Category: Corruption

Democrats Implode in Louisiana

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Ali Akbar, Anita Moncrief and other activists with the Black Conservatives Fund have been making a huge difference in Louisiana during the final weeks of the campaign leading up to Saturday’s election that will end the Senate career of Democrat Mary Landrieu.

However, as much credit as is certainly due to BCF, the real credit goes to the Democrats themselves, who simply weren’t ready for primetime once Ali’s crew showed up to expose their corruption. Take a look at this headline Monday from the London Daily Mail:

‘Go vote again tomorrow’: Video shows
Louisiana mayor whose son is Sen. Mary Landrieu’s
chief of staff encouraging voter fraud as final
US Senate contest’s runoff election draws near

The story of how BCF got that video is very interesting, but the real problem for Democrats is that they’ve been getting away with this stuff so long they don’t even know it’s wrong. Decades of habitual corruption — and Louisiana is a cesspool of crooked politics, the Chicago of the South — have this effect of making Democrats utterly shameless.

So how does Senator Mary Landrieu feel about all of this?
“I looked at the video, it was in a bar room, you know, on a stage, people were having a good time. It seemed to me to be a joke” explains Landrieu.


When they’re exposed, they don’t know how to react.

The staff of Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu and the Democrat Party continues to use black protesters but constantly stops them from speaking. Now two new videos show a white union supporter of Landrieu tell a black activist, Anita MonCrief, to “go down on Bill [Cassidy],” Landrieu’s opponent, and another black supporter of Landrieu tells MonCrief she is “pretty much” an uppity negro.


The Democrat Party is a political disease caused by a virus of selfishness that spreads through lies. The only known cure is truth.

Louisiana Runoff Polling Looks ‘Ugly’ For Landrieu

Damn, Andrew Breitbart would be so proud to see this day. After Saturday’s election, there won’t be anything left of the Democrat Party in Louisiana but a vast smoldering crater of failure and fear.





 

Democrats: The Party of Theft

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It’s not merely that they steal money from taxpayers. Democrats are just generally dishonest and untrustworthy:

Senator John Walsh of Montana took most of a 2007 final paper required for his master’s degree from the United States Army War College from other sources without proper attribution. Mr. Walsh copies an entire page nearly word-for-word from a Harvard paper, and each of his six conclusions is copied from a document from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace without attribution.

This revelation of Walsh’s defective character is only regarded by Democrats as problem because it might cost them an election:

Walsh was appointed to the Senate five months ago to fill Max Baucus’s vacancy; it’s not impossible to win as a Democrat in Montana, as both Baucus and Jon Tester can tell you, but it’s difficult as a short-term incumbent in a political climate that’s trending GOP. The rosiest polls for Walsh right now have him trailing Republican Steve Daines by around seven points. The bleakest polls have him down 20 or more. (The RCP average has Daines by 12.5 points.)

Somebody ought to write a book about this.

 

Homo Bureaucratus Is The Problem

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by Smitty

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.–Lord Acton

Over time, even petty amounts of power bring out the Nixon in all of us. Via Instapundit, Mark Fiztgibbons writes:

In America’s first 100 years, federal officials could be sued in state courts for acting beyond their authority. In his book Creating the Administrative Constitution, Yale law professor Jerry Mashaw chronicles how this helped temper bad behavior.

Law professor Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit is among those who believe that government officials need more civil and criminal liability for their bad acts. There are some private remedies on the books, but they are too weak to be effective.

Liability is not nothing, but I think it’s peripheral to the issue of concentrating power. Power makes cocaine look like talcum. Witness Cochran’s cheerful apparent flouting of the rules in the Mississippi GOP senatorial runoff. Likely not a surfeit of altruism in his case.

There still is no work-around for the need to have offices, and for officials to occupy them. However, in our Information Age, there isn’t any excuse for the rules being other than simple, understandable, and open to all. Furthermore, the kind of ball-hogging we see with career bureaucrats is clearly a 20th century holdover. Thus, other than the military, I submit that about a 10 year cap on all civil service positions would make sense. Keep the job simple, let people do the job, and let them get out of the way for someone else.

Let’s term-limit the corruption in our government down to an absolute minimum, say I. Homo bureaucratus is not the solution.

