No one wants to talk about that “redistribution of wealth”.  And there are many experts with many explanations. Well I sure ain’t no economic expert, but I do have some words to throw at the conversation.  Words that have been studied and verified since they were first postulated over 200 years ago.  “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”  It is, therefore, not a large task to extrapolate to the words, “from extreme wealth comes extreme poverty.”

Here’s the jump de jour: How the middle class became the underclass

Well, this reporter has done the research for us, have a look-see…

Levity aside, this guy should be occupying a cot at the Club Fed instead of a seat in the U.S. Senate.  If only half of the what the evidence shows is true, then this one is a traitor to his countrymen and should be afforded a traitor’s trial and a traitor’s fate.  These people make decisions that affect people’s everyday lives and decisions that have literally cost many people their very lives.  To think, for even an instant, that some of those decisions were based on favors or gifts or money, is truly disgusting.  If I were an Alaskan voter, the only future decision I would want him making is whether he wanted to work in the laundry or in the license-plate shop.

The sad Reality of the situation is bleak.  We all know that the Justice Department has been heavily padded with Republican operatives and it’s perplexing that they would bring these charges at this time. 

Jump to Anchorage Daily News

I ran across this in the LA TIMES  and want to share it with you.

Obama without his script

Judging by his reaction to the Georgia-Russia crisis, Obama’s make-believe presidency isn’t ready for prime time.

Jonah Goldberg
August 12, 2008

The Obama campaign has for months pursued the odd strategy of having the junior senator from Illinois act as if he were already kinda-sorta president of the United States. In June, it tried sticking a quasi-presidential seal on his lectern. Then in July, he conducted what seemed like official state visits with foreign leaders and delivered something like a “prenaugural” address in Berlin, inviting comparisons to JFK and Reagan.
It’s an understandable ploy. More than most candidates, Barack Obama needs to appear like a plausible commander in chief because he’s not only inexperienced (during the last Summer Olympics he was still an Illinois state legislator), he’s novel. The name, the skin color, the cosmopolitan upbringing: Fair or not, all of these things give Obama the aura of otherness that is both part of his charm and a potential handicap.
If the would-be president can seem plausibly presidential, voting for him might not seem like such a crapshoot. It all makes sense, even if it fosters an air of presumptuousness.
(David Letterman recently offered a list of the top 10 signs Obama is overconfident. Among them: “Asked guy at Staples, ‘Which chair will work best in an oval-shaped office?’ “; “Having head measured for Mt. Rushmore;” and “Offered McCain a job in gift shop at the Obama Presidential Library.”)
Now fate has given Obama a chance to be presidential rather than pretend. Taking advantage of the Olympic distraction in Beijing, the Russians invaded South Ossetia, a territory on the north side of Georgia, a democratic U.S. ally. Out of the blocks, the Russians bombed civilians, rolled tanks across an internationally recognized border and threatened to launch an all-out, destabilizing war. Now it looks as if their army has cut Georgia in two.
Moreover, Russian bombs reportedly targeted the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which runs through Georgia on its way to the Mediterranean — the only oil pipeline in Central Asia not under Russian control. Russia is tightening its chokehold on oil and gas at precisely the moment energy costs have become the paramount domestic issue in the U.S. presidential campaign.
Obama’s response?
First, late Thursday evening, he gave a conventional written statement calling for calm, U.N. action and “restraint” from both sides — followed an hour later by a slightly stronger condemnation of Russian aggression and a call for a cease-fire.
The invasion of Georgia elicited a wan written communique instead of the sort of exciting rhetoric we’ve come to expect from his make-believe presidency. But he did make it in front of the cameras the next day for a rally celebrating his vacation in Hawaii. He promised “to go body surfing at some undisclosed location.”
During Obama’s make-believe presidency, we’ve heard about bold action, about the courage to talk to dictators. When faced with a real “3 a.m. moment,” Obama — who boasts about 200 foreign policy advisors, broken into 10 subgroups — proclaims, “I’m going to get some shave ice.”
Now, of course, this is a bit unfair in that Obama had planned his no doubt well-deserved vacation for a very long time. But presidential vacations are always well planned — and often interrupted.
Indeed, President Bush’s jaunt to the Olympics as a “sports fan” should also have been cut short the moment tanks started rolling over a country he’d proclaimed a “beacon of liberty” during his visit there in 2005. By Monday, both Bush and Obama were playing catch-up to Sen. John McCain, who seemed to have grasped the gravity from the get-go and whose support for Georgia is long-standing. He took the lead from the outset, demanding on Friday morning an emergency meeting of NATO and Western aid to the fledgling democracy.
The geopolitical significance of Russia’s invasion of Georgia at this stage is hard to gauge. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin may not wish to revive the Soviet Union or the Cold War, but he clearly seeks to restore Russia’s imperial stature. And Item One on that agenda is to crush Georgia’s independence and smother hopes for NATO’s expansion to Russia’s “near abroad.”
The campaign significance for Obama is easier to calculate. He has been playacting at being presidential in order to convince voters that we live in a “new moment” with “new challenges” — and that he is the president we need for this new era.
This moment calls for more than playacting, yet Obama looks lost without a presidential script. Events in the Caucasus — and, for that matter, in Beijing — suggest that the times aren’t so new after all. Two powerful antidemocratic foes are once again flexing their muscles at a moment when America seems weak and distracted.
That is not a new challenge but a very old one. Perhaps this is not a time for a novice spouting grand rhetoric about a new page in history, but for someone who’s actually read the pages of some old, but still relevant, books. Perhaps this is not the time for playacting.
Perhaps it is not the time for body surfing?
jgoldberg@latimescolumnists.com

