Corruption and Cronyism Archives

If you are missing Ira Glass’ This American Life on NPR, you’re missing one heck of a good show.
When will the people stand up to corporations? In a recent poll, more people oppose healthcare reform than approve of it – thanks to the healthcare industry’s blood-stained money pouring into the airwaves and Barack [...]

From Reuters:
“The financial community is donating more to Democrats than ever before and you’ve got more Democrats in the financial community, creating a very powerful pattern there. I don’t think you’re going to see the Obama administration and Congress willing to be tough enough in dealing with these things.” An author who saw the global [...]

From Glenn Greenwald in Salon:
…late Friday afternoon, the Obama DOJ filed the government’s first response to EFF’s lawsuit (.pdf), the first of its kind to seek damages against government officials under FISA, the Wiretap Act and other statutes, arising out of Bush’s NSA program. But the Obama DOJ demanded dismissal of the entire lawsuit [...]

From Bonnie Erbe:
Funny how once they win election, politicians’ promises go out the window. President Obama promised change. But some of his cabinet and subcabinet appointments have been anything but. I posit two examples here, first Treasury Secretary-designate Tim Geithner:
Timothy F. Geithner became the ninth president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank [...]

From Glenn Greenwald in Salon:
Just as Nancy Pelosi and Jay Rockefeller can’t possibly demand investigations for crimes in which they were complicit, media stars can’t possibly condemn acts which they supported or, at the very best, towards which they turned a blissfully blind eye. They can’t indict Bush officials for what they did because [...]

As we have seen again and again, whistleblower protection is nonexistent. From Glenn Greenwald at Salon:
…Thomas Tamm is the mid-level, career Justice Department lawyer who, in 2004, blew the whistle on Bush’s illegal NSA spying program by alerting The New York Times‘ Eric Lichtblau to the fact that Bush was eavesdropping on Americans without the warrants required by [...]

Where’s that “change” thing that was so prominently advertised? From at Kevin Gutzman at Lew Rockwell:
It may be that the Illinois legislature will decide that the imperatives of a low-level Justice Department employee, the U.S. Attorney for Illinois, are more significant than the imperative to conduct a full and fair impeachment inquiry before tossing [...]

From the AP:
“If the appropriate restrictions were put on the money to begin with, if the appropriate transparency was in place, then we wouldn’t be in a position where you’re trying to call every recipient and get the basic information that should already be in public documents,” said watchdog Elizabeth Warren. Scott Garrett, a [...]

Gretawire…

From the AP:
John McCain supporters who believe they haven’t gotten a fair shake from the media during the Republican’s candidacy against Barack Obama have a new study to point to.
Comments made by sources, voters, reporters and anchors that aired on ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts over the past two months reflected positively on Obama [...]

From Just Say No Deal: Bill Ayers launched Obama’s political career from his home, appointed non-experienced Obama Chairman of Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and served with him on Board of Woods Fund. Obama calls the Weathermen founder and domestic terrorist “respectable” and “mainstream,” endorsed Ayers’ book in ‘97 yet recently claimed: he’s “just another [...]

See, this is why I was a Democrat all those years. I thought they were the good guys. Turns out they weren’t good, just not as good at being bad as the Republicans. They sure have caught up. From the (sorry to link to them but somebody had to say it, [...]

Women in Obama’s campaign paid less than men
Hillary Clinton’s unprecedented treatment at the convention
Bill Clinton on Hillary’s treatment during the campaign
Obama laughs off sexism
Obama says women have abortions because they are “feeling blue”
Obama tells women to “get over it”
Katie Couric comments
Obama says the “claws come out” and more
Pat Schroeder on sexism
Geraldine Ferraro on sexism
Robin [...]

Truth can be “negative”. Lies can be “positive”. I say let’s hear the truth. From No Quarter, a letter by Scott Nelson:
We cannot find a single statement or action prior to this summer in which the Senator denounced the actions and attitudes of Mr. Ayers. Senator Obama launched his campaign for the [...]

From the AP:
The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.
“It [...]

Check them out at Newsweek…

From Bonnie Erbe at US News:
Hate to say it, but when one thinks of voter fraud, one usually associates it with the GOP, the 2000 election, and the debate over who won Florida. You remember, voting machines that didn’t work, long lines to vote in predominantly Democratic districts, and recounts that weren’t accurate.
This election brings [...]

