A donor's gift soon followed Clinton's help

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/washington/04clinton.html?_r=1&hp

The preceding is the link to an interesting piece in the Times this morning.

I had been an earlier supporter of Hillary Clinton for President - I immediately threw my support behind the stronger and better candidate - Barack Obama when he announced his candidacy. As a former political appointee, I know politics and I tend to pick winners - just the way it is.

Many believe - mistakenly - that the reason those 180 million votes was not higher - the reason Hillary was not voted for and hence did not receive the nomination to the Democratic ticket - is because she is a woman. My belief is that it is because of her husband. He continues to be a liability with the donations to his foundation, questionable as some of them are.

According to the story - and again - I encourage you to read it in it's entirety - the junior Senator Clinton helped to enact legislation that ultimately approved a large amount of federal monies in the form of tax exempt bond dollars to help a developer in his quest to build and expand a mall in Syracuse.

While serving as a political appointee, I developed a distaste for developers - I won't bore you with the names and details, but suffice it to say that many of them had overblown egos and more money than they knew what to do with - they would build malls, housing complexes and all manner of buildings, not always to LEED specifications to my chagrin and certainly not always including affordable housing in the equation - indeed, there is at least one case of which I was aware where affordable and/or low income housing was demolished to make way for "development".

Mrs. Clinton is on to bigger and better things now. Her appointment as Madame Secretary is going before congress soon - her senate seat will likely go to Caroline Kennedy (more on that in one of yesterdays posts) - and she will likely be confirmed.

Or will she? The story is compelling and if there is any connection whatsoever to her husband's foundations receiving a $100,000 donation from the developer with curious timing after Senator Clinton approved the package - we should all be very concerned with how that appears.