Obama’s $100,000 garden grant wasted - Chicago Sun-Times

As a state senator, Barack Obama gave $100,000 in state money to a campaign volunteer who failed to deliver on a plan to create a botanic garden in one of Chicago’s most blighted neighborhoods.

Do you want Barack Obama throwing around money for things with no oversight or accountability like his botanic garden and making bad judgments about how to properly prioritize and most effectively use taxpayer resources in Washington D.C., just like he has done in Illinois?

I don’t know that I’d call the debate great, but other media types are talking about it. Its just another flip flop from Obama, saying his family is off limits and then using them like this. And Obama used them well, I must say. Maria Menounos did a credible job and he should be proud of his daughters as they are perfectly normal.

Maria Menounos

The problem isn’t the interview itself or with Maria Menounos’ questions. She did a good job drawing out how the family reacts in such a situation. Just fine.

The problem in the two faced Barack Obama. Against politics as usual, but playing politics as usual better than everybody right now. Barack Obama is a typical politician, as this news demonstrates.

And if you don’t like Maria Menounos doing a good job, well then you can kiss her …

Do you want Barack Obama to behave like a typical politician in Washington D.C. just as he has done in Illinois?

In a video aired Wednesday night on the Fox News program “The O’Reilly Factor,” Jackson leans over and whispers to fellow panelist Dr. Reed V. Tuckson, executive vice president and chief of medical affairs for UnitedHealth Group, “See, Barack been, um, talking down to black people on this faith based … I wanna cut his (testicles) off … Barack … he’s talking down to black people.”

Don’t feel singled out Jesse. Barack Obama talks down to all people equally without regard to race. He talked down to women during the campaign too. That is what Hyde Park Harvard elitists do. It was only a matter of time before someone came out and said that Barack Obama was acting uppity in comparing himself to other black people. The holding black males accountable sermon he gave was controversial and some of comments regarding his faith based initiatives didn’t sit will with Jesse Jackson.

John Kass Chicago Tribune - Jackson’s cutting remark may be helpful to Obama

CBS2 Chicago - Rev. Jesse Jackson Caught Bad-Mouthing Obama

From CBS2 Chicago - Comments On Jackson’s Crude Obama Remark

Do you want Barack Obama talking down to people that he thinks he is better than all across the US, like he has done in Illinois?

Odds long for constitutional convention - Chicago Sun-Times

Blagojevich hates Madigan. Madigan hates him back. And despises Senate President Emil Jones, who despises Madigan back.

All Democrats, all dysfunctional, all the time.

Meanwhile, citizens, fed up with being bystanders in this car wreck of a government, are stuck with skyrocketing gas prices, a faltering economy and a growing fear for their and their children’s futures.

David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s Chicago version of Karl Rove, is getting $2 million to convince Illinois voters to leave the powers that be alone. Barack Obama is silent on the issue that is important to the state of Illinois because whether to try for a new constitution will be on the ballot in Illinois.

Illinois government is broken, as Carol Marin says. A Constitutional Convention is one way to try to fix some of it. Barack Obama merrily runs along for President ignoring the people he represents and the damage his party is doing to future generations.

Do you want Barack Obama to ignore the people he represents by staying silent about the best avenues for change the neglected voters will have this generation in Washington D.C., like he is doing right now in Illinois?

Violations In Building Where Boy Was Crushed

City building inspectors on Monday found code violations at the Chicago Housing Authority property in the 900 block of North Cambridge, in Cabrini-Green, where a heavy gate broke free of its hinges and fatally crushed 3-year-old Curtis Cooper on Friday.

Gate that fell and killed child fails inspection

“If Chicago Housing Authority had been monitoring their properties, public housing wouldn’t be in the shape it is in now,” Steele said. “If they had been monitoring UPA, that gate wouldn’t have fell.”

UPA manages properties all over Chicago. The Davis family stands to make millions as part of CHA’s Plan for Transformation, the city’s ambitious effort to demolish high-rise public housing and replace it with mixed-income communities.

How reform-minded City Hall critic became a cozy insider - Chicago Sun Times

Here’s too much of the whole thing, bold is mine.

As a young lawyer, Allison S. Davis was a City Hall outsider.