Seen on Just Say No Deal:

Click on the link to see the scheme and how it played out at Just Say No Deal:
okay, the reason no one focuses on Obama’s “community organizing” is because few understand how it fits into the
big picture. focus, trace, read – revisit if necessary – but do understand why a) Obama has gotten to
where he [...]

From Renaissance Lady:
As a preface to Nancy?s article it might be helpful to offer a refresher for new No Quarter readers on the deep and long-term relationship between Barack Obama and ACORN, which stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ACORN Housing provides mortgage loan counseling, first-time home buyer classes, and helps clients [...]

From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:
Early in his career, Obama worked as an organizer for Project Vote, an ACORN offshoot, and represented ACORN in legal actions, according to various published reports, including Associated Press articles. ACORN’s political action committee endorsed Obama in the primary.
The organization has sparked controversy.
Accusations of voter fraud have followed ACORN’s canvassing projects in [...]

The staging of the Wizard of Oz continues…
While Ed Rendell is saying he will vote for Hillary, he’s falsely spinning this as “Sen. Obama was extremely generous,” which leads me to ask, was Jimmy Carter “extremely generous” to Ted Kennedy in 1980? Or did everyone just follow party rules back then? [...]

From the AP:
…Obama sought to link the troubled economy with Republican policies and offer his own energy plan in contrast. He has tried to cast McCain as more concerned about oil company profits and drilling than an overall energy strategy.
However, Obama himself voted for a 2005 energy bill backed by Bush that included billions in [...]

First, on the 8 second bounce, from Bonnie Erbe:
… the answer is that the far-left wing of the Democratic Party nominated a charismatic unknown, who has turned out not to be ready for primetime politics. His impeccably choreographed jaunt through the Middle East and Europe last week produced an 8-point bounce in the polls that [...]

From Now:
Alaska Senator Ted Stevens has been indicted for failing to disclose gifts he received from VECO Corporation, an Alaska-based oil services company. But his indictment is only the latest news – and perhaps the tip of the iceberg – in an ongoing political scandal that’s rocking the state and Congress.
This week, NOW goes behind [...]

A fascinating article by Rosemary Regello at The City Edition about Howard Dean and Donna Brazile (how on earth was she ever allowed within 50 feet of the party after mishandling Al Gore in 2000?) and the disenfranchising of voters (also see Politically Drunk for another article on this subject, including the disenfranchisement of voters [...]

Nixon Attorney General Elliot Richardson honored his oath of office – he resigned rather than help Nixon cover up a crime. From CNN:
…[Elliot Richardson] was best known for his actions in 1973, when, during the height of the investigation into the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, he refused Nixon’s orders [...]

Now, here’s a brilliant idea, how about letting someone this morally bankrupt run the United States of America. From Chris Fusco and Dave McKinney at the Chicago Sun-Times:
He can’t explain exactly how he spent $100,000 of taxpayer’s money on a garden that was never built. Instead, what was supposed to be a six-block [...]

This video is about the rigging of the 1996 state senate election. More of the same since then, but dirty tricks wouldn’t have been enough to bring this questionable local politician to the national arena, without the front runner’s disgrace by a domestic scandal.

From Glen Ford at Black Agenda Report:
Once again, Obama has proven that he isn’t about change – at least not change for the better. He has become a convert to Bush’s kind of evangelism: bribery on a huge scale, under the guise of religious faith. George W. Bush as his mentor, Barack Obama shamelessly dives [...]

From the New York Times:
Obama?s shifts are striking because he was the candidate who proposed to change the face of politics. Senator Barack Obama stirred his legions of supporters, and raised our hopes, promising to change the old order of things. He spoke with passion about breaking out of the partisan mold of bickering and [...]

From the Washington Post:
The Obamas bought the house for $300,000 less than the asking price of $1.95 million, while Rezko’s wife, Rita, bought the neighboring lot for the full asking price of $625,000. Rita Rezko later sold a portion of the undeveloped lot to the Obamas, enlarging the senator’s yard. Tony Rezko already had [...]

From the Boston Globe:
As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies.
But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies [...]

From Bill Moyers and Michael Winship:
“Four western companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.” There you have it. After a long exile, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and [...]

The danger of blind partisanship, particularly when a wild card like Obama is the beneficiary. From Raw Story:
“Is that really what anyone wants — transferring blind devotion from George Bush to Barack Obama? Are we hoping for a Fox News for Obama, that glorifies everything he says and whitewashes everything he does?” …The [...]

