THOUGHTS ON OBAMAS JUDGEMENT
This business of Rezko is important; there are many unanswered questions that go to judgment. Senator Obama's purchase of his house on the same day as Mrs. Rezko's purchase of the side lot at a time it was well known that Mr. Rezko was under investigation is more than just 'boneheaded'. Mr. Rezko was indicted October 2006, why did it take Senator Obama until January 2008 to donate this money from Rezko? He has known Mr. Rezko for well over 17 years, why give the impression it was just '5 hours' of work during the debate?
A reader tossed out Norman Hsu's donations to Senator Clinton. You might want to read up, Mr. Hsu has donated money to many Democrats and the Democratic Party as well as Senator Obama.
Then there is the matter of his early political years. The Chicago Tribune has an article "Obama Knows his way Around a Ballot". His challenges to the other candidate’s signatures to get on the ballot, leaving him as the only candidate, gives me great pause. It may have indeed been, as he claimed, his legal right, but it certainly was not fair, it certainly wasn't the image of a candidate who claims to be above it all.
There was another candidate not to long ago, who also talked of unity, changing Washington, he was like able we were told, in fact, they told us he was the kind of guy you could have a beer with, many people voted for him his name is President Bush.
Why is everyone so angry at Hillary for brining it up? She went there because Obama started the accusations in the debate...she followed suite. We should be glad the info is coming out to investigate. Why be angry at Clinton for Obamas "lack in judgment?" He claims his judgment is better than all the so called Washington politicians. This is questionable to say the least. Truth is he is like them.
Why is it up to Clinton to bring this up? Why hasn't the media brought it up on their own?. Oh and by the way, on top of all of his "not present votes" he didn't bother to show up in the US Senate to vote for the Iran Resolution, such an important vote that he condemns Hillary for, yet he didn't even vote. Why? Because there isn't a chance to vote "Present" and not have to put on record your vote? And the "oops" I made a mistake and pushed the wrong button 6 times in the Illinois Senate? Isn't your only job in the moment to push the right button? Or ... did you really want to change your vote because it was not popular. We are choosing a President....and he has to make sure that he can push the button he intends on pushing.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
OBAMA UN-MASKED-ARTICLE
Politics
Obama unmasked
Andrew Stephen
What's going wrong for the man who would be president? Our US editor Andrew Stephen reports from Washington.
We at the New Statesman must take some of the blame, I suppose. Barack Obama had been a senator for just ten months in 2005 when we devoted a cover to his face, anointing him as one of ten people likely to have an impact on the world. It was only during 2007, however, that the American media fell head-over-heels in love with Obama; when he trounced Hillary Clinton in the Democratic party caucuses in Iowa on 3 January, it seemed that the electorate was swooning in a headlong rush to the altar with Obama, too. By the end of the first week of the '08 presidential election year, the media had all but handed over the keys to the White House to him.
So it all came as a shock to the pundits and pollsters on the night of 8 January when, despite predictions of an overwhelming Obama triumph, it became clear that the voters of New Hampshire had given Hillary Clinton the victory over Obama she badly needed. The reason for the media's distortions, I believe, is that Obama's relationship with the press and the electorate is still at the stage of starry-eyed infatuation. Yes, he is a mesmerising political orator who offers a magic elixir that somehow contains both stimulants and sedatives: that we need not worry about the present or future, because we can look forward to a new dawn of hope and reassurance in the safe hands of President Obama. Exactly how and why this would happen is not clear, but it is heady and exciting stuff.
I suspect that the longer the relationship continues, however, the more Obama's many faults and shortcomings as a presidential candidate will emerge. In his speech admitting defeat in New Hampshire on Tuesday, for example, a hint of his bad-tempered haughtiness emerged. He is not the fresh-faced young idealist the media like to portray, but a hard-headed 46-year-old lawyer whose monumental drive and political calculations make the Clintons seem like a pair of amateurs. The media and electorate may have fallen in love with him spontaneously, but Obama has been carefully plotting his strategy to seduce them for decades.
A little "blow"
Even dedicated political operators such as the Clintons, for example, did not publish self-promoting memoirs at the age of 33 - but that is exactly what Obama did, revealing his use of cocaine ("a little blow") before anybody else could beat him to it, for example. In those memoirs, Dreams from My Father, he burnished a personal and political résumé that, in places, seemed almost unbelievable - so I was not surprised to read in his introduction to the reissued edition of "selective lapses of memory" and "the temptation to colour events in ways favourable to the writer".
I'll provide two brief examples of how Obama did just that. He wrote movingly of a turning point in his life when, as a nine-year-old, he read in Life magazine of a "black man who had tried to peel off his skin". But the Chicago Tribune - it and the Chicago Sun-Times being honourable exceptions to the media quiescence I have described - reported that "no such Life issue exists", and an exhaustive search of similar magazines failed to find any article remotely similar to the one Obama had described. The Obama media machine, too, obligingly enabled television crews this month to interview Obama's very elderly Kenyan "grandmother"; the only problem was that the woman in rural Kenya was not Obama's grandmother, but the alleged foster mother of Obama's father. "Give me a break . . . this whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen," huffed Bill Clinton, visiting Dartmouth College on the eve of the New Hampshire vote, telling his audience the US media are not being tough enough on Obama.