I apologize to those who are offended.

But, when I saw this one on noquarterusa.net

I just had to share it. Now he does look a little

those on the ‘dollar’ bills. Sort of.

In the campaigns this past week it was a sticky business.  Obama tried to maintain his exalted attitude of detachment by telling people in Missouri about who he was not.  As a result of this faux pas the McCain camp rattled their swords. And, what a noise that was. The only problem is that Michelle Obama brought up the issue of race when ‘The Presumptuous One’ was running against Hillary Clinton. I remember reading about a native of Lee County, for whom the fish hatchery is his sole monument, telling voters back in his time that he had been a private when he served in the military, and that his opponent had been a general, and that when it came time for the voters to decide who should be elected he figured if those who had been privates would vote for him and if those who had been generals voted for his opponent, he’d be happy with the  outcome. Maybe someone who does look like one of those presidents on the dollar bills should tell Obama that story. I mean after all, there is a preponderance of those of us who do look like the old presidents, and if we should decided to vote according tour color, as Michelle Obama implied those in a predominately black state should do, the Obama family might find when the votes are counted that there are more of us that there are of them. But, if I’m reading things right, wouldn’t that be racism?  Should elections be stage managed in such a fashion that it gets down to that? Haven’t we already been though enough of this before?  Shouldn’t it be about character, issues, and experience? Not about promises and whether or not someone feels thatquotas and guidelines should determine who serves as POTUS?

The ABCNews article says: “renovations to Steven’s home such as a first floor, a wrap-around deck, “a new Viking gas range, a tool storage cabinet and an automobile exchange” were all received from the oil company Veco.  VECO International, Inc. is the largest oil field services company in Alaska. It is also extremely interesting to note that this company was created the exact same year that Senator Stevens was elected to the Senate, 1968.  Man, I bet they’ve made some sweet deals over all that time.

There is no word about any charges that might be levied against the oil company.  But we all know that they are just as guilty.  How the hell do we ever expect to claw our way out of our current situation with guys like this around?

Here’s the jump to the ABCNews story: Feds Indict Republican Senator for Lying

One world? Obama’s on a different planet

The senator’s Berlin speech was radical and naive.

