Clearly Mr. Van Dyk was a huge fan of this President, thought his campaign “superb” and appreciated his promises of “reaching across party and ideological lines to get the public’s business done.” Van Dyk opines:

“You displayed an intellect and sense of cool that made us think you would weigh decisions carefully and view advisers’ proposals with skepticism.”

You know what I get from that phrase? Since the President acted “cool,” some mighty educated people actually believed this to be more than just a pose on his part. Not unlike Madonna’s use of “Voguing” back in the day. Now perhaps they begin to see that a pose has neither to do with governing nor an ability to adapt to the changing realities on the ground.

At that point, Mr. Van Dyk goes off the rails and we see that his blanket approval has come to an end:

The first warning signals for me came with your acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. In it, you stressed domestic initiatives that clearly were nonstarters in the already shrinking economy.

He then complains of Obama stocking his White House with “Clinton administration retreads who had learned their trade in the never-ending-campaign culture of the Clinton years.” Again, blame Clinton. But who did Mr. Van Dyk think this man was going to hire? He faults Obama for his “reliance on these Clinton holdovers.”

Your chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, defined your early strategy by stating that the financial and economic crises presented an “opportunity” to jam through unrelated legislation. To many of us, the remark was cynical and wrong-headed.

The crises did not represent an opportunity. They presented an obligation to do one thing: Return our financial system and our economy to good health.

Does Van Dyk assume any Democratic president would have been this reckless? Hillary Clinton had different health care proposals, different proposals for helping homeowners in this crisis and a much better understanding of the economy. None of her ideas are being utilized, I’m afraid. She just may have exhibited the good sense Mr. Van Dyk longs for and put the financial floor back under us before attempting a more drastic change. But we’ll never know…

Van Dyk discusses Mr. Obama being unfairly compared to FDR & LBJ. Discussing President Johnson’s “Great Society legislation”…

…at every stage, congressional leaders of both political parties and financial, business, labor and other private-sector leaders were consulted. Johnson wanted to assure that his legislation was substantively sound and could get consensus support in the Congress and the country.

Your strategy, by contrast, has been to advocate forcefully for health-care and energy reform but to leave the details to Democratic congressional committee chairs. You did the same thing with your initial $787 billion stimulus package. Now, you’re stuck with a plan that provides little stimulus until 2010. A president should never cede control of his main agenda to others.

President Obama is in over his head, so of course he “outsourced.” Why is this gentleman surprised? Mr. Van Dyk willfully ignores the fact that the biggest culprit here is not a “Clinton retread,” but the Queen Bee herself, Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She crafted the stimulus package behind closed doors and the President willingly allowed her this control. Perhaps that was his devil’s bargain for her help in kicking the ladder out from under Hillary. Republicans were not the only ones to be shut out of the crafting of the Stimulus package. Many Democrats were as well. Van Dyk continues:

This tactic has already had negative consequences. Frightened by the prospective costs of your health-care and energy plans — not to mention the bailouts of the financial and auto industries — independent voters who supported you in 2008 are falling away. FDR and LBJ, only two years after their 1932 and 1964 victories, saw their parties lose congressional seats even though their personal popularity remained stable. The party out of power traditionally gains seats in off-year elections, and 2010 is unlikely to be an exception.

He then offers up a prescription for a fix:

- Cut back both your proposals and expectations. You made promises about jobs that would be “created and saved” by the stimulus package. Those promises have not held up. You continue to engage in hyperbole by claiming that your health-care and energy plans will save tax dollars. Congressional Budget Office analysis indicates otherwise.

It’s time to re-examine these initiatives. Could your health plan be scaled back to catastrophic coverage for all — badly needed by most families, but quite affordable if deductibles are set at the right levels? Should the Rube Goldbergian cap-and-trade proposals be replaced with a simple carbon tax, with proceeds to be allocated to alternative-fuels development?

The evolving health and cap-and-trade bills are loaded with costly provisions designed to gain support from congressional leaders and special-interest constituencies. In short, they have become an expensive mess. This legislation will not clear Congress by the August recess, as you have requested, and could be stalled for the remainder of 2009. Settle for incremental change: Do not press Democratic legislators to vote for something they fear will destroy them in 2010.

- Talk less and pick your spots.

Applause and adulation are gratifying. But the more you talk, the less weight your words will hold. Let voters see you at your desk, conferring with serious people about serious matters. When you do choose to talk, people will understand that it’s important and they should listen.

“Let voters see you at your desk!” Doing some “work.” Great ideas!

- Conform your 2009 politics to your 2008 statements. During your campaign, you called for bipartisanship and bridge-building. You promised to reduce the influence of single-issue and single-interest groups in the policy process. Yet, in your public statements, you keep using President Bush as a scapegoat.

You have ceded content of your principal proposals to Democratic congressional leaders who in large part have yielded to special-interest constituencies and excluded Republican leaders from policy formulation. This certainly was the case with the stimulus plan. It has been the case with health and energy legislation, with the notable exception of Sen. Max Baucus’s attempt in the Senate Finance Committee to develop genuinely bipartisan legislation.

He concludes by telling Obama

“You have an enormous reservoir of goodwill among Americans of all persuasions. They want you to succeed. Level with them and trim your proposals to what is practical in the current environment.”

But ironically, it is Mr. Van Dyk’s closing statement with which I most take issue:

You had things right in 2008. Take a timeout. Get back to yourself. Make a fresh start.

He did not have things “right” in 2008 because there is no “self” to ‘get back to’. His campaign was always “words, just words.”

While I graduated college with high honors, I am no genius, yet I figured this out from my living room couch back in January of 2008. I watched this man at a debate and his “performance” told me everything I needed to know. I then looked at his voting record and the corporate interests with whom he surrounds himself, his addiction to pretty sound bytes and an over reliance on canned speeches rather than a resume that indicated he had worked even on a smaller level to achieve his stated goals. His current proposals are loaded with top heavy payback for special interests that arguably got him elected in the first place. Wall Street has gotten bailed out. Not Main Street. He lives in support of an oligarchy, like his immediate predecessor. If these are true Democratic principles, its the first I’ve heard of it.

The obscene amount of money spent on his inauguration, expensive “dates” and pizza parties and his hiring not less than 30 “czars” all of whom require staff and total salaries in the millions are more accurate indicators of the man than any of his campaign rhetoric.

Like Obama’s other supporters, perhaps Mr. Van Dyk has yet to understand that speeches will never equal governing ability. He too, blamed the Clintons for being “polarizing” as Bush was, but how true is his claim? Clinton passed true bi-partisan legislation. He had to, as he was working with a Republican Congress for 6 of his 8 years and did very well in that regard. But in his case, he also had deep knowledge of the economy and a willingness to reach across the aisle and conform to the existing reality. He certainly left the country in better shape than he found it.

President Obama, by contrast is the “salesman in chief.” That is what the DNC wanted. How is he supposed to pull us back to “reality” with his proposals when he clearly did not have these reasoned intentions in the first place, or a true understanding of how to get us there?

Apparently, Mr. Van Dyk has yet to travel the last mile in his awakening.

Obama campaign mum on NAFTA contact with Canada. Despite repeated requests, Barack Obama’s campaign is still neither verifying nor denying a CTV report that a senior member of the team made contact with the Canadian government — via the Chicago consulate general — regarding comments Obama made about NAFTA.

- Snip -

On Wednesday, CTV reported that a senior member of Obama’s campaign called the Canadian government within the last month — saying that when Senator Obama talks about opting out of the free trade deal, the Canadian government shouldn’t worry. The operative said it was just campaign rhetoric not to be taken seriously.

The Obama campaign told CTV late Thursday night that no message was passed to the Canadian government that suggests that Obama does not mean what he says about opting out of NAFTA if it is not renegotiated.

However, the Obama camp did not respond to repeated questions from CTV on reports that a conversation on this matter was held between Obama’s senior economic adviser — Austan Goolsbee — and the Canadian Consulate General in Chicago.

Earlier Thursday, the Obama campaign insisted that no conversations have taken place with any of its senior ranks and representatives of the Canadian government on the NAFTA issue. On Thursday night, CTV spoke with Goolsbee, but he refused to say whether he had such a conversation with the Canadian government office in Chicago. He also said he has been told to direct any questions to the campaign headquarters.

During a candidates’ debate Tuesday, both Democratic party leadership contenders — Obama and Hillary Clinton — suggested they would opt out of the North American Free Trade Agreement if core labour and environmental standards weren’t renegotiated.

- Snip -

On Thursday, the Canadian embassy in Washington issued a complete denial.

“At no time has any member of a presidential campaign called the Canadian ambassador or any official at the embassy to discuss NAFTA,” it said in a statement.

But on Wednesday, one of the primary sources of the story, a high-ranking member of the Canadian embassy, gave CTV more details of the call. He even provided a timeline. He has since suggested it was perhaps a miscommunication.

The denial from the embassy was followed by a denial from Senator Obama.

“The Canadian government put out a statement saying that this was just not true, so I don’t know who the sources were,” said Obama.

Sources at the highest levels of the Canadian government — who first told CTV that a call was made from the Obama camp — have reconfirmed their position.

- Snip -

However, Harper had a warning to anyone contemplating renegotiation of the trade deal.

“If a future president actually did want to open up NAFTA, which I highly doubt, then Canada would obviously have some things we would want to discuss,” Harper said.

My, my – was that really only a year ago? Oh, yes – Obama was saying one thing to people in the Midwest, and apparently, saying something quite the opposite on the down low in Canada.

Lo and behold, it seems the Canadian report was right, at least according to this NY Times article regarding Obama’s recent trip, Nafta Looming Over Obama’s Canada Trip :

As a candidate, Barack Obama courted votes in the Rust Belt by suggesting he might renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, a pact he criticized as not “good for America.”

Now Mr. Obama is about to make his first foreign trip as president to Canada, the United States’ largest trading partner — and he is sounding a strikingly different message.

With Canadians up in arms over “Buy America” provisions in President Obama’s economic recovery package, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper warning the United States not to back away from its international treaty obligations, Mr. Obama, who will make a day trip to Ottawa on Thursday, is no longer emphasizing the idea of reopening Nafta.

