Rezko Connections: More Questions for Obama

News of the memo changed the whole story, and the Clinton campaign quickly sought to take advantage of it. “At this point what we have is a lot of statements from the Obama campaign that have been proven to be demonstrably false,” Howard Wolfson, Hillary Clinton’s chief spokesman, told reporters Monday. “There is a memo surfacing and circulating in the Canadian government that makes clear that the Obama campaign communicated one thing to the people of Ohio about NAFTA and another thing to the Canadian government about NAFTA.”

What is going on? With the evidence we have so far, Obama appears to be in a difficult position. At first, his campaign denied that there was any contact with the Canadian government. Then, when it was forced to concede that there had been contact, it insisted that it had nothing to do with softening Obama’s position on NAFTA. And then, when the newly-released memo suggested that it had been about just that, Team Obama simply stuck with its story.

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."

What do William Ayers, former Weather Underground, and Rashid Khalidi, the professor at Columbia University who arranged the Ahmedinejad visit and has direct ties to the PLO, and Barack Obama have in common? According to well placed sources, Barak Obama and William Ayers directed money to Rashid Khalidi, the Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. Khalidi has long been at the center of controversy for his anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian statements. In 2005, Khalidi was barred from participating in a teacher training program in the New York City public school system for his extremist statements.

Originally posted by LLoyd45
I don't care for any of the three honestly. They're all liars, and anyone who believes Clinton or Obama will recall our troops is delusional. Too much money is to be had by continuing it.

reporters in Chicago will be credited with exposing the corrupt backbone of Obama political career
The list of reporters deserving of credit for doing the investigative work that should have been done by the leaders of the Democratic party before they got behind Obama, includes, but is not limited to, Chicago Sun-Times reporters, Tim Novak, Dave McKinney, Fran Spielman, Chris Fusco, Natasha Korecki, Steve Warmbir and Lynn Sweet. Chicago Tribune reporters especially deserving of credit include Jeff Coen, Bob Secter, John Chase, Virginia Groark, Rick Pearson, David Jackson, John McCormick, Mickey Ciokajlo, Rudolph Bush and Dan Mihalopoulos.

Obama is a political psychopath. He exhibits no shame, no matter where his money comes from. On September 5, 2007, the New York Post reported that, "Alexi Giannoulias, who became Illinois state treasurer last year after Obama vouched for him, has pledged to raise $100,000 for the senator's Oval Office bid.""Giannoulias is so tainted by reputed mob links," the Post noted, "that several top Illinois Dems, including the state's speaker of the House and party chairman, refused to endorse him even after he won the Democratic nomination with Obama's help."

Last week, Obama aired a television ad in Pennsylvania called "Nothing's changed" that outlines his energy proposals while declaring, "I don't take money from oil companies or Washington lobbyists, and I won't let them block change anymore."But he does accept money from executives and other employees of oil companies and two of his fundraisers are oil company executives. As of Feb. 29, Obama's presidential campaign had received nearly $214,000 from oil and gas industry employees and their families, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Clinton had received nearly $307,000 from industry workers and their families and Republican Sen. John McCain, the likely GOP presidential nominee, received nearly $394,000, according to the center's totals.

Rezko, 52, who raised thousands of dollars for Sen. Barack Obama and Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, is charged with using his clout with Blagojevich's administration to get a $1.5 million bribe from a contractor and pressure kickbacks out of money management firms wanting to do business with a $40 billion state pension fund.

Giannoulias got a taste of politics while helping Barack Obama get elected to the Senate in 2004, and he wanted his own chance at public service. He made his decision to run with the blessing of Obama, not the Democratic Party. He easily defeated Knox County State's Attorney Paul Mangieri in the primary, then overcame GOP state Sen. Christine Radogno with 53 percent of the vote.

During the campaign, Giannoulias touted his time as a vice president and senior loan officer at that institution, Broadway Bank in Chicago, which manages more than $750 million in assets. But he almost immediately faced questions about loans the bank made to campaign contributors as well as to a man with ties to organized crime.

"In the 2006 Democratic primary, for example, Obama endorsed first-time candidate Alexi Giannoulias for state treasurer despite reports about loans Giannoulias' family-owned Broadway Bank made to crime figures. Records show Giannoulias and his family had given more than $10,000 to Obama's campaign, which banked at Broadway." [Giannoulias is now a bundler for Obama's presidential campaign, aiming for $100,000.]

