Peter Schweizer has written a new book, Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison (available soon through Amazon). In it, he details some mighty interesting observations about how much Obama’s cronies have benefited since he took office. The Daily Beast had an excerpt, some of which I will share with you here, beginning with this:

When President-elect Obama came to Washington in late 2008, he was outspoken about the need for an economic stimulus to revive a struggling economy. He wanted billions of dollars spent on “shovel-ready projects” to build roads; billions more for developing alternative-energy projects; and additional billions for expanding broadband Internet access and creating a “smart grid” for energy consumption. After he was sworn in as president, he proclaimed that taxpayer money would assuredly not be doled out to political friends. “Decisions about how Recovery Act dollars are spent will be based on the merits,” he said, referring to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. “Let me repeat that: decisions about how recovery money will be spent will be based on the merits. They will not be made as a way of doing favors for lobbyists.”

Really?

[...]

Nevertheless, a large proportion of the winners were companies with Obama-campaign connections. Indeed, at least 10 members of Obama’s finance committee and more than a dozen of his campaign bundlers were big winners in getting your money. At the same time, several politicians who supported Obama managed to strike gold by launching alternative-energy companies and obtaining grants. How much did they get? According to the Department of Energy’s own numbers … a lot. In the 1705 government-backed-loan program, for example, $16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in loans granted as of Sept. 15 went to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers—individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party. The grant and guaranteed-loan recipients were early backers of Obama before he ran for president, people who continued to give to his campaigns and exclusively to the Democratic Party in the years leading up to 2008. Their political largesse is probably the best investment they ever made in alternative energy. It brought them returns many times over.

Shocking, isn’t it? I know none of us should really be surprised. There is so, so much more, even to this excerpt, which I encourage you to read in its entirety.

But I have just one more, pertinent to this whole issue of “green” technology companies: [snip]

One might think that the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office, which has doled out billions in taxpayer-guaranteed loans, would be directed by a dedicated scientist or engineer. Or perhaps a civil servant with considerable financial knowledge. Instead, the department’s loan and grant programs are run by partisans who were responsible for raising money during the Obama campaign from the same people who later came to seek government loans and grants. Steve Spinner, who served on the Obama campaign’s National Finance Committee and was a bundler himself, was the campaign’s “liaison to Silicon Valley.” His responsibilities included fundraising, recruiting more bundlers, and managing Obama’s relationship with a cadre of very wealthy donors. After the 2008 campaign, Spinner joined the Department of Energy as the “chief strategic operations officer” for the loan programs. A lot of the money he helped hand out went to that same cadre of wealthy Silicon Valley campaign donors. He also sat on the White House Business Council, which is made up of Obama-supporting corporate executives.

Again, Mr. Schweizer’s book will be out Nov. 15, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. It would make a great stocking stuffer.

But it is not just green companies which are benefiting from Obama’s largesse at our expense. Over the weekend, news broke that the Obama Administration has spent $443 MILLION of our taxpaying dollars to purchase a smallpox vaccine. You read that right – SMALLPOX vaccine. If you are thinking, “I thought that had been essentially eradicated,” you would be right. What is worse, though, is that this particular vaccine has not even been tested yet, and might not even work. Why, then would our government be spending so much money? You know the answer. From the LA Times:

[snip] Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world’s richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor.

When Siga complained that contracting specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services were resisting the company’s financial demands, senior officials replaced the government’s lead negotiator for the deal, interviews and documents show.

But wait – it gets worse:

When Siga was in danger of losing its grip on the contract a year ago, the officials blocked other firms from competing.

That’s right – it was a NO-BID contract:

Siga was awarded the final contract in May through a “sole-source” procurement in which it was the only company asked to submit a proposal. The contract calls for Siga to deliver 1.7 million doses of the drug for the nation’s biodefense stockpile. The price of approximately $255 per dose is well above what the government’s specialists had earlier said was reasonable, according to internal documents and interviews. (Click here to read the rest of this excellent article.)

Are you freakin’ kidding me?? Never mind that the nation already has enough smallpox vaccine to vaccinate every man, women, and child should it ever rear its ugly head again ($1 billion worth, according to the LA Times article), but they don’t even know if this new one even WORKS!

Wow. So glad Obama feels free to let our money run through his fingers like water. I am glad, though, that there are intrepid reporters out there ferreting out this information, from Peter Schweizer to David Willman at the LA Times, at least some people will not let this go under the radar. Nor should it – this is OUR money, and our nation is in a terrible economic fix. For Obama to act as if there is an unending pot of our money to pay back his donors is simply wrong, and must be stopped.

And these companies can start paying us back any ol’ time. What do you think?

They are creating an opportunity for people who are not part of the establishment of either party to get on the presidential ballot. While I cannot profess to know much about the organization behind this movement, the idea itself is an intriguing one:

For the 68 percent of Americans who said in an ABC/Washington Post poll released Wednesday that they had a negative view of government, the possibility of having a presidential candidate free of the currently gridlocked political parties could be just a few clicks away.

The nonpartisan, nonprofit Americans Elect has collected petition signatures – millions of them [1.6 million in California alone] – in all 50 states to put a “candidate of the people” on the ballot in November 2012. This candidate would be selected through an online draft and nomination process instead of through the traditional Republican and Democratic parties primary and caucus schedule.

“We are creating competition for all these folks who are politically homeless,” said Elliot Ackerman, Americans Elect’s chief operating officer. “A lot of the folks that engage with us are socially liberal and fiscally conservative, and those people don’t really have a voice in our political system right now. What we’re doing is really creating an incentive structure so that those individuals will be competed for.”

I understand the sentiment. I too have felt politically homeless since I witnessed the shenanigans of Democrats in the 2008 primaries. Whether one is in favor of Hillary Clinton or not, for her to have achieved a virtual tie in delegates, lead in the popular vote and still be cast aside at the Convention as the clear loser was the final disgrace in a contest fraught with sexist hazing and character assassination. Her opponent, however, received rose petals and caresses from the media daily, coupled with a startling lack of examination for his pie-in-the-sky – and often contradictory — campaign promises.

But Hillary’s treatment – and the disgraceful treatment her 18,000,000 supporters received at the hands of the mainstream media had another effect on the populace. We saw that the media, in the name of anointing their favored candidate was not above calling millions of Americans racist to threaten and keep them in line. Not to mention fellow Democrats calling us every dirty name in the book for supporting the “ho” and not the “bro.”

When we were called “low information, dried-up Archie Bunkers” by pundits and party powerful alike, many of us for the first time stepped back from the party we stood with for many years, ostracized and rejected. For the first time we felt what it must be like to be a conservative in this country, insulted regularly by the bulk of mainstream media and by many elitists in the DNC. As someone who made hundreds of GOTV calls around the country, I found that the “backwoods hillbilly” meme the media tried to sell was a lie. The mainstream media continues to hemorrhage credibility. There are many like me, waking up from a kool-aid stupor, no longer willing to accept demagogic ranting of the left or right at face value when its sole purpose is to fill Party coffers.

Continued gridlock in Washington, the refusal of either side to let productive legislation be crafted if it is contrary to the interests of politicians’ powerful backers, or partisan jockeying to prevent the other side from getting credit for a win has rendered us, for all intents and purposes, without advocates in Washington – regardless of where we fit in the progressive/conservative spectrum.

So far, the group has secured a spot on the ballot in six states, has collected the required number of signatures in four states and has about half the necessary signatures in four other states. Americans Elect spokeswoman Ileana Wachtel said the group would begin the petition process in seven more states within the week.

[snip]

The eventual nominee can be a member of either party or an independent but must chose a vice presidential running mate who is from a different party. Ackerman said he expected many of the losing GOP presidential candidates to move into the Americans Elect primary process after Republicans chose their nominee.

[snip]

“In the primaries you have to go far to the right or far to the left and tickets are having a hard time tacking back to the center,” he said. “Americans Elect allows a ticket to run authentically without having to go to extremes in the primary.”

A coalition ticket is an inviting notion although I cannot imagine who would be willing to abandon their own party in order to couple with the ‘enemy.’ A Sarah Palin perhaps…

While I am skeptical an idea like this can take hold to upend those currently in control of our two parties, its very existence, along with the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street should really give those in power something to worry about. Democrats have mistakenly tried to co-opt the current disorganized (and sometimes confused) OWS protests as their own version of the more conservative Tea Party movement, yet increasingly OWS is making clear they feel President Obama has sold out to Wall Street. Republicans also worked to co-opt the Tea Party movement, with mixed results.

Congressional approval is at an all time low. President Obama’s poll numbers continue to tank. Polling also reports that Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, even the currently downward trending Gov. Rick Perry could all beat Obama next year. Even still, Republicans are not all that enthusiastic about their choices. Neither party is anxious to undo the Gordian knot of special (read big money) interests that actually do the governing in this country. The phrase “politically homeless” rings as true as it is painful. To feel like it is not possible to trust the majority of our elected officials to do the right thing leaves many feeling bound and gagged. Americans are inching closer to that pitchfork moment.

Is the Americans Elect concept a good one? If so, who would you want on such a coalition ticket? And do you think there is any hope we can get ever move past the current plutocracy? We don’t want to split the vote and keep an ineffectual incumbent in office, but in the long run would enough dissatisfaction expressed through these myriad movements around the country actually lead to reform of our system?

Only when the failing crop currently in office know they are about to lose their jobs do we have a prayer that they will finally start to do their jobs. And yet, if they are fired, as long as they can count on a ritzy “K” street paycheck or some cushy commentating gig on CNN – what muscles can we flex to keep them honest? The teat is still flowing…

Naturally, Obama’s Administration has continued the trend of Obama the Candidate. It has taken a major step back in that whole transparency thing, according to the AP. Even when he wins awards for being transparent, he has to do so in a closed ceremony – how much more hypocritical can one be?

Well, there is one bit of transparency that is now coming forth about Obama. And that is how he pays off his big campaign donors. Of course, it is not unusual for a president to give a plum position to a big contributor, but Obama has done so for about 200 – that is two hundred – of his supporters in government positions in just two years. By comparison, George W. Bush hired about 200 contributors over EIGHT years. Uh, yeah.

So much for that “change” in Washington from “special interests,” huh? I know, I know, I am not surprised, either, but I didn’t drink the Kool Aide and vote for the man who made this claim:

[snip] As a candidate, Obama spoke passionately about diminishing the clout of moneyed interests. Kicking off his presidential run on Feb. 10, 2007, he blasted “the cynics, the lobbyists, the special interests,” who had “turned our government into a game only they can afford to play.”

“We’re here today to take it back,” he said.[snip]

Ahahahahaha – I know, I know, it is hilarious. Or it would be if so many people hadn’t bought this total BS.

And in direct contradiction to what the candidate said, here are some particulars of Obama the president’s sycophants:

Telecom executive Donald H. Gips raised a big bundle of cash to help finance his friend Barack Obama’s run for the presidency.

Gips, a vice president of Colorado-based Level 3 Communications, delivered more than $500,000 in contributions for the Obama war chest, while two other company executives collected at least $150,000 more.

