In 1996, Biden sold a home in Greenville for the asking price of $1.2 million — more than six times what he paid two decades earlier — to John R. Cochran III, a top executive at the MBNA credit card bank that was a longtime political benefactor.
Using profits from that sale, Biden paid $350,000 cash to real estate executive and developer Keith D. Stoltz for 4.2 vacant acres — a long, narrow lot a few miles from Biden’s old home. Stoltz had bought that same lot five years earlier for the same price.
Stephen Pyle, who sold the land to Stoltz in 1991, said he was surprised that Stoltz, who lived on a neighboring estate, did not make any profit selling to Biden. “That doesn’t sound like Keith Stoltz,” Pyle, an artist who now lives in Texas, said of Stoltz, whose company recently proposed a $525 million project at nearby Barley Mill Plaza, a former DuPont Co. office campus.
Cochran did not return numerous calls for this article.
It’s unlikely the national media will jump on this story, even though it comes from a mainstream daily newspaper. They’re too busy reacting to DailyKos smear theories, including that Sarah Palin cheated to win the Miss Wasilla Pageant, that she had an affair with her husband’s business partner, that she burned books at the local library, and probably that she clubbed harp seals for fun and profit in her spare time.
I spend a lot of time criticizing the mainstream media because they deserve it. Instances of class are so rare they are almost startling. Here are two:
• Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn, who on Aug. 29 knee-jerkily joined most of the mainstream media in slandering Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s parenting skills and her ability to do the job of vice president with five children, has apologized for her comments. On “The O’Reilly Factor” last night, Quinn had this to say (emphasis added):
You pointed out the other night that you thought I was being unfair and that I had judged her before I heard her speak and that I knew anything about her and I think you were right. I thought that she was amazing in her speech. She was funny and smart and poised and confident and she gave a great speech, beautifully delivered, and I think she is going to be a formidable opponent. So all of that, I think I was wrong about her. And I didn’t know anything about her.
Well, good for her. My respect for Quinn went up a few notches last night.
• Dan Barkin of The News & Observer did something today that no one in the mainstream media has done. He wrote a column pointing out that being a mayor is actually a very demanding job. Rather than joining his MSM colleagues in immediately denigrating Sarah Palin’s years as a smalltown mayor, Barkin used his first-hand observations of his own mayor, Jody McLeod of Clayton, to come to this conclusion:
There are thousands of Jody McLeods around the country, more of them running small towns than big cities. They have a substantial day-to-day impact on their residents. I’d swap 535 of them chosen at random for the incumbents in Congress and expect results that wouldn’t be worse and might be better.
The pundits are having fainting spells about Sarah Palin’s resume, but mayors do learn how to listen to the people and get stuff done.
Iowahawk got a community organizer to tell what he does. Here’s the job description:
Specifically, America’s community organizers:
* reach out and work with communities in various ways.
* liaison with, and for, community agencies for service within affected areas.
* fight to make a difference.
* raise awareness.
* deal with community issues.
* raise awareness in the community of how we are making differences about undealt-with issues .
* when necessary, refer inquiries to outreach coordinators.
* Help coordination agency administrators identify and address outreach opportunities.
* model timetables and conceptualize benchmarks.
* issue guidelines for poster contests and interpretive dance festivals.
* Gather voter registrations, win valuable prizes.
Sounds like it was taken from one of the lefty listservs in Durham. And he adds:
I am also proud to report that my outreach efforts have also helped get local disadvantaged youths involved in the community through politics. We met with local elected officials and showed them how successful programs piloted by ACORN in Chicago and Milwaukee could be adapted to keep local youths off the streets. The result is CFBH’s wildly popular Beer and Smokes for Votes program.
The Barack Obama/Columbia mystery gets more interesting. Here’s Libertarian vice presidential candidate Wayne Allyn Root, member of the same class with the same major as Obama, according to Obama’s bio. Root says no one, no one at all, in his class remembers Obama being at Columbia:
Class of ‘83 political science, pre-law Columbia University. You don’t get more exact than that. Never met him in my life, don’t know anyone who ever met him. At the class reunion, our 20th reunion five years ago, 20th reunion, who was asked to be the speaker of the class? Me. No one ever heard of Barack! Who was he, and five years ago, nobody even knew who he was.
