Sarah Palin: GUILTY of Abuse of Power
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Sarah Palin: GUILTY of Abuse of Power
| Fri, 10-10-2008 - 10:18pm |
Sarah did it! The standing Governor of Alaska is found Guilty of Abuse of Power by letting First Dude have so much access to state information, state employees, and making over 19 calls to pressure a state official to fire her BIL out of revenge. It was unlawful, but no charges??
I knew it. She did it as Mayor and got away with it. The McCain camp is making excuses as usual, instead of taking responsibility for her/their actions. Details will be released soon.


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There's a train acomin'...
Having a hard time keeping track of the facts? Here are eight things to know:
1. They met in 1990. Obama was a student at Harvard Law School and got an unsolicited job offer from Rezko, then a low-income housing developer in Chicago. Obama turned it down.
2. Obama took a job in 1993 with a small Chicago law firm, Davis Miner Barnhill, that represents developers -- primarily not-for-profit groups -- building low-income housing with government funds.
3. One of the firm's not-for-profit clients -- the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corp., co-founded by Obama's then-boss Allison Davis -- was partners with Rezko's company in a 1995 deal to convert an abandoned nursing home at 61st and Drexel into low-income apartments. Altogether, Obama spent 32 hours on the project, according to the firm. Only five hours of that came after Rezko and WPIC became partners, the firm says. The rest of the future senator's time was helping WPIC strike the deal with Rezko. Rezko's company, Rezmar Corp., also partnered with the firm's clients in four later deals -- none of which involved Obama, according to the firm. In each deal, Rezmar "made the decisions for the joint venture," says William Miceli, an attorney with the firm.
4. In 1995, Obama began campaigning for a seat in the Illinois Senate. Among his earliest supporters: Rezko. Two Rezko companies donated a total of $2,000. Obama was elected in 1996 -- representing a district that included 11 of Rezko's 30 low-income housing projects.
5. Rezko's low-income housing empire began crumbling in 2001, when his company stopped making mortgage payments on the old nursing home that had been converted into apartments. The state foreclosed on the building -- which was in Obama's Illinois Senate district.
6. In 2003, Obama announced he was running for the U.S. Senate, and Rezko -- a member of his campaign finance committee -- held a lavish fund-raiser June 27, 2003, at his Wilmette mansion.
7. A few months after Obama became a U.S. senator, he and Rezko's wife, Rita, bought adjacent pieces of property from a doctor in Chicago's Kenwood neighborhood -- a deal that has dogged Obama the last two years. The doctor sold the mansion to Obama for $1.65 million -- $300,000 below the asking price. Rezko's wife paid full price -- $625,000 -- for the adjacent vacant lot. The deals closed in June 2005. Six months later, Obama paid Rezko's wife $104,500 for a strip of her land, so he could have a bigger yard. At the time, it had been widely reported that Tony Rezko was under federal investigation. Questioned later about the timing of the Rezko deal, Obama called it "boneheaded" because people might think the Rezkos had done him a favor.
8. Eight months later -- in October 2006 -- Rezko was indicted on charges he solicited kickbacks from companies seeking state pension business under his friend Gov. Blagojevich. Federal prosecutors maintain that $10,000 from the alleged kickback scheme was donated to Obama's run for the U.S. Senate. Obama has given the money to charity.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/watchdogs/757340,CST-NWS-watchdog24.article
Rezko was also one of Obama's earliest supporters.
In 1995, when Obama ran for a seat in the Illinois Senate, Rezko, through two of his companies, donated thousands of dollars to the Obama campaign. Ironically, Obama won the election in a district that included 11 of Rezko's 30 low-income housing projects.
In 2003, Rezko held a lavish fundraiser at his Wilmette, Ill., mansion for Obama's Senate election. In fact, Rezko raised big dollars for Obama.
Still, Rezko and Obama had more than just a political relationship. In 2005, when Rezko was under federal investigation for influence peddling, Obama and Rezko's wife, Rita, bought adjacent pieces of property from a Chicago doctor.
The doctor sold one parcel to Obama for $1.65 million, $300,000 below the market price, while Rezko's wife paid full price, $625,000, for an adjacent vacant lot. Curiously, Mrs. Rezko made a $125,000 down payment and obtained a $500,000 mortgage when financial records shown at the Rezko trial noted that she had a salary of only $37,000 and assets of $35,000. The court records also show her husband had few assets at the time.
Obama claims that in buying his house in 2005, he also got a low mortgage rate from Northern Trust bank because another bank made a competitive bid for his loan. The only problem is the Obama campaign refuses to identify the other bank or show any proof of a competitive loan offer.
Six months later, Obama purchased a 10-foot wide strip of the Rezko property, paying Rezko's wife $104,500. According to Obama, the 10-foot strip was for a bigger yard. Still, the deal also rendered the Rezko parcel too small to build on, thereby increasing the value of Obama's property.
So the house (or mansion) that Obama built allegedly has some interesting foundations. Of course, the mainstream media is nowhere to be seen covering this explosive combination. Still, the old axiom of dogs and fleas proves true. One does not have to look far to find an infestation inside Obama's house.
http://www.newsmax.com/smith/barack_obama_tony_rezko/2008/09/02/126890.html
While Rezko's wife paid the full asking price for the land, Obama paid $300,000 under the asking price for the house. The house sold for $1,650,000 and the price Rezko's wife paid for the land was $625,000.
Obama denies there was anything unusual about the price disparity. He says the price on the house was dropped because it had been on the market for some time but that the price for the adjacent land remained high because there was another offer.
Obama then expanded his property by buying a strip of the Rezko land for $104,5000, which the senator maintains was a fair market price.