After the election, Gips was put in charge of hiring in the Obama White House, helping to place loyalists and fundraisers in many key positions. Then, in mid-2009, Obama named him ambassador to South Africa. Meanwhile, Level 3 Communications, in which Gips retained stock, received millions of dollars of government stimulus contracts for broadband projects in six states — though Gips said he had been “completely unaware” that the company had received the contracts.

[...]

• Overall, 184 of 556, or about one-third of Obama bundlers or their spouses joined the administration in some role. But the percentages are much higher for the big-dollar bundlers. Nearly 80 percent of those who collected more than $500,000 for Obama took “key administration posts,” as defined by the White House. More than half the 24 ambassador nominees who were bundlers raised $500,000.

• The big bundlers had broad access to the White House for meetings with top administration officials and glitzy social events. In all, campaign bundlers and their family members account for more than 3,000 White House meetings and visits. Half of them raised $200,000 or more.

• Some Obama bundlers have ties to companies that stand to gain financially from the president’s policy agenda, particularly in clean energy and telecommunications, and some already have done so. Level 3 Communications, for instance, snared $13.8 million in stimulus money.[snip]

The last one is particularly troublesome to me. I thought the nation generally frowned upon companies having inside tracks to getting our hard earned, tax paying dollars. I dunno about you, but for Level 3 to get that kind of cold, hard cash from the stimulus sounds like payback to me. (You know, the $3 Trillion stimulus that Obama thought was a joking matter the other day? When he flippantly, arrogantly, joked there weren’t as many shovel ready jobs as they thought, that one? What a piece of work. It is not a laughing matter to most of us, President Obama.)

Oh, but wait – there is more:

[snip] The appointment of George Washington University law professor Spencer Overton illustrates how the administration has rewarded many top fundraisers.

Overton wrote in 2003 that the influence big donors wield in elections means that an “overwhelming majority of citizens are effectively excluded from an important stage of the political process.” Yet Overton bundled at least $500,000 for Obama. He was named to the Obama transition team and in February 2009 was appointed principal deputy attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy. Overton visited the White House more than 80 times from January 2009 through the end of 2010 for events ranging from small meetings with high-level staffers to social and entertainment events, sometimes with his wife, records show. Overton resigned the $180,000-a-year job in July 2010. He declined to comment for this story.

Overton is one of seven campaign bundlers who took jobs at Justice, including Attorney General Eric Holder, who was a $50,000 bundler. Holder had been deputy attorney general in the administration of President Bill Clinton. [snip]

Just to be clear, here is the problem with “bundling” contributions:

[snip] Bundling is controversial because it permits campaigns to skirt individual contribution limits of $2,500 in federal elections. Bundlers pool donations from fundraising networks and, as a result, “play an enormous role in determining the success of political campaigns,” according to government watchdog Public Citizen. [snip]

Yes, that would be a bit of a problem. And it also helps explain how someone who has made such a mess of the DOJ got his position. Of course, I am referring to Eric Holder, who has been just a disaster in upholding federal law (the examples are too numerous to mention here, but the dismissal of the clear cut voter intimidation by the New Black Panthers case is the tip of the iceberg).

There is so much more to this story I cannot possibly recount it all here, so I urge you to read it all. It goes into more detail about those who got these positions, but I have to leave you with one more example:

[snip] In March 2009, Obama appointed $500,000 bundler and law school pal Julius Genachowski to chair the Federal Communications Commission, an independent agency. Two other bundlers at the FCC are chief of staff Edward Lazarus, a litigator and former federal prosecutor, and William T. Lake, a lawyer specializing in communications and e-commerce issues who serves as chief of the media bureau.

Genachowski had previously served as chief counsel to the FCC chairman in the 1990s, but his close ties to Obama have raised eyebrows. He has turned up so often at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. that in March, congressional Republicans demanded an accounting of whom he has met with and what was discussed. [snip] (Click here to read the rest.)

You know someone is spending a lot of time at the White House when US Representatives are demanding to know just what the hell they are doing there all of the time.

Ah, yes – the only thing transparent about Obama is how much “change” he is getting from his bundlers. I mean, members of his Administration. Heaven knows, they siphoned a whole boatload of it into his coffers. He is returning the favor with OUR change.

That is the kind of change I can do without.

Senator Lincoln is the one Democrat in this bunch, and I have to say, I am THRILLED she beat Halter. As you no doubt have heard, Halter was supported by MoveOn.org, and the big unions, which poured MILLIONS of dollars into Arkansas (around $10 million), so her win is a big push against the power of the unions, as well as the far left agenda. Here she is celebrating her win:

Lincoln isn’t done – she has a strong challenger in November, but beating the organized union and MoveOn.org backed candidate is huge, make no mistake. It can also be construed as a bit of a referendum on Bill Clinton v. Obama. Clinton endorsed Lincoln, and the Unions/MoveOn are Obama backers. Maybe the Old Dawg still has it…

Nikki Haley, with the backing of both Gov., Sarah Palin and First Lady (of SC) Jenny Sanford, won the vast majority of votes (49%) with her closest competitor, Gresham Barrett, at 22%. Here is Nikki Haley after the election:

Should Haley win come November, she will be the first woman governor in SC, and the second Indian American governor in the US (along with Bobby Jindal).

Meg Whitman talks about her win, and her upcoming race against Jerry Brown (or “Gov. Moonbeam,” as Karl Rove referred to him on “Fox & Friends Weds. morning). In her speech, Whitman gives a shout-out to Carly Fiorina on her win to face Barbara Boxer:

And speaking of Carly Fiorina, here she is in her speech following her win, a win which will pit her against long time senator, Barbara Boxer. She returns the favor to Whitman, with a “Holla” to her, too:

Sharron Angle, the Tea Party backed candidate, will be facing off again st Harry Reid in the Fall. Oh, I cannot begin to tell you how badly I want her to beat Reid. Even when I still considered myself a Democrat (before 5/31/08), I was not a fan of Reid’s, and my opinion of him has only gone down from there. Here’s Angle after her win:

Wow. Again, what a night. I might add, I have said a number of times, that after the Democratic Party eviscerated the best candidate they could have had to be the first woman president, I have no doubt that the first woman president will come from the Republican Party.

Honestly, it has been interesting to me to see how the Republican Party seems to support its women in positions of power far more than the Democrats do. You know, the party that claims to be the party for women. After the misogynistic treatment of Clinton by the DNC itself, compared to the treatment by the RNC with Palin, as well as other powerful women in the RNC, I just knew the Demos had blown their chance in a big, big, big way. Oh, sure, the Democrats have a few women senators and representatives, but none of them are on a par with Clinton. Hell, Obama is not on a par with Clinton, never will be (I think he knows that, too – that’s why he was always putting her down to try and build himself up).

When you look at a field like this, all of these powerful, successful women who are Republicans, you just know that our first woman president is going to come from this kind of group. That is assuming Hillary Clinton is telling the truth when she says she will not run for president again, though since Obama has made such a mess of things in such a short period of time, I am not sure she COULD win in this climate.

November will be must see with Boxer having a strong, accomplished woman like Fiorina facing her, Reid having Angle facing him, Whitman against “Gov. Moonbeam,” and Sheheen having the very popular Haley against him. Things don’t look great for Lincoln against her Republican opponent, though. Maybe Bill will show up for her again…

Stay tuned – November is not that far away!

UPDATE: Gov. Palin also endorsed Susanna Martinez (R) for Governor of New Mexico. Martinez also won big Tuesday night. Here is Gov. Palin talking with Megyn Kelly about the BP oil crisis, and near the end, she discusses the Primary results, especially the role her endorsements played:

In other words, Palin does not take credit for her endorsements making that much of a difference with the wins of the “Mama Grizzlies” – wow. What kind of politician is she, anyway? Ahem.

Anyway, the next few months should prove to be exciting. Can’t wait to see how all of this plays out!

UPDATE #2: And Libby Mitchell won in Maine to represent the Democratic Party(h/t to Yttik). From sea to shining sea, the women are on the rise. Wow!

“There is a dangerous, misguided movement out there that if we just let business rule the nation, all will be well — markets will take care of themselves, health care, jobs, just let business handle it. You know who says that the loudest? Business.

And now, it can say it even louder. It can shout down any candidate who opposes it. What happened to ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’?” (Excerpt from “Big Biz Needed No Help In The Election Game”, by Mitch Albom, columnist, Detroit Free Press.)

The country is rightfully reeling from the recent U.S. Supreme Court’s partisan 5/4 decision this past Thursday ruling that the “government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.” This decision, without question, continues the devastation of the power of the people in the elections process by ruling that corporations are “persons” who have a First Amendment Right to make campaign contributions without any kind of restriction.

What average citizen can compete with the lobbyists who already have overwhelming influence on our representatives, as well as compete with the deep pocket campaign contributions of our fellow “persons”, Big Business? Campaigns have already become “marketing” campaigns designed to sell a brand or personality more than be a campaign of ideas among the candidates. The American people already know that unlimited ability by a corporation to make campaign contributions to a certain candidate will surely undermine the “checks and balances” that our Founders intended for the elections process which were meant to be the sovereign province of “we, the people”, not “we, the corporations.”

The initial devastation of the essential balance of power between citizens and big business at the ballot box was the advent of voting machines in the elections process. These machines make it impossible for any citizen to oversee the counting of their votes due to the hidden counting by the voting software that runs the machines. Secret vote counting combined with the Court’s most recent decision has rendered a citizen’s role in the elections process virtually non-existent, which is tantamount to not having an election at all. How is this good for democracy?
Not surprisingly, citizens of all political persuasions are already protesting the Court’s decision because they can so clearly see the impending danger to the People’s role in elections and understand that the kind of money that corporations will use now to influence elections will most assuredly diminish, if not totally destroy, our freedom and way of life. In stark contrast, it has been so incredibly difficult for citizens to readily grasp that our right to control and visually witness the entire process of voting to know for certain that the persons truly chosen by the people have been elected has been stolen from us by government officials who cleverly convinced us to replace the ballot box of old with the way of the future — computerized voting.

For years, election integrity advocates have compiled a mountain of evidence against the use of these machines to no avail. The voting machine corporations have spent large sums of money on lobbyists and marketing these machines and have far too much support from politicians, election officials, computer security experts and powerful interest groups intent on keeping these machines an integral part of our elections process. They are marketed as “faster, easier and more secure!” Is democracy preserved when voting is allowed to be marketed as “fast and easy” rather than “public and accurate”? Despite investigations that definitively uncovered the truth about the dangers these machines pose to election integrity, which were featured in the Emmy nominated HBO documentary film, Hacking Democracy, our government is determined to maintain the current status quo.

It is important to note that American election integrity advocates haven’t been the only ones protesting the use of electronic voting machines counting their votes in secret. Citizens of other democratic republics, such as, Ireland, The Netherlands and India, are but a few of the growing number of countries that have either banned e-voting or are presently fighting to ban them and demanding a return to hand counts and the kind of voting every citizen can oversee and understand. The most recent has been Germany.

