Obama can run but he can't hide

Barack Obama the slumlords' pal has been in Tony Rezko's pocket so long he doesn't even notice the Twinkie wrappers anymore. I always liked his story that he barely knew Mr. Rezko at the time Rezko helped him buy his mansion with the 1,000 bottle wine cellar. I guess he wants us to believe that he had received Tony's orders for government subsidies by phone. Of course, Obama did finally have to admit that he had given ole Tony a tour of the palace they were buying jointly. I bet Rezko isn't eating any cookies sent to him anonymously in prison.

Barack Obama the crooked developers' pal

David Freddoso in today's NY Post - BARACK'S FAVORS FOR CORRUPT CRONY:

Barack Obama has admitted it was "boneheaded" to get involved in a land deal with Tony Rezko, his friend and fund-raiser. But the media's focus on that deal has distracted from the bigger question: Why would Obama become involved in any deal with a man like Rezko, who made his living sponging off taxpayers and corrupting public officials? Because, by the time of the deal, the two already had a long relationship of mutual benefit.
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After Rezko's 2006 indictment on unrelated federal corruption charges, Obama denied unequivocally that he'd ever helped the man: "I've never done any favors for him."

That's simply false. Rezko was a genius of corporate welfare who enriched himself at taxpayers' expense, both legally and illegally, via his multiple political connections. Yes, he went to others for the illegal deals that landed him in prison. But Rezko depended on Obama when he wanted legal access to the state treasury. The arrangement was a far cry from Obama's image of "change and hope."

The hope is for crooks who have Barry's cell phone number, but I digress.

In October 1998, Obama wrote city and state officials, urging them to give Rezko $14 million to build an apartment complex outside of Obama's state Senate district. The Chicago Sun-Times noted last year that Obama's request included $855,000 in "development fees" for Rezko and for another developer, Allison Davis, who happened to be Obama's old law-firm boss. Obama's spokesman said it was just a coincidence that the state senator wrote letters to obtain millions of dollars for his two longtime friends. In fact, Obama was a dependable ally of subsidized developers in the Legislature, giving Rezko and others broader help as well. In "The Case Against Barack Obama" [Freddoso's new book] I identify and parse six housing bills with which Obama was closely involved.
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These and the other Obama-backed bills helped make millionaires of Rezko and other slum developers at taxpayers' expense. The developers - including his former law boss and an adviser to his current campaign - reciprocated, together giving and raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for Obama's campaigns.

To sum up: Obama got them subsidies to build. He secured them a steady income of government rent subsidies. He arranged special tax credits and abatements for them. He backed measures that increased demand for their services, and helped them legally circumvent local laws.

Gosh, young Barry must have been a star pupil in the Chicago school of politics. I'm not as sure as Mr. Freddoso that Barry didn't do anything illegal though. Wanna bet that Rezko turns state's evidence to keep out of the slammer if Obama isn't in a position to pardon him after the election?

However, the best part is that ole Hussein thinks these types of "private-public partnerships" are just the ticket for developing affordable housing in the USA. Aside from the graft, read Binyamin Appelbaum's lengthy expose in the Boston Globe of how it worked out for the residents in Grim proving ground for Obama's housing policy:

The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for people who can't afford to live anywhere else.

But it's not safe to live here.

About 99 of the units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale - a score so bad the buildings now face demolition.

Grove Parc has become a symbol for some in Chicago of the broader failures of giving public subsidies to private companies to build and manage affordable housing - an approach strongly backed by Obama as the best replacement for public housing.

As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.

But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies - including several hundred in Obama's former district - deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable.

Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama's close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama's constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted.

Maybe Barry should just call his big plan the My Developer Pals Trust Fund? As for the taxpayers, well they always get screwed, just more so in Chicago.

Obama says we should just move on

Reminiscent of another Democrat pol caught with his pants down, Barack Obama and his chief Marxist dialectician, Michelle, think that us little people should now ignore Barry's long time association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and just move on:

Democrat Barack Obama and his wife said Thursday the public is tired of hearing about incendiary remarks by their former pastor, as they sought to put the controversy that has rocked his presidential campaign to rest.

"We hear time and time again voters are tired of this," Michelle Obama said in an interview the couple gave to NBC's "Today" show.

"They don't want to hear about this division, they want to know what are we going to do to move beyond these issues," she said. "And what made me feel proud of Barack in this situation is that he is trying to move us as a nation beyond these conversations that divide."

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"I think that this is about all I'm going to say on this issue, and I think we're going to close this chapter and move into the next phase of this election. With that, I'm hoping that we'll talk about something else."

Here's the problem, Barry. If we believe you, you spent twenty years swapping spit with Jeremiah Wright and never noticed he was a wacko which makes you seem rather less than perceptive, if you know what I mean. On the other hand, if you are lying, then you are a more than few fries short of a Happy Meal too and that makes you damn dangerous. So faced with the question as to whether you are a dullard or a moonbat, us little people are very interested in your ole pal Jeremiah and all your other old chums like William Ayers and Tony Rezko.

C'mon Barry, tell us some more about old times. We love to hear about it!

Golly, the press finally noticed that Emperor Barack was buck naked

Ask Tough Questions? Yes, They Can!