Instead, he and his senior advisers are talking up the booming trade relationship between Canada and the United States — the largest trade partnership in the world, the White House says — and limiting their Nafta message to revamping side agreements on environmental and labor protections.

Well, golly gee. Yet another campaign promise proven to be a lie. Raise your hand if you are surprised! Yeah, I thought not.

The article continues:

In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on Tuesday, the president said there were “a lot of sensitivities right now” about renegotiating trade pacts “because of the huge decline in world trade.” As he tries to right the struggling American economy, Mr. Obama pledged to do so in a way that would enhance, rather than suppress, trade between the two nations.

“It’s not in anybody’s interest to see that trade diminish,” he said.

Trade is an issue that has long bedeviled Democrats, and this is especially so for Mr. Obama. Trade has split the party along regional and economic lines, pitting those who see a globalized economy as inevitable and productive against those in economically depressed areas of the nation, like Ohio and Michigan, who see the price of free trade, in lost jobs and declining wages, as simply too high for the American worker to bear.

The last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, fought hard to pass Nafta (sic), and made many in his party uncomfortable — including, eventually, his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who like Mr. Obama talked of reopening the pact when she was running for president.

Interesting.

Ah, yes, Obama continues to renege on campaign promises made, now that he’s actually in the White House. His latest is yet another stand with a Bush Doctrine, Siding with Bush, Obama says Afghan detainees have no U.S. rights. Oh, what a surprise!!! Just like the Extraordinary Rendition and State Secrets part Obama kept – I have been saying this for MONTHS and months – Obama is Bush III. This is why he voted for FISA, too. He wanted all the same “tools” available to him that Bush managed to secure. Here’s the nitty-gritty:

The 600-plus detainees at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their imprisonment, the Justice Department said today in a two-sentence court filing.

Last summer the Supreme Court gave al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects held at Guantanamo Bay the right to challenge their detention. But the Justice Department argues that Bagram is different: it’s in a war zone and the prisoners are the result of continuing military action.

“They’ve now embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside the law,” said Jonathan Hafetz of the American Civil Liberties Union, who has represented several detainees.

“The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we’d hoped,” said Tina Monshipour Foster, a human rights attorney representing a detainee at the Bagram. “We all expected better.”

The decision also disappointed Amnesty International, which issued a report calling for judicial review of the detentions.

Uh, yes. Again, groups are “disappointed” – the ACLU, Amnesty International, HRC, and on, and on. All “disappointed” that Obama is not doing what he said he would do.

They SHOULD be disappointed in themselves for believing his lies, for pretending that his “hope and change” message was a substitute for certifiable experience and an actual RECORD on which to base his claims. They’re “disappointed.” Yeah. Join the club. I’m “disappointed” that all of these groups bought this crap in the first place, and stuck us with this guy.

Sigh. Once again, though, there is one bright light, one adult in the room who DOES instill some faith. Oh, and she actually HAS a record on which to base her actions. Oh, yes, Sec. Clinton. She is winding up her first trip abroad as the Secretary of State, and has been doing a fine job of it. Here she is arriving in China:

And while in China, Secretary Clinton has been focusing on a number of issues, particularly Climate Change. Hopefully, this will be an issue on which our two countries can work together successfully (Sec. Clinton did mention Tibet, but for now, the Obama Administration is keeping a low profile on the issue of human rights).

Hmmm – I wonder what will be next on Obama’s list of promises to break? Oh, that could be a whole new party game, come to think of it! We already have the drinking game Jon Stewart proposed (taking a drink whenever Obama pauses while talking), so why not have a “Which Promise Is Going Down The Toilet Next?” game? Hey, it’s one the whole family can play together! What a uniter!! Which one do you think is next?

The American populace knows that the primary architects in the formulation of the Stimulus Plan working its way through Congress are Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid. This contingent, along with President Obama, have not been bashful in stating they view the November election results as effectively a mandate to change policies emanating from Washington.

Against that backdrop, the initially proposed Stimulus Plan was so loaded with pork that the Republicans and the American population at large slammed it as more a promotion of the

Martin Feldstein

I will give President Obama credit for formulating a Panel to Advise Obama on Economy.

This panel will be known as the White House Economic Recovery Advisory Board. The Board will be headed by former Fed chair Paul Volcker. He will be joined by Jeff Immelt of GE, James Owens of Caterpillar, William Donaldson, former SEC chair, Roger Ferguson Jr. of TIAA-CREF, Richard Trumka of AFL-CIO, Anna Burger of SEIU, and Martin Feldstein, renowned Harvard economist. The group will be guided by Austan Goolsbee, an economic adviser to the White House.

Do you think President Obama and his economic team would listen to Mr. Feldstein or is that a “mere courtesy” having him on the board? Let’s review what Mr. Feldstein said about the Stimulus Plan just last week.

Regarding the proposed Stimulus Plan, Martin Feldstein offered that it is far better to go back to work and do it right versus merely doing it fast:

An $800 Billion Mistake

By Martin Feldstein
The Washington Post
Thursday, January 29, 2009

As a conservative economist, I might be expected to oppose a stimulus plan. In fact, on
this page in October, I declared my support for a stimulus. But the fiscal package now
before Congress needs to be thoroughly revised. In its current form, it does too little to
raise national spending and employment. It would be better for the Senate to delay
legislation for a month, or even two, if that’s what it takes to produce a much better bill.
We cannot afford an $800 billion mistake.

Start with the tax side. The plan is to give a tax cut of $500 a year for two years to each
employed person. That’s not a good way to increase consumer spending. Experience
shows that the money from such temporary, lump-sum tax cuts is largely saved or used
to pay down debt. Only about 15 percent of last year’s tax rebates led to additional
spending.

The proposed business tax cuts are also likely to do little to increase business investment
and employment. The extended loss “carrybacks” are primarily lump-sum payments to
selected companies. The bonus depreciation plan would do little to raise capital spending
in the current environment of weak demand because the tax benefits in the early years
would be recaptured later.

Instead, the tax changes should focus on providing incentives to households and
businesses to increase current spending. Why not a temporary refundable tax credit to
households that purchase cars or other major consumer durables, analogous to the
investment tax credit for businesses? Or a temporary tax credit for home improvements?
In that way, the same total tax reduction could produce much more spending and
employment.

Postponing the scheduled increase in the tax on dividends and capital gains would raise
share prices, leading to increased consumer spending and, by lowering the cost of capital,
more business investment.

On the spending side, the stimulus package is full of well-intended items that,
unfortunately, are not likely to do much for employment. Computerizing the medical
records of every American over the next five years is desirable, but it is not a cost-
effective way to create jobs. Has anyone gone through the (long) list of proposed
appropriations and asked how many jobs each would create per dollar of increased
national debt?

The largest proposed outlays amount to just writing unrestricted checks to state
governments. Nearly $100 billion would result from increasing the “Medicaid matching
rate,” a technique for reducing states’ Medicaid costs to free up state money for spending
on anything governors and state legislators want. An additional $80 billion would be given
out for “state fiscal relief.” Will these vast sums actually lead to additional spending, or will
they merely finance state transfer payments or relieve state governments of the need for
temporary tax hikes or bond issues?

The plan to finance health insurance premiums for the unemployed would actually
increase unemployment by giving employers an incentive to lay off workers rather than
pay health premiums during a time of weak demand. And this supposedly two-year
program would create a precedent that could be hard to reverse.

A large fraction of the stimulus proposal is devoted to infrastructure projects that will
spend out very slowly, not with the speed needed to help the economy in 2009 and 2010.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that less than one-fifth of the $50 billion of
proposed spending on energy and water would occur by the end of 2010.

If rapid spending on things that need to be done is a criterion of choice, the plan should
include higher defense outlays, including replacing and repairing supplies and equipment,
needed after five years of fighting. The military can increase its level of procurement very
rapidly. Yet the proposed spending plan includes less than $5 billion for defense, only
about one-half of 1 percent of the total package.

Infrastructure spending on domestic military bases can also proceed more rapidly than
infrastructure spending in the civilian economy. And military procurement overwhelmingly
involves American-made products. Since much of this military spending will have to be
done eventually, it makes sense to do it now, when there is substantial excess capacity in
the manufacturing sector. In addition, a temporary increase in military recruiting and
training would reduce unemployment directly, create a more skilled civilian workforce and
expand the military reserves.

All new spending and tax changes should have explicit time limits that prevent ever-
increasing additions to the national debt. Similarly, spending programs should not create
political dynamics that will make them hard to end.

The problem with the current stimulus plan is not that it is too big but that it delivers too
little extra employment and income for such a large fiscal deficit. It is worth taking the
time to get it right.

The writer, an economics professor at Harvard University, is president emeritus of the
National Bureau of Economic Research.

Barack, how about you and Martin go for a little walk. Take your time!!

LD

• “Does he wear a flag pin on his lapel? Yes, but not always. Like many presidential candidates, sometimes he wears a flag pin, sometimes he wears a breast cancer awareness pin, sometimes he wears his U.S. Senate membership pin and other times he wears no pin at all.”

• “Is he a Christian? Yes. He is a committed Christian. In 1985, he began working as a community organizer with a Christian church-based group seeking to improve the living conditions in poor Chicago neighborhoods.”

The mailer missed the mark! It reminds of us those rumors, that he is unpatriotic and a Muslim, rather than dispels them. Once again our family, friends and neighbors will be discussing the rumors anew.

Here is the second mailer. Part of this mailer has an older white woman saying “I am voting for the candidate who will fix our health care system.” Today, it was revealed that a health care plan backed by the AFL-CIO and SEIU may derail Obama’s healthcare plan.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcdnlNZg2iM[/youtube]

And now this on a union backed health care plan is called “guaranteed affordable choice”. More on that:

If SEIU and the AFL-CIO get their way, the day that all Americans have affordable insurance will be pushed into the unforeseeable future.

The labor-backed plan, which they call “guaranteed affordable choice,” would create a public program like Medicare that would allegedly compete with the nation’s 1,500 insurance companies. Americans would get tax-financed subsidies to purchase insurance from either a private insurance company or the public plan. Competition, which has never worked in the health insurance industry, would magically come to life.

