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Lots of attention has focused on Jim Johnson, who Barack Obama picked to guide the VP selection process. We have already talked about a number of the problems. It comes down to this: just as Tony Rezko helped Obama with a sweetheart deal to buy his house, Countywide Financial, which Obama rails against, helped Johnson buy his.

But there is more on Johnson. In 2001, he joined Persueus LLC as a Vice Chairman. Perseus has a number of funds. Among them:

PERSEUS-SOROS BIOPHARMACEUTICAL FUND, L.P., which Perseus co-manages, was formed in 2000 with capital commitments totaling $449 million to make investments in life sciences companies

So Perseus is a business partner with George Soros. And Johnson is the Vice Chairman …

Incidentally, as Say Anything Blog notes, Perseus also seems to own the publisher of the Scott McClellan book:

Public Affairs Books (editor at large Peter Osnos: About The Century Foundation.)

Public Affairs Books is owned by Perseus Book Group.

Perseus Book Group is in turn owned by Perseus Funds Group, (holding company Perseus LLC). Perseus has enjoyed growth of assets over the last 13 years of 10,000% (100 x 1995 value).

Are we looking at the finance empire of the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy?

The Pritzkers are one of the leading business families of Chicago. They run Hyatt and have a reputation for particularly cut-throat business practices. (sometimes outside of honorable) So it isn’t entirely surprising to find Penny Pritzker at the center of Barack Obama’s hypocrisy over his relationship to subprime lenders. Earlier today, I wrote about Jim Johnson, who got a sweetheart deal from Countrywide which Obama had attacked. And then there was UBS, which his campaign shopped a story about, and the reporter didn’t point out that the CEO of UBS has raised a quarter million for Obama.

And then there is Penny, Obama’s Finance Chair. She was the former Chairwoman of a bank that failed, according to regulators via a 2001 Chicago Tribune article, due to “poor oversight by its board.” The depositors felt so screwed, that they filed a RICO suit against Penny and other directors. The Pritzker family eventually settled with regulators for $460m.

So Obama is attacking CEOs of subprime lenders. And his Finance Chairman was the Chairman of a subprime lender that went under because of poor oversight. One of his major donors is the CEO of another one. And the person making his VP recommendation got a sweetheart deal from another.

On Friday, I sat down with Rep. Thad McCotter (R-MI), the Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee. We had a reasonably wide-ranging discussion. You can watch all of the segments here, and I will be posting them regularly here and at Redstate. In this one, McCotter explains that the issue environment may not be as bad for us as we may think.

What do you think? Do you buy this? I confess to being somewhat skeptical.

On Friday, I sat down with Rep. Thad McCotter, the Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee. We had a faily wide ranging coversation, and I will be posting pieces over it over the next couple of days here and at The Next Right. McCotter thinks that Obama will have a difficult time in Michigan where (1) the alliance between unions and environmentalists is quite weak and (2) his elitism will be a problem. Here’s some video:
See all the interview segments here.

A Democratic consultant in Alaska told me that the politics up there are fascinating. You have a civil war in the Republican Party between the old guard and new reformists. And you have a Democratic Party that is targeting the old guard. The consultant admitted that if Governor Sarah Palin continue to box them out on reform, ethics, and a degree of populism, it will be very hard for the Democrats to win any races. The News-Miner has a great wrap of these races.

The good news is at the House level, Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell is looking to defeat incumbent Rep. Don Young (R) in the primary. Parnell is up 37-34 over Young in the primary. In addition, Parnell defeats the likely Democratic challenger, 43-38, while Young loses 58-38.

On the other hand, the Senate seat is looking quite bad. Democratic candidate Mark Begich is up 51-44 over Ted Stevens. I have heard that Begich’s advisors biggest fear is that Stevens would get out and be replaced by a young, less-crooked Republican. They don’t think that they could beat a generic Republican.

I think that these polls bear a lesson for us. If Republicans are serious about small government, clean government, and reform, we can win. John McCain is showing life in a horrific environment with precisely this formula. And it is working in Alaska. Will anyone in Washington notice?

