Posts Tagged ‘corruption’
Monday, July 25th, 2016
Enjoy another Texas vs. California roundup:
June marked the 114th month that Texas was at or below the national unemployment average. Texas also created 246,600 jobs in the service sector.
Once again Texas ranks as the best state for business, and California ranks worst. (Hat tip: Fox and Hounds via Pension Tsunami.)
Elites watch while California crumbles:
The basket of California state taxes — sales, income, and gasoline — rates among the highest in the U.S. Yet California roads and K-12 education rank near the bottom.
California depends on a tiny elite class for about half of its income-tax revenue. Yet many of these wealthy taxpayers are fleeing the 40-million-person state, angry over paying 12 percent of their income for lousy public services.
Excessive state regulations and expanding government, massive illegal immigration from impoverished nations, and the rise of unimaginable wealth in the tech industry and coastal retirement communities created two antithetical Californias.
One is an elite, out-of-touch caste along the fashionable Pacific Ocean corridor that runs the state and has the money to escape the real-life consequences of its own unworkable agendas.
The other is a huge underclass in central, rural, and foothill California that cannot flee to the coast and suffers the bulk of the fallout from Byzantine state regulations, poor schools, and the failure to assimilate recent immigrants from some of the poorest areas in the world.
The result is Connecticut and Alabama combined in one state. A house in Menlo Park may sell for more than $1,000 a square foot. In Madera, three hours away, the cost is about one-tenth of that.
CalPERS suffers $30.8 billion annual loss. “CalPERS has notoriously minimized the annual pension contribution for its 3,007 government entities by fantasizing that its superior investments expertise will allow its investments to compound every year without loss for the next three decades at an annual rate of 7.5 percent.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
CalSTRS isn’t doing much better: “The California State Teachers’ Retirement System [earned] 1.4% for the fiscal year ended June 30.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Record tax revenues, yet somehow California is still broke:
California taxpayers are getting taken to the cleaners, but most of them are completely in the dark about how and why.
I will pose a quick question: Does it seem strange that California has recorded record revenue increases, yet we also see a record number of tax increases and bond issuances on the ballot?
In other words, the state’s tax system is collecting massive amounts of revenues, record amounts, yet politicians are still asking for a record number of new tax increases. For taxpayer advocates, it just doesn’t seem fair and seems very strange at first glance as to how this can even occur.
The truth of the matter is that California’s system of public finance is a complete train wreck and is set up such that no amount of tax revenues collected will ever be enough to satisfy “spending needs.” The so-called baseline expenditure increases are on autopilot and deficit projections are generated despite record revenue increases, a trend projected in the Governor’s May Revise.
(Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
“As we roll toward the November ballot, I’m reminded of H.L. Mencken’s quip that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” We always get it “good and hard” in California given the ever-expanding one-party rule. The worse it gets, the more voters from the GOP high-tail it to Nevada and Texas — and the worse it gets as political competition evaporates. It’s the political equivalent of a death spiral.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
Lots of tax hikes are on the California ballot this November, for a variety of different ostensible reasons, but actually for a single reason: Pensions. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
Beaumont, California: “Seven former officials were arrested and charged with stealing nearly $43 million during the city’s development boom. Now, residents are learning that the town’s problems go much deeper than the criminal case.” (Hat tip: Gregory Benford’s Facebook page.)
“California’s high-speed rail project increasingly looks like an expensive social science experiment to test just how long interest groups can keep money flowing to a doomed endeavor before elected officials finally decide to cancel it.” $68 billion and rising. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
“Teachers union writes a $10-million check for income tax ballot measure.”
“Oakland police officer Malcolm Miller more than quadrupled his $107,627 salary to $489,662 with overtime, benefits and other specialty pays last year — making him Oakland’s highest paid employee for the third year in a row.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
“C.C. Myers Inc., one of California’s highest-profile freeway builders, has filed for bankruptcy.”
Also filing for bankruptcy: California-based developer Criswell-Radovan, which owns the Tahoe Cal Neva casino Frank Sinatra used to own.
One tiny bit of dubious good news for the Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California: Now they’re only the second in bankruptcy filings in the nation at 45,000, having been overtaken by the Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois at 47,535 filings.
Nissan and Toyota battle over Texas. “Both automakers are zeroing in on Texas as a key growth opportunity.”
