Foreign Papers Investigate Obama

Doing the work, it seems, that the American press would, for so long, not do.

From The Times of London comes a nifty Q and A about Barack Obama's ties to Chicago slum lord and corrupt sleazeball Tony Rezko:

Who is Tony Rezko?
Antoin “Tony” Rezko, 52, a long-time friend and fundraiser for Barack Obama, is a Syrian-born property developer, pizzeria entrepreneur and political fixer in Chicago. Hillary Clinton has made him a campaign issue by denouncing him as a “slum landlord”. Mr Rezko faces two criminal trials as well as dozens of civil lawsuits.

How does he know Barack Obama?
Mr Rezko approached Mr Obama in 1990 after reading that he had become the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Mr Rezko and two real estate partners offered Mr Obama a job building inner-city homes in Chicago. Mr Obama declined, but remained friendly with Mr Rezko, who became one of his earliest and biggest fundraisers. Mr Obama says that he met Mr Rezko “once or twice a year” for lunch and the Rezkos and Obamas have dined together as couples perhaps “two to four times” since they have known each other. As a lawyer, Mr Obama did six hours’ work for partners of Mr Rezko’s company in state-subsidised apartment rehabilitation projects.

Why are they linked in a property deal?
The Obamas bought a mock Georgian mansion in Chicago in June 2005, after he was elected to the US Senate. Mr Rezko’s wife, Rita, bought the adjacent garden on the same day from the same seller. The sellers say that Mr Obama and Mr Rezko toured the property together before the transaction. At the time, it was already known that Mr Rezko was under criminal investigation. Mrs Rezko paid the full asking price of $625,000 (£315,000) for the garden. The Obamas paid $1.65 million for the house – $300,000 below asking price. The garden could be accessed only through the Obamas’ property, and Mr Obama’s gardener mowed the lawn. In January 2006, Mrs Rezko sold a 10ft strip of her garden to the Obamas for $104,500 and a fence was erected between the two lots. Mrs Rezko has since sold the remainder of the garden to a lawyer for her husband’s business.

Similar reportage can be seen from The Australian.

And let's not forget the whole Obama double talk on NAFTA; rather dangerous to a candidacy that based its entire image on being representative of some vague sort of new politics that was somehow above this sort of craven duplicity of promising contradictory things to different groups just to get elected.

SAN ANTONIO - Barack Obama said Monday that his campaign never gave Canada back-channel assurances that his harsh words about the North American Free Trade Agreement were for political show — despite the disclosure of a Canadian memo indicating otherwise.

According to the memo obtained by The Associated Press, Obama's senior economic adviser told Canadian officials in Chicago that the debate over free trade in the Democratic presidential primary campaign was "political positioning" and that Obama was not really protectionist.