He criticized Mayor Richard J. Daley over the 1968 riots. He worked to integrate Chicago neighborhoods. And he fought to elect judges based on legal ability, not political connections.

Today, Davis is a consummate City Hall insider.

He’s a loyal ally of Mayor Richard M. Daley, who appointed Davis to Chicago’s prestigious Plan Commission. Davis has gotten deal after deal from the mayor, helping to make Davis one of the city’s top developers. And Davis has forged strong ties to the Daley family, doing deals with one of the mayor’s nephews and giving legal business to Daley & George, mayoral brother Michael Daley’s law firm.

Now, Davis finds himself in the glare of an unwanted spotlight.

One of his business partners, William Moorehead, recently began serving a four-year prison sentence for stealing more than $600,000 from at least 13 federally funded housing projects he managed — including two buildings that he and Davis co-own. During the period Moorehead has admitted he was stealing the money, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned, he lent Davis $100,000 — a loan that has drawn scrutiny from federal investigators, though Davis hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing.

Another of Davis’ business partners, former top political fund-raiser Tony Rezko, is set to stand trial in February on charges he demanded kickbacks from companies seeking state teacher pension business under Gov. Blagojevich, a friend of Rezko.

Davis serves on a separate state pension board — the Illinois State Board of Investment — that also has been under federal investigation. Davis was appointed by Blagojevich, on Rezko’s recommendation.

Davis, 68, declined repeated interview requests for this story. His spokesman asked that questions be submitted in writing. Davis then submitted written responses to some of them.

Over the last decade, Davis and his partners got lots covering several city blocks from City Hall. They paid a total of more than $7 million for some of those lots. But they got many for free.
‘He likes to make money’

Davis and his partners — including his sons Jared and Cullen — have gotten more than $100 million in taxpayer subsidies to build and rehabilitate more than 1,500 apartments and homes, primarily for the poor. His deals include a massive redevelopment of the Chicago Housing Authority’s notorious Stateway Gardens, across the Dan Ryan Expy. from Sox Park.

It’s a lucrative business. Davis and his partners have made at least $4 million in development fees over the last decade.

Still in the works: With Daley nephew Robert Vanecko, Davis is redeveloping another CHA project, along Chicago’s south lakefront. Their fees have not been disclosed.

As Davis has become one of City Hall’s favored developers in the last 10 years, he also has become a major political player. He has donated more than $400,000 to dozens of political campaign funds. His top beneficiaries include Daley, Blagojevich and Sen. Barack Obama, who worked for several years as an attorney in Davis’ law firm.

Where is the accountability for these people getting $100 million? Where? Is it lost when they make big campaign contributions to powerful Chicago politicians?

Barack Obama can claim he was above Chicago style politics, but he was smack dab in the middle of it. Either he didn’t know it and is incompetent or he ignores it and is part of the problem, not the solution.

Company sued in boy’s gate death

The family just won the cruelest of lotteries. And it will take years before they get a payment I bet. And the money they get won’t come from this rich, politically connected, taxeaters. It’ll come from some government somewhere, in other words, the taxpayers.

I guess it bears repeating.

Do you want Barack Obama to hand out lucrative government housing subsidies to politically connected campaign donors that nelgect their properties and where 3 year olds are crushed by metal gates and there is absolutely no accountability for where our taxes end up, like he has done in Illinois?

“Curtis Cooper, 3, was killed Friday when a heavy iron gate collapsed and fell on him as he was riding his tricycle.”

What does that have to do with Barack Obama? The Chicago Housing Authority complex where 3 year old Curtis Copper died is run by Cullen Davis. Son of Allison Davis. Allison Davis is a big Obama campaign contributor as we learned in the Boston Globe investigation.

Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers - including Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko - collectively contributed more than $175,000 to Obama’s campaigns over the last decade and raised hundreds of thousands more from other donors. Rezko alone raised at least $200,000, by Obama’s own accounting.

Cullen Davis is a huge recipient of government subsidies to run these facilities. Many of which are well documented as being abandoned and uninhabitable even after millions of taxpayers dollars in subsidies. Cullen Davis also got a lot of money elsewhere. The Woods Fund. With board members Barack Obama and Bill Ayers. Remember him from yesterday? Socialism is worth bombing over but slum lords pocketing government subsidies while the poor suffer isn’t? That’s interesting.

