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While Michelle Obama fruitlessly pimped (oh ok, shilled, promoted) her corrupt, broke and now nationally known violent, native town, as a site for the 2016 Olympics, for the first time in her life she was seemingly proud of it. Her neighborhood "of working families -- families with modest homes and strong values.Sports were what brought our community together. They strengthen our ties to one another." It was also, and still is, a relatively high crime neighborhood. It is a testimony to Michelle and her parents that she emerged relatively unscathed except with a huge, but somewhat understandable, chip on her...

Several Miami-Dade commissioners are demanding drastic cuts to Mayor Carlos Alvarez's budget amid revelations he gave generous raises to favored staffers while pushing for unprecedented job and salary cuts throughout the rest of County Hall.

Denver (AP) Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter has awarded some of the state's first stimulus money to his former employer in a no-bid contract. Ritter hired his former law firm, the Washington-based Hogan & Hartson, in a no-bid contract to review stimulus spending, The Denver Post reported Friday. It said the firm was paid $40,000 in stimulus money through June. ...

Last year South Carolina Rep. James E. Clyburn was expected to stay neutral in the long, bitter Democratic presidential primary struggle between Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. An influential endorsement from Clyburn, a civil rights hero and top member of the House Democratic leadership, would have been welcomed by former President Clinton, who worked closely with him in the 1990s and thought they were close friends.

For months, a false campaign was launched to oust President Bush's second Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, for the firing of US attorneys. Jon Stewart would launch "jokes" sharply jabbing the AG and the Bush Administration, while Keith Olbermann would should until his face was red about "Mr. Gonzalez."

For example, the National Association of Home Builders hired Baker & Hostetler a week after Barack Obama’s inauguration to lobby explicitly on the stimulus bill, which, in the end, included an $8,000 credit for home purchases. Better Place Inc. is an electric car company that hired its first lobbyist — Steve McBee, a former staffer for House appropriator Norm Dicks, D-Wash. — to push for electric car incentives in the stimulus. The resulting cornucopia included an expanded tax credit for plug-in cars, $2 billion in funding for electric car batteries and $400 million to build an electric car infrastructure, complete...

The more we learn about the White House's summary firing of AmeriCorps' inspector general, Gerald Walpin, the more it smells of lawlessness, cronyism and a flagrant disregard for transparency and government accountability. Remember President Barack Obama's commitment to oversee the expenditure of taxpayer funds to avoid waste and inefficiency -- to the point that he deputized Vice President "Mean" Joe Biden as the executive enforcer? That was then. This is now. As has proved customary with this administration, the walk has not matched the talk. Biden's casual admissions that the administration "guessed wrong" and that money has been wasted don't...

My syndicated column today digs further into Obama’s AmeriCorruption. We now have the White House in full Chicago thug mode — maligning fired AmeriCorps inspector general Gerald Walpin as “confused” and “disoriented.” Yep, that was the response after Democrat Sen. Claire McCaskill weighed in and pronounced herself unsatistifed with Obama’s “loss of confidence” rationale. Implying that Walpin has lost his marbles is desperate and lame. Walpin has been consistenly lucid and laser-sharp in every TV and radio interview I’ve seen or heard — including on the Laura Ingraham show yesterday, where he noted that evidence in the Sacramento mayor/NBA star/Obama...

With Chicago officials in Switzerland promoting Chicago's 2016 Olympic bid at an important site selection meeting, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned that President Obama is creating a new White House Office of Olympic, Paralympic and Youth Sport. According to the White House, 'this permanent White House office will promote the values of the Olympic Movement and encourage increased youth participation in athletics. The primary function of the Office will be to enhance awareness of the Olympic Movement through promotion of its fundamental principles at the federal level." From the White House... President Obama Announces New White House Office of Olympic,...

Congress ought to open an investigation, New York Times editorialists should be in a state of apoplexy, and MSNBC hosts ought to be frothing at the mouth. Without appropriate documentation or good reason, President Obama has fired a federal investigator who was on the case against a political ally of the president's. Mr. Obama's move has the stench of scandal.

House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer and Reps. Chris Van Hollen and Daniel Maffei have circulated this letter today ... ... to Obama expressing “growing concern” with the closures of GM and Chrysler dealerships across the country. The lawmakers say they’re asking for a “compelling justification as to how closing healthy dealerships will make the automakers more financially sound. The lawmakers are asking for lawmakers to sign this letter by 5p.m. today. Full letter below: Dear President Obama: We are writing to express our concerns about General Motors’ and Chrysler’s decision to close profitable automobile dealerships across the country, and...

