Tell-All by Mr. Sell-All

Rod Blagojevich is outdoing Chicago hog merchants famous for marketing every part of the pig but the squeal by signing a book contract for his story.

The publisher, Phoenix Books, has announced a "six-figure deal" for a memoir by the ex-governor to be titled "The Governor," to go along with their current volumes--"a sexy, darkly funny, and surprisingly poignant memoir" by a hooker known as the $2000-an-hour woman and a tome, "Interview With a Cannibal," about a German gentleman who "killed a man and ate him with a glass of fine red wine."

“The governor chose to go with a large independent company because he wanted to tell his story without any restrictions over content that might’ve come with a major publishing house," a publicist explains. "He simply did not want to accept constraints or conditions on what he could say in this book.”

Blagojevich's new best-selling effort will have to overcome the hurdles of a pending criminal indictment as well as a bill just introduced in the Illinois Legislature covering any book or movie deals about a crime for which an elected official was convicted, specifying that profits would have to be turned over to the state.

But the Governor, who showed his literary inclinations by citing Kipling and the short story, "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner," before his impeachment, is unlikely to be deterred by such considerations as money from telling a story that "won't pull any punches."