In March 2009, Germany banned e-voting because two German citizens, Dr. Ulrich Wiesner and his father, Joachim Wiesner, filed a lawsuit declaring e-voting “unconstitutional” under the German Constitution (which, by the way, the final language put into their Constitution had to be approved by the U.S. after World War II). To further bolster their argument against e-voting, the Wiesners requested the help of a group of computer security experts, who were members of the Chaos Compute Club, to demonstrate for the Court technically how the voting system’s counting the votes was totally unobservable by the average citizen. In response to their lawsuit and the demonstration, the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled in favor of the Wiesners. The Court even took it a step further. They also ruled that no amount of testing or government checks of any kind, such as post election audits or recounts, can substitute for public observation. Ultimately, they unanimously declared that e-voting was, indeed, unconstitutional because computerized, secret vote counting does not subscribe to the democratic standards of their country! All elections in Germany have now reverted back to the use of hand-counted paper ballots.

In direct contrast to the U.S. Supreme Court’s priorities, the German Court’s priorities were to guarantee a German citizen’s human right, which in this case is to be able to “see” their votes counted without the need for any specialized technical expertise in order to do so. They did so to protect “principles of transparency” and the “public nature of elections” as the priority in how elections in a democratic republic must be administered. It is a great example of the German judiciary using its power the way it was intended by protecting the best interests of its citizens in one of the most important processes – elections – available to them in a democratic republic. Despite the historic nature of this decision, our mainstream media chose not to cover this story. Why not? You would think that the “greatest democracy in the world” would consider this decision by the highest court in Germany a must read by the American people, as well as by our own high court justices and government officials.

Yet, here in America, over 95% of us are forced to have a computerized voting system count our ballots because our government officials unilaterally sanctioned the control of our elections to the voting machine corporations through the passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002 and have protected their software from public scrutiny by upholding trade secret laws. As a result, no one can guarantee even a single voter that his or her vote is being counted as cast.

What a disturbing and glaring difference between the German Federal Constitutional Court and our U.S. Supreme Court when it comes to asserting their power as intended — to protect a citizen’s rights above all others. The German Court banned secret vote counting in elections and the U.S. Supreme Court gave corporations unchecked influence in our elections, in alliance with our government’s sanctioning of even further corporate control over our elections through the continued use of these voting machines. One Court protects the best interests of the citizens and the sanctity of their basic human rights in a democracy, the other protects the best interests of corporations.

Therefore, the most effective and pro-active action we, the People, can take in the wake of this horrendous decision by our U.S. Supreme Court is to immediately demand a return to publicly hand-counted paper ballots at the precinct level on election night and to posting the results at the precinct – before any ballots are moved – so the results can be publicly documented by citizens which will protect the integrity of the final tally at local, state and federal levels. When all is said and done, this is the only avenue left for citizens to be able to reclaim their rightful role in the election process. It will ensure that our vote – our voice – will be accurately heard as we bestow our consent to those we deem worthy of serving as the protectors of our rights and freedom. Our collective wisdom will see through the ruse of the corporation-backed candidates and elect those who will have the strength and courage to strike down this giant of corporatocracy and revive our quickly fading republic.

If the majority of American citizens can understand that free speech, as exemplified by the giving of financial support to candidates running for public office, should only be for people, not corporations, then it’s truly not a difficult leap for these very same Americans to understand that voting should only be “for the People, of the People and by the People” too. In fact, they go hand-in-hand. The very instant that the counting is hidden from view inside a machine, then voting ceases to be a public endeavor and becomes the domain of those with the financial resources and special expertise to create, program and run the counting devices means that “they” – not the People – will determine the election outcomes. This is not a prescription for democracy, but, rather, one for tyranny.

Demand hand-counted paper ballots now and we can defeat unlimited corporate money and influence, and the corporate machines that now control our elections. And so my fellow Americans, let’s say it together in one voice – ELECTIONS ARE FOR PEOPLE – NOT CORPORATIONS!

Contact: Kathleen Wynne (Founder HCPBnow.org and Former Associate Director of Black Box Voting.org) and Karen Renick (Founder VoteRescue.org) at: wynnekathleen@yahoo.com and karen@voterescue.org to learn more about hand counted paper ballots.

Thank you so much for sharing your perspective with us, Kathleen. Certainly food for thought, especially on the eve of Obama’s first State of the Union address.

Thoughts?

Greg Palast had an excellent post on this startling decision (first printed at Alternet.org), “Manchurian Candidates: Supreme Court Allows China And Others Unlimited Spending In The U.S.” That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? Palast went on to say:

In today’s Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Court ruled that corporations should be treated the same as “natural persons”, i.e. humans. Well, in that case, expect the Supreme Court to next rule that Wal-Mart can run for President.

The ruling, which junks federal laws that now bar corporations from stuffing campaign coffers, will not, as progressives fear, cause an avalanche of corporate cash into politics. Sadly, that’s already happened: we have been snowed under by tens of millions of dollars given through corporate PACs and “bundling” of individual contributions from corporate pay-rollers.

The Court’s decision is far, far more dangerous to U.S. democracy. Think: Manchurian candidates.

I’m losing sleep over the millions — or billions — of dollars that could flood into our elections from ARAMCO, the Saudi Oil corporation’s U.S. unit; or from the maker of “New Order” fashions, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Or from Bin Laden Construction corporation. Or Bin Laden Destruction Corporation.

Right now, corporations can give loads of loot through PACs. While this money stinks (Barack Obama took none of it), anyone can go through a PAC’s federal disclosure filing and see the name of every individual who put money into it. And every contributor must be a citizen of the USA.

But under today’s Supreme Court ruling that corporations can support candidates without limit, there is nothing that stops, say, a Delaware-incorporated handmaiden of the Burmese junta from picking a Congressman or two with a cache of loot masked by a corporate alias…(click here for the rest of the post).

Ah, yes, President Wal-Mart – now THERE’S some democracy for ya…

Palast continues:

Candidate Barack Obama was one sharp speaker, but he would not have been heard, and certainly would not have won, without the astonishing outpouring of donations from two million Americans. It was an unprecedented uprising-by-PayPal, overwhelming the old fat-cat sources of funding.

Well, kiss that small-donor revolution goodbye. Under the Court’s new rules, progressive list serves won’t stand a chance against the resources of new “citizens” such as CNOOC, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. Maybe UBS (United Bank of Switzerland), which faces U.S. criminal prosecution and a billion-dollar fine for fraud, might be tempted to invest in a few Senate seats. As would XYZ Corporation, whose owners remain hidden by “street names.”

Let’s just hold the phone for a minute here, Mr. Palast. While Obama no doubt did get a lot of smaller contributions through PayPal, there were also a LOT of questions about from where some of those contributions came since, according to the Obama Campaign itself, their tracking left a bit to be desired. But thanks for playing. Still, there is a point to be made:

George Bush’s former Solicitor General Ted Olson argued the case to the court on behalf of Citizens United, a corporate front that funded an attack on Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary. Olson’s wife died on September 11, 2001 on the hijacked airliner that hit the Pentagon. Maybe it was a bit crude of me, but I contacted Olson’s office to ask how much “Al Qaeda, Inc.” should be allowed to donate to support the election of his local congressman.

Olson has not responded.

Um, okay, I’ll say it – it wasn’t crude, it was CRUEL. I get his point, but really, that was uncalled for in my book. Still, the concept regarding foreign contributions is disturbing at best:

The danger of foreign loot loading into U.S. campaigns, not much noted in the media chat about the Citizens case, was the first concern raised by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who asked about opening the door to “mega-corporations” owned by foreign governments. Olson offered Ginsburg a fudge, that Congress might be able to prohibit foreign corporations from making donations, though Olson made clear he thought any such restriction a bad idea.

Tara Malloy, attorney with the Campaign Legal Center of Washington D.C. says corporations will now have more rights than people. Only United States citizens may donate or influence campaigns, but a foreign government can, veiled behind a corporate treasury, dump money into ballot battles.

Malloy also noted that under the law today, human-people, as opposed to corporate-people, may only give $2,300 to a presidential campaign. But hedge fund billionaires, for example, who typically operate through dozens of corporate vessels, may now give unlimited sums through each of these “unnatural” creatures.

And once the Taliban incorporates in Delaware, they could ante up for the best democracy money can buy.

A bit hyperbolic, but, well, yeah – they can, as can any other corporation-person, or country-person:

In July, the Chinese government, in preparation for President Obama’s visit, held diplomatic discussions in which they skirted issues of human rights and Tibet. Notably, the Chinese, who hold a $2 trillion mortgage on our Treasury, raised concerns about the cost of Obama’s health care reform bill. Would our nervous Chinese landlords have an interest in buying the White House for an opponent of government spending such as Gov. Palin? Ya betcha!

Given how things are going right this minute, a lot of people would probably be happier with a President Palin. Ask some Tea Partiers. But his point, and it is a good one, is this:

The potential for foreign infiltration of what remains of our democracy is an adjunct of the fact that the source and control money from corporate treasuries (unlike registered PACs), is necessarily hidden. Who the heck are the real stockholders? Or as Butch asked Sundance, “Who are these guys?”

We’ll never know.

Hidden money funding, whether foreign or domestic, is the new venom that the Court has injected into the system by its expansive decision in Citizens United.

We’ve been there. The 1994 election brought Newt Gingrich to power in a GOP takeover of the Congress funded by a very strange source.

Congressional investigators found that in crucial swing races, Democrats had fallen victim to a flood of last-minute attack ads funded by a group called, “Coalition for Our Children’s Future.” The $25 million that paid for those ads came, not from concerned parents, but from a corporation called “Triad Inc.”

Evidence suggests Triad Inc. was the front for the ultra-right-wing billionaire Koch Brothers and their private petroleum company, Koch Industries. Had the corporate connection been proven, the Kochs and their corporation could have faced indictment under federal election law. As of today, such money-poisoned politicking has become legit.

So it’s not just un-Americans we need to fear but the Polluter-Americans, Pharma-mericans, Bank-Americans and Hedge-Americans that could manipulate campaigns while hidden behind corporate veils. And if so, our future elections, while nominally a contest between Republicans and Democrats, may in fact come down to a three-way battle between China, Saudi Arabia and Goldman Sachs.

And again, to be fair, it isn’t just Republicans who are going to benefit from this new “Corporations are People, TOO!” ruling by the Supremes. Democrats will benefit, too:

Campaign Finance: The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations have a constitutional right to free speech. But Democratic leaders refuse to accept the decision, and their predictable reaction is to undermine it.

Rather than praising Thursday’s 5-4 decision to reverse the 1990 court ruling that banned corporations and unions from contributing directly to political campaigns as an advancement of liberty, President Obama condemned it.

“The Supreme Court,” he said, “has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for Big Oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans . ..

“That’s why I am instructing my administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision.”

Go get ‘em, Obama! Yeah, show some muscle on this!!! Oh, but wait – is this just more talk? It appears so:

The president is betting the public will accept his rhetoric without checking his facts, and the facts in this case show that lawyers and law firms, not “Big Oil” or “Wall Street,” are the biggest political contributors. According to opensecrets.org., 83% of their donations are going to Democrats in the current election cycle,

This is not unusual. In the 2008 cycle, Democrats took in 78% of lawyer and law-firm political dollars. In 2006, the ratio was 62% Democrats to 36% Republicans. Two years earlier, it was 80% to 20% in favor of the Democrats.

