Raise your hand if you stand for Business as Usual.

My column today shines light on Democrat Mass. Attorney General/Senate candidate Martha Coakley’s career tolerance for the culture of corruption.

While she cracks down on little gardening clubs, she has turned a blind eye to far bigger, dirtier, rotten scoundrels. The Big Labor spigots are flowing. And Big Pharma’s got her back. She’ll be a reliable rubber-stamper for Harry Reid’s Demcare bribery schemes, the SEIU’s power grabs, and Chicago-on-the-Potomac.

No wonder she’s lost the votes of the rank-and-file union workers being paid to hold up her signs.

Coakley: She treats ladies’ gardening clubs like crooks — and crooks like ladies’ gardening clubs.

One more item: Last night, I linked to the photo of Weekly Standard reporter John McCormack on the ground after being pushed by one of Coakley’s thugs. Where was Martha? Standing on the sidelines, doing nothing. As usual. McCormack has more.

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Martha Coakley: The voice for Fat Cats and Corruptocrats
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

Democrat Martha Coakley is the voice of the “little people” the way Ted Kennedy was the voice of sobriety. If Massachusetts voters want another privileged liberal who talks a good “social justice” game while ignoring public corruption, pocketing gobs of money from Beltway fat cats, and pandering to corporate special interests, Coakley’s the one.

Coakley, the Bay State’s attorney general, has campaigned to replace the late Sen. Kennedy on a law-and-order platform. But she has consistently turned a blind eye to both. When a top aide to Boston Mayor Tom Menino was caught deleting thousands of e-mails in violation of public records law last fall, Coakley punted. Democrat Menino was in the middle of a re-election bid; Coakley was wrapped up in her own senatorial bid.

Instead of expressing any concern about the City Hall information black hole, Coakley refused to investigate. She accused her critics of playing politics: “[W]e get lots of complaints from folks who are adversaries who have a particular agenda.”

But who’s got the agenda? After undertaking Herculean technical efforts to recover the trashed e-mails, Boston city officials discovered e-mail fragments related to an ongoing federal probe of former state senator Dianne Wilkerson. Wilkerson attained national infamy as the lawmaker caught on film stuffing thousands of dollars of bribes from an FBI informant down her bra in exchange for her help securing a liquor license for a nightclub. She is currently awaiting federal trial.

Coakley cut a blanket immunity deal with Wilkerson last year protecting her from prosecution for campaign finance violations. But according to the Boston Herald, the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance reported last month that Wilkerson had failed to comply or only partially complied with 11 of 51 conditions. Coakley allowed Wilkerson to pay a measly $10,000 fine to avoid any legal action. She has failed to make those payments, failed to file ordered paperwork, and failed to answer information requests from state campaign finance officials.

Coakley’s response? Meh. Instead, she used the power of her office to herald her new, taxpayer-funded $750,000 cybercrime lab initiative – a picture-perfect, campaign-ready moment — without an ironic pause and has launched a crackdown on ladies’ gardening clubs for failing to file financial disclosure forms related to their dues and plant sales.

Perhaps if they were in the lingerie business, they might have gotten a pass. Or if they had volunteered for Coakley’s campaign. While she’s a stickler with the gardeners, Coakley has been mighty sloppy practicing what she selectively enforces. She has siphoned $25,000 out of her state campaign fund for a poll on her federal Senate bid; used another $24,000 from her state account to pay Beltway political consultants advising her on the Senate campaign; and reportedly used a secret asset sale pact between her state and federal campaign committees to use state campaign funds to purchase a fundraising database, redesign her website, and obtain $6,000 worth of campaign paraphernalia with her Senate logo. Her senatorial ambitions have been almost pornographically transparent — but not her campaign finance operations.

Then there’s Coakley’s relationship with Massachusett’s corrupt former House Speaker Sal DiMasi. Bay State records show that Coakley sent annual donations to the beleaguered Democrat over the past three years worth just under $1,000. But the obeisance Coakley has paid to the Democrat machine has been priceless. Last June, di Masi was indicted on seven counts of mail and wire fraud related to pay-for-play schemes worth tens of thousands of dollars in monthly payments. “Where’s Martha?” asked Republican lawmakers.

Coakley let the feds take on the powerful di Masi. Only after months of foot-dragging did Coakley’s AG office initiate an investigation into and indictments of one of di Masi’s top cronies, Richard Vitale, on lobbying and campaign finance crimes.

More recently, Coakley’s GOP opponent Scott Brown blew the whistle on campaign finance shenanigans involving her deep-pocketed supporters at the SEIU. The radical labor organization, saddled with nationwide embezzlement scandals and political thuggery, is “pulling out all the stops” for Coakley and has dumped more than $200,000 into her campaign for radio ads (plus another $685,000 on the way for TV ads). In mid-December, SEIU Local 509, which represents public employees, sent two e-mails to 7,500 state government employee at their government e-mail address over public computers endorsing Coakley and urging union members to vote for her. The use of state resources for politicking is forbidden under state ethics laws and subject to both civil and criminal penalties.

Coakley’s office has not responded to the complaint. She’s probably too busy writing thank-you notes to all the fatcat lobbyists and donors who threw her a high-priced fundraiser in Washington, D.C. this week. Host committee members raised $10,000 or more for her coffers. They included representatives from drug companies, health insurers, and hospitals who joined the Demcare protection racket. (And Coakley has the nerve to attack “shadowy out-of-state organizations” for running ads supporting Brown.)

Washington is already teeming with Democrat foxes guarding the Cash for Corruptocrats henhouse. Isn’t there a nice gardening club in Massachusetts that can take Coakley in?