By John R. Bolton
July 26, 2008

SEN. BARACK OBAMA said in an interview the day after his Berlin speech that it “allowed me to send a message to the American people that the judgments I have made and the judgments I will make are ones that are going to result in them being safer.”
If that is what the senator thought he was doing, he still has a lot to learn about both foreign policy and the views of the American people. Although well received in the Tiergarten, the Obama speech actually reveals an even more naive view of the world than we had previously been treated to in the United States. In addition, although most of the speech was

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substantively as content-free as his other campaign pronouncements, when substance did slip in, it was truly radical, from an American perspective.
These troubling comments were not widely reported in the generally adulatory media coverage given the speech, but they nonetheless deserve intense scrutiny. It remains to be seen whether these glimpses into Obama’s thinking will have any impact on the presidential campaign, but clearly they were not casual remarks. This speech, intended to generate the enormous publicity it in fact received, reflects his campaign’s carefully calibrated political thinking. Accordingly, there should be no evading the implications of his statements. Consider just the following two examples.
First, urging greater U.S.-European cooperation, Obama said, “The burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together.” Having earlier proclaimed himself “a fellow citizen of the world” with his German hosts, Obama explained that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Europe proved “that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”
Perhaps Obama needs a remedial course in Cold War history, but the Berlin Wall most certainly did not come down because “the world stood as one.” The wall fell because of a decades-long, existential struggle against one of the greatest totalitarian ideologies mankind has ever faced. It was a struggle in which strong and determined U.S. leadership was constantly questioned, both in Europe and by substantial segments of the senator’s own Democratic Party. In Germany in the later years of the Cold War, Ostpolitik — “eastern politics,” a policy of rapprochement rather than resistance — continuously risked a split in the Western alliance and might have allowed communism to survive. The U.S. president who made the final successful assault on communism, Ronald Reagan, was derided by many in Europe as not very bright, too unilateralist and too provocative.

But there are larger implications to Obama’s rediscovery of the “one world” concept, first announced in the U.S. by Wendell Willkie, the failed Republican 1940 presidential nominee, and subsequently buried by the Cold War’s realities.
The successes Obama refers to in his speech — the defeat of Nazism, the Berlin airlift and the collapse of communism — were all gained by strong alliances defeating determined opponents of freedom, not by “one-worldism.” Although the senator was trying to distinguish himself from perceptions of Bush administration policy within the Atlantic Alliance, he was in fact sketching out a post-alliance policy, perhaps one that would unfold in global organizations such as the United Nations. This is far-reaching indeed.
Second, Obama used the Berlin Wall metaphor to describe his foreign policy priorities as president: “The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.”
This is a confused, nearly incoherent compilation, to say the least, amalgamating tensions in the Atlantic Alliance with ancient historical conflicts. One hopes even Obama, inexperienced as he is, doesn’t see all these “walls” as essentially the same in size and scope. But beyond the incoherence, there is a deeper problem, namely that “walls” exist not simply because of a lack of understanding about who is on the other side but because there are true differences in values and interests that lead to human conflict. The Berlin Wall itself was not built because of a failure of communication but because of the implacable hostility of communism toward freedom. The wall was a reflection of that reality, not an unfortunate mistake.
Tearing down the Berlin Wall was possible because one side — our side — defeated the other. Differences in levels of economic development, or the treatment of racial, immigration or religious questions, are not susceptible to the same analysis or solution. Even more basically, challenges to our very civilization, as the Cold War surely was, are not overcome by naively “tearing down walls” with our adversaries.
Throughout the Berlin speech, there were numerous policy pronouncements, all of them hazy and nonspecific, none of them new or different than what Obama has already said during the long American campaign. But the Berlin framework in which he wrapped these ideas for the first time is truly radical for a prospective American president. That he picked a foreign audience is perhaps not surprising, because they could be expected to welcome a less-assertive American view of its role in the world, at least at first glance. Even anti-American Europeans, however, are likely to regret a United States that sees itself as just one more nation in a “united” world.
The best we can hope for is that Obama’s rhetoric was simply that, pandering to the audience before him, as politicians so often do. We shall see if this rhetoric follows him back to America, either because he continues to use it or because Sen. John McCain asks voters if this is really what they want from their next president.
John R. Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “Surrender Is Not an Option.”