California’s Democratic State Controller Betty Yee fined $2,082 for violations during her 2014 campaign.
Rent a security robot for $7 an hour. How many human security guards will be left at California’s $15 an hour?
Old and Busted: Participation trophies. The New Hotness: California’s Democratic officials giving awards to their own family members.
“Judge throws out ex-L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca’s plea deal, saying six months in prison not enough.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Tags:bankruptcy, Beaumont (California), Betty Yee, Budget, California, CalPERs, CalSTARS, corruption, Crime, Criswell-Radovan, Democrats, Frank Sinatra, high speed rail, Illinois, minimum wage, Nissan, pension crisis, Tahoe, Texas, Toyota, unions
Posted in Budget, Crime, Democrats, Regulation, Texas, unions | No Comments »
Thursday, July 7th, 2016
I held off on analysis of the FBI non-indictment of Hillary Clinton because I knew there would be many piquant opinions to be harvested from around the Internet, and indeed there are:
“It’s not every day that an F.B.I. director makes up a legal standard to justify refusing to recommend prosecuting a presidential candidate.”
“The law in its majesty bows to the throne. Queen Hillary beat the rap. This will not work out well for her.”
“At one level, it seems like the people in charge are rubbing our noses in the fact they are beyond the reach of the public. They are no longer going to pretend to be citizens of a republic, beholden to the voters. They are above the law and the proof of that is one of their own has committed hundreds of crimes and will not be required to step aside, much less be prosecuted. The law is for the Dirt People and it will be enforced by the Cloud People, but, the Cloud People will do as they please.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Like the IRS and the Secret Service, more and more of the federal government is no longer trustworthy or competent….We used to try to do better in the United States, but lately the powers that be seem to be rubbing our noses in their untrustworthiness and their ability to avoid the consequences.”
The FBI report confirms what all non-shills have known for quite some time: Hillary lied under oath.
“If you’re wondering why Americans are losing confidence in our political system, this is why. Our political elites can’t even be bothered to conceal the appearance of corruption or their sense of entitlement.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Bernie Sanders supporters should be furious over emailgate. “If Hillary Clinton hadn’t lied her way through the primary, would she be the presumptive Democratic nominee?”
In other Clinton Corruption news:
An updated Clinton scandal primer. As with previous versions, he soft-peddles or omits several Clinton scandals…
More dirt on how the California primary was rigged against Sanders.
The return of Sudden Clinton Death Syndrome.
Son of well-heeled Clinton crony calls late Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel a “fascist.”
Tags:2016 Election, 2016 Presidential Race, Bernie Sanders, California, corruption, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Elie Wiesel, EmailGate, FBI, Glenn Reynolds, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton Scandals, James Comey
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections | No Comments »
Sunday, April 24th, 2016
Just because current New York mayor Bill De Blasio is a left-wing loon doesn’t mean he’s not also corrupt up to his eyeballs:
U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara has his sights set squarely on the political operative turned chief executive.
It’s a sprawling probe, but the main line appears to be following the money trail the Daily News’ Greg B. Smith, NY1’s Grace Rauh and others have extensively tracked since de Blasio ran for mayor in 2013.
That was when a union run by his cousin and a top donor to him both wrote six-figure checks to an anti-carriage horse group run by big developers that days later cut checks for the exact same amount to another group — very ironically named New York City Is Not For Sale — that promptly spent the cash, not disclosed until well after the damage was done, on TV ads that brought down then-frontrunner Christine Quinn.
Wait, Democrats and unions involved in corruption? What are the odds?
That happened just as de Blasio found religion on the carriage-horse issue, repeatedly vowing to end on “day one” of his administration an industry that very few New Yorkers saw as a scourge but that would open up what’s now vastly valuable land where the stables now sit on Manhattan’s Far West Side. The developer behind that push, Steve Nislick, wrote a “Shermanesque” statement to the Voice of the People last year vowing he wouldn’t personally profit from their closing.
And it’s not just ponies: “The feds are also looking at how the city helped turn a nursing home for AIDS patients into luxury condos and at a series of scandals involving hookers for top cops and diamonds for their wives.” Among many other transgressions.
