Obama And the Lobbyist

Look, I’ve been saying for months now, that once the people figure out that Obama comes from a long line of South Chicago crooked pols, all but the hardcore Democrat support will wither. But as of yesterday morning, we seem to have some evidence in Michael Isikoff’s investigative piece in Newsweek, even though Newsweek tried to bury the story.

There does, however, seem to be a leak or two in the dike, and I doubt even Newsweek has the right amount of thumbs to plug them all.

In short, the story comes down to a rather interesting relationship between Obama, and David Axlerod. Says Isikoff:

When Illinois utility Commonwealth Edison wanted state lawmakers to back a hefty rate hike two years ago, it took a creative lobbying approach, concocting a new outfit that seemed devoted to the public interest: Consumers Organized for Reliable Electricity, or CORE. CORE ran TV ads warning of a “California-style energy crisis” if the rate increase wasn’t approved—but without disclosing the commercials were funded by Commonwealth Edison. The ad campaign provoked a brief uproar when its ties to the utility, which is owned by Exelon Corp., became known. “It’s corporate money trying to hoodwink the public,” the state’s Democratic Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn said. What got scant notice then—but may soon get more scrutiny—is that CORE was the brainchild of ASK Public Strategies, a consulting firm whose senior partner is David Axelrod, now chief strategist for Barack Obama.

Last week, Obama hit John McCain for hiring “some of the biggest lobbyists in Washington” to run his campaign; Obama’s aides say their candidate, as a foe of “special interests,” has refused to take money from lobbyists or employ them. Neither Axelrod nor his partners at ASK ever registered as lobbyists for Commonwealth Edison—and under Illinois’s loose disclosure laws, they were not required to. “I’ve never lobbied anybody in my life,” Axelrod tells NEWSWEEK. “I’ve never talked to any public official on behalf of a corporate client.” (He also says “no one ever denied” that Edison was the “principal funder” of his firm’s ad campaign.)

Ummmm Yeah.

Well, we can see where this one’s going, can’t we?

Addendum:(Bit) Welcome Real Clear Politics readers

ARLINGTON, Va. -(Army.mil)- A patriotic ceremony honoring the service and sacrifice of America’s military members is scheduled for May 26 at 11 a.m. in Arlington National Cemetery.

This year’s event, which marks the 140th observance of Memorial Day on these hallowed grounds, will be hosted by Maj. Gen. Richard J. Rowe Jr., Commanding General of the U.S. Army Military District of Washington and Joint Force Headquarters National Capital Region.

A wreath-laying ceremony will take place at the Tomb of the Unknowns, followed by a remembrance ceremony in the Memorial Amphiteater. The event will commence with a prelude concert by the U.S. Army Band at 10:20 a.m. inside the amphiteater.

Both ceremonies are free and open to the military community and general public.  No tickets are needed to attend this event.

I gather that C-Span will be showing this live. If you don’t have C-span on your vid system at home, you can watch it all online, here. Feed starts at 10:55 eastern time.

I’ve never tripped a booby trap,
or stood upon a mine,
but I have seen what happens,
when you’re out there on the line.

Some men die real hard,
others not so bad,
but t really doesn’t matter,
when you’ve given all you had.

I was never wounded,
so I never felt the shock,
or felt the pain rip through my body,
while calling our for Doc.

Sometimes the pain is awful,
it can make you want to dry,
that pain can get so bad at times,
you might pray to God to die.

I know I was lucky,
that it never happened to me,
and that someone else’s blood,
was shed to keep me free.

-Ronald Murray

LOS ANGELES – (AP)- Dick Martin, the zany half of the comedy team whose “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” took television by storm in the 1960s, making stars of Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin and creating such national catch-phrases as “Sock it to me!” has died. He was 86.

Let’s face it; there was nobody alive back in the day who didn’t see Rowan and Martin.

“[Mrs. Clinton] has a history of covering up her own mistakes behind sexism.”

Maureen Dowd, via Noel Sheppard, Newsbusters.

Glenn:

THE CNN FOLKS emailed this tidbit from Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources:

KURTZ: But Marie Cocco, are the media being tarred with a pretty broad brush here because of the out-of-bounds comments of a certain number of loudmouths?

COCCO: Well, this is amplified on the Internet, which, you know, may not be the broadcast media, but it is part of the media of this campaign. And if you went to the Internet — you know, we all know about the false Muslim e-mails that go around about Barack Obama. But if you ever saw the language, the vulgarity, the vitriol that is hauled at Hillary Clinton by liberal Democrats, by the liberal blogs, largely by, frankly, Obama supporters, you’d be appalled. I mean, you’d punish your children for this.

Glad somebody’s noticing.

Yeah, but look what it took to get them to notice… a liberal being the target. This stuff has been directed at Conservatives since the days of Reagan, and nobody batted an eyelash at it. Now that a liberal’s the target, it’s all of a sudden a BAD thing.

I’ve pretty much held silence on this FLDS thing, but Ive started to notice a pattern in the labeling of the thing which I find disturbing. Witness this write-up from Mary Flood in the Houston Chronicle:

Many lawyers for children and parents in a Texas polygamist sect are boiling mad about the growing number of legal errors they claim the state has made in seizing and holding more than 460 children.

From the way officials handled an April anonymous phone tip about a sexually abused girl allegedly at the sect’s ranch, the seizure of the children, the court hearings and the questioning of children and parents alike, many attorneys are crying foul.

Well of course those charged are crying foul. When does that NOT happen?  I’m sure if we do a study on the reactions of those charged with ANY crime, or subject to ANY governmental action that they’re going to be angry about it, and think themselves the wronged party, despite their having been guilty as charged. Ask anyone currently serving time if they deserved what they got in terms of punishment. If you find one who says yes, he’s well along the road to rehabilitation, and likely has a firmer handle than most on reality. From the rest, you’ll get “But we’re people too”, while ignoring the fact that most criminals are people.

We had news reports on this business last week, that included the phrase ‘Children being ripped away from their families’…   Reports clearly designed to tug at the heartstrings of readers. What they didn’t mention i those reports was that such a statement is only true when applying the broadest imaginable standard to the term ‘family’… even broader and more all-encompassing than Chuckles Manson and his followers used.  The parental relationships are in fact the largest part of the problem… we’re talking about kids who don’t know who their parents ARE, and whose DNA is the only clue to work with. Kids who are forced to become parents while they’re but kids themselves.

It interests me that the usually anti-religious left is loudest among the groups attacking the CPS just now. Usually, these are people who never met a religion they didn’t hate, save for the worship of Gaia. But because the religion invoked here runs afoul of the values of Mainstream America, these guys are all over it… and to hell with the rights of the children involved. That rather dramatic shift away from their traditional roles of attacking religion should be the first clue that not all is what it seems.

CPS may not be the best avenue to approach this situation. Governmental screwups are a given. Sorry, but that’s the fact. But if not government, what else, then?  I am by no means saying the Texas CPS is without error… Of course not. But these kind of cases are notorious for making bad case law. This one is proving no exception to that rule. On that basis whatever higher court ruling happens on this stuff, it can only be damaging to American life, and the values that we hold dear as a society. But can we as a society sit back and watch the kind of child abuse reported in this case and do nothing? Not if we intend to remain a society, no.

Therein, I think lies the real issue.   I’ve said repeatedly over the last 10 years that the purpose of government… any government that wants to survive long… is to nurture and reinforce the culture that gave it life, and operate in support of it’s values. Arguably, that’s what Texas was doing here, albeit arguably hamhandedly. (What else but hamhandedness can one expect from government of any sort?)

In the end, though some will cast it in that fashion, this has nothing to do with infringement on anyone’s freedom. At what point is there a right, a freedom,  to subject children to what these kids have gone through?

As I say, though, this stuff is always a source of bad case law, and represents the camels nose under the tent of polygamy, incest, etc. And from there, the path our society is doomed to is clear to see. There are, alas, no easy answers to the dilemma, but the problem is even more dangerous long term to our society than are most of the possible cures being floated.

Mrs. Clinton is not a smart woman, but the Clintons are creatures of habit.    Mrs. Clinton is the habit of repeating her lies.   As she did with the Tuzila lie.  the Clintons will lie until caught and then attribute to last incidence, the one that got caught, lie to something like fatigue.   Same pattern, this time with the RFK lie is caught by, Carol Platt Liebau, Townhall:

Then, on the other hand, there’s the position that what Hillary said was wrong.  Within that rubric, there’s a first position — that the comment was simply a gaffe, brought about by fatigue, etc.  But if that’s the case, how is it that she came to make almost exactly the same comment to TIME magazine back in March?  And looking at her remark yesterday — “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California” — it’s noteworthy that she doesn’t mention that he was killed after winning a contested primary . . . she simply notes that he was assassinated

Like Microsoft, Mrs. Clinton’s gaffes are not lies.  They are features.

OK, this one caught me off guard.

I’ve run data centers for years, and I admire a well-kept one, or at least one that uses space and hardware in a clever fashion. But I’ve never seen one this big that was fully mobile.

Yeah, I know. That’s what I said, too.

We learned a few days ago that the daughter of singer Steven Curtis Chapman was accidentally run over in the driveway by her brother in the driveway of their home.

I’ve been out of pocket for a while, and lost track of the story. In a way, I’m glad I was. By way of Michelle, we now learn that Maria has died. Michelle really has a touching post on this. Go and see.

(Shake of the head) Ouch.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the family.

I note David’s post on the Hillary Clinton comment on the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy. I note also, a good amount of traffic on the web about it.

Unlike some of the traffic that I’ve been seeing, I’m actually willing to give Mrs. Clinton the benefit of the doubt as to whether or not there was any malice involved with the comment. I mean, look, I could be wrong, but the situation seemed less a genuine threat and far more a simple loose brain connection.  I recognize that this is a little unusual, that I’m giving Hillary Clinton the benefit of the doubt on much of anything, but there it is; in my assessment, the woman simply screwed up.

I think her trouble is, her reputation; She’s got far too much history for most folks to see this as anything but a threat.

What is interesting to me, is the number of Democrats who are no longer willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, as regards that reputation. Where is the vehement protest, the charges of a vast right wing conspiracy smearing a woman and a Democrat, from the usual suspectsthat we got for so many years, every time the subject came up?  Why is it that these usual suspects are screaming now, when we been screaming about the woman since the 90s, while dealing with their defense of her?  There’s no argument, here…. The Democrats over last several years have been very defensive of Mrs. Clinton and her reputation, claiming it to be undeserved.  Every time I bring up Vince Foster within the context of Mrs. Clinton, it’s a surefire bet that I’m going to get feedback from Democrats offended that I even brought up the relationship. Which is why they were able to ignore a dead Vince Foster holding a gun in his hand that wouldn’t fire, and accept that Foster committed suicide, for example.

When The Clintons were in the White House and for years afterward, theirs was a reputation the Democrats would seldom acknowledge, much less base a response on.  With this incident, they seem to be arguing that they’ve known all along the woman’s had a reputation, and is clearly dangerous.

So the question becomes, at that point; Why do they now take for granted a reputation that they defended against less than a year… hell, as short a time as three months… ago?

The answer to these questions seems fairly simple; The Democrats saw judging Mrs Clinton on her reputation as a threat to Democrat Party power, back in the 90’s, and these days they see Mrs Clinton’s reputation as a threat to Democrat party power. They’re willing to acknowledge, now, the reputation they so loudly denied back in the day.

I am forced to conclude that these Democrats knew full well what Mrs. Clinton and her politics represented all through the 90s.  They also suspected Mrs. Clinton and her involvement in the deaths of so many people as we pointed out, all through the 90s.  It wasn’t that they didn’t believe the rest of us when we told them. They knew we were right. They knew the Clintons were dangerous. Yet, they defended her. Why? Because they held the Democrat party power to be of greater value than the lives that got lost. In the end, that’s the only explanation for their difference in attitude between then and now. It’s clear to my mind that the source of corruption is not the Clintons, but the Democrats themselves, who hold party power above all else.

And I’ve gotta tell ya… John McCain, warts and all, is looking better all the time.

James Joyner:

Something really strange is going on with the Libertarian Party. I mean, more so than usual — I wouldn’t bother to point out the obvious.

Their annual convention is going on as I write. Some highlights:

• Bob Barr, most famous for opposing medical marijuana and for his role in the impeachment of Bill Clinton, is running to be its presidential nominee.

• So, possibly, is Tucker Carlson, the bowtied guy who filled the Pat Buchanan chair on Crossfire.

• Richard Viguerie, who has sent me approximately 6,000 emails since railing that Rudy McRomney wasn’t conservative enough at CPAC 2007, has just delivered the Keynote Address. The text is available at Richard Viguerie’s Conservative HQ.com.

What in the world is going on here? These people aren’t even from the libertarian wing of the GOP, let alone honest-to-goodness, according to Hoyle big-L Libertarians.

Yeah, no kidding.

The supposed party of principle, though, does get something out of all of this. Think on it;
They get:

• People. What little start power these fools have, brings in more people then the LP has gotten in years, on their own.
• Money. Such influx of people always brings in money for any party, and the LP is not unique here, nor are they unique in claiming that’s not what they’re about.
• Power. With added money and people parties invariably get more power from that combo.  Which, apparently, is their biggest motivation, when you get down to it.

So much for principle.

Ask me again why I’ve never taken the Libertarian Party seriously.

Is that a kaffiyeh around Rachel’s neck?.   Charles Johnson, Little Green Footbals,  thinks it is.   Michelle is not sure.   Cassy is  bothered.   I am not sure.  However, I give the final word to, Rusty, Jawa Report.

Michelle doesn’t have to find another donut shop.   Cassy can go back to cooking and me and Bit can continue to eat donuts.

Edit:  Corrected date.  High powered editors don’t work with low powered brains.  This was driving me bonkers.

It is not everyday I dedicate a post to a bridge, but not every bridge is the Brooklyn Bridge.  The Brooklyn Brdige turns 125 today.  A celebration is in order, Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

BROOKLYN — In 1883, New Yorkers and Brooklynites took the first step toward uniting their two cities when the Brooklyn Bridge, then called the East River Bridge, opened to the public, bringing to life the dreams and plans of John and Washington Roebling.

At the time, the bridge was for walkers, cable cars and horse-drawn vehicles, to be joined in time by an elevated line that some people still remember and, of course, by cars.

Hat tip photo: New York Observer

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Mrs. Clinton’s last campaign gaffe, Geoff Earl, New York Post:

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it.”

Taylor Marsh:

Is this thing over yet? That’s what many are feeling today, as everyone is as close to the breaking point with fatigue as it comes. We need a long weekend. Clinton’s statement today reveals our collective fatigue and was unbelievably unfortunate. Looking at her make her statement of regret you can see her pain and that she is devastated by what she said, which is clear in the statement below from the Clinton camp.

But anyone believing Clinton was suggesting that an assassination could vault her into… never mind, I can’t even finish the statement. It’s just too ludicrous. But that’s where we are

Statememt from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign:

“Earlier today I was discussing the Democratic primary history and in the course of that discussion mentioned the campaigns that both my husband and Senator Kennedy waged in California in June 1992 and 1968 and I was referencing those to make the point that we have had nomination primary contests that go into June. That’s a historic fact. The Kennedys have been much on my mind the last days because of Senator Kennedy and I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation, and particularly for the Kennedy family was in any way offensive. I certainly had no intention of that, whatsoever. My view is that we have to look to the past and to our leaders who have inspired us and give us a lot to live up to, and I’m honored to hold Senator Kennedy’s seat in the United States Senate from the state of New York and have the highest regard for the entire Kennedy family”

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign is over.    Mrs. Clinton is no lady and I don’t take the liar at her word.   The Clintons are not the type to apologize, or sympathize.  Any regret Mrs. Clinton may or may not feel is over her blown campaign.   The Clinton simply do not have regard for the feelings of others.

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