Gadhafi Surrounded In Tripoli Claims Minister! Countdown To His Capture & Trial! Loyalists Too!

Libyan Minister: Gaddafi Surrounded

A minister in Libya's National Transitional Council said on Friday rebel forces were surrounding an area of Tripoli where Muammar Gaddafi and his entourage were hiding and were monitoring their presence before attempting to capture them.

"The area where he is now is under siege," Justice Minister Mohammed al-Alagi told Reuters. "The rebels are monitoring the area and they are dealing with it."

Alagi, a lawyer who said he had come to Tripoli to establish the new "legal authority" declined to specify where Gaddafi was.

Other rebel officials have said they believe the fallen strongman has taken refuge in the Abu Salim area in the south of the capital -- an area that saw clashes in recent days.
Rebel fighters have said earlier this week that they thought they had Gaddafi cornered but these reports have turned out to be inaccurate, or at least premature.






Rebels in Libya work to rub out loyalist pockets

Opposition and NATO forces took aim at the Gadhafi regime in Tripoli and Sirte on Friday as rebels worked to consolidate their power across strife-torn Libya.

British warplanes pounded a "large headquarters bunker" overnight in Moammar Gadhafi's hometown of Sirte, the UK Defence Ministry said on Friday. Tornado aircraft fired a salvo of precision-guided missiles into the city, east of Tripoli on the central coast.

The opposition says its forces made late gains on Thursday as it closed in on Sirte, and clashes flared on Friday in that region, considered by fighters as a hot war zone.

Tornado aircraft destroyed one of Gadhafi's "few remaining long range surface to air missile systems, near Al Watiyah, close to the Tunisian border on Thursday, the ministry said.

The ministry said Tornados and Typhoons destroyed a loyalist-held command and control site in the Tripoli area, also on Thursday. Britain is part of NATO's mission to enforce a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for the protection of Libyan people against Gadhafi regime forces.

As for the airport, rebels said they controlled the facility, but were struggling to secure an area east of it controlled by Gadhafi loyalists.

They claim Gadhafi loyalists have been indiscriminately shelling the airport from a civilian village east of the facility in an effort to repel the advance of rebel forces. Rebels say they are cautious in their response to the incoming fire because of the civilian casualties.

One aircraft burned as loyalists resumed mortar and Grad rocket shelling of the airport, according to a CNN team that witnessed the attack.

This comes amid world concerns over revenge killings by rebels and loyalists.

Amnesty International has gathered accounts from survivors of abuse in Zawiya by pro-Gadhafi soldiers and rebel forces. It also issued a report on Friday about the killings of detainees in Tripoli by Gadhafi loyalists.

Evidence emerged of executions in the battle for Tripoli.

A dozen bodies, with their hands bound behind them, were discovered near Gadhafi's compound in Tripoli where fierce fighting erupted Thursday.

Rebels at the scene told CNN they had been executed by Gadhafi's men, but it was not immediately clear. The victims were black Africans, who composed a large part of Gadhafi's army.

The discovery of the bodies came a day after a doctor at a Tripoli hospital told CNN that he had examined a number of dead rebels who appeared to have been executed with a bullet to the head.

On the political front, the opposition National Transitional Council has announced it is moving its political base to Tripoli from its strong in Benghazi in eastern Libya.

Libya's rebel leadership on Friday pleaded urgently with the United States and other countries to unfreeze billions of dollars, saying the funds are vital to establish peace and stability in the nation.

"Our friends throughout the world are talking about the procedures needed to bring back peace and stability," Mahmoud Jibril, a senior NTC leader, told reporters at an international conference in Turkey. But we cannot do that unless we can fulfill our duties."

His call for funds came a day after the U.N. Security Council's sanctions committee approved a U.S. request to free up $1.5 billion of the at least $100 billion in Libyan assets frozen at the start of the war.

The National Transitional Council has been recognized by nations and alliances across the globe. The Peace and Security Council of the African Union failed to do so at a Friday meeting.

Neverthless, the council issued a communique that urged the "formation of an inclusive transitional government."

It called for the "establishment of a constitutional and legislative framework for the democratic transformation of Libya, as well as for support towards the organization of elections and the national reconciliation process."

It encouraged "the Libyan stakeholders to accelerate the process leading to the formation of an all-inclusive transitional government that would be welcome to occupy the seat of Libya in the AU, which represents countries across Africa.


