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Obama Contributor, Illinois Meat Plant Owner Charged With Financing Terrorists (Updated)
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- Remember the recent story about the mysterious raid of an Illinois goat meat plant? Sure you do. A UPI headline on October 20 read, "Raid on Illinois slaughterhouse a mystery." Accounts from locals in Kinsman, Illinois say there were about 100 federal agents involved in the raid, with snipers at the ready and men paraded out of the plant at gunpoint.
200810302410 | This Is What a Vote for Obama Gets You | / | Editorial
The governor of the State of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, has an approval rating of 4 percent. Rasmussen Reports ranks Blagojevich as the country's least popular governor. He is embroiled in the Tony Rezko/Stuart Levine corruption probe. Levine pled guilty and Rezko was convicted for scheming to obtain kickbacks from investment firms seeking business from two state boards. The governor's wife, Patricia, was a business partner of Rezko. Of course, we know the name Tony Rezko from his shady relationship with Barack Obama.
Under Blagojevich, the state's unfunded pension debt is the largest in the United States. In 2005 that amounted to $35 billion. But that didn't stop Blagojevich from raiding the State University Pension System to the tune of $1.2 billion in order to "balance the budget," something that still eludes the governor. Additionally, Blagojevich raised licensing fees on auto dealers almost 20-fold, required small businesses to print all of their own forms when filing state paperwork and proposed raising the fee for the Illinois Firearm Owners Identification Card from $50 to $500. He said the increased FOID fee, "...was necessary so people would think twice about wanting to own a gun." Of course, it also put the ability to purchase a gun - to defend oneself with a legally purchased firearm - out of range for many middle and lower-middle income families, the Second Amendment be damned.
Barack Obama's $1.1 Million Botanical Garden -- Er, $100,000 Gazebo (Graphics Updated) | NewsBusters.org
A trifling matter? I don't think so. More like a revealing one:
* Obama feels no sense of responsibility for the results of money directed to someone HE chose. This isn't "the buck stops here" of Harry Truman fame; this is "the buck went somewhere else."
* Gubernatorial staffs aren't responsible for monitoring projects like this. State agencies are. If the agency involved didn't do their job (according to the article, it's the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity), that's one thing, but the blame-shifting to other pols is either hopelessly naive (a legitimate possibility, given the candidate's seemingly endless well of ignorance) or irresponsible.
* If you look at the full text of the press release that announced the project, you'll see that Kenny Smith was on hand, and that he made representations about how he was "work(ing) with a variety of governmental agencies and not-for-profit groups to secure funding this project including the Chicago Transit Authority, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the American Society of Landscape Architecture. We have made some progress ...." My bet: Smith had, at most, met with these orgs once or twice, and was blowing smoke about the realistic chances of getting money. For a nominal $550 in campaign contributions, Smith got 100 grand, which "somehow" has mostly gone bye-bye. Bottom line: Obama got hustled. Did he even look into how the rest of the "fund-raising" was going before directing the release of the grant funds?
* Perhaps that's why Obama seems oddly indifferent to what ultimately happened. The response from his spokesman (and not the candidate) is tired boilerplate about "provid(ing) residents with a livable neighborhood." Zzzzzz.
Obama's Leftism
Obama left Chicago after three years to attend Harvard Law School. As he would explain, “I had things to learn . . . , things that would help me bring about real change.” After graduating with honors in 1991, he returned to the Windy City to join the small law firm of Judson Miner, an activist who had been attorney to Mayor Harold Washington.
Within three years of his return, he also became deeply involved with Bill Ayers, a former leader of the so-called Weather Underground. This leftist terrorist group, akin to the German Baader-Meinhof gang or the Italian Red Brigades, specialized in bombing government buildings. Ayers later wrote boastfully that he had personally carried out an attack on the Pentagon. Ayers’s wife and closest collaborator was Bernardine Dohrn, whose views were so extreme that they seemed to cross a line from ultra-leftism to Satanism. At a meeting of the Weather Underground, she hailed the murders then recently committed by Charles Manson’s demented followers. “Dig it, first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach!” she exulted, giving a three-fingered salute to signify a fork.
After the pair emerged from hiding in 1980, a court dismissed the main charges against Ayers on the grounds that the government had used an illegal wiretap. He pled guilty to possessing explosives, but served no time. The net outcome inspired him to gloat that he was “guilty as hell and free as a bird.” Dohrn served seven months. Then they both went respectable, but without changing their views. Ayers posed for a picture stomping on an American flag, and in 2001 he told the New York Times: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”
Islamic Ad on Chicago Buses Say Jesus was a Muslim!!! « Doctor Bulldog & Ronin
So you’ve heard about finding love on the 151 bus. How about finding religion?
That’s exactly what a few Chicagoans have discovered after seeing Chicago Transit Authority buses rolling past them with giant advertisements for Islam.
A Chicago-area Muslim group called Gain Peace has spent $29,900 to place signs on 25 CTA buses serving the North Side in a monthlong campaign organizers hope will help dispel misconceptions about Islam.
