Archive for the 'Corruption' Category

Peace, love, and an end to corruption of government by lobbyists

Lobbyists are fuming because they no longer control the debate in Washington:

A tide of anger and dismay is rippling down K Street as the Obama administration implements a new policy limiting the roles of lobbyists on federal advisory committees.

The policy change, described by the White House as the next step in President Barack Obama ’s drive to limit influence-peddling in Washington, could affect hundreds of lobbyists who serve on the panels, which were created by Congress in the 1970s to provide private-sector advice to the government.

By removing a key point of access to the administration, many lobbyists will be less useful to their clients, who will be forced to appoint others to take up the slack. And the information about federal government intentions gleaned from committee meetings will now be unavailable to many lobbyists as they strategize on how to work various issues.

“There is fury,” said a lobbyist who sits on one of the committees. “Absolute fury.” K Street veterans say they sit at the intersection of policy wonk-dom, Washington savvy, and the needs of business, and are therefore best suited to populate the panels.

But the White House views the move as a key step in rolling back what officials see as the open-door policy for K Street created in previous years. According to a senior White House official, the panels have been excessively dominated by lobbyists. “It is one of the ways special interests have historically shaped policy to the detriment of the public interest,” he said.

“There is fury!” Ha ha! Suck it, you filthy pigs!

America’s most dishonest politician shows her support for the Bridge to Nowhere that she now claims she opposed
(source)

How corrupt is Sarah Palin? And how blind would you have to be to accept her reasons for resigning at face value, ignoring the fact that she was leaving office a year and a half before her term was to end, and announced her resignation on the Friday before a major holiday?

We’re now finding out. Palin now faces new ethics charges stemming from her habit of billing the taxpayers of Alaska for travel expenses while staying at home:

In the new ethics complaint, filed with the Alaska Office of the Attorney General late Monday by Wasilla resident Zane Henning, there is no documentation showing how often Palin may have filed per diem claims in recent months. The complaint includes documents from Palin for the month of May, listing five travel reimbursement claims at $60 apiece. Henning is questioning the governor’s request since the listed activities for those days were in Wasilla and Anchorage.

“The taxpayers of Alaska should not have to pay the governor, or any other public official, $60 a night to stay in their own home,” Henning said in an interview.

State policy allows for reimbursement if a state official must travel 50 miles or more from his or her home for state business. Palin’s lakeside home in Wasilla and the state office building in Anchorage are about 45 miles apart.

It is unclear whether Palin has paid income taxes on the reimbursements.

In February, when state officials determined Palin would owe income taxes on nearly $17,000 paid to her in travel reimbursements, the governor’s spokeswoman, Sharon Leighow, said, “The amount of taxes owed is a private matter.”

So even though Palin had previously faced ethics charges for fraudulently billing the state of Alaska for travel expenses, she went ahead and did it again. No wonder she resigned.

This isn’t the only issue that’s given the ethically-challenged politician trouble. In 2008, a bipartisan panel found that Palin abused her authority when she tried to have her former brother-in-law fired as a state trooper.

***

I think Palin will go down in history as McCain’s Gift to Liberals:

As to whether another pursuit for national office, as when she joined Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in the race for the White House less than a year ago, would result in the same political blood sport, Palin said there was a difference between the White House and what she had experienced in Alaska. If she were in the White House, she said, the “department of law” would protect her from baseless ethical allegations.

“I think on a national level, your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we’ve been charged with and automatically throw them out,” she said.

There is no “Department of Law” at the White House.

Meanwhile, the True Believers still think Palin has plenty of credibility:

The Republican candidate for governor of Virginia indicated that he remains open to having Gov. Sarah Palin, R-Alaska, campaign for him — but said no plans for such an event are in the works.

Bob McDonnell, R-Va., said on ABCNews.com’s “Top Line” today that he doesn’t know yet whether Palin will campaign on his behalf in Virginia — reiterating his official campaign stance.

Asked whether he’d welcome her presence on the trail, McDonnell responded: “I think she’d be a good spokesman. She’s a successful governor in Alaska. She’s a popular governor in Alaska. Got a lot of things done on taxes and regulations, and ethics. And those are some of the things that I’m interested in getting done here in Virginia.”