It took many months and the mockery of "Saturday Night Live" to make it happen, but the lumbering beast that is the press corps finally roused itself from its slumber Monday and greeted Barack Obama with a menacing growl.

The day before primaries in Ohio and Texas that could effectively seal the Democratic presidential nomination for him, a smiling Obama strode out to a news conference at a veterans facility here. But the grin was quickly replaced by the surprised look of a man bitten by his own dog.

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."

When those failed, Obama tried another approach. "We're running late," the candidate said, and then he disappeared behind a curtain.

In related news, Barack informs us in a paid campaign commercial that he believes in the leftoid canard that Arab-Americans were "rounded up" after 9/11:

"If there is an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney, it threatens my civil liberties."

Good thing the mysterious "rounder-uppers" didn't touch Syrian-American moneyman Tony Rezko or Obama wouldn't have been able to buy his mansion!

Slumlord fun and profit with Barack Obama and Tony Rezko

What is it about Democrat politicos and sleazy real estate deals? No, I don't mean the odd funding for the Obama mansion in Chicago - that's chump change. I mean Barack's assistance over the years for his real estate wheeler-dealer pal Tony Rezko whose trial on charges of perpetuating a gigantic fraud on the taxpayers is due to start in March. The charges raise all kinds of questions which Barack isn't too keen on answering - Obama ducks the questions:

Barack Obama tells us he is the messenger of a new kind of politics.

Open. Transparent. Different.

But put the pedal to the metal and ask Illinois' junior senator new and serious questions about his radioactive, federally indicted, former friend Antoin "Tony" Rezko, and suddenly this gleaming presidential hopeful and paragon of new politics behaves just like any other dissembling, dismissive Chicago pol, ducking the discussion while pretending not to.

The story behind the story of this week's Sun-Times' reports on Rezko, the power broker slumlord, and Obama, voice for the voiceless, is revealing.

For five long weeks, Sun-Times' investigative reporter Tim Novak called, e-mailed, requested, practically pleaded with Obama's press people to provide information about the senator's relationship to Rezko when it came to the development of low-income housing in Chicago. In an abundance of fairness and an excess of solicitousness, Novak sent a list of questions.

For five weeks, no answer.

Then Novak published the reports (Obama and his Rezko ties, Broken promises, broken homes) and it wasn't a pretty sight:

Until Novak began his digging, the most we knew about the Obama/Rezko nexus was the revelation that Rezko, a major Obama donor and fund-raiser, had helped Obama enlarge the property surrounding his South Side mansion by having Mrs. Rezko simultaneously purchase an adjacent lot and then sell off a strip of that property to Obama. At the time, unless Obama never read a paper or watched the news, he couldn't help but know that Rezko was already under federal investigation. Rezko was ultimately indicted.

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But Novak's reports this week raise new questions about just how much attention Obama, a self-described activist, was paying to the critical issue of affordable housing in the district he used to represent as a state senator. It again involved Rezko, his longtime patron, who had 11 failed or failing buildings in Obama's district.

Though Obama says he, himself, did a mere five hours of work, the 12-person law firm where Obama was a junior partner did significant legal work for Rezko's company which, by 2002, was being sued by the city, state and a bunch of banks for defaulting on loans and doing a downright awful job of providing decent housing. Taxpayers and lenders have lost up to $100 million while Rezko's firm made about $7 million.

I'm sure it will all be cleared up by the billing records. Hmm, where have we heard that one before? Anyhow:

More than five weeks after receiving Novak's questions, the Obama people at last sent a partial written response. It arrived exactly five hours before the Sun-Times went to press.

That's OK -- any answer is better than none. But what about that interview?

Here's a candidate who these days is on camera more than many TV anchors, whose staff is putting out press releases faster than IHOP cranks out pancakes, and yet, the senator just didn't have time, his staffers claimed, to stop and talk on Monday even though he was in Chicago giving a speech at which, conservatively, there were 30 reporters and 15 cameras.

We didn't know it then, but while Novak and I were staking out the senator's big, black SUV parked outside, he was giving a quiet private interview to the Tribune about the wrongheadedness of the Sun-Times' story.

Meanwhile, an Obama staffer, sent to watch us, nimbly Blackberried our movements to someone inside.

Suddenly, bodyguards pulled the SUV down into a parking garage, grabbed Obama, and with wheels squealing, sped out and away.

Maybe it was the image of that getaway, played on the 5 o'clock news, that finally persuaded Obama to hastily call a news conference to which Novak was not invited but managed to find out about anyway.

Obama said while the new allegations about Rezko were "deeply troubling," none of it had ever been "brought to his attention."

Yep, sounds like a crooked Chicago politician to me. Catch the squealing tires on this video:

Barack Obama is actually a parrot, Michelle Obama is a genius too

We knew Barack Obama was an empty suit, but it's kind of neat the way he can repeat what he has heard.



Meanwhile poor Michelle Obama revealed that she had never been proud of her country until her husband the gasbag won a few primary victories.


Not even when slum lord Tony Rezko made it possible for you and Barry to buy a 2 million dollar house, Michelle? I would have thought you would have been real proud of that just like your $300,000 make-work job at the University of Chicago hospitals as a community relations specialist.


Via PhakeBarackObama.com.