By leaving the bloated insurance industry smack in the middle of our health care system, “guaranteed affordable choice” would have taxpayers and premium-payers continuing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on unnecessary administrative costs.

The other two faces on the mailer show white older males, one a retiree and one still employed. It will evoke memories of the comments spoken in front of wealthy donors in San Francisco. Here are Obama’s exact words:

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama said. “And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

And of course we will be reminded of Obama’s stance on NAFTA. Or were those just words and he didn’t mean it?

“While Senator Obama was telling voters he would fix NAFTA, his chief economics advisor was telling Canadians that his position was just words.

The AFL-CIO wasted their money and time. The AFL-CIO needs to go back to the drawing board on these mailers! If the mailers evoke these memories in me, what will they do for the union members and the bitter people living in Pennsylvania? All those campaign gaffes during the primaries will haunt Obama’s dream again, while I sleep peacefully at night!

This means, of course, that we have to take creative marketing guru David Axelrod’s word for it that he really spoke those words in 2002. By the way, after that unreported speech — unremarkable because he uttered those words safely ensconced in a very liberal neighborhood of Chicago — Obama never lifted a finger or spoke out again on Iraq. That is, until it became politically useful for him to make a major production out of that single unreported, unrecorded speech.

Sadly, his followers haven’t reviewed the true history of that one speech, haven’t questioned the authenticity of its reproduction in a recording studio, and haven’t factored in that Obama didn’t make any further effort to aid the anti-Iraq-war movement, even when he joined the U.S. Senate — where his voting record is identical to Hillary Clinton’s, except that he voted FOR the ill-suited Gen. George Casey, while Hillary Clinton did not. BELOW — and it’s a must-read — I have quoted Joseph Wilson’s writings about his memories of those opposed to the Iraq War and Obama’s notable absence from any participation in lobbying against the war before and since joining the U.S. Senate.

View more of TravisTCleveland’s videos. Like this one:

Now, the must-read section from Joseph Wilson’s op-ed, republished here at No Quarter:

A number of us, like then Illinois state senator Obama, opposed the second Gulf War. My own opposition from the beginning has been well documented. I fought the fight in the arena itself, Washington DC, against a ruthless administration and its supporters while the senator’s opposition came from a far distance and carried no risk, given that he represented in Springfield, Illinois the district encompassing the University of Chicago. As an obscure but safe provincial political figure, he never was granted access to the distorted intelligence that was used to drive the Congress and the media. When I looked to the left or to the right for support, I never saw the state senator. In fact, I never heard of Barack Obama until he announced his intention to run for the Senate in the 2006 election.

After he came to Washington, Obama’s views were thoroughly conventional and even timid. In 2004, he said about the 2002 congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force: “I’m not privy to Senate intelligence reports. What would I have done? I don’t know.” On Iraq-related votes in the Senate, Obama’s record identically matches Senator Clinton’s–with the exception that Senator Clinton voted against the confirmation of General George Casey as Army chief of staff. Obama’s vote was typically passive.

In the run up to the war and thereafter, I was in frequent discussions with senior Democrats in Washington, including Senator Clinton, and I was keenly aware of her demand for the full exercise of international diplomacy and allowing the weapons inspectors to complete their mission. Many of the most prominent early opponents of the war, including former General Wes Clark and former ambassador to the United National Richard Holbrooke support Senator Clinton for President, as do I. We do so because we know that she has the experience and the judgment that comes from having been in the arena for her entire adult life–and from close personal participation with her in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. And we have trust in her to end the war in Iraq in the most responsible way, consistent with our national security interests. …

Read all of Ambassador Wilson’s “The Real Hillary I Know — and the Unreal Obama.”

Washington DC, June 21 — Tonight political prisoner Larry Sinclair is spending his fourth night in the DC Jail, the victim of a Gestapo-style enemies’ list operation carried out just three blocks from the White House last Wednesday afternoon.

Sinclair had come to the National Press Club to detail his charges that the self-proclaimed Democratic presidential nominee Barack Hussein Obama had indulged in two homosexual encounters complete with crack cocaine in early November 1999, that Obama was complicit in the December 2007 assassination of Donald Young, the gay choirmaster of Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ, and that’s Obama’s resident perception monger, David Axelrod, had paid the pornographic website Whitehouse.com $750,000 to organize a campaign of character assassination against Sinclair, culminating in a faked polygraph test. At the close of the press conference, Sinclair was arrested inside the press club by US Marshals and DC police, apparently based on an old Delaware warrant.

GESTAPO TACTICS IN THE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB, THE TEMPLE OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT?

Where are the civil libertarians? Where are the paladins of the ACLU? Where is the outcry and the indignation? Is no one concerned about threats to lynch a gay man for political reasons in the heart of the nation’s capital? Where are the left liberals who have been ostensibly so concerned about civil rights and civil liberties from Nixon to Bush-Cheney? Perhaps they are sleeping, or perhaps they have drunk the Obama Kool-Aid and have become morally insane.

Or perhaps they are so obsessed with the reform of the FISA law and the danger that Bush might be listening in to their telephone calls that they do not notice when a prominent critic of a presidential candidate who is infamously a darling of the establishment media is actually arrested, taken into custody and led away, the target of Gestapo tactics in the National Press Club, the sanctum sanctorum of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the First Amendment generally.

Surely the weak sisters who have joined Obama’s fifth column are morally insane when they joke about how Barky’s Myrmidons were able to arrest Sinclair. If the First Amendment does not apply to speech which is not popular with the establishment and the mob, then the First Amendment does not exist at all, for anybody. Any journalist or writer should be able to see that they themselves may be next, now that the US Marshals are serving as the “Fight the Smears” enforcement arm of the Obama campaign. Selective and vindictive prosecution, anyone?

The mere fact that Larry Sinclair had been able to hold such a successful press conference was already a serious defeat for the corrupt and brutal Obama machine.

Sinclair had appeared in the Holeman Lounge before more than a hundred journalists, with 10 cameras set up on tripods in the back of the room. The number of handheld cameras, camcorders, and tape recorders was beyond counting. The press conference was dignified, businesslike, factual. There was no screaming, no disruption, no threats or insults.

Every journalist who wanted to ask a question was given ample opportunity to do so, and about three dozen questions were asked. Reasonable follow-ups were allowed.

There were journalists from Britain, from Germany, from India, from China. Most of the questions represented honest attempts to pin down the facts of what was being alleged.

Sinclair’s honesty compared favorably to most politicians today. He started his presentation with a detailed admission of his criminal record, jail time served, his pending court motion to dismiss an old Colorado warrant, and a statement that his troubles with the law date back more than 20 years to 1980-1986.

In the question-and-answer segment, Sinclair gave a straight answer to every question he was asked. He did not dodge questions, he did not prevaricate, he did not refuse to answer questions, and he did not bungle his answers. Sinclair has made serious mistakes in life, as he readily concedes. But Sinclair is not a candidate, not a person who has to be evaluated by the public and then accepted or rejected.

Sinclair comes forward as a witness with a series of allegations to make and a story to tell. It is up to public opinion and most emphatically the news media to evaluate those allegations and those facts, including through the efforts of enterprising investigative journalists anxious to make a name for themselves by finding out the truth about what is potentially the biggest political scandal of the century. Obama, after all, is the candidate of whom we know little and who needs urgently to be evaluated.

The issue posed is not what you think about Larry Sinclair. The overriding issue is the presidency in a time of military defeat, institutional crisis, and economic breakdown.

HOMOPHOBIC DEATH THREATS AGAINST SINCLAIR

Obama’s lemming legions, and especially his notorious mercenary squadristi of the Internet, had done everything possible to sabotage and disrupt Sinclair’s press conference. One Obama backer had issued a categorical death threat against Sinclair in terms that made it abundantly clear that a homophobic hate murder might be in the offing. The FBI and the District of Columbia police had shown zero interest in offering Sinclair protection against a possible hit by one of Obama’s fanatics.

Once it is accepted that police agencies can intervene in political campaigns, it is possible to a rest or detain almost anyone if the interest is great enough. The old warrant used to incarcerate Sinclair most probably refers to events already covered by the statute of limitations.

If nothing can be found at this level, there are always old parking tickets and library fines that can be ginned up. Any political candidate who has had dealings with the Federal Elections Commission can be hauled in on some minor technical violation. The precedent established by last Wednesday’s events at the National Press Club is exceedingly ominous for the public life of this country.

The irony is that repression is now being carried out not to help the Republicans but under ultra-left cover, to help the radical subversive Obama.

Since the warrant used as the pretext to arrest Sinclair apparently came from Delaware, our attention naturally turns to Senator Joe Biden, the incorrigible blowhard and defeated presidential candidate who is now known to be angling for the post of vice president or Secretary of State in a future Obama regime.

We also note that Biden’s son, the nepotist Beau Biden, is the current Attorney General of Delaware. As the cops would say, the Biden machine, anxious to ingratiate themselves with Obama, had the means, motive, and opportunity to arrange this outrageous arrest. For those gullible enough to believe that civil liberties might improve under an Obama regime, this ought to provide a reality shock.

Do not assume that civil liberties will get better under Obama; the evidence is now that they will get worse. Obama’s National Press Club caper is as blatant as anything seen under Bush – and Barky is not even in the White House.

At the end of his detailed indictment of Obama, Sinclair demanded information on four points. The first involves Obama as phone records for November 3, 1999 through November 8, 1999 — the time frame of the two allegedly encounters between Obama and Sinclair, mediated by Paramjit Multani of Five Star Limo at O’Hare Airport. The second involves Obama’s phone records for September 2007 — December 23, 2007, when Sinclair was receiving probing phone calls from Donald Young about how much Sinclair had revealed concerning Obama — calls that ended when Young was found dead from multiple gunshot wounds just before Christmas 2007.

Sinclair’s third demand for clarification touches communications from Obama, Axelrod, and campaign manager David Plouffe to Whitehouse.com in January and February 2008. Sinclair’s fourth point regards possible payments by Obama, Obama’s campaign, Axelrod, Plouffe, and Axelrod’s AKP Message and Media to Whitehouse.com in that same time frame of January-February 2008.