Zero Hedge covers a court hearing involving terminated Chrysler dealers with some follow-up on its previous analysis of Dealergate and possible Clinton-tied cronyism in Arkansas. Tyler Durden points to one very interesting declaration from Ethel L. Cook, a Chrysler dealer based in Little Rock. Click on his post for the PDF link to the full testimony, but here’s an excerpt: Having reviewed the pattern of assumption and rejection of dealers throughout their region, I have detected a pattern: In every market where there is a dealership connected with former Penske Automotive executive Steve Landers, or his new automotive partnership with...

First lady Michelle Obama has replaced her chief of staff with a longtime Chicago friend in a major shakeup of the East Wing Staff. Jackie Norris, who bonded with Obama during the 2008 primary campaign, has been replaced by Susan Sher, who worked with Obama at the University of Chicago. Sher had been providing legal advice to the administration as well as working on health care reform. Norris, who, Obama called a "colleague and friend" has been appointed as a senior adviser to the Corporation for National and Community Service and in a statement said she is "looking forward to...

As the top strategist at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Brian L. Wolff helped House Speaker Nancy Pelosi assemble the Democrats’ majority in the House. Now, as senior vice president for external affairs at the Edison Electric Institute, he is helping investor-owned electric utilities work with Pelosi, D-Calif., to push a common priority: legislation to address global warming. Wolff and other former top Democratic aides and Pelosi associates are helping the clients of lobbying powerhouses achieve legislative and political goals, even as the Speaker and her top lieutenants are reaching out to business and trade groups as part of an...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Despite his promises of change, President Barack Obama has kept tradition by naming top donors to plum ambassador posts, drawing fire from career US diplomats and causing dismay among some US allies. Obama has been criticized for naming fund raisers with no diplomatic experience -- and who together drummed up well over a million dollars for his record-shattering campaign -- to be ambassadors to Britain, France and Japan. "It's an 18th-century practice we are continuing which no other major democratic country does," said Ronald Neumann, a veteran ambassador and head of the American Academy of Diplomacy, a...

Conventional wisdom holds that the social rate of return to R&D significantly exceeds the private rate of return and, therefore, R&D should be subsidized. In the U.S., the government has directly funded a large fraction of total R&D spending. This paper shows that there is a serious problem with such government efforts to increase inventive activity. The majority of R&D spending is actually just salary payments for R&D workers. Their labor supply, however, is quite inelastic so when the government funds R&D, a significant fraction of the increased spending goes directly into higher wages. Using CPS data on wages of...

This is the bio for Jamie Morin, who has been selected to the the new Air Force SAF/FM (Assistant Secretary, Financial Management and Comptroller) Education: Yale University, (2003), Ph. D. in Political Science, Dissertation “Squaring the Pentagon: The Politics of Post-Cold War Defense Retrenchment.”** Advisers: Bruce Russett, Paul Bracken, Stephen Skowronek, David Mayhew, Alton Frye (Council on Foreign Relations). Completed coursework in with honors grades (3.93 GPA). Passed field exams in American Politics, Comparative Politics, and International Relations (with distinction). Received M.A. and M.Phil. degrees in 2001. Recognized in student evaluations and the campus press as a top teacher. Organized...

MAY 9, 2009 Demoting California Unions hold the state's stimulus hostage. One of the biggest stories in politics earlier this year was about California's budget teetering on the edge of a $42-billion deficit abyss. It only staved off insolvency when its legislature ended three months of gridlock to pass a budget with steep tax hikes and spending cuts. Guess what the Obama Administration is doing? It is telling Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that it will revoke nearly $7 billion in federal stimulus money unless the state restores legislated wage cuts for unionized health-care workers. Obama Administration to federalism: Drop dead. In...

Sen. Dianne Feinstein may have violated Senate ethics rules by introducing legislation in January that indirectly benefited her husband. The legislation authorized that $25 billion of taxpayer money be given to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to help finance an FDIC proposal to avoid home foreclosures by promoting loan workouts and increasing federal loan guarantees, The Washington Times reports. The Democratic California senator’s husband, Richard Blum, is chairman of the board of commercial real estate colossus CB Richard Ellis (CBRE). When Feinstein introduced her bill, the FDIC had just signed a contract with the firm to unload foreclosed properties for...

