WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.
According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.
“He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington,” Zebari said in an interview.
“However, as an Iraqi, I prefer to have a security agreement that regulates the activities of foreign troops, rather than keeping the matter open.” Zebari says.
Though Obama claims the US presence is “illegal,” he suddenly remembered that Americans troops were in Iraq within the legal framework of a UN mandate.
So, let’s quit pretending that the man who opened his campaign at the home of an American terrorist (and its awfully hard to find one of those), attended an America bashing church for twenty years, thinks there are 57 states, and cant recite lines from “Cat in the Hat” without a teleprompter is the agent of change we want. OK?
Hey Vern!
Sarah Palin looks better than you.
Hey Vern!
Sarah Palin sounds smarter than you.
Hey Vern!
Sarah Palin is going to be vice-president.
Coming soon. The “W” review and my new column “Hey Vern!”
Terry –
This accompanying article, that appeared in the NYT, is an example of good, journalistic reporting. The writer explored Obama, McCain and their parties ties with lobbyists as they pertain to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Isn’t it fascinating that the upstart Obama has been overshadowed by the upstart Palin.
September 10, 2008
’08 Rivals Have Ties to Loan Giants
By JACKIE CALMES
WASHINGTON — Senators Barack Obama and John McCain each cite the mess at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as a consequence of the corrosive coziness of lobbyists and politicians that they promise to end. But each man and his party also have ties to the fallen giants that will complicate the next president’s job of reshaping the mortgage finance companies that have been essential to the economy.
The Republican nominee, Mr. McCain of Arizona, has numerous close relationships with and contributions from current and former company lobbyists.
Mr. Obama, his Democratic rival from Illinois, is second among members of Congress in donations from the firms’ employees and political action committees.
Beyond the antilobbyist message, Mr. Obama also indicts the Bush administration and the Republicans who controlled Congress for a dozen years until 2007, including Mr. McCain.
He blames them for lax regulation that freed the companies to go deep into debt to buy the mortgages that crushed them as the housing crisis persisted. Yet his fellow Democrats in Congress have been well known as enablers of the two companies for years, protecting the firms’ dueling responsibilities to support affordable housing as well as to maximize shareholder profits.
For all their outrage now, neither Mr. Obama, with less than four years in the Senate, and Mr. McCain, after a quarter-century in the House and Senate, has a record of directly challenging the companies. Mr. Obama did warn publicly of a coming housing crisis in March 2007, five months before it erupted and the government first took action.
Several former company executives, as well as current and former Senate Republican staff members, said Mr. McCain seemed to avoid matters related to the financial industry after the last major financial crisis — the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s. He was one of the “Keating Five” senators investigated by the Senate, accused of interceding with federal regulators for the operator of a failing thrift. Mr. McCain received a rebuke.
More than Mr. Obama, Mr. McCain’s circle of advisers and contributors includes current and former lobbyists or directors for the companies, although since July he has called for a ban on any lobbying by the two firms.
Among the companies’ past advocates are Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, a longtime lobbyist; Mr. McCain’s confidant and adviser Charlie Black, whose firm worked for Freddie Mac for several years ending in 2005, and the deputy campaign finance chairman, Wayne L. Berman, a vice president for Ogilvy Worldwide and a former Fannie Mae lobbyist.
Mr. Davis previously was head of the Homeownership Alliance, a coalition of banks and housing industry interests led by Fannie and Freddie to stave off regulations.
The group was formed to counter another organization, FM Watch, an alliance of financial institutions and lobbying associations that wanted to even the playing field against Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, by challenging the implicit government guarantee that allowed the two firms to borrow funds at lower interest rates.
Six members of the Republican lobbying firm Fierce Isakowitz & Blalock, all Fannie Mae lobbyists, have given Mr. McCain $13,250, records show.
The New York investor Geoffrey T. Boisi, a member of Freddie Mac’s board, contributed more than $70,000 to Mr. McCain and Republican Party committees working for his election. Both he and Richard F. Hohlt, a Fannie Mae lobbyist, are among the McCain “bundlers” who have raised $100,000 to $250,000 from others, according to the campaign Web site.
Both candidates’ vetters for their vice presidential picks have links to Fannie. The former chairman, James Johnson, initially led Mr. Obama’s search committee, but stepped aside after a controversy over favorable loan terms he received from another firm. Mr. McCain’s vetter, Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr., was a past Fannie lobbyist.
Mr. Obama’s contributors include the Freddie Mac senior vice president Robert Y. Tsien and the directors William M. Lewis Jr., a banker at Lazard, and the Chicago businesswoman Brenda J. Gaines. He does not accept contributions from lobbyists, but Mr. Obama has been a favorite of Fannie Mae employees and their political action committee, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
He was second only to the Senate Banking Committee chairman, Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat, in contributions from the two firms’ employees and PACs since 1998, the analysis found, even though Mr. Obama has been in the Senate only since 2005. While the two firms have long been careful to hire from and contribute to both parties, generally Fannie Mae has favored Democrats and Freddie Mac the Republicans.
The center said he received $122,850, of which $101,150 was from Fannie Mae.
Until now, the companies were among the capital’s lobbying powerhouses — hiring former members of Congress, administration officials and top staff members as in-house lobbyists, contracting with outside lobbying firms, and sprinkling development projects and charitable contributions among Congressional districts.
With the Treasury’s action over the weekend putting Fannie and Freddie in government conservatorships, the issue of what went wrong and how to fix them has intruded into the presidential campaign.
Mr. McCain wants to see the companies carved up and privatized, as commercial lenders have long sought. Phil Gramm, Mr. McCain’s friend and longtime adviser, also took that position when he was the Senate Banking Committee chairman in the late 1990s to 2003.
