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.

New York Post:

Rep. Charlie Rangel’s multimillion-dol lar “oops” this month raises plenty of good questions, but this may be the best: How can Democrats continue to close their eyes to such sleaze?

And, more to the point, this: Will prose cutors follow up on any of it?

Rangel’s “corrections” to his financial-disclosure statements from 2002 through 2007 are stunning, even by the low standards of this “error”-prone paperwork-filer — who, by the way, happens to be in charge of writing the nation’s tax laws.

The Harlem Dem now admits that he failed to disclose several million dollars in income and business deals during those years — including up to $1 million from the sale of a building on 132nd Street.

How could that happen?

Charlie won’t say.

Even stranger, city records show that Rangel still owns the building.

How can that be, if Rangel sold it, as he now claims? Maybe the records are wrong, but Charlie’s not talking.

There are adjustments — as much as $780,000 — in the value of his assets:

* An “omitted” checking account valued between $250,000 to $500,000.

* Another fund worth up to $100,000.

* Unreported investment portfolios said to be between $15,000 and $50,000.

The unreported business deals total a jaw-dropping $3 million. Huh?

So what explains all this?

Yup: Charlie’s lips are zipped.

Absent anything dispositive, the best that can be assumed is that the nation’s tax-writer-in-chief is sloppy, careless — dare we say, incompetent? — beyond all possible credibility.

That’s bad enough. But given his mile-long record of “lapses” — even before these latest “oversights” — the public is left to wonder: What is Rangel hiding?

Remember, none of this would have come to light at all had the Sunday Post not broken the story, almost exactly a year ago, about his failure to disclose — and pay tax on — some $75,000 in rental income from his Caribbean villa.

Then followed revelations about his: (more…)

David Axelrod is the man who put Obama on track to win the White House. He’s also looking, if not dirty, then smudged by his connections.

Will the silly clowns who hollered Halliburton at Dick Cheney be outraged? Rhetorical question.

Two firms that received $343.3 million to handle advertising for Barack Obama’s White House run last year have profited from his top priority as president by taking on his push for health-care overhaul.

One is AKPD Message and Media, the Chicago-based firm headed by David Axelrod until he left last Dec. 31 to serve as a senior adviser to the president. Axelrod was Obama’s top campaign strategist and is now helping sell the health-care plan.

And apparently still has financial ties. Hugh Hewitt looks at the issue in depth.

Democrat “Cold Cash Jefferson” found guilty.

In addition to being a thief, the creep commandeered resources during Katrina to check on his cash in the fridge.

Former Democratic Congressman William Jefferson was found guilty of 11 of 16 corruption charges today by a federal jury. The jury of eight women and four men returned a guilty verdict following five days of deliberation.

In the 16-count indictment, Jefferson was charged with soliciting bribes and other crimes for a series of schemes in which he helped American businesses broker deals in West African in exchange for payments or financial considerations to companies controlled by members of his family, including his brother Mose, his wife, Andrea, their five daughters and a son-in-law.

Jefferson, 62, who represented the New Orleans-based 2nd Congressional District for nine terms, will now face sentencing by Judge T.S. Ellis III, who earlier meted out stiff sentences for lesser figures in the case. According to the U.S. attorney’s office, Jefferson faced 235 years in prison if convicted on all counts, and will still face substantial prison time.

Octagenarian House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, whose 40-something wife recently pleaded guilty to bribery charges over influence peddling (and which may implicate him), doesn’t think it’s worth his while to read the bills his gang of radicals is passing.

Shouldn’t there be a law against reckless legislating?

Some comments:

Betsy Newmark:

So I guess that the excuse is that, since they can’t read it or understand it, it’s fine just to let the House leaders (who probably haven’t read the whole thing either) reassure you that the whole thing is just fine. At least some representative’s aides somewhere have read some part of the bill so that should be enough, right? Who says that when you’re rejiggering over one-sixth of the US economy and incurring massive future debt that you need to know what it is you’re voting on.

Mark Steyn:

Thousand-page bills, unread and indeed unwritten at the time of passage, are the death of representative government. They also provide a clue as to why, in a country this large, national government should be minimal and constrained. Even if you doubled or trebled the size of the legislature, the Conyers conundrum would still hold: No individual can read these bills and understand what he’s voting on. That’s why the bulk of these responsibilities should be left to states and subsidiary jurisdictions, which can legislate on such matters at readable length and in comprehensible language.

Obama has brought his Chicago-style politics to DC, but his first scandal won’t go away.

