Obama Delegate Staying Put And More Obama Campaign Mischief In Indiana

The Illinois Obama delegate who got thrown under the bus earlier this week after a neighbor accused her of using a racially derogatory term, "monkeys" to describe the children playing in a tree, isn't giving up her delegate spot after all. Linda Ramirez-Silwinski , a village trustee in Carpentersville, Illinois, is now planning to stay put. “Ms. Ramirez-Sliwinski is an elected delegate and we respect her decision to represent the campaign at the convention," Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said in a statement. Ramirez was ticketed by village police last Saturday for disorderly conduct after she told neighborhood children to come down out of a tree in which they were playing and stop acting like monkeys. Ramirez explained that she was only concerned for the children's safety, and that she sometimes referred to her own grandchildren as monkeys. That wasn't good enough for Obama's campaign, which sought to force Ramirez to give up her delegate position.

Meanwhile, Obama is facing much more serious problems here in Indiana. A day after blogger Scott Fluhr filed a complaint with the Indiana Election Commission for offering Dave Matthews concert tickets to IU students in consideration for registering to vote, a Purdue student, Adam Stant, has leveled even more serious accusations against the Obama campaign on the Purdue University campus. A blog entry by Stant at Blue Indiana, a liberal Democratic blog, makes some damning allegations against Purdue and student employees of the university working on Obama's behalf. The blog entry reads, in part:

A secretive cadre of Purdue student employees organized and operating on behalf of the Barack Obama for President Campaign are using their positions in order to divert University resources from their workplace into the Obama campaign. Led by Laurent Wrzesinski, a Chicago native trained by the Obama campaign to act on its behalf on the Purdue Campus, the group has been operating in violation of both university policy and federal law. Worse, by carrying out these actions while in the employ of Purdue University, they have breached the University's obligations as an IRS 501 (c) 3 tax exempt organization. This breach, if fully prosecuted, would cost the University $140 million annually in tax exemptions, $3,500 per student at the West Lafayette campus.

According to the Blue Indiana post, Dr. Steven Akers, Purdue's Executive Associate Dean of Students, knew of Wrzesinksi's activities and had warned him to stop using university resources for the benefit of Obama's campaign. There is also this damning bit of information on Obama's voter registration efforts at Purdue. "During the month of March, Wrzesinski has begun an effort to encourage out of state students who have already voted in the Democratic primary in their home states to re-register to vote in Indiana in order to cast a vote in the primary in this state," the post reads. Obama is scheduled to be in the Lafayette area tomorrow as he continues his bus tour across the state of Indiana. Will anyone in the local news media ask Obama any questions about his questionable campaign activities in this state?