No Runny Eggs

Jim Geraghty kicked it off by asking why Barack Obama would “overpay” Rita Rezko (Tony’s wife, and yes, THAT Tony) $64,000 for a strip of land on a vacant property she owned next to his Chicago home. Headless Blogger jumped on it and asked why Rezko would “overpay” the previous owner of both parcels $384,000 for that piece of vacant land. I burned much of last night trying to do some digging through both the City of Chicago’s online GIS map and the Cook County Assessor’s office website to see what could be discerned from that.

First, I have to thank Headless for refreshing my memory on some of the specifics of the same-day purchases by Obama and Rezko:

• There are actually 3 parcels involved; two listed by the Cook County Assessor’s office as 5046 S. Greenwood Ave. (the house Obama purchased and an outlot behind the house and garage containing a second, small house also presumably purchased by Obama), and one listed as 5050 S. Greenwood (the vacant lot purchased by Rezko). At that time, the “main” 5046 parcel was about 10,400 square feet and the 5050 parcel was about 9,600 square feet (side note; CBS2Chicago said that it was 7,500 feet; guess they didn’t check city records too closely).
• The previous owner of all 3 parcels was looking to sell them all for $2.575 million. On the same day in June 2005, Obama purchased the two parcels at 5046 for $1.65 million ($300,000 less than the asking price), while Rezko bought the 5050 parcel for $625,000 (the full asking price).
• In January 2006, Obama bought 1/6th of the 5050 parcel from Rezko (about 1,600 square feet) for $104,000 (precisely 1/6th of what Rezko paid for it) despite it being appraised at only $40,500.
• That purchase not only increased the “main” 5046 parcel size to its current 12,047 square feet and reduced the 5050 parcel to 8,002 square feet, but it caused the combined 5046 southern property line to “jog” south (so much for the claim that he was trying to “balance” the property lines).

Now, the “why”s. Do bear in mind that this is complete speculation, but I suspect that Obama wanted the entire parcel, but didn’t yet have the ability to come up with $2.275 million (the total amount paid to the previous owner). He got his friend Tony Rezko to have his wife buy the vacant parcel with the understanding that he would pay her back as the additional money from his new job as US Senator came in by buying pieces of the parcel and attaching them to his property. That scheme fell apart after Tony was indicted on federal corrpution charges in October, 2006.

I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know whether that scheme violated federal law, Illinois law or Senate ethics rules in addition to smelling as bad as Jones Island after a 3-day rain. However, I do know that, had a Wisconsin politician participated in that scheme, he or she would have faced at a minimum a criminal investigation and likely prosecution.

Revisions/extensions (10:58 am 6/6/2008) – Some more info from a March 2008 article in the Chicago Tribune (H/T – Headless):

The house and the adjoining yard had been owned as a single property, but the owners were listing them separately and asking $1.95 million for the house and $625,000 for the landscaped side lot.

Obama disclosed Friday that someone else already had an option to buy the garden lot. But he said Rezko took over that option after Rezko learned Obama was bidding for the house. Obama said he knew next to nothing about those transactions and does not recall when he learned that Rezko was interested in buying the side lot- or even how Rezko learned it was for sale….

At some point before the property sales closed, Obama toured the home with Rezko for 15 to 30 minutes. Obama said he asked Rezko to assess the property because he was a real estate developer in the area. “He said, ‘I’d be willing to go inside and take a look,’ ” Obama recalled….

Rezko later sold the rest of the lot to one of his former attorneys, who now has it listed for more than $900,000. “It appears,” Obama said, “a sale is about to be consummated.”

Curiouser and curiouser.

I suppose, with both halves of the Presidential ticket now set, now is as good a time as any to outline the three choices conservatives have with regard to John McCain. I will say out front that I am still undecided on which course I will personally take because all three choices involve the highest of risks with at best a minimal chance of a reward, and I cannot yet see which course offers the better chance of reward.

First, we have to understand how we got where we are. The Republican National Committee and its leadership, from President Bush on down, has made its goal the supplanting of conservatives with moderates as its “base”. While the state parties didn’t quite follow the script as far as the Presidential nomination is concerned, they got the message to promote moderate-to-liberal candidates to the mutual exclusion of conservative ones loud and clear. The folly of that achieved goal is something that deserves its own post, but in case that post slips into the memory hole, I’ll state that there are far more conservatives that can be and are being turned off than there are moderates that can reasonably be expected to become part of the party.

Further, their apparent strategy continues to be “Dem Lite”, with but a couple of not-overwhelmingly-popular differences between the two flavors of what I term the bipartisan Party-In-Government in the forms of the War on Terror and socialism-lite versus socialism-heavy. Again, an expansion on those points is something left to its own thread.

So, what now? The first option is to say, “Screw McCain and the RNC this year; let the RNC come back to me.” That will undoubtedly, even with concentration on individual Congressional races, give the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in Congress. I may not have a lot of memories of the Carter administration, but those that I do have are uniformly bad. Further, I do believe we tried that in 2006, and look at what it got us even with but one statewide/Congressional “R” pickup (Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen) and a whole host of “R” losses.

On the flip side, the RNC will, in all likelyhood, finally understand that they can’t win without conservatives. Of course, if McCain does beat Barack Obama under this scenario, we are truly a group without a home.

The second, related option is to say, “Screw McCain and the RNC; I’m doing a third party.” I strongly believe that it would kill the Republican Party, which in a vacuum would not necessarily be a bad thing. However, we aren’t in a vacuum, and the Democrats have spent the last 75 years preparing for the destruction of the Republican Party. I doubt they’ll make the same mistakes as they did after killing the Federalists in the 1810s and the Whigs in the 1850s and allow either one of the current fringe third-parties or a brand new party to take root.

Also, in the lag time between the mass exodus and the final twitches, I doubt we’ll get a lot of support from the conservatives that have really hitched their wagons to the GOP structure.

The third option is to say, “I’ll swallow the bitter pill and don my noseplugs for McCain so I can get a chance of a seat at the table.” That is generally how politics works. However, once again, we tried that in 1988, 2000, and 2004, and look at what it got us; a party that voted for the largest (in absolute dollars) expansion of welfare in the history of the country, a party that continues to push for amnesty for 20 million illegal aliens in the face of 80% opposition, a party that has adopted the Gorebal Warming line of Bravo Sierra in the face of collapsing scientific support, and a party that is increasingly hostile to conservatives, now going so far as to support center-left candidates to the mutual exclusion of conservative ones for open Congressional seats.

Moreover, McCain is not as accomodating toward conservatives as Bush. Even if we delivered for him, I doubt he’ll even give us the lip service Bush did.