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Sources: Al Jazeera News, CNN, Daily Beast, PBS News, Youtube, Google Maps

Gov. Paterson's Aide Under Scrutiny; More Dirty, Racist Attacks

Paterson Aide’s Quick Rise Draws Scrutiny


David W. Johnson has worked for Gov. David A. Paterson for much of his adult life. He began as a young, ambitious intern from Harlem when Mr. Paterson was a state legislator. He rose to be Mr. Paterson’s driver, serving as a kind of protector and scheduler.

In recent months, however, Mr. Johnson’s ascent has been striking: he is now one of the most senior people in the governor’s administration, paid $132,000. He is described as Mr. Paterson’s closest confidant, a man with a designated room for his overnight stays in the Executive Mansion, and a broadening role in areas like campaign strategy, government initiatives and the management of the governor’s staff.

A review of Mr. Johnson’s rise and his history, undertaken after he emerged as perhaps the man closest to the state’s chief executive, shows that he was twice arrested on felony drug charges as a teenager, including a charge of selling cocaine to an undercover officer in Harlem.

The examination of his background, based on interviews and records, shows he has at least one other arrest, for misdemeanor assault in the 1990s, although there is very little publicly available about that case.

In a statement, Mr. Paterson noted how long ago the drug arrests had happened. “David Johnson has demonstrated, over the course of his adult life, that people can change their personal circumstances and achieve success when given a second chance,” he said. “I will not turn my back on someone because of mistakes made as a teenager.”

Mr. Johnson, 37, has also on three occasions been involved in altercations with women, two of which led to calls to the police. As recently as October, the police responded to a complaint of harassment at a Bronx address of a woman involved with him. It is unclear if the altercation was verbal or physical or both, but the case is listed as closed.

In 2001, when Mr. Paterson was a state senator, Mr. Johnson, according to a person who was present, punched a girlfriend outside the senator’s Harlem office. No arrest resulted, and Mr. Johnson, through a spokesman for the governor, said that he never touched the woman, that she had come to the office inappropriately and that she had been asked to leave by others. He declined recent requests for interviews.

The woman involved, who insisted on anonymity, said in a recent interview that Mr. Johnson had gotten violent with her in the episode. She said she did not file a formal report, but said she had filed an earlier domestic violence complaint to the police about Mr. Johnson. She declined to offer evidence of that.

A spokesman for Mr. Paterson said Mr. Johnson underwent a standard background check by the State Police in 2008, which found no criminal record. Regarding the October incident, the spokesman, Peter E. Kauffmann, said, “The governor looked into the matter, and the complaint has been withdrawn.” He said Mr. Paterson planned no further inquiry into Mr. Johnson’s history.

Mr. Paterson has made domestic violence a key issue in his career; when he was lieutenant governor, it was among his signature causes. In 2008, just a few months after taking office as governor, he signed a major expansion of New York’s domestic violence law to allow judges to issue civil protection orders against people in dating relationships, in addition to those who are married.

Last October, two weeks before the episode involving Mr. Johnson and the Bronx woman, Mr. Paterson opened a campaign to raise awareness about domestic violence, gathering with advocates for a lighting ceremony at the Empire State Building.

He has also become increasingly vocal in his criticism of former Senator Hiram Monserrate, who was convicted of misdemeanor assault last fall for dragging his companion down the hallway of his apartment building. On Friday, the governor praised the Senate’s move to expel Mr. Monserrate and spoke at length about the pressures that victims of domestic violence face from their batterers.

“This seemed like a classic case of a woman who was intimidated, who didn’t really understand what her independence could be, and was victimized,” he said of the Monserrate case, adding, “The reality is that it’s really just a prelude to another attack, in many instances.”




Part of Inner Circle

Mr. Johnson’s increasing prominence, and Mr. Paterson’s reliance on him, have worried some veteran aides to the governor, who themselves are trying to assist Mr. Paterson as he faces an enormous fiscal crisis and a daunting election effort. They would not speak by name, but more than four current or former officials expressed concern that Mr. Johnson and another aide, a former state trooper, had become the governor’s innermost circle and were simply not best equipped to help him tackle the multiple challenges facing him.

Some heads of significant government agencies have said they feel they have to go through Mr. Johnson, often known as D. J., to get to the governor. And several current and former administration officials said that Mr. Johnson’s dressing down of the governor’s Washington office in September contributed to the departure of several seasoned people from the office.

