Three months ago, while Barack Obama was running for president and his rival John McCain kept kinda-sorta threatening to bring up corrupt Chicago politics, Obama called up his good friend in the Illinois State Senate, Emil Jones, Jr, and convinced him to change his mind on an important upcoming vote. The formerly doomed bill suddenly passed! Man, that Chicago machine. So dirty! Of course, it was the ethics bill. The one that forced Governor Blagojevich to get all his corruption in before it went into effect in January, leading to his convenient pre-inauguration downfall.

A stalker emailed just a few minutes ago with this sighting: "Tracy Morgan at the AMC theater in Times Square. Standing behind him on the escalator as he bitches about Obama not caring about black people." Perhaps some sort of alliance with Jesse Jackson is in order! It worked for Sammy Davis Jr. Or maybe he was just quoting Jackson. Who knows.

In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama called his 2004 visit to the Googleplex the "most memorable part" of a trip to California. Google's salespeople are planning to make sure he doesn't forget it.

Usually the arrest of a corrupt Chicago politician would afford, at best, a paragraph of coverage here at Gawker. It's Dog-bites-man news. But Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is a magical figure, who is connected, directly and indirectly, with so many beloved Gawker characters. Steve Dressler put together this little illustration of Blago's Web of Deceit, and all those who've been caught in it. Join us for explanations, below.

Guess who's already been floated as the guy who made this Blagojevich investigation end in an arrest today instead of, say, late January? Rahm Emanuel! Chicago Fox affiliate reporter Jack Conaty said on the TV today that after Blago "reached out" to Emanuel regarding the Senate seat, Emanuel reached out to US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. Vid below.

US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald made a point of saying Barack Obama was unaware of the wrongdoings of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, but that decidedly does not mean that our president-elect will emerge from this unscathed. No, this is the kind of distracting, dragged-out mess than can derail a first term—or at the very least a first 100 days. And, you know, the full extent of the involvement of Obama's team and maybe Obama himself is yet to be discovered. So let's take a look at just a couple of the ways this can go terribly wrong for our president-elect!

Hey, Obama press availability time: president-elect Barry Obama is "saddened" by the actions of evil criminal governor Rod Blagojevich, but it's an "ongoing investigation," so he won't comment on it. Where have we heard that line before? Oh, right—from the Bush administration, for eight years. Now Barry will just talk about how he met Al Gore, who speaks for the trees. He is actually talking about climate change, and no one is listening. We want to hear about Tony Rezko and Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett and how they're tied up in this mess! No questions! Well, one question: "I had no contact with the governor or his office, so I was not aware of what was happening." Poor Al Gore.

The criminal complaint against impressively corrupt and stupid Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich makes a half-assed effort to hide the identities of everyone not accused of wrongdoing, but with redactions like "President-elect" it is pretty easy to figure out the identities of the people involved. The most interesting unnamed individuals are, of course, Senate Candidates 1-6. Some of them are easy to identify, some less so. The Smoking Gun named 1, 2, 5 and 6—find out who they are, what they want, and how they're related to President Hopey, below.

Barack Obama's incoming chief of staff, the famous political enforcer Rahm Emaneul, has a very special role in the criminal complaint filed against Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich! Emaneul plays a "President-elect Advisor" whom Rod wants to call to shake down for $15 million to start a nonprofit. And, you know, it is unsaid that if Rahm talks to Obama about raising this money, their friend Valerie Jarrett has a good shot at getting that Senate seat. Fun with corruption! But will Rod try to sink Rahm? Is Rahm in trouble? There was a bit of a veiled threat from Rod, just the other day.

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich kind of threw a bit of a monkey wrench into Barack Obama's pre-inauguration honeymoon today by getting arrested by the FBI for allegedly trying to sell Obama's vacated Senate seat and demanding recompense from the Obama team in exchange for appointing their preferred candidate. US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has been investigating Blago (as the cool kids call him) since, like, forever, but nearly all the evidence in the charging document comes from post-election wiretaps. Obama's team wanted Blago to appoint Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett to the position. But Blago wasn't thrilled about their unwillingness to bribe him. But Valerie's a major player in the criminal complaint. Who'll have to testify?

