Barack Obama: Toxic Mentors Start to Corrode

[BeatleBoot]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article3602710.ece

Barack Obama: Toxic Mentors Start to Corrode

The Democrat was surging ahead but now revelations about the men who helped shape him are putting voters off

Long before Barack Obama launched his campaign for the White House, when he was considering a run for the US Senate in 2003, he paid an intriguing visit to a former Chicago sewers inspector who had risen to become one of the most influential African-American politicians in Illinois.

“You have the power to elect a US senator,” Obama told Emil Jones, Democratic leader of the Illinois state senate. Jones looked at the ambitious young man smiling before him and asked, teasingly: “Do you know anybody I could make a US senator?”

According to Jones, Obama replied: “Me.” It was his first, audacious step in a spectacular rise from the murky political backwaters of Springfield, the Illinois capital.

The exchange also sealed an intimate personal and political relationship that is likely to attract intense scrutiny amid the furore over Obama’s links to some of Chicago’s most controversial political and religious power brokers.

Obama has often described Jones as a key political mentor whose patronage was crucial to his early success in a state long dominated by near-feudal party political machines. Jones, 71, describes himself as Obama’s “godfather” and once said: “He feels like a son to me.”

Like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the outspoken pastor of Obama’s Chicago church, and like Tony Rezko, the millionaire fundraiser and former friend of Obama who is on trial for corruption, Jones is in danger of becoming a hindrance to his protégé’s presidential ambitions.

For almost a year Jones has used his position as leader of the state senate to block anticorruption legislation passed unanimously by the state’s lower house. He has also become embroiled in ethical controversies concerning his wife’s job and his stepson’s business.


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[anonymous171]

1. Times is owned by Murdoch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_Corporation#Newspapers

[Hoof Hearted]

7. Didn't the Times endorse Obama?

[jackson_dem]

13. It called him the new JFK and Murdoch's New York Post endorsed Obama

The Times didn't formally endorse him because it is a foreign newspaper but drooling over him in a piece dubbing him the new JFK is about as close as it gets for a foreign paper.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

16. doesn't Murdoch fund Clinton?

[DJ13]

2. zzzzzzzz

:boring:

[here_is_to_hope]

4. Scoot over, youre hoggin the blankets again...zzzzzzzzzzz...n/t

[emilyg]

3. Thank you. K

[GoldieAZ49]

5. murky political backwaters - he can go back there, it isn't going

to work.

Obama is a farce and America is hearing all about and voting NO

[UALRBSofL]

6. So what Illegal connections do they have?

Obama has a pinchent to have a lot of corrupt friends in Chicago but what are they hiding?

[Rageneau]

8. Obama supporters take note: This is what we mean when we say Hillary has been "vetted."

Unlike Obama, there are no unknown Wrights or Rezkos or Joneses in Hillary's past. No new skeletons will be falling from her closets. She is the most investigated woman in American history. Virtually nothing in her past is unknown.

But as we've seen in the past couple of weeks, Obama has oodles of unexamined things and friends to look into. And every one of them WILL be looked into, too, with the jaundiced and evil eyes of GOP oppo researchers. Once Hillary is out of the way, the MSM will then be free to tear into him to their heart's delight. And his chances of election will drop with every new revelation.

Because, unlike Hillary, he isn't "vetted."

[ElsewheresDaughter]

9. exactly and Obama's "blank screen" is turning into a horror movie

[BearSquirrel2]

10. Have we even TALKED about Arkansas ...

Stuff might have blown over. That doesn't mean Murdoch can't make the winds change.

[Hutzpa]

11. ANOTHER LET IT SINK POST n/t

[BeatleBoot]

12. Yeah, it will just blow over.

[JoFerret]

17. How many "mentors" are there?

the number keeps growing

[xultar]

14. x

[sueragingroz]

15. Looks like i'm not the only one who saw this

If the admins want to merge my thread "who has heard of emil jones", I won't mind...