Politically, there is remarkably little difference between the three leading Democrats - Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. Obama was not in the Senate in 2002 and did not therefore vote for the resolution that authorised the invasion of Iraq. But he has not been the sainted man of peace his supporters portray, either. In his three years in the Senate he has kept his head safely below the parapet, leaving two congressional colleagues - Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania - to spearhead opposition to the war on Capitol Hill. In 2006 he voted against a Senate resolution calling for the withdrawal of troops and has also voted to continue funding the war.
Most recently, he said he would not hesitate to send US troops into Pakistan without Pakistan's permission to hunt down terrorists, and he insists that the US must not "cede our claim of leadership in world affairs". He wants the military to "stay on the offensive, from Djibouti to Kandahar" and to increase defence expenditure. Like most identikit US mainstream politicians, he talks of "rogue nations" and "hostile dictators", and says the US must maintain "a strong nuclear deterrent" and be ready to "seize" the "American moment". He appeared to support Israel's attack on Lebanon, but then said "nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people" - which, in turn, he denied saying.
In the meantime he let his mentor and fellow senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin, swing alone in the wind after Durbin - perhaps the most liberal Democrat in the Senate - compared US interrogation techniques of prisoners in Guantanamo with those of the Soviet Union, Nazis and Khmer Rouge. He voted to reauthorise the Bush administration's repressive Patriot Act, and says that as president he would not rule out a US first-strike nuclear attack on Iran.
His equivocations and contradictions thus proliferate. He promised solemnly on coast-to-coast live television on NBC in 2006 that he would complete his six-year Senate term and definitely not run for the presidency. He voted in favour of President Bush's nomination of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state. I am not the first to see Obama's self-portrayal as almost Christlike: a young black man is tormented by racism and gets into drugs, and only his own inner goodness rescues him from the ghettos to which he was surely consigned. Human foibles - that he smokes and likes playing poker, for example - are determinedly kept under wraps.
Dysfunctional
The sad point of all this is that the reality of his life is actually much more fascinating than the manufactured version. His background is strikingly dysfunctional but by no means economically underprivileged. His eccentric white American mother met his Kenyan father when both were students at the University of Hawaii, but like so many male politicians - Bill Clinton, for one - his father, an alcoholic who ended up fathering several families before being killed in a car accident in Kenya in 1982, was literally and figuratively absent from his life. He abandoned Obama and his mother to take up a scholarship at Harvard when the young Barack was a toddler. So much for his Kenyan "relatives".
His mother, who died in 1995, subsequently remarried an Indonesian student destined to become an oil company executive, and the newlyweds took the young Obama to live in Jakarta when he was six. He duly attended a local school that the Fox News channel gleefully but inaccurately labelled a madrasa. His middle name, like his father's, is Hussein - though Obama insists that his father was not, in fact, a Muslim but an atheist. The adult Obama now attends the evangelical Trinity United Church of Christ in Chi cago and says he is a devout Christian.
The young Obama acquired a half-sister when he lived in Jakarta (she is now a Buddhist), but his mother sent him to live permanently with his white grandparents in Honolulu when he was ten. He then began a new, elitist life that even he describes as "a childhood dream": surfing in Hawaii and attending the renowned private Punahou School, founded by Congregationalist missionaries in 1841 and known to local people as a school for the haole (whites). Its annual tuition today costs $15,725.
Far from being the brilliant student his image suggests, Obama was a consistently B-grade pupil. He went on to attend Occidental College, a perfectly respectable private liberal arts college in Los Angeles, but hardly an academic powerhouse; its present-day endowment is $377m. He transferred to Columbia University in New York and completed his degree there, and finally graduated with a degree from Harvard Law School at the age of 30. His upwardly mobile ascent had begun, and Obama joined the Chicago law firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland. He began his professional political career when he stood successfully for the Illinois General Assembly (the state senate) in 1996.
Here we come to one of the major contradictions between Obama's image and reality. The media, both here and in Britain, assume that Obama has the black vote sewn up - a Daily Telegraph columnist, with stupendous racism, casually asserted on Monday that Hillary Clinton has lost an opportunity because American blacks now "have one of their own to support" - but Obama is regarded with suspicion by most African Americans. My postman, for example, screws up his face with disdain at the mere mention of Obama's name. He alienated much of the black political Establishment in 2000, when he ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primaries against the incumbent congressman for an Illinois district, Representative Bobby Rush - a former Black Panther and current leading member of the Congressional Black Caucus. His congressional district has more black people than any other in the country, and Obama lost to Rush by 31 points.
In a career that has seemed - until now, at least - to be unstoppable, he nonetheless went on to win the Democratic nomination to run for the US Senate in 2004. The seat was being vacated by a retiring Republican, Peter Fitzgerald, but Obama had a tremendous stroke of luck: the former wife of his strong Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, made sordid allegations about their sex life and Ryan was forced to drop out. He was replaced by Alan Keyes, a former black activist and diplomat who had morphed into a figure of the far right and become one of America's fully paid-up political lunatics. Obama, having won national attention for the first time by delivering the keynote address at John Kerry's Democratic coronation convention in Boston the previous July, won by a 70-27 per cent landslide.