As anyone who watched The Wire knows, when the feds tape and tape and tape someone's phone calls, they're likely to hear them saying something stupid. And in the criminal complaint against Gov. Rod Blagojevich, arrested by FBI agents this morning for allegedly sellling the appointment of President-elect Barack Obama's Senate seat, he says plenty of really stupid things. The Smoking Gun has an excerpt and it's loaded with straight-off-the-wire quotes, such as his frank assessment: a Senate appointment "is a fucking valuable thing, you just don't give it away for nothing."

You want your Chicago-style politics? They don't come much more Chicago-style than this: Democratic Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was just arrested, along with his chief of staff, by FBI agents. How many corrupt things can one Governor do before a new ethics law takes effect at the beginning of next year? Blagojevich was apparently trying to set some sort of record. And Rezko's involved! And Tribune Co! Let's start with Rod's charming decision to sell the Senate seat vacated by squeaky clean president-elect Barack Obama!

It's kind of comforting that, amid economic collapse and a new political order, Ron Burkle is still a dirty old billionaire luring teenagers onto his jet and caressing distracted girls in clubs. Why, just this weekend he was out with Leonardo DiCaprio again, at Cipriani. Close personal friend Bill Clinton was not in attendance this time, but there's been no public sign of a split. Which, actually, is kind of a problem for president elect Barack Obama, particularly now that another of Burkle's sketchy business ventures has spectacularly exploded in scandal, this one involving large amounts of cocaine.

A momentous power summit accompanied last weekend's Kennedy Center Honors, where Barbra Streisand had her first-ever audience with President George Bush. Video from the event features Streisand — a vicious Bush critic who spent much of the recent election cycle as the Obama campaign's Deputy Director of Fundraising Medleys — welcoming the outgoing president to not only within bitchslap's-length, but actually close enough to share a skin-searing bipartisan kiss.

Sad news for crazy people: the Supreme Court decided not to hear an emergency call to intervene to stop Barack Obama from assuming the presidency, on account of how he's secretly not a citizen. The nut who brought the suit "also contends that two other candidates, Republican John McCain and Socialist Workers candidate Roger Calero, also are not natural-born citizens and thus ineligible to be president." Even David Horowitz has had enough of this nonsense. (This nonsense sponsored by Alan Keyes.) [AP/Yahoo]

About 200 laid-off factory workers are all having a magical sit-in in a closed plant in Chicago, because 1933 just broke out. The Republic Windows and Doors employees, members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, have been occupying the window factory ever since management announced their abrupt, immediate layoffs, without pay, in violation of federal law. Republic Windows and Doors had their credit cut off by Bank of America, which just got a cool $25 billion from the Treasury, in order to help them, uh, unfreeze credit. But it's an old-fashioned labor/management standoff, with a big evil bank involed, and hey, Barack Obama came out in support of the workers this weekend. Maybe he will be a liberal!

Michael Hirsh has a question: where is Joseph Stiglitz? Well, he's in Brazil or something, but where is he in the Obama administration? The liberal Nobel-winning economist, who will be forever in our hearts for the animosity between him and Larry Summers, was right about basically everything, of course, and the Obama administration hasn't even called him, going with Tim Geithner and Summers instead. Now all the whiny liberals are whining about how there are no liberals in the Obama cabinet!

Fred Thomson was a hot Republican presidential candidate for about 10 minutes at the start of the primary cycle, thanks to the former senator's Law & Order gig and the fact that he didn't seem as scuzzy as Rudolph Giuliani or Mitt Romney (not hard). He hasn't had much to do since then, except campaign inconsequentially for John McCain, try to point out Al Gore to a team of hired Serbian snipers at a presidential debate (pictured) and think about having a loser TV show like Mike Huckabee. But now it sounds like he's turning into a sad, desperate man, renting out his condo for the inauguration, instead of admiring Michelle Obama's dress like a true American.

You may have heard that Larry Summers, Barack Obama's chief economic advisor, has a controversial past. In 2006, protesters at Harvard University demanded he resign as president after he made remarks suggesting women were congenitally dumb. So what did Summers do?