[FURTHER UPDATE] Welcome, AoSHQ readers.  Note the petition below.

[UPDATE]: Thanks to Randy Mastro and our own Francis Cianfrocca - who will have a lot more to say about these races - here’s the petition cataloging said skulduggery; and you will not find it dull reading. (If you’re having trouble reading it, try here.)

It’s not that our opponents are geniuses at skulduggery.  It’s that they’re unaccustomed to being challenged on it.  When they do, they make mistakes:

A City Council hopeful won’t cough up documents related to whether the Working Families Party is scamming the campaign finance system — because the case could involve “criminal liability,” according to documents released yesterday.

The bombshell development was revealed at a court hearing where lawyers for the WFP and the campaign of Staten Island candidate Debi Rose tried to get a suit against them tossed.

Former Giuliani administration Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro, the lawyer opposing the Rose campaign, called it an “extraordinary development.”

The suit itself - I’m working to get a copy of it sent to me - alleges that WFP (which is, of course, a front for ACORN) is violating campaign finance laws by having WFP front group Data and Field Services provide “canvassing and other services for [City Council candidate Debi] Rose in her primary campaign against [current Conservative candidate* Ken] Mitchell for which the firm received far less than the market value.”  In that context, trying to avoid financial disclosure on the grounds of possible self-incrimination is at the very least eyebrow-raising; which is why they tried to walk back on it before 24 hours had passed. It should also be noted that the Rose race in Staten Island is not the only one where this sort of thing went on; Queens City Council candidate James Van Bramer is likewise heavily involved with WFP/Data & Field Services, as this diary from the Daily Kos (of all places) makes clear.  I’m sure that his campaign is watching this case unfold with great interest.

The moral here?  Well, aside from the obvious one of “ACORN taints everything that it touches,” it’s this: one-party rule makes people stupid.  And stupid people make mistakes.  Keep that in mind the next time you’re trying to decide whether or not to fight City Hall.

Moe Lane

*Who is actually a Democrat.  Welcome to New York fusion politics.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

…plotting to pass Net Neutrality.

I’ve written in this space for a while about who the real Astroturfers are in the Net Neutrality fight. Google – and its puppets like Free Press – are promoting this idea that it’s a struggle between big telecommunications firms, and the little guys. Except the little guys are actually bigger Internet firms. The corporations pressing for Net Neutrality are Fortune 500 and even Dow Jones Industrial Average firms, with billions in cash ready to be spent on Net Neutrality, trying to defeat Proposition 8, or even promoting Barack Obama.

That last one makes the FCC’s rush to regulate look bad, given all the placements of Google people within the Obama administration as well as the nearly one million dollars that Google employees gave to the Obama-Biden campaign. How do we know that the secretive Obama White House isn’t directing the FCC to pay off Google?

After all, we know he’s giving donors special treatment. In fact, it has come out that FCC Chairman Genachowski himself was a major fundraiser for Obama, pulling in over a half million for the campaign. Why shouldn’t we believe that this is all a big circle of back scratching in the Obama adminstration, when he refuses to release the kinds of information we need to determine otherwise?

The President has played political games with information all along. He dangles his birth certificate on a string in order to distract the right. He’s keeping as little of the Obamacare agenda in writing as possible, because he knows if we read it and expose his plans, we can win the fight, so we end up with ridiculous spectacles like a Senate committee voting on a bill that hasn’t been written yet. And now he’s playing footsie with donors in secret.

We must encourage and join Senator McCain and Representative Blackburn in their fresh legislative efforts to stop the Google/Obama Net Neutrality scheme. We cannot allow this kind of quid pro quo to go unchallenged.

Earlier, we noted that Charlie Rangel has been getting huge numbers of contributions from the Virgin Islands, and we tied it to his blocking legislation that cuts payments to rum producers in the Virgin Islands.

Several weeks ago, the Washington Times reported that Puerto Rico has turned on the contributions also.

What’s going on?

The answer is that Charlie Rangel is holding Puerto Rican grandmothers hostage (via Medicare payments) to protect his rum buddies.

Read More →

Promoted from diaries - Moe Lane.

Very rarely do I get to actually talk about my own hometown in a discussion on national politics. Very rarely are the goings on of Douglasville significant enough to merit a mention beyond the local papers.

However, that rant by Representative David Scott was one of the exceptions to the rule. As someone who spends a good portion of his year in that district, I can tell you that his little tantrum wasn’t the only time that Scott has behaved in ways unbecoming of one granted the public trust that comes with being a Congressman. There’s a similar incident where someone showed up at his house to discuss the healthcare issue with him:

Read More →

It’s only July, but time is fast running out on Governor Jon Corzine (D) in the New Jersey governor’s race.  Corzine trails Republican Christopher Christie by as much as 15 points in recent polling, and has only polled within ten points of the challenger twice in the last two months.  Even a visit from President Barack Obama has been unable to buoy the Corzine campaign back into making the race competitive.  Corzine needed to do something to change the dynamic of the race, and his best opportunity should have been his selection of a lieutenant governor running mate.