Earlier, I introduced Jim Johnson, the head of Barack Obama’s vice presidential search team. He is also a lobbyist, operative for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale (is this the change we need?), representative of a former head of state, bundler for the Obama campaign, and disgraced mortgage executive who mistated Fannie Mae profits to get a bigger bonus. Oh yeah.

Today, the NY Sun tells us that he also got sweetheart mortgages from bankrupt (legally, not merely in other ways) mortgage dealer Country Wide Financial:

James Johnson, one of three people tapped by Mr. Obama recently to oversee the search for his running mate, took at least five real estate loans totaling more than $7 million from Countrywide Financial Corp. through an informal program for friends of the company’s CEO, Angelo Mozilo, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

But I am sure that Barack Obama sees nothing wrong with that. After all, he got a subsidy on his own house from now-felon, then-FBI investigation target Tony Rezko.

So next time Barack Obama complains about the Housing crisis, ask him about his Vice Presidential search guy who gets sweetheart deals. Or even about his own sweetheart deals. He hasn’t answered enough questions there only, “like eight questions.” We agree with the Chicago Sun Times that that is not enough.

I have been meaning to write about this for a while, but just haven’t gotten to it. One of the more politically frightening things that I have read recently was Todd Beeton’s write up of SEIU’s Secretary-Treasuer Anna Burger’s speech to the SEIU convention in Puerto Rico two weeks ago. I can’t find the text of the speech anywhere, but Todd has excerpts. It focused on "Card Check" or the "Employee Free Choice Act" which would end the use of secret ballots in the votes to unionize shops. From Beeton:

And the key reason it is so important:

It is the fuel — the opening — for SEIU to change our growth curve from 100,000 to a million or more workers a year.

Which ought to be enough to scare anyone. More union members means more union dues spent on politics. It is clear that the unions get this incremental approach.  Read on after the jump.

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What seems like a minor technical change is actually something that gives them political access to potentially transformational political power. Back to Beeton:

That in itself, Burger argues, makes the Employee Free Choice Act larger than any one single issue, even more important than healthcare.

We are the leaders of the fight for healthcare. We are the biggest healthcare union in our three nations because we fight for it every single day. It’s time that the United States and Perto Rico join our sisters and brothers in Canda and win quality, affordable healthcare for every man, woman and child in 2009!

And:

The passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, Burger argues, will make the difference between incremental change and transformational change, because it will allow the creation of a movement that will not only demand that change, but enable it. So, the Employee Free Choice Act is more important than healthcare because without it, there is no healthcare reform, or at least not the real reform we want and need. Same goes for every other progressive legislation we hope to pass in the post-Bush era.

Imagine a world where five years after the Employee Free Choice Act is signed into law, SEIU is organizing a million or more workers a year and the labor movement has added 20 million members to its ranks. Through the Employee Free Choice Act we’ve built a principled, permanent workers movement that will redefine politics for the next century.

This is permanent majority language. However, when we were talking about permanent majority, we were talking about moving assets into the hands of more Americans. (this is the ownership society that Barack Obama belittles) This vision is about coercively moving more and more Americans into political organizations which use their precious financial resources in a way that they neither control nor even understand.

Given what is likely to happen in the Senate this cycle, this should be taken as dire warning of what an Obama presidency would mean for our society and our economy.

In addition, it is a call to arms both in the 2008 election for Senate seats and the White House, but also for analysis and data collection. The unions and their lackies in the Demcratic party are intent on a path that will destroy our productivity for a significant period of time. We need to document where we are and what happens.

The Madison Project reports that Columbus’s ABC 6 (WSYX) is reporting a poll they commissioned that Fred Dailey is up by double digits over incumbent class-of-2006 Democrat Zack Space. (I can’t find the poll on the site, but Dailey’s site has the screen shots)

According to the poll, Dailey is at 46%, while Space is at 32%.

That would put one district not just in play but seemingly in the GOP column. In any case, help Dailey out.

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Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty lays the smackdown on Virginia Governor Tim Kaine on Barack Obama’s far-left record:
My hunch is that these are two leaders in the VP race. If this is the matchup that we will be looking at, it is going to be fun to watch Pawlenty dismantle Kaine and Obama’s thin and fake record.

I have written some about Rashid Khalidi. Now Hannity is drilling down on the relationship. Watch it: