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From the passed bailout bill S-1424; TITLE I - Troubled Assets Relief Program SECTION 110 b. HOMEOWNER ASSISTANCE BY AGENCIES. 1. IN GENERAL.To the extent that the Federal property manager holds, owns, or controls mortgages, mortgage backed securities, and other assets secured by residential real estate, including multifamily housing, the Federal property manager shall implement a plan that seeks to maximize assistance for homeowners and use its authority to encourage the servicers of the underlying mortgages, and considering net present value to the taxpayer, to take advantage of the HOPE for Homeowners Program under section 257 of the National Housing...

Two years ago, the office of Michelle Obama, the vice president for community relations at the University of Chicago Medical Center, published a glossy report detailing the improvements her office had made in the lives of local residents, in part by increasing ties to minority contractors Center administrators declined to disclose which businesses benefited; the report lists one -- Blackwell Consulting Services. In 2005, the center expanded its bidding process and invited African American businessman Robert Blackwell Sr. to join a competition to upgrade the center's intranet, the in-house equivalent of a Web site. His company, Blackwell Consulting, won contracts...

I write to express my concern about the recent decision to eliminate the public corruption section in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. According to press reports, the 17 Assistant United States Attorneys assigned to the public corruption/environmental crimes unit in the Los Angeles office are being reassigned to other sections within the office. Public corruption cases will now apparently be mixed in with other types of cases and handled by a larger pool of prosecutors, rather than by a specialized section. Press articles have also mentioned the low morale and ill will that this decision...

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-shakeup20mar20,1,7868966.story

The president of the Illinois Senate is sitting in his statehouse office, talking in gravelly tones about political strategies and counter-strategies. Out of nowhere, the theme from "The Godfather" begins playing. It turns out to be the ringtone on his cell phone - an appropriate song for the man who amounts to Barack Obama's political godfather. Emil Jones Jr. helped Obama master the intricacies of the Legislature. When Democrats took control of the state Senate, Jones, though he risked offending colleagues who had toiled futilely on key issues under Republican rule, tapped Obama to take the lead on high-profile legislative...

From an interview on August 3, 2007: Governor Huckabee: You know, I looked for people who embodied those very things I just mentioned. A commitment to a strict constructionist view of their job, viewed the Constitution as something that they were simply to apply, not to reinterpret and rewrite. But I also looked for people who embodied the kind of temperament that we needed on the bench, who would, uh, divorce themselves and distance themselves from their own personal passions in the sense of letting their emotions drive them, but [instead] letting the Constitution drive them. And, uh, the kind...

In 1973, a 29-year-old federal prosecutor named Rudy Giuliani indicted a Brooklyn congressman, unknowingly creating a political opening for an ambitious 23-year-old named Chuck Schumer. It is the first and least known link between two powerful New York politicians whose paths have crossed and careers intersected in often surprising ways over the past four decades. But it certainly wasn't the last. Just two weeks ago, Sen. Schumer (D-N.Y.) found himself defying his own party to confirm U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, a retired Manhattan judge and close friend of the former mayor. Schumer and Giuliani may seem an odd pairing,...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former New York police commissioner and Rudy Giuliani protege Bernard Kerik was indicted on federal tax fraud and corruption charges related to his personal finance and business dealings, the U.S. attorney said on Friday. The 14-count indictment, which could pose an embarrassment to front-runner Giuliani as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination, stem in part from Kerik's receiving $255,000 worth of renovations to his apartment from a construction firm suspected of ties organized crime that was attempting to win city contracts. Kerik pleaded guilty last year to state charges over the home remodeling, but the...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Rudy Giuliani assured a conservative legal group Friday that if elected president he would appoint federal judges who adhere to their principles. He also praised a judge who declared the capital city's gun ban unconstitutional and ridiculed efforts to eliminate the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. In a speech marking the 25th anniversary of the Federalist Society, Giuliani spelled out a conservative legal agenda in which he cited Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts as models for the judges he would appoint to the federal...