But rather than make a bold choice that would have signaled a new direction for the campaign, Corzine went with the safe choice, selecting veteran State Senator Loretta Weinberg.  Weinberg is qualified, but at 74 years old she hardly brings energy to the ticket.  And her 17 years in elected state government brings “Trenton insider” baggage to the campaign, exactly the image that is dogging Corzine.  The Christie campaign wasted no time in driving home these points, releasing a mock Corzine-Weinberg movie trailer titled, “You can’t change Trenton from the inside.”

Read More →

What worse for a struggling incumbent governor than trailing by 15 points in the polls?  Scores of Democratic Party officials - including a member of your administration - arrested and implicated in a widespread official corruption scheme in an investigation begun by your challenger.

A two-year corruption and international money-laundering investigation stretching from the Jersey Shore to Brooklyn to Israel and Switzerland culminated in charges against 44 people on Thursday, including three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis, the authorities said. [...]

Weysan Dun, the special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Newark office…emphasized that the case was motivated by neither religion nor politics — an important point given that the New Jersey governor’s race pits a former United States attorney, Christopher J. Christie, under whom the investigation began, against the Democratic incumbent, Jon S. Corzine, whose administration was not spared in the arrests Thursday.

Agents also raided the home of Joseph V. Doria Jr., commissioner of the state’s Department of Community Affairs and a former mayor of Bayonne.

Corzine called a hasty press conference to denounce the corruption.  “Any corruption is unacceptable — anywhere, anytime, by anybody,” he said.  But if Corzine was hoping to insulate himself from and fallout from the arrests, it may already be too late.

Read More →

Or so it seems. We’re having difficulty keeping up.

UPDATE: OK, more information:

2 N.J. Mayors Arrested in Broad Inquiry on Corruption

The mayors of Hoboken and Secaucus, a state assemblyman and dozens of others were rounded up early Thursday as the F.B.I. swept across four counties in New Jersey as part of a two-year corruption and money-laundering investigation that ranged from the Jersey Shore to Brooklyn and has even reached into the State House in Trenton.

Agents raided the home of Joseph V. Doria Jr., commissioner of the state Department of Community Affairs, who also is the former mayor of Bayonne, an official confirmed Thursday morning.

Among the roughly 30 people arrested by mid-morning were Hoboken Mayor Peter J. Cammarano III and Secaucus Mayor Dennis Elwell, both Democrats, and Assemblyman Daniel M. Van Pelt, a Republican from Forked River, in Ocean County. Mr. Cammarano, who turned 32 on Wednesday, was elected mayor June 9 and sworn in July 1, after serving as councilman-at-large since 2005.

I’ve done a spreadsheet of the people named so far - and let me note: there’s something fun about a story where you need to do a spreadsheet in order to keep up with this sort of thing.

There’s going to be a press conference at noon, and it should be riveting.

Moe Lane

PS: You know who else is from Hudson County? Senator Robert Menendez.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

(Via Instapundit) No, not Fitzgerald: Illinois is a little too prominent right now for that kind of shenanigans. North Carolina, on the other hand…

Democrats fix sights on GOP prosecutor

John Edwards admits federal investigators are asking him questions. Federal subpoenas were issued Friday related to Mike Easley.

As the separate federal probes into a former senator and the former governor are emerging, Democrats are taking steps to replace the Republican prosecutor who is spearheading the inquiries about the highest-profile North Carolina Democrats of the past decade.

All the nearly 100 top federal prosecutors across the country serve at the will of the president. Any replacement for U.S. Attorney George E.B. Holding, a Bush appointee who has kept a priority on public corruption cases from Raleigh to the coast, will be subject to U.S. Senate confirmation.

The process gives a key role in the decision to U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan, a Democrat who was in the state Senate leadership for several years until she unseated Republican Sen. Elizabeth Dole in November. Already, Hagan has formed a panel to screen candidates. It is led by Burley Mitchell, former chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court who now works at the Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice law firm.

They’re claiming that this screening process is ‘coincidental’ to the investigations, of course.

Of course.

Read More →

Everyone complains about corruption, but . . . well . . . it’s not that no one does anything about it. Rather, it’s more that traditional anti-corruption efforts are so ineffective. We can pass laws until the cows come home, but all the laws in the world have done nothing to curb corruption.

Dan Mitchell makes these points and then offers an alternative anti-corruption plan–shrink the size of government. It’s a good plan, and it will most certainly work better than what we have tried thus far in terms of combating corruption. Take a look:

Manny Aragon was one of New Mexico’s most powerful law makers and power brokers. A former Senate president, Aragon was this week convicted and given a 67 month sentence for lining his pockets and that of his co-conspiritors with millions in fraudulently billed state contracting money.

While his “iconic” status is mentioned and his long standing position as a “Senate leader” is dutifully chronicled, his status as a Democrat doesn’t seem to make the cut of a large portion of the stories on his sentencing. This is a common practice of the Old Media. The word “Democrat” never seems to escape the editor’s cut in a story about a criminal Democrat.