“I started getting messages from D. J. telling me to call certain players in my industry,” said one former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing the governor.

Mr. Johnson, the official said, started to manage administration press conferences, dictating the order and seating of speakers and calling agencies to request they draft statements on particular issues.

“We were all quite surprised about D. J. taking more of a policy role,” another former official said. “It seemed like it was a long way to come in a short period of time for a guy who had been the governor’s wing man.”

Recently, the role evolved further, as Mr. Johnson began shaping campaign strategy.

Bill Lynch, one of the governor’s longtime political strategists, said that he talked campaign strategy with Mr. Johnson and that it had been Mr. Johnson’s idea to hold a series of community conversations in New York City late last year.

Asked what made Mr. Johnson qualified to be involved in campaign strategy, Mr. Lynch said: “I don’t know much about his history other than his working for the governor. But as far as I’m concerned, his instincts on these campaign things are good, if not damn near perfect.”

Assemblyman Keith L. T. Wright, a Harlem Democrat, said of Mr. Johnson: “I look at him as a gatekeeper. I actually think he’s done pretty well.

“He’s been with David for years. He is a good filter for David. David trusts him. And his influence has grown.”

Mr. Paterson first hired Mr. Johnson as an intern in 1999. His role, according to a co-worker from those days, was to be an advance man and to perform constituent services. He worked only about 10 hours a week but was considered “gung-ho,” the co-worker said, always volunteering to attend town-hall-style meetings and the like. He graduated from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2002.

“He wanted to be in the mix,” the co-worker said, “and because he was from Harlem, he had a natural connection with people there.”

An Imposing Figure

Mr. Johnson, the colleague said, was also valued because of the imposing figure he cast. At 6-foot-7, with a booming voice, he made Mr. Paterson, who is legally blind, feel secure, and so he was often scheduled to travel with him.

Mr. Johnson also helped keep people in line on those occasions when a troublesome constituent threatened to raise a ruckus in the Harlem office.

“Every now and then it was good to have a big guy in the office,” the colleague said.

Mr. Johnson eventually became Mr. Paterson’s driver, and at that point their relationship was further cemented.

“When you’re going back and forth to Albany a few times a week, once you get past Exit 17, you’re spending a lot of time alone with the other person in that car and you’re going to talk,” the colleague said.

Mr. Johnson’s first known arrest was in 1989 when he was 16; he was handled as a youthful offender, and the records sealed.

Two years later, when he was 18, he was arrested on drug charges, this time after selling crack cocaine to an undercover officer, according to people with knowledge of the episode.

The arrest by a 23rd Precinct officer occurred on the corner of Madison Avenue and East 107th Street, about a block from his mother’s apartment. It led to his indictment five days later on a single count of criminal possession of a controlled substance in the third degree with intent to sell, a felony for which he could have received up to 25 years in prison, the people with knowledge of the episode said.

Three months later, he pleaded guilty to a lesser felony, attempted criminal sale of a controlled substance in the third degree, a felony with a maximum of 15 years; he was sentenced to five years of probation, which a law enforcement official said he completed without incident. Mr. Johnson was treated as a youthful offender, and the records of the case were sealed.

Mr. Johnson’s disputed encounters with women came to involve at least one senior aide to Mr. Paterson in 2001. Woody Pascal, then Mr. Paterson’s chief of staff, interrupted the altercation between Mr. Johnson and the woman who was then his girlfriend outside the Harlem office. Mr. Pascal said he offered the woman counseling.

“Mr. Johnson and a companion had some kind of dispute, and I broke it up,” Mr. Pascal said in an interview. “I sent Mr. Johnson in one direction, and I counseled her, and that was the end of the dispute.”

The police were not called.

The woman said Mr. Pascal “handled it all.”

She said she had filed a police report against Mr. Johnson for domestic violence before the episode outside Mr. Paterson’s office, but nothing ever happened to him.

“It was a long time ago,” she said. “They didn’t take things as seriously back then.”

Mr. Paterson’s office encouraged The New York Times to speak to Deneane Brown, a woman it said had been present for the episode.

Ms. Brown, who now works for the State Department of Housing and Community Renewal, said she saw a brief part of what she described as a heated argument, or lover’s spat, but no violence. She said she had remained friends with Mr. Johnson.