A Long History Of Ineptitude And Corruption

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— Wombat-socho


While this could be a descriptor of many offices, bureaux, agencies and possibly even entire departments of the Federal Government, I’m addressing the problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is still referred to by many as the Veterans Administration or simply VA. As CNN points out in this excellent article (apparently they do still have good reporters, they just don’t let them on the air) the VA has been a disastrous pile of fail ever since 1921, when Congress formed the Veterans Bureau only to see it collapse into a slough of corruption so bad that it had to be abolished in 1930 and replaced with the Veterans Administration, which also took over pensions from the Interior Department and the National Home For Disabled Veterans, this last actually comprising a number of Federally operated homes for destitute and disabled veterans.


Trouble could have been foreseen from the beginning at the VA, since its first head was retired Brigadier General Frank Hines, who had headed the scandal-plagued Veterans Bureau for seven years; he would be sacked by President Truman in 1945 after a series of news reports on shoddy care in VA hospitals*. He was replaced by General Omar Bradley, but even Bradley could make little headway with the over-centralized VA bureaucracy, and by 1946 the American Legion was calling for his head. Two years later, a government reform commission found massive waste, fraud and inefficiency in the VA, some of which was cured by decentralizing the bureaucracy; another reform commission in 1955 noted that waste and poor care persisted. The problems continued on through the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and continue to persist today.


Part of the problem is that while theoretically the VA is supposed to provide care for all veterans, in practice, it triages veterans based on whether their injuries/illnesses are combat-related (this was at the root of the Agent Orange brouhaha) and whether they can afford to pay for their own care. Another part of the problem is that the VA has arguably never had the assets to properly do its job, and while the VA budget has increased since 2008, it hasn’t kept up with the surge of elderly veterans from the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boom who now comprise most of the patient load. This is also the reason why you’re seeing most of the “dying in line” cases coming out of the VA medical centers in Arizona and Florida – those states are very attractive to retirees, and so retired vets tend to flock there. You don’t hear about problems like this in Minneapolis, Washington DC and Boston, for example, because most retired vets either aren’t interested in living in climatic hellholes or simply can’t afford to live in the latter two areas due to their high costs of living. The number of Iraq/Afghanistan vets trying to fight their way through the paperwork to get their benefits is relatively small by comparison.


Megan McArdle posted a pessimistic essay yesterday which I linked to this morning, whose basic thrust is that the Obama Administration thought they could solve the VA’s ongoing problems by just throwing more money at the problem and hiring some more people, only to find that the solution just wasn’t that simple – people need to be fired and processes need to be changed, and both of these are a hell of a lot harder in the Federal government than they are on Wall Street or Silicon Valley. Instead, thanks to the executive decision to make it easier for vets to get help for PTSD and Agent Orange, the claims ratcheted up faster than the agency could deal with them (McArdle quotes a National Journal article that says Agent Orange claims ate up 37% of the VA’s claims processing resources from 2010 to 2012), so things wound up even worse off than they were before. The obvious solution, which is allowing the private sector to take some of the load off, has been fought by the American Federation of Government Employees, which has been fighting a new $9.3 billion program that encourages Medicare-eligible vets (about half the patient population) to seek care from civilian hospitals.**
Stacy’s Crazy Cousin John is often wrong, but as far as the VA is concerned, he’s right – the Veterans Health Administration needs to be stripped down to the things it does best, and hand off other medical care to private physicians. Given the current administration’s sinister ineptitude, though, I think we’ll continue seeing more veterans die in line while waiting for the VA bureaucracy to get them what they need.


*In an ironic tribute to the VA’s ongoing problems, the Chicago VA Medical Center is named for General Hines and is equally mired in scandal.
** Hat tip to The Lonely Conservative.


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Obama: ‘What IRS Scandal?’

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The big news out of Bill O’Reilly’s Sunday interview with President Obama was the latter’s claim that there wasn’t “a smidgen of corruption” in the IRS scandal. Just a bunch of inept bureaucrats accidentally targeting the president’s political enemies:

Rather, he said, IRS officials were confused about how to implement the law governing those kinds of tax-exempt groups.
“There were some bone-headed decisions,” Obama conceded.
But when asked whether corruption, or mass corruption, was at play, he responded: “Not even mass corruption — not even a smidgen of corruption.”
He acknowledged that then-IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman had been to the White House more than 100 times but said he couldn’t recall speaking to him on any of those occasions.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

 

The IRS Scandal Cover-Up

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Use of the Internal Revenue Service to harass the President’s political Enemies List? That’s not a crime. Entrusting investigation of the IRS scandal to Attorney General Eric Holder? Nothing suspicious about that. Most Transparent Administration in History™!

