a political-corruption crime spree&amp;quot; and to tell the world that Blagojevich&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;conduct would make Lincoln roll over in his grave.&amp;quot; It was, Fitzgerald added, a &amp;quot;moment of truth for Illinois,&amp;quot; which \u2014 given Chicago&amp;#039;s rich legacy of graft, corruption, and political buffoonery, plus the fact that the governor before Blago is serving a six-year sentence on federal corruption charges \u2014 is like swatting a mosquito and calling it a landmark in the fight against malaria. What sets the Blago case apart, of course, is the little matter of Barack Obama&amp;#039;s Senate seat. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a fucking valuable thing,&amp;quot; the governor allegedly announced in a phone call taped by the feds the day before Obama&amp;#039;s election. &amp;quot;You just don&amp;#039;t give it away for nothing.&amp;quot; On a second call, the day after the election, Blagojevich allegedly said, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve got this thing and it&amp;#039;s fucking golden, and I&amp;#039;m not just giving it up for fucking nothing.&amp;quot; Allegedly not. In New Jersey, where I live, some yutz named Jon Corzine made his political debut by spending $60 million of his own cash to buy a Senate seat in 2000, followed the next year by another political tyro, Mike Bloomberg, forking over $70 million for the mayoralty of New York City. So ten years later, figure a Senate seat may be worth $100 million. Giving a Chicago politician naming rights to that seat, what the hell would any sentient American adult expect that pol to do? Sorry \u2014 allegedly do. &amp;quot;They didn&amp;#039;t stop a crime spree,&amp;quot; says Blago. &amp;quot;They stopped a routine political deal that would&amp;#039;ve put five hundred thousand people to work, given fifty thousand to three hundred thousand people access to health care, helped keep four thousand people a day in their homes \u2014 that&amp;#039;s what they stopped.&amp;quot; The deal, says Blagojevich, was to name Attorney General Lisa Madigan, daughter of the Illinois Speaker of the House, Mike Madigan, to Obama&amp;#039;s seat. &amp;quot;I hate her and him,&amp;quot; Blago says. &amp;quot;But if I could get a public-works jobs bill, if I can get the expansion of health care, if I can get foreclosure relief&amp;quot; \u2014 all of which, Blago claims, were being held hostage by the Speaker \u2014 &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d hold my nose and make her a senator. Rahm Emanuel, we talked to him \u2014 my chief of staff was talking to Rahm about putting this deal together, and I was prepared to do it because it was the best I could get for the people.  &amp;quot;The day before they arrested me, I directed my chief of staff to work out the tactics and get it done, and all of a sudden, the next morning, they&amp;#039;re arresting me? The whole thing&amp;#039;s upside down. They stole me away from the people of Illinois. Now that&amp;#039;s the truth, okay? So someone&amp;#039;s lying here, about whether I&amp;#039;m selling that Senate seat for financial gain, or whether I was positioning and working to try to get a political deal that would benefit the people. Somebody is lying here, and that&amp;#039;s an unbelievable lie.&amp;quot; Whoever&amp;#039;s lying, the citizens of Illinois seem to have survived the theft of their Blago. One poll, conducted a month before his arrest, showed his approval rating as governor at 13 percent. So it came as no shock when the state legislature voted 59 \u2014 0 to remove him from office, and for good measure voted 59 \u2014 0 to forbid him from ever holding public office again in Illinois. And whoever&amp;#039;s lying, the most eloquent document to emerge from Blago&amp;#039;s demise may be a nine-page letter submitted to the Impeachment Committee of the Illinois House of Representatives by a man who served for more than a year as one of Blagojevich&amp;#039;s senior advisors. It talks about a governor in permanent combat mode, as detached from state business as Conrad&amp;#039;s Kurtz. &amp;quot;I think Rod Blagojevich is a good father and a great guy to go to a ball game with,&amp;quot; he writes, stressing that his critique isn&amp;#039;t personal. And then he &amp;quot;suggest[s] this committee seek an independent psychological evaluation of the Governor as part of this process. I believe Rod, the committee and the people of this great state would benefit from such a move. It is clear to anyone who has been around him that there is ample cause for such an extraordinary request.