Auchi connection
New attention is being focused on indirect connections between Iraqi-British billionaire Nadhmi Auchi, who has been tied to illegal activities in Iraq and France, and Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.
Auchi gave at least $10.5 million to Obama fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko, including a payment of $3.5 million that coincided with Obama's purchase in 2005 of a $1.65 million Chicago house, The timing of the payment and the house purchase, along with the purchase of land next door by Mr. Rezko's wife Rita from the same seller, raise questions about whether Auchi helped buy the house.
Bill Burton, a spokesman for Obama, would not answer when asked if Auchi helped buy the senator's house. He said the senator did not recall ever meeting Auchi, who was convicted of corruption charges in France in 2003.
A lawyer for Auchi said that his client is not aware that the money from a company linked to Auchi was used to buy Obama's house. Auchi and Obama had a brief encounter in 2004 at the Four Seasons Hotel in CA 2004. A Pentagon report identified Auchi as a global arms dealer and Iraqi billionaire "who, behind the facade of legitimate business, served as Saddam Hussein's principle international financial manipulator and bag man."
The report to the Pentagon inspector general stated that "significant and credible evidence was developed that a conspiracy was organized by Nadhmi Auchi to offer bribes to 'fix' the awarding of cellular licensing contracts covering three geographic areas of Iraq" under the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority.
"Additionally, significant and credible evidence has been developed that Nadhmi Auchi has engaged in unlawful activities working closely with Iraqi intelligence operatives to:
"Bribe foreign governments and individuals prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom to turn opinion against the American-led mission to remove Saddam Hussein.
• "Arrange for significant theft from the U.N. Oil-for-Food Program to smuggle weapons and dual-use technology into Iraq ....
• "Organize an elaborate scheme to take over and control the post-war cellular phone system in Iraq."
The report suggests Auchi has ties to British intelligence through a 2002 association with a former British intelligence chief, and that British telecommunications companies may have used Auchi to gain access to cellular phone markets in post-invasion Iraq.
Auchi has denied accusations over the cell phone contract.
Auchi gave a $3.5 million loan to Rezko in May 2005 through a Panamanian company linked to the Iraqi expatriate called Fintrade Services SA.
Several weeks after the loan,. Obama purchased a house on Chicago's South Side and Rezko's wife bought an expensive plot of land next to the house from the same seller on the same day. Rezko's wife later sold a 10-foot section of the property to Obama, to add to the Illinois Democrat's garden. In selling the 10ft land to Obama, it made Rezko’s lot unbuildable, thus Obama has a large piece of raw land next to his house that is un-buildable. Obama has called the land purchase a mistake.

How about this one question for Clemens:

"Mr. Clemens, if the physical evidence Mr. McNamee gave the Fed investigators proves that your DNA and HGH were on the syringes and given your testimony under oath today, would you be lying under oath? "

Anabolic steroids were added to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act in the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 1990. You get up to 7 yrs in prison for Schedule III drugs. Other Schedule III drugs are: barbiturates, Hydrocodone, codeine. Though MLB didn't ban steroids until just a few years ago (baseball banned steroids only in 2002, 27 years after the Olympics), MLB doesn't set the laws of the USA-Congress does and Congress decided steroids should be illegal 17yrs ago. If you or I were arrested w/ steroids we would be thrown in jail, not get some small token suspension from our employer - in this case Major League Baseball.

HGH..
These laws are supported by various parts of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and resulted from investigations indicating that people were distributing human growth hormone, a prescription drug, without a prescription. According to law human growth hormone can only be legally administered by a physician as part of the treatment of a disorder for which administration of HGH was indicated. Use of the drug for any other purpose is illegal. If a person is found to be administering prescription HGH with an intent to defraud or mislead, they are subject to a minimum of three years imprisonment in a federal prison. As the proliferation of illegal prescription HGH increased Congress passed two additional laws that were designed to further restrict illegal use and, especially, illegal use by athletes. Congress added wording to include steroids as well. The first Congressional action was an amendment to the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Amendments which became effective on November 18, 1988. The intent here was to make the distribution of anabolic steroids and HGH illegal unless it was both done by order of a licensed physician, and it was for the purpose of treating a disease.
---Chain of custody on the physical evidence will keep it from ever being introduced as evidence in a potential future Clemens perjury trial...but ....

