Obama Mama Drama

**LoungeMachine** · 02-13-2007, 09:26 PM

Originally posted by Seshmeister
I wouldn't vote for someone tha believed in Mormonism and(look out for the clue) the moroni to be the local town dog catcher.

Without even scratching the surface of the stupidity of the 'religion'...

It's not any further of a stretch to reality than Christianity.

**FORD** · 02-14-2007, 02:10 AM

**ODShowtime** · 02-14-2007, 08:50 AM

Originally posted by ULTRAMAN VH
Okay Lounge Manure, your party of Dumbocrats are piss weak. You have a Black candidate who is not even popular among blacks. But oops, the LIBBY media keeps forgetting to tell us that his mom was white. Oh and then there is Hitlary. She is running so fast from the left to the center that even guys like Ford hate her guts. On the Right side of the fence Mitt Romney just entered the race and is my personal favorite. BUT OH NO!!!! He is one of them Mormon folk. The guy has been married for forty years unlike his competitors McCain and Guilianni who both behave like Nick's favorite "THE BIG DOG". Heaven forbid we put up a candidate who stands for family values, secure borders and smaller government. Have a nice evening, douche.

"family values"?

What a crock of fuckin bullshit. They have you hook, line, and sinker.

**ULTRAMAN VH** · 02-14-2007, 11:15 AM

I love the way you libbys jump right on the race wagon and the Bush hate machine when someone questions the Dems. I think I have made it real clear that I and other conservatives are really disapointed in the current administration. With that said, it does not change how pathetically weak your party is. Your media created super hero, Obama has some learning to do before he runs an entire country. At this point it really matters not who is president. Our politicians on both sides of the fence have sold the country right out from under us. I recommend some Chinese language classes at your local community college.

Originally posted by hideyoursheep
And your ignorant ass buy's that shit every 4 fuckin' years.
WE NEED A PRESIDENT! Not a goddam spokesman for the Moral majority!
The LIBBY MEDIA? I guess it's not important to the fuckheads that blindly follow the party line and vote these criminals in that they are just as responsible for putting them there.Yeah,I'd wanna pair of earplugs too if I found out my beloved freedom fightin' president, who rewards incompetence and denies failures,either isn't REALLY President, or is in on the WORST case of Democratic sodomy the White House has ever seen.
Tell me-what's it called when you "out" a CIA operative in order to discredit her husband's contradictory intel?
And what's it called again when you tell the world,"whoever is responsible will no longer work in the White House"? then try to blame the FUCKING MEDIA?!?!?
And what's it called when all this is done for the VP's "former employer"?
Dumbocrats, my ass!
"OOhhh!! Clinton got a blowjob!"
Neo-Cunt, Please!!!

Gee whiz sheep lover, I guess it really is no different than that fella running down the street with highly classified terrorism documents bolging out of his fruit of the looms, trying to protect the Big Dog. What was his name again?? OH YES, Sandy Berger. What really pisses me off is that the Republicans let him slide and cut some kind of a deal. The list for scandal on the Dumbocrats is long and distinguished, Sheeplicker.

**hideyoursheep** · 02-14-2007, 07:34 PM

Originally posted by ULTRAMAN VH
I love the way you libbys jump right on the race wagon and the Bush hate machine when someone questions the Dems.

You hitched you pony to that wagon with your post,Uberdork.Go and read it again...

Your media created super hero, Obama has some learning to do before he runs an entire country.

Gee whiz sheep lover, I guess it really is no different than that fella running down the street with highly classified terrorism documents bolging out of his fruit of the looms, trying to protect the Big Dog. What was his name again?? OH YES, Sandy Berger. What really pisses me off is that the Republicans let him slide and cut some kind of a deal. The list for scandal on the Dumbocrats is long and distinguished, Sheeplicker. [/B][/QUOTE]