Which brings us back to his entry to the Senate in 2005 and our cover of him less than ten months later. Part of Obama's contrived sainthood is an undertaking that he will not take funds from lobbyists or political action committees. But, like the Clintons and just about any other American politician, he has assiduously done just that. According to the Washington Post, Hillary Clinton has so far raised $78,615,215 and Obama $78,915,507; Obama's campaign has relied heavily on people such as Kenneth Griffin, a Chicago-based hedge-fund manager who reportedly earned $1.4bn last year.
The further away you get from Chicago, though, the more the saintly image takes hold. Publications like the New Yorker may coo for pages over "the conciliator", but the two Chicago newspapers are much more interested in Obama's close 17-year friendship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a long-time Obama donor and property developer awaiting trial on charges of attempted extortion, money laundering and fraud. A low-income housing project received more than $14m from taxpayers while Obama was a state senator, but he consistently denied that he had done any favours for Rezko.
The hope mantra
That was until the Chicago Sun-Times unearthed two letters Obama wrote to state officials in 1998 urging them to grant extra funds for Rezko's project. Democrats and Republicans alike in Chicago, too, are intrigued by the question of why Obama paid $1.65m for a mansion in the city's south side in 2005 - $300,000 less than the asking price - on the very same day Rezko's wife happened to buy the house next door for the asking price. In their tax return for the following year, Obama and his wife, Michelle, who is vice-president of a non-profit hospital organisation, reported taxable income of $983,826 for 2006, down from $1.6m the previous year.
"Hope" is the mantra word in Obama's magic elixir, but Bruce Reed - president of the Democratic Leadership Council - points out that tens of millions of Americans are supporting Obama not because of what he's done, but because of what they hope he might do. "We don't need leaders to tell us we can't do what we need to do," Obama said in a typical stump speech on 7 January. "We need them to say 'yes, we can', to say 'yes, we believe'."
Huge crowds roar their approval over lines like this, long on beautifully delivered rhetoric but short on facts and concrete undertakings. A casual observer might assume Obama is proposing a vastly more ambitious health-care plan than Clinton; in fact, the reverse is true.
Those who know Obama say privately that he has a healthy sense of entitlement that often manifests itself in an imperious, thin-skinned manner. We caught just a glimpse of this peevishness in his concession speech in New Hampshire, I thought - of a man somehow denied his rightful Schadenfreude over the second humiliating defeat of Clinton that he and the American punditocracy had confidently anticipated. Obama's latest book may be called The Audacity of Hope, but it really should be called The Audacity of Hype.
Obama unmasked
Andrew Stephen
What's going wrong for the man who would be president? Our US editor Andrew Stephen reports from Washington.
We at the New Statesman must take some of the blame, I suppose. Barack Obama had been a senator for just ten months in 2005 when we devoted a cover to his face, anointing him as one of ten people likely to have an impact on the world. It was only during 2007, however, that the American media fell head-over-heels in love with Obama; when he trounced Hillary Clinton in the Democratic party caucuses in Iowa on 3 January, it seemed that the electorate was swooning in a headlong rush to the altar with Obama, too. By the end of the first week of the '08 presidential election year, the media had all but handed over the keys to the White House to him.
So it all came as a shock to the pundits and pollsters on the night of 8 January when, despite predictions of an overwhelming Obama triumph, it became clear that the voters of New Hampshire had given Hillary Clinton the victory over Obama she badly needed. The reason for the media's distortions, I believe, is that Obama's relationship with the press and the electorate is still at the stage of starry-eyed infatuation. Yes, he is a mesmerising political orator who offers a magic elixir that somehow contains both stimulants and sedatives: that we need not worry about the present or future, because we can look forward to a new dawn of hope and reassurance in the safe hands of President Obama. Exactly how and why this would happen is not clear, but it is heady and exciting stuff.
I suspect that the longer the relationship continues, however, the more Obama's many faults and shortcomings as a presidential candidate will emerge. In his speech admitting defeat in New Hampshire on Tuesday, for example, a hint of his bad-tempered haughtiness emerged. He is not the fresh-faced young idealist the media like to portray, but a hard-headed 46-year-old lawyer whose monumental drive and political calculations make the Clintons seem like a pair of amateurs. The media and electorate may have fallen in love with him spontaneously, but Obama has been carefully plotting his strategy to seduce them for decades.
A little "blow"
Even dedicated political operators such as the Clintons, for example, did not publish self-promoting memoirs at the age of 33 - but that is exactly what Obama did, revealing his use of cocaine ("a little blow") before anybody else could beat him to it, for example. In those memoirs, Dreams from My Father, he burnished a personal and political résumé that, in places, seemed almost unbelievable - so I was not surprised to read in his introduction to the reissued edition of "selective lapses of memory" and "the temptation to colour events in ways favourable to the writer".
I'll provide two brief examples of how Obama did just that. He wrote movingly of a turning point in his life when, as a nine-year-old, he read in Life magazine of a "black man who had tried to peel off his skin". But the Chicago Tribune - it and the Chicago Sun-Times being honourable exceptions to the media quiescence I have described - reported that "no such Life issue exists", and an exhaustive search of similar magazines failed to find any article remotely similar to the one Obama had described. The Obama media machine, too, obligingly enabled television crews this month to interview Obama's very elderly Kenyan "grandmother"; the only problem was that the woman in rural Kenya was not Obama's grandmother, but the alleged foster mother of Obama's father. "Give me a break . . . this whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen," huffed Bill Clinton, visiting Dartmouth College on the eve of the New Hampshire vote, telling his audience the US media are not being tough enough on Obama.
Politically, there is remarkably little difference between the three leading Democrats - Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. Obama was not in the Senate in 2002 and did not therefore vote for the resolution that authorised the invasion of Iraq. But he has not been the sainted man of peace his supporters portray, either. In his three years in the Senate he has kept his head safely below the parapet, leaving two congressional colleagues - Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania - to spearhead opposition to the war on Capitol Hill. In 2006 he voted against a Senate resolution calling for the withdrawal of troops and has also voted to continue funding the war.
Most recently, he said he would not hesitate to send US troops into Pakistan without Pakistan's permission to hunt down terrorists, and he insists that the US must not "cede our claim of leadership in world affairs". He wants the military to "stay on the offensive, from Djibouti to Kandahar" and to increase defence expenditure. Like most identikit US mainstream politicians, he talks of "rogue nations" and "hostile dictators", and says the US must maintain "a strong nuclear deterrent" and be ready to "seize" the "American moment". He appeared to support Israel's attack on Lebanon, but then said "nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people" - which, in turn, he denied saying.
In the meantime he let his mentor and fellow senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin, swing alone in the wind after Durbin - perhaps the most liberal Democrat in the Senate - compared US interrogation techniques of prisoners in Guantanamo with those of the Soviet Union, Nazis and Khmer Rouge. He voted to reauthorise the Bush administration's repressive Patriot Act, and says that as president he would not rule out a US first-strike nuclear attack on Iran.
His equivocations and contradictions thus proliferate. He promised solemnly on coast-to-coast live television on NBC in 2006 that he would complete his six-year Senate term and definitely not run for the presidency. He voted in favour of President Bush's nomination of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state. I am not the first to see Obama's self-portrayal as almost Christlike: a young black man is tormented by racism and gets into drugs, and only his own inner goodness rescues him from the ghettos to which he was surely consigned. Human foibles - that he smokes and likes playing poker, for example - are determinedly kept under wraps.
Dysfunctional
The sad point of all this is that the reality of his life is actually much more fascinating than the manufactured version. His background is strikingly dysfunctional but by no means economically underprivileged. His eccentric white American mother met his Kenyan father when both were students at the University of Hawaii, but like so many male politicians - Bill Clinton, for one - his father, an alcoholic who ended up fathering several families before being killed in a car accident in Kenya in 1982, was literally and figuratively absent from his life. He abandoned Obama and his mother to take up a scholarship at Harvard when the young Barack was a toddler. So much for his Kenyan "relatives".
His mother, who died in 1995, subsequently remarried an Indonesian student destined to become an oil company executive, and the newlyweds took the young Obama to live in Jakarta when he was six. He duly attended a local school that the Fox News channel gleefully but inaccurately labelled a madrasa. His middle name, like his father's, is Hussein - though Obama insists that his father was not, in fact, a Muslim but an atheist. The adult Obama now attends the evangelical Trinity United Church of Christ in Chi cago and says he is a devout Christian.
The young Obama acquired a half-sister when he lived in Jakarta (she is now a Buddhist), but his mother sent him to live permanently with his white grandparents in Honolulu when he was ten. He then began a new, elitist life that even he describes as "a childhood dream": surfing in Hawaii and attending the renowned private Punahou School, founded by Congregationalist missionaries in 1841 and known to local people as a school for the haole (whites). Its annual tuition today costs $15,725.
Far from being the brilliant student his image suggests, Obama was a consistently B-grade pupil. He went on to attend Occidental College, a perfectly respectable private liberal arts college in Los Angeles, but hardly an academic powerhouse; its present-day endowment is $377m. He transferred to Columbia University in New York and completed his degree there, and finally graduated with a degree from Harvard Law School at the age of 30. His upwardly mobile ascent had begun, and Obama joined the Chicago law firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland. He began his professional political career when he stood successfully for the Illinois General Assembly (the state senate) in 1996.
Here we come to one of the major contradictions between Obama's image and reality. The media, both here and in Britain, assume that Obama has the black vote sewn up - a Daily Telegraph columnist, with stupendous racism, casually asserted on Monday that Hillary Clinton has lost an opportunity because American blacks now "have one of their own to support" - but Obama is regarded with suspicion by most African Americans. My postman, for example, screws up his face with disdain at the mere mention of Obama's name. He alienated much of the black political Establishment in 2000, when he ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primaries against the incumbent congressman for an Illinois district, Representative Bobby Rush - a former Black Panther and current leading member of the Congressional Black Caucus. His congressional district has more black people than any other in the country, and Obama lost to Rush by 31 points.