I want him to offer as an explanation that McNamee tampered w/ this evidence… as my last sentence stated , the chain of custody makes this evidence inadmissible…
In other words, besides calling McNamee a "liar” Clemens would have to now call him a criminal for tampering w/ evidence and faking evidence while lying to federal investigators –all crimes. So the public would have to believe this guy would commit these crimes in order to smear Clemens? Not likely… but possible. I just want to pin Clemens down on the importance of testifying under oath…
Or Clemens might just say, I took it and it was a mistake.

Randolph NJ Township Manager John Lovell says that "he thinks they grow some hay on this land"... Unfortunately this answer is no answer, here's why:
Two simple facts:
1. it doesn't matter as the property is NOT exempted under the state's farmland statue;
2. There is nothing being grown there... he is incorrect. However, even if it were true-and it is not, before the property could enjoy low taxes, it would have to have the exemption. It does not. Not according to Morris Country tax records or to the Randolph Tax Assessor.If a property owner does have this exemption, then an inspector visits every year to make sure that the property owner is meeting the requirements of the farmland exemption.
Municipalities value land, thru their assessor's office, the land is then taxed at a rate that is based on that assessed value. This is true for farmland , commercial and residential property. The assessed value of this land $9k is so utterly ridiculously low, that it appears it was first decided by someone to tax it at only a few hundred dollars and then the assessed value was inputted to fit that tax. Almost 70 acres of farmland in Randolph is no way a mere $1mln (that is the exact amount very curiously of the 2004 sales price from "Calais Farms LLC" whoever that is, to Sal Campo's development company) or $9k which is what the town is valuing the land in terms of the tax assessment.By my calculation this 70 acres of land with no negatives to it should be valued at more like $14mln or $15mln or more (~$200k p/acre). Think about it this way: prime real estate in the middle of residential zoning with no roads having to be built, no major construction needed, in Randolph and it sold for only $14k per acre and is assessed by the town at only $128 per acre? It's so ridiculous that no one will be explain this away-not truthfully anyway.

Follow-up...

I spoke to the Randolph Township tax assessor's office today(1). They admit that this property (see below for details) is NOT farmland assessed. They could not explain why this property -almost 70 acres is taxed for only a couple of hundred dollars per year. The office said they think "there might be crop land" on the property. I informed them that nothing is being grown or harvested -neither animals or crops of any kind on this property. Either way, the property does NOT have a farmland exemption anyway. Perhaps at some point years ago there might have been, I can't rule that out, as it was sold by unknown entity called "Calais Road Farms LLC" to Sal Campo's (biggest developer in Randolph) development company "Heritage Farms LLC".
I am left with only one explanation: Occam's Razor: "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best".
In this case the likeliest explanation is summed up in one word: connections
A gift from the town council to the town's biggest developer and largest campaign contributor to the same town council. See below for more details on this gift.
Ah, the circularity of small town politics and business.

(1) Tax Assessor Barbara Gothie, 973-989-7074 http://www.randolphnj.org/townhall/township_directory/

States of Opportunity, WSJ
An old adage says high taxes don't redistribute income, they redistribute people. For new evidence look no further than migration patterns within the United States, as documented in a new survey by the moving company United Van Lines.
A record eight million Americans -- some 20,000 people every day -- relocated to another state last year. So where are these families headed and why? The general picture is this: Americans are continuing to flee the Northeast and Midwest, while the leading destinations continue to be Southern and Western states.
The United Van Lines study finds that the biggest population loser last year was Michigan, where two families moved out of the state for every new family that moved in. Americans are also fleeing New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois. Without interviewing the departed, it's impossible to know the reasons for this outward migration. No doubt overall economic prospects, climate, quality of life and housing prices play a role.
But one reason to conclude that taxes are also a motivator is because the eight states without an income tax are stealing talent from other states. They are Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming, and each one gained in net domestic migrants. Each one except Florida -- which has sky-high property taxes on new homesteaders -- also ranked in the top 12 of destination states. The nearby table ranks the top five destination and departure states.
Politicians who think taxes don't matter might want to explain the Dakotas. North Dakota ranked second worst in out-migration last year, while South Dakota ranked in the top 10 as a destination. The two are similar in most regards, with one large difference: North Dakota has an income tax and South Dakota doesn't.
Here's another example. The only Pacific Coast state to lose migrant population in 2007 was California, which has the highest state income tax in the nation. This is the continuation of a dismal 10-year performance with nearly one and a half million Golden Staters leaving what was once the premier destination state in America.
Meanwhile, next door, Nevada was second among the states in new families -- and a big percentage of the new arrivals are Californians. Nevada has no income tax. High income Californians can buy a house in Las Vegas for the amount of money they save in three or four years by not paying California income taxes.
One of the few Northeastern states that gained interstate migrants in 2007 was New Hampshire, the only state in New England without an income tax. For the exception that proves the tax rule, we should also mention Vermont, a high-tax state with a big net influx last year. Maybe these folks like the Ben & Jerry's lifestyle, and we also hope they like the government they're paying for.
We invite readers to visit the U-Haul Moving Company Web site (www.uhaul.com), where you can type in a pair of U.S. cities to learn what it costs to move from point A to B. If you want to move, say, from Austin, Texas to Southern California, the moving van will cost you $407 to rent. But if you want to move out of California to Austin, the same van costs $1,831. A move from Dallas to Philadelphia costs $663, versus $2,433 to swap homes in the other direction. The biggest discrepancy we could find was $557 from Nashville, Tennessee to Los Angeles, but the trip costs nearly eight times more, or $4,285, to move to Nashville from L.A.
Our friends on the left say Americans are willing to pay more taxes to get better government services, but their migration patterns reveal the opposite. Governors would be wise to heed these interstate migration trends as they try to cope with what may be one of the worst years in recent memory for state finances. The people who tend to be the most mobile in American society are the educated and motivated -- in other words, the taxpaying class. Tax them too much, and you'll soon find they aren't there to tax at all.