Sit down,Ultradummy, this is gonna take awhile.
MY media created superhero? I, unlike you, am not preprogrammed to think someone is "weak" or what's that word you retards like to throw around at individuals? Oh yeah, "liberals"-fucking funny you don't evern know what it means or if it even applies to me. Now a "sheep lover" would be that dumb motherfucker that "votes the bible".I like my politics and religion seperate, thanks anyway.
I also find it amusing that YOU could determine who is or isn't qualified to run an entire country.Do I really need to go into how no conservative is obviously able to tell? And not just once, but TWICE!
that deaf, dumb, and blind bunch- sure run a mean campaign
IF Berger is guilty of a crime, how could it be up to the Neo-Cunts to cut a deal? UNLESS they have something to hide....or maybe it's another "fact" pulled directly from Limpbaugh's ass.
And how do you defend an administration that ignored every warning given to them?Clarke worked for every president since your idol Reagan(who himself isn't without questionable ethics)but suddenly wasn't good enough for BushCo.What does the George do when confronted with the truth? Start a smear campaign to discredit him.DEJA-VU?!

You were suckered in 2000, '04, and will be suckered again! So long as it's a Republican scumbag in there fucking up, it's all good,huh?
Makes no sense to a real American. That would be myself,and anyone else capable of forming an opinion based on truth rather than the talk-radio reprogramming that has obviously impaired your thought process.
Who's the sheep again?

**DrMaddVibe** · 02-14-2007, 09:53 PM

**hideyoursheep** · 02-14-2007, 10:21 PM

That IS funny stuff.

Now post the one where Dubyah finds Jeesus at an NA meeting.

**ODShowtime** · 02-14-2007, 10:34 PM

Originally posted by hideyoursheep

Makes no sense to a real American. That would be myself,and anyone else capable of forming an opinion based on truth rather than the talk-radio reprogramming that has obviously impaired your thought process.
Who's the sheep again?

nice

it's five star time for you dude

**hideyoursheep** · 02-14-2007, 11:06 PM

Originally posted by ODShowtime
nice

it's five star time for you dude

I'm not worthy...

It's the same repetitive acid-spit with those Neo-Crackers.

**DrMaddVibe** · 02-19-2007, 03:09 PM

404 Error

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama19feb19,0,2525202,full.story?coll=la-home-nation

Obama memoir left out credits for activism, critics say
The senator and presidential hopeful's account of his work at a Chicago housing project leaves out others' work on asbestos removal, organizers charge.
By Peter Wallsten
Times Staff Writer

February 19, 2007

CHICAGO Ñ The drama began with a tiny ad in a local newspaper Ñ a notice that asbestos was about to be removed from the management office at Altgeld Gardens, the all-black public housing complex where young Barack Obama worked as a community organizer.

"You think it's in our apartments?" a worried mother asked.

"I don't know," Obama replied. "But we can find out."

What followed, Obama says in a memoir, was a life-altering experience, an early taste of his ability to motivate the powerless and work the levers of government. As the 24-year-old mentor to public housing residents, Obama says he initiated and led efforts that thrust Altgeld's asbestos problem into the headlines, pushing city officials to call hearings and a reluctant housing authority to start a cleanup.

But others tell the story much differently.

They say Obama did not play the singular role in the asbestos episode that he portrays in the best-selling memoir "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance." Credit for pushing officials to deal with the cancer-causing substance, according to interviews and news accounts from that period, also goes to a well-known preexisting group at Altgeld Gardens and to a local newspaper called the Chicago Reporter. Obama does not mention either one in his book.

"Just because someone writes it doesn't make it true," said longtime Altgeld resident Hazel Johnson, who worked with Obama on the asbestos campaign and had been pushing for a variety of environmental cleanups years before he arrived.

U.S. Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.) said it was Johnson's work, as well as asbestos testing conducted by the Chicago Reporter, that sparked the interest of Chicago officials and prompted Rush, who at the time was a City Council member, to launch an inquiry. Though he has not read Obama's memoir, Rush, who has been a political rival of Obama in recent years, said Johnson's role was so prominent that he was "offended" by anyone telling the Altgeld story without including her.

"Was [Obama] involved in stuff? Absolutely," said Robert Ginsburg, an activist who worked in Altgeld with Johnson and Obama. "But there was stuff happening before him, and after him."