“If there had been anything violent, I’m trained in domestic violence, so I would have had a duty to file a report,” she said.

Deemed a Dating Dispute

Asked last week about the episode, Mr. Paterson said he was not aware of it. But the governor recalled a separate episode involving Mr. Johnson and a woman, which he said also occurred in 2001, where the police were called.

In Mr. Paterson’s description, Mr. Johnson was having a dispute with a woman he was dating, and he visited her home. When he arrived, the police were there and spoke to him.

He said Mr. Johnson told him of the episode when Mr. Paterson was about to become lieutenant governor on Jan. 1, 2007, because his staff members would be subject to background checks.

“I asked him, Was there an arrest? ‘No.’ Was there a complaint? ‘No,’ ” Mr. Paterson recalled. “There was nothing. So it just sounded to me like an argument between two people.”

The governor said he was aware that Mr. Johnson might have had another problematic encounter with a girlfriend last October in the Bronx. He described it, essentially, as a bad breakup.

Interviews with people who have been briefed on the police report indicate that the police responded at 9:50 p.m. on Halloween night, and that the dispute involved the woman’s costume and whether Mr. Johnson had torn it off her or menaced her further. Mr. Johnson was gone, the interviews suggest, by the time the police arrived.

The woman, in a brief interview this month, said that there had been an incident and that she had not seen Mr. Johnson since. She would not comment further.

Asked whether Mr. Johnson’s history had been considered before his most recent promotion, to director of executive services — he received a raise of $23,850 — Mr. Paterson said: “Obviously, it was a breakup. They know a number of people in common, and it just sounded like breakups you hear about all the time.”

Mr. Paterson also said that Mr. Johnson had grown significantly over the years and that he did not believe that Mr. Johnson had problems with women.

“In D. J.’s case, other than, you know, that he had broken up with a few women that he went out with, I have not found him to be that kind of person,” the governor said.

Referring to the October episode, he added: “I think in anybody’s history, you can come up with a couple incidents where they acted improperly. And this may, and I accentuate may, have been one of them.”


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Sources: NY Times, CNN, Google Maps

Obama White House Throwing Loyalists Under The Bus...Clean Gov't, "Restructuring" Or Ruthlessness?

PRES. OBAMA ON ACORN: NOT SOMETHING I'M FOLLOWING CLOSELY

On ABC, George Stephanopoulos pressed President Obama on the recent controversy surrounding the community group ACORN. Here's the full exchange:

STEPHANOPOULOS: How about the funding for ACORN?

PRES. OBAMA: You know, if -- frankly, it's not really something I've followed closely. I didn't even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Both the Senate and the House have voted to cut it off.

PRES. OBAMA: You know, what I know is, is that what I saw on that video was certainly inappropriate and deserves to be investigated.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you're not committing to -- to cut off the federal funding?

PRES. OBAMA: George, this is not the biggest issue facing the country. It's not something I'm paying a lot of attention to.




The Boys Under the Bus


White House Counsel Greg Craig was just the latest Obama loyalist to be sacrificed for political expediency. Lloyd Grove tallies up the body count so far.


Presidents of the United States—all presidents—tend to adopt a clinically utilitarian view of the people who serve them. They burn through their staffs like rocket fuel, a White House observer once noted. In his readiness to discard underlings who are no longer useful to him, or otherwise have passed their sell-by dates, Barack Obama is no different from his predecessors. But he’s arguably more unsentimental than most about the unpleasant necessity of throwing friends and allies under the bus.

As Jacob Weisberg wrote recently in Slate, “Obama has a healthy disdain for the overrated virtue of political loyalty… If you're useful, you can hang around with him. If you start to look like a liability, enjoy your time with the wolves…The president is catlike also in his lack of evident affection for the people who take care of him.” Certainly he’s no Bill Clinton—whose eyes were apt to well up while his lower lip trembled, occasionally punctuated by a consoling hug, as he did what had to be done.

Defenestrated White House Counsel Gregory Craig—a crucial early supporter of Obama’s long-shot candidacy, who became a lightning rod for critics of White House efforts to close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—is only the latest loyalist to be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. He surely won’t be the last.