Lies about McCain while playing the race card, lies about his blatant flip flop on campaign finance, lies about presidential powers and FISA, … What does he believe in, anyway? Whatever serves Obama. Scott Simon on NPR

Obama moves DNC to Chicago…

As Hillary wins Puerto Rico decisively (and as we know, under the Republican system, she’d have won the nomination long ago, having won enough big states), Jerome Armstrong comments. The DNC closed-door secret committee decision to seat only half of Florida’s delegates (although Obama spent $1.3 million in Florida and still lost big to [...]

Ari Fleischer I couldn’t even bear to watch, something about an aversion to humans without consciences, I guess. McClellan was never comfortable with what he was doing, and it showed. From Salon:
…”No matter how good a press secretary [you are],” Washington Post media watcher Howard Kurtz told me, “you’re thrown into the shark [...]

Joan Walsh, Salon editor, rocks in this video, as she takes on Chris Matthews and a slow-witted talk show host parroting Obama campaign talking points.
“If people continue to demonize the Clintons, that will ruin the Democrats’ chances… Bill Clinton is the only two term Democratic president in my lifetime… To act [...]

The “manly two-step” – this is good, from Tom Watson:
I’ll admit it, the so-called end-game in this long Democratic nomination battle is beginning to confuse me. Let’s see if we can get it all down. Barack Obama is the presumptive nominee, favored in that status by national magazine cover stories. Yet no one has told [...]

And thus I clothe my naked villany
With odd old ends stol’n forth of holy writ,
And seem a saint when most I play the devil.
~ King Richard III
They turn a blind eye toward a lot, these Obama supporters…
The Kentucky ad where he’s surrounded by a halo of heavenly light looking skyward with a beatific look on [...]

Donna Brazile, as you recall, is the incompetent who nearly single-handledly destroyed Al Gore’s chances of a decisive victory over George Bush in 2000. Here is this bastion of professionalism’s deeply intelligent and eminently wise reply on behalf of the DNC (I guess she thought the personality comment a clever touch – maybe she’s [...]

From Rosemary Regello at The City Edition:
Bamboozling the American electorate again
Rove undoubtedly prepared well for 2008. Even with the full monte of election-scamming tools available to him – phone bank sabotage, fake polling data, swiftboating, waitlisting, electronic voting equipment, Norman Hsu, etc. – the neoconservative base he represents would be hard pressed to eclipse Clinton [...]

From Evelyn Pringle (click on the link, she’s got more):
With use of the internet, a fifth grader could connect the dots to show a picture of a guy who was picked up in college and carried up the political ladder by a corrupt gang of influence peddlers… As for the most recognized allegation against [...]

From No Quarter:
…Here?s some of the transcript from Donna?s nasty meltdown:
BRAZILE: Well, Lou, I have worked on a lot of Democratic campaigns, and I respect Paul. But, Paul, you?re looking at the old coalition. A new Democratic coalition is younger. It is more urban, as well as suburban, and we don?t have to just rely [...]

When slimeball Bob Novak admits something, listen up. From the Washington Post:
Buyer’s remorse was beginning to afflict supporters of Barack Obama before Tuesday’s primary election returns showed he had delivered a knockout punch against Hillary Clinton. The young orator who had seemed so fantastic, beginning with his 2007 Jefferson-Jackson dinner speech in Iowa, disappointed [...]

Mayor McDermott of Hammond, Indiana rocked challenging Mayor Clay of Gary, Indiana.
Here’s the video on you tube: CNN coverage

From J Brown, New American Disenfranchisement:
… The media has portrayed this race as a battle between two very good candidates that has now reached a point that could hurt the Democratic Party?s chances in November and damage their voter coalition. However, the reality is that this is a battle between the Wealthy & Elitist Far-Left [...]

From Fred Siegel in The Australian:
What makes it different is that there’s not just a gap but a chasm between his actions and his professed principles, which would normally kill a candidacy. And because his deeds are so few, the disparity is all the more salient. Obama, far more than the others, is the [...]

ObamaTruth.org

His dubious past and now his present, from USA Today:
Barack Obama often boasts he is “the only candidate who isn’t taking a dime from Washington lobbyists,” yet his fundraising team includes 38 members of law firms that were paid $138 million last year to lobby the federal government, records show.
Those lawyers, including 10 former federal [...]