I think this hit the nail on the head by declaring that Barack Hussein Obama may be out of touch with centrist American views, not only from a historical perspective but with what we see as the future of our role in world affairs. How about that? In spite of the overblown hyperbole of his speechmaker’s claims, America is not Obama’s to give to the world, as it currently stands. The writer analyses Obama’s Berlin speech  and it makes good reading for those who are curious to know how a few in the media, who have not lost their minds, think of the wunderkind.

It would seem that Obama’s big problem is that he is only a junior senator running for president and his words, while making the case for something on the extreme side of a one world political ideal, fall flat when it comes to the ‘how’ of his being there to say what he says, and the ‘how’ of his getting past the current state of world affairs. In this respect, most of Obama’s thinking never gets to the ‘how’ part of reality. His ‘rock star like persona’ makes the man hard to fathom, and though he wants to lead this country, the real question always goes back to the main question of ‘who is this guy anyway’? The nitty gritty of his person does not stand real scrutiny.

The image he has created is not the person he is, and not the one who would be president. That one remains hidden and is accessible only by a certain amount of detective work. That his operatives have put up roadblocks and are at work trying to hide who the real man is, is part of the puzzle that makes knowing Obama worth the effort.

Promises of an Orwellian future, with double-think phrases such as: ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for’, and other one-liners that have backward slanting ideas that hold no gravity in the real world seem to promise less for more, rather than more for less. Nowhere in his speechifying does Obama actually talk about what he has done to make anyone’s task a little easier, or anyone’s burden a little lighter. Chicago still has one of the highest crime rates in the country. It has a growing population of homeless people. Children are endangered by the very buildings his political donors have either built, or manage. Education under his watch is still stultified by infighting and mismanagement. And the list goes on. Under his tutelage can we not wonder if the whole country will not suffer a similar fate? Do we want an America that is but a larger version of Chicago? A place where politics is little more than a Doppelganger of the gangsters who once ran the city? Where ‘who sent you?’ is the way your bona fides are determined?

If you backtrack on his associations you’re confounded by the number of people he has known who are borderline politically, and whose views about the America that we know are skewed toward revolution, or the kind of change this great nation has gone to war to prevent. None of it adds up to the kind of puff he espouses in his speeches. Instead there are people like Tony Rezko,

who was convicted earlier this year of fraud and bribery. Yes, this is the same Tony Rezko who was one of Obama’s first major political contributors, the man who later helped him buy his mansion. According to Wikipedia:

.^[27] Starting in 2003, Rezko was one of the people on Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign finance committee, which raised more than $14 million.^[7] Rezko threw an early fundraiser for Obama, which Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendelland claims was instrumental in providing Obama with seed money for his U.S. Senate race.^[1] Obama has since identified over $250,000 in campaign contributions to various Obama campaigns as coming from Rezko or close associates, and has in consequence donated almost two thirds of that amount to charity.^[28][29]

Also, in 2005 Obama purchased a new home in the Kenwood District of Chicago for $1.65 million ($300,000 below the original price) on the same day that Rezko’s wife, Rita Rezko, purchased the adjoining empty lot from the same sellers for the full asking price.^[30] Obama acknowledged bringing his interest in the property to Rezko’s attention,^[31] but denied any coordination of offers. According to Obama, while the properties had originally been a single property, the previous owners decided to sell the land as two separate lots, but made it a condition of the sales that they be closed on the same date. Obama also said that the properties had been on the market for months, that his offer was the best of two bids, and that Ms. Rezko’s bid was matched by another offer, also of $625,000, so that she could not have purchased the property for less.^[32] Obama’s description of the purchase was later confirmed by the previous owner of the house.

Here is a paste and cut of an interesting article in the American Thinker, on further revelations on Obama’s Chicago connections.

Friday, March 07, 2008

Barack Obama, Tony Rezko, Nadhmi Auchi and Saddam Who?

Every Dog Has His Day.

The American Thinker has looked at a few of the connections of Barack Obamam, Antoin Rezko and Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi. The sudden emergence of Auchi into this story indicates Rezko’s deals may include a money trail leading back to dead Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Auchi’s Saddam links trace back to a failed 1959 assassination attempt on the life of then-Iraqi-prime-minister Abdul Karim Qasim. Go to the linked article for all the additional links.

