Fun With Earmarks

Thursday night, Jim DeMint forced a vote in the Senate, looking for a one-year moratorium on earmarks. However noble it may have been, only twenty-nine Senators voted in favor. Obama, McCain, and Clinton all voted yea. The peerless Dick Durbin voted nay. But this post isn't about him, it's about Obama getting tripped up in his own stupidity yet again (see previous post).

Because in the same week that he voted for that one-year moratorium, it emerges that in 2006 he requested a $1 million earmark for the University of Chicago hospital. Where his wife just happened to be Vice President of Community Affairs, a position created especially for her. [Jim Geraghty adds a spicy detail about this that makes following that link worthwhile, and a hat-tip to the HotAir folks for bringing it to my attention in the first place.] You have to wonder - did the conversation occur over dinner? "Honey, can you pass the salt and, you know, get a million in federal dollars for the hospital?" "Sure Michelle, and dinner's delicious." Elsewhere? I won't speculate.

So given that Obama = Change, one might expect him to recant and say that he shouldn't have requested the earmark in the first place. Instead, in that same Tribune interview, he says that he should have asked Dick Durbin to get the money instead. Imagine that conversation. "Dick, Michelle's asking me to, you know, steer federal funds to her employer. It looks bad, so can you do me a favor and get it?"

Apologies in advance for the weakness of what I'm about to say: given the old line about a million here and a million there suddenly being real money in Washington, one wonders whether a "paltry" million is the sort of change Obama stands for. Weak sauce. Feel free to hate.

Media Scrutinizes Obama

What do CNN, Fox News, the Baltimore Sun (admittedly using a Trib blog), LA Times and CBS News all have in common? They're all talking about the absurd and reprehensible comments made by Obama's religious adviser and pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Wright has alleged, among other things, that the US created AIDS; his sermons have also invoked at least once the evils of Zionism. Starting around the :45 mark, Wright also goes off on the US, proclaiming "God damn America," claiming that the US is ruled by the KKK, and essentially claiming the US deserved the 9/11 attacks in language reminiscent of Ward Churchill. I'm surprised to see this damning a report on the man from ABC (who I guess I should also credit up above). I'm also sad to hear a woman call it "not radical" but instead "being black in America." Really?

Let's clear some things up: Wright's radicalism wasn't hidden from Obama. As I noted last March, Trinity UCC's 12 precepts are all about black power; presumably Obama read these? Wright's history of controversial comments also meant that at the last moment he was asked not to speak at Obama's campaign kickoff in Springfield. So it shows a serious lapse of judgment, after all of that, to get him back into the campaign.

So the campaign has done what it can to minimize the damage. Obama, in an interview with the Tribune ed board yesterday, ascribed Wright's comments - and those of Clinton supporter Geraldine Ferraro - to the 1960s. So Ferraro makes comments widely derided as racist, and that's flower power for you? Wright goes off on America, and that certainly is the sixties, or at least the Black Panther version of it. Seems like a stretch, Barack.

He also repudiated Wright, and offered a three-part defense. Part two, the "I didn't know," flies in the face of what I said previously. Again, why pull him from the campaign kickoff if not for fear that he'd go off on America in front of national TV? Amusingly, and fittingly, his statement of repudiation was first posted of Huffington Post...real critical audience, that one.

But finally, the campaign corrected a mistake they never should have made: they showed Wright the door, cutting all official ties to him. Now someone needs to ask Obama whether he'll quit attending Trinity UCC, seeing as it was Wright's church embodying his principles, or whether he'll continue to seek the Holy Spirit there. Quick tip: try being an Episcopal. Nothing says establishment WASP quite so clearly!

Finally, let's put this in perspective. This is the second week in a row where the Obama campaign has had to play defense, thrown violently off message by campaign advisers who don't know when to keep their traps shut. Difference being, of course, that Samantha Power didn't seem to understand "on the record," while Wright was so on the record that he never should have been allowed near the campaign to begin with. Combined with the fact that the Rezko trial may be picking up steam, one has to wonder whether Obama's window of opportunity is closing fast. In light of all of this, will voters in the remaining states give Hillary a fresh look? Will we, in retrospect, understand Hillary's wins in Ohio and Texas (where Obama actually won more delegates) as the beginning of the end of "Yes we can?"