How do I get this deal?

Below/attached is the public records of block #49 Lot #3 in Randolph Township, NJ.

Tax records show that it is owned by the biggest developer in the town- “Heritage Village, Inc.” A company owned by developer Sal Campo. The land is flat law land that sits between Doby Rd and Calais Rd, Randolph. The Morris county tax documentation below shows that it is 67.6 acres*[1]in total. It was purchased for a rather strange exact amount of $1,000,000.00 or $14,792 p/acre! An acre of raw land in Randolph, NJ sells for 20x to 50x that amount.

It has an assessed value of only $9,300 and pays a ridiculous amount of taxes of only $273 (2007). Comparable tax records for similiar land shows that this land should have been taxed at 200 times more than it was and continues to be. Importantly, the tax records show it has no deductions or exemptions, like farmland. No one has ever viewed anything being grown on the property as well.
This is outrageous benefit somehow construed on the township’s largest developer who has given thousands of dollars to the Randolph Township town council-all members are Republicans.


[1] According to tax map Block 49 Lot 3 is 67.6 acres while tax records show 57.88. Either way, the land is ridiculously undervalued by both the town and sales data. Raw land is Randolph can NOT be bought for $14k p/acre or $17k p/acre which is the range based on 57.88 to 67.60.

Another reason to say that Jimmy Carter was the worse president ever... his negative effects on the world continue to this day:

The high dollar price of oil, which is imported, is a major driver of Salvadoran inflation. So, too, is the high cost of imported food. El Salvador once had its own vibrant agricultural sector, but agrarian reform imposed by the U.S. during the Carter administration destroyed the large, efficient farm and left rural communities destitute. So at a time when U.S agriculture was consolidating and mechanizing, a model of primitive, postage-stamp farming -- less than 500 hectares per farm -- was forced on El Salvador. Agriculture has never fully recovered

Tall Torture Tales
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri planned the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Abu Zubaydah was the mastermind of the foiled millennium terrorist attacks, which had Los Angeles airport as one of its targets. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed directed the September 11 attacks, and has claimed to have personally beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl.
All three men were captured by the CIA in 2002 and waterboarded in the course of their interrogations. They are also the only U.S. detainees to have been waterboarded. That fact, publicly confirmed yesterday by CIA Director Michael Hayden, shreds whatever is left to the so-called torture narrative, according to which the Bush Administration has engaged in widespread, needless and systematic torture of detainees.
Instead, we have sworn public testimony that the waterboarding was conducted against the three individuals best positioned to know about impending terrorist atrocities. The interrogations took place when a second major terrorist attack was widely seen as inevitable. And we know that the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah helped lead to the capture of KSM, and to the foiling of an active terrorist plot against the United States.
The waterboarding was conducted by intelligence professionals who understood they were operating not only with the approval of the Justice Department but also the informed consent of key Congressional leaders, including Democrat Jay Rockefeller, then the ranking minority Member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
In his own testimony yesterday, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell refused to rule out the use of waterboarding in the future, though he said it would have to be approved by the President and Attorney General. To the extent that his comments provide a measure of uncertainty to terrorist detainees who might otherwise think they have nothing to fear from their captors, this helps make us safer.