Tag: Axlerod

Obama Calls Romney a Crook: Glass Houses, Preezy

On By kingsjesterIn Politics9 Comments

Things are beginning to get down and dirty in the Race for the White House.

Politico.com has the story:

President Barack Obama said Mitt Romney should answer questions about his ties to Bain Capital — and soon — in an interview taped Friday with WJLA.

The interview came as a series of Romney interviews were set to air Friday evening, following days of attention to questions about when the Republican candidate exited the venture capital firm and stopped leading day-to-day operations.

“My understanding is that Mr. Romney attested to the SEC, multiple times, that he was the chairman, CEO and president of Bain Capital and I think most Americans figure if you are the chairman, CEO and president of a company that you are responsible for what that company does,” Obama said.

Obama told Scott Thuman of WJLA, the ABC affiliate in the Washington, D.C., area, that Romney “absolutely” must answer questions about his tenure at Bain and whether it continued past 1999 — when Romney has said in the past he left — to 2002, as Securities and Exchange Commission documents suggest.

“If he aspires to being president, one of the things you learn is, you are ultimately responsible for the conduct of your operations, that’s probably a question that he’s going to have to answer, and I think that’s a legitimate part of the campaign,” Obama said in the interview, which was conducted earlier Friday in Virginia Beach, Va.

The coverage area of WJLA — which shares a corporate parent, Albritton Communications, with POLITICO — includes Northern Virginia, a key region of the state that pushed Obama to victory in 2008. The election in Virginia is again expected to be close and hard-fought this year.

The president suggested Romney had ultimate responsibility over the company.

“As president of the United States, it’s pretty clear to me that I’m responsible for folks who are working in the federal government and you know, Harry Truman said the buck stops with you,” he said.

On 7/2/2010, I posted a Blog titled: The Great Disconnect, Part 3: The Chicago Ascent

Let’s hop in the Wayback Machine, Sherman, and check into Obama’s run for the Illinois State Senate, shall we?

In 1995 “Bomber” Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadette Dohrn hosted a fund-raiser for Obama prior to Obama’s run for Alice Palmer’s seat in the state Senate and Ayers donated $200 to Obama’s upcoming state Senate campaign.

In 1996 at age 34, he ran for the state Senate in dubious campaign that is barely known of, outside of Chicago. Alice Palmer, the incumbent, had decided to run for Congress and supported Obama as her successor. But after Palmer’s congressional campaign ran into trouble, she changed her mind and decided to run for re-election to the Illinois Senate after all. Obama refused to step aside and the melee ensued. One of Scooter’s volunteers challenged whether Palmer’s nominating petitions were even legal. Obama’s campaign pulled the same chicanery concerning the petitions of other candidates. Palmer dropped out, and the other candidates were disqualified. So, Obama won unopposed in the Democratic primary—guaranteeing his victory in the general election. This was truly an example of Chicago-style politics at it’s finest…or dirtiest.

Around this same time, at a Bill Clinton White House event, philanthropist Walter Annenberg announced that he was making a $500 million grant to cities across the nation to put towards the reform of public schools. Bill Ayers was the head of the Chicago group that, with$49.2 million in hand, formed the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The launch party in 1995 was attended by the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago, as well as anybody was influential among the Chicago Political Elite. Guess who the first chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was? You guessed. Obama held the post until 1999. At that time, he stepped down and remained on the board. Bill Ayers worked closely with the Challenge as a leader of the newly formed Chicago School Reform Collaborative.

They also both served on the board of the charitable Woods Fund of Chicago from 1999 to 2002. Just a “guy from the neighborhood”. Huh, Scooter?

Additionally, Scooter served on the board of the Joyce Foundation from 1994 to 2002. This foundation started as the financial back-up plan of a widow whose family had made millions in the lumber industry.

After her death, it was run by philanthropic people who increasingly dedicated their giving to Liberal causes, including gun control, environmentalism and school changes. It has grown over the years until it is now bigger than the TIDES Foundation and actually funds it.

The Joyce Foundation in 2000 and 2001 provided the capital outlay to start the Chicago Climate Exchange. It started trading in 2003, and what it trades is, believe it or not, air.

What a coincidence, that, as president, pushing cap-and-trade is one of his highest priorities, huh?

Back to the Future (Hey, that’s catchy. It would make a great movie title.  Oh, wait. Never mind.)…

Romney is finally manning up and fighting back, according to abcnews.go.com:

Mitt Romney wants President Obama to apologize for his campaign’s suggestion that the Republican candidate could have broken the law by making inaccurate statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Romney told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl late this afternoon that Obama should clean up his campaign staff after officials coordinated an effort to imply that Romney committed a felony by saying he left Bain Capital in 1999, though The Boston Globe reported this week that Romney was listed as the company’s CEO until 2002 on official files.

“The president needs to take control of these people,” Romney said. “He ought to disavow it and rein in these people who are running out of control.”

Romney added, “He sure as heck ought to say that he’s sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team.”