As she awaits confirmation as U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius faces allegations of favoritism by her administration in distributing Medicaid dollars. Republican legislators said Wednesday that they will have hearings into a decision by one of the Democratic governor's top appointees to increase Medicaid payments by $713,000 a year to a suburban Kansas City group providing services to people with developmental disabilities. One of the group's board members is Larry Gates, the Kansas Democratic Party's chairman. Another is Dan Biles, a Gates law partner Sebelius recently appointed to the Kansas Supreme Court. A third is...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is denying Republican claims that she is partisan, saying she has been open to GOP ideas. In an interview with Charlie Rose on Friday, Pelosi was asked what is the most unfair and misleading impression of her. Pelosi initially said she doesn’t think about it, but when pressed, the Speaker took on her Republican critics. “There seems to -- some people think there seems to be a market for saying that I am very partisan, and that I don't give the Republicans their opportunity. That simply is not true.

With a slimmed-down but much-needed stimulus package now in place, and with a substantial portion of it still aimed at rebuilding America's aging infrastructure, we need to act sensibly as well as quickly and dramatically. Unless we ensure the program reflects the realities of the marketplace for construction services, we risk being unable to implement the programs we need, or worse, handing billions of taxpayer dollars over to stimulus profiteers. Spending as much as the additional $150 billion for infrastructure that is included in the new legislation (still well below what is needed for the nation's aging systems and less...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has appointed yet another termed-out lawmaker to a six-figure post in state government, his sixth such appointment in the past three months. The latest appointee, former GOP Assemblywoman Sharon Runner of Lancaster, will earn $128,109 as a member of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, which meets publicly twice a month.

Barack Obama has been embroiled in a cronyism row after reports that he intends to make Louis Susman, one of his biggest fundraisers, the new US ambassador in London. The selection of Louis Susman, a lawyer and banker from the president's hometown of Chicago, rather than an experienced diplomat, raises new questions about Mr Obama's commitment to the special relationship with Britain. American commentators denounced the selection of a rich friend to the plumb post, regarded as one of the most prestigious in the president's gift, as worthy of a "banana republic". They said it was proof that Mr Obama...

Blagojevich refuses to budge NBC Nightly News VIDEO: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/vp/28200681#28200681&gt1=43001

Four senior Ohio Department of Job and Family Services mangers were disciplined this afternoon for their roles in improper computer checks that sought confidential information about "Joe the Plumber." Jan Allen, acting director of the the state agency, announced that deputy child-support director Doug Thompson and assistant agency director Fred Williams would be placed on unpaid leave Monday. Thompson will be suspended for four weeks and Williams for two weeks. Two others, Paul Fraunholtz, deputy director of family stability, and Judi Cicatiello, deputy director of unemployment compensation, received written reprimands for their conduct. Thompson will be suspended for four weeks...

“I want to know whether Congress was lied to or whether there was a team all along that had an alternate idea of how the money was spent,” Issa (R-CA) said, before demanding to know the “time and date” Hank Paulson, Treasury secretary, had decided to abandon his initial plan to buy up mortgages...Goldman, Paulson's old firm, has publicly admitted that it has picked up 100 new major clients since the financial crisis began...

> Those companies should be permitted to declare bankruptcy so that someone in the private sector can buy them at a discount, if they are worth purchasing. > Why not let them be bought by others in bankruptcy? There are those who say we are bailing out companies in order to prevent massive layoffs. In my view, those layoffs will come sooner or later anyhow because those companies are run by incompetents and no longer able to compete, while foreign companies like Toyota, manufacturing their cars in the U.S., are selling them and not seeking to be bailed out. >

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed wonders, Who would replace Obama's Senate seat? She's plugged into Chicago's upper-tier social scene, and what she says she hears should be stunning. Sneed hears Barack Obama wants an African American to fill his U.S. Senate seat if he wins the presidency. • • The upshot: U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. wants the spot. • • Hmmmm. That places Gov. Blagojevich, who is charged with selecting Obama's replacement, in a tricky place. • • To wit: Sneed hears Gov. Blago, who dismisses reports of a federal probe, wants to run for office again -- and...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, now reminds voters that deeds speak louder than words in politics because the two are so often out of sync. Last year, Pelosi supported a bill to prohibit both direct and indirect payment to spouses by campaign committees and political action committees for consulting, fundraising or other services. Nor could companies that employed spouses be paid for their services. Since such compensation makes its way into family coffers, it's a sort of self-dealing, and most members of Congress sensibly shy away from it. The House passed the bill by voice vote. It failed in...

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.