Crossposted from Flopping Aces

Take a guess which finger I’m giving them?

This is why politicians on both sides of the aisle should piss you off:

Hoyer said in his weekly press conference that he hoped to wrap up work on an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; “towards the end of this week or the beginning of next week.”

However, the majority leader acknowledged that there were “still disagreements” within the Democratic caucus over the issue of granting immunity to telecom companies who aided the government in the wiretapping program.

Although Democratic leaders insist they are working feverishly to iron out their differences, one House member - speaking on the condition of anonymity—suggested it could be a long time, if ever, before the bill was brought for a vote.

“A lot of people think the politics of doing nothing on this issue are very good for both sides of the political spectrum,” they said.

Republicans get to beat the Dem’s over the head with their failure to get this thing done while the Democrats don’t piss off their big breadearners….the trial lawyers.

Meanwhile our country’s security is in shatters…..

and:

The Questions Not Asked Of Obama

The Politico is asking why there isn’t more attention being paid to the Rezko trial:

Four lonesome television cameramen lounged on folding chairs, read newspapers and idly chatted on cell phones in the sprawling marble lobby of the federal courthouse here, hoping to catch the players in the just-underway trial of former Barack Obama fundraiser Antoin “Tony” Rezko.

The scene was quite a contrast from the circus atmosphere they recalled in the same lobby during the early stages of two other recent high-profile trials — those of former Illinois Gov. George Ryan and newspaper magnate Conrad Black.

The main reason they bring up for the lack of attention is that Obama supposedly played a bit role in the whole thing. But the problem with that type of thinking is that we don’t know how much of a role Obama played in all this until the trial. Just as we didn’t know for sure about the role of Hillary with Hsu, but the media went bananas on that story…as they should have.

Why are they not going bananas for this one?

Howard Wolfson, the bulldog communications director for the New York senator’s campaign, challenged reporters in a Friday conference call to answer a list of questions about Obama’s ties to Rezko:What has the Obama campaign done to root out straw donations from Rezko? How many fundraisers has Rezko thrown for Obama? How much money did Rezko bundle for Obama’s campaigns? How many events did Obama attend on behalf of Rezko?

“As good as the press corps on this call is, I bet that most of you don’t know the answers to those questions,” Wolfson said. “But I bet at some point, all Americans are going to know these answers to those questions if he’s our nominee.”

Wolfson asserted the Clinton campaign faced more scrutiny over — and was also more proactive and forthcoming in dealing with — its own troubled fundraiser, Norman Hsu (alternately pronounced “soo” or “shoe”), a fugitive convicted on grand theft charges years ago. The campaign gave to charity $23,000 contributed by Hsu and identified and returned more than $800,000 in contributions he bundled for Clinton.

“I can guarantee you that if the shoe were on the other foot, so to speak, no pun intended,” Wolfson said, “I would have been getting those calls, those questions, left and right, and having to come up with answers that were satisfactory to a very serious and dogged press corps.”

In fact, a Nexis search of major world newspapers Tuesday yielded 2,568 hits for the words “Clinton” and “Hsu” versus only 426 for the words “Obama” and “Rezko.” Expanding the search to include all media outlets, the Clinton/Hsu query produced more than 3,000 hits, while Obama/Rezko turned up 1,741.

Valid points. As the SNL piece I put up yesterday depicted so well, the media has swooned over Obama because he apparently is their chosen one to come save the country (and they say the MSM has no liberal bias). But they ignore a story which not only involves some very questionable “donations” and “gifts” but the fact that the main player, Rezko, was giving these donations to Obama….helping him out with property and fundraisers and the such…while at the same time he was borrowing money from a someone who was involved in the biggest scandal to come down the pike in decades….Oil for Food.

Not only that, there are new charges coming out, and being reported by the only MSM outfit who cares apparently, the Chicago Sun Times, that Rezko was involved in some skulldaggery to get a lucrative Iraqi contract:

As questioning of potential jurors wrapped up Tuesday in the corruption trial of political fund-raiser Tony Rezko, a new accusation has surfaced that Rezko paid a $1.5 million bribe in an effort to win a $50 million business deal in Iraq.

In a court filing, Rezko’s lawyers say that prosecutors accused him in a closed-door meeting of paying the bribe to Aiham Alsammarae, Iraq’s former minister of electricity.

These charges are based on the fact that Rezko owned a brand new security company called “Companion Security” and somehow this new company was able to secure a 50 million dollar contract from Iraq to train Iraqi power-plant security guards in the US. The whole thing died when new leaders came into power in Iraq and Mr. Alsammarae was jailed in Iraq on corruption charges. He later fled and came back to the good ole’ US of A.

I’m telling ya, this rabbit hole is getting larger every day, and the more the media stays away from the story because Obama is involved the more foolish they look. But at least the Sun Times isn’t shying away from it:

As recently as Sunday, on ABC’s “This Week” program, Obama’s campaign strategist, David Axelrod, insisted that Obama has fully responded to every question posed by reporters. But this is not so.

For months, Sun-Times investigative reporters have had a standing request to meet with Obama, face to face, to get answers to questions such as these:

• How many fund-raisers did Rezko throw for Obama?

• Obama is donating $150,000 to charity that Rezko brought into the campaign. But how much in all did Rezko raise?

• Did Rezko find jobs for Obama backers in the Blagojevich administration or elsewhere?

• Why did Obama only recently admit — after Bloomberg News broke the story — that Rezko had toured his South Side mansion with him in 2004 before he bought it?

Dribs and drabs of people’s lives have a most unfortunate way of coming out in trials.