OBAMA MUST ANSWER, NOT EVADE

It is now up to Obama to answer these charges. It is imperative that this be done now, without further delay. No responsible citizen wants a president who can be blackmailed and thus turned into a puppet because he is hiding secrets about bisexual activities, crack cocaine, political murder, and character assassination campaigns.

It is also up to the great news organizations, including ABC, CBS, NBC, The New York Times, and the Washington Post, to carry out their responsibility to the public. These news organizations should not play the role of kept courtesans of those in political power. As Sinclair pointed out, he has told his story and has thus done everything he can.

It is now up to the great media concerns to locate and interview the limo driver Paramjit Multani, to investigate the relevant telephone records, and above all to question Obama himself about this very serious matter. It is not up to the corporate media to sit back and sniff about whether a Sinclair has conclusively proven his own case to their satisfaction or not; the proving or disproving is the responsibility of the media, and let them make damn sure that they get it right.

By today’s journalistic standards, Sinclair’s allegations are extraordinarily substantive already, especially when compared with some other major scandal allegations heard during the primaries. Sinclair has filed a federal civil suit against Obama and Axelrod, complete with sworn affidavits and court papers.

This means that he is willingly risking Rule 11 penalties for filing a frivolous lawsuit.

He has also made statements to the Chicago police about his contacts with murder victim Donald Young. These steps represent a very high degree of public commitment by Sinclair to the truth of what he is saying.

Compare this to the shoddy standards of the New York Times which, on February 21, 2008 published and prominently displayed on its front page an innuendo about a supposed sex affair between Senator McCain and a certain Vicki Iseman, a Washington lobbyist. Not one single solitary named source was cited to support this innuendo. Or, take the case of Vanity Fair magazine, the house organ of decadent left liberalism, which included a slander piece entitled “The Comeback Id” by Todd Purdom in its July 2008 issue. Here again, there was not one single named source who was willing to have his or her name publicly associated with Purdom’s sleazy allegations.

It is painfully obvious that there is one set of journalistic standards for the Perfect Master Obama, and another and much laxer set for the competition. This is intolerable.

NO PRIVACY FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO ACCESS THE NUCLEAR BUTTON

It is fair to say that the idea of a private sphere for US presidential candidates about which the general public is not entitled to know anything became obsolete at the same time that intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads became available around 1960 to 1965. Since then, every presidential candidate has in effect appeared before the public asking to get his or her hands on the thermonuclear button that can start World War III.

At this point, the notion of a private sphere for presidential candidates becomes wholly untenable. In this day and age, we have the right to know everything but everything about presidential nominees who are asking for our votes.

We have a right to know their full personal histories, with no exceptions, no omissions, and no withheld documents.

We have a right to know if they are HIV-positive and whether they ever registered for the draft.

We want to know if they have received electroshock, psychopharmaca, and whether they have been treated by a psychiatrist.

We have a right to see their birth certificate, their college transcript, their senior thesis if they wrote one, their law school transcript, their passport, papers from earlier times in public office, and all other relevant documents.

We have a right to know about their mother, their father, their sister, their brother, their Aunt Tilly, their best friends at all stages of life, their boyfriends, their girlfriends, their pets, their backers, their sponsors, their gurus, their controllers, and their associates of every kind.

More than a right to know these things, we have an imperative duty to find them out.

For they are asking to get their hands on the thermonuclear button, the misuse of which can unleash a thermonuclear fireball that will not respect any aspect of the privacy of ourselves and our family.

Naturally, candidates are free to make their own choices in life just like everybody else: they can choose their religion, their personal associations, their forms of recreation, and all the rest in any way that they like.

But none of this — absolutely nothing — can be claimed as a secret off limits to the attention of the public. All of it must be thoroughly investigated, aired, and published when the presidency is at stake.

An Air Force crewman at a missile silo in the Dakotas goes through a background check which leaves scant room for privacy. We must demand nothing less from presidential candidates.

OBAMA’S COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT AND ALLEGED COCAINE USE

Larry Sinclair alleges that Obama has indulged in crack cocaine. Those familiar with the public literature about the current tenant of the White House know very well that there are many indications that his extraordinarily low level of performance may derive from cognitive impairment brought on by habitual cocaine use. How many more coke fiends in the White House are compatible with the further national survival of the United States?

Ronald Reagan notoriously suffered from cognitive impairment and constantly made his remarks off index cards which he kept hidden in his hands. Those index cards were a low-tech version of the glass plates of the Teleprompter upon which Obama relies.

As soon as he cannot read his words off those glass plates, Obama begins to stutter, to stammer and babble, to hem and to haw, repeatedly losing his syntax and constantly interjecting “um” and “you know.” What if Obama’s cocaine use really did extend beyond 1981, as he suggests in his memoir, and continued all the way to late 1999 at the very least, as Sinclair is alleging?

That might suggest that Obama suffers from greater cognitive impairment than Bush, as Obama’s incredible series of gaffes at the end of the primaries also indicates. Larry Sinclair stressed during his press conference that he has been a gay man all his life, and that he regarded the crack cocaine issue as the central one, at least until the time of the Donald Young murder.

During the press conference, Sinclair announced that he was willing to make his own personal medical records, including mental health records, available to responsible representatives of accredited news organizations, at their own expense.

That means that Sinclair is much more forthcoming about his medical history than Obama, who has withheld his medical records and offered a single meaningless page of advertising copy signed by his personal physician. And remember that Sinclair is not running for any office, while Obama wants to be president.

TWO MONTHS TO THE ROLL CALL OF THE STATES, AUGUST 27

The Democratic Party still has more than two months in which these very serious, substantive, and detailed allegations against its presumptive candidate can be thoroughly investigated.

It is unthinkable that any responsible political leader would be willing to see Obama receive the nomination while this sword of Damocles hangs over his head. Larry Sinclair’s videotape has been on the Internet since mid-January, and it has at various times been the object of discussion on something approaching a million websites.

The issues are Obama’s crack cocaine use, his bisexuality, his possible involvement in the Donald Young assassination, and the allegations of character assassination and harassment against Sinclair funded by the Obama campaign.

Karl Rove knows all about each one of these points, and there is no way to deter Karl Rove and his cohorts.

So, although it may seem incomprehensible to Obama’s drooling acolytes, the interest of the Democratic Party is best served by thorough airing of these allegations to before the roll call of the states is held on August 27, 2008 — and this is exactly what Sinclair has been trying to do since mid-January.

If Sinclair had been a GOP deployment, he would simply have waited for September or October to come forward.

There are of course those who lament and regret that it is necessary to dredge up the sordid details of a figure like Obama. They say that it is better to use political campaigns to talk about issues.

This document may sound plausible, but it is totally wrong, and the fault rests with Obama.

First, Obama does not campaign on issues in any systematic way. He presents himself as the Perfect Master, the Anointed One, the Savior, the Messiah, the Mahdi. His hysterical followers are obsessed, not with a political program or a set of issues, but with the personality cult of Obama. This means that any attempt to engage Obama on the issues is by definition an impotent and self-defeating tactic.

The only useful objections that can be made to Obama are ad hominem biographical revelations designed to show that he is not so anointed after all, and that his ability to walk on water has been overestimated.

Then there is also the matter of Obama’s notorious duplicity and flip-flops even where he does have specific positions on certain issues. First Obama wanted a fixed schedule for getting out of Iraq, but Samantha Power revealed that this was not the case at all. Barky said he wanted a different kind of foreign policy, and then he pandered to AIPAC, probably lying through his teeth in the process. First, Obama wanted to help the lower income brackets, but now he is talking about cutting the corporate income tax. Obama attacked free trade in Ohio and Pennsylvania, even as his top economic controller, Austan Goolsbee of the Friedmanite Chicago school reassured the Canadians that this was just election posturing; now Obama has told Fortune magazine that he likes free trade and is devoted to “free markets.”

First, Obama was going to be tough on FISA; now he is going along with the Democratic congressional leaders as they attempt to appease Bush.

Obama had built his career on ethics in government and reducing the role of political contributions; now he has turned his back on the only meager legislative achievements by becoming the first presidential candidate in modern times to repudiate matching funds in the general election.

On all these points, to attempt a substantive debate with Obama is a fool’s errand. The only way to pin Barky down is through pointed reference to crucial facts in his own background, biography, and associations which cannot be changed or swept under the rug. Any other approach is deliberate impotence and capitulation.

FREE LARRY SINCLAIR!

In the meantime, Larry Sinclair is still sitting in the DC jail. He could be extradited to Delaware at any time.

What kind of a presidential campaign are we going to have when critics of the most radical subversive to ever get this close to the presidency have to worry about a knock on the door in the middle of the night? It is time to put massive public pressure on the Obama campaign to drop their enemies’ list operation against Larry Sinclair, and to release him from jail at once.

Webster G. Tarpley is the author of Obama – The Postmodern Coup: Making of a Manchurian Candidate.

“I have always opposed NAFTA.”

“I don’t think NAFTA has been good for America – and I never have.”

“Ten years after NAFTA passed, Senator Clinton said it was good for America. … Well, I don’t think NAFTA has been good for America – and I never have.” –Senator Barack Obama in Toledo, Ohio on February 24, 2008

Now in an interview with Fortune magazine out on Monday June 23, 2008, the very junior Senator from Illinois wants us to believe that was just rhetoric. He really didn’t mean what he said.

“Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,” –Senator Barack Obama in a Fortune magazine interview to be published Monday June 23, 2008

Never mind the heat of battle rhetoric, how about the more reflective printed word?

In his own flyer, Obama is quoted as saying that “one million jobs have been lost because of NAFTA, including nearly 50,000 jobs here in Ohio.” But those figures come from an anti-NAFTA source, the Economic Policy Institute written by Robert Schott. Other economists have criticized that report’s methodology and its conclusions as having overstated the impact of NAFTA, rather they point to a lax enforcement of regulations that have permitted an exodus of American manufacturing jobs and primarily to China, Korea and other East Asian countries not to Mexico or Canada. Other economic studies have concluded the trade deal resulted in much smaller job losses or even a small net gain. Here’s what the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has to say on NAFTA’s effects on American jobs:

NAFTA’s net effect on jobs in the United States has been minuscule, given the size of the U.S. economy and the importance of other trading partners.

