Chicago Daily Observer

An embattled member of Barack Obama’s vice presidential search team quit today following criticism of favorable loans he received from a subprime mortgage lender under federal investigation.

Jim Johnson, former chief executive officer for the mortgage lender Fannie Mae, quit his post with the Obama vetting team, the Obama campaign said in a statement released moments ago.

No surprise here; the Chicago City Council today approved a new home for the Children’s Museum in Grant Park.

Now that we’ve got it straight that Grant Park can be torn up on the whim of Mayor Richard M. Daley, as if it were another Meigs Field, maybe we should look around Grant Park for what’s next to go. You’ve got all that empty space in the south end of the park, by Buckingham Fountain and the rose gardens that’s just going to waste.

Now that Barack Obama has secured the nomination of Democratic candi­date for president, he and his handlers are ramping up their efforts to immunize him from his Chicago past.

We’ve already seen him distance himself from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, quit Trinity church, criticize Father Pfleger, and downplay his early ties to Tony Rezko.

But Mayor Daley presents a stickier wicket. He’s a big-city boss who has presided over a corrupt, inefficiently run, high-tax government for years. While Obama has mildly disapproved of a few of the most noto­rious scandals, he enthusiastically endorsed the mayor in the last election. They even share David Axelrod as a campaign strategist.

As you may have noted from the below post, Brian Wesbury contributes an insightful column on economics for the Chicago Daily Observer on a weekly basis, and is also one of the top columninsts at the Wall Street Journal.

We have been publishing Brian’s Monday Morning Outlook for a few months now, which Brian provides via First Trust, in Lisle Illinois. In his analysis, Brian offers a degree of experience and detail unmatched in business and economic journalism making him popular with viewers of CNBC, readers of the Wall Street Journal (and of course cdobs.com). Please welcome another leader in the field to The Chicago Daily Observer.

The price of oil jumped $11 per barrel last Friday (a record daily dollar amount), after a $5 move on Thursday. For perspective; just seven short years ago, in 2001, oil was trading at about $20/barrel.
The spike in oil was due to a confluence of factors. A senior Israeli official suggested an attack on Iran – to prevent the latter country from acquiring nuclear weapons – was a possibility. The European Central Bank raised the specter of a rate hike, which hurt the dollar, especially after the unemployment rate jumped to 5.5%, possibly pushing any Fed rate hikes further off into the future.
A re-ignited oil price has re-energized the outlook for recession from some analysts. Despite avoiding one so far, these analysts are convinced that a teetering consumer will be pushed over the edge by $4 ... Read More...

Barack Obama may have come up with a creative way to solve the housing recession: Let everyone buy property at a discount the way he did from Tony Rezko, and give everyone in America a discount mortgage the way Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide did for Fannie Mae’s Jim Johnson. Team Obama’s real estate and mortgage transactions are certainly a change from business as usual. They suggest old-fashioned back-scratching below even current Beltway standards.

For weeks, the members of Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of the city felt battered by the national spotlight that had accompanied the growing fame of their longtime member, Senator Barack Obama.

First came the endless television coverage of incendiary statements by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, their controversial former pastor. Then reports of a visiting Roman Catholic priest who had mocked Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. And finally on Sunday, a day after Mr. Obama announced that his family was leaving the church, satellite trucks idling again outside the 7:30 a.m. service.

Because the American people want one thing more than anything: their American lifestyle. And that lifestyle is threatened by a couple of things:

1. Oil prices

2. Environmental extremists

The winning political message is going to be:

You elect me, and I will vote yes—-to drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

You elect me, and I will vote yes—-to drilling for oil off the Atlantic Coast and the Pacific Coast.

You elect me, and I will vote yes—-to drilling in Alaska’s Anwar.

You elect me, and I will vote yes—-to oil shale extraction in Colorado.

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Eric Zorn hypnotically tells us that Rita Rezko did not assist Barack Obama in buying his Kenwood Mansion in exchange for Sen. Obama’s continued support of her husband Tony Rezko.

Seems odd that the Rezkos would go to all the trouble they did on this transaction as some kind of coincidence but Zorn tells us it is just an “ordinary real estate story” when one of the great Chicago political manipulators gives you a walk through on your house.

Does Eric Zorn actually believe that Sen. Obama thought Tony Rezko was good judge of real estate, after coming off 15 flopped “affordable” housing projects between Rezmar and Obama’s law firm? We suspect that Sen. Obama may have got some very specialized handling from the Rezkos, in exchange for continued immediate access to a US Senator and presidential candidate, only interrupted by Tony Rezko’s indictment.