In a career that has seemed - until now, at least - to be unstoppable, he nonetheless went on to win the Democratic nomination to run for the US Senate in 2004. The seat was being vacated by a retiring Republican, Peter Fitzgerald, but Obama had a tremendous stroke of luck: the former wife of his strong Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, made sordid allegations about their sex life and Ryan was forced to drop out. He was replaced by Alan Keyes, a former black activist and diplomat who had morphed into a figure of the far right and become one of America's fully paid-up political lunatics. Obama, having won national attention for the first time by delivering the keynote address at John Kerry's Democratic coronation convention in Boston the previous July, won by a 70-27 per cent landslide.
Which brings us back to his entry to the Senate in 2005 and our cover of him less than ten months later. Part of Obama's contrived sainthood is an undertaking that he will not take funds from lobbyists or political action committees. But, like the Clintons and just about any other American politician, he has assiduously done just that. According to the Washington Post, Hillary Clinton has so far raised $78,615,215 and Obama $78,915,507; Obama's campaign has relied heavily on people such as Kenneth Griffin, a Chicago-based hedge-fund manager who reportedly earned $1.4bn last year.
The further away you get from Chicago, though, the more the saintly image takes hold. Publications like the New Yorker may coo for pages over "the conciliator", but the two Chicago newspapers are much more interested in Obama's close 17-year friendship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a long-time Obama donor and property developer awaiting trial on charges of attempted extortion, money laundering and fraud. A low-income housing project received more than $14m from taxpayers while Obama was a state senator, but he consistently denied that he had done any favours for Rezko.
The hope mantra
That was until the Chicago Sun-Times unearthed two letters Obama wrote to state officials in 1998 urging them to grant extra funds for Rezko's project. Democrats and Republicans alike in Chicago, too, are intrigued by the question of why Obama paid $1.65m for a mansion in the city's south side in 2005 - $300,000 less than the asking price - on the very same day Rezko's wife happened to buy the house next door for the asking price. In their tax return for the following year, Obama and his wife, Michelle, who is vice-president of a non-profit hospital organisation, reported taxable income of $983,826 for 2006, down from $1.6m the previous year.
"Hope" is the mantra word in Obama's magic elixir, but Bruce Reed - president of the Democratic Leadership Council - points out that tens of millions of Americans are supporting Obama not because of what he's done, but because of what they hope he might do. "We don't need leaders to tell us we can't do what we need to do," Obama said in a typical stump speech on 7 January. "We need them to say 'yes, we can', to say 'yes, we believe'."
Huge crowds roar their approval over lines like this, long on beautifully delivered rhetoric but short on facts and concrete undertakings. A casual observer might assume Obama is proposing a vastly more ambitious health-care plan than Clinton; in fact, the reverse is true.
Those who know Obama say privately that he has a healthy sense of entitlement that often manifests itself in an imperious, thin-skinned manner. We caught just a glimpse of this peevishness in his concession speech in New Hampshire, I thought - of a man somehow denied his rightful Schadenfreude over the second humiliating defeat of Clinton that he and the American punditocracy had confidently anticipated. Obama's latest book may be called The Audacity of Hope, but it really should be called The Audacity of Hype.
OBAMAS PROBLEMS plus video
Despite Obama's successes so far, it's hard to argue with Bill Clinton that it's a "roll of the dice" to vote for a freshman senator less than four years removed from the Illinois legislature. Obama still has much to prove. The potential for setbacks and mistakes is high.
REZKO: Obama's relationship with indicted businessman Antoin "Tony" Rezko threatens his image as an antidote to the poisons of Washington. Rezko, accused of scheming to pressure companies seeking state business for kickbacks and campaign contributions, poured thousands of dollars into the campaigns of Obama and others. Rezko also helped Obama increase the size of his yard in a transaction that the Illinois senator now calls a "boneheaded" mistake.
RECORD: Scrutiny of Obama's record will increase with each step he takes toward the Democratic nomination. The New York Times recently poked holes in Obama's explanation of his role in legislation that ultimately benefited a nuclear energy company whose executives and employees have donated more than $200,000 to his campaigns.
RACE: Obama makes history with every victory as the first black candidate with a serious shot at the White House. But the question persists: Can a black man win it all? Obama drew support from four in 10 whites across 16 states _ more than he had captured in earlier primary states. He and Clinton tied among white men while Clinton led among white women. Clinton won six in 10 Hispanic voters, a crucial group that helped her win in California and Arizona.
TEMPERAMENT: Unlike his rival, Obama has never experienced a tough campaign _ and it shows at times. Remember when he said in New Hampshire that Clinton was "likable enough"? It grated on female voters. He needs to avoid looking rude, crabby or cocky. His friends would tell you that's not always easy for him.
EXPERIENCE: The unusually self-aware Obama acknowledged last summer that it was "a stretch" for voters to consider him for the presidency. He needs to avoid a miscue that underscores his inexperience. About one-fifth of the Democratic voters Tuesday said they favored a candidate with seasoning, and Clinton won nearly all their votes.
REZKO: Obama's relationship with indicted businessman Antoin "Tony" Rezko threatens his image as an antidote to the poisons of Washington. Rezko, accused of scheming to pressure companies seeking state business for kickbacks and campaign contributions, poured thousands of dollars into the campaigns of Obama and others. Rezko also helped Obama increase the size of his yard in a transaction that the Illinois senator now calls a "boneheaded" mistake.
