Posted on 02/10/2010 10:57:57 AM PST by opentalk
Yes, there is. Who decides what is relevant? Obongo’s thugs in Chicago? Let’s hear them all. If anyone thinks that stinky, homo Kenyan wasn’t involved, I have some swampland to sell them.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that was true. Seriously!
There was never a single photo, a single article, ZERO regarding Rahm in Africa. That wasn’t planned. It was so fishy it smelled half way around the world.
Right! Remember, Blago on BOR’s tonight. (Thursday).
Exactly. He went to take care of the African end of the issue, while stinky as* Obongo headed to Hawaii to take care of it there. The power outage in HI was very convenient dontcha know.
Timeline Advisor A = Tom Balanoff, head of SEIU Illinois State Council?
(no link)
Blagojevich went fishing for post in Obama’s cabinet
Star-Ledger, The (Newark, NJ) - Thursday, December 25, 2008
Author: DAVID LIGHTMAN, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Rod Blagojevich , the secretary of health and human services?
Apparently, the embattled Illinois governor thought it might be a good idea for him to be President-elect Barack Obama’s point man for one of the most difficult, highest-priority issues that the incoming 44th president plans to tackle.
It came up in a conversation between Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett - who thought that the notion of any cabinet post for Blagojevich was “ridiculous” - and Illinois union official Tom Balanoff , who also was very skeptical, according to the Obama team’s review of contacts with the governor.
Federal prosecutors allege that Blagojevich talked about trying to secure a cabinet appointment or an ambassadorship in return for naming a successor who was acceptable to Obama, who resigned his Senate seat last month.
The four-page Obama report found no inappropriate contact between Obama and his staff and Blagojevich and his staff.
U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has said Obama, who had held the seat since January 2005, wasn’t involved in the matter, and the president-elect has said he knew nothing about the schemes.
Jarrett was thought to be a contender for the job, but she took herself out of the running Nov. 9. Five days later, Obama said she would be a senior adviser in his White House.
On Nov. 7, the report said, Jarrett, then still a potential Senate contender, spoke with Balanoff , who heads the Services Employees International Union Illinois State Council.
Jarrett said she had “no contact or communication” with Blagojevich or his staff about the vacancy. Balanoff isn’t a member of the governor’s staff and “did not purport to speak for the governor on that occasion,” the report says.
Balanoff said he’d talked to Blagojevich about naming Jarrett to Obama’s Senate seat, according to Jarrett, and “told her that the governor had raised with him the question of whether the governor might be considered as a possible candidate to head up the Department of Health and Human Services in the new administration.”
According to Jarrett, Balanoff told Blagojevich , “It would never happen.”
Balanoff “did not suggest that the governor, in talking about HHS, was linking a position for himself in the Obama Cabinet to the selection of the president-elect’s successor in the Senate,” the review adds.
(snip)
http://obamawtf.blogspot.com/2008_11_01_archive.html
His father, Benjamin, was born in Jerusalem, the son of pharmacists who had escaped the Russian pogroms. In the 1940s Benjamin Emanuel interrupted his medical school training in Switzerland to take part in an unsuccessful scheme to smuggle guns from Czechoslovakia to the Israeli underground. He later served as a medic in the 1948 Israeli war of independence. (Rahm would echo his father’s dedication during the Gulf war: With Iraqi Scuds falling on his father’s home country, he volunteered for military-vehicle-maintenance duty near the Lebanese border.)
In 1953, Dr. Emanuel’s medical training brought him to the States, where he met Marsha, then an X-ray technician at Chicago’s Mount Sinai hospital. They married and, after a brief return to Israel, settled down in Chicago. Dr. Emanuel’s pediatrics practice on the North Side’s Lincoln Avenue drew a passel of immigrants, and eventually became-with his partners-one of the largest in the city. (Decades later the “Doc’s” families would turn out to vote for his son in a congressional election.)
Money was tight in the early years. The family left their first Chicago apartment because it was rat-infested. They were kicked out of their second apartment because tenants complained that the three rambunctious boys were too loud. Yet Chicago also meant a lively street life of playing hoops in the park and building go-carts in the alley with the artist who lived upstairs.
That came to an end when Rahm was 9 and their immigrant father achieved the American dream of buying a house in the suburbs, the lakeside Republican enclave of Wilmette. The boys, recalls brother Zeke, missed the city. “The suburbs never grafted on to us,” he says.
The boys also joined their mother on most civil rights demonstrations within a 50-mile radius of Chicago. “I only brought the kids if I thought it was going to be peaceful, with no arrests,” Marsha Emanuel insists. (Though it wasn’t always predictable; she wore a dress and had a dinner party planned when she was carted off by cops for her first overnight jail term.)
Marsha’s father was a burly Moldavian immigrant who arrived alone on a ship at age 10. He went on to become a union organizer. Politics-loud and argumentative-infused Marsha’s childhood; her three boys got their own dose from trips in their grandfather’s delivery truck.