The best models to date suggest that NAFTA has caused either no net change in employment or a very small net gain of jobs.

And that’s now after seven years of the Bush Administration failing to enforce regulations that shed American jobs. Under President Clinton, it was a far different story. Here’s Professor of Economics Brad Delong (an Obama supporter, I might add) of the University of California at Berkeley writing in July 2000:

It is time to conclude that NAFTA–the North American Free Trade Agreement–is a success.

His article largely is about the impact of NAFTA on Mexico but he finds that economic benefits accrued to all members of the trade pact. However, he does note the following:

Far from shrinking, employment in autos and auto parts in America has grown by more than twenty percent since the beginning of NAFTA. Far from falling, hourly earnings of U.S. automotive workers have risen since the beginning of NAFTA.

Even as recently as February 2008, just about the time Obama was making his comments in Toledo on how he had always opposed NAFTA, Professor Delong was writing that NAFTA was not the cause of Ohio’s woes.

And, of course, if we go back to his Senate campaign of 2004, Obama said this:

“The United States benefits enormously from exports under the WTO and NAFTA.” quoted in an article by Ron Ingram, Obama, Keyes Court Farmers, Decatur Herald & Review, on September 9, 2004. Source: Lexis/Nexis.

So he was for it before he was against before he was for it. Sound familiar? And so much for the “I never have” part of his argument.

And one more point, I may not remember what I had for lunch earlier this week, but I do remember what I have said over the years, maybe because I have core convictions and that is just it with Senator Obama, he has no core convictions. It’s always what is politically expedient for him at the time.

More on this topic and perhaps others once the full interview is out. He can excuse his “rhetoric” as a slip of the tongue but the printed word is a little harder to dismiss.

_________

From my blog, By The Fault.

Our first installment began the task of decoding Barack Obama’s curious appeal to our right-of-center friends and relatives. (His point man on domestic policy is also the DLC’s Senior Economist — a deregulatin’, free tradin’, globalizin’, sharp-shootin’ son-of-a-centrist-gun from Waco Texas, Milton Academy, Yale’s Skull and Bones society and the Chicago school.)

The second member of Obama’s policy advisor triad is Harvard’s Jeffrey Liebman. Specialty: “pensions and poverty”, i.e., “entitlements”, i.e., “Social Security“.

Liebman’s reputation: centrist alarmist and moderate privatizer. [CONTINUED below]

He has supported partial privatization of the government-run retirement system, an idea that’s anathema to many Democrats and bears a similarity to a proposal for personal investment accounts that Bush promoted, then dropped in 2005.

“Liebman has been to open to private accounts and most people in town would say he’s a moderate supporter of them,” said Michael Tanner, a Social Security expert at the Cato Institute

Again, this is from RonK Seattle’s “The Audiology of Hope: Dogwhistle Economics 102.” READ all of RonK Seattle’s diaries published at Daily Kos on his inestigative work in exposing the REAL Barack Obama. (It is no wonder that RonK Seattle fled Daily Kos — and the insidious thuggish Obamabot attack machine — for the more nurturing environs of The Confluence.)

SEE ALSO: RonK Seattle’s first installment, “The Audiology of Hope: DLC Dogwhistle Economics ,” in which he dissects the background and policies of Austan Goolsbee — yes that Goolsbee who shall forever be infamous for his conversations with the Canadian embassy to reassure them that Barack Obama wasn’t really against NAFTA. A RonK Seattle sampler on Goolsbee: He is “DLC senior economist.”

I am reminded of the column of Paul Krugman which I wrote about in February.

THE KEY POINT to keep in mind here is that the next president must be STRONG on policy as well as highly experienced and knowledgeable about the maneuverings of Congress in order to protect Social Security. That requires the next president be experienced in the ways of Washington, D.C. and be stalwhart in his/her determination to protect Social Security.

And must I add the obvious? That the next president must TRULY CARE about protecting Social Security?

Now, here’s what I wrote about and quoted from Dr. Krugman’s column in “Hmmm … who is Krugman talking about?“:

From “Don’t Rerun That ’70s Show,” NYT op-ed columnist and economist Paul Krugman, February 22, 2008 — the conclusion:

[E]ven if the next president is a Democrat, any serious stimulus plan would face intense, ideologically motivated opposition in Congress. Will the next president be prepared to fight for an effective plan? Or will we end up with a compromise like the one Congressional Democrats agreed to this year, legislation that assuages conservative objections at the cost of undermining the plan’s effectiveness?

Until recently, I thought the biggest political struggle facing the next president was likely to be over health care reform. But right now it looks as if the first thing on the next administration’s plate will have to be dealing with a weak economy.

And if effective action isn’t forthcoming, the next president will suffer the fate of Jimmy Carter, who began his administration with words of uplift — “Let us create together a new national spirit of unity and trust” — and ended up delivering America into the hands of the hard right.

Could Krugman be thinking about this candidate, whose first economic stimulus plan Krugman called “disreputable” and whose second plan the economist found “tilted to the right“?

I remain in a state of shock that the Democratic party leadership could be led by the nose by Barack Obama — who cares not a bit about policy — but instead is solely focused on grabbing complete and utter control.

That’s why he selects economic advisers — who themselves have great power and means — regardless of whether those advisers “tilt” to the right and advocate the privatization of Social Security.

What those advisers believe and advocate matters not to Obama. All he cares about is their ability to help him grab power. Goolsbee is a prime example of an economist with a POWER BACKGROUND, a man of means who is superbly CONNECTED to the elite power structure in this country.

RonK Seattle (I repeat this for emphasis) describes Goolsbee’s resume that shows how well-connected he is:

Goolsbee. Economic wunderkind, forensics champ, MIT PhD, Yale Bonesman out of Waco via Milton Academy, Obama’s chief / top / senior economic spokesman and senior policy advisor.

Oh, and DLC senior economist. … (Read more here.)

It is Goolsbee’s powerful connections that Obama desires. Not his policy views and advice. Which I maintain Obama cares not about.

I don’t like feeling that I wasn’t being dealt with honestly [about if he's smoking or not]. …

This isn’t the only time I’ve felt that way about the Obama campaign, of course — its response to the Austan Goolsbee controversy was a profile in dissembling. (Not that Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain or their campaigns are entirely innocent in this area either. Or even that Obama is necessarily the worst offender.)

_______________________________

Now, the floor is PsychoDrew’s: Amid more false attacks from the Obama campaign on NAFTA, the Clinton campaign called on Senator Obama to allow the campaign official privately directing Obama’s NAFTA policy take a more public role:

“The Obama campaign ought to have Austan Goolsbee on their call today [April 2],” Clinton Campaign Spokesperson Jay Carson said. “While Senator Obama was telling voters he would fix NAFTA, his chief economics advisor was telling Canadians that his position was just words. Instead of making false attacks on Hillary Clinton’s character, the Obama campaign should finally explain why it continues to mislead voters about Mr. Goolsbee’s meeting with the Canadian government.” [No reports indicate that Mr. Goolsbee joined in on the call.]

The audacity of hype is hitting a fever pitch in the Obama camp with another Obama surrogate accusing Hillary Clinton of re-writing history.

“I find it disturbing (she) would rewrite history at this point,” said California Rep. George Miller, an Obama supporter who voted in Congress against NAFTA in 1993.

If she was such a strong opponent of it, and spoke out so often about it, why did she never speak to those of us who were principals in that ._._. I don’t know who these audiences are that she refers to, but they weren’t members of Congress.

A careful analysis of the public record does not indicate that, as First Lady, Hillary Clinton ever gave a public speech denouncing NAFTA and calling on her husband to scrap the plan or even held meetings to mobilize forces to bring the trade pact down. Would such an action have prevented NAFTA from being passed by Congress? Perhaps. But it also would have created an image of a dysfunctional White House, providing further ammunition to the GOP in the 1994 midterm elections and the 1996 general election.
Can you imagine the America we’d have if Bob Dole had been elected in 1996?

There never would have been a surplus for George Bush to squander. Kosovo would not have declared independence last month, because Bob Dole would have sat on his hands and watched as Serbian forces carried out a genocide on the Kosovar Albanians.

What is really maddening about Obama’s attack is that he has asked us to accept a similar explanation for his own seemingly contradictory behavior. How many times have we heard about this famous speech in 2002 opposing the war? And we have all read his comments to the NY Times at the Democratic National Convention in 2004:

”But, I’m not privy to Senate intelligence reports,” Mr. Obama said. ”What would I have done? I don’t know. What I know is that from my vantage point the case was not made.”

But have you ever heard his explanation for this contradiction? When CNN’s Candy Crowley asked Obama about why he wavered in his opposition to the resolution in that interview, he said that it would not have been appropriate to criticize the Democratic nominees on the eve of the convention:

“The only time when I said I’m not sure what I would do if I were in the Senate was right before the Democratic convention, when we had two nominees that obviously I did not want to be criticizing right before they got up and received the nomination,” he said.

“But you didn’t mean it?” Crowley asked.

“So — well, no. What I’m suggesting is, everybody had difficult choices to make. And I — and these were difficult choices. I made the right choice.” Obama replied.

So the right choice was to shut up and stand behind the leaders of the party? And now he criticizes Hillary Clinton for having done the same thing when her husband was president!? Why is he peddling such a blatantly hypocritical attack right now? Well, the Leader-Post has a theory:

Aiming to undo political damage the Illinois senator himself has suffered because of the “NAFTA-gate” controversy with Canada, Obama’s campaign said Clinton’s White House records “completely contradict” the New York senator’s assertions she was a frequent and forceful critic of the deal her husband signed with the Canadian and Mexican governments.