Maybe the president just doesn’t consider lawyers and law firms to be special interests. OK, so how about the securities and investment industry, a sector Democrats have demonized and unfavorably link to Republicans? Is this group a special interest?

The president can define special interests any way he wants. But he can’t redefine the fact that 73% of the political donations from the securities and investment industry — the “Wall Street” he apparently holds in such low regard — are going to Democrats in the 2010 cycle. In 2008, 64% went to Democrats, in 2004 it was 61% and in 2002 56%. In the 2006 cycle, the parties evenly split donations from the sector, each taking in 47%.

Oh, well, um – yes it would seem this is indeed more “words, just words,” from the man behind the curtain. What a big surprise – not at all. But there’s more:

As telling as that is, our fact-checking exercise revealed another valuable nugget. Of the 50 industries and sectors categorized as contributors by opensecrets.org, Democrats are the top recipients during this cycle in all but two (emphasis mine). Oil and gas, one of those named a “powerful interest,” is ranked as the 14th largest political contributor, and the auto industry, which ranks 46th.

In short, the stampede of special interest money began long before the court’s ruling, and Democrats are the biggest beneficiaries (emphasis mine).

Oops. Wait, look over THERE! Or, there! Or anywhere but here!! Um, do you smell something burning? Oh, yes – their pants are on fire:

The president knows this, and so does Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. Yet Schumer calls the court’s ruling “poisonous” and, according to The Hill newspaper, promises to hold hearings “to explore ways to limit corporate spending on elections.”

Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, also knows that his party is swimming in special-interest money. But he vows hearings as well.

If Democrats are acting as if they fear what the ruling will mean, it’s because they probably do. They feel their funding advantage, which already includes so much indirect union money that the court’s overturning of the ban on direct union contributions won’t help them, is now at risk.

But their complaint about a stampede of special interest dollars is hard to take seriously, and not only because of how much special interest money they’re already getting. While supporters of campaign finance laws say money is the corrupting element, they ignore the second part of the equation and the more corrosive factor: lawmakers’ votes.

Their implication is that big money buys votes in Congress, and they might be right. But trying to cut the flow of political money won’t stop the practice; it will only drive it underground. The way to stop the corruption is to prosecute lawmakers who sell their vote.

Though tainted by undue persecution, political dollars are a necessary part of our system. They illuminate the issues for everyday Americans and give challengers a chance (to) drive out entrenched incumbents. No one, not even a group of individuals, should be barred from taking part in this exercise of freedom.

Still don’t think I can concur that a group of individuals is the same as a corporation. But other than that, this piece does highlight that it isn’t just Republicans who are going to benefit from this unprecedented decision by the Supreme Court, but ALL politicians will benefit.

But will WE?

Oh, and these positions aren’t just “fun” ones, like being the Ambassador to the Bahamas, for instance. You may have heard of this position: US Attorney General. Yes, indeedy, Eric Holder was an Obama contributor, though comparatively speaking, he and Susan Rice got their jobs for not a whole lotta green (between $50 – 100,000). Ain’t politics GRAND?

Naturally, rhese are paid positions – and the pay is mighty nice, as you will see below. What you might not realize is that there are actually professional diplomats. You know, people who know how to play the game of diplomacy. They would not be in this group of folks Obama is putting into these plum roles, either. Oh, you know they’re happy about that – not.

Fredreka Schouten had this article in USA Today, Top Obama Fundraisers Get Posts. She should have written, “Plum Posts” in her title:

More than 40% of President Obama’s top-level fundraisers have secured posts in his administration, from key executive branch jobs to diplomatic postings in countries such as France, Spain and the Bahamas, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

Twenty of the 47 fundraisers that Obama’s campaign identified as collecting more than $500,000 have been named to government positions, the analysis found.

Overall, about 600 individuals and couples raised money from their friends, family members and business associates to help fund Obama’s presidential campaign. USA TODAY’s analysis found that 54 have been named to government positions, ranging from Cabinet and White House posts to advisory roles, such as serving on the economic recovery board charged with helping guide the country out of recession.

Nearly a year after he was elected on a pledge to change business-as-usual in Washington, Obama also has taken a cue from his predecessors and appointed fundraisers to coveted ambassadorships, drawing protests from groups representing career diplomats. A separate analysis by the American Foreign Service Association, the diplomats’ union, found that more than half of the ambassadors named by Obama so far are political appointees, said Susan Johnson, president of the association. An appointment is considered political if it does not go to a career diplomat in the State Department.

That’s a rate higher than any president in more than four decades, the group’s data show, although that could change as the White House fills more openings. Traditionally about 30% of top diplomatic jobs go to political appointees, and roughly 70% to veteran State Department employees. Ambassadors earn $153,200 to $162,900 annually.

Dang – that’s a mighty nice salary! Can you imagine being the Ambassador to, well, anywhere, but I’ll pull one out – BELIZE – and getting that kind of salary? And BONUS – you don’t even really have to know how to do the job!! Sheesh! No wonder real diplomats are a bit peeved:

“It is time to end the spoils system and the de facto sale of ambassadorships,” Johnson said. “The United States is best served by having experienced, knowledgeable and trained career officers fill all positions in our diplomatic service.”

The administration is “well aware of the historical target of career vs. non-career ambassadors, and we will be right on that target,” said White House spokesman Thomas Vietor. He said the first round of diplomatic jobs traditionally go to political appointees because those are the first available when a president takes office.

Vietor said Obama also made it clear early on that he would “nominate extremely qualified individuals who didn’t necessarily come up through the ranks of the State Department but want to serve their country.”

Among the top Obama fundraisers with jobs: former technology executive Julius Genachowski as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and Nicole Avant, a music industry executive who is the top envoy in the Bahamas. Neither granted interview requests.

Always a man of his word, that Obama. Ahahahahaha – I could barely type that out. I mean, he does say words, and so what if he rearranges the order of those words from time to time so that their meaning is the exact opposite of what he said previously? Picky, picky.

I know you are worried about those people who gave Obama a bucket of money who DIDN’T get to come work in the White House, or in Paris. Don’t you fret – Obama is taking care of them, too:

Those not in the administration benefited in other ways, including attending invitation-only White House bashes, such as a St. Patrick’s Day gala.

Fundraiser David Gail, a Dallas lawyer that the campaign identified as raising between $100,000 and $200,000, joined dignitaries in July for an East Room country music concert featuring Alison Krauss and Charley Pride. He said he greeted Obama after the event but doesn’t have special access to the president, who was elected on a pledge to change business-as-usual in Washington.

“I’ve seen people who have been included on conference calls or events who were very involved at the grass-roots level,” Gail said.

“Contributing doesn’t guarantee a visit to the White House,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Wednesday, “nor does it preclude it.”

Oh. My. GODDESS. Have you ever seen such mealey mouthed contradictory hooey? Oh, wait, you probably have – the LAST time I quoted Gibbs. You know, someone who can hedge like that ought to have a career in landscape design, for cryin’ out loud.

Okay, so some of these people aren’t ambassadors, or the US Attorney General, or Chair of the FCC, but they are still getting by:

Others not on the campaign’s list of official bundlers also have reaped rewards.

Sacramento developer Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis, a fundraiser in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential campaign, was nominated this month by Obama to serve as ambassador to Hungary. Clinton is now secretary of state.

Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis did not respond to interview requests, and her office referred calls to the White House.

It’s too early to tell how big a role Obama’s fundraisers will play. On the ambassador front alone, nearly 100 top positions remain unfilled, according to the American Foreign Service Association’s tally.

Ronald Neumann, president of the American Academy of Diplomacy, wants Obama to limit political appointees to about 10% of diplomatic jobs. “The direction is not good,” he said of Obama’s appointments to date, “but you cannot definitively say what the picture will be for the whole administration.”

“The direction is not good.” Uh, yeah. These are the people either running our country, or having an impact on foreign affairs, or charged with ensuring the very laws that govern our land. And you wonder why Washington is such a mess. The people who are running it are the ones who washed someone’s back, and are simply getting their payback. It is some kind of payback they are getting, too – plum positions, and positions of power. All because they have deep pockets. I bet that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside (for me, it is my blood pressure rising).

Below is the list of people thus far, also from the USA Today article. Have fun perusing it and seeing just what a few hundred grand will get you. Wait, is THAT the kind of “change” Obama meant??

FROM FUNDRAISER TO STAFFER

President Obama has named 54 fundraisers to government positions. Here’s a look at who they are and how much they raised. The campaign reported fundraising in broad ranges only.

RAISED MORE THAN $500,0000

Nicole Avant Ambassador to the Bahamas
Matthew Barzun Ambassador to Sweden
Don Beyer Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein
Jeff Bleich Ambassador to Australia**
Richard Danzig Member, Defense Policy Board
William Eacho Ambassador to Austria
Julius Genachowski Chairman of Federal Communications Commission
Donald Gips Ambassador to South Africa
Howard Gutman Ambassador to Belgium
Scott Harris General Counsel, Department of Energy
William Kennard Ambassador to the European Union**
Bruce Oreck Ambassador to Finland
Spencer Overton Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General
Thomas Perrelli Associate Attorney General
Abigail Pollack Member, Commission to Study the Potential Creation of a National Museum of the American Latino
Charles Rivkin Ambassador to France and Monaco
John Roos Ambassador of Japan
Francisco Sanchez Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade
Alan Solomont Ambassador to Spain and Andorra**
Cynthia Stroum Ambassador to Luxembourg**

RAISED BETWEEN $200,000 and $500,000

A. Marisa Chun Deputy associate attorney general
Gregory Craig White House counsel
Norman Eisen Special counsel to the president for ethics and government reform
Michael Froman Deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs
Mark Gallogly Member, Economic Recovery Advisory Board
Max Holtzman Senior adviser to the Agriculture secretary
James Hudson Director, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
Jeh Johnson General counsel, Department of Defense
Samuel Kaplan Ambassador to Morocco
Nicole Lamb-Hale Deputy general counsel, Commerce Department
Andres Lopez Member, Commission to Study the Potential Creation of a National Museum of the American Latino
Cindy Moelis Director, Commission on White House Fellows
William Orrick Counselor to the assistant attorney general
John Phillips Chairman, Commission on White House Fellows
Penny Pritzker*** Member, Economic Recovery Advisory Board
Bob Rivkin General counsel, Transportation Department
Desiree Rogers White House social secretary
Louis Susman Ambassador to the United Kingdom
Robert Sussman Senior policy counsel, Environmental Protection Agency
Christina Tchen Director, White House Office of Public Engagement
Barry White Ambassador to Norway
RAISED BETWEEN $100,000 and $200,000
Preeta Bansal General counsel, Office of Management and Budget
Laurie Fulton Ambassador to Denmark
Fred Hochberg President, Export-Import Bank of the United States
Valerie Jarrett Senior adviser to the president
Kevin Jennings Assistant deputy secretary of Education
Steven Rattner Treasury Department adviser
Miriam Sapiro Deputy U.S. trade representative**
Vinai Thummalapally Ambassador to Belize

RAISED BETWEEN $50,000 and $100,000

Eric Holder Attorney general
David Jacobson Ambassador to Canada
Ronald Kirk U.S. trade representative
Rocco Landesman Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts
Susan Rice Ambassador to the United Nations

** Nominated, not yet confirmed by Senate; *** National finance chairwoman
Sources: Obama campaign, Public Citizen; White House; USA TODAY research
Contributing: Andrew Seaman

In his August 20, 2009, meeting with supporters at the Democratic National Committee and its “Organizing for America” (OFA) arm – formerly the “Obama for America” campaign – President Obama blamed the media for the fact that many untrue claims made by opponents of his health care reform push had been accepted by many Americans as fact.

