While we’re on the subject of corrupt Democrats in Congress, let’s not forget Rep. Alcee Hastings from South Florida.

He committed his crimes before getting elected. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First from his bio from his website:

“Alcee L. Hastings represents his native state of Florida by serving as Congressman for District 23, which includes parts of Broward, Palm Beach, Hendry, Martin, and St. Lucie Counties.  Congressman Hastings was first elected in 1992 and is currently serving his 9th term in the Congress. Born in Altamonte Springs, he attended Florida’s public schools, and graduated from Fisk University in 1958.  He earned his law degree from Florida A&M University in Tallahassee.

Known to many as “Judge,” Alcee Hastings has distinguished himself as an attorney, civil rights activist, judge, and now Member of Congress.  Appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, he became the first African-American Federal Judge in the state of Florida, and served in that position for ten years.”

Judge?

Well, yes, he was the first black Federal Judge in the state of Florida, until he became the first black federal judge impeached — then convicted — of crimes and removed from the bench in disgrace.

From Wikipedia:

In 1981, Hastings was charged with accepting a $150,000 bribe in exchange for a lenient sentence and a return of seized assets for 21 counts of racketeering by Frank and Thomas Romano, and of perjury in his testimony about the case. He was acquitted by a jury after his alleged co-conspirator, William Borders, refused to testify in court (resulting in a jail sentence for Borders).

In 1988, the Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives took up the case, and Hastings was impeached for bribery and perjury by a vote of 413-3.

Voters to impeach included Democratic Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, John Conyers and Charles Rangel. He was then convicted in 1989 by the United States Senate, becoming the sixth federal judge in the history of the United States to be removed from office by the Senate.

Nancy “Drain the Swamp” Pelosi must have forgiven him his felonies because she’s kept him high in the House hierarchy.

Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Waters is accused of influence peddling over OneUnited Bank, a minority-owned lender with a terrible record of lending to minorities.

Oops.

Well, there must be some reasonable explanation, maybe the CEO is a model citizen.

Oops.

OneUnited Bank, the financial institution at the center of a congressional ethics investigation involving Rep. Maxine Waters, paid for a luxurious lifestyle for its chairman, including a Porsche and a house on Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica despite his having a record that includes arrests and allegations of drug use.

The bank has been criticized by regulators in Florida for having an unusually poor record of lending to people in low-income neighborhoods. It also has failed to pay back $12 million in federal bailout funds.

…

Yet although the bank touts itself as an institution for the underserved, its directors approved paying a reported $26,500 monthly lease for Cohee’s beach house in Santa Monica and providing him the all-expenses-paid luxury sports car — until regulators ordered a halt to such corporate largesse. Waters’ husband, Sidney Williams, served on the board of the bank from January 2004 through April 2008 and owns 3,500 shares of the bank’s stock, according to the House Ethics Committee’s report of alleged violations.

Cohee’s high-flying perks came despite his having been charged in 2007 with felonies after his arrest by the Santa Monica Police Department on suspicion of possessing cocaine, crack cocaine and concentrated cannabis, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. The case was dismissed the next year after Cohee completed a drug diversion program.

He was also arrested in 2007 after a woman filed a complaint alleging that Cohee had forcibly sodomized her, according to public records. Prosecutors did not pursue the assault charge. The Boston Herald quoted Cohee as saying that the arrest was “utter and complete nonsense that went nowhere.”

Patrick Jonsson in the Christian Science Monitor:

As if the Democrats didn’t have enough headwind going into the November elections, now two of the most prominent and longest-serving black Democrats in the country – Rep. Charlie Rangel of New York and Rep. Maxine Waters of California – are now reportedly both set to fight ethics charges at open House trials before Election Day.

Congressman Rangel faces 13 ethics charges, including allegations of improper fundraising and tax evasion, which were released this week.

Congresswoman Waters, a House ethics subcommittee is reportedly about to allege, broke ethics rules by lobbying Treasury officials for a $25 million bailout of OneUnited Bank in Boston, in which her husband, former NFL player Sidney Williams, has a financial stake.

Both House members have reportedly turned down plea offers for relatively light reprimands in order to fight the charges. Both ordeals promise to be showcase trials in the critical days before an election that Republicans are painting as a referendum on the agenda of the Democrat-controlled Congress and White House.

If they come to fruition, the trial-like ethics hearings could also drive a dispiriting wedge between Democrats, including the Obama White House, and African-American supporters who, so far, have been the only voting bloc not to waver in their support for the first black president.

But the risk of black voters staying away from the polls, some analysts say, pales in comparison to Democrats appearing to whitewash a key tenet of the party’s success in 2006 and 2008, what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called “draining the swamp” of the kind of Washington backroom dealings that she said hounded Republicans in the George W. Bush era.

“Of course, the spectacle of a public trial will not be good for Democrats (more…)

Michael Barone notes how differently the Washington Post reports GOP vs. Dem scandals.

Our friends at the Washington Post gave front-page treatment this morning to SEC charges that Texas billionaires Sam Wyly and Charles Wyly gained $550 million in fraudulent stock trades.

This is certainly a legitimate story and arguably deserves front-page prominence and 28 paragraphs of text. Curiously, the article makes no mention of how the Wyly brothers became rich or what businesses they have built until deep into the story, when it notes almost parenthetically that they “amassed their fortune by founding a computer company and investing in a wide range of interests, including oil, insurance and restaurants.” Instead the article concentrates heavily on the Wylys’ political contributions and on the charges against them and their lawyer’s response.

This intensive treatment led me to wondering how the Post handled the conviction and sentencing to 12 years in jail earlier this month of Democratic fundraiser Hassan Nemazee for defrauding banks of $292 million? Answer: It ran as part of a three-item story labeled CRIMINAL JUSTICE on page A3, a five-paragraph Associated Press story headlined “Former Democratic Fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, Kerry Gets 12 Years for Fraud.”

The story noted that Nemazee was finance chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and that he also raised money and contributed to the campaigns of Barack Obama, John Kerry and Al Gore. Had I missed an earlier story providing more lavish detail?

As the Charles Rangel scandal simmered for two years, the LA Times wrote virtually nothing. It’s coverage has been basic. The former head of the House tax writing committee is accused of not reporting income? Yawn.

Now Rep. Maxine Waters — the same crank who called the Rodney King race riots an uprising — has been charged with a serious ethics violation. As a local congressperson, you’d think this would be big news for Angelenos.

Where did the story run? Page AA3. It got bigger coverage on their website.

A House panel is preparing to accuse Rep. Maxine Waters of at least one ethics violation in her efforts to help a bank with ties to her husband, and the longtime Los Angeles Democrat plans to fight the charges in a House trial, according to a source familiar with the case.

The allegations were presented Friday to Waters, the source said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is confidential.

Waters, an outspoken legislator who has held elective office in Sacramento or Washington for more than three decades, could not be reached Friday night.

In California, this should be going on statewide.

The stench of scandal has been following Rep. Charles Rangel, one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress, for going on two years. The LA Times covered almost none of it.

Finally, they break down and print an AP story.

Rep. Charles Rangel, who has spent half of his 80 years as a member of Congress, says he looks forward to fighting ethics charges. Other Democrats won’t be so pleased.

The ethics trial sought by the New York congressman and former Ways and Means Committee chairman will coincide with campaign season. Democrats will have to defend their party’s conduct. If enough of them lose, the party could cede control of the House.

Republicans are already going negative, reminding voters that Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised to “drain the swamp” of ethical misdeeds in Congress.

Rangel had a choice.

His lawyer had been negotiating with the House ethics committee to settle his case. But to end it, Rangel would have had to accept the allegations. Rangel had been willing to accept some, but that didn’t satisfy the committee, according to a person familiar with the talks but not authorized to be quoted by name.

“I look forward to airing this thing,” Rangel, who is tied for fourth in House seniority, told reporters Thursday, insisting the allegations against him have no substance.

“I am pleased that, at long last, sunshine will pierce the cloud of serious allegations that have been raised against me in the media,” he said.

It was disclosed Thursday that Rangel is being charged with multiple ethics violations. The ethics committee won’t reveal the specific charges until next Thursday at a public meeting. However, several persons familiar with the allegations, who were not authorized to discuss them publicly, said some of the charges against Rangel, who has spent 40 years in Congress, were related to:

—Rangel’s use of official stationery to raise money for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College of New York.

—His use of four rent-subsidized apartment units in New York City. The city’s rent stabilization program is supposed to apply to one’s primary residence. One had been used as a campaign office, raising a separate question of whether the rent break was an improper gift.

—Rangel’s failure to report income as required on his annual financial disclosure forms. The committee had investigated his failure to report income from the lawmaker’s rental unit at the Punta Cana Yacht Club in the Dominican Republic. Rangel also belatedly disclosed hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment assets.

To put it bluntly, Charlie’s accused of cheating on his taxes. That’s not just an ethics violation, it’s a federal felony.

Some officials in Rangel’s hometown voiced their support. And one analyst said the allegations are likely to change little for Rangel, who is running for re-election in the fall.

“They make jokes about people who are so popular they wouldn’t lose an election even if they were indicted,” said Lawrence Levy, a political commentator and head of Hofstra University’s National Center on Suburban Studies. “Charlie is so popular it probably won’t have much effect on him.”

Exactly. Corruption blooms when there’s no accountability.

The citizens of Bell (pop. 36,000) near downtown Los Angeles, are in a fury over their city manager’s $800,000 salary.

LA Times:

The Bell City Council has announced an emergency closed-session meeting for Thursday afternoon in which officials could decide the fate of three top administrators who are among the highest paid in the nation.

The city council members pay themselves $100,000 per year for a part-time job. Anyone see the problem?

Attorneys for the city have been negotiating with the three officials for several days, hoping to reach deals in which the city manager, assistant city manager and police chief would step down, sources told The Times.

Resigning would make City Manager Robert Rizzo, Police Chief Randy Adams and Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia eligible for lucrative pensions. But the three also have contracts that protect them from being fired without cause.

As a result, unless they agree to resign, the city would face the prospect of buying out their contracts, which could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional payments.

Rizzo earns nearly $800,000 a year, making him the highest-paid city manager in California and possibly the nation. Adams makes $457,000 — 50% more the Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck — and Spaccia makes $376,288, more than the top administrator for Los Angeles County.

The salaries, revealed by The Times last week, sparked protests in the small, predominantly working-class town southeast of downtown Los Angeles.