&amp;quot;  You have anyone to talk things out with, or just Patti? &amp;quot;Mostly that \u2014 me and Patti.&amp;quot; Rough. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve got a friend or two I talk to from time to time, but all the people you knew \u2014 friends and all the rest \u2014 they want nothing to do with you, because what you&amp;#039;ve got in your life they don&amp;#039;t want in theirs.&amp;quot; Patti must be tough as nails. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s great. What people saw in that show is who Patti is \u2014 whether they liked her or not, that&amp;#039;s who Patti is. When the judge wouldn&amp;#039;t let me go and they wanted Patti, she wasn&amp;#039;t inclined to do it. I frankly didn&amp;#039;t want her to do it. By then I had gotten an advance on the book, so we were okay for a couple of months, but she just made the decision to do it.&amp;quot; Mrs. Blago is no shrinking violet; she&amp;#039;s the daughter of a longtime Chicago alderman \u2014 he and Blago have been at war for years now \u2014 and she can allegedly be heard on the Fitzgerald tapes tossing f-bombs in the background.  &amp;quot;You know what was a reality show? Me with my kids by myself for a month. Every night was an Elvis night; we&amp;#039;d watch one of his movies. Her first night away \u2014 it was so sweet. We&amp;#039;re about ready to watch Blue Hawaii, and the little one snuggles right next to me, and then my older one gets up and comes on the other side and snuggles next to me. They&amp;#039;d never been away from their mother \u2014 they were vulnerable and afraid.&amp;quot;  Did they see her eat the tarantula?  &amp;quot;Yeah. My little one, her little nose gets red because she&amp;#039;s crying a little bit seeing her mother eat that. You do these things because you love your children. We have no income, we have a mortgage, it costs us on the COBRA plan $1,600 or $1,800 to keep health care for them. I can get my law license back, but who&amp;#039;s going to hire me?&amp;quot; Blago&amp;#039;s also hosting a two-hour Sunday show on a local AM talk station. &amp;quot;They impeached me and now unleashed me&amp;quot; is one of his tropes, and he&amp;#039;s fond of inviting his gubernatorial successor, Pat Quinn, to come down to the station &amp;quot;so I can kick your ass.&amp;quot; He also has a Web site, maybe a shot at being one of Donald Trump&amp;#039;s celebrity apprentices, and he may be available as an Elvis impersonator. Someone e-mailed me a YouTube link of you singing &amp;quot;Treat Me Right&amp;quot; at a block party. &amp;quot;Yeah \u2014 &amp;#039;Treat Me Nice.&amp;#039; I got paid for it \u2014 it&amp;#039;s the only reason I did it.&amp;quot; Really? &amp;quot;Yeah. I think I got paid like $10,000 to do it.&amp;quot; I think my heart just broke a little bit. &amp;quot;Thank you, but you know what? When I was governor, had someone asked me to sing &amp;#039;Treat Me Nice,&amp;#039; I&amp;#039;d have done it for nothing.&amp;quot; There was some guy on the stage with you who looked like Fabio. &amp;quot;You want to meet him? He&amp;#039;s a childhood friend. I grew up with him. He knows Fabio \u2014 the real Fabio discovered him because he looks so much like Fabio, and he&amp;#039;s friends with the real Fabio. But the real Fabio apparently is much bigger than him, he tells me. He&amp;#039;s big, but the real Fabio is like six four, I guess.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s got to be weird, to go around looking like Fabio.  &amp;quot;Evidently he likes it, because he&amp;#039;s chosen to do it.&amp;quot; Jeez. Being in a cover band is just one or two nights a week. &amp;quot;You should meet him \u2014 he&amp;#039;s a great guy. His name is Butch \u2014 Butch Colla.&amp;quot; Tell me something, governor: Would you have eaten that tarantula? &amp;quot;Yeah. Of course. I mean, all that&amp;#039;s shit you do when necessity compels you to find a way to make a living for your kids.&amp;quot; I guess it&amp;#039;s better than blowing sailors. &amp;quot;That I wouldn&amp;#039;t do.&amp;quot; On the record? &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s on the record.