The Best We Have To Offer
July 28, 2016 at 4:25 p.m.
By Gary [email protected]
We have these two candidates running for president of the United States.
These two people - chosen by the voters - apparently are the best their respective parties have to offer.
So, just for grins, type the name of your favorite candidate in the "exact wording or phrase" window of an advanced Google search.
Then hit tab and type corruption in the "one or more of these words" window. I plan on doing this each week until election time.
My hope would be that I would run out of things to write about, but trust me - there will be plenty of material.
This week, we'll talk about Barack Obama. (Don't freak out demos. We'll get to John McCain next week.)
There was in interesting article by Los Angeles Times staff writers Chuck Neubauer and Tom Hamburger last April 27.
It chronicled how after an unsuccessful campaign for Congress back in 2000, then Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama was a little down in the cash category.
He just finished up a losing campaign so he had a bunch of debts, very little cash and for about a year, he had neglected his law practice.
Not to worry.
Within a few months, help was on the way.
Obama nailed down a lucrative new legal client - a longtime political supporter named Robert Blackwell Jr.
Blackwell paid Obama $8,000 a month to give legal advice to an outfit called Electronic Knowledge Interchange. All-in-all, Blackwell's payments to Obama over the next year or so came to around $112,000.
Obama was giving Blackwell some really good advice.
And...
A few months after the checks started rolling in Obama, wrote a letter on state senate letterhead urging the legislature to pony up $50,000 in tourism promotion grants for a company called Killerspin.
Killerspin was another company owned by Blackwell.
It specializes in ping pong. It sells a line of clothes and equipment. It runs tournaments and sells DVDs of the tournaments.
It's a long and moderately complex story, but, according to the L.A. Times, "With support from Obama, other state officials and an Obama aide who went to work part time for Killerspin, the company eventually obtained $320,000 in state grants between 2002 and 2004 to subsidize its tournaments."
Now, of course Obama's staff says he only advocated for that first year grant, which was only $20,000 instead of the requested $50,000.
And, also of course, Obama's staff rejects any hint that there was any connection between Obama's contract with Blackwell's other company and the grant money - or the $1,000 campaign contribution Obama got from Blackwell the day after he wrote the letter.
Normally, the L.A. Times points out, big tourism grants from the state are generally only bestowed upon events that draw huge crowds - like the Breeders' Cup, an "internationally known horse race that brought 50,000 to the Chicago area in 2002."
Killerspins' tournaments brought in between 3,000 and 6,000.
This is the kind of stuff that drives me nuts.
Obama plays himself off as this guy who would never engage in this type of thing.
He's always harping on special interests, conflicts of interest and lobbyists. They're not going to run his White House, he's fond of saying.
(Even though he tapped Joe Biden as V.P. Biden's no stranger to lobbyists. And then there's Obama's ties to that Tony Rezko guy who just was indicted and convicted on charges of wire fraud, bribery, money laundering, and attempted extortion. Rezko tried to extort millions of dollars from businesses seeking to do business with the Illinois Teachers Retirement System Board and the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. CBS News called Rezko's trial a "high-profile federal trial that provided an unusually detailed glimpse of the pay-to-play politics that has made Illinois infamous." But I digress. There's a couple other columns worth of stuff in this paragraph.)
So despite all that stuff he says, his dealings with guys like Blackwell show he's quite willing and able to toss around a little of his legislative influence on behalf of somebody who's given him a favor or two.
And the rat hole goes even deeper.
From washingtonpost.com, Aug. 22:
Two years ago, the office of Michelle Obama, the vice president for community relations at the University of Chicago Medical Center, published a glossy report detailing the improvements her office had made in the lives of local residents, in part by increasing ties to minority contractors.
Center administrators declined to disclose which businesses benefited; the report lists one - Blackwell Consulting Services.
In 2005, the center expanded its bidding process and invited African American businessman Robert Blackwell Sr. to join a competition to upgrade the center's intranet, the in-house equivalent of a Web site. His company, Blackwell Consulting, won contracts totaling nearly $650,000.
Blackwell and his family, records show, have been longtime donors to the political campaigns of Michelle Obama's husband, Barack. Robert Blackwell Jr., a former partner in the firm, is a major fundraiser for Barack Obama. At various times, Blackwell Sr. says, his and his son's businesses each have retained Barack Obama as an attorney.
The Post's article didn't mention that Blackwell Jr. was the ping pong guy.
Aw, shucks, that's just some good old-fashioned, back-slapping Chicago influence peddling.
Frankly, none of this is illegal.
It's what bloggers like to call "honest graft."
