POLITICO: Blagojevich questions censored on Transition site.

President-elect Barack Obama’s Transition today launched “Open for Questions,” a Digg-style feature allowing citizens to submit questions, and to vote on one another’s questions, bringing favored inquiries to the top of the list.

It was suggested when it launched that the tool would bring uncomfortable questions to the fore, but the results so far are the opposite: Obama’s supporters appear to be using — and abusing — a tool allowing them to “flag” questions as “inappropriate” to remove all questions mentioning Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich from the main pages of Obama’s website. . . . So far, Obama’s team does not seem to have stepped in to allow uncomfortable questions to rise to the top, and instead is allowing his supporters to sanitize the site.

Hope and change!

UPDATE: Stories on Obama/Blagojevich go down the memory hole.

Well, he promised the most transparent administration in history — and this stuff is, well, pretty transparent!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tim Blair: “It’s all an unwelcome distraction.”

Gawker: “The same Obamatards who voted up total blowjob questions on the Digg-like question section of Change.gov have, all too predictably, almost completely obliterated any question mentioning ROD BLAGOJEVICH. In fact, if you mention ROD BLAGOJEVICH in your question, at all, even totally politely in a relevant way, your question will not only be voted down but ‘removed’ (says the site) as ‘inappropriate,’ visible only through a specific search for ROD BLAGOJEVICH.” Hmm, group censorship of uncomfortable subjects. Nothing creepy about that on a political site. Hope and change!

UPDATE: Reader Steve Nelson writes:

Notice the problem with Obama’s websites?

Neither he nor his staff is censoring the comments…. but they’ve set the site up to allow others to do so.

Neither he nor his staff asked for any illegal foreign contributions, or for contributions from obviously false donors….. they just disabled the standard controls and credit card checks to allow it to happen.

They didn’t have any ties to whacky characters with extreme ideas…. but the campaign website allowed anyone to set up a “blog” and put out the propaganda.

In each case, Obama and his staff were careful to leave no directly illegal / unethical fingerprints of their own….. but they sure made it easy for “supporters unknown” to do so through their IT systems.

Deniability — it’s built right in.

An army of grifters.

CLARICE FELDMAN: Illinois Scandal Taints Obama Halo.

GOOD: Auto Rescue Bill in Peril, Opposed by GOP Senators.

THIS IS KIND OF COOL: A hydrogen-powered toy car. “The car uses a real fuel cell and its own on-board hydrogen storage system. Use this accessory to fuel the H-racer with an unlimited supply of clean energy. To create free hydrogen fuel at the flick of a switch, just add water to the station’s tank!”

HEH: “He was just a governor who lived in my neighborhood.”

GEE, DO YOU THINK? Analysis: Ill. governor scandal could dog Obama.

CHRYSLER’S HIDDEN COFFERS: Why is Cerberus, one of the world’s richest private equity firms, begging for a bailout?

PRINCETON SETTLES with the Robertson family. “Princeton is providing $40 million to pay the legal fees of the Robertson family, establishing a $50 million foundation to prepare students for government service, and has pledged to dedicate the remaining funds to the support of the Woodrow Wilson school. The endowment will be dissolved, and replaced by a new university-controlled foundation . . . but substantively it looks like a victory for the Robertson family’s contentions about how the money was being used.”

UPDATE: More, from Fausta Wertz.

A CULTURE OF CORRUPTION. “For the last three years, Democratic leaders cheered GOP ethics woes. Dean accused Republicans of making ‘their culture of corruption the norm.’ Pelosi touted cleanliness as a liberal virtue. But with the eye-popping pay-for-play and bribery case against Democratic Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich topping a year of nationwide Democratic scandals, the corruption chickens are coming home to roost.”

UPDATE: Bill Quick: “Obviously, the only thing that can clear the air – and Obama’s reputation – is for George Bush to appoint a Special Counsel, preferably Fitzgerald himself, to investigate every slimy strand of this mess.” Then I guess we need one for the Countrywide scandal, too . . . .

JUST SAY NO TO DYNASTIC POLITICS: Ross Douthat pans Caroline Kennedy as a replacement for Hillary.