RECORD: Scrutiny of Obama's record will increase with each step he takes toward the Democratic nomination. The New York Times recently poked holes in Obama's explanation of his role in legislation that ultimately benefited a nuclear energy company whose executives and employees have donated more than $200,000 to his campaigns.
RACE: Obama makes history with every victory as the first black candidate with a serious shot at the White House. But the question persists: Can a black man win it all? Obama drew support from four in 10 whites across 16 states _ more than he had captured in earlier primary states. He and Clinton tied among white men while Clinton led among white women. Clinton won six in 10 Hispanic voters, a crucial group that helped her win in California and Arizona.
TEMPERAMENT: Unlike his rival, Obama has never experienced a tough campaign _ and it shows at times. Remember when he said in New Hampshire that Clinton was "likable enough"? It grated on female voters. He needs to avoid looking rude, crabby or cocky. His friends would tell you that's not always easy for him.
EXPERIENCE: The unusually self-aware Obama acknowledged last summer that it was "a stretch" for voters to consider him for the presidency. He needs to avoid a miscue that underscores his inexperience. About one-fifth of the Democratic voters Tuesday said they favored a candidate with seasoning, and Clinton won nearly all their votes.
VIDEO ON EXELON -click title-
Obama should right a book on how not to answer a question. The fact of the matter is that obama voted for the 2005 energy bill that was the nuclear industry's dream. Why doesnt he go and drink the water in the commnities who's wells have been contaminated by Exelon?
Please do a search on Exelon and Obama. There's more clarity out there than before. It is a very scary story and it involves citizens drinking contaminated water.
Please do a search on Exelon and Obama. There's more clarity out there than before. It is a very scary story and it involves citizens drinking contaminated water.
OBAMA LINKED TO ANTI-HILLARY SITES
Obama Ad on Hillary-Hater Siteby Jason Horowitz
Published: August 15, 2007
Obama Ad on Hillary-Hater Site
Here's something that's probably not in the script for the Obama campaign:
Published: August 15, 2007
Obama Ad on Hillary-Hater Site
Here's something that's probably not in the script for the Obama campaign:
I noticed yesterday on this conservative anti-Hillary web site an ad for Barack Obama's campaign site, prominently displayed among titles like "Truth Boating Hillary" and appeals to "Derail Hillary." The bottom of the ad clearly stated that the "Meet Barack Obama" ad was paid for by Obama for America.
The ad's presence on a site accusing Clinton of breaking federal election laws isn't necessarily the result of a direct decision by the Obama campaign. Most likely, the campaign bought certain key terms from Google, which, through its automated calculations, placed the ads where those key terms appear. (It's noted right under the ad that it was placed by Google.)
Google puts it this way: "Ads by Google are contextually relevant advertisements that appear beside related content on the page."
It's the same reason that Obama ads turned up on web sites sympathetic to Fred Thompson in July.
I asked JT Thompson, the webmaster of the anti-Hillary web site, for an explanation.
Here's what he said:
"The ads on the site are Google's AdSense. As a site owner we have no control over the ads. We DO have the ability to block certain domains from being advertised, but other than that its all based on Google's technology, including special keywords they use. There's no way for us to know that. (What the search terms are.) If it were publicized it would be abused so there's a real tight lipped exchange between publishers and advertisers."
Out of curiosity, I asked the Obama campaign what search terms they might have bought to end up there. Spokewoman Jen Psaki responded only with the following statement:
"The campaign purchases web ads using keywords on google, but most of the sites are chosen through a computerized system. The ad is nolonger on the site and we monitor placement closely."
The ad's presence on a site accusing Clinton of breaking federal election laws isn't necessarily the result of a direct decision by the Obama campaign. Most likely, the campaign bought certain key terms from Google, which, through its automated calculations, placed the ads where those key terms appear. (It's noted right under the ad that it was placed by Google.)
Google puts it this way: "Ads by Google are contextually relevant advertisements that appear beside related content on the page."
It's the same reason that Obama ads turned up on web sites sympathetic to Fred Thompson in July.
I asked JT Thompson, the webmaster of the anti-Hillary web site, for an explanation.
Here's what he said:
"The ads on the site are Google's AdSense. As a site owner we have no control over the ads. We DO have the ability to block certain domains from being advertised, but other than that its all based on Google's technology, including special keywords they use. There's no way for us to know that. (What the search terms are.) If it were publicized it would be abused so there's a real tight lipped exchange between publishers and advertisers."
Out of curiosity, I asked the Obama campaign what search terms they might have bought to end up there. Spokewoman Jen Psaki responded only with the following statement:
"The campaign purchases web ads using keywords on google, but most of the sites are chosen through a computerized system. The ad is nolonger on the site and we monitor placement closely."
DIRTY POLITICS-SSDD
OBAMA FACTS dirty politics
1. In Nevada, a union endorsing Barack Obama unleashed a Spanish language ad that read "Hillary Clinton does not support our people." Barack Obama said he did not support organizations spending their own money on his campaign, but did not take a stand against the claim made in the ad.
2. The Obama Campaign sent out 3-4 page memos to the media with alleged quotes from the Clinton campaign that could be interpreted as racial when used out of context. To give him credit, Barack did acknowledge and apologize for the memos at the Nevada debate. But this only shows how ruthless he is and that he is exactly like all other Washington politicians he claims to be above!!
