Senate Candidate 5? It's Jesse Jackson, Jr.! Someone connected to the congressman apparently had ROD BLAGOJEVICH convinced that ROD BLAGOJEVICH would make a cool million dollars by appointing Jackson to Barack Obama's Senate seat, against the president-elect's wishes. Jackson says he was told he's "not a target of this investigation," and says he'll cooperate with the investigation. This makes two Obama allies caught seeming a bit corrupt in the Blagojevich filing!

"Illinois law is silent on whether a governor must leave office after he's arrested on corruption charges...." While that's hardly a shocking sentence to read, it does seem like it's come up often enough for Illinois lawmakers to have a plan in place. So. What happens now to Rod Blagojevich and the governorship and and Barack Obama's vacant senate seat? It's a hilarious, Chicago-style mess!

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.

Maybe it sounded like Paula Abdul was "chiding" Fox on her satellite radio show Monday, as the AP headline has it, but the charge was quite serious: That the network purposely gave Paula Godspeed a slot on American Idol to irritate singer/judge Abdul. In other words, Fox put Godspeed on the show, repeatedly, not because they were ignorant of her history as a mentally imbalanced stalker, but precisely because they knew this history. Godspeed's 18 years of letter to Abdul and her stint on the show were capped, infamously, with an apparent suicide near Abdul's home.

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.

Poor John Rogers. The former CEO of Pay By Touch can't pin the fall of his online-payments startup, which raised $340 million and employed 750 people before going bankrupt. This self-aggrandizing outlaw has no one but himself to blame.

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.

In the world of startups, there's fraud — and then there's fraud. It's one thing for entrepreneurs to bilk venture capitalists with a sketchy PowerPoint. But using money meant to buy baseball bats and uniforms to fund your company? Despicable.

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.

Michael Sneed is a local gossip columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. And she's the latest journalist to be steamrolled by Chicago's US attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald—the same prosecutor who sent fallen Times reporter Judy Miller to jail! But Sneed won't have to go to court to try to keep her sources secret, because they're named right in the complaint against corrupt governor Rod Blagojevich. You see, Sneed was allegedly the guv's go-to reporter for planting fake rumors designed to help his scheme to extort money in exchange for Obama's replacement in the Senate. Oh, this one is good.

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?

Rod Blagojevich wanted to sell an Illinois Senate seat. Who's in the market for such a thing? Apparently, Blagojevich figured either Obama would pay up (with a cabinet post or something) for the right to pick his own successor, or he would go ahead sell it to "Candidate 5"—someone who was publicly reported to want it. Logic dictates that Candidate 5 is probably Jesse Jackson, Jr [UPDATE: Or is it? Alternate theory added below]. Which puts this corrupt, white governor in the interesting position of trying to play the old vanguard of Black American leadership against its new version. And failing miserably.

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!

An alderman in Milwaukee, a town not famous for sobriety, compared the local Chuck E. Cheese to "something out of a Quentin Tarantino film... there is alcohol and pistols being brandished." In Brookfield, Wisconsin, the children's pizzeria-plus-creepy-robot-theater gets far more police activity than a nearby biker bar, including a 40-person riot earlier this year. One participant in a 10-person brawl in Toledo's Chuck E. Cheese actually detached a velvet rope and started swinging the brass end at people. Intrigued? Good, because the Wall Street Journal is dying to tell you why you should watch your back inside the animatronic dystopia.

In the past 45 years, the percentage of US homicides solved annually has declined from 91% to just 61%. On top of that, incompetent superflack and total war advocate Ronn [sic] Torossian has published an op-ed about the importance of "earning trust." [AP, AJC]

Photographer Steve Schapiro needs a hook to sell his $700 special edition book about the Godfather movie. The behind-the-scenes pictures (including James Caan wired up with explosive squibs, left), 1,000-copy print run and author signatures might not be enough, and lord knows the economy isn't going to help matters. So he struck a deal to excerpt Mario Puzo's 1972 book on the making of the film. This excerpt was, in turn, excerpted in the Daily Mail this weekend, and the part where the late crooner Frank Sinatra screams at Puzo in a restaurant is the talk of the blogs, 35 years after it surfaced in Time. It's a worthy tale.