Should Rizzo be forced from his job, he would immediately gain a new title: highest-paid retiree in the state’s CalPERS retirement system.

Rizzo, 55, would be entitled to a $659,252-a-year pension for the rest of his life, according to retirement calculations made by The Times that were reviewed by pensions experts.

Daily Caller:

Tony Podesta is in the news because he lobbies for BP, public enemy No. 1 in President Obama’s Washington after a BP-rented oil rig blew up and started gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico 63 days ago.

Podesta and his wife Heather aren’t just any lobbyists. Tony’s brother John — who now heads the liberal think tank Center for American Progress — led Obama’s transition team and has been dubbed the “shadow president” because of his close ties to the White House. Tony and Heather Podesta each have visited the White House seven times, according to public visitor logs.

Tony Podesta’s last quarterly filing shows that clients he personally represented paid his firm $3.5 million in only three months, from January to March. Since he usually works with about six other lobbyists, if he worked 40 hours a week that would come out to about $1,000 an hour in revenue. (Note: This is only a ballpark figure.)

Just what, exactly, are people paying him that much for?

Doug McIntyre

City Controller Wendy Greuel is shocked to discover gambling in Casablanca!

Of course, in this case Casablanca is Los Angeles and the controller’s long-overdue audit of the Department of Water and Power only confirms empirically what most of us have known intuitively – the DWP is a rogue agency.

According to Greuel’s audit, the DWP had the $73.5 million it owed the city and could easily have transferred the funds without a rate hike. However, as Greuel said, “It’s hard to look at these numbers and not say that the DWP was trying to extort the City Council.”

What Greuel won’t say is who wrote the extortion note. “It will be up to them (DWP) to question their staff on who provided them with the information,” said the controller.

Which is like asking BP to investigate how BP caused the oil rupture in the Gulf.

To paraphrase President Obama, “Whose ass do the ratepayers kick?”

Still, it’s a step forward that we now have the city controller officially on record that the DWP is run by thugs who extorted a rate hike. Unfortunately, the controller’s report also says the DWP should be allowed to keep the money they extorted. Why?

The City Council approved this rate hike under duress based on deliberately falsified data. Justice demands the rate hike be immediately suspended. The extortionists should have to return to the Council with real numbers before one additional penny is turned over.

And now for the eternal Los Angeles question – who will be held accountable?

When someone as rhetorically cautious as Wendy Greuel uses words like “misled” and “extortion,” it’s time to clean house. But consider which house we’re talking about – “The House That Tony Built.”

Every member of the DWP board, as well as the DWP’s interim general manager, Austin Beutner, were all picked by Mayor Villaraigosa. The mayor issued a vanilla response to Greuel, “thanking” her for the report, but if you have any doubts about how the mayor truly feels about the audit, consider Beutner’s immediate response: he attacked Greuel claiming her report contains “errors of fact.”

Since it’s beyond pointless to ask the DWP to investigate themselves and at this point it’s hard to tell if the mayor runs the DWP or the DWP runs the mayor. We need to look elsewhere for the truth. Maybe council members Jan Perry and Bernie Parks will turn up the heat from the council horseshoe, but how much can we expect from the Paul Koretzes and Janice Hahns of the world? These people will wet themselves before they’d dare cross Brian D’Arcy and his uber-powerful IBEW Local 18, the DWP union that’s behind almost everything.

What a shock.

The radical activist group ACORN “works” for the Democratic Party and deliberately promotes election fraud, ACORN employees told FBI investigators, according to an FBI document dump Wednesday.

The documents obtained by Judicial Watch, a watchdog group, are FBI investigators’ reports related to the 2007 investigation and arrest of eight St. Louis, Mo., workers from ACORN’s Project Vote affiliate for violation of election laws. All eight employees involved in the scandal later pleaded guilty to voter registration fraud.

Project Vote is ACORN’s voter registration arm. Project Vote continues to operate despite the reported dissolution of the national structure of ACORN.

The handwritten reports by FBI agents show that ACORN employees reported numerous irregularities in the nonprofit group’s business practices.

One employee told the FBI that ACORN headquarters is “wkg [working] for the Democratic Party.”

According to one report, an ACORN employee said the purpose of “[f]raudulent cards” was “[t]o cause confusion on election day to keep polls open longer,” “[t]o allow people who can’t vote to vote,” and “[t]o allow to vote multiple times.”

Hassan Nemazee, 60, who once ran a private equity firm, admitted in Manhattan federal court to defrauding Bank of America Corp of more than $142 million, Citigroup Inc of $74.9 million and HSBC Holdings Plc of $74.9 million to pay his debt to Citigroup.

During the plea proceeding, Iranian-born Nemasee, who owned several multimillion dollar properties and had interests in various companies and hedge funds, said he had tried to get out of financial difficulty starting in the 1990s.

“It was my intention to repay … but the hole that I dug was larger and I borrowed more,” said the gray-haired, dapper Nemazee, who appeared embarrassed and contrite.

“I am deeply ashamed of my conduct, for the harm that I inflicted on the banks and most especially my family,” he told U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein in a somber voice as family members sat in court.

…Nemazee was listed as one of the top “bundlers” of contributions to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, according to OpenSecrets.org, a website run by the Center for Responsive Politics.