Caroline Kennedy is no doubt more prepared – in terms of her base of knowledge about national politics, her comfort with the ways of Washington, etc. – to be a United States Senator than Sarah Palin was to be Vice President. But if you consider where the two women started and stack their subsequent accomplishments against one another, Palin’s Alaskan career is roughly six times more impressive than Kennedy’s years as a high-minded Manhattan socialite and custodian of her family’s good name. That doesn’t mean that McCain was wise to pick Palin as his running mate. But if you think he wasn’t, then you should definitely hope that the Democratic Party of New York hunts a little longer through its ranks before handing a Senate seat to the editor of The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Ouch.

ANN ALTHOUSE: “Why am I getting the feeling that the mainstream media will do what it can to obliterate the connection between Rod Blagojevich and Barack Obama?”

WHO WOULD BE THE BEST CHOICE to run General Motors?

RICK MORAN: Democratic Party Scandal: How High Will It Go?

KATIE GRANJU: Axelrod recants on Blagojevich; I don’t. “So I’m supposed to believe that Axelrod ‘misspoke’ when he said he knew that his boss had spoken with the governor? Because I don’t. Either Axelrod is lying or Obama is lying. That’s my position based on my knowledge of how politics works, and the evidence so far.”

UPDATE: The real news from Chicago. “Sure, the name Rod Blagojevich came into the story, but each announcer in turn tripped over himself to assure the audience that BARACK OBAMA HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Via Katie Granju’s comments, here’s a story about Obama meeting with Blagojevich to talk about filling his Senate seat. [LATER: Hmm, that story has mysteriously vanished. But Katie posted an excerpt here. More on that story here.]

MORE: ABC News: Sources Say Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. Is ‘Senate Candidate No. 5’.

Plus, questions for Obama.

STILL MORE: John McGinnis writes: “Edwards was right all along. There really are 2 Americas — Those that are on the take, and those that are not.”

MORE STILL: From Tom Maguire. “Axelrod lied plenty of times on the Ayers story, so the idea that he is saying what is expedient, rather than true, is pretty familiar. And clearly someone from the Obama side told someone from the Blago side that they would not play ball. I suppose the potentially embarrassing question is whether the Obama side then mentioned this to Prosecutor Fitzgerald.”

IN THE MAIL: From Bob Zubrin, How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet.

A BLAGOJEVICH INSTA-POLL:

POLITICO: In Scandal, Risks for Obama. Gee, do you think?

DEEP BUDGET CUTS at Harvard.

BEST HEADLINE: ILLINOIS GOV IN LAND OF $TINKIN’.

SPEAKING OF GRAFT: Big 3 Auto Rescue Bill Bails Out Transit SILO Tax Shelters.

INSTEAD OF A BAILOUT, a two-month income tax holiday for the American people? Not likely to fly, since it offers no opportunity for graft.

UPDATE: From Greg Mankiw, some reasons why it might help. Too bad about the lack of graft, though. That’s probably a deal-killer . . . .

ETHICS COMMITTEE expands Rangel probe.

BLAGOJEVICH: “Vengeful and Profane.” Doesn’t sound like he’s going to get much support from the media, or fellow Democratic politicians.

Meanwhile, Eugene Volokh has some legal questions, and Jim Lindgren looks at the timeline.

UPDATE: A suggestion that the Obama team has been working with Fitzgerald.

MICKEY KAUS: Why shouldn’t the bailout deal include an explicit reopening of labor contracts? “If the new ‘auto czar’ can order the companies to restructure, tell them to build smaller cars and veto any expenditure over $25 million, shouldn’t he or she be able to require the UAW to give up the precious work rules that have rendered the domestically-owned industry inflexible and inefficient for decades? . . . If the taxpayers are going to foot the bill, then the goal has to be a successful industry in the long run–not a Congressional fix designed to protect the UAW from what it would face in a normal bankruptcy. That means rewritten contracts. If the UAW members didn’t want that, they shouldn’t have let their firms go broke.”

106 YEARS OF POPULAR MECHANICS — available for free online. Cool.