Verbal Diarrhea: Great for Your Lawn, not so Great for Hiding Bribery

I am agnostic on the question of whether JJJ (Jesse Jackson Jr.) was himself or through his cronies involved in offering to pay for Obama's Senate Seat. I agree, however, that he comes off pretty badly in this clip. There are all the signs that he's lying, including the excessive blinking and the "protesting too much."

On a more general note, however, I'm kind of sick of this whole "family business" thing that we've got going on in politics. I understand that it's always been the case that sons of politicians have an easier path to becoming politicians, but it seems like that trend should be decreasing over time, not increasing. Most recently, it struck me the wrong way when Caroline Kennedy's name came up as a frontrunner to be appointed Senator from NY for no apparent reason other than that her last name is Kennedy. It may be that she'd be a good Senator, and she seems smart and capable from what little I know of her, but is that really the way that someone who has never held public office before should become a U.S. Senator, through appointment? At least in the case of the shenanigans in DE where a placeholder was appointed so that Biden's son (the current state AG who is serving in Iraq) can run in 2 years, Biden will still actually have to win the spot in a fairly contested election. He'll be at a big advantage there, but he's still got to win (this reminds me a little of the good ol' days when Kennedy got elected president and he and his father pressured the governor to appoint his college roomate so that Ted Kennedy could run when he turned 35 with no entrenched incumbent).

All these are far from the only examples. In fact, Andrew Cuomo seems to be another front runner for the NY Senate spot primarily because of his name, though he too at least has been serving in public office for a while. I'm not sure where this really leads except to the point that, it's easy enough already for relatives of politicians to win elections based on little more than their names, do we really need to be appointing them to the offices they might seek and make it even easier? I'm personally leaning towards a suggestion I've seen out there that there should be no such thing as governors appointing senators and that all vacant senate seats should be required to be filled within a fairly short amount of time by a special election, with another regular election scheduled (in the case of the Senate) for 2 years after the initial special election to allow the public to make a more considered choice. The current system is just begging to be abused, though usually not so blatantly as the way the Illiois governor did.