________________

March 06, 2008
Obama’s Iraqi Oil for Food connection
By Andrew Walden American Thinker

Out on bail awaiting trial, dual US-Syrian citizen, Antoin ‘Tony’ Rezko, was rousted out of bed by police pounding on the doors of his Chicago mansion the morning of Monday, January 28. According to the Associated Press:
“U.S. District Judge Amy J. St. Eve jailed Rezko…saying he had disobeyed her order to keep her posted on his financial status. Among other things, he failed to tell her about a $3.5 million loan from London-based Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi — a loan that was later forgiven in exchange for shares in a prime slice of Chicago real estate. Rezko gave $700,000 of the money to his wife and used the rest to pay legal bills and funnel cash to various supporters.”
Funds from Auchi’s loan may have helped finance a complex series of transactions between Rezko and Democratic Presidential candidate Illinois Senator Barack Obama involving the 2005 purchase of Obama’s Chicago mansion and Rezko’s purchase of an adjoining landlocked parcel.
The Times of London reports:
“A company related to Mr. Auchi, who has a conviction for corruption in France, registered the loan to Mr. Obama’s bagman Antoin ‘Tony’ Rezko on May, 23 2005. Mr. Auchi says the loan, through the Panamanian company Fintrade Services SA, was for $3.5 million.
“Three weeks later, Mr. Obama bought a house on the city’s South Side while Mr Rezko’s wife bought the garden plot next door from the same seller on the same day, June 15. Mr. Obama says he never used Mrs. Rezko’s still-empty lot, which could only be accessed through his property. But he admits he paid his gardener to mow the lawn.”
Rezko’s relationship with Barack Obama goes back to at least 1990, when Obama’s law firm did work relating to a Rezko housing development. Rezko was a key early-money fund raiser in Obama’s state Senate campaigns and his failed run at the US Congress. In June 2005, when the mansion was purchased, Rezko was widely known to be under federal investigation. Rezko also is a key fundraiser for Illinois Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich.
The sudden emergence of Auchi into this story indicates Rezko’s deals may include a money trail leading back to dead Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Auchi’s Saddam links trace back to a failed 1959 assassination attempt on the life of then-Iraqi-prime-minister Abdul Karim Qasim.
Auchi’s General Mediterranean Holdings company was also the largest private shareholder in Banque Nationale de Paris which later merged with Paribas to become BNP Paribas. At Saddam’s insistence, billions of dollars of Oil for Food transactions passed through BNP from its 1995 inception until 2001.
In January 2004, Iraqi newspaper Al-Mada published a list of 270 Oil for Food beneficiaries. The list was translated and published on line by The Middle East Media Research Institute. Hundreds of millions of dollars of Oil for Food money was illegally diverted to buy Saddam favor from the United Nations, possibly reaching as high as Secretary general Kofi Annan’s son. Also receiving million’s from Saddam’s slush fund were heads of state and their associates from Russia, France, China, and numerous Islamic countries.
The Auchi-Obama links go beyond the mansion deal. The Times of London February 1 reports uncovering, “state documents in Illinois recording that Fintrade Services, a Panamanian company, lent money to (an) Obama fundraiser in May 2005. Fintrade’s directors include Ibtisam Auchi, the name of Mr. Auchi’s wife.”
Auchi, a Chaldean Christian, was later pardoned by Qasim. As Saddam’s Baath party took power, Auchi prospered. He went to work for the Iraqi Ministry of Oil in 1967. He rose to be Oil Ministry Director of Planning and Development before leaving Iraq in 1979. His brother was apparently killed by Saddam’s regime as were family of many high-ranking Baathists. But there are also claims that Auchi continued secretly working for Saddam’s intelligence services, a kind of dual reality not uncommon in the twisted world of Saddam’s upper echelons.
What is certain is that Auchi prospered mightily collecting “commissions” on sale of weapons and other goods to Iraq in the 1980s and 1990s. Living in the UK, he is now listed as Britain’s 18th-richest man. The Times of London reports, “On the 20th anniversary of his business in 1999, Mr. Auchi received a greeting card signed by 130 politicians, including (Prime Minister) Tony Blair, (Conservative Party leader) William Hague and (Liberal-Democratic Party leader) Charles Kennedy….”
In spite of his British connections and an earlier 2004 US visit, Auchi was denied entry into the US in 2005. It is believed that he was attempting in 2005 to win a US visa with the help of Rezko several as-yet-unnamed Illinois political figures. Among Auchi’s many international awards is a 2005 election as an “Honorary Member in the International College of Surgeons in Chicago, Illinois.” Obama has denied trying to help Auchi.
Auchi has played a role in BNP since the late 1970s. When BNP was privatized by the French government in 1993, Auchi acquired stock in the banking giant through his Luxembourg-based company, General Mediterranean Holdings. Auchi played a key role in BNP’s 2000 merger with Paribas. According to the New York Times, “As recently as 2001, General Mediterranean Holdings described itself in an annual report as one of largest single shareholders in BNP Paribas.” Saddam used Oil for Food fraud to channel millions of dollars to heads of state, activists, terrorists, and journalists–many of whom returned the favor by backing Saddam in 2003 when the US finally invaded.
In 2003 Auchi was convicted in France for receiving about $100 million in illegal commissions as part of a scandal involving the French oil giant Elf Aquitane. The UK Guardian wrote:
“(Elf was) the biggest fraud inquiry in Europe since the Second World War. Elf became a private bank for its executives who spent £200 million on political favours, mistresses, jewellery, fine art, villas and apartments.”