Do you want Barack Obama to hand out lucrative government housing subsidies to politically connected campaign donors that nelgect their properties and where 3 year olds are crushed by metal gates and there is absolutely no accountability for where our taxes end up, like he has done in Illinois?

The University of Chicago wants to create a Milton Friedman Institute. The Hyde Park progressives would rather Milton Friedman stayed dead and was never talked about again. The Chicago Tribune captured the story.

In a letter to U. of C. President Robert Zimmer, 101 professors—about 8 percent of the university’s full-time faculty—said they feared that having a center named after the conservative, free-market economist could “reinforce among the public a perception that the university’s faculty lacks intellectual and ideological diversity.”

And then we hear this.

“It is a right-wing think tank being put in place,” said Bruce Lincoln, a professor of the history of religions and one of the faculty members who met with the administration Tuesday.

The Milton Friedman Institute will concentrate on bringing in visiting scholars to conduct research on business, economics, and law. And the notion that Milton Friedman was a right wing anything is preposterous coming from a history professor, but not if you know the neighborhood.

Hyde Park is a bastion for socialists, and that’s not meant as a smear or scare tactic, but the simple truth. William Ayers ring a bell? Bill Ayers has many friends around Hyde Park including Barack Obama. Bill Ayers believes sacrificing human life to further the cause of socialism is acceptable by word and deed. Barack Obama called him a friend for what that is worth. Sean Hannity would say that makes Barack Obama a terrorist sympathizer, but it’s not that simple because that view completely ignores the slavery that was still happening then.

Should a person be willing to forgive someone like Bill Ayers who literally blew other people’s property up because he thinks all property should be communal? Blacks weren’t exactly considered full human beings at the time, so he’s got that going for him as a cause of liberty, but… In the process of making bombs to destroy someone’s property, some of his closest friends were killed, so there is yet more to the story. And we don’t doubt Mr. Ayers would gladly use the free market system to sell his movie rights story to Hollywood as he did using freedom with his book. A book that would have to be approved by the government in his view of the world, and a world where the likes of Milton Friedman would be silenced by the same government bent on squashing opposing points of view.

And that is what is happening right now at the University of Chicago and in Barack Obama’s Hyde Park. The socialists and modern progressives are trying to wipe Milton Friedman’s work from the history of the University of Chicago by claiming to be victims. Barack Obama has remained silent on this “controversy” his friends and liberal colleagues at the University of Chicago are causing to try to stain the work of Milton Friedman. He’s running for President and won’t comment. But somebody should ask him his opinion about a Milton Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago, which he uses on his Presidential Resume.

No question today. Just food for thought and background information on Barack Obama’s friends and neighborhood and how they are treating Milton Friedman so soon after his death. And a challenge to some reporter intellectually stimulated enough to know of the impact Obama’s answer about Milton Friedman might have in the world. There are more Che Guevara cultists out there than there should be.

Is Barack Obama smart enough to know that embracing Milton Friedman in any way would splinter his support among the Che Guevara flag wavers, not to mention the much more important teacher’s unions everywhere? Is anyone in the media smart enough to ask him about his thoughts on a Milton Friedman Institute at the University he calls home in Chicago? And then ask him about his kids being in private schools and the rate of Chicago Public School students that graduate, let alone go on the get any 2 year degree in the neighborhood he’s represented since 1996?

This article is on the cusp of, if not at the level of award winning journalism. (Thanks to Reverse Spin.) If only the author was from Chicago and could connect more dots. Valerie Jarrett running the Chicago Transit Authority much the same way she ran Grove Parc Plaza, which is into the ground after making a whole lot of government contractors rich. Tony Rezko using his connection to Obama to parlay “success” with Emil Jones Jr. and Rod Blagojevich and now a federal prison cell. The Muntu Dance Theater, Michelle Obama, government grants, and federal lobbyists.