Stating that end of life care was “previously considered a bipartisan concept,” the president said, “this used to be just a sensible thing that everybody could agree to.”

But it “suddenly became ‘Death Panels,’ and scared Grandma,” he said, “and it’s just irresponsible.”

“Scared Grandma?” Can our President say anything that doesn’t sound condescending and insulting?

The president added, “I have to say, part of the reason it spreads is the way reporting is done today. If somebody puts out misinformation, ‘Obama’s Creating Death Panels,’ then the way the news report comes across is: ‘Today such-and-such accused President Obama of putting forward death panels. The White House responded that that wasn’t true.’ And then they go on to the next story. And what they don’t say is, ‘In fact it isn’t true.’”

Even more preposterous than the President demonizing “grandma” and anyone else angered by the arrogant, flatfooted handling of health care reform legislation, he is now demonizing the press, his strongest allies.

No “death panels” eh? Glad to hear it. But I wonder why a Senate subcommittee then promptly removed a suspicious sounding provision from their bill after Sarah Palin made a stink about it on her Facebook page. Even Obama cheerleader Eugene Robinson admitted she had a point. His monstrous health care bill (I think there are 5) has not even been formulated yet, but the Obama Administration is going full steam ahead selling it to the American people, criticizing anyone questioning their audacity in ramming through a bill no one understands. The latest we hear is that Obama has backed off the public option. This magical health care legislation morphs into something new daily.

As Tapper points out:

Today OFA sent out an email to supporters continuing this line of criticism. (You can see the email HERE.)

“Over the past few months, two things have become clear about the fight for health insurance reform,” writes OFA director Mitch Stewart. “1. Our opponents will create and spread outrageous lies to try to stop President Obama from creating real change. 2. We just can’t count on the media to debunk them.”

Obama cannot count on the media? Not two months ago, he made fun of the media’s fawning when he joked about rolling over in bed to find Brian Williams lying beside him. The President is also being disingenuous. When the “death panels” comment hit the net, the press was all over itself debunking it, and insulting Palin once again. The American people saw through the many conflicting statements on health care and decided they weren’t buying. That is the real issue. But the President can’t come out and tell the American people off for not being seduced by more smoke and mirrors.

This comment is the pièce de resistance…

Stewart then quoted President Obama from August 20, and said supporters need to “double our own efforts to get the truth out. That means more organizers running door-to-door canvases and phone banks to educate our neighbors, more events to spread the word to Congress, and more ads on the air countering the smears. And we’ll need the money to pay for it all. Can you chip in to help make it happen?”

“Stepping in when the media fails is a daunting challenge,” Stewart writes.

Yes, let’s go door to door for more bullying. Let’s raise lots more money people don’t have to push a plan when we’re still not sure what’s in it.

So far, this administration has not earned enough points with the American people to convince us we should take legislation this important on faith. Stewart has a lot of nerve to talk about what should be done when the media fails to do its job. I think there are still a good number of Hillary’s 18,000,000 voters who might like to get a piece of that action.

No one, not even President George Bush ever had such loving, sycophantic treatment by the press. More than owing contributors to his huge war chest, President Obama owes the mainstream media for their blind praise and abject refusal to vet him throughout 2008. That was reason numero uno why this man was elected. Now he is criticizing the press for actually daring to let a little real news see the light of day. In reality, he is criticizing the fact that press efforts to minimize the gravity of grass roots opposition has backfired.

Of course we need reform, but before we do something drastic to 1/6th of the economy in such perilous times, let’s make sure we are doing something to help, not hurt. The Obama Administration has once again chosen bullying and hubris over returning to the drawing board to fix the problem.

The media still defends the President at every turn. It is an indicator of negative public sentiment when the President feels he must resort to criticism of an organism that has largely functioned as his own personal PR firm for 20 months. It will be interesting to see if any of our so called journalists finally declare enough is enough and remember the way they USED to do their jobs.

We’re waiting…

Huffington Post featured an exclusive excerpt from Wolffe’s book on Obama’s ascent to the Presidency. You can run over and see it for yourselves if you feel so inclined, I will not link to it. Much as I would wish otherwise, I must express bottomless contempt for the continuously disrespectful way the Clintons are discussed and regarded by the Obama camp. Apparently Wolffe appeared on the “Today” show this morning to discuss his book and the internal debates within the Obama campaign regarding offering Hillary Clinton the job of Secretary of State:

Of all his transition choices, none was easier to make, or more complex to execute, than Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. Obama had long wanted his former rival on his team, no matter what his friends and aides said about her aggressive campaign… His staff opposed the idea for the most part, arguing that Clinton would never be truly loyal. But Obama was willing to leave the primaries behind, including his own strong feelings at the time. “I don’t hold grudges,” he told his aides. “I don’t worry about the past. I’m concerned about what happens now. If she can help me and Bill Clinton isn’t too much of a liability, we should seriously look at this.”

Hillary’s aggressive campaign? Heaven forefend a woman actually have the temerity to step up to the plate and compete for the nomination the way any man would. Bill Clinton a liability? Tell that to the thousands, perhaps millions who now benefit from the Clinton Global Initiative. Tell that to those of us old enough to remember the nineties when Bill and Hillary presided over eight years of peace and prosperity, a balanced budget, an enormous surplus, and unemployment cut in half.

According to Wolffe, Obama stated:

“I’m really interested in pursuing this, but I know she has some hard feelings coming out of this campaign.” Emanuel and John Podesta, the former Clinton official who ran the transition, assured Obama that she was over those hard feelings now. Obama smiled and said, “Believe me. She’s not over it yet.”

He smiled? I bet he did. Again with “over it.” Just because Obama’s surrogates daily intimated the Clintons were racists, I can’t imagine why any of us would have a problem getting over it. But this is the piece de resistance:

[Obama’s] decision to offer her the job of secretary of state came surprisingly early. Well before the end of the primaries, when his staff and friends still felt hostile to her, Obama decided that Clinton possessed the qualities to carry his diplomacy to the rest of the world.

So during the primaries when he had ‘already made this decision,’ he campaigned daily with the meme that Hillary had no foreign policy street cred and her visits to over 80 countries as First Lady were nothing more than “tea parties, even though he knew that was a bald faced lie. “Carry his diplomacy to the rest of the world” …like his grateful, supine hand maiden. Wolffe’s writing here sounds like a bunch of school boys fantasizing about a hareem. Don’t look now, but Wolffe just betrayed his own paradigm.

And no, I am not over it so don’t even go there. Nor should anybody be over it who actually cares about democracy or decency. Further, Obama states:

“We actually thought during the primary, when we were pretty sure we were going to win, that she could end up being a very effective secretary of state… I felt that she was disciplined, that she was precise, that she was smart as a whip, and that she would present a really strong image to the world…I had that mapped out.”

Obama had that mapped out. Wow. He really is brilliant. And her voters had it mapped out a long time ago that she could dance circles around Obama. Guess we should have all had degrees from Harvard, too. According to Wolffe, Clinton had “issues” including settling her campaign debt and Obama informed his senior aides:

“I’m not begging her to take this job. If she wants it, I could help. But I’m not willing to go out in these difficult economic times to do a flashy fundraiser in California.”

“In these difficult economic times?” So that’s why he has a ½ million dollar pizza party on Wednesday nights? Or jet sets around to different parts of the country to sign a bill on the taxpayers’ dime. Or why he spent $6 million of his supporters hard earned dough on faux Grecian temples at his nomination festival? Or why his Inauguration festivities cost twice as much as that of President Bush? Guess times must not be quite that tough.

But here is really the lowest insult of all. I wonder who this quote is coming from – a senior aide? Who is unnamed? What Senate Democrat actually said this – if any?

As it happened, plenty of people in the Senate were begging Obama to offer Clinton the job. Obama’s aides believed that many Senate Democrats thought Clinton had extended her presidential campaign far beyond the point where she had lost the election. Her negative advertising wasted Democratic money, threatened to undermine the party’s nominee, and suggested that she was disloyal to the party. They were unwilling to offer the junior New York senator a position ahead of her lowly rank, and she stood little chance of becoming majority leader. “There was a lot of encouragement from inside the Senate to get her into this job,” said one senior Obama aide. “They wanted her out of there.”

Why in God’s name would Wolffe write this? If he is so enamored of Barack Obama that is fine, but surely at this difficult point in our history, if President Obama actually cares about the country and our standing in the world, he would never want to undermine his Secretary of State. Would he? Giggle, giggle. And let me go on the record as saying if the knuckle draggers at the Obama campaign are anything like his frat boy speechwriter Jon Favreau, who put a picture on his Facebook page of he and a pal groping a life sized cardboard poster of Hillary Clinton and forcing a beer down her throat, that should clarify the level of some of the folks who helps to get our current President elected. Is it any wonder that we read quotes like these: “They wanted her out of there…”

And if it is in fact true that the Senate Democrats “wanted her out of there,” it is because they couldn’t bear their shame in looking her in the face at work every day. She was forced out after a nominating contest that was razor close, and was not even allowed to legitimately have her name in nomination, though she had won the popular vote. She outclasses every single one of those cowardly back stabbers. And if anyone wants to complain about who depleted voters coffers so there was no money left for Senate Democrats, you have to look no further than the Obama campaign, who outspent her three to one. After Mr. Obama promised he would help Harry Reid with down ticket races, he reneged. So how real is this complaint anyway? Furthermore, the Clintons have raised more money for the Democratic Party over the years than anyone.

After the Presidency, Secretary of State is the biggest and most important plum post– everyone from John Kerry to Governor Richardsion was begging for it. I’ll bet VP Biden would have rather had SoS than the position he now holds, so to pretend they had just successfully farmed Hillary Clinton out to the minor leagues for the sole purpose of “getting her out of there” is laughable at best.

Further, Glenn Thrush of Politico chimes in to note that:

Wolffe may be overstating the case. According to my reporting at the time, some Senate Democrats admired Clinton’s grit, and many others thought she’d earned the right to ride out the campaign to the end.

It looks as though Wolffe’s blockbuster reporting is just more revisionist history coming from Obama’s sour aides who were pissed that an amazing sixty year old lady in a pantsuit actually made their candidate sweat for something he wanted. It is no less than horrifying to appoint a Secretary of State who clearly knows what she is doing and is a huge asset, only to constantly disparage her as being no more than an egregiously disloyal, irritating inconvenience. I wonder if Wolffe realizes how bad and how petty he makes Obama’s aides look for their negative characterizations of SoS Clinton when clearly, she has repeatedly demonstrated her willingness and ability to rise above all of this. Then again, Wolffe is a “contributor” to Newsweek/MSNBC. Uh, need I say more. Oh, but he does:

As for controlling the uncontrollable Bill Clinton, Obama’s aides drew up a series of checks on his fundraising for both Clinton Global Initiative and his work on HIV/AIDS across the world. But they really counted on Hillary to be the ultimate safeguard – against both her husband and her own ambition. “It’s in her interests to keep him in line,” warned one senior Obama aide. Others in Obama’s inner circle said the president-elect believed Clinton needed to demonstrate that she was a team player and to shape her own career and legacy. “There are plenty who don’t trust her and think she still harbors something,” said another senior adviser. “It’s still potentially problematic down the road. Barack’s thinking on this is that it’s not in her interests to mess with us. She can’t win that fight internally and she’s smart enough that she won’t want that fight publicly.”