But Obama lost Ohio’s Democratic primary on March 4 to Clinton after reports his senior economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, told Canada’s consul general in Chicago that the Illinois senator’s tough talk on NAFTA was just campaign rhetoric. The controversy is thought to have contributed to Obama’s loss in Ohio, and Clinton has used it to hammer Obama among voters in Pennsylvania.

While Senator Obama avoids giving “straight answers to tough questions” by making false attacks against Senator Clinton, the one million workers who lost their jobs because of NAFTA are waiting for Senator Obama to decide which of the five explanations he’s provided for Goolsbee’s meeting with Canadian officials is true:

5. 3/10/08 – Sen. Obama: The meeting did happen, they did discuss NAFTA, but advisor just said Obama wanted to make NAFTA ’stronger for U.S. workers.’ “So here’s what happens. You’ve got one of my economic advisors goes and visits a Canadian embassy and they’re asking him questions and he says, ‘Well, Senator Obama isn’t planning to repeal NAFTA, but he wants to amend it to make it stronger for U.S. workers.’ The Canadian embassy writes it up as, ‘Well, maybe Obama is not as tough on NAFTA as you might think.’ And the Clintons start waving this and saying, ‘See? Actually, he’s the one.’” [Mississippi Rally, 3/10/08]

4. 2/29/08: Sen. Obama: ‘It did not happen.’ Anchor: “So, completely inaccurate, did not happen, end of discussion.” Sen. Obama: “It did not happen.” [WKYC TV, 2/29/08]

3. 2/28/08 – Rice: ‘There had been no contact.’ “The Canadian ambassador issued a statement that was absolutely false. There had been no contact. There had been no discussions on NAFTA. So we take the Canadians at their word…period.” [MSNBC, Susan Rice, 2/28/08]

2. 2/27/08 – Obama advisor just said ‘hello.’ “Goolsbee: Canada’s consul general in Chicago contacted him ‘at one point to say ‘hello’ because their office is around the corner.” [ABC, 2/29/08]

1. 2/27/08 – ‘No conversations have taken place’ with the Canadian government on NAFTA. “Earlier Thursday, the Obama campaign insisted that no conversations have taken place with any of its senior ranks and representatives of the Canadian government on the NAFTA issue.” [CTV, 2/29/08]

Oh, the audacity!

So I went hunting, and was often surprised at what I found. It amounts to a pattern that I find dismaying. There are a lot of links here, documenting sources for my conclusions, and there is a lot to read.

Here is my list, in no particular order. See if you agree with me, and answer the questions for yourself… did he really not know, or is it just that he didn’t mind?

1. He joined and remained active in a church where racism and anti-American hate is routinely preached. He and his family attended, and heavily contributed for about 20 years. This has received worldwide attention, as show in the link below.
Ten Must-See Videos from The Times Online
Obama first claimed not to know about Wright’s inflammatory statements. He later admitted he did.
CBS News
Flip-Flip Video
CBS News
OOPS… didn’t notice. Or else he forgot.
Rev Wright, one of the ministers, even promoted Obama and denigrated Hillary Clinton from the pulpit spurring an IRS investigation as to the validity of their non-profit status. The Obama campaign is also reported to have campaigned on at least one occasion at church events, furthering the curiosity of the IRS.
WCBS TV

Obama Speech at General Synod of the United Church of Christ

But, OOPS… he didn’t know. Or didn’t mind.

2. Senator Obama bought stock in two companies whose investors included his 2004 campaign political donors. One, in fact, was developing medicine to treat avian flu — with the stock purchase coming right before Obama introduced legislation to increase funding to combat the virus.
The other company, SkyTerra, received government permission to build a national wireless network on the day Obama purchased his shares. Among the principal owners of this business were four people who had raised more than $150,000 for Obama. Attorney Obama claimed later that they were in a semi-blind trust, that just didn’t legally work out. When this became public, Obama sold the stock.

Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
Oops… he didn’t know. Or didn’t he mind?

3. Senator Obama came into politics through the famously corrupt Chicago political machine, with the help of some of the slimiest characters imaginable. (Several major players who helped him are have been indicted for graft, fraud, etc. Obama now keeps a rep at Rezko’s trial every day to monitor testimony.) Obama has had to donate to charity much of the money they gave him to get his start, though the admitted dollar amount keeps increasing as time goes on. It’s now up over $250,000. Tony Rezko, currently at trial on federal charges of attempted extortion, money laundering, and fraud, was also involved in the purchase of Obama’s home at well below market value.

Huffington Post
Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
Not so well publicized is the fact that Obama wrote letters to the Illinois Dept of Housing, recommending Rezco’s company, North Kenwood, LLC, for the housing projects that soon became slums, causing inhumane hardship for their residents.

Obama Letters
These slums, later repossessed, were in Obama’s district while he was an Illinois senator. In fact, some are about a mile from his home, and several are still boarded up. Obama professed to be unaware of any problems. During the Democratic debate on January 21, 2008, Obama, in fact, gave the impression that he had merely done about 5 hours of legal work for “this individual.”
The Rezko Foreclosed Properties
telegraph.co.uk
No Quarter
Rezko Watch
Chicago Tribune: Almost Believable
OOPS… he didn’t know. Or did he care?

4. According to the Sun-Times, Barack Obama, “allegedly decent guy and agent of change” in Washington, requested an earmark in 2006 for $1 million taxpayer dollars for the University of Chicago Hospitals, where is wife, Michelle Obama, was a vice president. Said hospital, by the way, gave Michelle Obama a huge raise (nearly $200,000, more than doubling her salary) in 2005 after Barack was elected to the United States Senate.
Michelle Obama
Chicago Sun-Times
According to The Chicago Tribune, “Obama had a special connection to Maytag: Lester Crown, one of the company’s directors and biggest investors whose family, records show, has raised tens of thousands of dollars for Obama’s campaigns since 2003.” Maytag closed its refrigerator plant in Galesburg, Ill during Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign, but Crown says Obama never raised the fate of the Galesburg plant with him. Obama’s campaign responded “that the senator did not know Crown sat on Maytag’s board until the Tribune noted it last September in a story about the closing of the Maytag headquarters in Newton, Iowa.”

Chicago Tribune
Obama Truth
Oops… he didn’t know? Or didn’t he care?

5. Obama took donations from federal lobbyists and political action committees for his House and Senate races and his own Hopefund political action committee. He only stopped taking this political money — and began speaking out against it — when he launched his presidential campaign in February 2007. However, he still takes hundreds of thousands of dollars from their high level employees.
Politifact
The Hill
Politifact
Oops… he didn’t know? Or doesn’t mind?

6. Opponents have asked Senator Obama to release the records from his term of state office in Illinois. Since he has little other experience in politics (he did, after all, declare his presidential candidacy barely 2 years after election to the US Senate), this doesn’t seem an unreasonable request. The records might also shed light on his relationship with Rezko and some of the other corrupt individuals he rubbed shoulders with during his climb up through Chicago politics. But lo and behold, the records all seem to have mysteriously disappeared.
Politico
The Pantagraph, a central Illinois newspaper

Questions have also been raised about Obama-sponsored legislation during the last year he was in office there. It is alleged that, in the interest of making Obama appear more prolific, then Illinois Senate Majority Leader Emil Jones appointed Obama as sponsor of many pieces of legislation, even though other senior senators had spent many years working on the bills.

“I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen,” State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. “Barack didn’t have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.”
“I don’t consider it bill jacking,” Hendon told me. “But no one wants to carry the ball 99 yards all the way to the one-yard line, and then give it to the halfback who gets all the credit and the stats in the record book.”

As a result, Todd Spivak of the Houston Press noted, “During his seventh and final year in the state Senate, Obama’s stats soared. He sponsored a whopping 26 bills passed into law — including many he now cites in his presidential campaign when attacked as inexperienced.”
Houston Press

Oops… he didn’t know? Or did he mind?

7. Obama’s website sported a page for the New Black Panthers organization until it was discovered and reported by the media. It was quickly removed. Obama denounced their support, but the New Black Panthers’ Winter 2008 newsletter still carries a full page ad for his campaign on page 36. Though the origin of the ad is not stated, it contains logos, graphics and quotes from the Obama website, which Obama could have ordered removed as a copyright violation.
The NBP page, before its deletion.
NBP Winter 2008 Newsletter
OOPs… he didn’t know.

8. In addition to the controversy concerning his numerous “present” votes while in the Illinois legislature, Obama also maintains that he just pushed the wrong button on 5 or 6 other votes. (Let’s not even go there!)

According to the New York Times, however, an examination of Illinois records shows at least 36 times when Mr. Obama was either the only state senator to vote present or was part of a group of six or fewer to vote that way, causing many to question whether he was really just trying to avoid taking a stand.
LA Times on Obama votes

Real Clear Politics
New Your Times
Obama also has an exceptionally high no-show ration for votes since coming to the Senate.
Media Matters
OOPS… he didn’t know? Or didn’t he care?

9. On Wednesday, Feb 27, 2008, CTV reported that a senior member of Obama’s campaign, Austan Goolsbee, spoke directly with the Canadian Consulate General in Chicago to assure them that if Obama publicly spoke about opting out of NAFTA, they should not take it seriously. It would just be political posturing… campaign rhetoric. Obama flatly denied the report, attacking both Senator Clinton and Senator McCain for their comments on the issue.
On March 4, the New York Times, among other sources, revealed that the conversation had indeed taken place, and published the memo. The Canadian government announced that an investigation would begin to find out who was responsible for leaking the memorandum concerning the conversation.
CTV News
New York Times
New York Times published the memo
OOPS… he didn’t know.

10. Obama’s position on the war in Iraq, in spite of the October 2002 speech, has not been as unwavering as he would have us believe.

Commentary Magazine
Obama Gets the Facts Wrong
Clinton Takes on Obama
MSNBC
The Boston Globe
OOPS… did he forget?

11. Senator Obama is chair of of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on Europe, having been appointed in early 2007. According to Congressional Records, the subcommittee’s jurisdiction includes “all matters, policies and problems concerning the continent of Europe, including the European member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.” That means it has jurisdiction over NATO.
As Senator Clinton asserted in a recent debate, “NATO is critical to our mission in Afghanistan. He’s held not one substantive hearing to do oversight, to figure out what we can do to actually have a stronger presence with NATO in Afghanistan.”
Politifact
OOPS… he didn’t know… or did he forget?