&amp;quot; I can vouch for the fact that he has a sense of humor wide enough to embrace some degree of self-deprecation, and I saw with my own eyes \u2014 at restaurants, stopped in traffic, on the sidewalks \u2014 that folks around Chicago greet him with genuine warmth: hugs, shouts of support, requests to take a photo with him. And more than a few times, after he had moved past, they said, &amp;quot;He didn&amp;#039;t do anything that the rest of &amp;#039;em don&amp;#039;t do, he just got caught,&amp;quot; or some such. Part of this is authentic charisma. Part of it is Chicago&amp;#039;s cynical admiration for a homeboy made bad. Part, no doubt, is simply the strange fruit of celebrity. But he did plenty of things right during his time as governor \u2014 enough for some folks to regard him still with gratitude, and for others, in his salad days, to see him as a young man with a bright future. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s no governor in America that did free public transportation for senior citizens. Illinois became the first state in American history where every child gets access to comprehensive health care \u2014 I did that. And I had to make political deals to get it done; it wasn&amp;#039;t easy. Preschool for all three- and four-year-olds here. More money in public education. Never raised the income tax on people. &amp;quot;David Axelrod called me the day after John Kerry lost to Bush \u2014 Wednesday \u2014 and he said, You need to think about running for president in 2008. A new face from the Midwest to challenge Hillary Clinton. He used to work for me. He had Obama in his stable already \u2014 he&amp;#039;s a consultant, so he&amp;#039;s just gathering potential talents. That&amp;#039;s what these guys do \u2014 it&amp;#039;s all about picking winners.&amp;quot; Which reminds him: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll show you where Rahm lives,&amp;quot; he says. We&amp;#039;re in my rental; Blago&amp;#039;s ride these days is a 1988 Volvo owned by his brother, and alleged coconspirator, Rob.  &amp;quot;That house with the flag, and then there&amp;#039;s the lot right next door \u2014 he bought that. When he left the [Clinton] White House, he got into some deal where he made a quick $15 million through his connections with Exelon ComEd \u2014 amazing. Fifteen million \u2014 it&amp;#039;s that white-collar stuff people do. He&amp;#039;s using his connections in the White House, but I&amp;#039;m the guy facing what I&amp;#039;m facing. And I&amp;#039;m broke.&amp;quot; How ...  &amp;quot;He makes that money, and he&amp;#039;s where he is. I&amp;#039;m busted, I&amp;#039;m broke, because I&amp;#039;ve worked as an honest public official, and the federal government, my very accusers themselves, say I&amp;#039;m indigent. It&amp;#039;s unbelievable.&amp;quot; So ...  &amp;quot;People out there who are getting fucked by big, powerful forces in faraway places \u2014 they don&amp;#039;t know who&amp;#039;s doing it to them, or they have some idea who&amp;#039;s doing it to them, but they don&amp;#039;t feel like they have any control over it. I will show you can fight back when you have righteousness and the truth on your side.&amp;quot; You ...  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s such a cynical business, and most of the people in the business are full of shit and phonies, but I was real, man \u2014 and am real. This guy, he was catapulted in on hope and change, what we hope the guy is. What the fuck? Everything he&amp;#039;s saying&amp;#039;s on the teleprompter. I&amp;#039;m blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived. I saw it all growing up.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s nearly impossible to imagine Rod Blagojevich on the witness stand, but it&amp;#039;s wholly impossible to imagine that Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama \u2014 who has had ties with Chicago real estate developer, alleged Blago coconspirator, and convicted felon Tony Rezko \u2014 have not pondered that very prospect.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m absolutely going to testify,&amp;quot; Blago promises. &amp;quot;Absolutely. I&amp;#039;m going to go up there and tell the whole truth \u2014 and the complete truth.&amp;quot;  Let us stipulate that no one has firm purchase on the truth, much less on the truth whole or complete. And let us stipulate also that, however just and noble his ends may be, the means used by Patrick Fitzgerald to effect the climax of his case against the governor \u2014 the 6:00 A.M. FBI raid at Casa Blago and the self-congratulatory noon press conference \u2014 smack of prosecutorial grandstanding, if not abuse. That still leaves us with a federal affidavit based on eight weeks of wiretapped phone calls that portray Blagojevich as both a scumbag and a whore, variously \u2014 and allegedly \u2014 trying to figure out exactly what he could get for Obama&amp;#039;s old seat. A job for Patti. A Cabinet post for Blago \u2014 Health and Human Services \u2014 or an ambassadorship. Up to $1.5 million from those most able and willing to pay among the potential Senate candidates. Had Skittles been part of the family then, some collar bling might have been involved, too.  