Byron York:

Gerald Walpin, the AmeriCorps inspector general who was summarily fired in June amid controversy over his investigation of a politically-connected supporter of President Obama, has filed suit alleging that the firing was “unlawful,” “politically driven,” “procedurally defective” and “a transparent and clumsily-conducted effort to circumvent the protections” given to inspectors general under the Inspectors General Reform Act of 2008.

Walpin’s suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, is against the Corporation for National and Community Service, which oversees AmeriCorps.  Also named are Nicola Goren, the acting CEO of the Corporation, Frank Trinity, its general counsel, and Raymond Limon, the Corporation’s “chief human capital officer.”  The suit asks the court to declare Walpin’s firing unlawful and restore him to his position as the Corporation’s inspector general.

At the time of his firing, Walpin was involved in a dispute with the Corporation’s board over his handling a case involving the misuse of hundreds of thousands of dollars in AmeriCorps funds by Kevin Johnson, the former NBA star who is now mayor of Sacramento, California and a prominent supporter of President Obama.  The board disapproved of Walpin’s aggressive probe of Johnson, and the investigation also sparked conflict with the acting U.S. attorney in Sacramento, because of fears that the probe — which could have resulted in Johnson being barred from ever winning another federal grant — might stand in the way of the city receiving its part of billions of dollars in federal stimulus money.  This spring, the Corporation’s top management decided to lift sanctions against Johnson.  Walpin strongly disapproved; at a board meeting on May 20, he frankly criticized board members for going along with that decision to let Johnson off easy.

Instapundit:

“CULTURE OF CORRUPTION” UPDATE: Conyers abandons plan to probe ACORN. Why? “The powers that be decided against it,” says Conyers. I’m sure they did. . . .

UPDATE: Reader Jim O’Neill writes:

rom your current front page:

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MONICA CONYERS GUILTY OF BRIBERY CONSPIRACY CHARGES, faces up to five years. Her husband is Rep. John Conyers (D-MI).

“CULTURE OF CORRUPTION” UPDATE: Conyers abandons plan to probe ACORN. Why? “The powers that be decided against it,” says Conyers. I’m sure they did. . . .
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Gee, do I see a narrative here? What deal did they offer Conyers to play ball? Or what threat, I should ask?

Hmm. This is the sort of thing a free, independent watchdog press would look into, if we had such a thing . . .

Culture of corruption. WSJ:

Irish property prices have plummeted since 2002. But a “cottage” in County Galway owned by Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd has tripled in value during the same period, according to a financial disclosure form filed by the Senator this month.

There are two possible explanations for this remarkable turn of fortune. Maybe Mr. Dodd is luckier than a leprechaun. Or could it be that he paid well below the market price when he bought out a co-owner in 2002 and had undervalued the property accordingly? If it’s the latter, then Mr. Dodd received a “gift,” in IRS parlance, and should have declared it on his financial disclosure form that year. He did not. Oh, and by the way, the seller at that low, low price has been the business partner of a man for whom Mr. Dodd lobbied to receive a Presidential pardon.

It’s also been nearly a year since a former loan officer at Countrywide Financial charged that the mortgage lender had classified Mr. Dodd as a “very important person” (a.k.a., a “friend of Angelo” Mozilo, Countrywide’s then-CEO). As such, Robert Feinberg said, Mr. Dodd received — and knew he’d received — preferential rates and fees on two mortgages he and his wife refinanced in 2003. As a power on the Senate Banking Committee, he also knew this was a conflict of interest. This was the era when Countrywide originated and then sold to Fannie Mae high volumes of subprime loans.

The SEC charged Mr. Mozilo with fraud and insider trading earlier this month, and the Los Angeles Times reported in May that there is an FBI investigation which “includes a probe of [Countrywide's] role in an influence-peddling scandal involving” Mr. Dodd. The Senate Ethics Committee won’t comment on its own investigation of almost a year.

More on the culture of corruption.

The headquarters of Murtech, in a low-slung, bland building in a Glen Burnie business park, has its blinds drawn tight and few signs of life. On several days of visits, a handful of cars sit in the parking lot, and no trucks arrive at the 10 loading bays at the back of the building.

Yet last year, Murtech received $4 million in Pentagon work, all of it without competition, for a variety of warehousing and engineering services. With its long corridor of sparsely occupied offices and an unmanned reception area, Murtech’s most striking feature is its owner — Robert C. Murtha Jr., 49. He is the nephew of Rep. John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who has significant sway over the Defense Department’s spending as chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee.

Robert Murtha said he is not at liberty to discuss in detail what his company does, but for four years it has subsisted on defense contracts, according to records and interviews. He said Murtech’s 17 employees “provide necessary logistical support” to Pentagon testing programs that focus on detecting chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats, “and that’s about as far as I feel comfortable going.” Giving more details could provide important clues to terrorist plotters, he said.