Her own ambition? Again, ambition in a woman is something dirty to be rejected, but a man with less than two years in the Senate under his belt running for President – that vaunting ambition would not be considered negative. Clearly, Hillary put ambition aside and graciously opted to help Obama get elected to push forward a Democratic agenda. Disloyal? How dare these arrogant asses say anything of the kind? If Secretary of State Clinton has any failing at all, it is that she is loyal to a fault – and has certainly received no end of slaps even from some of her own supporters for that very attribute.

Several weeks into the administration, even Clinton’s internal critics believed the relationship was a success. “They have both worked really hard at it,” said one senior White House official. “There’s a natural affinity and respect that ironically grew out of being opponents. You get to know someone really well after all that.”

What respect? Obviously, if Obama and his camp had any respect for her, we would not be reading any of this tripe. President Obama’s aides and advisors once again exhibit their complete lack of class by stating this drivel. They will never forgive Hillary Clinton for outclassing their chosen messiah on preparedness, knowledge and stamina. Clearly, he will not forgive either, as he must always remind everyone how superior he is. I would gently like to remind Mr. Obama that he is the President. So we don’t need any reminding. Perhaps he needs to remind himself as he still feels somewhat insecure in this regard. Hillary Clinton encouraged us all to look behind the curtain to see the Wizard and for that she must forever be punished, as though anything she is given by Obama is a favor for which she should get down on her knees and thank her lucky stars.

To the contrary, it is President Obama who is extremely fortunate to have her on his team. And frankly, I think he well knows that. She made 180 campaign appearances for him to drag him across the finish line and to signal to her supporters that it was okay to vote for him. She must be in his prayers at night because certainly he needs an adult minding the store on foreign affairs, something he is woefully unprepared to handle.

At first, I was so angry writing this it took twice as long to get my fingers to work properly. However, the more I think about it, I take their obsession with diminishing Secretary of State Clinton as a huge compliment. Surely if you feel a constant need to deflate and degrade another person and make it appear as though you have your boot on her throat, she must be quite intimidating indeed. Further, I think it an odd coincidence that this book comes out now, when Hillary Clinton’s popularity in the polls has eclipsed that of President Obama. Clearly, popularity polls are not something this lady is worried about. She is busy quietly doing her job to the best of her ability as she always does.

All this goes a long way to illustrating that sexism is alive and well in this country. The woman must be kept in her place at all costs. As much as Hillary Clinton’s supporters are constantly told we need to “get over it,” by the tenor of the comments Wolffe quotes in his new book, clearly, it is Obama’s people who are not yet “over it.”

The three 30-minute ads or infomercials cost Obama nearly $1 million each. This is the first time mark the first time in 16 years that a White House contender has aired commercials of that length on broadcast networks. Billionaire Ross Perot paid for 11 half-hour ads during his 1992 bid as an independent.

According, to USA Today, Obama’s ad spending will easily surpass the record $188 million President Bush spent in 2004. How is this possible? How does Obama have $230 million to spend on television advertising? The answer is that he accepted campaign finance reform and then rejected it when his campaign decided he was not just a cash cow, but the whole herd. Meanwhile, John McCain, who first began working on campaign finance reform with Senator Russell Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin,13 years ago, is limited to $84.1 million because he accepted taxpayer funds for the general election.

Once again, John McCain shows himself to be a man of his word. And Barack Obama?
Well, he has already shown himself to be a liar, since he went back on his promise to accept campaign finance reform as well as on many issues. But as if that is not sufficient cause for alarm, one has to wonder about the conscience of the man who is being hailed as the messiah of the Democratic Party. One has to wonder about a man who claims to have worked in the field of education for years.
$230 million for television advertising????
It takes my breath away.

And I’m wondering, how many school books that might buy. How many salaries for teachers? How many college educations?
Hmmm . . . How many mortgages might that pay? How many gas tanks might that fill?
How many hungry bellies might that feed?
I guess Obama is for redistribution of wealth as long as it is not his wealth.
I am stunned at the utter lack of morality and ethics on display here.
For shame, Obama. For absolute shame.
Let’s not waste a moment letting the world know that the American public will not be bought. Let’s get ourselves to any field office or campaign office, especially if it is in a battleground or border state.
This is the real deal. So I say, Just Say No Deal. Vote McCain/Palin and do the right thing.

At the end of the Democratic Primary season, this was the situation:

Popular Vote
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton: 17,857,446, (48.04%)
Senator Barack Obama: 17,584,649 (47.31%)

Pledged delegates

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton: 1,730.5 (39.17%)
Senator Barack Obama: 1,747.5 (39.55%)

(source)

Then, for no apparent good reason, in June Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosis decided THEY, not the delegates chosen by the electorate and not the superdelegates appointed via proper party procedure, were going to decide who would represent the top of the ticket for the general election. Now that same leadership wants YOU to legitimize their undemocratic and unprincipled methods by putting their selected candidate into the White House on November 4.

But WE can say no to the subversion of democratic principles within the Democratic Party. We can say no with our votes and by urging our fellow Democrats to pay attention to the particulars of the candidate Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi selected to represent the Democratic Party.

Put this ad on the air and let America know that our voices count.

Over the next 24 hours and across the internet, we as a community will urgently be raising money to run edgy and persuasive ads made by Democrats in key battleground states. Generous contributors have pledged $500 in matching funds. Your voice counts. Please contribute now

CLICK ON ROSIE TO DONATE:

Or go to Democrats For Principle Before Party – The Denver Group’s general election website, where you can view other ads the group is running:

Medusa’s original post: According to a rumor on Daily Kos, Obama’s internals show him with a mere 2 point lead in Pennsylvania. If true, this is very bad news for the Anointed One. John Kerry carried Pennsylvania by only 2.5 points, and Kerry didn’t insult the voters there.

Heidi Li Feldman and Marc Rubin of the Denver Group and Democrats for Principles Before Party (DFPBP) have two ads currently running in different metro regions in Pennsylvania. Watch the most recent one, here:

Pennsylvania is key in the election, and as you may have heard, Democratic Representative Jack Murtha first called his own Pennsylvania constituents “racists” but has now softened the insult by calling them “rednecks.” In an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Murtha said:

There is no question that western Pennsylvania is a racist area

But actually it turns out that these people are the gun-toting, bitter, religious types that the Dems find so clingy and bitter. Murtha clarified his remarks to mean that:

some of his constituents in western Pennsylvania are “rednecks” and the entire region just five to 10 years ago was “really redneck.

Marc Rubin’s fabulous post on No Quarter How Democrats Can Defeat Obama, See McCain Win, Still Get Everything They Want and Respect Themselves In The Morning spelled out the reasons why many Democrats refuse to vote for Obama:

Many Democrats seem to be going through a period of conflict over this election. They see Obama for what he is: a dishonest snake oil salesman, unfit and unqualified to be President, throwing out one sweet talking lie after another as the political Mr. Goodbar, trying to pick up as many votes as he can get.

Rubin rightly states that Obama must be defeated in order to “fumigate” the Democratic Party of its corrupting influences. And he urges people to vote for McCain to send a clear message to the party that gave us the Rules and By-Laws that awarded Hillary’s votes to Obama:

Obama is the nominee because of a dishonest primary in which these same people, along with the press, did everything possible to sell Obama as the nominee and do it as dishonestly as they knew how, including rigging the roll call vote, violating every Democratic Party rule and procedure in the process.

Dean, Pelosi, Brazile, Fowler and every member of the DNC who engineered and went along with fixing the process needs to go. Those who won’t resign (though I think many will after an Obama defeat) need to have their power and their base removed, so the that the Democratic Party can air itself out. And the only way that can happen is with an Obama loss. And the bigger the better.

Rubin is a former advertising executive and he understands how advertising works. In a recent interview on No We Won’t radio, with Riverdaughter, Heidi Li and Harriet Christensen, Rubin explains how skewed the polls are and why, and he says that with enough money to create ads, he feels that the DFPBP could influence this election away from Obama. Listen to the interview here.

Donating to The Denver Group’s DFPBP is a powerful way to make a difference now. If we can get 500 No Quarter regulars to donate $20 we, as a community, could raise $10,000 to run powerful, persuasive ads in Pensylviania and other battleground states!!! Now is the time to act. You have the power. Click here to donate.

Remember what Hillary said:

For everyone here in Ohio and across America who’s ever been counted out but refused to be knocked out, for everyone who has stumbled but stood right back up, and for everyone who works hard and never gives up — this one is for you.

More No Quarter posts on The Denver Group:

The quality of intent: What is really at stake in the 2008 Presidential Election by Heidi Li Feldman

Holding the DNC’s Feet to the Fire: An Interview with Marc Rubin of The Denver Group by Ani

The Denver Group’s New Video by SusanUnPc

The Denver Group’s Letter To Prevaricator Howard Dean by Uppity Woman

MAKING THE SQUEAKY WHEEL SQUEAK LOUDER Marc Rubin

NQ Radio Interview — The Denver Group Bud White

**********Truthteller asks bloggers and reporters to direct their attention to Amrish Mahajan and the Mutual Bank of Harvey.**********

Mike Robinson’s AP article entitled “Obama Fundraiser, Convicted of Fraud, Spills Beans,” corroborates what we at No Quarter have been writing for weeks: Antoin “Tony” Rezko is cooperating with federal prosecutors interested in Barack Obama. While the national media’s attention to this topic is long overdue, I am not prepared to state that it is too little, too late. I am, however, disappointed.

Also disappointing but somewhat predictable is the blogosphere’s bungled reception of Mike Robinson’s article. Of course those who have embraced Obama will dismiss the story as so much yellow journalism. One blogger claims that prosecutors are interested in Blagojevich and not Obama. But looming in the blind spot of that blogger’s necessarily tendentious gaze is Rezko’s 9 JUN 2008 letter to Judge Amy St. Eve and the reference to Obama as “Individual D” in the superseding indictment and the proffer of evidence filed by Fitzgerald and his prosecutors during the Rezko trial. Obama’s name can be printed again and again on the surface of the legal documents filed during the proceedings of the Rezko trial, but these writers with all their “naked” insight will clothe the verifiable record with their blindness. Knowledge production, it seems, has been lifted from its evidentiary supports when Democrats write about Barack Obama and Antoin “Tony” Rezko.

And yes, those Democrats include some ostensible Hillary Clinton Democrats. Seizing upon the following quotation in a Chicago Sun-Times column, one blogger believes the AP story heralds the end of the political careers of Alexi Giannoulias and Barack Obama:

Sneed hears rumbles political fund-raiser/fixer Tony Rezko, who is now singing sweetly to the feds from his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, has been talking about his “dealings” with a Chicago bank, which has political connections.