That cops and hookers scandal (which took place on a plane to Las Vegas, a nice plus for a juicy sex and corruption story) involved Jeremy Reichberg and Jona Rechnitz, both of whom are De Blasio donors.
Given that Bharara took down former Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver and former Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, there’s a good chance he’ll succeed in taking down De Blasio. Then it might finally be Andrew Cuomo’s turn in the barrel…
(Hat tip: Instapundit’s Twitter feed.)
Tags:Bill De Blasio, corruption, Crime, Dean Skelos, Democrats, hookers, horses, Jeremy Reichberg, Jona Rechnitz, New York City, Preet Bharara, Sheldon Silver, Steve Nislick
Posted in Crime, Democrats, unions | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2015
It’s been a big week for Democratic Party corruption.
First, Democratic Speaker of New York’s Sheldon Silver was convicted of all the corruption charges against him:
“The Democratic speaker of the state Assembly for more than 20 years, Mr. Silver was found guilty by a 12-person federal jury in Manhattan of four counts of honest-services fraud, two counts of extortion and one count of money laundering.”
More on Silver from Steve Malanga of City Journal:
For years, New York State has ranked among the most litigation-friendly places in America. (Those unlucky enough to get caught up in the state’s civil justice system call it “Sue” York.) Lawsuit reform has bypassed New York largely because one of the state’s most powerful politicians, former assembly speaker Sheldon Silver, was himself a plaintiff’s attorney who benefited from the system he helped create. Over the years, Silver not only blocked attempts to change unique features of New York’s civil justice system, but he also appointed other trial lawyers to key legislative positions, including on the crucial Assembly Judiciary Committee. So it’s not shocking that when Silver himself finally fell from grace, the case revolved around state grants Silver arranged to a cancer researcher, who then referred mesothelioma patients back to the former speaker’s law firm so that they could become clients in the lucrative asbestos-litigation business.
Snip.
Silver thought the people’s money was his money. For years, he helped lead a regime in which legislators from both parties received millions of dollars to distribute as “earmarks”—money handed out directly by elected officials to favored organizations outside of the state’s regular contracting or granting process. The New York Times dubbed Silver the “king of earmarks” because he used them as a way of exercising power over members of his political caucus. In doing so, Silver was accountable to no one. He handed out millions of dollars of state money, for instance, to the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, an organization run by William Rapfogel, the husband of Silver’s longtime chief of staff. Judy Rapfogel sat in on meetings about funding for her husband’s group, according to press accounts. In 2013, William pled guilty to stealing some $3 million over a nearly 20-year period from the largely government-funded Met Council. He served 14 months of a 3- to 10-year sentence in an upstate prison and recently entered a supervised work-release program.
In New York, the earmark process is so corrupt that politicians can create their own nonprofits and then finance them with taxpayer money—a remarkably blatant display of conflict-of-interest.
Meanwhile, in Rahm Emmanual’s Chicago:
THERE’S been a cover-up in Chicago. The city’s leaders have now brought charges against a police officer, Jason Van Dyke, for the first-degree murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. But for more than a year, Chicago officials delayed the criminal process, and might well have postponed prosecution indefinitely, had it not been for a state court forcing their hand.
They prevented the public from viewing crucial incriminating evidence — first one police car’s dashboard camera video; now, we learn, five such videos in total. And these senior officials turned a blind eye to the fact that 86 minutes of other video surveillance footage of the crime scene was unaccountably missing.
Snip.
The video of a police shooting like this in Chicago could have buried Mr. Emanuel’s chances for re-election. And it would likely have ended the career of the police superintendent, Garry F. McCarthy.
And so the wheels of justice virtually ground to a halt. Mayor Emanuel refused to make the dash-cam video public, going to court to prevent its release. The city argued that releasing the video would taint the investigation of the case, but even the attorney general of Illinois urged the city to make it available.
Then the city waited until April 15 — one week after Mr. Emanuel was re-elected — to get final approval of a pre-emptive $5 million settlement with Mr. McDonald’s family, a settlement that had been substantially agreed upon weeks earlier. Still, the city’s lawyers made sure to include a clause that kept the dash-cam video confidential.
Compared to those scandals, allegations of garden variety marital infidelity with a lobbyist by Texas Democratic State Senator Carlos Uresti is relatively small peanuts… (Hat tip: Push Junction.)