Auchi’s General Mediterranean Holdings also has connections to the new Iraq-connections which lead right back to Tony Rezko. Auchi’s company helped finance a 250 megawatt power plant in the Kurdish town of Chamchamal, Iraq, teaming up with Rezko and Iraq’s former Minister of Electricity, Aiham Alsamarrae. Alsamarrae, a Chicago resident with dual US-Iraqi citizenship is accused of graft involving Iraq reconstruction projects-an embarrassing connection for the war critic Obama.
Returning in 2003 to post-Saddam Iraq, Alsamarrae had been made Minister of Electricity under the occupation government of Paul Bremer. Alsamarrae escaped in what he called “the Chicago way” from the Green Zone in December, 2006 after being held for four months in relation to a $2 billion Iraqi reconstruction corruption case. He is now living in his Chicago mansion.
Writing in Human Events, March 3, 2008, John Batchelor reports on an Alsammarae-Obama-Rezko connection:
“…in April 2005, one month before Mr. Alsammarae left his post, his Ministry of Electricity signed a contract for $50 million with Companion Security to provide training to Iraqis to guard electrical plants by flying them to Illinois for classes.
“Companion Security was headed by a former Chicago policeman with a troubled history, Daniel T. Frawley, in partnership with Mr. Rezko and in association with Daniel Mahru, the lawyer for the original contract and Mr. Rezko’s former business partner. In April 2006, Mr. Frawley entered negotiations with Governor Rod Blagojevich’s staff to lease a military facility in Illinois to be a training camp. In August 2006, Mr. Frawley started negotiations with Mr. Obama’s U.S. Senate staff to complete the contract….
“The timeline of Companion discussions in 2006 is important to note: April 2006 Frawley speaks to governor’s office; August 2006 Frawley speaks to senator’s office; October 2006 indictment of Rezko revealed; October 2006 Rezko arrested upon return from Syria; October 2006 Alsammarae convicted in Baghdad and makes his first escape attempt; December 2006 Alsammarae escapes from Baghdad. …
“(In 2004) Mr. Auchi traveled by private aircraft to Midway Airport in Chicago and then to a fete at the Four Season Hotel, where he met with his business partner in Chicago real estate, Mr. Rezko, as well as with Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Also present that night, according to a fresh report by James Bone and Dominic Kennedy of the London Times, was State Senator Barack Obama, who had recently won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat….”
Most politicians try to keep their financial backers out of trouble until after the election. But Rezko, is already indicted by a federal grand jury. And now his trial has begun in a Chicago federal court.
Rezko, along with Ali Ata and Abdelhamid Chaib, face federal grand jury charges presented in October 2006 by U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois Patrick Fitzgerald. The case revolves around allegations of fraud between 2000 and 2004 in the sale of 17 Papa Johns’ Pizza parlors in Detroit, Chicago and Milwaukee. The case may begin with pizza but it could easily lead back to Europe, Syria, Iraq, and the UN Oil for Food program.
Fitzgerald is the prosecutor who won perjury convictions against Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, in March, 2007. Chaib is an officer of several of Rezko’s restaurant chains including Chicagoland Panda Express franchises. Ata was appointed Executive Director of the Illinois Finance Authority by Governor Blagojevich. Ata was also a former president of the Chicago Chapter of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and had a financial interest in Rezko’s restaurants. Ata reportedly donated as much as $60,000 to Blagojevich and $5,000 to Obama. Rezko reportedly raised as much as $500,000 for Blagojevich and at least $70,000 for Obama’s various campaigns. Obama has redirected as much as $150,000 in donations “bundled” by Rezko.
Rezko has other unsavory financial ties. Arab American Media Services reports:
“In 1997, Panda Express won the right to open a lucrative concession at O’Hare International Airport under the city’s Minority Set-Aside program which directs large contracts to companies owned by Women, African Americans or Hispanics. The city awarded a 10-year contract for O’Hare Airport to Crucial Inc. in 1999, which the city believed was owned by an African American, Jabir Herbert Muhammad, the son of the late Elijah Mohammad.”
Elijah Mohammad led the Nation of Islam until his death in 1975. Jabir Herbert Muhammad was sued in 1999 by boxer Muhammad Ali for unauthorized use of his name in connection with the so-called Muhammad Ali Foundation. Rezko served as Executive Director of the Foundation.
Jay Stewart of the Better Government Assn. in Chicago told the LA Times:
“Everybody in this town knew that Tony Rezko was headed for trouble. When he got indicted, there wasn’t a single insider who was surprised. It was viewed as a long time coming. . . . Why would you be having anything to do with Tony Rezko, particularly if you’re planning to run for president?”
At a March 3 news conference in San Antonio, Texas, Chicago-based reporters peppered Obama with some of the questions the national news corps has avoided for over a year. Obama claims he had already answered the questions in the Chicago media. He said: “These requests, I think, could just go on forever. At some point, what we need to try to do is respond to what’s pertinent.”
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post wrote:
“Reporters, however, had a different idea of what was pertinent, and the questions about Rezko, NAFTA and other unpleasant subjects continued to come. An aide called out ‘last question,’ and Obama made his move for the exit — only for reporters to shout after him in protest. ‘C’mon, guys,’ he pleaded. ‘I just answered, like, eight questions.’”
Obama has refused to sit down at length with the Chicago reporters who have worked this story for years. But as Milbank pointed out, “The questioning…has only just begun.” With old-time Chicago corruption now going international-and Presidential–finding those answers is more urgent than ever.

