Sign up now!
Click here to receive free updates on headline news from John T. Reed

View Cart

 Bookmark and Share

Featured Products

Succeeding
1 year Subscription to Real Estate Investor's Monthly
Distressed Real Estate Times
How to Get Started in Real Estate
How to Buy Real Estate for at Least 20% Below Market Value

Checkout
How to Order

Copyright by John T. Reed

Part of the scandal surrounding IL Governor Rod Blagojevich is his efforts to get his wife appointed to some $150,000-a-year board membership.

What an outrage!

But excuse me.

Obama’s wife got appointed to a $325,000-a-year University of Chicago hospital job.

Do Harvard Law grads like Michelle Obama make $325,000 a year?.

Yes, if they make partner in a successful law firm. She quit the legal profession after one apparently non-sterling year. The hospital job has nothing to do with law. It’s an “outreach” job. (I roll my eyes wearily as we learn about yet another affirmative-action taxpayer-funded give-away.)

Does she also have an MD or any other advanced degree or training related to hospitals?

Nope.

So how did she get $325,000? Here are two mainstream media stories on how she got so much (hint: payback for a million-dollar earmark Obama got from Congress for the hospital):

http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2006/sep/27/news/chi-0609270216sep27
http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2008/03/sweet_scoop_obama_after_initia.html

My speculation on the answer from my article “The end of affirmative action” is:

$50,000 a year for being a Princeton/Harvard Law grad who no longer practices law—that is, what she would make if she were white
$120,000 a year for combining black skin with preppy pearls and vocabulary
$155,000 a year for being celebrity Barack Obama’s wife

So if it’s a scandal for Blagojevich to want his wife to get a dubious job that pays $150,000 through politics, why is it not a bigger scandal for Obama’s wife to get a more dubious job through politics—a job that pays more than twice as much—after the University of Chicago kicked back part of the Obama $1,000,000 earmark to Michelle in the form of a raise?

Because Blagojevich, now that the wiretaps have been publicly quoted, can do no right, and Obama can do no wrong in the eyes of his media and other supporters. If I may paraphrase Richard Nixon from the current movie Frost/Nixon,

If the Messiah does it, it’s not illegal.

If I were in Obama’s position, I would urge my wife not to take any position that she could not get if she were not married to me in terms of either salary or responsibility or status. Obama should have said the same to his wife. It appears that he did not.

He has no ethics, but he is a real smooth talker and that is apparently a satisfactory substitute for ethics to the media and his other cultish supporters. And neither of them have any shame when it comes to accepting their affirmative-action “entitlements” and/or “South Side of Chicago” political patronage-based special treatment.