Hmmm… From NY Daily News:
Barack Obama’s campaign tossed around nearly $600 at Tiffany’s last month – for a trinket that remains a secret.
Obama’s team tapped his flush campaign bank account to pay the $572.25 tab at the famed jeweler last month, recently released federal fund-raising records show.
When asked about the curious expenditure, campaign spokeswoman [...]

Frontline airing tonight and tomorrow night (also can be seen online)

His faithful describe him as hope and love (Is Barack Obama the Messiah?), but he’s really an insider politician. From a 2006 Harpers article:
… it is also startling to see how quickly Obama’s senatorship has been woven into the web of institutionalized influence-trading that afflicts official Washington. He quickly established a political machine funded [...]

From John Kass in the Chicago Tribune:

When the parish priest does right by the patronage boss to protect the mayor who gets endorsed by that great reformer Sir Barack of O’bama, that’s the Chicago Way… Naturally, there are some squares who don’t think taxpayers should pave the Chicago Way to make it easy for Rezko [...]

Press Conference – CNN
Craig Ferguson – Late Late Show
Drunk and/or stupid compilation
International embarassment – CNN
And another – BBC
David Letterman – Late Show

Buying the War on PBS…
“The program analyzes the stream of unchecked information from administration sources and Iraqi defectors to the mainstream print and broadcast press, which was then seized upon and amplified by an army of pundits. While almost all the claims would eventually prove to be false, the drumbeat of misinformation went virtually unchallenged [...]

From NOW:
NOW shines a bright light on the scandalous connection between VECO Corporation?an Alaska-based oil services company?and Alaska’s old-boy Republican network. Two state legislators have been convicted in Federal court for accepting bribes from VECO. The FBI has video and audio evidence that reveal VECO executives shockingly handing out cash to those legislators in exchange [...]

“I am not being facetious when I say that the real enemies in this country are the Pentagon and its pals in big business.”

That says it all – how sad that our country has come to this. What’s in our future, Tiananmen Square? From the Washington Post:
Iraq has failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress, according to a draft of a Government Accountability Office report. The document questions [...]

See the article Does Comcast Hate Macs? at tech.blorge.com…

Fact Checkup
Some of the facts – supporting evidence and more facts are at the above link:
SiCKO: There are nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance.
SiCKO: 18,000 Americans will die this year simply because they’re uninsured.
SiCKO: $100 million spent to defeat Hillary’s health care plan.
SiCKO: The United States is ranked #37 as a health system by [...]

From David Coddon in the San Diego Tribune:
I’m not making this up.
Wish I were.
I have a heart condition. Last week, on the Fourth of July, I went to my box to retrieve the previous day’s mail. In it was a letter from my health insurance provider. It began:
?Dear Mr. Gddon:?
That was only the beginning of [...]

From John Dean at FindLaw:
Those with whom I have spoken have serious doubt that Bush and the White House staff really knows what Cheney is doing, why he is doing it, or how he is doing it. It has long been apparent that Cheney’s genius is that he lets George W. Bush get out [...]

From the Los Angeles Times:
“We can’t find any cases, certainly in the last half century, where the president commuted a sentence before it had even started to be served,” said Margaret Colgate Love, a former pardon attorney at the Justice Department. “This is really, really unusual.”
“Consistency and fidelity to the law are extraordinarily important. We [...]

From Peter Travers at Rolling Stone:
Sicko is a movie whose time has come, even if the Treasury Department is already on Moore’s case for illegally taking a boatload of lung-sick 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba for free medical care they can?t get at home. Another dumb move from the Dubya camp.
In an era when the [...]

From Democracy Now:
AMY GOODMAN: Hundreds of thousands of protesters are gathering in Germany ahead of tomorrow?s G8 meeting of the world?s richest nations. The three-day summit is being held in the coastal resort of Heiligendamm. German police have spent $18 million to erect an eight-mile-long, two-meter-high fence around the meeting site.
Global warming will be high [...]

This is as bad as it gets. Two reports from NBC:
Update to the original story
Last September, NBC News first reported on a fierce debate within the Pentagon over Trophy, an Israeli-made weapons system, that literally shoots down rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and even more deadly anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs). There were plans to battle-test Trophy [...]

From Mother Jones:
Subpoenas have been authorized, the press is swarming, the Bush administration’s flacks are taking a pounding ? I think it’s safe to say that the White House email controversy has officially blossomed into a full-blown scandal. This week the White House acknowledged that it may have “lost” an unspecified number of emails that [...]