3. Barack Obama's campaign released television ads that ran on Cable Networks in Florida. David Plouffe, Obama's Campaign Manager, made the claim that no campaigning occurred in Florida -- clearly not true.!!
4. Barack Obama was the ONLY Democrat to have Television ads running in Florida before the primary, and he still lost! Had he won he would be calling for the votes to count.
5. Barack Obama often talks about wanting to unify the nation -- Michigan and Florida are both states where the polls predicted that he would not do well - If he really wanted to unify the nation, he would be willing to seat the delegates at those states, as determined by the primary results, even if those results do not help him. By calling for votes not to count he is no better than George W. Bush who stole one election already, Obama is another election thief.
1. In Nevada, a union endorsing Barack Obama unleashed a Spanish language ad that read "Hillary Clinton does not support our people." Barack Obama said he did not support organizations spending their own money on his campaign, but did not take a stand against the claim made in the ad.
2. The Obama Campaign sent out 3-4 page memos to the media with alleged quotes from the Clinton campaign that could be interpreted as racial when used out of context. To give him credit, Barack did acknowledge and apologize for the memos at the Nevada debate. But this only shows how ruthless he is and that he is exactly like all other Washington politicians he claims to be above!!
3. Barack Obama's campaign released television ads that ran on Cable Networks in Florida. David Plouffe, Obama's Campaign Manager, made the claim that no campaigning occurred in Florida -- clearly not true.!!
4. Barack Obama was the ONLY Democrat to have Television ads running in Florida before the primary, and he still lost! Had he won he would be calling for the votes to count.
5. Barack Obama often talks about wanting to unify the nation -- Michigan and Florida are both states where the polls predicted that he would not do well - If he really wanted to unify the nation, he would be willing to seat the delegates at those states, as determined by the primary results, even if those results do not help him. By calling for votes not to count he is no better than George W. Bush who stole one election already, Obama is another election thief.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Rezko-Obama2-10-08 "OPERATION BOARD GAMES"
chicagotribune.com
'Operation Board Games' besmirches both parties
John Kass
February 10, 2008
The inevitability of President Barack Obama seems all but given now, doesn't it?Just consider those enemy tribes—the Clintonistas and the Limbaughtonians—sullen peasants on a muddy roadside, waiting for the wheels of Obama's glittering coach to spatter their homespun garments.The media so loves Obama that he's transcending again, this time from a politician into a religion.So if some Mt. Vesuvius were to erupt over America, preserving us in its ashen heavings, future archeologists would one day hunch down over our covered forms, and chip away until America was revealed like the Pompeian clay people, our arms outstretched, eager, waiting for Barack.Or, maybe not.
Either way, there are a few who don't consider Obama to be inevitable. They'll be paying close attention to the upcoming federal political corruption trial in Chicago of Obama's personal real estate fairy, indicted political fixer Tony Rezko.You'll be hearing a lot more about "Operation Board Games," but don't make the mistake of thinking that it's all about Democrats. It involves Republicans too.Rezko is a pal of the Democratic Gov. Rod "The Unreformer" Blagojevich. Rezko became involved in the questionable purchase of Obama's home, while under federal investigation. Every politician in Illinois—except for Obama—figured Rezko to be leprous with federal subpoenas. By dancing with Rezko, Obama impeaches his own judgment, and raises questions as to whether he has the presidential stuff.Rezko stands accused of using his Illinois political connections to extort kickbacks and political money from investment firms seeking billions of dollars worth of state business in the investing of state pension funds.But Republicans eager to use the trial to unearth problems about Obama should understand that if they dig deeper in the Rezko case, they will find evidence of the disaster facing them now.Because long before establishment Republicans in Washington lost their credibility—expanding big government, scarfing up pork like the "Bridge to Nowhere," and dealing with corrupt fixers like Jack Abramoff—the leaders of the Illinois GOP were quite busy.Their heads were in the taxpayer trough, their behinds up in the air, curly tails wiggling as they gulped. They ate up the deals, and squeezed out or killed off the conservatives, and danced with the Chicago Machine Democrats and became mouthpieces for the heavily corporate Republican establishment. And they formed an unofficial partnership I call the bi-partisan Illinois Combine.One of the Combine bosses implicated, but not charged, in "Operation Board Games" is Springfield's "Big" Bob Kjellander, a self-professed pal of former White House political guru Karl Rove.Kjellander was the treasurer for the Republican National Committee until he was identified as "Individual K" in the federal indictments. He made $4.5 million in finder's fees on state pension fund deals through the Blagojevich administration—then was made national GOP treasurer. That nifty move, pocketing Democratic money while mouthing Rove's talking points, makes him a candidate for Illinois Combine poster boy.But the real poster boy is Republican boss William "The Pope" Cellini—who started out in patronage, and has since made a fortune in state gaming, development and asphalt empires. Cellini and Kjellander backed Mitt Romney in Illinois, the same Romney who all but called for the ouster of the federal prosecutor investigating them.But that's probably just a coincidence.The other day, federal prosecutors heated Cellini up again, in Rezko court documents. The Tribune published a fascinating and detailed