rahm emanuel – Page 3

Governor X revealed?

If so, the New York Daily News is being rather artful about it:

Meanwhile, people have been speculating with vengeance since we told you about the former Davis escort who contends Spitzer wasn’t the only governor she romped with. On Friday, when Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell‘s spokesman Chuck Ardo resigned, Ardo insisted his retirement had nothing to do with Gawker and other sites putting Rendell on their short list of pols who may be Governor X. Ardo told The D.C. Write Up that Rendell is not the new luv guv – “no way, no how, no place, no time.”

Many seem to be aching for X to be Arnold Schwarzenneger. While we’re continuing to investigate the escort’s highly detailed story of her three “dates” with him, we won’t identify the chief exec with the prominent wife. But we will say this: it ain’t California‘s Governator.

So Gov. Rendell’s former PR flack’s denial that his former boss patronizes prostitutes gets reported without comment – while unnamed rumors that it was actually Gov. Schwarzenegger get firmly and unequivocally debunked. Either way, absolutely deniable on the Daily News’ part. Continue reading Governor X revealed?

White House Spellcheck FAIL.

General staff oversight FAIL, too.

It’s like this administration goes out of its way to lower expectations (via Andrew Malcolm):

(They spelled the President’s name as ‘Barak Obama.’ On an official diplomatic agreement.)

This is what happens when you use spellcheck as a crutch; at a guess, somebody added “Ehud Barak” to the relevant computer’s custom dictionary a while back, thus making certain that the little red dots didn’t appear under the President’s misspelled name. And then nobody bothered to do three full re-readings of the document, using two different people. And the Chief of Staff is apparently too busy failing to live up to expectations for 2010 recruitment to live up to expectations for keeping the White House staff on its toes. Continue reading White House Spellcheck FAIL.

What were Rahm Emanuel’s (D) links to Tim Mahoney (D), anyway?

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

No, I don’t have any updates to the FBI investigation of former Congressman Mahoney (D, FL-16) and whether he used campaign funds to pay off one of his mistresses, sorry. That’s going to be a quiet kind of story until the FBI finishes said investigation; after all, Mahoney was brutally sacrificed to the media gods by the Democratic Party desperate to have that story not derail their 2008 Congressional campaign. People who may find themselves accused of anything similar, please note: don’t count on a payback for your loyalty – even if you happen to be innocent, which Mahoney was almost certainly not.

Which brings me to my next point. Rahm Emanuel. Name was linked to Mahoney’s back then – something about sanitizing the record – but nobody in the media was interested in pushing on that for very long. But now that Rep. Emanuel is COS Emanuel, and now that we’re reminded that Emanuel’s a Freddie Mac guy who entered into lucrative contracts on the DCCC’s behalf with his landlord’s polling firm (it’s claimed that it was a complete coincidence that he wasn’t paying rent), one does have to ask: what, exactly, did Rahm Emanuel have to do with Tim Mahoney’s little payoff problem?

And can we get an answer under oath? I only ask because there’s been an awful lot of Democrats Behaving Badly stories in the news lately.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

New York Post: Rahm Emanuel Freddie Mac board member during fraud years.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

Funny how this sort of thing takes forever to make the papers. From Dick Morris and Eileen McGann:

RAHM’S ‘RENT’ IS JUST THE TIP OF ETHICS ICEBERG

[snip]

Consider: Emanuel served on the Freddie Mac board of directors during the time that the government-backed lender lied about its earnings, a leading contributor to the current economic meltdown.

The Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight Agency later singled out the Freddie Mac board as contributing to the fraud in 2000 and 2001 for “failing in its duty to follow up on matters brought to its attention.” In other words, board members ignored the red flags waving in their faces.

The SEC later fined Freddie $50 million for its deliberate fraud in 2000, 2001 and 2002.

Meanwhile, Emanuel was paid more than $260,000 for his Freddie “service.” Plus, after he resigned from the board to run for Congress in 2002, the troubled agency’s PAC gave his campaign $25,000 – its largest single gift to a House candidate.

That’s what friends are for, isn’t it?

Continue reading New York Post: Rahm Emanuel Freddie Mac board member during fraud years.

Gawker notes that it got Rahm Emanuel in trouble…

…here (Via Hot Air Headlines). It unfortunately does not note to its readers the minor detail that Rahm Emanuel employed Stan Greenberg’s polling firm as both a Congressman and as Chair of the DCCC, which makes the arrangement a good deal less of an “oops” and more of a “can we see those contracts you signed with them again?”

Crossposted at RedState.

Rahm Emanuel’s creative income calculations.

Here we go again…

I read with some interest (via the Corner’s Mark Hemingway) the report that Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel never paid rent on his five year stay with Congresswoman DeLauro, who just happens to be married to a pollster…

The White House chief of staff said this week that he did not pay rent during the five years he bunked at the Capitol Hill home of Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn). But that raises questions whether Emanuel reported the rent-free lodging to Congress, since DeLauro is married to pollster Stan Greenberg. And will either of the parties report what could be “imputed income” to the IRS? Reps for Emanuel and DeLauro argue that House Ethics rules allow “hospitality between colleagues.”

…who also just happens to be the Chairman of a polling company that had Rep. Emanuel and the DCCC as clients. As you can see, they’re claiming that this wasn’t a commerical transaction at all – and thus not taxable, which is suddenly a burning issue among Obama staffers. You can believe as much of that as you like, of course: for my own part, I take this as an indication that maybe John Edwards was right all along. Maybe there really are two Americas: there’s the America where people pay their taxes and disclose their income without engaging in undue shenanigans, and then there’s the America that Democratic politicians live in. Speaking as someone who lives in the first America, let me make the denizens of the second one aware of something: we tolerate this sort of thing only when times are good.

Times are not good.

Moe Lane

PS: Please, by all means: try the “but it was technically legal!” defense. That always works so well with people who don’t have a Congressman’s influence and pull.

Crossposted at RedState.