From CNN:
Gonzales has said he knew little about the discussions concerning the dismissals, but his former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, testified March 29 that Gonzales was continually briefed on the matter. Previous battles with Congress over the administration’s torture policy and the warrantless surveillance program have left Gonzales with little good will on [...]

From Real Time with Bill Maher:
Valerie Plame was the CIA’s operational officer in charge of counter-proliferation. Which means she tracked loose nukes. So, when Bush said, as he once did, that his absolute, number-one priority was preventing terrorists from getting loose nukes, okay, that’s what she worked on. That’s what she devoted her life to, [...]

Typical Republican hypocrisy. From NNDB:
On Laura Schlessinger’s popular train wreck of a radio show, listeners can hear strangers’ lives ruined by bad advice for three hours daily. Callers are often interrupted before they can finish explaining their personal problems, and she usually berates them brusquely for what she perceives as moral, parental, or religious [...]

From the AP:
“My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior officials in the White House and State Department. I could no longer perform the work for which I had been highly trained… They all knew that I worked with the CIA. They might not have known what my status was [...]

“Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or [...]

From Deepak Chopra:
In a free market it would be insane to invest in death, which is what the war system produces as its end product. Not only does death rob the economy of workers, it demoralizes those left behind. I wrote recently on the seeming paradox that the Iraq war could be such a total [...]

Another flawed editorial debunked at Think Progress…

From Arianna Huffington:
Before the GOP spin machine kicks into high gear, shouting from the mountain tops that the Libby verdict is just about making false statements to the FBI, and that no one was ever charged with the underlying crime of outing Valerie Plame, let’s make it clear that Libby was found guilty not just [...]

From Margaret Carlson:
What the I. Lewis Libby verdict shows beyond a reasonable doubt is that the first instinct of the White House when caught doing something wrong is to lie.
From the false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, to Abu Ghraib, to Katrina, Walter Reed Hospital and the purging of eight U.S. attorneys, the urge [...]

Like Bunny Greenhouse. From the Washington Post:
Even though the ATF has enjoyed successive years of budget hikes under Bush, it had to cut back on such basic needs as replacement cars for the field agents and bulletproof vests to protect them. One reason is that the Bush appointee to head the agency, Carl [...]

From Steven Weber at the Huffington Post:
The women responded: “We will not take one dime. We want accountability”. And why wouldn’t Issa or Shays think that the motive behind the grieving families’s lawsuit would be anything other than financial? After all, that is how America does business. That is the heart of why Blackwater USA [...]

From the AP:
Federal investigators have already determined the Bush administration squandered $1 billion on fraudulent disaster aid to individuals after the 2005 storm. Now they are shifting their attention to the multimillion dollar contracts to politically connected firms that critics have long said are a prime area for abuse. The tally for Hurricane Katrina waste [...]

From the Wall Street Journal:
“When I graduated from college in the 1960s, the average CEO made 20 times what the average worker made. Today, that CEO makes 400 times as much. Working Americans have been repeatedly seduced at the polls by emotional issues such as the predictable mantra of “God, guns, gays, abortion and [...]

From the Atlanta Journal Constitution:
“Republicans have wrapped themselves in the American flag, and then they appear to be carrying the cross of Jesus Christ ? if you’re not with us, you’re against Christianity. Those are high standards to hold themselves up to, and the current Congress has failed miserably ? taking bribes, influencing votes [...]

Another hypocrite bites the dust. It’s like a parade of hypocrites. From the AP:
The Rev. Ted Haggard said Friday he bought methamphetamine and received a massage from a male prostitute. But the influential Christian evangelist insisted he threw the drugs away and never had sex with the man.
Haggard, who as president of the [...]

Showtimes…
In the 2000 presidential election, an electronic voting machine recorded minus 16,022 votes for Al Gore in Volusia County, Fla. Electronic voting machines count 80% of the votes cast in America today. But are they reliable? Are they safe from tampering? From a current congressional hearing to persistent media reports that suggest misuse of data [...]

From Christian Miller, author of Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq, in the Huffington Post:
The Department of Justice under the Bush administration has completely checked out of the accountability game when it comes to contractors operating in Iraq. Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty has just announced that the Justice Department [...]

Sure, Republican leadership appointed crooks to high office, but once the public found out about the crooks, and the Republicans were shamed and pressured to do something about it, they finally did. You’re doing a heck of a job, Denny. Bob Schieffer interviews Congressman Ray LaHood about Mark Foley – must see video…