Tags:Carlos Uresti, corrupt scumbags, corruption, Crime, Democrats, New York, Rahm Emanuel, Sheldon Silver
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Waste and Fraud | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 21st, 2015
Been a while since I took a look at the last region of Texas where Democrats still wield political power: the Rio Grande Valley. What’s going on down there these days?
Would you believe…corruption?
The Rio Grande Valley is considered the most corrupt area in the country, according to the latest statistic from the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Valley has the highest number of federal public corruption convictions. In 2013, 83 cases received guilty verdicts or pleas. The FBI since launched their anti-corruption task force.
Let’s look at a few examples, shall we?
A look at vote buying in the valley:
They’re called politiqueras — a word unique to the border that means campaign worker. It’s a time-honored tradition down in the land of grapefruit orchards and Border Patrol checkpoints. If a local candidate needs dependable votes, he or she goes to a politiquera.
In recent years, losing candidates in local elections began to challenge vote harvesting by politiqueras in the Rio Grande Valley, and they shared their investigations with authorities. After the 2012 election cycle, the Justice Department and the Texas attorney general’s office filed charges.
“Yes, there is a concern in which the politiqueras are being paid to then go and essentially round up voters and have them vote a certain way,” says James Sturgis, assistant U.S. attorney in McAllen.
In the town of Donna, five politiqueras pleaded guilty to election fraud. Voters were bribed with cigarettes, beer or dime bags of cocaine. In neighboring Cameron County, nine politiqueras were charged with manipulating mail-in ballots.
Funny how much of that voter fraud Democrats claim doesn’t exist there is. (Hat tip: Push Junction.)
From the same series: How the drug trade turns good cops bad, focusing on Jonathan Treviño, former head of a Hidalgo County narcotics squad who’s now doing 17 years in prison
Still another piece from the same series: “Jonathan Treviño’s father, Lupe, who was Hidalgo County’s powerful and popular sheriff, is serving a five-year prison term for a separate conviction. He admitted taking $10,000 in illegal campaign contributions from a drug trafficker known as The Rooster, with ties to the Gulf Cartel.” Plus an estimate that 20% of the border’s economy is based on drugs. NPR guesses this estimate is too high; I would guess it’s probably low.
Speaking of which: “The Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office blocked auditors from investigating whether or not former Sheriff Lupe Treviño’s administration allowed county workers to fraudulently report they worked extra hours — and rack up so-called ‘comp time’ they could spend campaigning for him.”
And this was at the direction of former Sheriff’s Office Cmdr. Jose Padilla, who “himself pleaded guilty to working with a Weslaco-based drug trafficker named Tomas ‘El Gallo’ Gonzalez, talked about the time card tampering allegations during a videotaped interview with anti-corruption activists.”
“Two former Hidalgo Housing Authority officials have plead guilty to bribery this afternoon. Sixty year-old Susana Mungia and 53-year-old Lubina Pedraza both admitted in Federal court to have engaged in a bribery scheme, after they had solicited and received money in exchange for allowing people to skip the waitlist and immediately obtain housing assistance.
“A Starr County justice of the peace facing bribery and cocaine charges has been forced off the bench until further notice, state officials ordered Monday. The Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct ordered Salvador Zarate suspended without pay until further notice, according to court documents. Zarate, 62, the Place 3, Place 1 justice of the peace, is accused of taking $500 to lower two defendants’ bond on Christmas Eve.”
“The Indian Lake Police Chief John Chambers was arrested [in February] on 14 counts of tampering with governmental records.”
These are only the stories that have caught my eye this year…
Tags:Border Controls, corruption, Crime, Donna (town), Guadalupe “Lupe” Trevino, Hidalgo County, Indian Lake, John Chambers, Jonathan Trevino, Jose Padilla, Rio Grande Valley, Starr County, Texas, Tomas "El Gallo" Gonzalez, Voter Fraud
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Texas | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 7th, 2014
It’s no longer a surprise when Democratic cronies rake in the benefits from pork programs created by Democratic Senators and Representatives. After all, giving out taxpayer money to connected interest groups is pretty much the Democratic Party’s business model. However, the family of North Carolina’s Democratic Senator Kay Hagan has taken it to the next level:
Sen. Kay Hagan’s husband and son created a solar energy contracting company in August 2010, and then, using $250,644 in federal stimulus grant funds, her husband hired that same company to install solar panels at a building he owns.