Romney insisted that he abandoned the private-equity firm he founded to run the Olympics and that, after 1999, he had “no role whatsoever in the management” of Bain even though SEC documents listed him as president, chairman of the board and sole stockholder.

“I left any responsibility whatsoever, any effort, any involvement whatsoever in the management of Bain Capital after February of 1999,” Romney said.

Obama is proving that he’s not just a “guy in over his head”, he ‘s a vindictive, petulant president with a re-election team weened on Chicago Politics.

Romney is going to have to treat Obama like he did his fellow Republicans, in he wants to win on November 6th.

On Wisconsin

On By kingsjesterIn Politics6 Comments

Obama’s main flunky David Axelrod informed reporters on Sunday that an “army of lawyers” will be in the Badger state “to protect” the vote during the recall election.

And, sure enough, Attorney General Eric Holder is sending the troops in:

The Justice Department announced today that it will monitor elections on June 5, 2012, in the following jurisdictions to ensure compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and other federal voting rights statutes: Alameda, Fresno and Riverside Counties, Calif.; Cibola and Sandoval Counties, N.M.; Shannon County, S.D.; and the city of Milwaukee.

The Voting Rights Act prohibits discrimination in the election process on the basis of race, color or membership in a minority language group. In addition, the act requires certain covered jurisdictions to provide language assistance during the election process. Fresno County, Riverside County and the city of Milwaukee are required to provide assistance in Spanish. Cibola, Sandoval and Shannon Counties are required to provide language assistance to Native American voters. Alameda County is required to provide language assistance to Hispanic, Chinese, Vietnamese and Filipino voters.

Under the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department is authorized to ask the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to send federal observers to jurisdictions that are certified by the attorney general or by a federal court order. Federal observers will be assigned to monitor polling place activities in Shannon County based on the attorney general’s certification and in Alameda, Riverside and Sandoval Counties based on court orders. The observers will watch and record activities during voting hours at polling locations in these jurisdictions, and Civil Rights Division attorneys will coordinate the federal activities and maintain contact with local election officials.

In addition, Justice Department personnel will monitor polling place activities in Fresno County, Cibola County and the city of Milwaukee. Civil Rights Division attorneys will coordinate federal activities and maintain contact with local election officials.

Why is today’s Recall Election attracting so much attention?  To answer that question, we need to examine what is going on within the state itself.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

Triggered by a backlash against the Republican governor’s move 15 months ago to crimp collective bargaining for the state’s public employees, the recall race has pitted neighbor against neighbor, damaged decades-old friendships, and, in one case, led a woman to drive into her husband when he tried to stop her from voting for Mr. Walker’s opponent in a primary last month.

Wisconsin has long been a purple state with a fluid middle. Its U.S. senators have included both Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, the progressive champion of the early 20th Century, and Joseph McCarthy, the fiery anti-Communist senator of the 1940s and 50s. Four of its past eight governors have been Democrats; four have been Republicans. While Wisconsin has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1988—Barack Obama won in 2008 by 14 percentage points—the 2010 election gave Republicans control of both houses of the state legislature and ushered Mr. Walker into office.

Mr. Walker and his supporters say curbing public union’s collective-bargaining rights is essential to balancing the state budget, lowering property taxes and creating a business-friendly environment. Union members and many Democrats say public-sector unions weren’t the cause of the state’s budget problems and argue that Mr. Walker has used his office to drive an ideological agenda well to the right of what most Wisconsinites want.

Both sides, along with the national political establishment, would see a victory Tuesday as a validation of their position and a harbinger of the public mood heading into November’s presidential election.

This spring, as the recall entered the home stretch, political positions have become so hardened that a Marquette University Law School poll late last month found only one in every 50 likely voters hadn’t decided how to vote. The poll showed Mr. Walker ahead of his Democratic opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, by seven percentage points, within the margin of error. More than one-third of respondents said they had stopped speaking about politics to someone because of disagreements over the recall.

“I don’t have any of them for friends anymore,” Mr. Ertel said of those with whom he might disagree. “It’s just better to ignore them.”

The race has drawn tens of millions of dollars in political donations—much of it from outside Wisconsin—into a state of just 5.7 million people. Much of it has found its way into negative advertisements. In Sheboygan, a Republican-leaning middle-class city of 50,000 on Lake Michigan roughly halfway between Milwaukee and Green Bay, yard signs are ubiquitous and bumper stickers run to the demeaning.

Carol Zoren, a 73-year-old Democrat, sports a bumper sticker on her car that says “Vote Republican Values: Debt, Corruption and Invented War.” A few weeks ago, a man started screaming at her in a parking lot. “He said he was a veteran and he didn’t fight for people like me,” she said. “I told him to buzz off.”

Politicians have tapped into the discord. At a bratfest behind the Sheboygan County Republican headquarters, State Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, a candidate for the U.S. Senate, told a crowd: “The Democrats will do anything to steal an election; I do believe that.” The comment drew loud applause.

Hence, the ” uninvited oversight” from the Obama White House, while the “Boss”, in true Chicago Politics style, remains as removed from the situation as possible, in order to claim plausible deniability.

Stay tuned.