account of this on Friday.Though Cellini has not been charged, prosecutors insisted that he was a significant player in the case involved in extortion and kickbacks. They identified him in court documents as "Co-Schemer A" (that's A as in Alpha) and they knocked down the contention by Rezko's attorneys that since Cellini was not interviewed by investigators or charged, Cellini must be innocent of any crimes."As the court is aware," wrote prosecutors, "there are many other explanations that can account for the failure to charge or interview an individual other than innocence. Rezko's assumption to the contrary is unsupported by the evidence in the case."Republican Cellini's lawyer in the case is former U.S. Atty. Dan Webb, who recently represented the now-imprisoned former Republican Gov. George Ryan.Webb is a boss at the giant law firm Winston & Strawn. Other Winston & Strawn lawyers there are being paid millions of dollars by Blagojevich, presumably for criminal legal work related to "Operation Board Games."Sound confusing? Illinois politics is often quite muddy. Just don't think what's coming is just about the Democrats and Rezko and, by extension, Obama.It's about Republicans in Illinois mud too
'Operation Board Games' besmirches both parties
John Kass
February 10, 2008
The inevitability of President Barack Obama seems all but given now, doesn't it?Just consider those enemy tribes—the Clintonistas and the Limbaughtonians—sullen peasants on a muddy roadside, waiting for the wheels of Obama's glittering coach to spatter their homespun garments.The media so loves Obama that he's transcending again, this time from a politician into a religion.So if some Mt. Vesuvius were to erupt over America, preserving us in its ashen heavings, future archeologists would one day hunch down over our covered forms, and chip away until America was revealed like the Pompeian clay people, our arms outstretched, eager, waiting for Barack.Or, maybe not.
Either way, there are a few who don't consider Obama to be inevitable. They'll be paying close attention to the upcoming federal political corruption trial in Chicago of Obama's personal real estate fairy, indicted political fixer Tony Rezko.You'll be hearing a lot more about "Operation Board Games," but don't make the mistake of thinking that it's all about Democrats. It involves Republicans too.Rezko is a pal of the Democratic Gov. Rod "The Unreformer" Blagojevich. Rezko became involved in the questionable purchase of Obama's home, while under federal investigation. Every politician in Illinois—except for Obama—figured Rezko to be leprous with federal subpoenas. By dancing with Rezko, Obama impeaches his own judgment, and raises questions as to whether he has the presidential stuff.Rezko stands accused of using his Illinois political connections to extort kickbacks and political money from investment firms seeking billions of dollars worth of state business in the investing of state pension funds.But Republicans eager to use the trial to unearth problems about Obama should understand that if they dig deeper in the Rezko case, they will find evidence of the disaster facing them now.Because long before establishment Republicans in Washington lost their credibility—expanding big government, scarfing up pork like the "Bridge to Nowhere," and dealing with corrupt fixers like Jack Abramoff—the leaders of the Illinois GOP were quite busy.Their heads were in the taxpayer trough, their behinds up in the air, curly tails wiggling as they gulped. They ate up the deals, and squeezed out or killed off the conservatives, and danced with the Chicago Machine Democrats and became mouthpieces for the heavily corporate Republican establishment. And they formed an unofficial partnership I call the bi-partisan Illinois Combine.One of the Combine bosses implicated, but not charged, in "Operation Board Games" is Springfield's "Big" Bob Kjellander, a self-professed pal of former White House political guru Karl Rove.Kjellander was the treasurer for the Republican National Committee until he was identified as "Individual K" in the federal indictments. He made $4.5 million in finder's fees on state pension fund deals through the Blagojevich administration—then was made national GOP treasurer. That nifty move, pocketing Democratic money while mouthing Rove's talking points, makes him a candidate for Illinois Combine poster boy.But the real poster boy is Republican boss William "The Pope" Cellini—who started out in patronage, and has since made a fortune in state gaming, development and asphalt empires. Cellini and Kjellander backed Mitt Romney in Illinois, the same Romney who all but called for the ouster of the federal prosecutor investigating them.But that's probably just a coincidence.The other day, federal prosecutors heated Cellini up again, in Rezko court documents. The Tribune published a fascinating and detailed account of this on Friday.Though Cellini has not been charged, prosecutors insisted that he was a significant player in the case involved in extortion and kickbacks. They identified him in court documents as "Co-Schemer A" (that's A as in Alpha) and they knocked down the contention by Rezko's attorneys that since Cellini was not interviewed by investigators or charged, Cellini must be innocent of any crimes."As the court is aware," wrote prosecutors, "there are many other explanations that can account for the failure to charge or interview an individual other than innocence. Rezko's assumption to the contrary is unsupported by the evidence in the case."Republican Cellini's lawyer in the case is former U.S. Atty. Dan Webb, who recently represented the now-imprisoned former Republican Gov. George Ryan.Webb is a boss at the giant law firm Winston & Strawn. Other Winston & Strawn lawyers there are being paid millions of dollars by Blagojevich, presumably for criminal legal work related to "Operation Board Games."Sound confusing? Illinois politics is often quite muddy. Just don't think what's coming is just about the Democrats and Rezko and, by extension, Obama.It's about Republicans in Illinois mud too
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