Public records show that Green State Power was formed seven weeks before JDC Manufacturing — a company owned in part by Greensboro attorney Charles “Chip” Hagan III, Sen. Hagan’s husband — received the stimulus grant for the solar project at a 300,000-square-foot facility in Reidsville, N.C.
A story in late September on the Washington, D.C.-based website Politico revealed that JDC Manufacturing received “nearly $390,000 in federal grants for energy projects and tax credits created by the 2009 stimulus law, according to public records and information provided by the company.”
The story reported that JDC “was one of 27 in North Carolina to be awarded funds for energy-efficient projects, to the tune of about $250,000. The company received the money in 2011, after the first phase of the project was completed in late 2010.”
And needless to say, Kay Hagan voted in favor of the pork-laden stimulus her family so richly benefited from.
From a purely amoral viewpoint, you have to admire the brazen efficiency of sucking down the maximum amount of taxpayer subsidies at every stage of the project pipeline. It’s like The Human Centipede of recycled graft…
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Tags:Budget, Chip Hagan, corrupt scumbags, corruption, Democrats, fraud, Kay Hagan, North Carolina, Stimulus
Posted in Budget, Democrats, Elections, Waste and Fraud | No Comments »
Thursday, July 3rd, 2014
Enjoy Independence Day tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s another Texas vs. California roundup:
Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby wasn’t the only important Supreme Court case last year. The Harris vs. Quinn decision, invalidating mandatory union fees for home health care workers, could have a huge impact on SEIU in California. “where 400,000 state-paid in-home care workers are represented by the SEIU.”
Former CalPERS CEO to plead guilty to bribery and conspiracy charges.
At least 1,500 Bay Area employees have racked up $50,000 in yearly overtime. “A Monterey County jail guard who worked enough overtime to nearly triple his annual base pay to $264,000 last year.”
Wonder why San Bernardino is bankrupt?
“San Bernardino, California, said that to exit bankruptcy it must terminate a union contract that pays an average annual salary of $190,000 to each of its top 40 firefighters,” according to an article in Bloomberg. That’s just salary. Firefighters receive the generous “3 percent at 50″ retirement package that allows them to retire with 90 percent of their final years’ pay at age 50. And there are lots of pension-spiking gimmicks and other benefits on top of that.
“These cities are run for the benefit of those who work there. Public services are a side matter at best.”
Murrieta, California Protesters greet Obama Administration shipment of illegal aliens with protests, blocking them from being dumped in their community.
Judge strikes down Pacific Grove pension initiative.
Some bay-area California cities want to hike they local minimum wage. Hey, that won’t hurt businesses here in Texas, so knock yourselves out…
More on Toyota’s relocation to Texas, along with some tidbits on the Texas economy:
Toyota’s move to Texas is a high-profile relocation, but Texas has been used to adding — and filling — new jobs at a superlative pace. The state added more than 1.9 million new jobs over the period from December 1999 to April 2014, more than 35 percent of the entire nation’s total for that 15-year period, noted Michael Cox, an economics professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. And Texas had an unemployment rate of just 5.1 percent in May, 16th-lowest in the United States.
Meanwhile, Cox noted, Texas’s median wages are 28th-highest in the nation; and they rank 8th-highest after adjusting for taxes and prices. Texas schools rank 3rd, he said, after adjusting for variations in student demographics, a raw statistic which places Texas 28th in the nation.
“We’re able to accomplish all this and more because the business environment in our state is largely competitive, and free markets solve problems,” Cox told me. “Texas is a meritocracy, where incentives still work to produce good results.”
“Six current and former members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department were found guilty Tuesday of obstruction of justice.
Grand Jury:”Hey, you might want to consider a pension reform task force.” City of Napa: “Get stuffed.”
Santa Ana-based Corithhian Colleges could be headed for bankruptcy.
Texas is now home to more Fortune 1000 Companies than any other state.
Liberals are still upset that Texas’ red state model is kicking the ass of California’s blue state model. Enter the Texas Tribune, which admits that:
Drive almost anywhere in the vast Lone Star State and you will see evidence of the “Texas miracle” economy that policymakers like Gov. Rick Perry can’t quit talking about….