He typically donated more than $100,000 annually to Democratic Party political candidates, including Obama and now-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Obama promised openness and sunshine. Instead, he’s manipulating the greed of reporters to control the message (that’s he wonderful, always.)

Steve Clemons:

There are good friendships between White House media and those they cover inside the White House — but they can’t be FRIENDS in the fullest sense. They are supposed to be rivals, wrestling over stories and the truth that is conveyed through the media to American citizens.

But an unhealthy pattern is developing in this White House — a trend that may very well have been a part of other presidencies as well — but what is happening today needs comment.

Some journalists seem to be putting their self interest above their responsibilities to the public as well as their employers.

As Howard Kurtz and Glenn Greenwald have both commented, many White House correspondents and other top tier journalists want to write Obama books.

Anything with “Obama” on it is running at a huge premium in the book publication market.

But the kind of books that sell need “inside access” and this is something that the communications team at the White House doles out minimally, and increasingly, only when favors are part of the arrangement.

What I have learned after discussions over the last several days with several journalists who either have regular access to the White House or are part of the White House press corps is that there is a growing sense that access is traded for positive stories — or perhaps worse, an agreement that things learned will not be reported in the near term.

The White House is working hard to secure deals that yield fluffy, feel good commentary about the Obama White House. One American White House reporter used colorful terms to describe the arrangement. The reporter said, “They want ‘blow jobs’ first [in the press sense]. Then you have to be on good behavior for a bit or be willing to deal, and then you get access.”"Axe” and “Gibbs” know who needs access to get their books pushed forward.

They know who will pay for play — and are taking notes on who has been naughty and nice in their reporting.

Edward Luce, Washington Bureau Chief of the Financial Times, who has been one of the few to resist the ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ offers from the White House has found himself in a dust-up with the White House for his recent article co-authored with Daniel Dombey, “US Foreign Policy: Waiting on a Sun King“.

Luce was given access to one senior official for the piece, but because Luce reported that National Security Adviser Jim Jones may be on his way out and that Obama’s national security team lacks a top tier strategic thinker — other than Obama himself perhaps — Luce has been pummeled by the White House who think he violated a quid pro quo deal to do a fluff story in exchange for access.

Luce reported to me, “The FT never does these kind of deals. “

New York Rep. Charles Rangel temporarily stepped aside as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Wednesday as he struggled with mounting ethics woes that left his political future uncertain at best.

Rangel’s decision cheered Democrats who feared political fallout affecting their own futures, but did little to satisfy Republicans seeking a formal vote to require his permanent removal from the chairmanship.

The 20-term congressman has played a key role in President Barack Obama’s attempts to win passage of historic health care legislation, and it was not clear who would replace him at the committee’s helm.

Why not Rep. Alcee Hastings? He’s black and he’s crooked, so he’s a perfect fit.

From Wikipedia:

In 1981, Hastings was charged with accepting a $150,000 bribe in exchange for a lenient sentence and a return of seized assets for 21 counts of racketeering by Frank and Thomas Romano, and of perjury in his testimony about the case. He was acquitted by a jury after his alleged co-conspirator, William Borders, refused to testify in court (resulting in a jail sentence for Borders).

In 1988, the Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives took up the case, and Hastings was impeached for bribery and perjury by a vote of 413-3. He was then convicted in 1989 by the United States Senate, becoming the sixth federal judge in the history of the United States to be removed from office by the Senate. The vote on the first article was 69 for and 26 opposed, providing five votes more than the two-thirds of those present that were needed to convict. The first article accused the judge of conspiracy. Conviction on any single article was enough to remove the judge from office. The Senate vote cut across party lines, with U.S. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont voting to convict his fellow party member, and U.S. Senator Arlen Specter voting to acquit.^[1]

I was living in South Florida during the Hastings scandal. What Wikipedia doesn’t recount was Hastings’s playing of the race card or comparing his prosecution to Jesus Christ’s crucifixion.

That his district reelects a dirty judge repeatedly for 20 years speaks volumes.

She’s not just obnoxious, she has a grand sense of entitlement.

Is it a legitimate use of military jets to transport the Speaker of the House and her favored Congressional coterie for routine travel? Even if you believe it is — and, personally, I do not — any rational taxpayer would admit that it is monumental waste of money. Military flights cost between $5,000 and $20,000 per hour to operate. The Speaker and her passengers routinely reimburse the Air Force $120 to $400 for each flight.

Since Nancy Pelosi took over as Speaker in 2006, she’s rung up millions in military travel expenses to commute between San Francisco and Washington.

Worse still, she also appears to have requisitioned entire flights for the personal use of her children and grandchildren. That is, unaccompanied by any member of Congress, her kids, in-laws and grandchildren are utilizing entire military passenger jets for their routine travel needs.

You need to follow the link to get the full measure of her greed.

Bernie on ice.

Inmate No. 61727-054 shares an unlocked cell at the medium-security prison at Butner Federal Correctional Complex with a younger man named Frank. He wears khaki prison garb and has been spotted walking on an outdoor track. He plays bocce, chess and checkers. He scrubs pots and pans in the prison kitchen.

The architect of the biggest Ponzi scheme in history has served about five months of his 150-year prison sentence. WSJ’s Dionne Searcey discusses Bernie Madoff’s life in lockup.