12. Senator Obama told Tim Russert in January of 2006 that “I will serve out my full six-year term.”

From the official transcript of Meet the Press:
MR. RUSSERT: But there seems to be an evolution in your thinking. This is what you told the Chicago Tribune last month: “Have you ruled out running for another office before your term is up?” Obama answered, “It’s not something I anticipate doing.” But when we talked back in November of `04 after your election I said, “There’s been enormous speculation about your political future. Will you serve your six-year term as United States senator from Illinois?” Obama, “Absolutely.”

SEN. OBAMA: I will serve out my full six-year term. You know, Tim, if you get asked enough, sooner or later you’re going to get weary and you start looking for new ways of saying things. But my thinking has not changed.

MR. RUSSERT: So you will not run for president or vice-president in 2008?

SEN. OBAMA: I will not.

Obama formed an exploratory committee in January of 2007 and declared his candidacy two months later.
Meet The Press Transcript January 22, 2006
“Obama Takes the Russert Test” from The Swamp
Obama Learns the Washington Ways
OOPS… he forgot.

13. Senator Obama promised to use public financing for the general election if his Republican opponent would do the same. Now, apparently after he realized how much more money he could have at his disposal, he has reversed himself.
League of Women Voters
Mr Obama’s Waffle
OOPS… he forgot.

14. Obama bragged in the Iowa debate about the “nuclear legislation I’ve passed.” When he encountered resistance from the nuclear industry… including Illinois-based Excelon, the country’s largest nuclear plant operator and one of Mr. Obama’s largest sources of campaign money, he edited his bill several times, making it weaker each time. The bill, however, never passed. It died. But Mr Obama gained a chief political strategist… David Axelrod. In October 2007, Obama resubmitted the bill in its watered-down version.
Nuclear Leaks and Response Tested Obama in Senate
OOPS… he forgot.

15. Senator Obama purports to be in favor of “universal” health care, utilizing private insurance, on the campaign trail. In fact, he adamantly denied advocating single payor. But there was a time when he was in favor of the single payor system.

Video
The Swamp
OOPS… he forgot.

16. While campaigning, Obama told several hundred people in Iowa, “No lobbyists need apply to my White House.”
However, in contrast to his pledge to fight against the influence of special interests, his record on employing lobbyists isn’t quite so pristine. Several high level members of his campaign are registered lobbyists, including his New Hampshire campaign manager. Lately, he has softened his campaign line to, “They are not going to run my White House.”
The Boston Globe
The Wall Street Journal
Politico
The Washington Post
The Hill
Obama actually seems very comfortable working with lobbyists on legislation. To site just one example…

According to ABC, Obama “has quietly worked with corporate lobbyists to help pass breaks worth $12 million,” that gave two overseas companies tariff suspensions. Both companies also have facilities in Illinois.
One of these companies, Nufarm, told its shareholders it was making “more money than ever before in North America because it had increased its prices on its U.S. and Canadian customers, predominantly farmers.” This had the effect of profiting business interests in his state, while punishing its farmers.
According to ABC News, “With a dozen tariff suspension bills to his name, Obama stands out as the most prolific of any Democratic presidential hopeful on the topic.”
Despite Rhetoric, Obama Pushed Lobbyists’ Interests
OOPS… he forgot. Or didn’t he mind?

How many other things are we going to find that Senator Obama conveniently forgot? It is my hope that the political powers-that-be will lay off the talk about ending the primaries early, and that the media and the internet diggers will help us truly vet Senator Obama. Use a little old-fashioned, objective journalism… remember that?
If he has nothing more to hide, it can only help him.
But if we don’t know the whole story yet, it might just help us be certain that we can indeed put a Democrat in the White House in November.
That is, after all, what Democrats want, isn’t it?

Cross-posted at MyDD.com.

My, Barack Obama’s advisers and officials are contributing quite a little heap of embarrassments to his campaign, aren’t they? 

First, there was Austan Goolsbee’s little chat with the Canadians about NAFTA (Obama didn’t mean it) that the bad Canadians totally misunderstood and twisted out of context.  Then Samantha Power told a far right British paper that Hillary Clinton is a ‘monster‘ before remembering to add (too late, said the reporter) that it was "off the record."  In all the outcry over the insult, Obama’s supporters seemed not to have noticed or to have cared that she also announced that his firm commitment to prompt troop withdrawals wasn’t nearly as firm as progressives assume. 

Then intelligence adviser/former Bush Administration official John O. Brennan announced that he was afraid he just didn’t  agree with Obama on telecom immunity.   And I don’t even need to mention the Rev. Wright.

Then there’s this (via Memeorandum):

Last Thursday the Obama campaign was up in arms over the news that the Illinois senator’s passport information had been breached….Well, be careful what you wish for.

Turns out, one of the three people who accessed the candidate’s files works for… wait for it… Obama foreign policy advisor, John O. Brennan, president and CEO of the Analysis Corp. Brennan’s employee was the only one of the three who was not fired, merely disciplined and, CNN’s Zain Verjee reports, the unnamed employee also accessed John McCain’s files. In a separate breach, Hillary Clinton’s passport information was also breached. (Swampland)

None of this proves that Brennan was involved or even that the breach amounted to misfeasance by the employee.  Still, there is an irony in the revelation after all the (usual) outrage by Obama’s supporters over the breach of his file. 

I am merely mentioning this in passing as a further instance of ways in which Obama’s "brilliantly run campaign"—which I have heard people, people I thought were sensible, seriously argue is evidence that he is qualified to run the country—seems to be imploding.

Of  more concern to Democrats should be right-wing blogger’s Ed Morissey’s report that Obama military adviser, Gen. Tony McPeak, has made statements concerning Iraq that appear to be completely in line with McCain’s and rather far from the views of the progressives who support Obama.  McPeak is the same adviser who just compared Bill Clinton to Joseph McCarthy.

Morissey says:

In an interview with the Oregonian, posted here but confirmed by me through its purchase from the archives, McPeak essentially makes the exact same argument that John McCain makes about staying in Iraq — and which Obama ridicules:

Is Iraq the last country we confront in the Middle East?

Who wants to volunteer to get cross-ways with us? We’ll be there a century,  hopefully. If it works right.

Isn’t this the exact argument McCain has made repeatedly, and which Obama derides as “a hundred-years war”? Of course it is….McCain and McPeak both argue for a big footprint in the Middle East for a very long time in order to protect American interests and to overawe the other nations there into behaving themselves.

This should raise some eyebrows on the Obama campaign’s willful deception on this point….He meant exactly the same thing as McCain. What’s more, he underestimates democracy. He wanted the Bush administration to install a military dictator with whom we could work in order to establish our Middle East footprint..  (Hot Air)

You can read the interview yourself, since the link is provided in the posting.

My question is this:  If McPeak said all this, isn’t it further evidence that Obama has surrounded himself with advisers whose views are wildly opposed to those of the progressives who are pushing for his nomination and whose methods are far from consistent with the ‘New Politics’ for which they idealistically long? 

I’d say that it was evidence. 

As Larry Johnson said some time ago:

These people cannot be trusted to accurately represent their candidate’s public positions on key issues and Senator Obama wants the American people to trust his judgment in selecting folks to run the bureaucracies that he already admitted he can’t run?  God save us.

Instead of recognizing that he is not exactly the candidate they imagine, they go on rationalizing on his behalf and making up explanations for him so he doesn’t have to.  Bear in mind, these are intelligent, even brilliant people.  I have said it before; I see the man’s appeal, and he’s incredibly attractive and of course an unparallelled maker of speeches, but isn’t this cause for concern? 

I suspect that by the time they finally let this information in, it will be too late for them to do anything about it.

Memeorandum has commentary on the passport story.

RELATED POSTINGS

Dept of Desperate Diversions:  Obama Aide Compares Bill Clinton to Joseph McCarthy

"New" Politics? Obama "Punching" and Pushing for Hillary to Drop Out (email included)

The Democratic Campaign Grows Even Uglier

Maybe ‘New Politics’ is All Obama’s Got

Obama Doesn’t Mean What his Advisers Say 

Obama Campaign Uses Bush Tactics in Fundraising Email

Paxman & Samantha Power (Before Her Faux Pas)

No Quarter’s List Of Obama’s NAFTA-Gate Statements

Canadian PM said Hillary’s Campaign did Not Try to Reassure Canadians re: NAFTA

NAFTA-gate: Part Two

See Part i of How Can Obama Square These? [Update by Larry Johnson].”

SEE ALSO:

• “Racism and the Race Card”

• “Imagine if Wright Were Hillary’s Pastor …”

• “Obama’s 2006 Earmarks & the Crown Family”

• “The forgotten people”

• “Obama’s Pastor: “God Damn America”

• “[Updates] Irrefutable Proof That Obama’s Own District Was Home to 11 Rezko Foreclosed Properties”

• “The racists are coming. The racists are coming.“
• “The Rezko Saga: Two Videos [Updated]”

• “Thin-Skinned Obama Fans“

OF NOTE: “Clinton is viewed favorably by 75% of Likely Democratic Primary Voters. However, that figure includes just 56% of Obama voters. Obama is viewed favorably by 68% of Likely Democratic Primary Voters, a figure that includes 41% of Clinton supporters.” Rasmussen Reports

TANTALIZING SPECULATION OF THE DAY: “Was There an Obama-Daley Deal on the Presidency?”

Okay, now for the “Gates” news:

• “Going to school on presidential politics — As an adviser in Barack Obama’s campaign, U. of C. economics professor Austan Goolsbee finds himself caught in the NAFTA crossfire,” Chicago Tribune, March 9, 2008. Here are a couple tidbits:

  “It’s [NAFTA-gate] very frustrating for him, because he says everything that’s being said about what he said is all very false,” said his mother, Jane Goolsbee. “It’s very, very frustrating.” [...]

