Category: Corruption

Obama Helping the Rich Get Richer

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If you’re a liberal who thinks Republicans are corrupt pawns of Big Business, and who thinks that Democrats are the party that cares about the poor, isn’t it time you WAKE THE HELL UP?

Investigators Probe White House
Role in Massive Energy Loan
House investigators said they have uncovered evidence that White House officials became personally involved in an Energy Department review of a hot-button $535 million loan guarantee to the now-failed California solar company Solyndra. . . .

If the praises of high-ranking Obama-administration officials were a viable business plan, the solar-panel maker Solyndra would be an industrial juggernaut. . . .
Obama and Biden were literally invested in Solyndra’s success. The company got a half-billion-dollar federal loan guarantee, the first in a highly vaunted Department of Energy green-jobs program, as part of the stimulus. This was supposed to be the new economic model: government and its favored industries cooperating to lead the country into a green, politically approved recovery. . . .
A Department of Energy spokesman explained wanly, “The company was considered extraordinarily innovative as recently as 2010.” Innovative, maybe; profitable, no. It had never turned a profit since its founding in 2005. In the still “extraordinarily innovative” year of 2010, it canceled an attempted IPO and axed its CEO. . . .
President Bush was flayed for the Enron bankruptcy, based on his tenuous ties to the firm. If the same media rules applied, Solyndra would be Obama’s Enron, given his active promotion of the company and his lavish funding of it. A prodigious Obama-Biden fundraiser is a major backer of the failed concern.

“Green jobs” = Obama gets the green. You lose your jobs.

Vadum: Obama Administration Gave ACORN More Than $500,000 This Year

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Investigative reporter Matthew Vadum is author of the new book, Subversion, Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, and he just broke another huge scoop. Having previously reported that ACORN got $80,000 in federal funding despite a congressional ban, it now turns out the actual number was much, much bigger:

I discovered Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) gave ACORN another $461,086 in January. The funds were earmarked for ACORN Housing Corp. in January under HUD’s Self-help Homeownership Opportunity Program (SHOP), according to the government website USAspending.gov.
In order words, the Obama administration gave fraud-ridden ACORN nearly a half million dollars to be used on housing development.
The administration isn’t even trying to conceal the fact that it gave this money to ACORN.
USAspending.gov identifies the recipient as “ACORN Housing Corporation Inc.” even though that nonprofit entity filed papers last year legally changing its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA).
The website also provides the address of record for ACORN Housing as 1024 Elysian Fields Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana. That’s the renovated funeral home that until recently served as headquarters for ACORN’s 370-plus shady affiliates.
This means the Obama administration has given at least $540,905 in taxpayer money to ACORN this calendar year alone.

Read the whole thing. And be sure to buy his new book!

‘Hey, TSA, Is That My iPad in Your Pants, or Are You Just Happy to Frisk Me?’

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Damn that VodkaPundit: He got to this joke headline before I did. Great drunks think alike, I guess. But enough about us — let’s talk about the government hiring criminal thugs to rip off innocent taxpayers:

The Broward [County, Fla.] Sheriff’s Office says 30-year-old Nelson Santiago stole around $50,000 worth of electronics over the past six months from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport’s Terminal 1.
Santiago — a TSA officer since 2009 — was caught earlier this week by a Continental Airlines employee taking an iPad out of someone’s luggage and stuffing it into his pants, the cops say.
After being arrested Monday on two counts of grand theft, police say Santiago admitted to stealing computers, GPS devices, video cameras, and other electronic merchandise from luggage he was supposed to be screening.

(Via Memeorandum, with links by Hit & Run, The Lonely Conservative and Weasel Zippers.) Santiago was reportedly selling the stuff by posting it online while he was still “at work.” The fact that this thief was hired in 2009 might lead suspicious minds to wonder whether hiring standards at this agency — part of Janet Napolitano‘s Department of Homeland Security — have been lowered since January 2009.

No way. Because that would be completely irresponsible — like selling guns to Mexican drug gangs and illegal immigrants. And only crazy right-wingers could ever imagine that any federal agency would ever do something  like that.

RE-ELECT PRESIDENT OBAMA
A Government Of Thugs, By Thugs, For Thugs

How Fannie and Freddie Screwed Over Taxpayers and Wrecked the Economy

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Amazing to see this on PBS:

UPDATE: Linked by The Lonely Conservative and Dan Collins at The Conservatory — thanks! Meanwhile, reviewing Reckless Endangerment at Barron’s, Gene Epstein writes:

It starts at the beginning — in 1991, when Jim Johnson, a political operative and former top aide to Sen. Walter Mondale, took over as Fannie Mae’s CEO. Previously, Fannie had been run as a business; afterward, it was run like a political machine.

George Will also praises the book:

Put on asbestos mittens and pick up “Reckless Endangerment,” the scalding new book by Gretchen Morgenson, a New York Times columnist, and Joshua Rosner, a housing finance expert. They will introduce you to James A. Johnson, an emblem of the administrative state that liberals admire.
The book’s subtitle could be: “Cry ‘Compassion’ and Let Slip the Dogs of Cupidity.” Or: “How James Johnson and Others (Mostly Democrats) Made the Great Recession.”

‘Subversion, Inc.’: Book-Partying in D.C. With Author Matthew Vadum Tonight

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The notorious “Beltway cocktail party circuit” is a political cliché, suggestive of effete insiders conspiring over martinis in some sort of Machiavellian power-status cabal. There is some truth to that cliché. Washington, D.C., is very much a town where who you know is more important than what you know, and the most important thing is always what you know about who you know.