Last year, Palin helped John McCain become the first Republican presidential candidate since 1964 to lose in Virginia.

At least one Republican displayed some common sense when speaking about Palin. In the understatement of the year, House Minority Leader John Boehner said that Palin’s quitting in the middle of her term will make it very difficult for her to run for president in 2012. Duh.

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and his granddaughter, Monica. Conyers was first elected to the Senate the year after Monica was born.

From the New York Times:

Monica Conyers, a City Council member and the wife of Representative John Conyers Jr., pleaded guilty on Friday to a felony charge of conspiracy to commit bribery and accepting cash-filled envelopes in exchange for her tie-breaking vote on a city contract. Mrs. Conyers’s plea to the conspiracy charge comes on the heels of a scandal that led former Mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick to resign and serve jail time last year, though his crimes were unrelated to hers.

Mrs. Conyers, 44, admitted taking money from a representative of Synagro Technologies before voting in favor of a $1.2 billion sludge-hauling contract with that company. The indictment, released Friday, cited two instances when she received bribes outside a recreation center and a McDonald’s restaurant.

She had originally spoken out against the Synagro contract but suddenly changed her mind. The bribery payments listed in the indictment were made a week before and a week after the 5-to-4 Council vote approving the contract in November 2007.

Mrs. Conyers, who faces up to five years in prison, was released Friday on a personal bond after entering her plea in federal court. She was first elected to a four-year term in 2005.

Terrence Berg, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said investigators found no evidence that Mr. Conyers, a Democrat who leads the Judiciary Committee, knew that his wife had accepted bribes. Mr. Conyers, 80, did not try to interfere with the investigation, Mr. Berg said.

Right now, Rep. Conyers is probably the only person in congress who would gladly trade places with South Carolina governor Mark Sanford.

Today we intended telling the terrible tale of the ‘take what you want when you want’ culture of (apparently), tons of turdy Brit members of parliament.

But then, somebody anonymously sent us this particularly odious porker-picture…

…which, suddenly made us stop and wonder why we should bloomin‘ be bothered to.

Since ‘The Telegraph‘ is already doing such a sterling job of explaining and exposing exactly what sort of absolutely stinking stuff has (seemingly, serially) been happening in our old Brit House of Commons.

So, click here to see lots & lots about some of said shocking smelly shenanigans for yourself.

Shame?

This shower of SOBs simply possesses none.

(Cross posted from across at How This Old brit Sees It)

In our old Brit Londoner’s famous rhyming-slang, cockney-speak, it’s called “boracic lint”. To the rest of we Brits it signifies absolutely “skint”.

Translated into American, it says “stony broke”.

U.S. economy is in worst decline for more than a quarter century

The U.S. economy suffered a huge nosedive in the final three months of last year, shrinking by a staggering 6.2 per cent.

The figures released by the U.S. department of commerce yesterday far outstripped the worst fears of the government and the gloomiest predictions by financial analysts.

The contraction is the worst decline in America’s gross national product for more than a quarter of a century.

So see the rest of this sad story for yourself.

Shocking? For sure.

Surprising? You’ve got to be joking

Surely only the extremely stupidest of suckers couldn’t see it coming.

Boy, oh boy, oh boy.

What BushCo & their various criminal, greedy and corrupt cronies broke, Barak Obama has got one hell of a job to fix. Temporarily to repair, even.

Well, we sure wish him lots & lots of luck, since he’s certainly going to need some.

It’s long been said that whenever the US sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold.

The terrible truth of today is that America has actually already succumbed to one sodding serious case of the ‘flu. And as almost all of us have already learned by past personal experience, the flaming ‘flu sure is one infamously contagious critter.

Sad to say, we strongly suspect that things are set to get a lot worse before they start to get better.

But what should silly old sods such as ourselves know?

Eh?

After all, this is the 21st century. Things are so much different these days.

So long as one stays silent regarding mere trifles such as wanton warfare, woeful welfare and (still) hardly any real health care.

(Cross posted from across at How This Old Brit Sees It)

Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It)

From MSNBC:

For years, the juvenile court system in Wilkes-Barre operated like a conveyor belt: Youngsters were brought before judges without a lawyer, given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent off to juvenile prison for months for minor offenses.