The 71-year-old Mr. Madoff also is salvaging something that disappeared in the outside world the moment his fraud was exposed: respect. “To every con artist, he is the godfather, the don,” says an inmate interviewed earlier this week.

Mr. Madoff has served about five months of a 150-year prison sentence for pulling off the largest Ponzi scheme ever. Losses suffered by Madoff customers are estimated at $19.4 billion.

“All things considered, he’s OK,” says Ira Sorkin, Mr. Madoff’s lawyer. “He still suffers deeply for what he did.”

Not like the little people he wiped out. Unlike Madoff, no one is paying for their three squares a day and a bunk.

Times of London:

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

That is, the cooked data.

In the ’80s I was writing a news release for a mortgage broker that arranged financing for an office tower.

I was referred to the architect to find out how many square feet were in the building. His answer: “How many square feet do you need?” It was revealing because the value of a building was a multiple of its rentable space. Thus more square feet meant more value.

No doubt his number became a cell in a spreadsheet that generated an “official” presentation that looked airtight. After all, numbers never lie, right? Especially when they come from a computer.

Within days, government leaders are convening in Copenhagen to draft an agreement to deal with a climate “crisis” that has been predicted by computer models conjured by scientists.

Most will blithely ignore the recent revelation — part of the ClimateGate scandal — that the computer code cranking out the doomsday scenarios was buggy. As Megan McArdle observed:

The emails seem to describe a model which frequently breaks, and being constantly “tweaked” with manual interventions of dubious quality in order to make them fit the historical data.  These stories suggest that the model, and the past manual interventions, are so poorly documented that CRU cannot now replicate its own past findings.

That is a big problem.  The IPCC report, which is the most widely relied upon in policy circles, uses this model to estimate the costs of global warming.  If those costs are unreliable, then any cost-benefit analysis is totally worthless.

Sounds a bit like, “How many degrees do you need?”

The videos just keep on coming. There’s more at Big Government.

First, from the Corner:

And you thought the Pelican State had seen it all. Nearly five years ago, then–Louisiana congressman William Jefferson, a Democrat, hid $90,000 cash in his freezer. Following an FBI bribery sting, he was finally sentenced to 13 years in prison last week. Turns out he was a cheap date.

ABC News reports that Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu, one of the last Democrats holding out on supporting Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s health-care legislation, has sweetened Louisiana’s slice of Obamacare by $100 million (via disaster-relief dollars) in a little-noticed provision on page 432 of Reid’s bill. Landrieu, of course, is not doing anything to hide this $100 million allocation. If anything, she’s proud of it. It’s “something she has been working on for a long time,” says Robert Sawicki, Landrieu’s press secretary.

Not all of Landrieu’s colleagues, however, are quite so happy about it. One reason: The $100 million provision was hammered out behind closed doors on Thursday in Reid’s office.

“I’m sure they were talking about more than the weather,” Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) tells NRO. Look, says McCain, “there should not be a surprise boost in Medicaid funding for states that have been declared disaster areas in the last seven years. If you look at what’s in that provision, you see the benefits those states (that are home to fence-sitting Democrats) will receive, especially Louisiana, which suffered from Hurricane Katrina in 2005.”

And from ABC News’ Jonathan Karl:

What does it take to get a wavering senator to vote for health care reform?

Here’s a case study.

On page 432 of the Reid bill, there is a section increasing federal Medicaid subsidies for “certain states recovering from a major disaster.”

The section spends two pages defining which “states” would qualify, saying, among other things, that it would be states that “during the preceding 7 fiscal years” have been declared a “major disaster area.”

I am told the section applies to exactly one state:  Louisiana, the home of moderate Democrat Mary Landrieu, who has been playing hard to get on the health care bill.

In other words, the bill spends two pages describing would could be written with a single world:  Louisiana.  (This may also help explain why the bill is long.)

Senator Harry Reid, who drafted the bill, cannot pass it without the support of Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu.

How much does it cost?  According to the Congressional Budget Office: $100 million.

Here’s the incredibly complicated language:

SEC. 2006. SPECIAL ADJUSTMENT TO FMAP DETERMINATION FOR CERTAIN STATES RECOVERING FROM A MAJOR DISASTER.

Section 1905 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1396d), as amended by sections 2001(a)(3) and
2001(b)(2), is amended— (1) in subsection (b), in the first sentence, by striking ‘‘subsection (y)’’ and inserting ‘‘subsections (y) and (aa)’’; and (2) by adding at the end the following new subsection: (more…)

A former Louisiana congressman who famously stashed cash in his freezer was sentenced Friday to 13 years in prison for taking hundreds of thousands in bribes in exchange for using his influence to broker business deals in Africa.The sentence handed down in suburban Washington was far less than the nearly 30 years prosecutors had sought for William Jefferson, a Democrat who represented parts of New Orleans for nearly 20 years.

//

Agents investigating the case found $90,000 wrapped in foil and hidden in boxes of frozen pie crusts in his freezer.

Just One Minute:

The NY Times front-pages a mini-debacle – Peter Galbraith, adviser to John Kerry and Joe Biden, has been getting rich off the advice he has been giving the Kurds:

American Adviser to Kurds Stands to Reap Oil Profits

By JAMES GLANZ and WALTER GIBBS

OSLO — Peter W. Galbraith, an influential former American ambassador, is a powerful voice on Iraq who helped shape the views of policy makers like Joseph R. Biden Jr. and John Kerry. In the summer of 2005, he was also an adviser to the Kurdish regional government as Iraq wrote its Constitution — tough and sensitive talks not least because of issues like how Iraq would divide its vast oil wealth.