Obama later told the Chicago Sun-Times, "It was a mistake to have been engaged with him at all in this or any other personal business dealing that would allow him, or anyone else, to believe he had done me a favor."
Obama had known Rezko long before the house deal, calling him a "friend."
An ABC News review of campaign records shows Rezko, and people connected to him, contributed more than $120,000 to Obama's 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate, much of it at a time when Rezko was the target of an FBI investigation.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Story?id=4111483&page=2
Edited 10/12/2008 4:08 am ET by sahasranaama
There is an EXCELLENT (and very short) book by an academic named Harry Frankfurt called On Bulls**t. It's main thesis is that people are usually assumed, especially in an arena like politics, to be either telling the truth, or lying. Those are the poles to which one's honesty gets tied. Pope John Paul II? Honest. etc. But Frankfurt suggests that another way which is neither one of those two poles nor in fact even somewhere in-between the two, exists, and this is the position of the bulls**tter. It's not a middle-ground between truth and lies, because it can't be reliably pinned-down. And, in fact, Frankfurt argues that the BSer is actually, on a moral scale, even LESS moral than the liar.
How can that BE? Isn't lying the worst thing one can do, especially in a political campaign, where the public needs, and deserves, to know the truth? Well, that's the common wisdom. But what Frankfurt argues is that one thing the liar and the honest person share in common is that they both operate in the general framework of the truth: the honest person TELLS the truth, which is easy enough to understand. The liar however, even as (s)he lies, is tacitly admitting that (s)he understands and agrees with what the truth is....and is consciously choosing for personal or political reasons, to tell you something ELSE, something the liar KNOWS to be untrue. These people have the good graces to look ashamed if caught. They will often have what poker-players refer to as a "tell" when they lie (looking down, blinking, etc.) - because they know they are telling you a lie, and they hope that you don't figure it out, and that they don't get caught.
The BSer is a different animal. Karl Rove is a BSer, as are most current conservative mouthpieces/flacks. The BSer is someone who does not even recognize the legitimacy or primacy of truth over lies. It's irrelevant in their framework, or at least it's much farther down the ladder of importance than either the honest person OR the liar places it. To the BSer, what's REALLY important is the goal or the cause. It may be personal aggrandizement, it may be a political goal, but it displaces the traditional magnetic-north of honesty from the moral map, and replaces it with succeeding at the goal. This is often very difficult or even impossible for most people to discern, because most people - having been raised with honesty as a virtue - perhaps even one of THE primary virtues - assume (usually correctly) that others are the same way. They're equipped to recognize a liar, and an honest person, because the vast majority of the people they deal with in everyday life fall into one of these categories, more or less, but they are NOT equipped to recognize and deal with the BSer. The BSer may or may not be telling the truth at any given moment; what is certain is that they will be telling you whatever they feel best advances their own agenda/goal. They'd probably PREFER to be telling you the truth, because they know it has the advantage of being able to be backed up by the facts....but they're equally comfortable with any other set of words or ideas or line of reasoning, however UNtrue, if they believe it advances their goals best. And because they don't care or even really distinguish on a moral level between the two, they're able to equally placidly and comfortably spout even the most outrageous fantasies and lies out of their mouths without the slightest hesitation, chagrin or sense of having done something immoral or wrong.
The BSer believes that truth and lies are simply two tools in the drawer for getting where (s)he wants to go, which is the REAL moral value: achieving one's goal. Neither one's inherently better than the other, except for the negligible advantage that truth has over lies in being able to be backed up by facts. But even this isn't always true: sometimes, when the subject isn't one which can be measured by actuarial tables but instead is a complex stew of human motivations and assumptions and emotions - which is often the case in politics - there's no way to ultimately PROVE what is true and what is lies, even though anyone with a moral compass can figure it out pretty well. But what's so disorienting for most people about coming into contact with an honest-to-goodness BSer is that they start to question their own judgment, because the BSer seems so serenely certain of their own reasoning and arguments that one starts to feel like one's in the twilight zone. One starts thinking "hey, am I crazy here, or is (s)he?" The BSer - although they may not articulate it consciously - believes in the equality of facts and opinion. Opinion, in their mind, is raised up to be on an equal footing of legitimacy - or, probably more accurately, facts are debased in legitimacy until they are on an equal footing with well-argued opinion. And when nothing is truer than anything else, all is permitted....and the best-sounding argument wins, every time. That's how appeals to emotion, "instinct" and similar arguments which sound anywhere between mildly and wildly nonsensical if viewed through either the lens of reason or the lens of truth and facts being worth more than well-constructed BS, nevertheless wind up carrying the day, often to the shock and chagrin of people who had mistakenly assumed that truth, honesty and facts would eventually prevail.
And this is, like I said, the dominant overarching philosophical ideal among many if not most of today's conservative leaders and opinion-setters: they are BSers. And, increasingly, the people who follow and consume their toxic stew of truth, half-truth and lies, sprayed with a fine mist of self-righteousness, come to believe and to be, as well: BSers. I mentioned Karl Rove earlier, and it's not by accident. Karl Rove learned his craft at the foot of the master, Lee Atwater (now dead). But both long ago became past masters of the craft. Katherine ("Kit") Seelye, a reliable GoOPer hack at the New York Times, wrote this puff piece on Rove recently in the Times, she predictably didn't get to the heart of the Rove phenomenon; why he's been so successful and such a magnetic figure in politics, which has everything to do with his being a top-tier, consummate BSer, and almost nothing to do with his supposed (but nearly nonexistent) "genius." Luckily, as Digby pointed out, one of the most incisive journalists of the age, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, gave us some actual insight into the cult of Rove, and it's what I'll close this post with (some "ooky" words redacted):
You're "sure"?
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