People in the nation’s capital really do conduct a lot of business over cocktails (or beer), and so I’m off to D.C. tonight to attend a book-signing party for my buddy Matthew Vadum, whose book Subversion, Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

In addition to being my buddy — which should be recommendation enough — Vadum is the nation’s foremost expert on ACORN’s nefarious activities, having covered them for years as an investigative journalist with the Capital Research Center. And in a Washington Times column he reminds us that (a) ACORN is still in business, contrary to rumors of their demise, and (b) they’ve collected tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding over the years:

America’s long-suffering taxpayers scored a resounding victory as the Supreme Court told one of the nation’s foremost tax-eating groups to take a hike.
The high court denied an appeal last week by the radical left-wing gangster group ACORN, ruling in effect that Congress was entitled to cut off federal taxpayer funding for the group, which routinely perpetrates voter fraud and encourages welfare recipients to buy houses they have no hope of paying for.
ACORN still matters because reports of its demise have been exaggerated. Although the national ACORN organization filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy on Election Day last year, ACORN is restructuring itself in time to help re-elect its former employee, President Obama, next year. ACORN’s voter-mobilization arm, Project Vote, is conducting business as usual out of ACORN’s D.C. offices.
The ACORN network has taken in an astounding $79 million in federal funding, and those are only the grants I could find in the U.S. government’s antiquated databases. . . .

So I’ll be in D.C. tonight celebrating Vadum’s excellent new book — more than 400 pages, with more than 700 footnotes — and encourage you to buy it now. When you purchase Subversion Inc. through the Amazon Associates link, you get a low price and I get a small commission, and the resulting profit may help convince my wife that hanging around D.C. cocktail receptions is a legitimate journalistic endeavor, rather than just an excuse to party with Vadum.

BREAKING: Blagojevich Convicted

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Rod Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois, has been convicted of several counts in his corruption and bribery trial in Chicago.

UPDATE: Blagojevich was found guilty on 17 counts, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

UPDATE II: The Chicago Tribune reports:

Blogojevich showed no reaction as the jury found him guilty on 17 of 20 counts against him. . . .
Blagojevich was arrested in December 2008, after the FBI had wiretapped hundreds of his telephone calls at work and home. The Illinois Legislature impeached him a month later.

UPDATE III: Chris Bury of ABC News reports:

For seven days, Blagojevich took the stand in an attempt to counter hundreds of FBI wiretaps that, prosecutors argued, demonstrated his maneuvering to peddle the vacated Senate seat of the newly elected Barack Obama. In perhaps the most infamous recording, the then governor is heard saying, “I’ve got this thing and it’s f—— golden. And I, I’m just not giving it up for f—— nothing.”
Other wiretaps recorded Blagojevich musing aloud about possible senior jobs in the new administration he might get should he appoint Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett. “How about Health and Human Services, can I get that?” “How about U.N. Ambassador?”
Jurors also heard recordings that, prosecutors said, showed Blagojevich scheming to sell the Senate Seat to allies of U.S. Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. in exchange for more than $1 million in campaign contributions. Jackson has insisted he had no knowledge of any “unauthorized” efforts on his behalf.

UPDATE IV: Linked at The Lonely Conservative — thanks! — and there’s now a Memeorandum thread.

The Power of Simple Sentences

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Why is Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) ready to “move on” now?

Some statements are either true or false. Expressing things in simple declarative sentences helps clarify meaning, so that we can either agree or disagree as to the truth or falsehood of such statements. Here are three examples:

SENTENCE 1

On Nov. 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas.

SENTENCE 2

On Sept. 11, 2001, nineteen Islamic radicals perpetrated the worst act of terrorism in U.S. history.

SENTENCE 3

On May 27, 2011, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) used his Twitter account to send a photo of his bulging crotch to a 21-year-old college coed from Seattle he had never met.

There are people who doubt Sentence 1 and/or Sentence 2, but most who have studied those incidents have concluded that Oswald was the lone assassin in Dallas, and that Mohammed Atta & Co. were responsible for 9/11. We now turn our attention to Sentence 3.

Do we know that Sentence 3 is true? No.

Do we know that Sentence 3 is false? Again, no.

What we have are (a) the uncontested fact that, on Friday, Weiner’s Twitter account was used to send a YFrog link of the aforesaid bulging crotch photo, and (b) the statements of Weiner and his spokesman that the congressman was the victim of “hackers,” an accusation of criminality subsequently softened to “prank.”

We do not need to choose between these alternatives in order to conclude that it is a worth the effort required to determine the truth or falsehood of Sentence 3. Continue reading The Power of Simple Sentences →

Shocking: Government Wastes Money!

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I’m sure you’ll be stunned into silence by the startling revelation that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is not a model of efficiency:

The federal government’s largest housing construction program for the poor has squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on stalled or abandoned projects and routinely failed to crack down on derelict developers or the local housing agencies that funded them.
Nationwide, nearly 700 projects awarded $400 million have been idling for years, a Washington Post investigation found. Some have languished for a decade or longer even as much of the country struggles with record-high foreclosures and a dramatic loss of affordable housing.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the nation’s housing fund, has largely looked the other way: It does not track the pace of construction and often fails to spot defunct deals, instead trusting local agencies to police projects. . . .

Read the whole thing. (Via Memeorandum.)