Now Mr. Galbraith, 58, son of the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith, stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars as a result of his closeness to the Kurds, his relations with a Norwegian oil company and constitutional provisions he helped the Kurds extract.

In the constitutional negotiations, he helped the Kurds ram through provisions that gave their region — rather than the central Baghdad government — sole authority over many of their internal affairs, including clauses that he maintains will give the Kurds virtually complete control over all new oil finds on their territory.

If this had been an advisor to Dick Cheney, libs would be leaping from tall buildings (Glenn Greenwald may leap anyway).  Instead, the Times is utterly and absurdly opaque on the Biden connection:

As the scope of Mr. Galbraith’s financial interests in Kurdistan become clear, they have the potential to inflame some of Iraqis’ deepest fears, including conspiracy theories that the true reason for the American invasion of their country was to take its oil. It may not help that outside Kurdistan, Mr. Galbraith’s influential view that Iraq should be broken up along ethnic lines is considered offensive to many Iraqis’ nationalism. Mr. Biden and Mr. Kerry, who have been influenced by Mr. Galbraith’s thinking but do not advocate such a partitioning of the country, were not aware of Mr. Galbraith’s oil dealings in Iraq, aides to both politicians say.

Joe Biden did not advocate partitioning Iraq?  Uh huh, and Dick Cheney never worked for Halliburton.

Meanwhile, back here in reality we are left wondering, if Biden never avocated the partition of Iraq then why did the Times print this guest rubbish from none other than Peter Galbraith back in 2007:

IN a surge of realism, the Senate has voted 75-23 to acknowledge that Iraq has broken up and cannot be put back together. The measure, co-sponsored by Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential candidate, and Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, supports a plan for Iraq to become a loose confederation of three regions — a Kurdish area in the north, a Shiite region in the south and a Sunni enclave in the center — with the national government in Baghdad having few powers other than to manage the equitable distribution of oil revenues.

While the nonbinding measure provoked strong reactions in Iraq and from the Bush administration, it actually called for exactly what Iraq’s Constitution already provides — and what is irrevocably becoming the reality on the ground.

And why did the Times accept this piece in May 2006 from Leslie Gelb and a what I infer is a Biden pretender calling for the partition of Iraq?  Why did they tell us in 2007 and 2008 that Biden favored the partition of Iraq?

Back when Biden-advisor Galbraith was positioning himself to make millions with the Kurds, Biden was advocating the policies that would help Galbraith achieve just that.  For the Times to pretend otherwise is absurd.  The only argument I can imagine them making in support of their burial of the Biden connection is that as of November 12, 2009, Joe Biden no longer advocates the partition of Iraq.  So what?

To their credit the Times does acknowledge that this is a story by front-paging it; after they reprise their own archives it may dawn on them that the story is not limited to one opportunistic “private citizen” but points directly to the judgment of the Vice President.

One of his prior live-in boyfriends ran a prostitution ring from Barney’s townhouse. Now this:

FOX25 has learned that Congressman Barney Frank was present during a marijuana arrest at James Ready’s home in Ogunquit, Maine.  Ready is well-known for his relationship with Congressman Frank.

According to a police report, police charged Ready with marijuana possession, cultivation and use of drug paraphernalia in August of 2007.  Ready admitted to civil possession and paid a fine.  The remaining charges were dismissed in 2008.

Sources tell FOX25 that when Frank was questioned he told police that he did not live in the house and that he only smoked cigars.

Not only that, he doesn’t swallow coffee, only tea bags.

Congressman Frank tells FOX25 that he was surprised and disappointed with what police found.  He also tells us that he wouldn’t recognize a marijuana plant if he saw one because he is, “not a great outdoorsman,” and ,”wouldn’t recognize most plants.”

What a gawd-awful excuse. It’s almost as bad as, “I didn’t inhale.”

Nearly half the members of a powerful House subcommittee in control of Pentagon spending are under scrutiny by ethics investigators in Congress, who have trained their lens on the relationships between seven panel members and an influential lobbying firm founded by a former Capitol Hill aide.

The investigations by two separate ethics offices include an examination of the chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on defense, John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), as well as others who helped steer federal funds to clients of the PMA Group. The lawmakers received campaign contributions from the firm and its clients. A document obtained by The Washington Post shows that the subcommittee members under scrutiny also include Peter J. Visclosky (D-Ind.), James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) , C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) and Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.).

The document also indicates that the House ethics committee’s staff recently interviewed the staff of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) about his allegation that a PMA lobbyist threatened him in 2007 when he resisted steering federal funds to a PMA client. The lobbyist told a Nunes staffer that if the lawmaker didn’t help, the defense contractor would move out of Nunes’s district and take dozens of jobs with him.

The document obtained by The Post offers the most detailed picture yet of a widening inquiry into the relationships between lawmakers and PMA, a lobbying firm founded by Paul Magliocchetti that has been under criminal investigation by the Justice Department. A year ago, the FBI raided PMA’s offices and carted away boxes of records dealing with its political donations and the firm’s efforts to win congressionally directed funds, known as “earmarks,” for clients.

