Warren Buffett, Obama donor and namesake of the infamous “Buffett Rule,” invested $5 billion in Bank of America last year in an effort to help the ailing financial institution. Last month, two weeks after OFA took out the loan, Bank of America announced a plan that would lay off 16,000 workers by the end of the year.

Obama has a complicated relationship with Bank of America. The bank contributed $20 million toward the cost of the Democrat National Convention earlier this year. Bank of America stadium, home to the Carolina Panthers, was supposed to host Obama’s acceptance speech. At the last moment, the campaign switched to a significantly smaller venue. The campaign claimed that an impending storm would not allow the President to deliver his address. Many questioned whether move was made because the campaign was having trouble filling such a large stadium.

It is unclear why the first $1 billion campaign needed an extra $15 million for the final two months of the campaign.

The most serious charge against Luckie is a first-degree felony that could land him 11 years in prison.

The Dayton Daily News reports:

Charges include theft in office, money laundering, forgery, tampering with records, tampering with evidence, engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity, and filing false ethics statements for failing to disclose four separate loans. …

Luckie sent campaign cash to his personal checking accounts, made almost $19,000 in ATM withdrawals, and spent almost $40,000 in 800 debit card transactions, according to Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien. He made $1,700 in cash withdrawals from the campaign account at casinos in Indiana, Florida and West Virginia, made an $1,800 online transfer from his campaign account to make a home equity line of credit payment to a bank and spent campaign cash at Morris Home Furnishings, Weber Jewelers, Famous Footwear, Nordstrom and other retail stores, according to O’Brien.

During his tenure at the retail supply firm, Sinegal faced allegations of widespread gender discrimination at the company, which was the target of a 2006 class-action lawsuit.

The plaintiffs in the case alleged that Costco frequently promoted less-qualified male employees to the detriment of female employees, and failed to give sufficient notice of advancement opportunities.

Court filings charge that Costco practices allowed for “favoritism and individual biases” in the awarding of promotions. The company disregarded complaints of such discrimination, and Sinegal personally opposed recommendations to provide advanced notice of senior management opportunities, the suit alleged.

“I have always felt very, very strongly and very adamantly, that those were not the types of jobs that should be up for posting,” he said in a 2006 testimony.

Costco’s lead attorney said Seligman personally signed off on all promotions to management positions.

The lawsuit noted that although women made up about half of Costco’s 78,000 employees, less than 20 percent of senior managers were female, well below the established benchmark of 34.1 percent for other retail companies.

Sinegal attempted to explain the gender discrepancy in an April 2006 deposition, saying it was because female workers preferred to work fewer hours due to family responsibilities.

“Our experience is that the women have a tendency to be the caretakers and have the responsibility for the children and for the family,” he said.

Sinegal dismissed the allegations in a 2009 interview, saying: “You can always find someone who is dissatisfied with the way you’ve done something and is going to bring a lawsuit.”

The case, which involves about 800 female Costco employees who were denied promotions to general manager or assistant manager, had been on hold for years but began to move forward in June 2011 following a Supreme Court ruling in a similar case involving Walmart.

Sinegal, who has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates and committees since 2007, hosted President Obama at a fundraiser last month. The president praised Sinegal and Costco at the event, saying he “couldn’t ask for somebody I admire more to introduce me than Jim Sinegal.”

“The story of Costco and everything you guys have done I think is representative of what America is all about,” the president said.

Sinegal is not alone in being criticized for discriminating against female employees.

The White House, the Obama campaign, prominent Democratic Senators, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), and the Democratic National Committee all consistently pay women less than men, several Washington Free Beacon analyses have found.

Only the most cynical among us could have penetrated at the time the gauzy scrim that masked Obama’s purpose and ambition as he began his march to the highest office in the land. Little did the audience know that eight years later these supposedly United States would be riven by intense class, race, partisan, and sectarian divisions, as polarized factions struggled to define the size and scope of the federal government.