  … Goolsbee lunches regularly with economic conservatives on the U. of C. faculty such as Kevin Murphy and Nobel Prize winner Gary S. Becker. He remains close to MIT’s Poterba, who chaired an economics panel that advised President Bush on his tax-cut strategy. [...]

  “He’s a strong free-trade person,” Becker said. “He believes in free trade, as a vast majority of economists do.”

• “Spotlight reveals Obama camp missteps,” Politico.com, March 9, 2008. …

• From “Spotlight reveals Obama camp missteps“:

  … elements of his inner circle are still dangerously new to the maelstrom of presidential politics. [...]

  There’s little doubt as to the cause of their unforced errors: the sheer novelty of the spotlight. [...]

  [F]ormer State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin called it “amateur hour on making foreign policy.”

  “He can’t seem to run a foreign policy team the way it’s supposed to run,” he said.

• “Obama’s inner circle,” columnist Lynn Sweet, Chicago Sun-Times, March 9, 2008. (From David Axelrod to Julianna Smoot.)
• “Run Herd on the Obamans?,” columnist Victor Davis Hanson, The Corner blog, National Review Online, March 9, 2008.
  

  Obama’s campaign needs to take a time out, gather together, and start to get a grip. First, the candidate gets huffy at a press conference,then the unnecessary NAFTA flap, then Michelle is back at it again (America is “just downright mean”),and then his adviser Ms. Power (not content to be sober and judicious despite past attacks on her) gives an unnecessary book promo interview and dubs HIllary a “monster”.

  All this has a deer in the headlights look to it, as the mantra “hope” and “change” starts to get old, and we are getting back to to a normal old 19th century campaign of head-to-head invective and back and forth—which Obama has not yet gone through.

  Two things are starting to happen and the Obama pros need to get a handle on it asap. One, there is a McGovernish flavor to the campaign of a bunch of freelancing ideologues that are going off message and in sloppy fashion ranting and raving in petulant 60-style. Two, the shelf life of all messiahs is not long if they don’t produce miracles, and Obama has not quite yet knocked Hillary off as expected,. So the above-the-fray, change the world love-ins will have to change a bit. …

• “Obama and the Pet Rock,” columnist Victor Davis Hanson, The Corner blog, National Review Online, March 9, 2008.

BONUS ITEM: “The Sorrow and the Pity Party,” James Wolcott, Vanity Fair, March 9, 2008. Wolcott takes down a Daily Kos diarist — and how — along with other crybabies of his ilk.

And there’s that he needs more than the usual number of advisers because he has a tendency to push the wrong button. Of course, who he chooses as his advisers makes one shudder. My prediction is that if he’s somehow elected president, the “Ship of State” will become the “Ship of Fools.”

Here are some more bits and pieces on those powerful advisers:

• David Alexrod: “Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, who also advises and defends and speaks for Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, hasn’t forgotten how politics is played back home.” — from John Kass’s latest column, “Chicago Way the only way to settle Obama-Clinton tiff,” for the Chicago Tribune, March 9, 2008.

  (Does that mean, sigh, that you and I now have to search Daley’s speeches for “hope,” “change,” “yes we can,” and “words, just words”?)

• Austan Goolsbee: “One aspect of this whole episode that has gotten less coverage is the background of Austan Goolsbee. Ron K in Seattle wrote about him in: The Audiology of Hope: DLC Dogwhistle Economics” — from Eriposte’s story today at LeftCoaster, “More on the Obama NAFTA Flap.” Eriposte adds:
  

  RonK’s post is worth a read to discover why George Will likes Austan Goolsbee and why Sen. Obama’s position on economic issues have often tracked to the right of Sen. Clinton. Also, here’s an amusing observation from Big Tent Democrat at Talk Left: … [the story is about a misfire by Kos]

• Tony Rezko: Besides the news that three people Rezko tried to land Illinois state jobs for are now on Obama’s staff, there’s hot speculation on the blogs about why Barack Obama said, with certainty in his now-famous 2002 speech on Iraq, that “I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors.” Continued below …

I have no idea if there is any “there there” on this speculation. But the questions remain. Here’s an excerpt from “One-degree of separation 2: Obama’s 2002 speech and Rezko’s power plant in Iraq,” posted at Avid Editor’s Insights blog (and the same quotes are at MyDD, Rezkowatch, and other blogs) [CORRECTION: Avid Reader took this material from RezkoWatch but didn't clearly provide attribution.]

Let’s focus on the key words ‘I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors’.To say that you know something requires an explanation. It has to be based on information certain—not a belief and certainly not hope. How did Obama know? How could he speak with such certainty? Could it perhaps be because of Obama’s 15-to-20-year friendship with indicted Syrian and Chicago resident Tony Rezko, his political fundraiser patron? Could it possibly be because of Rezko’s long-term relationship with exiles and former residents of Iraq, Syria and Jordan, many of whom have either resided in or visited Chicago? Could it possibly be because of Rezko’s affiliation with Iraqi-British billionaire Nadhmi Auchi, alleged to have been a long-time bagman for Saddam Hussein’s secret money-laundering trail, to whom Rezko was ‘introduced several years’ prior to 2005 ‘by a mutual acquaintance in London’ and with whom he entered into a multi-million dollar 62-acre Chicago development deal, and the source of the $3.5 million ‘loan’ wired from a Middle East bank that landed Rezko back in jail January 29, 2008, to await jury selection March 3, 2008? Could it possibly be because of Rezko’s affiliation with corrupt Iraqi exile and Chicago resident—and Interpol fugitive—Aiham Alsammarae who returned to Iraq in 2003 to serve as the Coalition Provisional Authority’s minister of electricity and who was jailed in Iraq in relation to missing millions in reconstruction funds? Could it possibly be because of the joint plan in 2003 by Rezko, Auchi and Alsammarae to build a power plant in Kurdish Iraq—a plan yet unfilled as recently as December 2006?
Note that Auchi claims that no such relationship exists.

Brush aside Obama’s claims of being guilty of making ‘bone-headed’ mistakes in regards to his Rezko-related issues. This very significant one-degree of separation between himself and Rezko’s Iraqi business partners and Saddam Hussein is much more troubling. The apparently now dead-in-the-water plan for the Iraqi power plant—a plan, by the way, openly discussed by Chicago media—raises greater concerns about his judgement where his ties to Rezko are concerned, extending far beyond the unseemly Rezko-facilitated Obama house deal in Chicago or any other assumptions or assertions about political pay-to-play in Illinois.Recently, Chicago political blogger Bill Baar raised questions about the connections between Baghdad and Chicago, saying that:

“Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Ill.), Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, ‘[may] not [be] looking hard enough. There is a fascinating trail of philanthropy between Chicago and Baghdad worth sorting out, and considerable sorting it’s going to take.’”

On February 5, 2008, Baar added in regards to the upcoming Rezko trial:

[Writes Baar] We’re going to hear blunt recordings from [the] man who was Obama’s mentor for over 17 years with guys who called themselves ‘The Pope’ (Bob Cellini) and ‘The Rabbi’ (Stuart Levin). They’re going to sound like players out of the Sopranos raising money for Obama: the unamed Political Candidate in the proffer. (A connection leaked to the [Chicago] Sun Times by maybe Levine or Rezko themselves? I doubt Fitz’s office did that.) All it takes is for Obama’s name to pop up a few more times in these documents and recordings and I think Obama will be finished politically. Won’t matter if Obama knew about the wrongdoing or not. Add in the Iraq reconstruction connection when Rezko goes on trial for that, and I think it will be a very damaging picture of Obama’s character and judgement. He won’t survive Illinois politics and Patrick Fitzgerald. …

I don’t know. I just don’t know. But the home purchase is definitely troubling. The American Pundit blog picked up a MyDD diary post, stating, “Hwc looks at the Obama/Rezko land deal and comes to many of the same conclusions I do.” HRC’s diary begins:

The question is whether Rezko did a $925,000 favor for Obama by paying for part of his home? A picture is worth a thousand words, so take a look at this NBC news feature with extensive photos of the property:

The American Pundit blog notes:

1) As you can clearly see from the overhead photos in the video, this was clearly NOT an “adjacent” piece of property. This was quite obviously the yard for the Obama house. The only access to the Rezko property is from Obama’s parcel. The intent here was clearly for Rezko to purchase the land and continue making it available for the exclusive use of the Obama family. A $925,000 favor to a sitting US Senator.

Why did Obama buy a strip of “Rezko” land and build a fence? Simple. Obama knew that eventually somebody would photograph the property and the sham nature of the arrangement would be instantly obvious. Thus, he had to do something to give the appearance of Rezko’s land actually being separate from the Obama house. Thus, building a fence (with a gate providing the only access). Obviously, the Rezko property was never intended to be a separate piece of land and a fence on the original lot line would have been absurd…

American Pundit asks: “Does this sham property purchase, regardless of its legality, seem like good ‘judgment’ to you?,” and then recommends its readers check out the rest of the MyDD diary.

It’s all about the company he keeps.

And here’s an effective YouTube on the Samantha Power brouhaha:

Reporters from the Associated Press and Reuters went after him for his false denial that a campaign aide had held a secret meeting with Canadian officials over Obama’s trade policy. A trio of Chicago reporters pummeled him with questions about the corruption trial this week of a friend and supporter. The New York Post piled on with a question about him losing the Jewish vote.

Obama responded with the classic phrases of a politician in trouble. “That was the information that I had at the time. . . . Those charges are completely unrelated to me. . . . I have said that that was a mistake. . . . The fact pattern remains unchanged.”

Rezko and the Jewish vote aside — Obama’s lies and obfuscations aside — there’s that the national press corps realizes that NAFTA matters deeply to their readers. And Obama knows that Hillary Clinton’s campaign is hitting him hard for his failure to protect workers in his OWN state, as well as his “wink, wink” game with Canadians. Here’s a new mailer (flip page below the fold) arriving in Ohioans’ mailboxes that echoes what union president Tom Buffenbarger has decried with understandable furor:

All credit for posting this mailer, and providing an accompanying story, goes to The Daily Bellwether blog’s story, “Hillary Ohio Mailer Attacks Obama: Cites $200,000 Contribution In Illinois Maytag Plant Closing.” Read the full story there.