Barack Obama is from Chicago and the story of daily corruption can only be lived since there is just too much of it to be caught by reporters, prosecutors, or the politicians elected that should be policing themselves to begin with. It is just as bad now, if not worse, than when Barack Obama was first elected. He’s done nothing to try to stop it, and has his current success to thank for it in the form of Rezko financing Obama’s way into office.

This story is not a complete picture of Barack Obama’s legacy in Illinois, but it’s almost complete as it relates to how much Obama really cares about housing the poor. Barack Obama cares more about continued campaign contributions from well-known slum lords (Hillary was right) than he does about the living condition of poor people in housing he approved government subsidies for less than a mile from his own home in Chicago. Barack Obama either never visited the “projects” he championed to get more money for, or he did visit them and didn’t care.

The convicted Tony Rezko was a slum lord pocketing government subsidies on the backs of the poor BEFORE he helped launch Barack Obama’s political career with Barack Obama’s first big donation the first time Barack Obama ran for office.

OIL will be quoting the article a lot in the future.

The campaign did not respond to questions about whether Obama was aware of the problems with buildings in his district during his time as a state senator, nor did it comment on the roles played by people connected to the senator.

Change? Sounds suspiciously like the Bush administration when first asked about Valerie Plame.

Do you want Barack Obama to sponsor legislation to dole out untold millions of dollars to private developers without ever holding anyone accountable for making the poor live in wretched conditions while the rich developers pocketed their “profits”, like he has done in Illinois?

Yet we have this statement from Barack Obama.

There’s no doubt that I have friends and continue to have friends that come out of the more traditional school of Chicago politics, but that’s not what launched my career and that’s not what I’ve ever depended on in order to get elected.

Sure, Obama is said to have donated an equal amount as he received from Rezko many years ago, but he definitely relied on that money to get elected. And did he donate the campaign contributions he received from other people that were actually from Rezko, or is he ignorant as to how much extra money Rezko was funneling to him? It was AFTER he won the US Senate seat that he tried to equal out the illegal Rezko donations and who knows about the “straw” campaign checks.

In the Rezko trial, the prosecutors asked the judge to allow them to present evidence as to why Rezko’s money was being  laundered through others into Barack Obama’s campaign accounts, but they didn’t do it. Barack Obama will claim he was unaware he was the recipient of laundered money, yet by his statement above about “traditional” Chicago politics we know Obama knew funny business happens in campaign accounts. Barack Obama ignored the corruption, participated in it, or at the very least failed to even keep it out of his own bank account.

Do you want Barack Obama to continue to let laundered money enter into politics right under his nose from his biggest campaign contributors and refuse to apologize for failing to keep his own campaign money clean while still claiming he’s completely clean, as he has done in Illinois?

Sure, the EITC is there, but can you tell us right now without looking how small the deduction off poor people’s tax bill the EITC amounts to? It’s certainly not enough in almost all cases when you know poor people pay sales tax on things like electricity and water and food and flushing their toilet .

Poor people without health care, or much of anything beyond the basics, pay for social security and health care for other people through their payrolls taxes, even when they can’t afford to save for retirement or health care for themselves. Poor people also help pay for $10 million individual pensions for State of Illinois employees, thanks to Barack Obama.

So what does this proposal from Barack Obama tell us?

Democrat Barack Obama said Friday he would apply the Social Security payroll tax to all annual incomes above $250,000, which would affect the wealthiest 3 percent of Americans.

And you ask, what’s the big deal about socking it to the rich? So we ask, if government’s purpose really is to help people, one would think that at the very least, they would stop taxing poor families when some of those taxes go toward $10 million government employee pensions, right?

Would you agree ending taxation of poor families making less than $25,000 should be a higher priority than raising taxes on families making $250,000? The very LEAST the government should do is to STOP taxing poor people. That should be common sense for someone that will change how D.C. works, right?

Spending priorities using poor people’s labor taxes is something Barack Obama admits he has little regard for.

Where is Barack Obama’s proposal to stop taxing the poor? Eliminating ALL payroll labor taxes on incomes less than $25,000 would be a good start wouldn’t it? From his proposals and actions it appears Barack Obama is more interested in punishing success than in helping the poor.

Do you want Barack Obama to continue to ignore the taxes poor families pay and to continue to tax poor people all across America, like he has done in Illinois?