Newt's Zipper Issue

Consider the lead: "Less than two months after ascending to the United States Senate, Barack Obama bought more than $50,000 worth of stock in two speculative companies whose major investors included some of his biggest political donors."

Hmmm . . .

"One of the companies was a biotech concern that was starting to develop a drug to treat avian flu. In March 2005, two weeks after buying about $5,000 of its shares, Mr. Obama took the lead in a legislative push for more federal spending to battle the disease."

Hey, that doesn't sound good.

"The most recent financial disclosure form for Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat, also shows that he bought more than $50,000 in stock in a satellite communications business whose principal backers include four friends and donors who had raised more than $150,000 for his political committees."

I'm thinking, is this the next Hillary-and-the-cattle-futures?

But then I read that Obama's spokesman says the senator didn't know about the investments until the fall of 2005, and then sold them for a $13,000 loss.

And then, the coup de grace: "The spokesman, Bill Burton, said Mr. Obama's broker bought the stocks without consulting the senator, under the terms of a blind trust that was being set up for the senator at that time but was not finalized until several months after the investments were made."

A blind trust?

How can it be a conflict if it's a blind trust? Sounds like a swing and a miss to me.

The Times remains suspicious. But liberal bloggers are highly critical.

Matthew Yglesias calls the story "bogus" with its formulation that "some of Barack Obama's investments that 'raise questions' about this and that. In fact, once you read through the whole article then go back and read it again to try to make sense of it, you'll see that no questions are, in fact, raised. Instead, Barack Obama made some financial transactions that the Times has no evidence were improper and for which there does not appear to be any realistic motive for improper action (nobody, for example, profited financially from the transaction) and for which there are perfectly plausible explanations.