This hot economy, politicians say, is the direct result of their zealous opposition to over-regulation, greedy trial lawyers and profligate government spending. Perry now regularly recruits companies from other states, telling them the grass is greener here. And his likely successor, Attorney General Greg Abbott, has made keeping it that way his campaign mantra.
It’s hard to argue with the job creation numbers they tout. Since 2003, a third of the net new jobs created in the United States were in Texas. And there are real people in those jobs, people with families to feed.
But the piece also notes that Texas has led the nation in worker fatalities for seven of the last ten years. I’m not going to get into the details of worker compensation that make up the bulk of the piece, and it is quite possible there is some room for improvement in worker safety. But I do want to note that, as the second largest state in the union, and the one with the biggest oil and gas industry, it’s not terribly surprising that Texas would have the largest number of fatalities, since oil and gas has a fairly high fatality rate (though not injury rate) compared to other industries (see page 14 here).
Tags:Border Controls, Budget, California, CalPERs, corrupt scumbags, corruption, Crime, fraud, Harris vs. Quinn, Los Angeles, Murrieta, Napa, San Bernardino, SEIU, Texas, unions
Posted in Border Control, Budget, Crime, Democrats | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 11th, 2014
You may remember the case of New Rome, Ohio, an infamous speedtrap that existed only to line the pockets of a corrupt family and their friends. The corruption was so bad, Ohio disolved the town on September 9, 2004.
Now comes word that Hampton, Florida seems to be trying many of the same tricks.
“A state audit of Hampton’s books, released last month, reads like a primer on municipal malfeasance. It found 31 instances in which local rules or state or federal laws were violated in ways large and small.”
The big question seems to be where the ticket money went…
(See also: Maywood, California.)
Tags:corruption, Crime, Florida, New Rome, speed trap
Posted in Crime, Waste and Fraud | No Comments »
Friday, January 11th, 2013
Between work and the TPPF Policy Orientation, it’s going to be a busy day, so here’s a quick Friday LinkSwarm:
How bad did you think 2012’s economy was? Guess what? It was even worse than you thought.
Profile of Jim DeMint’s replacement, new South Carolina Senator Tim Scott: “One of the most threatening places to be in politics is a black conservative…there are so many liberals who want to continue to reinforce a stereotype that doesn’t exist about America. That somehow, some way, if you’re a Republican you’re a racist and if you’re black, there’s no chance for you in society.”
Phil Gramm on how wind subsidies screw up the economy.
Obama played Ed Koch for a schmuck.
George Will on why Republicans should push for a balanced budget amendment. “No politically conceivable or economically feasible middle-class tax rate can fund the entitlement state.”
Obama doesn’t think he has a spending problem, just like Lindsay Lohan doesn’t think she has a drinking problem.
A story of fake job shenanigans from a government employment center. “We were used by a bogus company to rake in funding by the state. It’s like a full blown industry here to pass around jobless people and keep them from getting real jobs.”
35 years ago, the Chicago Sun-Times exposed the city’s corruption in the Mirage tavern series. Does anyone think Chicago is any less corrupt today? Why don’t they have the balls to do something like that now? (Hat tip: Dwight.)
I think Bloomberg just hates people.
Washington is booming on your money.
The homeless are responsible for 35% of downtown Austin’s violent crime.
Tags:Austin, Budget, Chicago, corruption, Crime, Democrats, Energy Policy, George Will, LinkSwarm, Michael Bloomberg, Phil Gramm, pork barrell, Texas, welfare
Posted in Austin, Budget, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Texas, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010
Of 11 of the 13 counts against him by the House ethics committee.
And what will Rangel be sentenced to for tax evasion, rent control fraud, etc.? Most likely, a strongly worded letter. He’ll get to live on in the 112th congress as reminder of Nancy Pelosi’s “most ethical congress ever.”
And how badly did his ethics problems hurt him at the polls? He won his race against Michel Faulkner by 86% of the vote. Maybe if he had killed someone on live television, his poll numbers might have dipped into the 70s…
Tags:Charlie Rangel, corrupt scumbags, corruption, Democrats, Nancy Pelosi, tax evasion
Posted in Democrats, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »