Corvid
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Well, maybe you ought to actually read the story and, better yet, do a little research into the entire Rezko-Obama backstory. It's out there in a number of mainstream, responsible publications.
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And here's a little on Auchi, from the Observer of London (a decent paper). He's a bit more than just "Iraqi-born":
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"An Anglo-Iraqi billionaire who has close links to the Blair government, built his financial empire on peddling his influence with Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime - the Observer can reveal.

Nadhmi Auchi, who is one of Britain's richest men, will appear in court Tuesday [this was last fall] after his arrest in London. He faces extradition to France on fraud charges connected with a multi-million pound corruption scandal involving the French oil giant Elf-Aquitaine.

In a series of astonishing new developments in a story first broken by this newspaper two years ago, a fresh Observer investigation has discovered that Auchi:

· Was tried alongside Saddam Hussein for his involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate an Iraqi prime minister in Baghdad in the 1950s;

· Used money from military contracts in Iraq to establish a business and banking empire in Britain and Luxembourg; and

· Was employed to pay alleged bribes from Italian companies to win oil contracts in Iraq because of his close links to the regime.

The disclosures have already prompted opposition MPs to demand full details of Auchi's relationship with the Blair government."
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Look, if this character was trying top keep Rezko out of jail, and Rezko and Obama are old buddies going way back, it probably ought to raise some red flags, don't you think? And, yep, the Republican slime machine an be expected to pick up on this.
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When Democrats have two better choices--Clinton and Edwards, mainly Edwards--to choose from (they each have their baggage but each is more of a change candidate and substantively better than Obama on a range of issues), why insist on Obama?
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Posted at January 29, 2008 11:02 AM in response to Teddy Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy, Toni Morrison -- and me!

Corvid
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Wouldn't it be a good idea for some of these Obama adorers to just once check out his background BEFORE endorsing him?
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I say that as the Chicago Tribune reports this morning the jailing of Tony Rezko, the crooked, Syrian-born Chicago "property developer" with whom Obama has a deep and long-lasting relationship. And now it appears that Rezko is linked up somehow with a shadowy Iraqi-born billionaire, Nadhmi Auchi. Here's the link:
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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-tony-rezko-arrestedjan29,0,7987753.story
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The Obamas have a mansion on the South Side. Rezko helped them get it. He also has been a key backer of Obama at crucial points in his political career. It doesn't matter how much Rezko money Obama returns now; the damage is done. (And Obama no longer needs the dough. For instance, I see he's taken something like $870,000 from credit card companies in the current cycle, which may explain why he refused to vote for any cap on credit card interest rates when he had the chance. But I digress.)
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Just in general, Obama is a real sweetheart (as are Clinton and most of the others, quite true) for anyone with deep pockets. The point is that Obama is nothing special, nothing different and least of all is he any kind of agent for "change." Quite the opposite, in fact, if you look at his background--which hardly anyone seems willing to do.
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Again, I'll refer you all to beachwoodreporter.com, which is a terrific little blog that has been quite diligent about aggregating responsible, mainstream journalism OF SUBSTANCE on Obama. So it's not just the Chicago Tribune (which decidedly is NOT a Republican newspaper in its news columns). The New York Times and even The Guardian, among others, have from time to time reported these disturbing details. They just tend to get shunted to the side by these great gushes of misty-eyed (and blind) enthusiasm for Obama.

Posted at January 29, 2008 8:20 AM in response to Teddy Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy, Toni Morrison -- and me!

Corvid

And Obama is correct. If you look at the enormous racial (racist?) difference between whites and blacks in the ACTUAL SOUTH CAROLINA VOTE, with 80 percent of blacks going for Obama and fewer than half the whites, Bill Clinton's remarks about Jackson vs. Obama were perfectly valid and 100 percent relevant.
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This is just like that brouhaha over Bill's "fairy tale" remark. He was talking about Obama's record on the Iraq war--not Obama's entire campaign. Still, that's the story that got out. The fact that Bill said and meant nothing of the sort is simply immaterial for those who want to believe otherwise.
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And who are those people? For a while I thought it was a good little story line for the media--kind of like all that nonsense about Al Gore supposedly saying he invented the Internet. Of course, he said nothing of the sort, but he has been saddled with this garbage for years.
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In Bill Clinton's case, however, I think something else may be at work. It does seem that the Dem establishment (including the Kennedy clan) now see an opportunity to chuck off these Arkansans that they were never terribly comfortable with from the start. They've been lying in the bushes till now, but now that they and/or the media have successfully gouged a chink in the Clinton armor, they're piling on, going for the kill.
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I don't like the Clintons, not one little bit. But as a Chicagoan, I dislike Obama even more. Those who support him should, for instance, maybe look into how he managed to purchase a mansion on the south side, and who helped him buy it, as well as his long record of endorsements for some of the filthiest pols in Illinois--and that's saying a helluva lot, even though it only scratches the surface. Then there's the actual substance of his campaign, which is timid, half-hearted and overly eager to reach out to the damned Republicans--in short, the least changeful of all the Dems--but then no one's paying any attention to that. Maybe it's even somehow "racist" in the eyes of Obama partisans to bring it up. Who knows?
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In all, this campaign is a very sorry, sordid little spectacle. But the very sorriest and most sordid corner of it right now is this vicious, cowardly, fact-free rounding on the Clintons by the media and the Dem establishment. Have they no shame?