Posted by 2164th at 3/07/2008 10:44:00 AM

Labels: Barack Obama, Nadhmi Auchi, Tony Rezko

I don’t intend this to get out of hand, so when you feel yourself ready to reach for the Pepto just take a break and come back when you want to. It gets more and more interesting as you go along.

I took this little ditty from none other than the Washington Post. I know there’re more about the subject but I won’t make this too intense.

Candidate Watch

Obama’s ‘Weatherman’ Connection

Chicago Police photos of William Ayers in 1968

“William Ayers, in the age of terrorism, will be Barack Obama’s Willie Horton.”
–Former counterterrorism official Larry C. Johnson, The Huffington Post, Feb. 16, 2008.

There has been a sudden spate of blog items and newspaper articles, mainly in the British press, linking Barack Obama to a former member of the radical Weather Underground Organization that claimed responsibility for a dozen bombings between 1970 and 1974. The former Weatherman, William Ayers, now holds the position of distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Although never convicted of any crime, he told the New York Times in September 2001, “I don’t regret setting bombs…I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Both Obama and Ayers were members of the board of an anti-poverty group, the Woods Fund of Chicago, between 1999 and 2002. In addition, Ayers contributed $200 to Obama’s re-election fund to the Illinois State Senate in April 2001, as reported here. They lived within a few blocks of each other in the trendy Hyde Park section of Chicago, and moved in the same liberal-progressive circles.