PS: Wright was apparently also Oprah's spiritual adviser. Why am I not all that surprised? Will this tarnish Oprah's star power too? We can only hope!

Live-Blogging Rezko

The Tribune's doing it here; sadly it doesn't seem to have an associated RSS feed.

Oh and did Rezko pay to play for an Iraqi contract? It's not just his political ties that are so interesting, it's these foreign ties...which raises the question of the origin of that money he loaned to Barack Obama.

Obama, Tony Rezko and More!

Although the majority of Americans won't notice them right away, clouds are beginning to gather behind Barack Obama. The line of attack, or at least of questioning since day 1 has been simple: how in God (aka Mike Ditka)'s name did Obama rise so fast in Chicago's political machine? He got some lucky breaks in South Side politics, yes, including throwing his political mentor (and state senate predecessor) under the bus.* But any Chicagoan for whom Obamamania didn't require psychiatric evaluation has and had doubts. The media's starting to get on the trail, both in the city itself and nationally - and while it's only the Journal right now, events in coming weeks means that it'll be hard for the others to follow suit.

John Fund wrote a worthwhile piece for yesterday's Opinion Journal asking that question, especially with regard to indicted Chicago fixer Tony Rezko. But it's deeper than just Rezko - who will soon stand trial - and the story of Obama's dream house, which has actually received some play in the media. It also ties in one of Rezko's close partners, a secretive Iraqi-born billionaire property developer, who may or may not have had dealings with Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War. Rezko himself, Fund notes, "traveled 26 times to the Middle East between 2002 and 2006, mostly to his native Syria and other countries that lack extradition treaties with the U.S."

Barring hard evidence of wrongdoing - or at least sufficiently damning circumstantial evidence, it's hard to push this line of questioning too far without giving the Obama campaign a prime pushback opportunity; they'll just claim it's the old "Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim" story in a new burqua.

John Kass is one of the Tribune's most undervalued columnists, nationally speaking. But I have a feeling that if there turns out to be any juice in the Rezko trial, he'll quickly become pretty famous. He isn't so much conservative as he is contrarian - an old-school political muckraker raking the muck around an old-school political machine.

His latest column asks one of the big questions to non-Chicagoans: why isn't the McCain campaign more outwardly jubilant about the pending trial? The reason: it's Chicago and everyone pays to play - and Rezko could easily take down Republicans as well as Democrats (potentially including Governor Rod Blagojevich, an Obama ally). One of those Republicans may be Bob Kjellander, an RNC committeeman.

Thus the McCain campaign's unwillingness to pop the champagne too soon becomes evident: if a big elephant goes down too, that may be the part that dominates the media headlines (especially if Obama doesn't take any serious hits); worse, that Republican might have donated to McCain.

But there are other reasons for McCain & Co. to back off. Letting the trial run its course, and claim its victims, will generate its own media maelstrom. They may have to give it a gentle nudge once in a while, but odds are this one will generate headlines. Further, as Charlie Cook noted yesterday, they're understaffed and underfunded; a trial that may or may not blow Obama up isn't their primary worry at the moment.

*I realized that I made reference to this without it being a well-known phenomenon. I wasn't aware, either, till the Politico buried it on p.2 of that story about Obama's ties to unrepentant members of the Weather Underground; I'll go ahead and quote it in full: "The exact date [of a meeting between Obama and the terrorists] is not known, but it was in the second half of 1995, before Palmer’s [his predecessor and mentor] decision — late in her losing congressional primary against Jesse Jackson Jr. — to jump back into the special election for her state Senate seat. (Her decision produced a rift between her and Obama, who was able to get her thrown off the ballot on technical grounds.)" That's change you can believe in!