The mainstream media are focusing on former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's increasing popularity among Republican Iowa caucus-goers and his showing this past weekend at the annual Reagan Dinner in Iowa: Three of the top-tier Republican presidential candidates—Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and John McCain—failed to show at the seventh annual Reagan Dinner in Iowa Saturday night, unwisely ceding the floor to the six remaining GOP hopefuls. Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson took advantage of the absences.... Rising in the Iowa polls, Huckabee used his time on the stage to assure the crowd against one of his biggest criticisms by some in...

If Sen. Hillary Clinton is to chart her own course independent of her husband, why did she choose Sandy Berger to give her advice on foreign policy? This suggests reunion time for cronies. In 2003, Mr. Berger took several highly classified documents about the Clinton-era Millennium terror plot from the National Archives while "aiding" the September 11 commission. Mr. Berger successfully negotiated a plea bargain and received only two years probation, along with a security-clearance suspension and a $50,000 fine. Were he anything less than a member of the permanent Clinton establishment, he would be in sitting in a prison...

Just Breaking

Report says that more than $45 billion of the estimate is either in error or undocumented. The State Auditor's Office this morning released a report challenging the validity of almost half of a purported $86 billion shortfall in Texas transportation funding over the next generation, and cautioning that the gap estimate "may not be reliable for making policy or funding decisions." That $86 billion figure has been cited repeatedly by Texas Department of Transportation officials and some legislators as a major reason for the state's increasing need for new toll roads. The number is a compilation of estimates from local...

Isn't that nice? The city of Manhattan Beach is renaming an oceanfront park, Bruces' Beach, after Charles A. and Willa Bruce, an African-American couple who had purchased the land in 1912 and developed it into a beachfront resort in the 1920s. The Bruces were driven off their land in the mid-1920s, according to a Los Angeles Times article last week, after city officials became uncomfortable with the idea of numerous black people sunbathing and dining at Bruces' Lodge. At the urging of the local community, the officials discovered a compelling public interest in creating a public park on that very...

What is it about Michael Chertoff, President Bush's unqualified, unsuccessful, unrepentant and yet still unreplaced Homeland Security Secretary? After (1) bungling the federal response to Hurricane Katrina by treating FEMA as an unwanted step-child in a massive Homeland Security Department focused on the War on Terror and (2) hamstringing former FEMA Director Michael D. Brown by officially putting him in charge and then tethering him to Baton Rouge when he needed to be in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coat, it was Mr. Chertoff who should have resigned, but did not. For an encore, Mr. Chertoff ran Homeland Security...

Charlie Crist Let My Daughter Die by Robert Schindler, Sr. Posted Jul 31, 2006 As most Americans know, on March 31, 2005, my daughter, Terri Schindler Schiavo died of starvation and thirst after having her feeding tube removed by court order. The sad chain of events that concluded with Terri’s death ignited a media firestorm nationally and internationally. What few saw or heard was the callous inaction of aspiring governor Charlie Crist. Florida Atty. Gen. Charlie Crist let my daughter die. He had it within his authority to save her life, but he turned a blind eye to her suffering....

Governor Must Immediately Replace Reiner Strickland: “Controller needs to freeze Reiner funding and conduct immediate accountability audit” Sacramento, CA– Taxpayer Advocate Tony Strickland today called upon Governor Schwarzenegger to “immediately replace Rob Reiner on the First 5 California Children and Families Commission. His term has expired and nothing prevents the Governor from selecting an appointee who will restore the transparency and credibility to taxpayers when it comes to how government spends their tax dollars.” The firestorm of controversy has continued unabated since a Los Angeles Times story on Monday exposed a series of abuses orchestrated by Reiner and a small...

Over the next 30 years, most of Harris County's remaining open space will succumb to subdivisions, office buildings and shopping centers where millions of new residents will live and work, projections by local planners show. The spread of development, particularly west and northwest of Houston, is among the more striking trends shown in preliminary population and job growth projections developed by the Houston-Gal- veston Area Council for the eight-county Houston region. The potential loss of open space alarms conservationists and others concerned about suburban sprawl. It is among the factors driving an effort by business and civic leaders to find...