Read More →

Okinawa Jack seems very, very defensive in this article (H/T: Instapundit):

Murtha defends statement

The region’s outspoken congressman is in the national lens again – this time CBS News television cameras – in a report Wednesday that calls him “the king of earmarks who wastes a lot of taxpayer money” and implies that the FBI is investigating.

U.S. Rep. John Murtha, D-Johnstown, responded by waving the Constitution at the camera, saying: “What it says is the Congress of the United States appropriates the money. Got that?”

The CBS article in question is here, along with video footage that Murtha is going to regret. You can say and do things to, say, a private citizen with a video camera that you can’t do to a national news organization, and he made no friends in CBS with that antic. As can be seen with the next couple of paragraphs:

Read More →

Well, Rep. Flake tried to get the Democrats to vote in favor of ethical behavior again, and again they voted him down. Via Instapundit:

House turns back call for PMA probe

The House on Thursday night turned back another call to investigate the PMA Group, a once-powerful lobbying firm whose offices were recently raided by the FBI and which has close ties to Pennsylvania Rep. John P. Murtha (D).

Twenty-one Democrats, including nine freshmen, voted to proceed with debate on the measure offered by Arizona Rep. Jeff Flake (R) calling for an investigation of the lobbying firm. Most of the Democrats represent fiscally conservative districts.

Read More →

(Followup to this post)

The bad news, of course, is that majority party Democrats are adamant against having any investigation into whether there are links between campaign contributions and earmarks in bills - which is very interesting, given that they control Congress, and thus can presumably make sure that the proceedings are fair…

The House voted Wednesday to kill a resolution calling for an ethics investigation into potential quid pro quo between lobbyist campaign donations and lawmakers.

Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., sponsored the proposal that would have forced the House Ethics Committee to launch a probe into ties between the source and timing of campaign contributions by lobbyists and subsequent legislator requests for special projects or earmarks.

While open-ended, Flake’s resolution was a direct response to the ongoing federal investigation into the PMA Group, a lobbying company accused of making fraudulent donations to lawmakers using names of people who did not exist.

The firm, which has contributed millions to politicians in the last decade, has close ties to senior Democratic appropriators including Reps. John Murtha D-Pa., and Pete Visclosky,D-Ind. The FBI raided PMA’s headquarters in November and is investigating the group’s founder and president, Paul Magliochetti, a former Murtha aide.

Ah. That might be the problem, right there.

Read More →

Promoted by Jeff

United States Senators are busy people with demanding schedules.  Its understandable if one of the most powerful members of the most powerful legislative body in the nation doesn’t know where her husband is and what he is doing twenty-four hours of every day.  Still, you’d think better than a half-a-year employed by one of your major campaign donors as an illegally unregistered lobbyist… advocating a project you made a point of running against during your last statewide election… might raise a red flag or two.

That’s the reality Senator Debbie Stabenow has faced for the last six months as her husband, Tom Athens, made bank on the payroll of Democratic mega-donor and alleged lothario Jim Papas.  Unfortunately, despite the unending rhetoric about transparency and ethics in the Dem controlled Congress, the Senator who once voted to establish the Senate Office of Public Integrity chose to turn a blind eye to her husband’s criminal actions, putting him, partisan election interests and the family bank account above Michigan residents and campaign promises.

Meanwhile, voters and taxpayers are left with more questions than answers…

How long has Senator Stabenow known her husband was breaking the law, making a living as an unregistered lobbyist?

Read More →

The Daschle tax dodge cries out for more attention. Far be it from little old me not to give it. A brief flavor of the piece:

. . . While I have David Boaz to thank for a clever title for this article, I am sure that he joins me in wishing that it never had to be written. Alas, the Obama Administration and its allies seem to have a serious problem when it comes to paying taxes. Or, as House Republican Whip Eric Cantor puts it, “It’s easy for the other side to advocate for higher taxes because you know what? They don’t pay `em.”

Read it all (he said, immodestly). And along the same lines, there is this.

Barney Frank, Luis Gutierrez, and Danny Davis are all using the TARP program to intervene on behalf of constituent banks and get them aid, even when the individual financial situation of those banks does not justify any grant of aid whatsoever. What’s more: These champions of “progressive” government regulation are also trying to ensure that regulators don’t come calling on their constituent banks.

Money quote:

Politicians’ efforts to intervene on behalf of specific banks during the current crisis recall the savings and loan turmoil of the late 1980s, when members of Congress pressured the government to go easy on struggling thrift institutions. . . .

“This is a disturbing parallel to precisely some of those things that made the savings-and-loan debacle into a political scandal as well as a financial scandal,” said William Black, an associate professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, who was a bank regulator in the S&L crisis.

“Most ethical Congress in history,” according to Nancy Pelosi. And these people have gotten more TARP funds released with which to play. If that doesn’t keep one up at night, I don’t know what will.