No one disputes that Obama was active in organizing Altgeld residents. Several who worked directly with him say he was the most effective organizer they had seen Ñ a surprise, given his youth. "He was our motivator," said Callie Smith, now 50. "We did all the work, but he was our inspiration."

The varying accounts of what occurred 20 years ago are noteworthy because Obama, now a freshman U.S. senator, has begun a campaign for the White House after three years on the national stage.

Beyond Illinois, where Obama was a state legislator, much of what the public knows about the Chicago Democrat comes from his two best-selling books. On the campaign trail, he has said that through the books he has revealed more of himself to the public than has any other candidate. They provide "insights into how I think and how I feel about the issues facing America," he told reporters this month, according to an account in the Wall Street Journal. Many people at his rallies bring copies.

But "Dreams From My Father," the first of Obama's books, is not a historical account. In it, Obama uses literary techniques that are rarely found in political memoirs.

Dialogue in the memoir is an "approximation of what was actually said or relayed to me," Obama wrote in its introduction. For the sake of compression, he wrote, some characters are "composites of people I've known, and some events appear out of precise chronology." Most names in the book were changed for the sake of privacy, he wrote.

And though most memoirs place their authors at the center of events, critics of "Dreams From My Father" say the book unfairly omits others responsible for the successes of the asbestos campaign, an event that Obama portrays as central to his maturation as a political leader. For example, Johnson is not mentioned, and no character in the book appears to resemble her, even though she was already a prominent Altgeld activist and her presence in the anti-asbestos effort is confirmed by interviews and news accounts at the time.

An Obama spokesman said the memoir was never intended to be a complete account of Altgeld nor to portray Obama as a hero, but merely was the recollections of one activist. Published in 1994 and re-released in 2004, the book primarily tracks Obama's journey to racial identity as the child of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother.

"This is making a mountain out of flat land," said Robert Gibbs, the Obama spokesman, referring to inquiries from The Times. "The book isn't a history of social efforts to help the area. It was about what he was involved in."

Built in the 1940s to house black industrial workers, Altgeld Gardens has long been called a "toxic doughnut." The community is surrounded by a massive landfill, a paint factory, an odor-emitting sewage plant and the polluted Calumet River.

Obama arrived at Altgeld soon after graduating from Columbia University in 1983. He had taken a job with a small group called the Developing Communities Project, which aimed to help people who were struggling after plant closures and other economic troubles.

Obama and his group helped persuade the city to open a job center. Working with parents at a local school, he tried to improve basic services at the housing project: repairing the toilets, the windows, the heating system.

Then, he writes, the asbestos threat appeared.

According to the memoir, Obama's group was tipped off to the problem when a woman, "Sadie," noticed a classified ad soliciting bids to remove asbestos from the Altgeld management office.

"I don't know if it means anything," says Sadie in the book, "but I wanted to see what you thought."

Obama encourages the group to ask the on-site manager about the asbestos. But they are fearful of confronting authority, Obama writes, and unsure how to respond when their first inquiry produces no answers.

"What do we do now?" Obama quotes one parent as asking.

"We go downtown," Obama answers. "If they won't come to us, we'll go to them."

Obama then guides the group Ñ which he says one person dubbed Obama's Army Ñ through two dramatic, confrontational meetings with housing officials in 1986. The meetings drew news coverage and produced results, his memoir says.

In the first meeting, at Chicago Housing Authority headquarters downtown, Obama's group secured a promise of immediate asbestos testing at Altgeld and prompted aldermen to call hearings.

The second meeting was a chaotic event in which 500 Altgeld residents ran Chicago's top housing official off the grounds. But it produced "a victory of sorts," Obama writes, as workers in "moon-suits" soon appeared and started sealing asbestos.

In the book, Obama writes that his success in motivating the residents still inspires him. "I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way," he writes of confronting the housing officials downtown.

"That bus ride kept me going, I think. Maybe it still does."

Even as he campaigns for the White House, Obama speaks about his time in Altgeld. His first television interview after announcing his candidacy this month, on CBS' "60 Minutes," featured Obama leading a driving tour through the housing project.