Herewith, The Daily Beast’s official scorecard of the body count so far:


GREGORY CRAIG

The 64-year-old Craig was a Washington wise man, having enjoyed a stellar career in politics, policy, and the law before President Obama tapped him to be his top legal adviser in the White House. A partner at the powerhouse firm of Williams & Connolly, Craig had been a trusted aide and confidante of Sen. Ted Kennedy, a top policymaker in Bill Clinton’s State Department and ultimately Clinton’s impeachment lawyer before he became enthralled by the freshman senator from Illinois. Craig’s early support lent Obama’s presidential ambition a degree of Washington street cred that it might otherwise have lacked. Indeed, Craig’s support was one of the factors that led to Kennedy’s game-changing endorsement. On Friday—after months of toxic leaks to the press from anonymous White House aides questioning Craig’s handling of politically sensitive Guantanamo Bay matters, among others—he was forced to resign in humiliating fashion. The president, on his way to Asia, issued an anodyne statement of thanks and appreciation, but the damage to Craig’s reputation was done.


CASSANDRA BUTTS

A close friend of the president’s from Harvard Law School, Butts was at least afforded a soft landing when she was removed Nov. 6 as deputy White House counsel—a week before Greg Craig’s forced resignation. Butts was named to the wordy post of “senior adviser in the office of the chief executive officer at the Millennium Challenge Corporation”—compared to the West Wing, a governmental backwater—with the vague mission of “combating global poverty.”


JAMES A. JOHNSON

When he was at the height of his power in the mid-1990s, former Democratic political operative and Walter Mondale aide Jim Johnson was nicknamed “Chairman of the Universe.” He simultaneously ran the Brookings Institution, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the home mortgage behemoth Fannie Mae. He was a pillar of the Washington establishment who had gotten rich in business while becoming a generous philanthropist. Johnson was frequently touted as a potential Treasury secretary in a future Democratic administration—probably the Obama administration. It looked like all-systems-go in June 2008 when the freshly victorious candidate promptly tapped his loyal supporter to lead his vice-presidential vetting team—the sensitive, all-important task of assessing prospective running mates. And then, just as quickly—after press reports of low-interest personal loans Johnson had obtained as a friend of embattled Countrywide mortgage chief Angelo Mozilo—Obama kicked him to the curb.


TOM DASCHLE

The former Senate Majority Leader—who lost his 2004 reelection bid in South Dakota—was national co-chairman of the Obama campaign, a key policy adviser, especially on health-care reform, and a savvy surrogate on the Sunday talk shows. When Obama’s nomination of Daschle to be secretary of Health and Human Services encountered stormy weather over his nonpayment of income taxes—and acceptance of free chauffeured limousine services, embarrassingly enough—nobody blamed the president for pulling the plug. (Daschle paid back many of the taxes, but reports suggested others remain unpaid, and a spokesperson suggested the acceptance of the free limo service was “naïve.) Some old Washington hands were rattled by Obama’s cold-eyed bluntness. “I screwed up,” the president said about the abortive nomination, over and over, in a series of television interviews on the day that Daschle was forced to withdraw.


NANCY KILLEFER

Along with Daschle’s dashed nomination, the president forced the withdrawal of business consultant Nancy Killefer, a McKinsey & Co. executive whom he had picked, with great fanfare, to be deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget while also filling the brand new role of chief performance officer in the White House. “Today was an embarrassment for us,” Obama told NBC after Killefer acknowledged a $946.69 tax lien from the District of Columbia government. It didn’t matter that she had resolved the problem years earlier; she was toast.


VAN JONES

A Yale-educated lawyer and environmental activist, as well as an ardent Obama campaign supporter, Jones was given the nominally low-profile job of White House special adviser on "green" jobs. But some intemperate statements from his past (such as “Republicans are assholes”) and ill-advised associations from his flirtation with radical politics (such as his apparent sympathy with 9/11 conspiracy theorists) provoked withering attacks on Jones and Obama from Fox News star Glenn Beck and a host of Republican office-holders. The White House let Jones fend for himself; in September he was finally forced out of his job, complaining in his resignation letter of “a vicious smear campaign against me.”


STEVE RATTNER & RICK WAGONER

After Obama tapped Steve Rattner to restructure the foundering automobile industry in February, the New York financier and Democratic fundraiser quickly shook up General Motors and Chrysler, and helped orchestrate the resignation of GM Chief Executive Rick Wagoner as that company coped with bankruptcy proceedings. With Rattner’s goals as car czar largely achieved, he reportedly had hoped to secure other Washington assignments. But the president let him leave under a cloud in July when New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo was reported to be pursuing a civil investigation into the public pension fund management business of Rattner’s Quadrangle Group.