Rahm jumped into politics right after his graduation from Sarah Lawrence College, where he promised his mother he would take advantage of the campus’s stellar dance program but never did. He quickly discovered a penchant for fundraising, which he applied to campaigns for Senator Paul Simon, the DCCC, and Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley. In 1991 he joined Clinton’s presidential campaign. Emanuel wowed the team from the start, opening a spigot on needed campaign funds, and after Clinton’s election helped program a picture-perfect inaugural. He nabbed the plum White House position of political director.
Then he started shooting off his mouth. There was the time he rapped on a conference table to get “Lloyd’s” attention. (”We were all aghast,” recalls one Clinton aide, noting that even Lloyd Bentsen’s wife still called the Treasury Secretary “Senator.” ) He had a very public run-in with the late Senator Patrick Moynihan, who accused him of being the source of an anonymous quote that “we’ll roll all over [Moynihan] if we have to” on welfare reform. (Emanuel denied saying it.) Most damaging were Emanuel’s battles with Hillary Clinton loyalists, who accused him of leaks about the travel office episode.
A year after Clinton took office, Emanuel was demoted. “He was very upset,” recalls Zeke. “He thought he was going to get kicked out of the White House.” He didn’t, and neither did he quit. Instead, Emanuel regrouped, helping lead the charge on key Clinton initiatives, including the crime bill, the assault weapons ban, and NAFTA. “He was constantly on the offense,” says Begala. Emanuel planned to leave after the 1996 election, but Clinton promoted him to take George Stephanopoulos’s spot as senior advisor for policy and strategy.
Still, Emanuel had political aspirations of his own, which necessitated some financial security. So in late 1998 he traded in Clinton as his boss for Bruce Wasserstein, a major Democratic donor and Wall Street financier. “Money is not the be-all and end-all for him,” says brother Zeke. “But he knew he needed money so that wouldn’t be a problem while he was doing public service.” Over a 2 1/2-year period he helped broker deals-often using political connections-for Wasserstein Perella.
According to congressional financial disclosures, he earned more than $18 million during that period. His deals included Unicom’s merger with Peco Energy and venture fund GTCR Golder Rauner’s purchase of SBC subsidiary SecurityLink. But friends say his compensation also benefited from two sales of the Wasserstein firm itself, first to Dresdner Bank and then to Allianz AG.
By 2002, Emanuel emerged as a wealthy man with a reputation as a battle-hardened national strategist. That year he won a tough primary race for a seat in Congress that paid $138,000. His 1994 White House demotion was ancient history.
(more at link)
He may not be holding all the cards but he's got just enough to make the game interesting. Throw in Jarrett, Emanuel, and Rezko. Don't ya just luv popcorn, mmmm mmmmm mmmm.
“Emanuel had hoped Blagojevich had the authority to appoint a candidate to fill out the remaining weeks of Emanuel’s term before a new Congress was sworn in the following January, sources said.”
Perhaps Blago (who probably *is* that ignorant, not to mention not very smart) misunderstood what Emanuel was asking for, which could have been that Blago call a quick double special election for December 2008 for (i) the term ending on January 3, 2009 (so that Claypool would have more seniority than freshmen reps elected in November 2008, who would not be sworn in until January 3) and (ii) for the term commencing on January 3, 2009 and ending on January 3, 2011; Emanuel could have also asked Blago to use his influence to obtain endorsements for Claypool from ward leaders.
OOoooohhhhh, WWWwwwwwooooowwweeeeeee.
This is going to get very interesting as long as Blago is alive.
Three former Illinois governors have gone to prison in the past 35 years, and a host of other governors have gotten into legal trouble.
_Otto Kerner, a Democrat who was governor from 1961 to 1968, served less than a year of a three-year sentence after his 1973 conviction on bribery, tax evasion and other counts. He was convicted of arranging favorable horse racing dates as governor in return for getting horse racing association stock at reduced prices. Kerner died in 1976.
_Dan Walker, a Democrat who was governor from 1973 to 1977, served 1 1/2 years of a seven-year sentence after pleading guilty in 1987 to bank fraud, misapplication of funds and perjury. The charges were not related to his service as governor.
_George Ryan, a Republican who was governor from 1999 to 2003, was convicted of corruption in 2006 for steering state contracts and leases to political insiders and helping cover up bribes paid in return for truck drivers licenses while he was secretary of state and then governor. He is serving a 6 1/2-year prison term.
In addition, William Stratton, Illinois governor from 1953-1961, was later indicted but was acquitted on charges of income tax evasion.
Should be interesting.
Do you have a source?
The PINHEAD BOR will try to debunk the B.C. and the other issues as well!!!
BTTT
BTTT
BTTT
After shoveling a few tons (literally) from my side of the street/pavements to the other side where one could hardly pile anymore (six foot deep piles from last storm), digging car out finally, then having to go around the back of the row homes wading through some three foot drifts of now very heavy snow and finally digging out a path in the rear of my home. Figure four hours plus of non stop back breaking work... I am not up to reading the whole of this post. But thanks for the ping. I’ll scratch the surface on this one.
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