Stay tuned.

While Rezko was a customer of Alexi Giannoulias’s Broadway Bank, where he amassed a debt of $450,000 after writing bad checks at Las Vegas casinos, and while Giannoulias did write loans for Rezko, I do not believe one can aver with the confidence of the blogger I cite above that federal prosecutors are now focusing on Giannoulias, even if Giannoulias was tied to Rezko by his opponent during his 2006 bid for the office of Illinois state Treasurer. Allow me to be clear: Obama bundler, mobster banker and Obama protégé Giannoulias is, to be sure, embroiled in the Rezko scandal and in other aspects of Chicago politics any political observer would find unsavory, but he is not in my opinion the topic of the conservation occurring between Rezko, Rezko’s attorney and Fitzgerald’s team of prosecutors. I do admit he is grist for the mill of impetuous bloggers who desire web traffic and a controversial headline or two, however. Because I tend to rely on evidence and not on hearsay, I believe we should focus our attention on Amrish Mahajan and the Mutual Bank of Harvey, not on Giannoulias and the Broadway Bank, if we are to assign names to the financial institution about which Sneed of the Chicago Sun-Times has heard “rumblings.” Although Mahajan is not known to readers of No Quarter and to the national media, I imagine they will desire more information on the unscrupulous banker once they read the information I unpack below the fold. And yes, Obama is involved, deeply involved.

My interest in Amrish Mahajan and the Mutual Bank of Harvey was picqued by this list of contributors in Rezko’s bundling network provided by the Chicago Sun-Times last March. View the second page of the document, and notice the following entry:

The data available in the Sun-Times spreadsheet is corroborated by the following data, which is democratically available at the Federal Election Commission‘s website:

MAHAJAN, AMRISH
CHICAGO, IL 60607
MUTUAL BANK

OBAMA, BARACK
VIA OBAMA FOR ILLINOIS INC
12/20/2003 500.00 24020030170
04/14/2004 1000.00 24020461757

Not only was Mahajan a member of Rezko’s bundling network; his bank, the Mutual Bank of Harvey, granted Rita Rezko the $500,000 mortgage she needed in order to purchase the lot on which the Obama mansion in Chicago sits. As many of you may recall, the Obamas could not have purchased the mansion they could not afford unless transactions for the mansion and the lot closed on the same day. Obama needed to locate someone who would buy the lot, and he approached Rezko, the convicted slumlord with whom Obama toured the property before they mutually agreed to the following arrangement:

The home and lot sales closed on June 15, 2005. A land trust controlled by the Obamas bought the house for $1.65 million, and the Obamas secured a $1.32 million mortgage from Northern Trust to complete that purchase. That same day, Rezko’s wife, Rita Rezko, bought the side lot for $625,000. A $37,000- a-year Cook County employee, she secured a $500,000 mortgage from Mutual Bank of Harvey.

The structure of this transaction begs the following question: What bank would lend a government employee who earns $37,000 per annum a $500,000 mortgage? What bank would assume such a risk?

The Mutual Bank of Harvey, of course, for the Mutual Bank of Harvey’s President is a man who is deeply connected to the Chicago machine that backed Barack Obama. Indeed, Amrish Mahajan was one of Mayor Daley’s first political appointments in 1989, when he was named to a seat on Chicago’s Plan Commission, where he would be joined by Obama’s former boss and Rezko’s business partner Allison Davis and by Valerie Jarrett, Daley’s Chief of Staff who chaired the Commission from 1991-1995. Mahajan, in other words, worked with those who devised and profited from Daley’s failed public housing experiment in Chicago, a public housing policy Obama helped fund as state Senator and US Senator.

Rezko, according to the Boston Globe, was one of the major beneficiaries of Obama’s legislative advocacy for funding of Daley’s public housing experiment. Other major beneficiaries are Jarrett and Allison Davis. Mahajan was also a beneficiary, for his bank had made $3.4 million dollars in loans to Tony Rezko’s slum landlord business since 2002. A banker for one of the slumlords who benefitted from the Daley housing program Obama helped bankroll, Mahajan was returning a favor when he wrote a $500,000 mortgage in 2005 for the wife of one of his clients. Although Tony’s financial problems were mounting in 2005, and although Rita earned only $35,000 per annum, Mahajan underwrote the mortgage. Favors must be reciprocated, I guess, especially when one can satisfy two parties at once: the person with whom one has a complicated relationship in real estate and the politician who helped finance that complicated relationship as state Senator and US Senator.

I doubt federal investigators are interested in the Mahajans solely for their involvement in the property deal involving Obama, Mahajan and the Rezkos. The Mahajans, I believe, are the foci of their probe for many reasons.

• Anita Mahajan, the wife of Amrish, has been involved with questionable real estate deals that are the subject of federal probes with Governor Blagojevich’s wife, Patricia
• Anita Mahajan exploited lucrative no bid contracts with the Department of Children and Family Services to steal $2.1 million from Illinois taxpayers; she was charged and released on a $250,000 bond in March 2007
• “Uncle Amrish” has raised more than a half million for Blagojevich and approximately $50,000 for Mayor Daley, whose father helped launch Mahajan’s banking career
• “Uncle Amrish” also helped Obama purchase a house he could not afford

The real estate transaction involving Rita Rezko, the Obamas and Mutual Bank of Harvey is just the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, the Mutual Bank of Harvey seems to be at the center of all the corruption in Chicago. To quote former Donald Perillo, Chicago insurance mogul and son of the lawyer for Al Capone, in the Chicago Tribune article I cite above:

Donald Parrillo said he isn’t surprised to see Mahajan mix it up with politics and business. “He got that attitude from the Parrillo family,” the former alderman said. “He wanted to get in the game.”

And Mahajan certainly is in the game. The banker of the Chicago machine, he is also the man who wrote the mortgage for Rita Rezko that facilitated Obama’s purchase the mansion he could not afford. This is why I believe prosecutors are interested in Harvey Mutual Bank. Not only did Rezko receive loans from this institution; this bank is heavily involved in problematic real estate dealings involving Blagojevich and Obama. And if I may quote Rezko in the 9 JUN letter he wrote to Judge Amy St. Eve:

Your Honor, the prosecutors have been overzealous in pursuing a crime that never happened. They are pressuring me to tell them the “wrong” things that I supposedly know about Governor Blagojevich and Senator Obama. I have never been party to any wrongdoing that involved the Governor or the Senator. I will never fabricate lies about anyone else for selfish purposes. I will take what comes my way, but I will never hurt innocent people. I am not Levine, Loren, Mahru , or Winter.”

Rezko is now talking, and prosecutors are presently interested in a politically connected financial institution. I bet Obama now regrets paying Rita Rezko $104,500 for the strip of the land in the lot on which his house sits in January 2006. Acquired with the assistance of a questionable $500,000 mortgage from Amrish Mahajan’s Mutual Bank of Harvey, this lot and Obama’s desire to expand his yard by bit was the catalyst for all the investigative reports into Obama’s deep ties to Rezko. By the way, Rita’s lot is only accessible through the front gate of Obama’s home; it is not a separate property, and it was never intended to be a separate property.

“It was a mistake to have been engaged with him at all in this or any other personal business dealing that would allow him, or anyone else, to believe that he had done me a favor,” Obama says of the real estate transactions with Rezko. I wonder if now he also believes it was a mistake for him to serve as the legislator who represented and bankrolled Richard Daley, Amrish Mahajan, Valerie Jarrett, Allison Davis and the Chicago Plan Commission. But at least he and Michelle have a house, a house the Mutual Bank of Harvey, the politically connected bank that wrote loans for Rezko, helped them procure in 2005. Too bad that house will be the end of Barack Obama.

—————————————————-
No Quarter dossier on Obama and Rezko:

• Rezko, Giannoulias, Obama – Dominoes?
• CORROBORATED: Rezko Speaks, Prosecutors Interested in Obama Listen
• More Than Just a Boneheaded Mistake
• The Epistolary Rezko
• The Illinois Combine II: The DNC Moves Into Chicago
• Obama’s Gangster Mentality
• Prescience: “Will Rezko Blow Up Obama?”
• “CHICAGO MACHINE”
• The Tipping Point?
• Barack, The Truth Ain’t A Smear
• Recently Unsealed Documents Confirm Obama Heavily Embroiled in Rezko Case
• Boston Globe Exposé, Part II: Barack Obama (D-Slumlord) Is Aloof, Oblivious, Dangerous
• Boston Globe Exposé, Part I: Introducing Cecil Butler, Obama’s West Side Slum Landlord Patron
• Patrick Fitzgerald Issues Obama A Warning
• What Hypocrite Obama Should Have Discussion during His Wesleyan Commencement Address
• Barack Obama’s Candidacy as a Take on The Picture of Dorian Gray
• A Majority of One: On Losing the Democratic Base
• Ok, So Tell Us What IS Allowed
• Two Lone Voices Speak for Millions of Us
• What’ll Be Left of the Democratic Party
• It Ain’t Over: Obama MAY Have to Pay the Piper After All
• Obama to Donate Contribution from Rezko’s Iraqi Friend
• Be My Friend, Godfather
• Jaws V, Starring Barack Obama
• The Chicago Three: Obama, Ayers & Rezko
• Charlie Gibson, Will You Ask Barack about Nadhmi Auchi?
• Saddam Hussein, Barack Hussein Obama’s Hidden Real Estate Partner?
• Barack “I-Didn’t-Know” Obama
• Those Who Haunt Him
• Hillary’s Campaign Comes out Swinging
• “Nobie and Obama”
• Authorization to Use Misleading Falsehoods
• What We’ve Noticed about the Speech
• This Is for Main Street (And for the Forgotten People Barack Obama Doesn’t Know)
• Michelle Obama: “Give Us Something Here”
• Rezko Muckrakers Alert!
• The Forgotten People
• Irrefutable Proof That Obama’s Own District Was Home to 11 Rezko Foreclosed Properties
• Speak the Truth, Fallout Be Damned
• The Rezko Saga: Two Videos
• Get Your Daily Rezko Dose Here
• The Media’s Panderbears, Part I
• Sunday Scoops: Rezko-gate and Adviser-gate
• Obama’s Prime-Slime Advisors
• Good Morning, Barack! (Rezko Got Jobs for Your Staffers? Do Tell.)
• Today’s Rezko Trial Scoops (And Prosecutors on $20K Kickback to Obama)
• ABC News: Rezko $50 Million in Debt
• 312.321.2417
• (Pants on Fire!) Lynn Sweet: Obama and His Taking Questions on Rezko
• Rezko Trial: Obama May Be Witness
• Obama’s Judgment on the Eve of Judgment Day
• Truthtelling from Lanny Davis (What about “Iron My Shirt?”)
• Experience, and Experiences (of the Rezko Sort)
• No He Can’t Because Yes They Will
• More Questions on Rezko
• “Obama Bagman” in Jail
• Democratic Death Wish
• How to Buy A Mansion You Can’t Afford
• Will Rezko Blow Up Obama?
• It is “Possible” Obama Was Aware of Rezko’s Financial and Legal Woes
• 20-Year Associate of Obama Arrested
• Look before You Leap: Obama’s Mobbed-Up Allies
• Politics Is A Blood Sport
• BREAKING: ABC News Reports $100,000 from Rezko That Obama Hasn’t Returned
• CNN on Rezko and Obama: This Is Obama’s “Slumwater”
• FACT CHECK: Obama, His Contributor Rezko, The Slum Landlord Business
• A Dope with Hope?
• Obama/Rezko: It Comes down to Judgment
• Didn’t Obama Watch The Firm
• Steve Clemons on Tonight’s Debate
• Patrick Fitzgerald Ties Obama to Rezko Indictments
• All in for Hillary
• Obama, His Lobbyists and His Cronies

RezkoWatch contains even more information on Obama’s deep and problematic ties to convicted slumlord and notorious political fixer Antoin “Tony” Rezko.