The explanation, prosecutors say, was corruption on the bench.

In one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record, two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.

Prosecutors say Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan took $2.6 million in payoffs to put juvenile offenders in lockups run by PA Child Care LLC and a sister company, Western PA Child Care LLC. The judges were charged on Jan. 26 and removed from the bench by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court shortly afterward.

No company officials have been charged, but the investigation is still going on.

The high court, meanwhile, is looking into whether hundreds or even thousands of sentences should be overturned and the juveniles’ records expunged.

Among the offenders were teenagers who were locked up for months for stealing loose change from cars, writing a prank note and possessing drug paraphernalia. Many had never been in trouble before. Some were imprisoned even after probation officers recommended against it.

Many appeared without lawyers, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1967 ruling that children have a constitutional right to counsel.

If these judges don’t spend the rest of their lives in prison, then there’s something very wrong with our justice system.

Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich made an ill-advised visit to David Letterman’s show, his first TV appearance since being removed from office. Predictably, Letterman made Blago look like a complete fool:

Will someone please drive a stake through Rod Blagojevich’s heart?

Usually, when a politician gets caught abusing his office, he lies low for awhile. Maybe he’ll emerge later on, either penitent or self-righteously rationalizing his behavior. But most are smart enough to understand that while the scandal is still fresh in everyone’s mind, anything the politician says will only serve to make him appear more dishonest and more foolish.

Lately, though, many crooked politicians seem determined to make themselves appear both guilty and ridiculous at the same time.

The primary offender is Governor Rod Blagojevich (D-IL). He stands accused of trying to sell Barack Obama’s then-vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. The evidence is pretty damning: during a recorded telephone conversation in which he discussed possible candidates for the post, Blagojevich said, “I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and I’m just not giving it up for fucking nothing. I’m not gonna do it.” But Blagojevich still maintains his innocence.

Predictably, Blagojevich proclaims his innocence in a rather bizarre and self-contradictory fashion. He’s been quoting poetry and comparing himself to Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi. He’s compared his arrest to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and claimed that the whole investigation is nothing more than a plot by his fellow Democrats to raise taxes. He’s said that he welcomes an impeachment trial so that he can clear his name, but he’s boycotting that trial.

It’s gotten so bad that even Blagojevich’s lawyer can’t stand him anymore.

A bit less entertaining, but no less crazy, is former senator Ted Stevens (R-AK). Stevens narrowly lost his seat after being convicted of several corruption charges, but he also continues to offer the most bizarre defenses possible:

Attorneys for former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) have accused an FBI agent involved in the Stevens corruption investigation of having an inappropriate relationship with a key witness in the case.

Based on a complaint by an FBI whistleblower, Agent Chad Joy, the Stevens defense team claims that Mary Beth Kepner, the lead FBI agent on the case, had a personal relationship with Bill Allen, the CEO of an Alaska oil services firm and a witness against Stevens.

Stevens’ attorneys want the verdict against the former senator dismissed or a new trial granted. Stevens was convicted of failing to report more than $250,000 in improper gifts, including home-remodeling work paid for by Allen. Allen has already pleaded guilty to bribing two state lawmakers but has not been sentenced.

Federal prosecutors have denied the allegations of wrongdoing.

Whether the allegation about Kepner is true or not, it doesn’t constitute exculpatory evidence, and it has nothing to do with the fact that Stevens illegally took more than $250,000 from people for whom he did political favors.

As entertaining as Stevens and Blagojevich are, I think it’s about time we just tossed them in prison and threw away the key. The comedy routine is getting a bit old, and it’s time that justice was served.

It appears that despite the efforts of Democratic leaders, Roland Burris may be accepted into the Senate. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Rules Committee, reversed her earlier support of efforts to bar Burris from the chamber, and some members of the Congressional Black Caucus now question the decision to deny a seat to the man who would become the Senate’s only African-American member.

Since Burris is widely respected former Attorney General, and since he isn’t closely tied to disgraced Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, it seems unlikely that Majority Leader Harry Reid and his allies will be able to keep Burris out of the Senate for much longer.