Sunday, January 25, 2009

Obama's staff has been subpoenaed

Pretty much everyone who is anyone on Obama's staff has received a subpoena from investigators looking into Blago and his doings. Is the mainstream media acknowledging this extraordinary occurrence? (Thanks to our friend Lori.)

15 comments:

Alessandro Machi said...

wow, nice scoop.

Anonymous said...

Joseph please watch the first youtube video (9 min) about how Rove instigated persecution of 1,000 lower level Dem officials/fundraisers located in key swingstates over the past 7 years. this puts the case against rezko in a different light. These indictments never made the news like the trumped up charges against Dem Governors such as Donald Siegelman did get into the news.

Here's one way that BushCo worked to whittle down Obama's victory marginin the swing states. Through such vast selective prosecution of lower-levelDemocrats--legislators, aides, fundraisers et al.--Rove's "Justice" helpedto turn Obama's actual landslide into merely a "decisive victory."


This documentary is an eye-opener for all of us--and makes still clearer why the new administration has to take a good hard look at Rove's machine:


http://www.atlargely.com/2009/01/political-proseuctions-documentary.html

Very interesting to hear about the 100 FBI agents who showed up at the former Michigan gov's house as part of his indictments--that's in the second 9 min video. The 3rd segment is only 3 minutes.

thanks

Anonymous said...

Rezko is GOP - with the exception of Obama (whom I think is a Republican as well), all of his donations go to GOP politicians - so no, it doesn't put it in a different light. Fitz has been tasked with cleaning up the corruption in Illinois and has won over 40 convictions from people of both parties - including the last GOP governor. In fact, I think Fitz has convicted more Republicans than Dems though i could be wrong.

Now, what Rove did is despicable but has nothing do with what Fitz is doing.

What whittled Obama's win down is that huge chunk of the liberal wing of the Democratic party can't stand the guy and didn't show up to vote. He was a lousy candidate that couldn't unite the party., if hadn't have been for the financial meltdown, I don't believe he would have won. Pathetic that in a year such as we had, Dems had to rely on getting lucky with the worst financial crisis in seven decades to put them over the top.

I think it's gonna be an ugly year to be an Obama supporter. I've repeatedly had it explained to me tonight that this is no big deal - and of course, it is a very, very, very big deal.

Perry Logan said...

Mark Crispin Miller estimates that Obama's victory was cut in half by Republicans via their armatorium of vote-tinkering techniques. What a messed-up scene.

Joseph Cannon said...

Perry, in this instance, I think that Miller is blowing smoke.

Anonymous said...

Your 'ads' are covering part of your posts making it difficult if not impossible to read - think you can fix that?

Gary McGowan said...

Anon, Most of us don't
have 'ads' covering
text. Try another
browser (I'net Explorer
or Firefox, etc) I see
this site fine with
either one.

Made this narrow in the
hope it'll help you to
see it O.K.

Good luck.

Anonymous said...

Rezko gave money to both Republicans and Democrats in Illinois, although he favored Democrats probably because he was doing business in Chicago and Cook County:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/353782,CST-NWS-rezpols23.article
http://www.newsmeat.com/ceo_political_donations/Tony_Rezko.php

Former Illinois governors Jim Edgar and George Ryan are Republicans, as are Rep. Mark Kirk and DuPage State's Attorney Joseph Birkett. (Kirk's district is in Cook and Lake counties, DuPage County abuts Cook County). Rezko gave to those in power, regardless of party.

I agree with Lori that the news of the economic meltdown (so conveniently timed) gave the election to Obama. I'm not sure if McCain would have won without it, but I do believe that it would have been a lot closer.

old dem

Anonymous said...

I also see ads covering text at the right. Using IE with a 24" wide monitor. The problem just started on this site a few days ago.

Anonymous said...

Rove's phony prosecutions are old news; they were revealed in the MSM years ago - it was a big scandal, don't you remember it? -and were done keep Kerry out of office (and later to try and maintain the GOP hold on Congress), not Obama. One such case happened here in WI; her conviction was overturned a year ago (or more) and noted by the judge as having lacked any merit.
Greg Palast and RKF Jr. tried to tell us that the GOP was going to try to steal the election again - using the evidence that they did so in '04 - but their article fails to answer this question: why didn't they use these techniques to hold onto Congress in '06? The answer: because those techniques don't work anymore. Miller did some very nice work on '04 in his book "Fooled Again", however, I would like to see the kind the detailed analysis he did there, rather than some vague claim of an "estimate."