Is there anything here that raises questions about Obama’s judgment or is this just another example of guilt by association?

The Facts

The first article in the mainstream press linking Obama to Ayers appeared in the London Daily Mail on February 2. It was written by Peter Hitchens, the right-wing brother of the left-wing firebrand turned Iraq war supporter, Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens cited the Ayers connection to bolster his argument that Obama is “far more radical than he would like us to know.”

The Hitchens piece was followed by a Bloomberg article last week pointing to the Ayers connection as support for Hillary Clinton’s contention that Obama might not be able to withstand the “Republican attack machine.” Larry Johnson, a former counterterrorism official at the CIA and the State Department, predicted that the Republicans would seize on the Ayers case, and other Chicago relationships, to “bludgeon Obama’s presidential aspirations into the dust.”

The London Sunday Times joined the chorus this weekend by reporting that Republicans were “out to crush Barack by painting him as a leftwinger with dubious support”.

The only hard facts that have come out so far are the $200 contribution by Ayers to the Obama re-election fund, and their joint membership of the eight-person Woods Fund Board. Ayers did not respond to e-mails and telephone calls requesting clarification of the relationship. Obama spokesman Bill Burton noted in a statement that Ayers was a professor of education at the University of Illinois and a former aide to Mayor Richard M. Daley, and continued:

Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence. But he was an eight-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost forty years ago is ridiculous.

In the short term, the person who has most to gain by speculation about Obama’s acquaintance with a former terrorist is Hillary Clinton. The former First Lady likes to present herself as “tested and vetted” after years of exposure to Republican attacks, in contrast to Obama, a relative newcomer to hardscrabble presidential politics. Such arguments resonate with Johnson, the counterterrorism expert, who told me that he is a Clinton supporter, although not involved with the campaign.

But the Obama-Ayers link is a tenuous one. As Newsday pointed out, Clinton has her own, also tenuous, Weatherman connection. Her husband commuted the sentences of a couple of convicted Weather Underground members, Susan Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans, shortly before leaving office in January 2001. Which is worse: pardoning a convicted terrorist or accepting a campaign contribution from a former Weatherman who was never convicted?

Whatever his past, Ayers is now a respected member of the Chicago intelligentsia, and still a member of the Woods Fund Board. The president of the Woods Fund, Deborah Harrington, said he had been selected for the board because of his solid academic credentials and “passion for social justice.”

“This whole connection is a stretch,” Harrington told me. “Barack was very well known in Chicago, and a highly respected legislator. It would be difficult to find people round here who never volunteered or contributed money to one of his campaigns.”

SAN FRANCISCO – "A measure seeking to commemorate President Bush’s years in office by slapping his name on a San Francisco sewage plant has qualified for the November ballot. The measure certified Thursday would rename the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant the George W. Bush Sewage Plant."

Jump to Yahoo: Proposed George W. Bush Sewage Plant makes ballot

Taxpayers in Mississippi will pay $2.6 billion for total Iraq war spending approved to date.  That’s 2600 million.

Taxpayers in Mississippi will pay $529.8 million for tax cuts for the richest 10% in FY 2009.

Have a nice day folks.

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The Republicans have pert near had a strangle hold on the entire Federal Government for the past 10 years running, at least, and we see the sad, sad, state we now find ourselves enduring daily.  Yet it’s the democrats trying to make them look bad.  Too funny.

The article also provided another belly laugh when Wicker reached way down into his bag of goodies and came out with the all-new, all-profound, statement, …. are you ready for this? …. "it’s Bill Clinton’s fault".  It just don’t get no funnier than this folks. I know a fella down the road and he just knows that everything negative that has happened since 1975 is Bill Clinton’s fault!

Oh well I guess you’ve got to "run" on something, and if you’re a Republican, it sure as hell can’t be your record.