The sign caught Moses Robinson’s eye. A 38-year-old Gary resident who works for a software company, he saw one of the buses on Canal Street when he left his office on a break. “Everything clicked into place,” he said. After calling the number on the side of the bus and meeting with Gain Peace, he converted to Islam the next day.
[Uhm... Yeah, right... I'm thinking either Mr. Robinson is a plant by the Muzzies or else he is little touched in the head...]
Of course, most people interviewed at CTA bus stops downtown Tuesday hadn’t even noticed the ads. And one rider thought they were inappropriate, although CTA officials say they see no problem as other ad campaigns on CTA vehicles have featured religious themes or messages.
Gain Peace says the campaign has been a success.
“We’ve had eight conversions, close to 400 calls and we’ve had close to 75,000 hits on our Web site in one week,” said Sabeel Ahmed, the director for Gain Peace.
In fact, it’s going so well, the group just bought six more weeks of ads
Explore posts in the same categories: Christians, Christians under attack, Creeping Sharia, Indoctrination, Muslims in The USA
The Bench: Who Sent Barack Obama?
Machine-made in Chicago
Steve Diamond's excellent posting discusses the mystery man Barack Obama and his hard-t0-explain rapid rise in politics. From street agitator to presidential candidate in what amounts to the blink of an eye, Obama's rise is so unusually fast that it begs questions, and Diamond not only asks the right ones, he provided interesting answers and theories for them too.
An excerpt from Diamond's "Global Labor and Politics" blog:
So it is reasonable to ask, who "sent" Barack Obama? In other words, how can his meteoric rise to political prominence be explained? And, of course, in an answer to that question might lie a better understanding of his essential world view. When I started looking at this question a few weeks ago I quickly grew more concerned about the kinds of people that seem to have been very important in Obama's ascendancy in Chicago area politics. FULL POST at Global Labor and Politics...
Flying Debris: Obama Still Allied With Granny Grifter - Part II
According to Michael Sneed's Friday Chicago Sun Times column Barack Obama is continuing to use Illinois State Treasurer Alexi Gianoulias in his Presidential campaign. As Flying Debris has pointed out here, here, here, here, here, here and here, that as a private citizen Mr. Gianoulias was involved as a bank loan officer in a $1 million scam that could ultimately defraud an 87 year-old woman of her home near the edge of Chicago's Greek Town. Mr. Gianoulias was working for his family bank, the Broadway Bank of Chicago when the bank made the $1 million loan to a woman who could not afford to repay the loan (as Alexi admitted under cross examination), could not fill out the loan forms and who had felons as co-signers, including one convicted of bank fraud. The felons ended up taking the money and now the Gianoulias family bank is suing the woman to take her home.
Barack Obama:By Elias Crim and Matthew Vadum » VAJoe.com
“What Obama is proposing goes far beyond
the boundaries of traditional community
service volunteers. Obama wants to bring
the spirit and tactics of community organizing
into the political system, and there is no
road map out there for how to do it.” —John
K. Wilson, Barack Obama, The Improbable
Quest (2008)
The Chicago winter of 1996-1997 was
a bad one, especially for residents of
the Englewood apartment building at
7000-10 South Sangamon. The 31-unit building
had been rehabilitated with a $653,500
loan from the city of Chicago’s low-income
housing fund, another $654,000 in bank fi -
nancing, and $1.9 million in tax credits. The
general partner on the project was Rezmar
Corporation, run by Antoin (“Tony”) Rezko
and Daniel Mahru. But the tenants shivered
for over fi ve weeks without heat because
Rezko and Mahru claimed they lacked the
cash to turn the heat back on again.
Rezko was a successful real estate investor
who owned fast-food restaurants in
Chicago’s inner-city neighborhoods. But he
branched out into politics in the early 1980s
when he met Jabir Herbert Muhammad,
the former manager of retired heavyweight
champion Muhammad Ali and son of Nation
of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad.
Jabir Muhammad asked Rezko to donate to
mayoral candidate Harold Washington, an
African-American challenging Chicago’s
white establishment. After Washington was
elected mayor, Rezko, an Arab Christian who
emigrated from Syria to Chicago in 1971, became
increasingly involved in causes linking
his business interests to the political clout of
Chicago’s black community. For several years
he was even chairman of the Muhammad A
Foundation, an Islamic charity founded in
1975 that in 1985 changed its name from
the Elijah Muhammad Foundation when
the champ lent it his name. Rezko was also
the actual owner of fast-food franchises that
Jabir Mohammed told city offi cials were his.
Daled Amos: Obama's Ongoing Threats Against Free Speech (Updated)
o so far...
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Obama's Ongoing Threats Against Free Speech (Updated)
The first glimmer of the kind of strong arm tactics Obama would use came back in 1996 when Obama ran (over his competition) for the State Senate:
The day after New Year's 1996, operatives for Barack Obama filed into a barren hearing room of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.
There they began the tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of state Sen. Alice Palmer, the longtime progressive activist from the city's South Side. And they kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama's four Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot.
Fresh from his work as a civil rights lawyer and head of a voter registration project that expanded access to the ballot box, Obama launched his first campaign for the Illinois Senate saying he wanted to empower disenfranchised citizens.