The DOJ lawyer who’s heading the investigation is an Obama donor and the FBI, after seven months of supposedly investigating this, only recently contacted tea-party groups targeted by the IRS. But other than that, everything here seems legit.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

 

Obama’s IRS Scandal Cover-Up

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OK, now it’s time to begin impeachment proceedings:

The Justice Department selected an avowed political supporter of President Obama to lead the criminal probe into the IRS targeting of tea party groups, according to top Republicans who said Wednesday that the move has ruined the entire investigation.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell E. Issa, California Republican, and regulatory affairs subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, said they have discovered that the head of the investigation is Barbara Kay Bosserman, a trial lawyer in the Justice Department who donated more than $6,000 to Mr. Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, as well as several hundred dollars to the national Democratic Party.
“The department has created a startling conflict of interest,” Mr. Issa and Mr. Jordan said in a letter sent Wednesday and reviewed by The Washington Times. “It is unbelievable that the department would choose such an individual to examine the federal government’s systematic targeting and harassment of organizations opposed to the president’s policies.”

The fake investigation led by a hack loyalist is a classic cover-up move. The Justice Department is now clearly part of a widespread pattern of corruption in the administration, Eric Holder’s resignation is long overdue, and upholding the rule of law requires that Congress open an impeachment inquiry immediately.

Via Memeorandum, with more at Breitbart News, MichelleMalkin.com, Newsbusters, Weasel Zippers and the Free Beacon.

 

#Occupy Suckers: De Blasio’s Corrupt Connections to Wall Street Exposed

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If you thought his idealistic far-left supporters bothered to investigate the guy they elected mayor, you need to think again:

Mayor de Blasio’s ties to the Brooklyn Democratic boss he teamed up with to anoint the next City Council speaker run all the way to Hizzoner’s doorstep, The Post has learned.
Since 2012, de Blasio has refinanced both homes he owns in Park Slope through the firm where Brooklyn Democratic leader Frank Seddio formerly served as vice president — Wall Street Mortgage Bankers.
Public records show that the most recent deal came just three days after de Blasio’s primary victory on Sept. 10, when he refinanced his 11th Street home with the firm for $625,000.
In June 2012, he had refinanced another home his family owns down the block with Wall Street Mortgage Bankers for $630,000.

“Wall Street Mortgage Bankers“! Was there ever a name so perfectly calculated to epitomize everything the Left claims to hate?

There is no question but that New York’s new mayor, Bill De Blasio, owes his landslide victory in the November election to the Occupy Movement.
It was Occupy Wall Street’s minions, hemmed in by thug-like NYPD officers armed with sidearms, clubs and pepper spray cans, who in 2011 abruptly changed the national conversation about capitalism, introducing the concept of “We are the 99%,” and focusing attention on the enormous enrichment of the top 1% of Americans over the past several decades, as a direct result of public policies on taxation and de-regulation.
And it was that new focus on the country’s yawning wealth and income gap that provided De Blasio with his winning campaign theme.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss:

City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito fessed up Monday, admitting she failed to disclose years of rental income she received, as first revealed by the Daily News.
The East Harlem Democrat, who is Mayor de Blasio’s choice for Council speaker, acknowledged the lapse after The News reported that several people lived in a three-unit building she owns during a period when she reported no rental income on her city ethics forms.
“This was an unintentional mistake,” her spokesman, Eric Koch, told The News on Monday night.

The resemblance between Mayor De Blasio and a comic book villain is purely coincidental, but this “self-awareness fail” raises the question: Are liberals capable of learning anything? Is there no amount of betrayal and disillusionment which can cause liberals to question whether their ideals are, y’know, ideal? How many times do liberals need to go through this process — getting fucked raw by power-hungry greedheads masquerading as egalitarian reformers — before they finally recognize that progressive idealism is the Gospel of Chumps?

Say what you will about the GOP, at least when Republicans rip you off, sell you out, stab you in the back and fuck you over, they don’t claim to be doing it in the name of “social justice.”