CREIGH DEEDS

Although he had no prior relationship with the president—and, indeed, had thought it prudent to assert his independence from the Obama White House—state Senator Creigh Deeds was the 2009 Democratic nominee for governor of Virginia. The current governor, Tim Kaine, was a close friend of the president and his hand-picked chairman of the Democratic National Committee. And yet, as Deeds’ campaign started to falter, Obama’s top aides in the White House were not reluctant to trash him—to the contrary, they unloaded to The Washington Post, two weeks before the Nov. 4 election, about all the mistakes Deeds had made in the race, and how Obama couldn’t and shouldn’t be blamed for Deeds’ inevitable defeat.


DAVID PATERSON

Even the many detractors of New York’s embattled governor were surprised when the president’s operatives—led by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and political director Patrick Gaspard—actively attempted to push David Paterson to drop out of next year’s election campaign. They were aghast that anonymous “administration officials” boasted about their efforts in a front-page story in The New York Times. “Butt out,” Harlem Rep. Charlie Rangel advised the Obama White House. So far Paterson has steadfastly refused to assume the presidentially approved position, under the bus.


ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI & ROBERT MALLEY

Zbigniew Brzezinski—Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser and a gray eminence in the foreign-policy establishment—gave a big and early lift to Obama’s candidacy with his August 2007 endorsement. But after pro-Israel activists howled that Zbig’s presence raised troubling questions about Obama’s commitment to the Jewish state, the candidate dropped him like a hot falafel and trotted out his senior Middle East adviser, former ambassador Dennis Ross, to claim: “Brzezinski is not an adviser to the campaign.” Zbig later got his revenge, telling The Daily Beast that Obama and his “lousy staff work” badly botched his announcement of scrapping the Bush administration’s missile-defense program.

In May 2008, candidate Obama sacked foreign-policy adviser Robert Malley, a Middle East expert, after he disclosed that he’d met with the militant Palestinian group Hamas in his non-campaign-related work for the International Crisis Group, a conflict-resolution think thank. A campaign spokesman promptly declared him a non-person: “He has no formal role in the campaign and he will not play any role in the future.”


GENERAL DAVID MCKIERNAN

In May, the president had Secretary of Defense Robert Gates abruptly fire David McKiernan, the Army’s top general in Afghanistan. The ostensible reason was that McKiernan was too cautious and conventional a thinker about how to bring stability to the war-torn, corruption-plagued country that Obama had previously announced was crucial to America’s security. Now that McKiernan’s replacement—Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal—has shown himself to be anything but cautious and conventional (even preempting announced White House policy by publicly demanding tens of thousands of additional troops), there are rumblings that McChrystal is likely to be next.


BILL RICHARDSON

New Mexico’s governor provoked the enduring anger of Hillary and Bill Clinton—from whom he had received two coveted jobs, U.N. ambassador and Energy secretary—when he endorsed Obama in March 2008. Obama rewarded Richardson, a former presidential campaign rival, by nominating him to be Commerce secretary, and then threw him under the bus a month later amid reports of a federal grand jury investigation into New Mexico state contractors and their donations to Richardson’s political action committee. More than a year has passed since then, and no indictment has been forthcoming. Richardson, who fiercely maintained that he had done nothing wrong, “has seen his political fortunes crater,” according to Politico.


JEREMIAH WRIGHT & WILLIAM AYERS

“I could no more disown Reverend Wright than I could my own white grandmother,” candidate Obama famously declared in his speech on race in Philadelphia. Yes, he could! After his Chicago pastor of 20 years persisted in making incendiary statements of the “God Damn America” variety, Obama surgically cut him loose and cast him into the outer darkness. “Whatever relationship I had with Reverend Wright has changed as a consequence of this,” Obama said by way of explaining the final breach. “I don’t think that he showed much concern for me. More importantly, I don’t think he showed much concern for what we’re trying to do in this campaign and what we’re trying to do for the American people.”

Obama’s divorce from former Weatherman Bill Ayers, a friend, neighbor, and occasional political supporter from Chicago’s Hyde Park ‘hood, was far less painful but just as decisive.


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Sources: The Daily Beast, Politico, ABC News, Youtube, Google Maps