Little did the audience know that the man who spoke so eloquently at the podium would find himself, less than a decade hence, embracing and exploiting the very same “spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of ‘anything goes,’” who “slice-and-dice our country into red states and blue states,” that he once denounced.

The Obama legacy is therefore not confined to presiding over the worst economic recovery since World War II. It is distinguished not only by the president’s failure to address adequately or imaginatively America’s broken tax code and budget process, or by his lackadaisical approach to health entitlements. What makes Obama’s presidency ironic and indeed rather tragic is his persistent betrayal of the promises contained in that 2004 speech. The image of Obama as reconciler and unifier grows more distant and faint with each day. The president has not lessened our antagonisms or detoxified our political culture. He has made them worse.

What is most remarkable is Obama’s obstinate refusal to acknowledge the tensions he has aggravated. “I don’t think you or anybody who’s been watching the campaign would say that in any way we have tried to divide the country,” he defensively told Entertainment Tonight Wednesday evening. “We’ve always tried to bring the country together.”

This was Obama doing his best impression of Captain Renault in Casablanca, a man just shocked, shocked to find division and anger and hatred in the country he has governed for three and a half years. Not 24 hours before the Entertainment Tonight spot, his vice president had told a largely black Democratic audience in southern Virginia that the Romney-Ryan ticket would “put y’all back in chains.” These are the men who are trying “to bring the country together”?

At the beginning of August, the president’s affiliated Super PAC released an incendiary advertisement that implied Romney was somehow responsible for the death of a steelworker’s wife by cancer. Obama’s campaign had featured the same steelworker on a conference call in the spring, before it shifted its focus to what may or may not be in Romney’s tax returns and whether the Republican nominee may have once committed a felony. At multiple points during this week’s Iowa visit the president himself ridiculed Mitt Romney for taking a family trip with the dog kennel on the roof of the car. This is months after he had described the House Republican budget, which Ryan authored, as “thinly veiled Social Darwinism” that is “antithetical to our entire history.”

The attacks and slanders and demands for apologies grew so intense a week before the first party convention that veterans of the mainstream media struggled to find a precedent for the warfare. “All restraints are gone, the guardrails have disappeared, and there is no incentive for anyone hold back,” wrote 30-year veteran Dan Balz of the Washington Post. “This is about as ugly as I’ve seen it,” Brit Hume said on Fox. Mark Helprin of Time and MSNBC called it “nuclear war.”

The merchants of snark on the Internet and cable juxtaposed sarcastically the campaign sludge-fest with the candidates’ stated desire for a thoughtful contrast between the big choices facing the country. Yet the cynics and smirking pundits missed the point: The importance and clarity of this election is precisely why it has been so dirty and bitter and cruel.

Anemic economic growth and the albatross of Obamacare have pushed Obama’s approval rating to worrisome levels for an incumbent. His re-election depends on turning out his base of white liberals, Millennials, and minorities at levels similar to 2008. Otherwise the game is over. Obama, Biden, David Axelrod, Jim Messina, and David Plouffe know that fear motivates people. The president and his allies have thus spent the last eight months distributing goodies while demonizing the Republicans. Obama’s abandonment of his 2004 persona was neither an accident nor a casualty of politics. It was a strategic choice.

The appeal to liberals began with the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline in January and continued through Obama’s hastily arranged endorsement of same-sex marriage in early May. His promises to shift the tax burden increasingly on the wealthy, as well as his rhetorical pose of middle-class populism, also set liberal hearts aflutter.

For the young, Obama offers subsidies for college tuition, the ability to stay on parental health plans until age 26, free birth control, an end to the war in Afghanistan, and the prospect of a diverse, nonjudgmental, technological, secular future.

Obama has treated the minority vote the most cynically. Striking fear in the black community is part of the strategy. Biden’s remarks in Virginia did not occur in isolation. Last year the chairman of the Democratic National Committee accused the Republicans of wanting “to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws.” In May, Attorney General Eric Holder told the Council of Black Churches that Republicans have created a situation in which “some of the achievements that defined the civil rights movement now hang in the balance.” The controversy over constitutional and popular state legislation to require photo identification at the polls has become so agitated and raw that even mild-mannered authors pen screeds describing half the country as “oligarchs and racists clad in the skins of dead elephants.”