Also listen to our NQR Radio Show entitled “READING REZKO with Truthteller and SusanUnPC”

The American Issues Project, in a press release from today, says the ad seeks to put the blame of the crisis on Washington liberals:

Our ad seeks to set the record straight and let the American people know who is responsible for this $700 billion catastrophe,” said Ed Martin, the organization’s president. “While liberals and some in the media try to affix blame to the Bush Administration for the housing crisis and resulting financial meltdown, this is one case where the real impetus for all these troubles is crystal clear. It was not the free market but government supported and propped-up institutions Fannie and Freddie that are the root cause. All roads for this failure lead back to liberals and their close ties to these two government institutions.

The initial ad buy is for $1 million and it will run on cable news networks.

Below is the first ad on Obama’s ties to domestic terrorist Bill Ayers:

Here are some No Quarter posts on the first American Issues Project ad and Bill Ayers:

The 527’s Reply to Obama’s Efforts to Quash Ayers Ad

Obama’s New Bill Ayers Lie

BREAKING NEWS: David Axelrod Talking Regularly with Bill Ayers?

Swiftboating or Vetting?

Quibbles and Bits – Aug 26

Your Honor, the prosecutors have been overzealous in pursuing a crime that never happened. They are pressuring me to tell them the “wrong” things that I supposedly know about Governor Blagojevich and Senator Obama. I have never been party to any wrongdoing that involved the Governor or the Senator. I will never fabricate lies about anyone else for selfish purposes. I will take what comes my way, but I will never hurt innocent people. I am not Levine, Loren, Mahru , or Winter.”

Either Rezko is “Levine, Loren, Mahru, [sic] or Winter,” or Rezko decided he will no longer relate “the ‘wrong’ things” but the right things he knows about Governor Blagojevich and Senator Obama. For according to a Chicago Tribune article published today, Rezko has met with prosecutors and is considering cooperating with their investigation. I quote the Tribune:

Antoin “Tony” Rezko, a convicted influence peddler who was once one of Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s most trusted confidants, has met with federal prosecutors and is considering cooperating in the corruption probe of the governor’s administration, sources told the Tribune.

Rezko’s possible change of heart—after years of steadfast refusal—has sent ripples through a tight circle of prominent defense attorneys who represent dozens of potential witnesses and targets in the wide-ranging probe.

His cooperation would give prosecutors investigating the governor and his wife access to someone they have described as an ultimate political insider at the center of a pervasive pay-to-play scheme.

Rezko’s trial this year laid bare a culture of scams, bribes and backroom deals stretching from City Hall to the Statehouse. It even became fodder in the presidential campaign of Democratic nominee Barack Obama, whose fundraising and personal ties to Rezko go back more than a decade.

Key phrases in this excerpt are “ripples through a tight circle of prominent defense attorneys who represent dozens of potential witnesses and targets,” “political insider at the center of a pervasive pay-to-play scheme” and “culture of scams, bribes and backroom deals stretching from City Hall to the Statehouse.” Obama, we recall, is the “unnamed political candidate” mentioned in the superseding indictment and in the proffer of evidence filed by Fitzgerald and his prosecutors. I quote the Chicago Sun-Times:

Obama is not named in the Dec. 21 court document. But a source familiar with the case confirmed that Obama is the unnamed “political candidate” referred to in a section of the document that accuses Rezko of orchestrating a scheme in which a firm hired to handle state teacher pension investments first had to pay $250,000 in “sham” finder’s fees. From that money, $10,000 was donated to Obama’s successful run for the Senate in the name of a Rezko business associate, according to the court filing and the source.

Rezko, who was part of Obama’s senatorial finance committee, also is accused of directing “at least one other individual” to donate money to Obama and then reimbursing that individual — in possible violation of federal election law.

This is only a scratch on the surface, however. For as I describe in one of my many essays on the subject of Obama and Rezko, Obama’s relationship with the convicted slum landlord is extensive and elaborate. I quote myself on the years 2003-2005:

2005 is the year Rezko helped Obama purchase the mansion in the Kenwood neighborhood in inner city Chicago. And 2003 is the year Rezko held a fundraiser for US Senate candidate Barack Obama at his posh home in Wilmette, Illinois. Another event of significance in 2003 is Illinois Governor Blagojevich’s appointment of Rezko to the Board that oversees the $30 billlion dollar teachers’ pension fund. This is the same year during which Barack Obama was appointed to the Illinois state Senate Committee on Pensions and Investments by his friend and mentor state Senator Emil Jones. According to the Superseding Indictment filed by Fitzgerald in December 2006, Obama’s appointment to this state Senate committee coincided with Rezko’s attempts to leverage his influence with “high-ranking State of Illinois officials” to oppose a pension consolidation plan that would complicate the efforts of Rezko and Levine to defraud investment firms and the pensions funds of Illinois. Notice also how Obama sat on the state Senate Pensions and Investments Board when Rezko funneled money he defrauded from an investment firm that sought access to the Illinois pensions fund to Obama through Joseph Aramanda, whose son worked as an intern in Obama’s US Senate office in 2005, the year Rezko advised and assisted the Obamas when they purchased the Kenwood mansion they could not afford.

That is only a brief summary of Obama’s involvement with Rezko during the years that are the focus of Fitzgerald’s probe. For more on Obama’s relationship with Rezko since at least 1991, I recommend consulting the diaries whose titles are listed below.

Obama’s ties to Rezko are deep and controversial. Moreover, recently unsealed documents from the court proceedings reveal Judge Amy St. Eve permitted prosecutors to summon witnesses who could provide testimony on Obama’s ties to Rezko. Prosecutors, in other words, were interested in Obama’s role in Rezko’s elaborate web of influence peddling and corruption.

The alarm expressed by defense attorneys who represent witnesses and potential targets in the wake of the revelation that Rezko is cooperating with prosecutors should be of interest to readers of No Quarter. For not only is Obama deeply embroiled in Rezko’s legal woes; Obama was also one of the prosecutors’ many targets. And although Obama’s campaign will claim that “prosecutors during Rezko’s trial never made any suggestions that Obama was involved in anything improper,” they neglect to understand that anything Rezko may relate now that he is cooperating with prosecutors will be used against Barack Obama. Besides, Rezko mentions Obama in his letter to Judge St. Eve dated 9 June 2008. If prosecutors were not pressing Rezko to reveal details about his relation to Obama, why would Rezko bother to mention Obama’s name?

Because Rezko is cooperating with prosecutors who demonstrated an interest in Rezko’s relation to Barack Obama during the trial, I imagine Obama’s campaign and defense attorneys are not pleased with this latest revelation in the Chicago Tribune. And yes, we at No Quarter will keep everyone posted. Rezko, after all, is one of the many reasons we insist on probing Barack Obama’s record.

—————————————————-
No Quarter dossier on Obama and Rezko:

• “CHICAGO MACHINE”
• The Tipping Point?
• Barack, The Truth Ain’t A Smear
• Patrick Fitzgerald Issues Obama A Warning
• What Hypocrite Obama Should Have Discussion during His Wesleyan Commencement Address
• Barack Obama’s Candidacy as a Take on The Picture of Dorian Gray
• A Majority of One: On Losing the Democratic Base
• Ok, So Tell Us What IS Allowed
• Two Lone Voices Speak for Millions of Us
• What’ll Be Left of the Democratic Party
• It Ain’t Over: Obama MAY Have to Pay the Piper After All
• Obama to Donate Contribution from Rezko’s Iraqi Friend
• Be My Friend, Godfather
• Jaws V, Starring Barack Obama
• The Chicago Three: Obama, Ayers & Rezko
• Charlie Gibson, Will You Ask Barack about Nadhmi Auchi?
• Saddam Hussein, Barack Hussein Obama’s Hidden Real Estate Partner?
• Barack “I-Didn’t-Know” Obama
• Those Who Haunt Him
• Hillary’s Campaign Comes out Swinging
• “Nobie and Obama”
• Authorization to Use Misleading Falsehoods
• What We’ve Noticed about the Speech
• This Is for Main Street (And for the Forgotten People Barack Obama Doesn’t Know)
• Michelle Obama: “Give Us Something Here”
• Rezko Muckrakers Alert!
• The Forgotten People
• Irrefutable Proof That Obama’s Own District Was Home to 11 Rezko Foreclosed Properties
• Speak the Truth, Fallout Be Damned
• The Rezko Saga: Two Videos
• Get Your Daily Rezko Dose Here
• The Media’s Panderbears, Part I
• Sunday Scoops: Rezko-gate and Adviser-gate
• Obama’s Prime-Slime Advisors
• Good Morning, Barack! (Rezko Got Jobs for Your Staffers? Do Tell.)
• Today’s Rezko Trial Scoops (And Prosecutors on $20K Kickback to Obama)
• ABC News: Rezko $50 Million in Debt
• 312.321.2417
• (Pants on Fire!) Lynn Sweet: Obama and His Taking Questions on Rezko
• Rezko Trial: Obama May Be Witness
• Obama’s Judgment on the Eve of Judgment Day
• Truthtelling from Lanny Davis (What about “Iron My Shirt?”)
• Experience, and Experiences (of the Rezko Sort)
• No He Can’t Because Yes They Will
• More Questions on Rezko
• “Obama Bagman” in Jail
• Democratic Death Wish
• How to Buy A Mansion You Can’t Afford
• Will Rezko Blow Up Obama?
• It is “Possible” Obama Was Aware of Rezko’s Financial and Legal Woes
• 20-Year Associate of Obama Arrested
• Look before You Leap: Obama’s Mobbed-Up Allies
• Politics Is A Blood Sport
• BREAKING: ABC News Reports $100,000 from Rezko That Obama Hasn’t Returned
• CNN on Rezko and Obama: This Is Obama’s “Slumwater”
• FACT CHECK: Obama, His Contributor Rezko, The Slum Landlord Business
• A Dope with Hope?
• Obama/Rezko: It Comes down to Judgment
• Didn’t Obama Watch The Firm
• Steve Clemons on Tonight’s Debate
• Patrick Fitzgerald Ties Obama to Rezko Indictments
• All in for Hillary
• Obama, His Lobbyists and His Cronies

RezkoWatch contains even more information on Obama’s deep and problematic ties to convicted slumlord and notorious political fixer Antoin “Tony” Rezko.

Also listen to our NQR Radio Show entitled “READING REZKO with Truthteller and SusanUnPC”