But other forces Ñ unacknowledged in Obama's book, but receiving public attention at the time Ñ were at work in the asbestos story.

At the same time Altgeld tenants were asking their questions, the respected Chicago Reporter published an expose of asbestos problems in a different housing project. It also asserted that heating pipes at other Chicago projects had similar asbestos insulation.

The Reporter's investigation was cited repeatedly on television and in local newspapers, and the Chicago Sun-Times credited it with bringing the asbestos problem to light.

"That article stirred me, and it stirred many others," said Rush, the former alderman, who said he initiated a City Council inquiry into asbestos because of the Chicago Reporter story. (Rush, a long-serving congressman, has endorsed Obama's presidential campaign, though he faced a primary election challenge from Obama in 2000.)

Obama's Altgeld Gardens account also omits the work of Johnson.

She was already widely known for her pioneering work in pushing officials to investigate environmental hazards at local industrial sites. Spurred by her husband's premature death from lung cancer, Johnson had begun documenting the health complaints of Altgeld residents in the late 1970s. Johnson formed a group called People for Community Recovery and tried to cajole scientists to study possible links between the ailments that residents reported to her and the harmful substances around their community.

One of those scientists, Regnal Jones, visited Johnson in the early 1980s and recalls sitting in her kitchen as she laid out hundreds of index cards listing the illnesses throughout Altgeld. He said he was "blown away" by Johnson's survey.

During that visit, Jones said, he inspected Johnson's apartment and concluded that her heating pipes were insulated with asbestos.

From that point on, Johnson says, she included asbestos in her complaints to government officials.

As Obama became involved in the asbestos issue, Johnson was among those who worked with him.

In interviews, she said she helped plan the Altgeld tenants' confrontational trip to the Chicago Housing Authority, meeting occasionally with Obama in her living room.

Press accounts show that she was part of the protest.

Today, Johnson is particularly disturbed that Obama's memoir portrayed the tenants as meek and confused, highlighting one parent who was illiterate. Johnson had been quoted on many occasions in the press by the time she met Obama. She had persuaded city officials to request the tests that found hazardous materials in local drinking water.

"Why would he paint us as so pathetic?" asked Cheryl Johnson, Hazel's daughter, who now runs the Altgeld group founded by her mother, who is 72. "Isn't a memoir supposed to be accurate?"

Said Jones, who was working for the city's health department at the time: "There's no way that you could have done anything out there without knowing that this little old lady had been in Altgeld forever."

Another Chicago community organizer said he had no quarrel with the license that Obama took in his memoir. "If you were writing your movie, I'm sure you'd be the star," said Salim Al Nurridin.

"It's his movie."

peter.wallsten@latimes.com

**hideyoursheep** · 02-19-2007, 03:35 PM

Yes, from out of virtually nowhere come the Obama "swift boat" memoirs.

I bet Cheney would swear on a stack of satanic bibles asbestos was harmless.

The question has been raised towards his "inexperience" and some possible illegal drug use in the past....

Sounds alot like some other guy.................

Repukes hate to talk about that shit when it relates to the George.

**LoungeMachine** · 02-19-2007, 08:00 PM

Halliburton Pays Dearly but Finally Escapes Cheney's Asbestos Mess

By Allan Sloan
Tuesday, January 11, 2005; Page E03

It's time for yet another Halliburton story -- but not the one you may be expecting. This isn't about the endlessly scrutinized Iraq contracting business of the big energy services company that Dick Cheney ran before he became vice president. And it's not about Halliburton's profit-boosting accounting change during Cheney's regime, or the scandals and problems currently affecting some of the firm's far-flung projects.

Instead, let's talk about Halliburton's well-executed $5 billion escape from its asbestos problems, most of which Cheney created when he orchestrated Halliburton's purchase of Dresser Industries in 1998. Few people connect this problem with Cheney, but they should, given that he was in charge at the time and got a raise as a result of buying Dresser.
Dresser's asbestos problem was only a potential one when Halliburton bought it, but rapidly metastasized into a threat to Halliburton's existence. By then, though, Cheney had gone off to Washington.