Posted at January 28, 2008 7:08 AM in response to The Clintons, Atwater, Rove, and the Future

Corvid

I've worked at several newspapers since the 1970s and one unifying theme I've seen is the utter cravenness at the top, the sickening, weepy sensitivity to criticism from whatever source or political direction. Publishers aren't just thin-skinned, they're absolute hemophiliacs when it comes to taking a barb of any sort.
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I've never worked at the NY Times or Wash Post, but it appears things are no different there. So one wonders about The Wall Street Journal. Pre-Murdoch, at least, they had some integrity in their news columns. And their editorial and op-ed pages have been the subject of a perpetual blowtorch of criticism, yet they're impervious. Nothing fazes them.
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I guess it must be the nature of the Journal's core readership, which loves that kind of op-ed crap. But don't ordinary newspapers, including the Times and Post, have readers who have their own values, like an appreciation for reporters and columnists who make an honest, unbiased effort in their work? Do these publishers not feel there's enough of a market for this sort of thing, enough so they can resist the temptation to skew the news and publish columnists they absolutely know are full of baloney?

Posted at January 26, 2008 6:43 AM in response to Triumph of the Know-Nothing Bullies

Corvid

Never mind the spineless candidates. It'll be interesting to see what kind of coverage this gets in U.S. media. I take it this happened early in the day over there, probably late enough to miss this morning's papers here, but early enough so that the shock value will have worn by the time editors get around to planning their Thursday morning fronts this afternoon.
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Still, it's one helluva story. And there ought to be dramatic photos, as well as good ways for reporters to follow up.
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My bet, however, is that they won't. It will certainly get some nice inside play, but I doubt that our media--chiefly the major newspapers--have much appetite for pointing out the essential inhumanity of penning people up the way Israel does in Gaza.
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Kudos to M.J. for making an appropriately big and timely sound about this.
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(Now if we could just somehow ween him off the timid and compromise-with-Republicans-prone Obama candidacy, he'd be darn near perfect.)

Posted at January 23, 2008 6:35 AM in response to Gaza: 350,000 Palestinians Cross Into Egypt For Food!!!

Corvid

Let's look at the entire field of play here. We have a lending and credit system that lets lenders assume that borrowers are infinitely able to provide for themselves under all circumstances and at all times--sort of an agrarian or stone-age assumption--while actual borrowers live in an industrialized world in which such assumptions are completely invalid. But no matter.
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So in the lender's fantasy world (sadly enforced by actual laws), all the risk and penalty can be laid off to the borrower and if the borrower doesn't pay up, why, it's an obvious moral failing and he can be chastised and whipped till he does.
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Of course, in the real world of the borrower, virtually every aspect of his life, including employment and income, are well beyond his control and competence. So the borrower must assume ALL the risk for any loan he takes out, on top of the burden of not knowing from one day to the next whether he will have any income at all.
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Here we (actual human beings) stand, subatomic particles with all the financial might and terror of a mysterious and opaque financial world arrayed against us, naked in the blast of a globalized maelstrom. And we, individually, are supposed to figure it all out.

Posted at January 18, 2008 8:18 AM in response to Financial Life and Death--and Something in Between

Corvid

I'm something of a communitarian myself, but I can understand people's reactions against it. Often, it seems to them (and perhaps accurately) that it amounts to government that has been captured by certain busybodies sticking its nose in where it's not wanted. "It takes a village," for example, is abhorred by many because it sounds like government interjecting itself between parents and their children.
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Real community would be mostly a person-to-person thing, with some ultimate expression, perhaps and only in a secondary role, through government. It also would cultivate virtues, things like reverence for life, humility before God, respect for the sanctity of marriage (things that promote and advance Western civilization and much beloved--at least so they say--by conservatives) at the expense of identity politics, multi-culturalism and an overweening, precious sense of self worth and the highly cultivated sense of endless victimization beloved by liberals.
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On the other hand, community would mean mastering, taming and putting in its proper place the market so that it serves everyone's interest, not just those of the capitalist. You'd see things like corporate boards in which only workers and communities are represented and limits on the ratio of highest- and lowest-compensated citizens (Aristotle liked 5-to-1, which seems about right). Thus, for instance, globalization in any form would vanish. So communitarianism would gore a lot of right-wing sacred oxen as well.
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In short, communitarianism would go well beyond the notion that each individual is endowed with the right to an individual pursuit of happiness in some kind of societal vacuum enforced only by the police. It's not just yet another label for the sadly familiar palliative politics of our watered-down Democratic Party.
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Communitarianism, I think, is radical, radical stuff. It cuts off at the knees American liberal and conservative politics. As such, it's not something that a politician of any stripe--including Chicago machine pol Barack Obama--is capable of articulating in a remotely meaningful or honest way.

Posted at January 15, 2008 12:46 PM in response to A Communitarian in the White House?

Corvid

Has anyone read "The Whiskey Rebellion" by William Hogeland? Apparently Hamilton tried to tempt Washington into sedition, all as part of a scheme to satisfy bondholders. Sounds like a jerk, to me.
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And what is it with this "Hamilton Project" at the Brookings Institution that Robert Rubin is part of? I thought Brookings was halfway decent. Rubin, on the other hand ...

Posted at January 13, 2008 6:16 PM in response to Alexander Hamilton's 250th Birthday

Corvid

What syvanen forgets is that Obama is supposed to be the candidate of change, change, CHANGE!
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No. 1 priority if you're the CHANGE candidate: Drop all links to lobbyists. Doesn't matter whether they're good, bad or indifferent. The American people (so we're told) are fed up to the teeth with electing pols who go to statehouses or Washington and are immediately swarmed by great gooey gobs of 6-figure and 7-figure lobbyists.
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Whether Hillary or any of the others are cheek-by-jowl with lobbyists is immaterial. They're not the candidates of change. Obama is.
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Except he isn't.

Posted at January 7, 2008 9:31 AM in response to Obama, What Drugs Are You Using?

Corvid
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Let me lend Larry a hand here. Check out the following from the Boston Globe, via beachwoodreporter:
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BOSTON GLOBE: When Barack Obama and fellow state lawmakers in Illinois tried to expand healthcare coverage in 2003 with the "Health Care Justice Act," they drew fierce opposition from the insurance industry, which saw it as a back-handed attempt to impose a government-run system. ("Obama's Lobbyist Relationships Questioned.")

Over the next 15 months, insurers and their lobbyists found a sympathetic ear in Obama, who amended the bill more to their liking partly because of concerns they raised with him and his aides, according to lobbyists, Senate staff, and Obama's remarks on the Senate floor.

The wrangling over the healthcare measure, which narrowly passed and became law in 2004, illustrates how Obama, during his eight years in the Illinois Senate, was able to shepherd major legislation by negotiating competing interests in Springfield, the state capital. But it also shows how Obama's own experience in lawmaking involved dealings with the kinds of lobbyists and special interests he now demonizes on the campaign trail.

Most significant, universal healthcare became merely a policy goal instead of state policy - the proposed commission, renamed the Adequate Health Care Task Force, was charged only with studying how to expand healthcare access. In the same amendment, Obama also sought to give insurers a voice in how the task force developed its plan.

Lobbyists praised Obama for taking the insurance industry's concerns into consideration.

"Barack is a very reasonable person who clearly recognized the various roles involved in the healthcare system," said Phil Lackman, a lobbyist for insurance agents and brokers. Obama "understood our concern that we didn't want a predetermined outcome."

In one attempt at a deal, Obama approached the Campaign for Better Health Care with insurers' concerns, asking if the group would consider a less stringent mandate than requiring the state to come up with a universal healthcare plan. The coalition decided not to bend, said Jim Duffett, the group's executive director.

"In this situation, Obama was being a conduit from the insurance industry to us," Duffett said.

During debate on the bill on May 19, 2004, Obama portrayed himself as a conciliatory figure. He acknowledged that he had "worked diligently with the insurance industry," as well as Republicans, to limit the legislation's reach and noted that the bill had undergone a "complete restructuring" after industry representatives "legitimately" raised fears that it would result in a single-payer system.

"The original presentation of the bill was the House version that we radically changed - we radically changed - and we changed in response to concerns that were raised by the insurance industry," Obama said, according to the session transcript.

Posted at January 7, 2008 9:23 AM in response to Obama, What Drugs Are You Using?