Bring Better Hit Pieces

The Times has this on Obama?  Although Drudge is hawking it as "NYT: INDICTED BUSINESSMAN WAS FRIEND AND PATRON OF OBAMA... DEVELOPING...", this is a recycled nothing-burger.

And their motivation is?  Maybe when people are actually paying attention and the Times is shoveling dirt on Giuliani, McCain et al, their editors will point to this article as proof that they are evenhanded.  But no worries - based on their coveraige of Kerry in 2004, no Democrat will be scathed by the Times at crunch time.

Comments

[RichatUF]

...And when Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, bought a house in 2005, Mr. Rezko helped smooth the transaction. Even though his finances were deteriorating, Mr. Rezko arranged for his wife to buy an adjacent lot, and she later sold the Obamas a 10-foot-wide strip of land that expanded their yard...

I've heard this story before. I'm sure the real good dirt will first appear in The Cobblers Quarterly from Liverpool on its way to the front page of the NYT.

//and its still just June of 07...

RichatUF

[Other Tom]

It's been a long time since the New York Times affected any national election, and it will never do so again. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, and most of those who do don't take it seriously.

[cathyf]

Does the Sunday NYT have coupons? I can make back the price of the paper twice over the weeks when proctor & gamble put their coupon circular in the papers...

[clarice]

No coupons, cathy. No cartoons either unless you count the editorial page and Times Select.

[vnjagvet]

Two words sum up the motive:

Hillary Clinton

[JM Hanes]

I imagine the new Clinton White House as the ultimate product placement opportunity, pix of Hill & Mr. Hill on Sunday morning reading the Times, doing the Crossword puzzle. Come Monday she'll be drinking White (House) Lattés in the Oval, and he'll be over in the China room filming spots for the Hill & Bill Shopping Channel.

[Jeff Dobbs]

I agree with Tom on the sorry hit piece. Back in the heady days of Obama cynicism hunting, the Rezko thing and I crossed paths. I tried, I really tried to make something of it, but never did.

Might as well mention, though that the Chicago Sun-Times article about Obama and Rezko notes...

The transaction occurred at a time when it was widely known Tony Rezko was under investigation by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and as other Illinois politicians befriended by Rezko distanced themselves from him.

[Section9]

Ah, the New York Times, the Volkischer Beobachter of the Modern Age.

A more craven group of bootlicking Clinton toadies have never walked the earth.

[Rick Ballard]

"I tried, I really tried to make something of it, but never did."

More effort, H & R. Dem voters need help in distinguishing between the thieves and liars pursuing the top spot. The NYT is incapable of journalism, leaving the burden to YOU.

Now, dig down and report which of these two is likely to steal more should either succeed in first stealing the election. I give Hillary the edge but I'm prepared to change my mind.

[Jeff Dobbs]

Well, in this case, Mr. Lifson can carry the Obama-Rezko story.

And he carries it to the cynicism angle very well...the conclusions from his two recent pieces at AT:

There is a kind of person who looks you right in the eye and offers a shameless evasion. Such characters are familiar to us all, and are rarely aloof from cynicism.

...

The problem is not that Obama was really in bed with him, but rather what it shows about the man. ... Given the lofty rhetoric of fighting cyncism, Obama's pattern of pragmatically playing the political game seems rather hypocritical. A candidate so highly packaged that his advisors and insiders find it helpful to think of him in terms of brand management would seem to be ultimate in cynicism.

[Jeff Dobbs]

Rick:
More effort, H & R.

Oh and speaking of my efforts...

From time to time I go out and look if anything I've written shows up in google's blog search. It's vanity.

Well, one of my pieces was linked and quoted by a site. What site? Well, let me get to the heart of the story and explain it's significance.

Last night, mrs hit and run had received some pics from a friend via email. She downloaded them and they pulled up in a viewer. She saw the first one, closed it, then downloaded the second. While looking at the second, she wanted to go back to the first. The viewer had a back button and she pressed it.

What came up? A pic of a completely naked woman.

Oh crap.

That site that linked to one of my pieces? That link takes you to the google search, not the site itself, called The Carnal Conservative.