Sergei Rostov

Anonymous said...

Lori is correct, a big chunk of the liberal wing of the Dem party - something like 9 million people - couldn't stand Obama and the fact that in terms of morals and ethics - and in many of his positions - he went against what the Democratic Party stands for.
(I'm also not sure if I buy the argument that a full 20% of Republicans stayed home rather than vote McCain, especially with him being paired with Sarah Palin, whom the rank-and-file loves.)
Lori and her Anon replier are also correct in this respect: with McCain's pick of Palin his campaign had been reenergized, and things had turned around for him...but then the economic meltdown comes at almost exactly the right time to turn things back in Obama's favor...which is suspicious enough in and of itself, but even more suspicious when we consider that Obama was the pick of the very subprime lenders who precipitated the crisis..

Sergei Rostov

Anonymous said...

Sergei,

Miller is not "blowing smoke".

here is the answer to your claim that the GOP techniques used in 2004 were not effective in 2006.

In fact, those techniques were still used in 2006 as they were used again in some swing states in 2008. check out this article:

Take 2 minutes to click on part 2 of Michael Collins' review of MCM's new book "Loser take all" which covers how the 2006 Congressional House Races results for the Democrats were shaved by 4%. Yes the Dems took back the House in 2006 but analysis shows they should have taken back more seats than they did.

Michael Collins: Election Fraud and Tyranny - Part 2

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0807/S00177.htm

Election Defense Alliance researchers Jonathan Simon and Bruce O'Dell studied the 2006 results and found that there was a net shift of at least three million votes away from the Democratic candidates in the 2006 elections for the House of Representatives. The Democratic victory margin was shaved by 4% according this highly persuasive analysis.

Simon and O'Dell conclude:

"there was gross vote count manipulation [that] had a great impact on the results of E2006, significantly decreasing the magnitude of what would have been, accurately tabulated, a [Democratic] landslide of epic proportions."

If the GOP techniques were effective in shaving off 4% in the 2006 congress/senate races, then it would be no surprise that some of the very close races for president in Missouri and in Arizona also relied on these techniques in nov 2008.

The problem is that with electronic voting machines with no paper trail, it is virtually impossible to determine if the votes cast were correctly counted. hence in those states we truly have "faith based voting".

Anonymous said...

Anon:
(A quibble: it was Joe who used the term, "blowing smoke", not me.}

Note:


"In a separate paper, "Fingerprints of Election Theft," Simon, O'Dell, et al established a clear pattern indicating that certain competitive races were targeted for manipulation. Adding that information, a 3 million vote shift nationwide would likely determine the outcome of dozens of targeted competitive races"


http://electiondefensealliance.org/fingerprints_election_theft

They said races were targeted, and that the 3 million vote shift would "likely" have determined the outcome of those races, not that it actually did.



They picked counties (as opposed to districts, which is a major flaw - considering that House races are for districts, not counties, they should have done both to reduce error), only 16 of them (smaller sample means more chance for error), and small ones at that (smaller sample again, sometimes as few as 300 votes). Also they defined "competitive" as less than 10%, that's huge, 5% is much more reasonable. And they didn't actually look at each county where they say fraud occurred to look for evidence of same (which would have been easy, given the small sample size).
There's more critique of "Fingerprints" here:

http://inside.bard.edu/~lindeman/smudge.pdf

including consideration of poll wording, unconsidered factors, etc.


SergeiRostov

Anonymous said...

"anonymous" (Mark... is that you?)

Crispin went off the deep end when he started defending the 9/11 nuts (Mormon "scholars" for Twoof-nuttery).

He really lost his marbles when he started shrieking about how the Clintons stole NH. I was in NH during the primary. HIllary had huge and deep support and I was baffled by all the MSM hype vs the reality on the street.

Mark Crispin Miller toked wayyyyyyy too much Hopium and 9/11 nuttery to be of any use as a serious source.

Joseph Cannon said...

And with Zee's wise words, we shall close all further discussion of Mark Crispin Miller. May he return to his senses.