Things are going from bad to worse at the Bush Department of Homeland Security. Do not be fooled by DHS chief Michael Chertoff's tough-sounding rhetoric. While the Washington muckety-mucks pay lip service to reforming the nation's broken detention and deportation system, catch-and-release of immigration lawbreakers remains the order of the day -- not only at the border, but all across the country's interior. The rudderless and overwhelmed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency still does not have a new chief. Which is just as well since Bush nominee Julie Myers (a nice Bush lawyer with virtually no immigration or customs...

Nov 1 (Reuters) - Here are brief portraits of the main players in Canada's cash-for-favors scandal, under which money designed to promote a united Canada was channeled to advertising firms close to the ruling Liberals, often for little or no work. An official report on the scandal was released on Tuesday.

WASHINGTON - Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination to be a Supreme Court justice Thursday in the face of stiff opposition and mounting criticism about her qualifications. Bush said he reluctantly accepted her decision to withdraw, after weeks of insisting that he did not want her to step down. He blamed her withdrawal on calls in the Senate for the release of internal White House documents that the administration has insisted were protected by executive privilege. "It is clear that senators would not be satisfied until they gained access to internal documents concerning advice provided during her tenure at the White...

President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court has divided the conservative movement. Initially, most conservatives, but not quite all, expressed disappointment with the nomination. Since then, paths have diverged. Some conservatives, having gone on record as wishing that Bush had chosen someone else, have now migrated back into the fold, pronounced Miers a qualified candidate, and defended her nomination as the president's prerogative. Other conservatives have continued to ratchet up their attacks on Miers. Nearly every day produces yet another instance of Miers's alleged incompetence, inexperience, or suspected liberal sympathies. Some of the criticisms of Miers are...

Such is the perfect perversity of the nomination of Harriet Miers that it discredits, and even degrades, all who toil at justifying it. Many of their justifications cannot be dignified as arguments. Of those that can be, some reveal a deficit of constitutional understanding commensurate with that which it is, unfortunately, reasonable to impute to Miers. Other arguments betray a gross misunderstanding of conservatism on the part of persons masquerading as its defenders. Miers's advocates, sensing the poverty of other possibilities, began by cynically calling her critics sexist snobs who disdain women with less than Ivy League degrees. Her advocates...

TRANSCRIPT FROM TUCKER CARLSON SHOW: Adding to the sexism, elitism, faith, and threat cards in the White House arsenal, comes the "far right" card. Speaking in support of Harriet Miers on Tucker Carlson's MSNBC show last night was Brad Blakeman, described by Carlson as "a former deputy assistant to President Bush [who] shared an office with Harriet Miers for three years." I'm posting the entire transcript of the Blakeman interview below. Go to the parts in bold to see the "far right" business. CARLSON: ...today one of the many questions regarding Harriet Miers has been answered, in part, anyway, in...

According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, 54 percent of Americans think President Bush values party loyalty and personal friendship over competence. The poll was prompted, as if you didn’t know, by Bush’s habit of appointing friends and retainers to major jobs in his administration. Some of these seem qualified enough: Condi Rice, Alberto Gonzales. Others seem more questionable, none more so than Michael Brown and Harriet Miers. In one sense this is nothing new for Bush. From the start, his administration was marked by a web of family connections, and certain members of the press were quick to cry...

Is Miers Pro-Wife? Here's a fascinating detail from a Reuters report on an appearance by six former Texas Supreme Court justices supporting the nomination of Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court: The six former justices, all of them men, said they had worked with Miers while she was a lawyer in Dallas and they endorsed her Supreme Court nomination. "I'd trust her with my wife and with my life," former Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice John Hill told reporters on the White House driveway after a meeting with President George W. Bush. "I'd trust her with my wife"? This...

The nomination of Justices of the Supreme Court is one of the most awesome responsibilities of the President of the United States. Most of our Presidents have so regarded it, but a few have yielded to the temptation of using vacancies on the Court to reward friends or to pay political debts. Fortunately those instances have been sufficiently rare to attract special attention. George Washington set an admirable example in making the first appointments to the Supreme Bench. In a letter to Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York he had set forth his revolve to choose judges "with a...