Apparently when I had been looking at who had linked to my pieces, I had clicked through to that site....and apparently some of the images from that site were downloaded into my temporary internet files.

Gee, great. Now I'm under investigation and likely to face multiple indictments and convictions and a lengthy sentence that would make the Fitz/Walton combo look like amateurs.

Stupid internet.

I Blame Gore.

[Other Tom]

OK, I'm making my bid for the world record for furthest off-topic post of all time. But I'll bet no one will complain. (I owe this to Lucianne.com.)

Here's what you do. You go to YouTube.com and search "Paul Potts sings." (Mr. Potts is a geek cell phone salesman from South Wales.) Turn up the sound all the way. Watch the faces of the people listening to him. Lemme know what you think.

[RichatUF]

Rick says...

...Now, dig down and report which of these two is likely to steal more should either succeed in first stealing the election. I give Hillary the edge but I'm prepared to change my mind...

LOL!Now if I could only distill this down to a bumbersticker...

I need some help-Did Obama make a speech at Howard University a week or so ago: I don't seem able to find it-found a write up on the Harvard speech...

RichatUF

[hoosierhoops]

Apparently when I had been looking at who had linked to my pieces, I had clicked through to that site
H&R

First H&R you outed a woman on the internet..naked no less..
Then you come up with some story about 'Apparently...' trying to lie and decieve a story about the outing of this young 'under-the covers' woman.
Did you forget? Were you under the pressures of running a war?
No? I think a special prosecutor is called for in your case..mmm say about..oh a 30 month sentence should do quite nicely.
:)

[RichatUF]

Hamas took over a Fatah security station today, then dragged the people they caught out into the street and shot them.

Such civilized people

RichatUF

[JM Hanes]

Rich:

Read somehwere last night that there's new hope for the 2 state solution: Hamas gets Gaza. Fatah gets the West Bank.

[RichatUF]

JM Hanes-

A while back I argued that the reason that Sharon evacuated the Gaza Strip was for economy of force and to make Gaza Egypt's problem. The economy of force is pretty easy to get-if there were no Israeli's inside the fence no need to forward deploy military personnel. The downside has been the rocket attacks; however, Hamas has been true to form and prevented Gaza from being used as a coordinated base.

It is Egypt's problem becasue of the leakage from Gaza into the Sinai (and eventually into Cairo). If Hamas is not having success attacking Israel, they do what they always do, blame someone else-I'd love to be on that agitprop campagin.

My longterm thinking (more hope than anything else) is that the Gaza Strip goes back to Egypt and the people living there are given Egyptian citizenship and the Arab portions of the West Bank go back to Jordan and the residents are given Jordanian citizenship. The US then dismantles the UNRWA and the "Palestanian identity" is put back into the history books as a cautionary tale (think Aztlan) along with all the other KGB myths and fables.

RichatUF

[Poppy]

Mark my words.

It appears the media is cajoling Bloomberg to mount a third party run in order to get Hillary in the White House.

This would be right with the Bill Clinton - Perot play book. They know Hilliary can't win a two way race, they need a deep pockets third party to take votes so Hilliary can win with 43 - 46 % of the vote.

You heard it here first.

[RichatUF]

Seems it didn't take long for Israel to get the blame

graf-

The Hamas campaign to eradicate Fatah from Gaza is certainly not the sole cause of Gazans' misery. They long suffered from Israel's suffocating occupation, and then from Ariel Sharon's foolishly unilateral withdrawal in 2005, a move that allowed Hamas to bid for power with the misleading claim that its rockets and suicide bombings had driven Israeli soldiers and settlers out of Gaza. Gazans were victimized as well by the corruption and misrule of Yasser Arafat's Fatah cronies.

Also in my previous post about Sharon evacuating Gaza. One of the sub-arguments I made [in a different forum] was that Israel had targeted the Hamas leadership probably with Egyptian and PA help because Sharon understood better than anyone-once Arafat died the Palestinian territories would become a blood bath as rival factions fought over the begging bowl of the Palestinian people.

The Palestinian identity was Arafat and nothing more, and Arafat was the world's most successful mafia don.

RichatUF