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The Coming
Attacks
by Ann in Philly
I did some research on Barack's house. There's
good news and bad news.
The good news is: he didn't pay cash for the
house. The bad news is: not only does his association
with Rezko go further back than he has admitted
to (for example, here's a factoid for you: Rezko
offered Obama a job in 1990, before he even graduated
from Harvard Law School), but the mansion
deal was structured in a way that initially concealed
his involvement with Rezko in the whole transaction.
Also, there is a very shady character called Nadhmi
Auchi, a Middle Eastern arms dealer (not a "sheik"
but close enough), whose connections with Obama
have been extensively covered in the Times of London,
owned, if you will recall, by one Rupert Murdoch.
Bottom line: Obama is not only dirty, he is very
dirty, and has consistently lied about the true extent of
his involvement with Rezko and Auchi. Reporters
for both Chicago newspapers, the Tribune and the
Sun-Times, have also done a lot of digging on
Obama, apparently over stiff resistance from the publishers.
I started my research by checking land records
in Cook County (remember what I told you about librarians!).
Curiously, I found no records for Barack and
Michelle Obama for any "mansion," only for a condominium unit
they had owned up until 2005. I only found the
land records for the house he bought in 2005 because, when he
released his 2006 tax return, the address was
on the face of the return. Hint: in Lexis you can do public records
searches on addresses as well as names. When
the land records came up, mortgage, tax assessor, and deed
records were in the name, not of Barack and Michelle
Obama but of a "Trust #10209," listed
at the Northern
Trust Bank. The tax assessor records are even
more interesting: the owner of the property is listed as one
William Miceli, who it turns out is the partner
of the community development law firm that hired Obama after
he graduated from Harvard Law. More on "community
development" later.
Of course, several questions immediately occurred
to me. According to the Times of London, Barack and
Michelle are the sole beneficiaries of this trust.
But who is or are the grantor or grantors? Who are the trustees?
And why conceal what is supposed to be a legitimate
real estate transaction under cover of this trust?
The answer becomes clear in the land records,
which also record the transaction between Obama's trust and
Rezko for a piece of the parcel adjoining the
house. Both the house and the adjoining land were sold on the
same day, the house to Obama, the adjoining land
to Rita Rezko. This Obama refers to as a "coincidence,"
despite the fact that the seller for the house
and adjoining land was the same party, despite the fact that the
title company is the same for both transactions.
I have had some experience in real estate transactions, and it
strains credulity to assume that these transactions
were not handled at the same time. Obama later bought
one-sixth of that adjoining land for his own
use.
When I did some further searching in the land
records for Illinois, I found about 15 other records for purchases
or sales done by "Trust
#10209" through other banks. It's not clear whether these transactions
were performed
by the same trust as the one that did Obama's
property purchase, or if these are different trusts that coincidentally
have the same name, but I don't believe in coincidences.
In any case, the only way to find out is if Obama agrees
to release all the information about the trust,
which of course he will not do. For one thing, I would like to see the
tax records, as well as the trust documents themselves
and the participants.
As for the "community development" work obama
claims to have done? For that read "community destruction."
The firm he worked for, and that William Miceli,
the administrator of the land trust that owns his house works for,
uses community development work fronted through
local and community groups to get local, state, and federal
funds to fund projects for Rezko and other "community
activists." The whole thing is nothing more than a glorified
racket, in which the poor of the south side of
Chicago either wind up being removed from their neighborhoods,
or stuck in substandard housing run by Rezko
and his ilk.
To quote from Evelyn Pringle's article, "Barack Obama - The Wizard of Oz,"
"The Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland law
firm, where Obama worked for nearly a decade,
served as a hub for a slew of slumlord deals,
many that benefited the firm's founder, Allison Davis,
and Obama's claims that he knew nothing about
the inner workings of this small firm, represent
an insult to the intelligence of the American
public."
From where I sit, the whole thing stinks to high heaven.
It gets even worse when you start to do a newspaper
search. As I said, the Chicago papers had already begun
to do a lot of this digging, as has the Times
of London. Here's a link to a web site that has a lot of the stories,
including some done by an on-line site from New
Zealand, OpEdNews, by Evelyn Pringle. She apparently
followed the same paper trail that I did, and
the results ain't pretty.
My conclusion is the same as hers: the
Republicans are salivating over the chance to use this stuff in the
general election. I think her prediction that
Obama's viability won't survive a month is right on target.
And the other sources quoted by noquarterusa
are good, well-sourced stories. Here it is: http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/04/26/be-my-friend-godfather/
If Obama gets the nomination, we can forget about the White House in November.
This is a time bomb waiting to explode under our
feet. Needless to say, I'm sick about this.
But I now understand why the pressure on Hillary
to quit the race.
The longer she stays in, the greater the chance
all this will come out.
If she drops out, all this goes away, ...that
is until McCain detonates the land mine.
Keep hammerin'
Ann in Philly
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