The document shows that both the ethics committee and the Office of Congressional Ethics are looking into the matter. The OCE investigates and makes recommendations to the House ethics committee, which has the power to subpoena and sanction lawmakers. Internal ethics investigations of members of Congress are normally confidential, but The Post learned details of their work through the document, which became available on a file-sharing network.

Under the description of the OCE inquiry, the document says investigators are looking at House members who may have been “accepting contributions or other items of value from PMA’s PAC in exchange for an official act.” A Hill source cautioned that the ethics committee has not gathered a significant amount of material and has not zeroed in on specific lawmakers.

$200 million in earmarks

Together, the seven legislators have personally steered more than $200 million in earmarks to clients of the PMA Group in the past two years, and received more than $6.2 million in campaign contributions from PMA and its clients in the past decade, according to an analysis by Congressional Quarterly and Taxpayers for Common Sense.

The Post reviewed earmark and campaign records and found that the seven had each supported funding for PMA clients and also received donations. Young has recently received very little from PMA.

Read it all.

Disgraced pols used to lie low a few years before opening their yaps. Washington Examiner:

Disgraced former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer thinks people who own shares in mutual and pension funds should pressure the directors and executives of America’s great corporations to silence the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Spitzer, aka the “Client Number Nine” who famously kept his socks on while dallying with Emperor Club VIP hookers, now accuses the chamber of misrepresenting its members. How? By lobbying against “the reform of markets, health care, energy policy and politics that we have all been calling for.”

Spitzer’s solution is for mutual and pension fund owners to demand that the corporations cancel their chamber memberships, thus denying the nation’s most influential business voice of the lifeblood of every trade association — dues revenue. It comes as no surprise to hear such demands from Spitzer, who as New York attorney general posed as an ethical champion while using the mere threat of state-sponsored litigation to force corporate boards and executives to take actions that clearly weren’t in the best interests of their stockholders.

Lest anybody gets the idea that Spitzer can be considered a credible source on issues of corporate ethics, let’s review a few facts about his own misuse and abuse of the public trust. During his successful 2006 campaign for governor, Spitzer loudly announced his return of more than $124,000 in campaign contributions he had received since 2003 from lawyers with the Milberg Weiss law firm in New York. The firm and four of its senior partners had been indicted on 20 counts as a criminal enterprise by the Justice Department for paying an estimated $11.7 million in bribes to plaintiffs in at least 150 cases going back to 1981. The firm received $250 million or more in tainted legal fees from the cases.

What Spitzer didn’t say was that he kept an additional $42,555 in such contributions. Among the unreturned checks were $10,000 from senior partner Melvyn Weiss and $10,000 from senior partner David Bershad. Weiss was convicted and sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and $10 million in fines, while Bershad cut a deal with the government, got a six-month prison sentence, paid a $250,000 fine and forfeited $7.75 million. Spitzer also kept checks totaling $8,000 from Weiss senior partner Steven Schulman, who was convicted and served a six-month federal prison term.

These facts perhaps shed light on why Spitzer sat on his hands in 2004 when the Washington Legal Foundation filed an official complaint with him concerning Milberg Weiss. So anytime Spitzer gets the urge to lecture the U.S. Chamber or anybody else on ethics, he would be well-advised to put a sock in it.

CBS2

Congressional Republicans are again demanding that Congressman Charles Rangel step down as chairman of the House tax writing committee, saying his ethics problems make him the poster boy for institutional arrogance.

Democratic support for embattled Rangel will get another test this week. Republicans will introduce a resolution calling for the Harlem Democrat to step down as chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee until ethics probes — which keep on growing — are complete.

“These are all violations of the rules of the House,” Rep. John Carter (R-Texas) told CBS 2 HD. “Some of them seem to be violations of the rules of the IRS and I don’t think the top tax guy ought to be having those kinds of problems.”

Carter, author of the “dump Rangel” resolution, said keeping Rangel in his position will be a headache for Democrats and will infuriate voters in next year’s midterm elections.

“They don’t think that it’s fair. They think there’s special treatment being given to Mr. Rangel because of his position,” Carter said.

Former Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu was sentenced Tuesday to more than 24 years in prison by a judge who accused him of funding his fraud by manipulating the political process in a way that “strikes at the very core of our democracy.”

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero sentenced the 58-year-old Hsu, who raised money for Hillary Rodham Clinton and others, to 20 years in prison for his guilty plea to fraud charges and another four years and four months in prison for his conviction at trial for breaking campaign finance laws.

A large military spending bill moving through Congress contains a little-noticed outlay for Boston that has nothing to do with national defense: $20 million for an educational institute honoring late Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

The earmark, tucked into the defense bill at the request of Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, requires US taxpayers to help the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate realize its goal of building a repository for Kennedy’s papers and an accompanying civic learning center on the University of Massachusetts at Boston campus in Dorchester, next to the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.

The Kennedy’s, being destitute, cannot afford to fund this themselves. Nor can Kerry, husband of the ketchup heiress named Heinz.

So it’s up to us proles to foot the bill for Teddy’s shrine.