Blagojevich allegedly even ponders parachuting himself out of the governorship and into the Senate \u2014 and allegedly at one point refers to the president-elect as a &amp;quot;cocksucker.&amp;quot;  Forbidden to discuss the details of the tapes, Blago characterizes all these things in general terms as tossing around ideas \u2014 &amp;quot;some of them were good, some were not so good&amp;quot; \u2014 humdrum horse-trading and political spitballing.  &amp;quot;In conversations over the telephone, without me saying what&amp;#039;s on it, because I can&amp;#039;t, but I recall over and over I&amp;#039;m saying things like, &amp;#039;If I can get this, how much do I love the people of Illinois to make that cunt senator?&amp;#039; &amp;quot; How deeply stirred a Chicago jury may be by such stuff is anybody&amp;#039;s guess. Likewise, who knows if the prosecutors can spin wiretapped calls about crimes never consummated into criminal convictions? Or if Blago truly has courage and craziness enough to let the government&amp;#039;s lawyers cross-examine him under oath? But the apparent chasm between Blago the alleged lout allegedly scheming on the phone and this charismatic fellow quoting Kipling is hardly unusual in politics, and every other form of theater, and it won&amp;#039;t be enough to keep him from going up the river for a few years. The gang&amp;#039;s all here \u2014 Patti and the girls, Rod and Skittles. We&amp;#039;re at a family friend&amp;#039;s house to watch Manny Pacquiao fight Miguel Cotto for Cotto&amp;#039;s welterweight title, twenty or so people in all, with plenty of food and booze.  It comes as no surprise that Blago boxed Golden Gloves back in the 1970s, or that he identifies with Pacquiao, who began his pro career as a 106-pounder and has battled his way to titles in seven weight classes. Cotto is bigger, more heavily muscled, and \u2014 says Blago \u2014 doomed to fall in eight or nine rounds tonight. &amp;quot;For every little guy on the schoolyard, when the big guys push him around, and he&amp;#039;s fighting back, Manny Pacquiao is an inspiration to us. It comes down to the schoolyard and little guys kicking the ass of the big guys.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Come on, Rod,&amp;quot; says the host, stopping by the couch with a bottle of Galliano. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re not keeping up with me.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m good, Bill.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You keep saying you&amp;#039;re good, but you&amp;#039;re not drinking it.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m in training,&amp;quot; Blago tells him. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m fighting the U. S. government.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re gonna beat &amp;#039;em.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Damn right, baby.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re gonna knock &amp;#039;em out.&amp;quot; Cotto manages to stagger through rounds 8 and 9, but Pacquiao, all angles and quick hands, clearly has the fight won long before the ref stops it a minute into the twelfth and final round.  It&amp;#039;s past midnight and everybody&amp;#039;s happy, except Skittles, who&amp;#039;s sound asleep on the rug. &amp;quot;Hey, Rod, you smoke a cigar with us?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Sure, Bill.&amp;quot; A few of us head out to the deck off the living room for a stogie before we head home. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re gonna think positive tonight,&amp;quot; Bill says. &amp;quot;No negative. We love America. Great country. Land of opportunity.&amp;quot; Inside, Judy Garland&amp;#039;s warbling &amp;quot;Over the Rainbow&amp;quot; \u2014 someone must have changed the channel. &amp;quot;Isn&amp;#039;t Rod the greatest, you guys?&amp;quot; asks Bill. There is general assent.  &amp;quot;Rod,&amp;quot; Patti calls from the living room. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s 1:00 A.M.&amp;quot; Nobody seems to have the cigar cutter. &amp;quot;Did you take the cutter?&amp;quot; Bill asks Rod. &amp;quot;I did not,&amp;quot; says Blago, giggling. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s another false accusation.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a6857/rod-blagojevich-interview-0210/>