During the trial, Rezko’s attorney presented an email exchange to the jury that hinted at Obama's role in setting up the scheme. The exchange showed that Obama and seven other top Illinois politicians consulted on the legislation passed in 2003 and were involved in recommending the members for the board.

Only two pay-to-play schemes succeeded before the Feds swooped in and shut them all down. Blagojevich did not receive the $1.5 million from the Planning Board deal because the hospital was never built.But Obama received $20,000 from the first kickback paid in the pension fund scheme and the straw donors used to funnel the $10,000 payments, Elie Maloof and Joseph Aramanda, also made $1,000 contributions to Obama's failed run for Congress in 2000. In addition, Aramanda gave $500 to Obama's senate campaign on June 30, 2003. In the summer of 2005, Aramanda's son landed an intern position in Obama's Washington office.Obama also received contributions for his senate campaign from the two persons appointed to rig the vote on the pension fund board. On June 30, 2003, Jack Carriglio contributed $1,000, and the other appointee, Anthony Abboud, donated $500 on June 30, 2003, $250 on March 5, 2004, and $1,000 on June 25, 2004.The person chosen to funnel the kickback in a future scheme, Michael Winter, donated $3,000 to Obama on June 30, 2003.

The following fact pattern was out in the open long before Obama severed his ties to Rezko (sometime in late 2006): In 1983, Rezko started raising a lot of money for Chicago politicians. In 1989, he and his partner Daniel Mahru started vacuuming up deals with the city to develop low-income housing, despite having virtually zero experience in the field. They proceeded to obtain over $100 million in city, state, and federal grants and bank loans to develop 30 run-down properties into affordable-housing projects, earning $6.9 million for themselves. By 2007, the city had sued them numerous times for failing to heat these properties; over half of the properties had fallen into foreclosure, and six of them were boarded up.

Obama helped put one of these deals together during his time as a junior associate at Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland. Other lawyers at Davis Miner helped Rezko acquire half of the properties that fell into disrepair. And many of these properties were located in the district Obama represented as an Illinois state senator. Nonetheless, Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times that he was unaware of Rezko’s growing reputation as a slumlord until he read Sun-Times reporter Tim Novak’s two-part series on the subject. So we are to believe (yet again) that Obama was the last person to know what one of his longtime friends was up to.

Obama may have thought all of his interactions with Rezko were above-board, but they weren’t. One of the counts against Rezko detailed how he funneled the proceeds of an illegal kickback scheme into Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign. Rezko’s co-conspirator, a former trustee of the Illinois Teachers Retirement System (TRS) named Stuart Levine, told the jury that he directed the TRS to invest $50 million with a firm called Glencoe Capital. In exchange, Levine arranged for himself and Rezko to be paid a fraudulent $500,000 “finder’s fee.” Levine routed Rezko’s half to an associate named Joseph Aramanda in March of 2004. That month, Aramanda wrote a $10,000 check to Barack Obama’s campaign. But what became clear over the course of the Rezko trial is that this kind of scheme exemplified Rezko’s way of doing business. It’s hard to believe that Obama could be so clueless about Rezko’s character, just as it’s hard to believe that Obama sat in Jeremiah Wright’s pews for 20 years and had no idea that the man was a radical black nationalist.

Originally posted by chromatico
Can't America do better than the slate of candidates we have right now?

“The more we learn about the Illinois Senator, the more obvious it becomes that he is anything but the ethically upright outsider he purports to be,” said Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch.“It appears that Obama never kept records of his time in the Illinois state legislature, or he discarded them,” Fitton stated. “Either way, he clearly intended to leave no paper trail.”

Originally posted by Unit541


Yes, we could do much better. In fact, we could do better by randomly picking some homeless guy off the street to be president. The question is will we. And the answer, apparently, is no.

Senator Barack Obama (D-IL): ...n 2007, more reports surfaced of deeper and suspicious business and political connections It was reported that just two months after he joined the Senate, Obama purchased $50,000 worth of stock in speculative companies whose major investors were his biggest campaign contributors. One of the companies was a biotech concern that benefited from legislation Obama pushed...