Maybe public funding is a good idea. That way we can demand equal time. For example, we can insist there be:

• a collection of Ted’s empty whiskey bottles
• an exhibit of Chappaquiddick with photos and the orthopedic collar Ted wore for the benefit of TV cameras
• an exhibit about his time at La Brasserie, where he fondled waitresses and bonked a lobbyist in a private dining room
• an exhibit of all the women Ted screwed while married. This might require an additional $20 million to complete.

Democrats are acting incensed about GOP Congressman Joe Wilson erupting with “You lie!” when Obama claimed his healthcare plan would not cover illegal aliens.

(We Californians know that illegals get free medical care, free public schooling and in-state tuition discounts for college. Anyone who believes the Feds will be more careful in spending our $$ is self deluded.)

Anyway, despite Wilson’s immediate apology to Obama and the nation, Democrats want him to publicly apologize on the floor of the House or else face a reprimand. No doubt, they are looking for a juicy video clip.

He should give them one. Here’s what he should say:

My outburst during the President’s speech was bad manners on my part. I am sorry for anyone who took offense.

I am also sorry that I am asked to humble myself before you for a breech of manners, while Charles Rangel, who is steeped in financial scandal, continues to chair the Ways and Means Committee.

How can we allow a tax cheat to be responsible writing our tax laws?

How can we allow Mr. Rangel to buy off members of our so-called Ethics Committee with funds from his campaign coffers?

Yes, I am sorry. Sorry that the ruling members of this body have lost all sense of proportion. On that, I do not lie.

Thank you.

New York Post

Is Charlie Rangel worried that the House Ethics Committee — notorious for handing out little more than a slap on the wrist for even the most egregious congressional misconduct — might make an exception in his case?

Maybe that’s why the embattled Harlem Democrat has been playing Santa Claus with his House colleagues, doling out more campaign cash from his own re-election kitty than almost any other member of Congress.

Among the 119 lucky recipients: three of the five Democrats on the House Ethics Committee.

The same people who are meant to be probing the growing list of his financial “oversights” and deciding what, if any, punishment to mete out.

(If they ever get around to finishing their investigation, that is — the committee allegedly has been looking into Rangel’s tangled fiscal affairs for the past 12 months.)

One member of the panel, Peter Welch of Vermont, wisely decided to return his $20,000 gift from Rangel, citing the need for “an abundance of caution.”

But the other two — Ben Chandler of Kentucky and G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina — are holding on to Rangel’s largesse, claiming it in no way interferes with their ability to sit in judgment on their benefactor.

So much for Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s promise that this would be “the most ethical Congress ever.”

Rangel, of course, faces probes on a whole host of issues, many of them first uncovered by The Post: illegally maintaining four rent-stabilized apartments; use of House stationery to solicit funds for a policy center; failure to pay property taxes; failure to report rental income, and acceptance of free Caribbean trips paid for by corporate lobbyists.

Then there’s his most recent discloure filings — which listed hundreds of thousands of dollars in previously unreported assets.

All of which makes Rangel’s continued role as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee — Congress’ primary tax-writing body — a mockery.

The Washington Post recognizes this — the paper just called on Rangel to step down as chairman, saying he has “violated [the public] trust continually and seemingly without care.”

Byron York:

It hasn’t gotten much attention amid news of Ted Kennedy, Obamacare and the worsening outlook in Afghanistan, but an extraordinary situation is developing in the House of Representatives.

Hasn’t got much attention is an understatement.

The most recent  article about a Rangel scandal in the LA Times is December 2008.

With each passing day, it’s becoming more clear that the powerful committee chairman in charge of writing America’s tax laws is a financial wheeler-dealer, a serial asset-hider, and a tax offender.

Rep. Charles Rangel has been in the House since 1971. He’s as old bull as you get in the Democratic hierarchy, and he waited through 12 long years of Republican rule to take over as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in 2007. Along with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and fellow Democratic power brokers Henry Waxman and Barney Frank, Rangel is playing a key role in the effort to push the president’s health care, environmental, and financial initiatives through the House.

Last week, we learned that Rangel filed a grossly misleading financial disclosure report for 2007 — failing to report at least half a million dollars in assets.

It turns out Rangel had a credit union account worth at least $250,000 and maybe as much as $500,000 — and didn’t report it. He had investment accounts worth about the same, which he also didn’t report. Ditto for three pieces of property in New Jersey.

Beyond that, we’ve learned that Rangel has failed to report assets totaling more than $1 million on legally required financial disclosure forms going back to at least 2001.

The news comes on top of revelations last year that Rangel didn’t report — and didn’t pay taxes on — income from a villa in the Caribbean. In that matter, the Internal Revenue Service gave him sweetheart treatment; Rangel paid about $10,000 in back taxes but was not required to pay any penalty or interest.

…

But the Rangel case is very, very serious.If you don’t think so, just look at this, from the front page of the Oct. 28, 2008 Washington Post: “Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, one of Congress’s most powerful Republicans, was convicted yesterday of lying on financial disclosure forms to conceal his receipt of about $250,000 in gifts and expensive renovations to his house. …”

Stevens’ conviction was later thrown out because of prosecutorial misconduct, but the message was clear: This is the kind of thing you can go to jail for.

Rangel appears to have hidden greater sums of money than Stevens allegedly did. Democratic leaders don’t want to face it now, but it’s just a matter of time before they’re forced to admit they have a serious Rangel problem.