But honestly, is this the best we have to offer?[[In-content Ad]]
We have these two candidates running for president of the United States.
These two people - chosen by the voters - apparently are the best their respective parties have to offer.
So, just for grins, type the name of your favorite candidate in the "exact wording or phrase" window of an advanced Google search.
Then hit tab and type corruption in the "one or more of these words" window. I plan on doing this each week until election time.
My hope would be that I would run out of things to write about, but trust me - there will be plenty of material.
This week, we'll talk about Barack Obama. (Don't freak out demos. We'll get to John McCain next week.)
There was in interesting article by Los Angeles Times staff writers Chuck Neubauer and Tom Hamburger last April 27.
It chronicled how after an unsuccessful campaign for Congress back in 2000, then Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama was a little down in the cash category.
He just finished up a losing campaign so he had a bunch of debts, very little cash and for about a year, he had neglected his law practice.
Not to worry.
Within a few months, help was on the way.
Obama nailed down a lucrative new legal client - a longtime political supporter named Robert Blackwell Jr.
Blackwell paid Obama $8,000 a month to give legal advice to an outfit called Electronic Knowledge Interchange. All-in-all, Blackwell's payments to Obama over the next year or so came to around $112,000.
Obama was giving Blackwell some really good advice.
And...
A few months after the checks started rolling in Obama, wrote a letter on state senate letterhead urging the legislature to pony up $50,000 in tourism promotion grants for a company called Killerspin.
Killerspin was another company owned by Blackwell.
It specializes in ping pong. It sells a line of clothes and equipment. It runs tournaments and sells DVDs of the tournaments.
It's a long and moderately complex story, but, according to the L.A. Times, "With support from Obama, other state officials and an Obama aide who went to work part time for Killerspin, the company eventually obtained $320,000 in state grants between 2002 and 2004 to subsidize its tournaments."
Now, of course Obama's staff says he only advocated for that first year grant, which was only $20,000 instead of the requested $50,000.
And, also of course, Obama's staff rejects any hint that there was any connection between Obama's contract with Blackwell's other company and the grant money - or the $1,000 campaign contribution Obama got from Blackwell the day after he wrote the letter.
Normally, the L.A. Times points out, big tourism grants from the state are generally only bestowed upon events that draw huge crowds - like the Breeders' Cup, an "internationally known horse race that brought 50,000 to the Chicago area in 2002."
Killerspins' tournaments brought in between 3,000 and 6,000.
This is the kind of stuff that drives me nuts.
Obama plays himself off as this guy who would never engage in this type of thing.
He's always harping on special interests, conflicts of interest and lobbyists. They're not going to run his White House, he's fond of saying.
(Even though he tapped Joe Biden as V.P. Biden's no stranger to lobbyists. And then there's Obama's ties to that Tony Rezko guy who just was indicted and convicted on charges of wire fraud, bribery, money laundering, and attempted extortion. Rezko tried to extort millions of dollars from businesses seeking to do business with the Illinois Teachers Retirement System Board and the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. CBS News called Rezko's trial a "high-profile federal trial that provided an unusually detailed glimpse of the pay-to-play politics that has made Illinois infamous." But I digress. There's a couple other columns worth of stuff in this paragraph.)
So despite all that stuff he says, his dealings with guys like Blackwell show he's quite willing and able to toss around a little of his legislative influence on behalf of somebody who's given him a favor or two.
And the rat hole goes even deeper.
From washingtonpost.com, Aug. 22:
Two years ago, the office of Michelle Obama, the vice president for community relations at the University of Chicago Medical Center, published a glossy report detailing the improvements her office had made in the lives of local residents, in part by increasing ties to minority contractors.
Center administrators declined to disclose which businesses benefited; the report lists one - Blackwell Consulting Services.
In 2005, the center expanded its bidding process and invited African American businessman Robert Blackwell Sr. to join a competition to upgrade the center's intranet, the in-house equivalent of a Web site. His company, Blackwell Consulting, won contracts totaling nearly $650,000.
Blackwell and his family, records show, have been longtime donors to the political campaigns of Michelle Obama's husband, Barack. Robert Blackwell Jr., a former partner in the firm, is a major fundraiser for Barack Obama. At various times, Blackwell Sr. says, his and his son's businesses each have retained Barack Obama as an attorney.
The Post's article didn't mention that Blackwell Jr. was the ping pong guy.
Aw, shucks, that's just some good old-fashioned, back-slapping Chicago influence peddling.
Frankly, none of this is illegal.
It's what bloggers like to call "honest graft."
But honestly, is this the best we have to offer?[[In-content Ad]]
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