The president’s media supporters tried to portray Romney’s speech to the NAACP as a sort of racial insult. Shortly after the Republican ticket was announced, Obama donor and rap mogul Russell Simmons wrote that Romney-Ryan “will destroy our people.” This week, too, the Obama administration filed a Supreme Court amicus brief defending race-based affirmative action. The racial and ethnic lines have been drawn.

When the people’s representatives in Congress blocked the DREAM Act amnesty for young, illegal immigrants, Obama took matters into his own hands and declared it policy in June. The executive action went into effect Wednesday. The lines of Millennial-generation undocumented aliens stretching for blocks in America’s largest cities testified to Obama’s “slice-and-dice” approach to politics. ICE agents might as well have handed out “Obama Biden 2012” buttons along with the work permits. Meanwhile the president promises to enact “comprehensive immigration reform” in a second term.

That this Balkanization of the American electorate might have been avoided comes as cold comfort. Whether it was at the 2004 Democratic convention, or Election Night 2008 at Grant Park, or Inauguration Day 2009, or the memorial ceremony for the victims of the Tucson shooting in January 2011, or the televised address on the killing of Osama bin Laden that May, Americans have always responded to Obama when he speaks to them as the leader of the entire nation, not as the leader of a political party or of the progressive movement.

Time and again, however, Obama has missed opportunities to seize the ground of national unity and possibly split the GOP. He could have for example included defense funding in the stimulus bill, or decided to go back to the drawing board on health care after Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, or embraced fully the Bowles-Simpson Commission’s recommendations in January 2011. He did none of these things. What we got instead was a mobilization of the center-left coalition toward partisan ends that had been on the agenda for years and in some cases decades. What we got was an unshackled and unhinged country whose people are at each other’s throats.

“Alongside our famous individualism,” Barack Obama said in 2004, “there’s another ingredient in the American saga, a belief that we’re all connected as one people.” That sentiment may have been true once. It certainly isn’t true now. Barack Obama’s America is an America coming apart.

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The ad, titled “The Choice,” features President Obama saying that he intends to “pay down the debt” in his second term by “asking the wealthy to pay a little more.”

Sessions said that the mid-session review of the White House budget, also released Friday, “reveals just how dramatically false this claim is.”

The White House budget office issued revised projections for the economy and called for $195 billion in new stimulus spending to confront an economy that “still faces significant headwinds.”

The White House projected a budget deficit of $1.2 trillion for the current year, and downgraded its GDP growth projection to 2.3 percent from 2.7 percent in February; the projection for 2013 was revised down to 2.7 percent from 3 percent.

The U.S. Commerce Department on Friday announced that the economy grew at a sluggish 1.5 percent in the second quarter of 2012.

The updated budget also foresees a $10.6 trillion increase in gross debt through 2022, Sessions said, and total debt of $25.4 trillion accumulated over that same period.

“America can have robust economic growth—and avert a catastrophic debt crisis—but it requires a credible fiscal plan and the leadership necessary to achieve it,” he said.

The president’s proposal to force Americans earning more than $250,000 a year to “pay a little more” passed the Senate earlier this week. It is estimated to raise about $100 billion in new revenue per year, enough to fund the government for less than 10 days.

The White House was nearly two weeks late submitting its revised budget, which is required by law to be submitted no later than July 16.

The report, which fondly recalls the swooning crowds of Europeans who turned out for Obama’s 2008 European romp, purports to explain what it claims is Romney’s lukewarm reception:

As the Democratic presidential hopeful in 2008, Barack Obama’s visit to Europe ahead of the election drew saturation media coverage and massive crowds — including 250,000 people for a landmark speech in Berlin — that cemented the senator from Illinois’s rock-star status in the grand capitals of the Old World. Four years later, President Obama, although somewhat off his peak, still receives approval ratings of 80 percent or higher in Britain, France and Germany.