The e-mails are deeply divided and vehement on both sides. Anti-anti-Miers people want me to christen the Coaltion of Robert the Bruce and start naming names, call for the cancellation of various subscriptions, and gather Octavious Lepidus and Anthony for a list-making. The anti-Miers people want the same thing, just with different names attached. The nomination of Miers is one of three things: a brilliant move by the president; a blunder like Reagan's nominations of Justice O'Connor and Kennedy or the first Bush's of Souter; or a betrayal of the sort that occasions taking leave of the whole project. Other...

Imagine if Bill Clinton had nominated his personal attorney and White House counsel to a post on the U.S. Supreme Court. Somehow, I can't imagine my conservative friends supporting the nominee – particularly if there were questions about controversial documents being destroyed that might actually shed light on scandals of the past. The stunning series of articles by WND columnist Jerome Corsi, raising serious and nagging questions about Harriet Miers' role as chairman of the Texas Lottery Commission and the cover-up of the way that story intersects with George W. Bush's National Guard service, points up why this kind of...

These are strange days in Washington. For the first time since Bill Clinton was president, Democrats are happier than Republicans. President George W Bush is discovering that he has less political capital than he had imagined. A combination of circumstances, ranging from an apparently endless engagement in Iraq to the federal government's bumbling response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina have ensured the president has no need to seek his troubles. To the list of woes must be added the investigations into the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity by senior White House staff, the indictment of House...

President Bush on Monday nominated Dallas native Harriet Ellan Miers to the United States Supreme Court — turning the eyes of the nation on a 16-year-old document stored in the garage of longtime lesbian leader Louise Young. Bush named Miers, the White House counsel, to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Miers, formerly a prominent Dallas lawyer and a past president of the State Bar of Tex-as, is a longtime, close associate of Bush’s. She has no prior experience as a judge. When she heard the news of Bush’s nomination, Young re-membered that Miers had appeared before the Lesbian/Gay Political...

The latest snark among conservatives opposed to the Miers nomination has been generated by this paragraph this story in the Washington Post: In an initial chat with Miers, according to several people with knowledge of the exchange, Leahy asked her to name her favorite Supreme Court justices. Miers responded with "Warren" — which led Leahy to ask her whether she meant former Chief Justice Earl Warren, a liberal icon, or former Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative who voted for Roe v. Wade . Miers said she meant Warren Burger, the sources said. Here's what Polipundit was told happened: "Miers...

My favorite supporting character in the legendary strip, “Peanuts,” is Pigpen. His unique trait is raising a cloud of dirt everywhere, even on a clean, dry sidewalk. Pigpen came to mind when I saw the White House Press Corps’ question President Bush Wednesday on his nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. First, the status of the nomination. Monday afternoon, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid held a nearly unprecedented press conference with Harriet Miers, just hours after her nomination. Reid said that she was an “exceptional” candidate, and “the sort of person who should be nominated.” In short, the...

Cronyism is the signature of the Bush administration. Harriet Miers' nomination to the United States Supreme Court is the high-water mark. The Senate should reject the nomination to honor the original meaning of the Constitution. As Alexander Hamilton amplified in Federalist 76, the Senate confirmation role was intended to "prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity." President Bush's sound track during two campaigns was Scalia-Thomas as the philosophical North Star for Supreme Court appointments. Miss Miers, in contrast, is an ink blot. On constitutional matters, to...

Ann Coulter is one of many conservative pundits criticizing the SCOTUS nomination of Harriet Miers. I relish the opportunity to debate the matter with those, like Ann, who take a stance different from mine. In fact, because I believe that serious debate is such enlightening fun, I will continue to publish views on this site that differ from mine. Sadly, Ann has taken the low road, rather than debate me on the merits of my argument in favor of Miers. On her website today (though not in her syndicated column that contains some duplicate verbiage) she dismisses my defense of...