Had he still been Halliburton's chief executive, Wall Street might have forced him to take responsibility for the asbestos problem he imported to his company. But because he wasn't around -- and because his successor, Dave Lesar, was a stand-up guy -- Cheney has largely escaped scrutiny for this fiasco.

Now that Halliburton has managed to extract itself from its asbestos liability by paying a ton of cash and stock to trusts that will compensate victims and their lawyers, we can get a handle on how much Dresser's piece of the problem cost Halliburton. It turns out to be almost as much as Halliburton paid for the company.

While Halliburton's all-stock takeover of Dresser was valued at $7.7 billion when it was announced in February 1998, it was worth only $5.3 billion when it was completed seven months later. The bankruptcy settlement is costing Halliburton just about that much: around $2.8 billion in cash, Halliburton stock with a market value of $2.3 billion the day before Dresser's bankruptcy was resolved and miscellaneous odds and ends and potential payments.

The bankruptcy resolution, which became final on Jan. 3, covered both the Dresser problems and the smaller asbestos problems that Halliburton already had.

Halliburton hasn't said how much each set of liabilities cost, but Dresser is clearly way more than half. How do I know that? Because a Halliburton bankruptcy filing discloses that "historical Dresser" accounts for about two-thirds of the claims, and the filing also shows that claims from Dresser's business average from 2.5 to five times as much as equivalent claims from Halliburton's businesses.

Do the math, and at least five-sixths -- 83 percent -- of the claims costs are from Dresser. So let's attribute 85 percent of the costs to Dresser. That seems reasonable, if not conservative.

That works out to around $4.3 billion. That doesn't include what Dresser-related claims cost Halliburton between the purchase in 1998 and the Chapter 11 filing in 2002 by Dresser and other Halliburton subsidiaries. It doesn't include offsets for possible insurance payments, either, but I don't know how to value those.

I give Halliburton's current management huge credit for pulling off this tricky maneuver. And I give them big credit for dealing with the problem rather than awaiting a miracle rescue from Congress. Almost from the day it took office, the Bush administration has pushed hard to get Congress to limit asbestos liability. That includes President Bush's visit to Illinois last week to push his "reform" proposals.

Halliburton, whose fortunes are tied to the oil industry, has profited from the surge in oil prices. Even though its stock has quadrupled from its asbestos-woe low, it's still below what it was when Cheney left in the summer of 2000. Imagine what Halliburton shares would fetch today had the Dresser problems never happened. Much more than it currently sells for, I'm sure.

A Cheney spokesman said the vice president wouldn't comment about Halliburton, and referred all queries to the company.

Halliburton, which is understandably eager to put the whole asbestos mess behind it, wouldn't discuss Cheney's role or how much Dresser's asbestos problems have cost it. "We are certainly glad to close the asbestos chapter in Halliburton's history," said company spokesman Wendy Hall. "We are focused on moving forward in 2005, not backwards."

Even if it had been a non-celebrity CEO who messed up big-time with Dresser, this would still be a tale worth telling. That's because this deal shows that when you analyze a transaction, you have to look long-term as well as short-term.

As Cheney's Dresser misadventure shows, today's triumphant deal champ can be tomorrow's chump.

Sloan is Newsweek's Wall Street editor. His e-mail address is sloan@panix.com.

**LoungeMachine** · 02-19-2007, 08:02 PM

Originally posted by LoungeMachine

Instead, let's talk about Halliburton's well-executed $5 billion escape from its asbestos problems, most of which Cheney created when he orchestrated Halliburton's purchase of Dresser Industries in 1998. Few people connect this problem with Cheney, but they should, given that he was in charge at the time and got a raise as a result of buying Dresser.
Dresser's asbestos problem was only a potential one when Halliburton bought it, but rapidly metastasized into a threat to Halliburton's existence. By then, though, Cheney had gone off to Washington.

**LoungeMachine** · 02-19-2007, 08:03 PM

Eat that. MsASSPipe

**DrMaddVibe** · 02-19-2007, 08:50 PM

That AARP discount kick in for those glasses yet?

Obama Mama Drama

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