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Born at the Crest of the Empire

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Straight out of the Obama oppo research (trying to get Edwards voters)

I think this was planned to break for the debate *after Obama gave back the Rezco money) to turn around the "slumlord" charge and put Clinton on defense for awhile.

But, it should be noted that this also comes the day after Edwards got out, freeing up all of his anti-corporate, anti-lobbyist, anti-insider voters, and they don't like things like this.

Short version: Bill Clinton flew to Kazakhstan with a "newcomer" to the uranium mining business.....
(Kazakh PM) Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.

The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.

Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton’s charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3 million donation from Mr. Giustra that had remained a secret until he acknowledged it last month. The gift, combined with Mr. Giustra’s more recent and public pledge to give the William J. Clinton Foundation an additional $100 million, secured Mr. Giustra a place in Mr. Clinton’s inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges.


Wow.

There's More: ABC is pushing a pretty shaky story that Clinton never stood up at the Walmart board meetings to defend unions, (ABC just happens to have received videotapes of 1980's board meetings?) and somebody's been digging through her FEC reports.
Her Senate campaign returned a $5,000 contribution from a Wal-Mart Political Action Committee, although ABCNews.com discovered another $20,000 in contributions from Wal-Mart executives and lobbyists.

Again, think Edwards voter/union endorsers. (And I would assume anti-Walmart does well among parts of the Latino community in California.)

(One of the rumors is that Edwards was afraid to endorse Obama because he didn't think he had the stomach for a fight.)

2 Comments:

  • So much for, "I've been vetted already. No surprises here..."

    By Blogger -epm, at 10:14 AM  

  • Well, the Walmart we knew about and the other is since the last vetting.

    Obama is closing, but almost out of time. This is the push.

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 10:26 AM  

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