It’s nice that ABC notices, but what political party does John Murtha belong to? Huh? Wha?

Here’s Murtha in a more overt criminal phase.

On the day the new Congress convened this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to route $25 billion in taxpayer money to a government agency that had just awarded her husband’s real estate firm a lucrative contract to sell foreclosed properties at compensation rates higher than the industry norms.

Mrs. Feinstein’s intervention on behalf of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was unusual: the California Democrat isn’t a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs with jurisdiction over FDIC; and the agency is supposed to operate from money it raises from bank-paid insurance payments – not direct federal dollars.

The Augusta Chronicle:

Corruption is an elusive bird with a siren’s song.

It’s often hard to recognize corruption because its tools are suits and handshakes and fancy titles and serpent smiles, not guns or knives. But robbery is robbery.

It’s difficult to acknowledge or confront corruption, because its victims are often paid off and made to be happy of it.

Corruption is all the more insidious because it’s easier to spot from a great distance; it’s hard to see it when it’s right in front of you. It’s more difficult to admit that friends or acquaintances might be corrupt.

Nor does corruption always have to be criminal. Corruption is always corrosive, frequently seductive, and sometimes addictive — but often quite legal.

By almost every measure, Washington is hopelessly corrupt.

And we are at once victims and accomplices.

Career politicians are spending the country to near-bankruptcy as they feather their own nests, tighten their leash on our necks and pat us on the head. They take our money, bend it to their will, then return small portions of it at their discretion to make us feel it has all been worth it.

Washington is to the taxpayer as the drug cartels are to the addict.

Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina did his best to wean his state off the cocaine of federal money. He knows it’s corrupting. He knows it will mask the state’s needs rather than fill them. He knows we are stealing from our children.

Washington is over $10 trillion in debt already. The Obama budget blueprint calls for adding another $9 trillion to that debt in the next 10 years. And the country is already facing untold trillions — $60 trillion or more — in Medicare and Social Security promises we’ve made to future retirees, money for which we have no identifiable source.

Meanwhile, with the power to give out our money as they wish, congressmen take campaign money from lobbyists and industries they regulate. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., is only the latest poster boy for that, but boy is he a good one. There may be no one who better represents all that is wrong with Washington. The powerful Senate Banking Committee chairman got a sweetheart mortgage from Countrywide; he has received $280,000 in campaign contributions from troubled insurer AIG; and he made sure that AIG executive bonuses were untouched by Congress — then claimed for 24 hours that he knew nothing about it, before reporters forced him to admit the truth.

Polls show Dodd is in re-election trouble. But don’t hold your breath: Despite record-low approval ratings for Congress last year, we continued sending our congressmen back at about a 90 percent retention rate.

We have, sadly, been corrupted.

Gov. Mark Sanford stood nearly alone in trying to break this cycle of co-dependency. He never stood a chance.

Only the people of America can do it.

We hope the “tea party” movement that is now taking shape — rallies are planned across the country April 15, including one on the Riverwalk in Augusta from 5 to 10 p.m. that day — will become the foundation for taking our country back. From both parties.

We have very specific ideas about what needs to be done and how to do it. We’ll be sharing those at the tea party April 15.

The term “Washington corruption” may bring to mind the fuzzy video of a congressman taking blatant bribes and such. But that’s the least of the problem. The bigger problem is out in the open, but perhaps harder to see: A corrupt Washington is bleeding us dry and paying us to be quiet.

It may work for a while. But there are enough of us who are on to this corruption. And we won’t be silenced.

Show me the money! Show me the money! Show me the money!

As Democrats prepared to take control of Congress after the 2006 elections, a top boss at the insurance giant American International Group Inc. told colleagues that Sen. Christopher J. Dodd was seeking re-election donations and he implored company executives and their spouses to give.

Getty Images Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, has lost some political standing heading into re-election because of his ties to American International Group Inc.

The message in the Nov. 17, 2006, e-mail from Joseph Cassano, AIG Financial Products chief executive, was unmistakable: Mr. Dodd was “next in line” to be chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, which oversees the insurance industry, and he would “have the opportunity to set the committee’s agenda on issues critical to the financial services industry.

“Given his seniority in the Senate, he will also play a key role in the Democratic Majority’s leadership,” Mr. Cassano wrote in the message, obtained by The Washington Times.

Mr. Dodd’s campaign quickly hit pay dirt, collecting more than $160,000 from employees and their spouses at the AIG Financial Products division (AIG-FP) in Wilton, Conn., in the days before he took over as the committee chairman in January 2007. Months later, the senator transferred the donations to jump-start his 2008 presidential bid, which later failed.