But in that initial bid for political office, Obama quickly mastered the bare-knuckle arts of Chicago electoral politics. His overwhelming legal onslaught signaled his impatience to gain office, even if that meant elbowing aside an elder stateswoman like Palmer.
Obama's $100K Englewood garden grant being probed :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: The Watchdogs
A $100,000 state grant for a botanic garden in Englewood that then-state Sen. Barack Obama awarded in 2001 to a group headed by a onetime campaign volunteer is now under investigation by the Illinois attorney general amid new questions, prompted by Chicago Sun-Times reports, about whether the money might have been misspent.
The garden was never built. And now state records obtained by the Sun-Times show $65,000 of the grant money went to the wife of Kenny B. Smith, the Obama 2000 congressional campaign volunteer who heads the Chicago Better Housing Association, which was in charge of the project for the blighted South Side neighborhood.
As lawyer, Obama was strong, silent type :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Barack Obama
His practice was confined mainly to federal court in Chicago, where he made formal appearances in only five district court cases and another five in cases before the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals -- a total of 10 cases in his legal career. He was on the winning side of just about all those cases. Miner said there were 30 cases to which Obama contributed in some way.
The Daily Blogster: The Obama-Daley Connection
Democrat/Daley generational machine. CHANGE is not a word you would use to describe Richard Daley...status quo would be a much more accurate description.
No bid contracts for friends and fellow Democrats, awarding his own company as recipient to millions in funds is nothing new for Chicago politics, it's business as usual. This is the environment where Barack Obama cut his political teeth.
Global Labor and Politics: Obama/Ayers/Annenberg Update: The NY Times finally mentions the A-word
That's A for Ayers, Bill ("I don't think violent resistance is necessarily the answer") Ayers, and A for Annenberg, as in the $160 million (not 150 as the Times mistakenly reports) seven year long Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC).
And the Times finally had the courage to put both names in the same article.
Of course, they still missed the heart of the story, but perhaps this will finally convince folks that unlike Gertrude Stein's Oakland, in Chicago there is something there when it comes to Obama, Ayers and Annenberg.
Followers of the story of Bill Ayers and Barack Obama will quickly see the missing key points of the New York Times version:
cbs2chicago.com - Nearly 125 Shot Dead In Chicago Over Summer
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An estimated 123 people were shot and killed over the summer. That's nearly double the number of soldiers killed in Iraq over the same time period.
In May, cbs2chicago.com began tracking city shootings and posting them on Google maps. Information compiled from our reporters, wire service reports and the Chicago Police Major Incidents log indicated that 123 people were shot and killed throughout the city between the start of Memorial Day weekend on May 26, and the end of Labor Day on Sept. 1.
According to the Defense Department, 65 soldiers were killed in combat in Iraq. About the same number were killed in Afghanistan over that same period.
In the same time period, an estimated 245 people were shot and wounded in the city.
Obama writes chaper on community organizing
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For three
years Barack Obama was the director of Developing Communities
Project, an institutionally based community organization on
Chicago's far south side. He has also been a consultant and
instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, an organizing institute
working throughout the Midwest. Currently he is studying law at
Harvard University. "Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the
Inner City" was first published in the August/ September 1988
Illinois Issues [published by then-Sangamon State University, which
is now the University of Illinois at Springfield].
By Barack Obama
(c) 1990 Illinois Issues, Springfield, Illinois
Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog: Why Chicago Is a Politician's Paradise
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n my VDARE.com column, I return to Obama's relationships with so many unsavory Chicago characters, which has been so baffling to outsiders. Here's the beginning, but please read the whole thing to understand how Chicago works. You've seen some of it in blog posts before, but I'm finally pulling it all together in a coherent fashion here.
Global Labor and Politics: Who "sent" Obama?
In Chicago politics a key question has always been, who "sent" you? The classic phrase is "We don't want nobody that nobody sent" - from an anecdote of Abner Mikva's, the former White House Counsel (Pres. Clinton) and now retired federal judge. (And someone I campaigned for while in high school when he ran, unsuccessfully, for Congress in the early 70s.) As a young student, Mikva wanted to help out the his local Democratic Party machine on the south side of Chicago. In 1948, he walked into the local committeeman's office to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas and was immediately asked: "Who sent you?" Mikva replied, "nobody sent me." And the retort came back from the cigar chomping pol: "Well, we don't want nobody that nobody sent."
Right Wing Nut House » OBAMA’S COMPLICATED DANCE WITH THE CHICAGO MACHINE
the one thing that informs Obama’s career – the one defining characteristic of his rise has been an overarching ambition to achieve high office. This has forced him to make alliances with individual Machine politicians like Illinois state Senate Leader Emil Jones and fixers like Tony Rezko. At the same time, he has kept one foot firmly planted in the reformers camp, running for the state senate out of a district that elected legendary reformer Alice Palmer while occassionally talking the talk of an anti-Machine crusader.
How does he get away with it? Obama is a very clever, very tough, very shifty politician as we have seen these past 17 months. He is both of the Machine and an outsider. And the thing that makes these seemingly disparate parts whole is the engine of his ambition. Whatever suits his plans at the moment is what determines where he comes down on an issue or a personality.
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