Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevitch has been found guilty on 17 counts of corruption, including seeking to sell Barack Obama's former Senate seat. The governor faces a sentence potentially decades in length.

US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald managed to not call Barack Obama to testify, and nobody in the Obama administration, rooted in the same corrupt political culture of Cook County, faced any peril in the trial. Should the incumbent attorney general Eric Holder be forced out in the Fast and Furious scandal, my money would be on Fitz to be rewarded with the attorney generalship.

Now that Rod Blagojevich has a family to support and a prison sentence to serve, will he succumb to the temptation to write a tell-all book about his political life? I, for one, would buy such a book. There is a huge national appetite to know more about the swamp from which Barack Obama emerged.

How corrupt is Cook County? Consider this from the Chicago Sun-Times today:

A Chicago venture capital fund whose projects paid more than $1.2 million to former Mayor Richard M. Daley's son has been taken over by the federal government, which says the fund owes taxpayers $21.4 million.

Cardinal Growth L.P. -- which was run by attorney and former federal prosecutor Robert Bobb Jr. and accountant Joseph McInerney, a close friend of Daley's son, Patrick Daley -- borrowed nearly $51 million from the U.S. Small Business Administration over the past decade but has been unable to repay $21.4 million, court records show.