Now, this could very well be the kind of conspiracy theory that blows up in this guy’s face, like the one on the lefty blogs about Todd Palin’s former business partner supposedly sealing his divorce records because he had had an affair with Sarah Palin. Turns out, not that at all. He did it, ironically, to keep the lefty kooks and mainstream media from invading his privacy.
MORE: Root also wonders how Obama got into Harvard Law School if no one can even remember him coming to class. Investor’s Business Daily points out that he had someone running interference for him with Harvard, a man with close Saudi ties. This is not speculation, by the way, unlike the made-up “facts” the MSM and lefty blogs are turning out on Sarah Palin. Will the MSM put as much investigative energy into the Obama-Saudi connection as they did to the Trig-is-not-Bristol’s-baby hoax?
The born can at least vote and write letters to the editor. The unborn can only kick, squirm, and wonder whether Mommy grants them vacuum suction or life.
As an ex-fetus, in this predicament I’d like a pitbull on my side.
When two gunmen smashed through the glass front door of her suburban Fort Worth home, Kellie Hoehn didn’t think twice.
The 34-year-old mother of two grabbed a shotgun that had been pointed at her face early Wednesday, starting a struggle that ended with one intruder killed with his own weapon and another in the hospital.
“I wasn’t going to let them get to my babies,” she said, recalling the moment when she pushed up the muzzle of the shotgun, pointing it away from her children’s rooms.
A story in The New York Times characterized Sarah Palin’s speech Thursday as “electrifying.” That kind of candor from the NYT surprised blogger Patterico, so he posted on the unusual event:
I gotta get a new hearing aid. Could you just say that one more time? I heard “the potential power of Ms. Palin’s something something speech . . .” What was that word again?
Did the New York Times just call Sarah Palin’s speech “electrifying”?
And did I just read that Obama is going to fight all of this energy and electricity by . . . hiding behind some womens’ skirts?
His hopes that the NYT had changed its ways were dashed a bit later, though, when the word “electrifying” was stricken from the story and the headline was changed from “Obama to Dispatch Female Surrogates” to “Obama Camp Turns to Clinton to Counter Palin.”
Patterico also asks a very good question: “Why is it ‘Mrs. Clinton’ but ‘Ms. Palin’?”
A new poll by Rasmussen Reports clearly illustrates that the majority of Americans believe Supreme Court decisions should be based on the Constitution and precedent. See question #2. Remember this the next time someone tries to tell you that Justice Thomas, Scalia, Roberts or Alito is an extremist.
Sen. Barack Obama was in Pennsylvania today and mentioned Penn State’s “Nittaly Lions.” Any casual follower of college football knows it’s Nittany Lions.
This gaffe can’t help but make voters think of candidate John Kerry saying in 2004 that the Green Bay Packers played at “Lambert” instead of Lambeau Field.
I’m not a big Brokaw fan, and he’s said some really incredible things about media bias in the past. But his instant analysis of the Thursday night GOP convention speeches leading up to Sarah Palin’s appearance show that the man has some real — and objective — journalistic chops. Too bad the same can’t be said of the two guys he was sitting with, Keith Olbermann and Brian Williams. Here’s Brokaw on McCain:
And we all said, and so did his admirers within the party, that he was toast. But he fought his way back. I have been thinking about him today and I think probably the most apt metaphor for this old Navy aviator, is that he is a pilot of the old school.
He doesn‘t like flying in formation. He flies dogfights as they did in World War II, Pappy Boyington and Joe Foss. And John McCain likes to engage in that kind of combat. And that‘s what we see here, tonight. It‘s very improvisational and it could work, just like the selection of Sarah Palin appeared to be more improvisational than well thought out.
Olbermann was speechless at Brokaw’s tour de force, off-the-cuff, objective analysis, the kind we used to get from the network anchors. Read his full remarks here.