Mr. Obama’s comments signal a preference for the sort of public-private hybrid that Fannie and Freddie were, but with tighter controls. The firms, until now, were shareholder-owned and highly profitable, but chartered by the government and backed by an implicit government guarantee that is now explicit.
Both senators issued statements supporting Treasury’s seizure. And both increased the populist rhetoric in their competition to be seen as an agent of change.
Mr. McCain attributed the companies’ troubles to “cronyism, special interest lobbyists and executives making millions of dollars a year while things were going downhill.”
Mr. Obama, in Ohio on Tuesday, said he would oppose any golden parachutes for the companies’ ousted executives. “Any action with respect to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac needs to put taxpayers first and can’t under any circumstances bail out shareholders or senior management of those companies,” he said.
He sent a letter late Monday to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and James B. Lockhart, the companies’ conservator, seeking clarification that the bailout would not provide “a windfall” to ousted executives.
LOL. Amir Taheri is still getting published? You can be pretty sure this story is not true if Taheri told it. And this is the neocon-shilling hatchet piece Crowley considers worthy of his latest copy-and-paste job. What next Terry, a nugget from Jerome Corsi? Did you hear about this story in some chain mail? I hear Barack is a secret Muslim too! LMAO…
Just a LITTLE BIT from Taheri’s wikipedia entry:
Amir Taheri has been accused of concocting nonexistent conpiracies in his writings, and “repeatedly referring us to books where the information he cites simply does not exist. Often the documents cannot be found in the volumes to which he attributes them…. [He] repeatedly reads things into the documents that are simply not there.”[15] Shaul Bakhash of George Mason University has stated that Taheri’s 1988 Nest of Spies is “the sort of book that gives contemporary history a bad name.”[15]
On May 19, 2006, the National Post of Canada published two pieces, one by Taheri, claiming that the Iranian parliament passed a law that “envisages separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct colour schemes to make them identifiable in public.”[7] Numerous other sources, including Maurice Motamed, the Jewish member of the Iranian parliament, refuted the report as untrue. The Associated Press later refuted the report as well, saying that “a draft law moving through parliament encourages Iranians to wear Islamic clothing to protect the country’s Muslim identity but does not mention special attire for religious minorities, according to a copy obtained Saturday by The Associated Press.” [8] Reuters also reported that “A copy of the bill obtained by Reuters contained no such references. Reuters correspondents who followed the dress code session in parliament as it was broadcast on state radio heard no discussion of proscriptions for religious minorities.”[9] Taheri insisted that his report is correct and that “the dress code law has been passed by the Islamic Majlis and will now be submitted to the Council of Guardians”, claiming that that “special markers for followers of Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism are under discussion as a means to implement the law”.[10] The National Post retracted the story several hours after it was posted online. The newspaper blamed Taheri for the falsehood in the article,[11][12] and published a full apology on May 24.[13]
Dwight Simpson of San Francisco State University and Kaveh Afrasiabi accuse Taheri and his publisher Eleana Benador of fabricating false stories in the New York Post in 2005 where Taheri identified Iran’s UN ambassador Javad Zarif as one of the students involved in the 1979 seizure of hostages at the US Embassy in Tehran. Zarif was Simpson’s teaching assistant and a graduate student in the Department of International Relations of San Francisco State University at the time.[15]
In a 29 March 2008 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Taheri makes the statement that, “The truth is that Sunni and Shiite extremists have always been united in their hatred of the U.S.”, and alleges that Iranian Government supports Sunni groups such as Al Qaeda. [16] Under Sunni groups, Taheri mentiones the Talysh nationalist movement in the republic of Azerbaijan the Rastakhiz party in Tajikistan.[16] However, the Talysh are predominantly Shia[17] with a Sunni minority in the mountainous regions.[18] Rastakhiz (Islamic Renaissance Party) was incorported into the United Tajik Opposition (UTO) was an amalgam of nationalist and Islamist parties and movements….
etc. etc. etc.
You shall know a blogger by the writers he copies and pastes. Heck of a job, Crowley!
Speaking of knowing this blogger 🙂 when I read the blog linked I found this little bon mot among the comments:
americancitizen101 wrote:
This is just old information regurgitated with a disgusting, disgraceful spin by a republican journalist laughing) to try to do a little bit of spinmistering on behalf of the McCain campaign (which we know is full of liars).
The FACT is Obama spoke on the tarmac right after speaking with the Iraqi Prime Minister on June 16, 2008, and Obama said this according to Athena Jones of NBC News on June 16, 2008:
GO READ THE ARTICLE YOURSELF:
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/06/16/1146329.aspx
Obama said he told Zebari that negotiations for a Status of Forces agreement or strategic framework agreement between the two countries should be done in the open and with Congress’s authorization and that it was important that that there be strong bipartisan support for any agreement so that it can be sustained through a future administration. He argued it would make sense to hold off on such negotiations until the next administration.
“My concern is that the Bush administration–in a weakened state politically–ends up trying to rush an agreement that in some ways might be binding to the next administration, whether it was my administration or Sen. McCain’s administration,” Obama said. “The foreign minister agreed that the next administration should not be bound by an agreement that’s currently made.”
So, Obama did not try to hide his comments. And further as a Senator suggesting that congress have a role in reviewing the final agreement, and that there be bi-partisan agreement, before we commit our nation to a 25 or 50 year commitment to Iraq, is just sensible.
9/15/2008 2:28 PM EDT
You know, I like a candidate that doesn’t trust the Bush Administration.
And another “coke bottle” from Missouri smashed to bits by OC patriots armed with Google. When will Crowley learn.
Hey Vern! Hey Anonyms!
Thanks for setting the record straight.
Hey Crowley!
Keep trying!