Results for "blago"

DLTDHYOTWO!*
See ya:
Scott Lee Cohen, the pawnbroker whose surprise victory in last week’s Democratic lieutenant governor primary was followed by scandalous revelations about him, quit the race tonight during the half time of the Super Bowl, saying he didn’t want to “put the people of Illinois in jeopardy in any way.”
Cohen made the tearful announcement at [...]

Grabby hands.

Guess how many members of Congress — a swamp teeming with tax cheats, conflict of interest-laden wheeler-dealers, and corner-cutters– have been punished by the House ethics committee?

Zero, zip, nada:
Nearly three years after Congress approved sweeping ethics rules to “drain the swamp,” as incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it, no member of Congress has been [...]

“It was anything but SEIU.”

My column looks at the year in Washington political bribery. And what a year it was for the Beltway’s reverse Santa Clauses, who are suspended simultaneously in mental states of denial and indignation. Democrat Sen. Mary “Louisiana Purchase” Landrieu defended her payoff while declaring that she “can’t be bought.”Democrat Sen. Tom “Iowa Bounty” Harkin dismissed [...]

Back on June 12, I detected Michelle Obama’s fingerprints all over the Americorps IG scandal and flagged the First Lady’s former chief of staff-turned-Americorps senior adviser, Jackie Norris.
So, this is no surprise via Byron York:
Congressional investigators looking into the abrupt firing of AmeriCorps inspector general Gerald Walpin have discovered that the head of AmeriCorps met [...]

Meow.

Payoffs from A to Z.

Update: 11/19 9am…Holder hedges on GOP request for disclosure/recusal information…

Attorney General Eric Holder, Team Obama’s Dirty Dozen (get your trading cards here)
If you’ve been paying attention, you already know all about AG Eric Holder and his DOJ staff’s national security conflict of interest as senior partner with Covington & Burling — the prestigious Washington, D.C. [...]

Obama’s double-talk on dissent.

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Michael Scott’s name came up several times during the Obama-lympics 2016 debacle. He was one of many Chicago cronies who stood to gain from the bid.
The local papers in Chicago sniffed out his conflicts of interest as an Olympics committee member who was also involved in trying to develop a for-profit real [...]

This is how they roll in Barack and Michelle Obama’s Chicago. The 26-year-old son of Nation of Islam chieftain Louis Farrakhan gets a $63,000 government job as a “business manager” in C(r)ook County after the Nation of Islam-endorsed C(r)ook County Board president, Todd Stroger, wins his seat.
The local Fox affiliate pressed Stroger on the patronage [...]

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, desperate for cash to prop up his bankrupt and broken city, will lease anything. Parking meters. Airports. Now, water.
A constituent asks: “Why are we having a fire sale on everything in the city?”
Because everything’s for sale in the city…
If the parking meter deal put a bad taste in [...]

President Obama has nominated the SEIU Purple Shirts’ associate general counsel, Craig Becker, to a slot on the National Labor Relations Board. Today, the Senate HELP Committee cleared him through on a 15-8 vote without a hearing. GOP Senators Mike Enzi (for whom Becker served as a labor counsel) [correction: the GOP NLRB nominee Brian [...]

Over the past two weeks, I’ve reported on the grass-roots revolt by home health providers against the SEIU and rival AFSCME in Illinois.
SEIU-endorsed Gov. Pat Quinn signed an executive order in June approving collective bargaining by “individual providers of home-based support services” — effectively busting open the doors of private homes for the Purple Shirts [...]

President Obama with Anita Dunn, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, and Robert Gibbs (via White House Flickr stream)
Earlier this week, I spotlighted White House interim communications director and chief Fox-basher Anita Dunn’s career-long commitment to flacking for one of the Beltway’s most entrenched and crooked creatures, Tom Daschle.
I also noted that Dunn is married to Obama [...]

Same old, same old.

Photoshop: Paul Croteau
My syndicated column today — reprinted below with added links, pics, and info — gives you a rundown of the Obama cronies inside and outside the White House who stand to gain the most from the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid.
Chicagoans of all political stripes who oppose massive government funding of Mayor Richard [...]

Cronies.

You know about Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
But have you ever played Six Degrees of Roddy Blago?
Take any Blago corruption story, and you can link it to Team Obama in six easy steps or less.
Watch.
Over the weekend, Rod Blagojevich’s former chief fundraiser, Christopher Kelly, died after his girlfriend found him over his car wheel in [...]

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In May, I told you how the Service Employees International Union’s $61 million investment in Barack Obama paid off with cabinet appointments, executive orders, key personnel slots, and legislative goodies.
Now, the SEIU thugs are looking out for The Boss. In Tampa, Florida and St. Louis today, the Purple People turned out to [...]

Three items for you:
* John Ruberry tracks the latest Blago-gate revelations concerning a Burris-Blago brother wiretap first reported by the Chicago Sun-Times. More from WaPo and NYTimes.
* The Associated Press reports that Rahm-bo and Blago traded phone calls over a $2 million state school grant. No word on the F-bomb count.
Birds of a feather…
Oh, [...]

That’s the name of the Rowdy Roddy Blago criminal racket that the feds came up with in their indictment today.
Legal Insurrection has a handy rundown: Blago meets RICO.
I think it’s safe to say Blago and his hair were not happy today.

The FutureGen near-zero emissions “clean coal” plant earmark championed by corruptocrat Rod Blagojevich and Democrat No. 2 Dick Durbin was the largest single earmark in the porkulus package. Sen. Tom Coburn fought to strip it out. He lost.
Now, we learn that the project has ballooned in cost to an estimated $2.3 billion.
Hey, good thing [...]

Just when you think Blago-gate can’t get any slimier, along comes another corruption angle on the story. This one involves embattled Sen. Roland Burris’s son, who — get this — serves as an Illiniois senior housing authority counsel despite facing foreclosure on his own home.
And you wonder how we ended up with a tax cheat [...]

Hmmmm. Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin took time from his Greece junket to comment on the Senate ethics probe now under way into Roland Burris’s possible perjury:
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin says he believes the testimony Roland Burris gave to Illinois lawmakers about his appointment to the U.S. Senate was incomplete and a Senate ethics investigation [...]

Uh-oh.

I filed today’s syndicated column on Turbaconducken before the final conference report was FINALLY posted on the House Rules Committee website late last night. Guess what’s back in the bill? Money for stadiums and museums. You’ll recall that GOP Sen. Tom Coburn’s amendment striking stimulus spending on things like Harry Reid’s Mob Museum passed. [...]

Tee time.

Laughingstock.