Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Osama Hussein's Finances

Obama's fuzzy investing:

Less than two months after ascending to the United States Senate, Barack Obama bought more than $50,000 worth of stock in two speculative companies whose major investors included some of his biggest political donors.

One of the companies was a biotech concern that was starting to develop a drug to treat avian flu. In March 2005, two weeks after buying about $5,000 of its shares, Mr. Obama took the lead in a legislative push for more federal spending to battle the disease.

The most recent financial disclosure form for Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat, also shows that he bought more than $50,000 in stock in a satellite communications business whose principal backers include four friends and donors who had raised more than $150,000 for his political committees.

What to make of this. Some - mostly on the right I'm sure - will see this as evidence that Barrack is as corrupt as Harry Reid. Hell, maybe even getting up there with the big boys like Hillary Clinton (yes, "boy." She has a penis, after all.)

Me? I'm more inclined to see this as two coincidences in what is most likely the gigantic portfolio of a millionaire. Hell, I may even buy the excuse the Obama camp is putting out there:

A spokesman for Mr. Obama, who is seeking his party’s presidential nomination in 2008, said yesterday that the senator did not know that he had invested in either company until fall 2005, when he learned of it and decided to sell the stocks. He sold them at a net loss of $13,000.

The spokesman, Bill Burton, said Mr. Obama’s broker bought the stocks without consulting the senator, under the terms of a blind trust that was being set up for the senator at that time but was not finalized until several months after the investments were made.

“He went about this process to avoid an actual or apparent conflict of interest, and he had no knowledge of the stocks he owned,” Mr. Burton said. “And when he realized that he didn’t have the level of blindness that he expected, he moved to terminate the trust.”

To me this is what should be a non-story. But here I am, living in a country of liberals that cook up bizarre, out of the way conspiracy connections like: "Bush was on the same board of trustees as this guy who once worked for a company that once employed someone who was at another time employed by another company that was partially funded by some Middle Eastern guy who owned shares in another company that Osama Bin Laden's brother-in-law's dad once owned."

The left loves to play "10 degrees of George Bush" to tie him to the most heinous criminals, terrorists and despots of our time and then they expect us to just brush something like this under the rug. Well, I'll chock this little Obama fiasco up to a blind trust, but it's a good thing to have in mind the next time someone tells you that "Bush's brother's wife's dad's uncle bought stock in Halliburton - only five years before we invaded Iraq! Coincidence? Please."

Side note: Why on earth is this story in the New York Times. It's either that the NYT has decided that they would prefer Hillary to Obama for president, or, more likely, they feel the need to get the story out there and provide the usual ten paragraphs defending Obama to ever one criticizing him before a more fair and balanced news outlet can crack the story.


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