In contrast, as Romney arrives for a week-long run through Britain and Poland, with a trip to Israel in between, the Republican presidential candidate remains relatively unknown in Europe. His first stop in London has received miserly coverage in the back pages of British newspapers, where he is often characterized by his wealth and Mormon religion. Over the course of an hour in this city’s busy Paddington Station this week, eight of 15 people stopped by a reporter were not sure who Romney was.

Obama is not only beloved by Europeans; he also philosophically resembles one of the continent’s newest socialist leaders, French President Francois Hollande, the New York Times reported.

Documents filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) list a June disbursement of $424.50 to the “Treasurer of Virginia” for “wage garnishment.”

The exact reason for the garnishment is unclear. Most states permit it as a means to secure payment on back taxes, bankruptcy proceedings, unpaid domestic support, or other debts.

The revelation comes amid the Obama campaign’s relentless demands for Republican challenger Mitt Romney to publicly release years more of his tax returns.

Senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod on Monday appeared to break the political “ceasefire” following last week’s the tragic shooting in Aurora, Colo., accusing Romney of “secrecy” on taxes.

Meanwhile, Democrats are becoming increasingly concerned with the rate at which the Obama campaign is spending money.

The campaign’s FEC filing for June shows payroll costs of $2.9 million in wages before taxes, paid out to roughly 780 staff members.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty noted that the Obama campaign has been spending liberally in states that most view as safely Democratic. The campaign, for instance, has spent nearly $2 million in Rhode Island, a state that has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1984.

The Obama campaign did not immediately return a request for comment.

The most publicized example of crony capitalism touted by Republicans is that of Solyndra, the solar panel firm championed by influential Democratic donors that received a $535 million taxpayer-guaranteed loan in 2009, only to file for bankruptcy two years later. Solyndra was forced to lay off more than 1,800 workers, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

Thanks to a deal negotiated by Obama’s Department of Energy (DOE), Solyndra’s private investors, such as Obama bundler George Kaiser, were given priority over taxpayers with respect to the first $75 million recovered in the event of the company’s collapse.

Smith defended the Solyndra loan to the Detroit News, saying “the company was widely praised as successful and innovative both before and after receiving the Department of Energy loan guarantee.”

In addition to striking some as insensitive to the employees who lost their jobs, Smith’s comment is patently false.

Although President Obama did praise Solyndra as “the true engine of economic growth” in 2010, a host of administration officials were skeptical that the company was a worthwhile investment.

Emails uncovered by Congressional investigators reveal that officials at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the DOE, who were responsible for reviewing Solyndra’s loan application, were concerned about the company’s viability in the days before the loan was formally announced. In particular, the officials noted that the administration’s own forecasting model predicted that Solyndra “runs out of cash in Sept. 2011.”

Solyndra filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 6, 2011.

Days before President Obama’s visit to Solyndra in May 2010, California venture capitalist and top Obama bundler Steve Westly emailed White House adviser Valerie Jarrett to urge the president to avoid Solyndra due to the company’s financial struggles.

“The president should be careful about unrealistic/optimistic forecasts that could haunt him in the next 18 months if Solyndra hits the wall, files for bankruptcy, etc.” Westly wrote.

Jarrett relayed these concerns to Ron Klain, former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden, who wrote back: “Bottom line is that we believe the company is okay in the medium term, but will need some help of one kind or another down the road.”

One OMB staffer wrote in email around the same time: “Hope [Solyndra] doesn’t default” before Obama’s visit.

Klain was correct that Solyndra would need further help down the road. In early 2011, the DOE opted to restructure Solyndra’s loan agreement by waiving certain repayment requirements and prioritizing private investors over taxpayers in an effort to attract new capital. OMB officials, however, questioned the wisdom of the decision.

“While the company may avoid default with a restructuring, there is also a good chance it will not,” one OMB staffer wrote in an email.